The maritime cantons still made an attempt to defend themselves against the Roman domination in concert with their neighbours on the Loire. Insurgent bands from the Andian, Carnutic, and other surrounding cantons assembled on the lower Loire and besieged in Lemonum (Poitiers) the prince of the Pictones who was friendly to the Romans. But here too a considerable Roman force soon appeared against them; the insurgents abandoned the siege, and retreated with the view of placing the Loire between themselves and the enemy, but were overtaken on the march and defeated; whereupon the Carnutes and the other revolted cantons, including even the maritime ones, sent in their submission.

The resistance was at an end; save that an isolated leader of free bands still here and there upheld the national banner. The bold Drappes and the brave comrade in arms of Vercingetorix Lucterius, after the breaking up of the army united on the Loire, gathered together the most resolute men, and with these threw themselves into the strong mountain-town of Uxellodunum on the Lot[50], which amidst severe and fatal conflicts they succeeded in sufficiently provisioning. In spite of the loss of their leaders, of whom Drappes had been taken prisoner, and Lucterius had been cut off from the town, the garrison resisted to the uttermost; it was not till Caesar appeared in person, and under his orders the spring from which the besieged derived their water was diverted by means of subterranean drains, that the fortress, the last stronghold of the Celtic nation, fell. To distinguish the last champions of the cause of freedom, Caesar ordered that the whole garrison should have their hands cut off and should then be dismissed, each one to his home. Caesar, who felt it all-important to put an end at least to open resistance throughout Gaul, allowed king Commius, who still held out in the region of Arras and maintained desultory warfare with the Roman troops there down to the winter of 703-704, to make his peace, and even acquiesced when the irritated and justly distrustful man haughtily refused to appear in person in the Roman camp. It is very probable that Caesar in a similar way allowed himself to be satisfied with a merely nominal submission, perhaps even with a de facto armistice, in the less accessible districts of the north-west and north-east of Gaul[51].

Thus was Gaul - or, in other words, the land west of the Rhine and north of the Pyrenees - rendered subject after only eight years of conflict (696-703) to the Romans. Hardly a year after the full pacification of the land, at the beginning of 705, the Roman troops had to be withdrawn over the Alps in consequence of the civil war, which had now at length broken out in Italy, and there remained nothing but at the most some weak divisions of recruits in Gaul. Nevertheless the Celts did not again rise against the foreign yoke; and, while in all the old provinces of the empire there was fighting against Caesar, the newly-acquired country alone remained continuously obedient to its conqueror. Even the Germans did not during those decisive years repeat their attempts to conquer new settlements on the left bank of the Rhine. As little did there occur in Gaul any national insurrection or German invasion during the crises that followed, although these offered the most favourable opportunities. If disturbances broke out anywhere, such as the rising of the Bellovaci against the Romans in 708, these movements were so isolated and so unconnected with the complications in Italy, that they were suppressed without material difficulty by the Roman governors. Certainly this state of peace was most probably, just as was the peace of Spain for centuries, purchased by provisionally allowing the regions that were most remote and most strongly pervaded by national feeling - Brittany, the districts on the Scheldt, the region of the Pyrenees - to withdraw themselves de facto in a more or less definite manner from the Roman allegiance. Nevertheless the building of Caesar - however scanty the time which he found for it amidst other and at the moment still more urgent labours, however unfinished and but provisionally rounded off he may have left it - in substance stood the test of this fiery trial, as respected both the repelling of the Germans and the subjugation of the Celts.

As to administration in chief, the territories newly acquired by the governor of Narbonese Gaul remained for the time being united with the province of Narbo; it was not till Caesar gave up this office (710) that two new governorships - Gaul proper and Belgica - were formed out of the territory which he conquered. That the individual cantons lost their political independence, was implied in the very nature of conquest. They became throughout tributary to the Roman community. Their system of tribute however was, of course, not that by means of which the nobles and financial aristocracy turned Asia to profitable account; but, as was the case in Spain, a tribute fixed once for all was imposed on each individual community, and the levying of it was left to itself. In this way forty million sesterces (400,000 pounds) flowed annually from Gaul into the chests of the Roman government; which, no doubt, undertook in return the cost of defending the frontier of the Rhine. Moreover, the masses of gold accumulated in the temples of the gods and the treasuries of the grandees found their way, as a matter of course, to Rome; when Caesar offered his Gallic gold throughout the Roman empire and brought such masses of it at once into the money market that gold as compared with silver fell about 25 per cent, we may guess what sums Gaul lost through the war.

The former cantonal constitutions with their hereditary kings, or their presiding feudal-oligarchies, continued in the main to subsist after the conquest, and even the system of clientship, which made certain cantons dependent on others more powerful, was not abolished, although no doubt with the loss of political independence its edge was taken off. The sole object of Caesar was, while making use of the existing dynastic, feudalist, and hegemonic divisions, to arrange matters in the interest of Rome, and to bring everywhere into power the men favourably disposed to the foreign rule. Caesar spared no pains to form a Roman party in Gaul; extensive rewards in money and specially in confiscated estates were bestowed on his adherents, and places in the common council and the first offices of state in their cantons were procured for them by Caesar's influence. Those cantons in which a sufficiently strong and trustworthy Roman party existed, such as those of the Remi, the Lingones, the Haedui, were favoured by the bestowal of a freer communal constitution - the right of alliance, as it was called - and by preferences in the regulation of the matter of hegemony. The national worship and its priests seem to have been spared by Caesar from the outset as far as possible; no trace is found in his case of measures such as were adopted in later times by the Roman rulers against the Druidical system, and with this is probably connected the fact that his Gallic wars, so far as we see, do not at all bear the character of religious warfare after the fashion which formed so prominent a feature of the Britannic wars subsequently.