After completing a survey of both the history of the English monarchy as well as the Papacy –both of which offer two differing visions of millennia-spanning political monarchic regimes– I decided to turn my gaze toward the history of the French monarchy in an effort to learn more about the rise and fall of this regime. In many ways, the French monarchy displayed many parallels with its counterpart, the English monarchy, in terms of both form and substance, however it also shared a great deal of kinship with the Papacy in Rome (with the French monarchy being a predominantly Catholic endeavor). Some questions I hope to explore with this project: How did the French monarchy rise to power? Why did it fall prey to a violent revolution whereas the English monarchy, on the contrary, managed to endure? After the French Revolution, what came to replace the power vacuum left by the monarchy? Was it successful? These and other questions I hope to explore, because as Charles de Gaulle wrote in his memoirs, “Toute ma vie, je me suis fat une certaine idée de la France.”
According to John Julius Norwich, France begins, not unlike England, in a racial cocktail consisting of Ligurians, Iberians, Phoenicians, and Celts along with the five-hundred or so distinct tribes of Gaul. Perhaps around 600 BC, a group of adventurous Greeks from Phocaea on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor ventured to France and founded Marseille. However, they left behind no surviving monuments. The story of France really begins toward the end of the second century BC when the Romans conquered the south-east corner of France and made it their first province (hence the name it still bears “Provence” –and its capital town of Aquae Sextiae, which later became Aix-en-Provence). Other cities were soon to follow: Nîmes, Arles, and Orange. Pliny the Elder dubbed it “more like Italy than a province.”
Vercingetorix (80 – 46 BC)
In the search for the first great hero of France –turning our focus prior to the reign of Charlemagne—we find Vercingetorix, whose name means either “great warrior king” or “king of great warriors.” It was 58 BC, the age of Julius Caesar, in which Rome sought the pretext for an invasion of Gaul to turn the three mutually hostile Gallic tribes against each other. Then in 52 BC, while Julius Caesar was raising an army in Cisalpine Gaul (or “Gaul” on the Italian side of the Alps), a thirty-year-old Vercingetorix became chieftain of the Arverni tribe who inhabited what is now Auvergne. He quickly managed to persuade his fellow Gauls to unite against Rome, winning a crucial victory according Caesar at Gergovia in the Massif Canal wherein the Romans lost some 750 legionaries including 46 centurions. Plutarch later called Vercingetorix “the chief spring of all the war” as he employed a scorched-earth policy that soon rattled his own forces. The turn came when Rome overran Avaricum, a wealthy hilltop settlement, and then Caesar won at Alesia which saw the Gauls fleeing from the field, and being slaughtered almost to a man. When the battle was over, Vercingetorix rode out of the city gates in full armor. He made a ceremonial turn around Caesar before dismounting, shedding his armor, and remaining seated at Caesar’s feet before being led away to prison. He was imprisoned for five years before being paraded through the streets of Rome and meeting his customary death by strangulation. In the nineteenth century, the legend of Vercingetorix found newfound praise as Napoleon III hailed him as the first great French nationalist.
Rome established three governments in the conquered region –Gallia Celtica (headquarters of the Governor General in Lyon), Gallia Belgica (present-day Belgium), and Aquitania in the south-west corner. Gradually, the Gauls grew to resent and despise the often cruel, occupying Romans; but aside from slavery and plunder, the Roman influence also brought roads, cities, villas, theatres, public baths, and education.
Christianity & “The Dark Ages”
Gaul remained under Rome for five-hundred years, and as Rome spread widely across Europe, so did its influence. By the first century AD, this meant a new religion from Asia was set to inaugurate profound changes across the continent. The first Christian missionaries reached Marseilles in 100 AD, and in another century it reached Lyon. Despite being a fairly tolerant empire towards many cults and religions, Christianity was unwilling to also worship the cult of the emperor and so persecution was inevitable. It began under Nero in 64 and continued on and off for the next 250 years, reaching its zenith in the reign of Diocletian at the turn of the third and fourth centuries. This was the age of Christian martyrs. Stories only fueled more desire for martyrdom –a venerated celebration of death became a way of life for the new religion. Consider the tall tale of Saint Denis, third-century Bishop of Paris, who when beheaded calmly picked up his severed head and supposedly walked several miles to the site of the abbey that now bears his name while preaching a sermon of repentance. These tales of strange supernatural phenomena have always been the engine of the church.
An end to Christian persecution finally came in February 313 when two emperors, Constantine the Great and Licinius, issued the Edict of Milan which officially declared tolerance for Christianity. In the ensuing centuries, France would suffer numerous hideous, fanatical religious wars, but the dominance of Christianity would not again be threatened until the Revolution many centuries later.
Clovis & The Merovingian Dynasty (509-751)
By the fifth century, the Roman Empire was in steep decline, nearly defenseless against the barbarian Goths, Huns, and Vandals who swept southward in search of warmer climates, and more fertile lands (in particular lebensraum). The Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) and Visigoths (Western Goths) and Vandals were all Christian Arian “heretics” –believing that Jesus was not co-eternal and of one substance with God. The Huns, however, were Mongols under the rule of Attila. “Within the space of a few years he had made himself feared throughout Europe: most feared, perhaps, than any other single man – with the possible exception of Napoleon – before or since” (6).
These were the people who flooded across the Rhine in early 451 and defeated by a combine force of Roman Visigothic soldiers, but by now, the elaborate machinery of the Roman Empire had crumbled. The last Emperor, the pathetic child-rule Romulus Augustulus, abdicated in 476 and even though the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople continued to claim authority over Gaul, the whole region “disintegrated into a mass of small barbarian states under so-called kings, dukes and counts. As we know, however, nature abhors a vacuum; sooner or later one state becomes stronger than the rest and ultimately achieves domination. This time it was the Salian Franks. Relatively recent arrivals, they first appeared in the area in the second century, and over the next three hundred years gradually merged with the Gallo-Roman populations, giving their name to modern France in the process. In the later fourth century their kingdom had been founded by a certain Childeric, son of Merovech, and was consequently known as Merovingian; and it was Childeric’s son Clovis who became King of the Franks in 481. Uniting as he did nearly all Gaul under Merovingian rule, Clovis has a serious claim to have been the first King of France. His name, in its later version of ‘Louis’, was to be given to eighteen successors before the French monarchy ended” (7).
By all accounts, Clovis was a monstrous brute who was known to murder his enemies in cold-blood, though he did succeed in uniting much of modern-day France. Before he died in 513 (the precise date is uncertain) he had also reluctantly abandoned Arianism largely at the behest of his Burgundian wife Clotilde who convinced Clovis to be received into the Catholic faith on Christmas Day 496. This dramatic moment led to the eventual decline of Arianism and it ave birth to a religious unification between France and Germany which was to endure for the next millennia. And three hundred years later, the baptism of Clovis led to the eventual crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day –a moment which hailed the Holy Roman Empire.
For 250 years, the Merovingian dynasty ruled France –“and came dangerously near to destroying it.” It was an age of familial wars and endless violence. For example, Clovis’s son Chilperic, whom the later French Chronicler Gregory of Tours dubbed “the Nero and Herod of his time,” engaged in a bloody feud with his own brother when his wife was found strangled in her bed. His brother was murdered, while eye-gouging was introduced as a fitting punishment for enemies, and Chilperic was stabbed to death (not to fear, his son posthumously avenged his father by capturing the assailant and strapping them to the tail of a horse.
At any rate, in theory there were approximately twenty-seven Merovingian kings, though in truth, France was ruled at this time by numerous warring minor kingdoms (perhaps not unlike the Anglo-Saxons across the channel). But one of the notable kings of this era was Dagobert, known to French children for wearing his trousers inside out, managed to annex Alsace, the Vosges, and the Ardennes around 630, creating a new duchy whose capital became Paris. He was a considerably debauched figure, and also deeply religious –he founded the Basilica of Saint Denis in which he was the first French king to be buried. From the tenth century onwards, all but three French kings were to join him.
“These were the dark ages; and in France they were very dark indeed. The only glimmering of light came from the Church which, unlike the State, remained firm and well organized. By this time the ecclesiastical hierarchy had been securely established, with a bishop in every diocese and conscientious if largely uneducated priesthood. Meanwhile, thanks to the benefactions of the faithful and the efficient exaction of tithes, church property was steadily increasing – as indeed was church property: every ruler knew all too well that he was in constant danger of excommunication or even of an interdict, which would condemn not only himself, but all his subjects as well. The monasteries too were beginning to make their presence felt. They had long flourished in the east, where there was only one monastic order, that of St. Basil; but the Basilians were essentially contemplatives and hermits. St. Benedict, the sixth-century father of monasticism in the west, had very different ideas. The black-robed Benedictines were communities in the fullest sense of the word, dedicated to total obedience and hard physical labour, principally agricultural. But they also found time to study, to copy manuscripts – immensely important in the centuries before the invention of printing – and generally to keep alive a little spark of learning and humanity in the bleak, depressing world in which they lived” (9).
Charles Martel (688-741)
Then in 633 another religion came bursting forth –a mere thirty years after the Prophet’s death, Syria, Palestine, much of the Persian Empire, Afghanistan, and the Punjab all were conquered by Islam before turning westward and eventually crossing the Straight of Gibraltar through Spain, up to Tours where, as legend has it, the last Frankish king Charles Martel stopped them in their tracks. Had Charles Martel “The Hammer” failed and the advance continued further northward, Edward Gibbon wrote the following: “Perhaps the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of Revelation of Mahomet.” Though, more contemporary scholarship seems to suggest the Battle of Tours was merely a skirmish with a raiding party who had roamed hundreds of miles in front of its army.
By now, the Merovingians had descended into debauchery and irrelevance, leaders were known as the “Mayor of the Palace.” Charles Martel ruled as de facto King of France for 25 years until he was succeeded by his son Pepin the Short. Pepin forced the last king, Childeric III into a monastery and had himself proclaimed King of the Franks by the Pope. In doing so, he founded a new royal dynasty: Carolingian (named after his father, Charles Martel).
Charlemagne & the Carolingian Dynasty (751-840)
“Pepin was by far the greatest European ruler of his time” but he will forever be overshadowed by his son, Charles or “Charlemagne,” a tall, vigorous man with five legitimate wives and four supplementary spouses. As his legend spread across Europe, in 774 he captured Pavia and proclaimed himself King of the Lombards, and before the same was true f the Saxons and Bavaria (forcing mass conversions to Christianity everywhere he went). He was less successful with his invasion of Spain though it did inspire the famous epic ballad “Chanson de Roland.” He then destroyed the kingdom of the Avars in Hungary and Upper Austria –in a single generation, Charlemagne had elevated the Franks from a small tribal region into a powerful force in European politics. All the while, he received the approval of the pope. His father aided Pope Stephen II in his efforts to crush the Lombards and donated the central Italian territories that were to become the Papal States. Like his father, Charlemagne came the rescue of the new pope, Pope Leo III, who faced significant backlash in Rome and was even attacked and beaten unconscious in the streets of Rome. Only by happenstance was he rescued and sent away to Charlemagne’s court in Paderborn before returning to Rome under the protection of Frankish agents only to face trumped charges by his enemies: simony, perjury, and adultery.
Needless to say, the papacy once again found itself in a tremendously weak position and the empress in Constantinople, Irene, was not seriously considered despite her brutal act of blinding and murdering her own son. Christendom lacked both an emperor and a pope. Thus, at Christmas Mass in 800 Pope Leo III laid the imperial crown upon Charlemagne’s head –an immensely consequential moment that was more valuable than any land or conquest –it meant that for the first time in four hundred years, Western Europe once again had an emperor. The Rex Francorum et Langobardorum became inexorably tied to the pope, elevating the status of both pope and emperor, but the Carolingian Renaissance was not last much longer after Charlemagne’s death in 814 –his line ended in 888. His son Louis I “The Pious” had three children who roughly divided the kingdom –Charles the Bald received western France (west of the Rhone and Saone), the Germanic territories went to Louis II (northeast France, Belgium, and western Germany, Bavaria, Swabia, and Saxony), while the youngest Lothair was given a long stretch of land stretching from the North Sea to northern Italy. It was this partitition at Verdun in 843 that effectively created the modern countries of France and Germany as well as the Alsace-Lorraine territory between them that has “bedeviled their relationship ever since.”
“Furthermore, although Charlemagne’s empire perished, his ideas did not. Henceforth, the western Europeans were almost able to forget about Constantinople. Before 800, there was only one empire in the Christian world –the empire of Augustus, Trajan and Hadrian, which was not a jot less Roman for having had its capital transferred to the Bosphorous. But the Bosphorous was nearly 1500 miles from Paris; the West now had an emperor of its own, on its very doorstep. And that emperor had been crowned by the pope in Rome. In Merovingian days most of the kings had been little more than the leaders of bands of thugs; the Carolingians and their successors would be the Lord’s anointed. Emperor and Pope would rule jointly, hand in hand, the former physically protecting the latter, the latter ensuring not only the spiritual but also the cultural well-being of his flock. To be sure, later centuries would see this system break down on countless occasions, but the thought was always there. After Charlemagne, Europe would never be the same again” (14).
Carolingian dynasty
- Pepin “The Short” (751-768), son of Charles Martel.
- Charles I “Charlemagne” (768-814)
- Carloman I (768-771)
- Louis I “The Pious” (814-840), second son of Charlemagne.
- Charles II “the Bald” (843-877), son of Louis the Pious and grandson of Charlemagne.
- Louis II “the Stammerer” (877-879)
- Louis III (879-882), ruler of the North.
- Carloman II (879-884), ruler of the South.
- Charles (III) “the Fat” (884-887), last ruler to control all Frankish territories, deposed by the nobles.
Robertian dynasty (888–898)
- Odo (888-898), defended Paris from the Vikings.
Carolingian dynasty (898–922)
- Charles III “the Simple” (898-922), posthumous son of Louis II the Stammerer; proclaimed king in opposition to Odo in January 893; deposed by Robert’s followers; later captured by Herbert II, Count of Vermandois. Died in captivity.
Robertian dynasty (922–923)
- Robert I (922-923), son of Robert the Strong and younger brother of Odo; killed at the Battle of Soissons against Charles III. Sole king to die in battle.
Bosonid dynasty (923–936)
- Rudolph (923-936), son of Richard, Duke of Burgundy and son-in-law of Robert I; Duke of Burgundy since 921. Died of illness after a reign of constant civil war and viking raids.
Carolingian dynasty (936–987)
- Louis IV “from Overseas” (936-954)
- Lothair (954-986)
- Louis V “the Do-Nothing” (986-987), died in a hunting accident; last Carolingian ruler.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.