After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the occupation of much of Gaul by the Franks, Roman power never returned far enough to come into conflict with the Frankish kingdom (except, to an extent, in the South of Italy). Instead, as the advent of Islām permanently ended the possibility of further Roman revival, when Pope Stephen III met Pepin the Short (753) and obtained help against the Lombards, we get a passing of the torch from Constantinople to the Franks.
By 774, the Franks were virtually the only organized Christian kingdom between Islām in Spain, the pagan powers to the east and north, and Romania -- the remaining Roman Empire, now linguistically Greek in character -- to the southeast. The core of Christian Western Europe thus became Francia.
While forms of this name, from Francia in Spanish to France in French, have settled on what was originally West Francia -- Francia Occidentalis -- German allows a differentiation, with Frankenreich, the "Kingdom of the Franks," for the full extent of the Carolingian state, and Frankreich for the modern France. In English, where "France" is also used for modern France, "Francia" may be used without ambiguity for Frankenreich and for the greater Periphery of Francia.
Indeed, to many beyond Francia the Franks now were all the Western European states as far as ran the writ of the Pope and the use of the Latin language. In Greek, the Franks are the Φράγγοι, Phrangoi. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus even refers to the empire of Charlemagne as ἡ μεγάλη Φραγγία, "Great Francia." Liutprand of Cremona (c.920-972) says that in 968 the Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas "made fun of the Franks -- under which name he understood both the Latins and the Germans," Ex Francis, quo nomine tam Latinos quam Teutones comprehendit, ludum habuit [Liudprandi Legatio, XXXIII, 25-26].
The words for "European" in Arabic, 
, ʾal-ʾIfranj (أَلْإِفْرَنْج), "the Franks," 
, ʾIfranjī (إِفْرَنْجِي), "a Frank, Frankish, European," and Persian, 
, farangi (فَرَنْگِي), preserve the word -- as does even Thai, 
, fàràng, and Laotian, 
, farang or falang, "foreign, European, Caucasian" or just "French."
In these terms, it should be remembered that Muslim sources distinguished between Franks and 
, ʾar-Rūm, i.e. Romans -- the Christians (such as Constantine VII and Nicephorus Phocas) of the surviving Roman Empire. But as Romania faded from memory, all Europeans became "Franks." The word "Frank" even appears in Ming China, with the arrival of the Portuguese, as 
(佛郞機). Initially, Christians and Jews coming to China where grouped with the 
(回回), meaning Turks, Uighurs, and Chinese Muslims.
In European languages, "frank" can mean open, forthright, and sincere, i.e. with the noble qualities of the Frank. It also can mean "free," as in the "franking" privilege of sending free mail, or as in "franchise," which is the grant of some privilege or immunity. "Frankish" -- Latin "Franciscus," masculine, and "Francisca," feminine -- also occurs as a very common given name in Western European languages, from "Francesco/Francesca" in Italian,
| Europa, c. 800 AD | |
|---|---|
| Francia | Romania |
| Franks | Romans |
| Latins | Greeks (Armenians, Vlachs, etc.) |
 [Holy] Roman Emperor |  Emperor of the Romans |
| Rome | Constantinople |
 Pope | Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, & Jerusalem |
In two of the Star Trek series, Star Trek, the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, we encounter extraterrestrials called the "Ferengi," a word which looks like the Hindi, 
, Phǝrǝŋgi (Phirǝŋgi, फ़िरंगी), version of the Persian . Since the Ferengi are obsessed with profit and under no scruple to only obtain it honestly, the use of the term may refect the leftist and anti-capitalist ideology of the Star Trek series -- not to mention an attendant cultural self-hatred on the part of the producers or writers.
From Persian , Farangi, we also get 
, Farangestān (فَرَنْگِسْتَان), Turkish Frengistan, "land of the Franks."
Comparing Francia of Charlemagne's day to Romania, i.e. the remaining Roman Empire around Constantinople, usually called the "Byzantine" Empire by historians, it is noteworthy that while the cultural and religious center of the West is at Rome, that City would never again be the actual political capital of Western Europe. Indeed, the Popes ruled their own little domain, the Papal States, and prevented the unification of Italy until the 19th century.
While the Popes then wielded much influence in the West, and they wanted to install and dispose of secular rulers at their whim, it was only rarely that Papal political power amounted to much. Although it was sometimes used to humble even the Kings of England and France, and the German Emperor, its power drained quickly when overused. After Philip IV of France sent a gang of thuggish operatives to kidnap and rough up Pope Boniface VIII in his own palace, the Papal leviathan seemed to deflate like a punctured balloon.
Meanwhile, Constantinople was a real capital, with resident Emperors of legally absolute power. The Western Emperor, elected by German princes who became increasingly sovereign, the non-resident ruler of increasingly detached and uncontrollable states like Italy and Burgundy,
| Europa | 1. Romania | 2. Constantinople |  |
| 2. Francia | 1. Rome |  | |
| 3. Russia | 3. Moscow |  | |
In the treatment here, "Francia" will mean all of Europe that in the Mediaeval period was subject to the Roman Catholic Church, with its Latin liturgy, headed by the Pope, the Bishop of Rome. (The Schism of 1054 separated the Latin Church from the Orthodox Churches of the East.) Since the Pope retained the right to crown Emperors in the area subject to his Church, the Emperors in Charlemagne's line retained an implicit primacy, if not sovereignty, over all of Roman Catholic Europe, however little actual authority they may have exercised.
For many centuries, Latin was the principal, sometimes the only, written language over an area, "greater" Francia, that came to stretch from Norway to Portugal and from Iceland to Catholic parts of the Ukraine. A Swede like Karl von Linné would be known by a Latinized name as Carolus Linnaeus, a Pole like 
Mikolaj Kopernik as Nicolaus Copernicus, and an Italian like Christoforo Columbo (Cristóbal Colón in Spanish) as Christophorus(-er) Columbus. These men were even, significantly, figures getting into the modern period, not of the deep Middle Ages.
One consequence of the dominance of Latin was the universal use of the Latin alphabet, and the borrowing of Latin vocabulary for vernacular languages from Norwegian to Hungarian. 
In an age when alphabets went with religions, the only exception to this was the use of the Hebrew alphabet to write Spanish (Ladino) and German (Yiddish) by European Jews. Islām was not tolerated in Mediaeval Francia, except in unusual circumstances, mainly in Spain and Sicily.
The alphabet that had been developed to write Gothic disappeared with its language. The old 
Runic alphabet also largely disappeared with the Christianization of Germany and Scandinavia, though its values were not forgotten. The use of Latin and its alphabet contrasts with the official use of Greek and its alphabet in Romania (together with other special alphabets, like Armenian) and the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in Russia and other Orthodox countries.
Today, the cultural predominance of Europe has led to the use of the Latin alphabet for many languages around the world, including Indonesian/Malaysian (Malay), Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Samoan, languages in Africa like Swahili, and many others. World languages with their own traditional writing, like Chinese and Japanese, use Romanization extensively, both officially and unofficially.
The use of the Latin alphabet in Francia often goes along with languages, the Romance languages, that are themselves descended from Latin, like Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. On the other hand, Francia was the result of the West Roman Empire collapsing under the inroads of Germans and then of a new identity being formulated by the Germanic Franks. Even the major wars of the 20th century can be thought of as continuing conflict along the Romance/Germanic boundary 
in the heart of Francia. The balance of power then, however, ended up being determined by another Germanic speaking power, England, coming in on the side of Romance speaking France.
Meanwhile, the language family that was displaced by the Romans in Gaul and by the Angles and Saxons in Britain persists in the "Celtic Fringe" of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, including Brittany, which was actually colonized with refugees from Celtic Britain. Welsh betrays its heritage as the language of Roman Britain with Latin days of the week and other borrowings.
In the East, the Slavic languages represent another boundary productive of conflict. After the initial migration of Slavic speakers that pushed Germans behind the Elbe and replaced large areas of indigenous languages in the Balkans, German speakers moved steadily east until World War II, after which the Russians expelled many Germans and returned the boundary to about where it was in the 12th century. Between the northern and southern Slavs, however, is a Romance speaking remnant in the Balkans, Romania, and the Hungarians, who were the only steppe people to first invade Europe but then settle down and even retain their linguistic identity, despite their country often being called after the earlier and unrelated Huns. The only other languages in Francia related to Hungarian, which is not an Indo-European language, are Finnish and Estonian, which are probably at the western end of a very ancient distribution of the Uralic languages.
The language that has the best claim to being the autochthonous language of Francia is Basque, which has no established affinities with any other language in the world and whose people have been determined by genetic studies to have been in the area since the Pleistocene. On the southern edge of the map is a little bit of Francia, Malta, where a language is spoken, Maltese, that is descended from Arabic and so unrelated to other modern languages in Francia. This is a remnant of the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily, although now the Maltese have long been Catholic, and the language is written, of course, in the Latin alphabet.
The orange area on the map above merits special notice. Lithuanian and Lativian are the remaining Baltic languages. They are more closely related to the Slavic languages than to the others, but are significant for their conservatism. Lithuanian is the only surviving Indo-European language with a tone accent. Today, a tone accent is most conspicuous in Chinese. Of early Indo-European languages, tones are attested only in the similarly conservative Classical Greek and Sanskrit -- indeed, the accents used for several purposes by many languages, the ácute, gràve, and circûmflex, originally wrote the tones of Greek.
Historically, Lithuania holds the prize as the last country in Europe to become Christian, not definitively converting until the Grand Duke Jagiello (1377-1434). Meanwhile, for a good two centuries it had played the role of a frontier, and a wild one, between Catholic Europe in the West and both Orthodoxy Muscovy and the Mongol Golden Horde in the East. In converting to Catholicism and marrying the Queen of Poland, Jagiello joined Lithuania to the West. In doing so, however, he defeated what had previously represented the frontier of the West, the Teutonic Knights. The Knights had occupied the territory of the Prussians and converted them, while their compatriots, the Livonian Knights, had occupied the territory of the Latvians and converted them. The Prussian language was also part of the Baltic group, but eventually the Prussians themselves became German speaking. Today, the original land of Prussia is divided between Poland and Russia, with most of the German speakers, including those who would have been ethnic Prussians, expelled. Modern Latvia, like Lithuania, has at long last again become independent.
The original core of Francia, the Frankish Kingdom that came to dominate the West under Charlemagne, can be identified as those areas upon whose ruler the Pope at one time or another conferred a crown as the Roman Emperor. Part of the Mediaeval theory of Papal power came to include this ultimate authority to create and legitimate secular authority. Outlying areas, Spain, Britain, Scandinavia, etc., The "Empire" came to be regarded as consisting of four crowns: (1) East Francia, or Germany, (2) Lombardy (the "Iron Crown"), or Italy, (3) Rome, and, after 1032, (4) Burgundy. Lorraine, which had been a separate kingdom in the inheritance of Charlemagne, soon become part of the system of "Stem Duchies" in Germany. Most of the Stem Duchies, like Saxony, Franconia, and Bavaria, corresponded to preexisting German tribes.
The title dux ("leader"), which was the Roman title of a frontier military commander, thus achieves its elevated Mediaeval meaning as a feudal title in relation to these units. As the authority of the German Emperors declined, and that of the Kings of France grew, the "Middle Kingdom" (Francia Media) of Lorraine, Burgundy, and Italy began to pass either from German to French control (Upper Lorraine, Burgundy) or from German control to separate status (Lower Lorraine, i.e. the Netherlands and Belgium, and Italy). This process continued well into the modern period, when we see a multiplication of kingdoms, reaching five in Germany (not counting Bohemia) and two in Lower Lorraine. The Dukes of Savoy, beginning with a county in Burgundy, acquired more land and a capital (Turin) in Italy, named their new Kingdom after Sardinia and ultimately succeeded as the modern Kings of Italy. After Mussolini conquered Ethiopia in 1936, one King of Italy was briefly, and fatally, associated with this as the Emperor of Ethiopia. Without otherwise going outside of Francia, we certainly see enough emperors.
The Holy Roman Emperors, especially after the title became nearly hereditary with the Hapsburgs, became less and less concerned with confirming their crown with the Pope. The last time the Pope was called upon to crown an Emperor was when Napoleon decided to reclaim the title for the Western Franks, the French (and himself), in 1804. Napoleon knew better, however, than to allow that the Pope really had the kind of authority that the coronation of Charlemagne implied: Napoleon took the crown from the Pope's hands and crowned himself.
The Hapsburgs were not going to be left behind by this: They elevated Austria to the status of Empire without any help from the Pope -- apparently on the principle that they had a right to the status to which they had become accustomed. Napoleon then abolished the Holy Roman Empire, leaving a French and an Austrian Emperor in Francia. After Napoleon's fall, the French title was later revived by Napoleon III, but then in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and his fall, Otto von Bismarck decided to transfer the dignity to a newly reunited Germany, with the King of Prussia as a new, entirely German and not even Catholic, German Emperor, ruling over Prussia and the three other remaining kingdoms (Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg -- Hanover had been absorbed into Prussia).
Except for the brief episode with Mussolini, emperors vanished from Francia, and from Russia, in the Götterdämmerung of World War I. This did not mean, unfortunately, the immediate triumph of democracy and liberty. Instead, the conservative oppression of regimes like Austria, which were said to be "despotism tempered by inefficiency," was followed by the far more oppressive, sinister, and murderous "evil empires" of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, both founded on 20th century totalitarian, collectivist ideology -- though Hitler did like to think of his regime as a "Third Reich" continuing the German empires of the past. Lenin and Stalin had no use for such historical romance, though their power would have been the envy of any Tsar and did continue police state devices begun by the Tsars. It is post-Communist Russia, struggling with corrupt democracy and a struggling economy, that now may be the most susceptible to Fascist romances about the Tsars. The development of the core of Francia can be represented in The original Kingdom of Burgundy, giving rise to Switzerland and Savoy, has mostly fallen to France, while Savoy went on to unite Italy. The principal German speaking states left over from the Empire, Prussia and Austria, assembled their own Empires, leading to the reduced modern republics of Germany and Austria, while Upper Lorraine is now entirely in the hands of France.
Each kingdom and empire here is indicated with a crown, as in the Francia maps above. The colors here more or less match the color of the corresponding table of rulers and, to an extent, the map colors. This chart illustrates well, like the "early Mediaeval" core of Francia map above, the fact that for a long time there was only one Empire, Rome. France (i.e. Napoleon) and Austria broke that understanding, followed by the German Empire, which, like Napoleonic France, saw itself following Charlemagne. The "Third Reich," of course, had no Emperor. The only Empires external to Francia evident here are Mexico and that of Italy in Ethiopia. Mexico, however, was not a European possession, except that French troops supported the Emperor Maximilian, brother of the Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. When the troops withdrew, he was overthrown and killed. This page continues and supplements the material in "Rome and Romania, 27 BC-1453 AD", Germania, 395-774 AD", and "The Ottoman Sultāns, 1290-1924 AD".
The sources for all these tables are varied and now sometimes hard to keep track of, since my own notes made from years ago do not always indicate their origin. References and difficulties in specific areas, as with Flanders, are usually discussed at the appropriate place. Here I will mention a few general sources. Some of the earliest lists are from An Encyclopedia of World History; Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged, compiled and edited by William L. Langer [Houghton, Mifflin, Company; the Riverside Press, Boston, 1940, 1948, 1952, 1960]. This one volume compendium I borrowed from a high school friend in the Sixties and recently consulted it again when it turned out that a colleague at Valley College had a copy. Amazon.com has now found a used copy for me after some months of searching. At lot of this, however, now looks a bit dated.
That drawback is remedied by a new edition by Peter N. Stearns, The Encyclopedia of World History; Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Chronologically Arranged [Sixth Edition, Houghton Miffilin Company, 2001]. While Stearns' version has much of the genealogical information, and more, of the original, it does seems to be missing the chart of the Capetian descent of the Bourbons which Langer had -- it also drops rather than updates the lists of British Prime Ministers, French Presidents and Premiers, and Italian Prime Ministers that Langer included.
This Encyclopedia is to be distinguished from the Encyclopedia of World History, by Patrick K. O'Brien et al. [George Philip Limited, Facts on File, 2000], which is arranged alphabetically -- including various lists of world leaders such as were dropped from the Stearns Encyclopedia. Other more recent information and extensive genealogies are in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II, c.700-c.900 [Cambridge University Press, 1995] and The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume III, c.900-c.1024 [Timothy Reuter, editor, Cambridge, 1999].
The most comprehensive lists of rulers I have found in print are in Kingdoms of Europe, by Gene Gurney [Crown Publishers, New York, 1982]. Gurney has some errors and obscurities, but I have not found any other work that has put so much together in one volume. I have also found a nice genealogical presentation, a chart, Kings & Queens of Europe, compiled by Anne Tauté [University of North Carolina Press, 1989]. This is not as comprehensive as Gurney, but seems to exhibit more careful scholarship.
Among prose histories, one which is of the most longstanding value has been a textbook I originally had for a class in Beirut, Medieval Europe, by Martin Scott [Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., London, 1967]. It is hard to know what other such subsequent books to list. A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman [Ballantine Book, 1978] is a marvelous history of the 14th century, a period not otherwise noted in most surveys except for the Black Death.
Otherwise, some of the most comprehensive treatments and enjoyable historical reading I have ever had involved a couple different history of Europe series that used to be published by Harper Torchbooks. In one series, I had several of the books as textbooks in classes: Reformation Europe, 1517-1559, by G.R. Elton [Harper Torchbooks, 1963], Europe Divided, 1559-1598, by J.H. Elliott [1968], Europe of the Ancient Régime, 1715-1783, by David Ogg, and Revolutionary Europe, 1783-1815, by George Rudé [this was in the Harper series, but I have a British edition published as the "Fontana History of Europe," the same as the Harper books, Fontana Library, Collins, 1964].
Of another Harper Torchbook series, "The Rise of Modern Europe," I had a couple of volumes in classes but then took some pains to acquire many of the rest. These include, The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660, by Carl J. Friedrich [Harper Torchbooks, 1962], The Triumph of Science and Reason, 1660-1685, by Frederick L. Nussbaum [1962], The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685-1715, by John B. Wolf [1962], The Quest for Security, 1715-1740, by Penfield Roberts [1963], Competition for Empire, 1740-1763, by Walter L. Dorn [1963], From Despotism to Revolution, 1763-1789, by Leo Gershoy [1963], A Decade of Revolution, 1789-1799, by Crane Brinton [1963], Europe and the French Imperium, 1799-1814, by Geoffrey Bruun [1965], Reaction and Revolution, 1814-1832, by Frederick B. Artz [1963], Political and Social Unpheaval, 1832-1852, by William L. Langer [1969], Realism and Nationalism, 1852-1871, by Robert C. Binkley [1963], and A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900, by Carlton J.H. Hayes [1963].
All by different authors, it can be imagined that the literary quality of these books is uneven. The Age of the Baroque, 1610-1660 and The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685-1715 are very fine books. Many were also written even a couple of decades before the Sixties editions that I have. Some of the material might therefore be a little dated now; but there is also the virtue that these histories are going to be largely innocent of the brainless Marxism and the kinds of politically correct "race, class, and gender" analyses that have become popular in "post modern" academia.
On the internet, "Brian Tompsett's Royal and Noble Genealogy" [now a dead link to Hull University] was invaluable, and the lists of the Dukes of Lorraine and of several other German dynasties were originally compiled using little else. The only drawbacks are that (1) Thompsett's lists were, indeed, genealogical, which means it was sometimes hard to find unrelated rulers in a succession, (2) the entries were very summary, without any explanation of may be happening as, for instance, when domains are divided among multiple heirs, and now (3) that the site is gone.
Some of these drawbacks could be remedied with Bruce R. Gordon's Regnal Chronologies. Gordon's chronological lists are no help with genealogy, or with events, but do give all of the successors. Gordon also has a large bibliographical page. Unfortunately, Gordon's site is gone; but it can be found archived, linked here on the Philosophy of History index page.
For a while, there was also WW-Person, A WWW Data base of European nobility, which combined genealogy with chronological lists. This site, however, sometimes returned blank pages, and not every chronological page included a link to the corresponding genealogical page, which means a great deal of hunting around was sometimes necessary to find the genealogical connection, and usually there is even less in the way of additional information on a page than in Thompsett. Nevertheless, this site did have genealogy that is missing with Thompsett -- and it now, like Tompsett, seems to be entirely gone.
Obviously, the drawback of on-line sources is that they can abruptly disappear. I'm sure they are archived somewhere, but the difficulty of hunting such things down does not seem worth the trouble. The "Proceedings of the Friesian School," at least, has been on line since 1996, without change of domain or (mostly) URL's.
Many of these genealogical sources themselves go back to German Stammtafeln editions. Since I've been able to obtain several volumes of the recent Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, revisions and additions have been proceeding based on this, as noted where applicable. This source includes Volume I, Parts 1 & 2, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I & II [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997], Volume II, Parts 1 & 2, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser I Westeuropa & II Nord-, Ost- und Südeuropa [Andreas Thiele, R. G. Fischer Verlag, Part 1, Third Edition, 2001, Part 2, Second Edition, 1997], and Volume III, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser, Ergänzungsband [Andreas Thiele, R. G. Fischer Verlag, Second Edition, 2001]. This is a marvelous resource, but stupefyingly dense and, of course, in German. I have also recently drawn on the Regentenlisten und Stammtafeln zur Geschischte Europas, by Michael F. Feldkamp [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 2002].
The maps are originally those of Tony Belmonte, edited to eliminate references to "Byzantium" and with corrections and additions. Tony's historical atlas (with Tony) has disappeared from the Web. It was painstakingly reassembled by Jack Lupic, but then his site has disappeared also. A while back, Belmonte's site seemed to have reappeared, but my inquries about it have bounced.
Corrections and additions to maps here are based on The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (Colin McEvedy, 1961), The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (Colin McEvedy, 1992), The Penguin Atlas of Modern History (to 1815) (Colin McEvedy, 1972), The Penguin Atlas of Recent History (Europe since 1815) (Colin McEvedy, 1982), The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume I (Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor, 1974), The Anchor Atlas of World History, Volume II (Hermann Kinder, Werner Hilgemann, Ernest A. Menze, and Harald and Ruth Bukor, 1978), The Times Concise Atlas of World History (edited by Geoffrey Barraclough & Geoffrey Parker, Hammond Inc., Times Books Ltd., 1982, 1988, 1993, 1996), and various prose histories. My graphics programs do not seem to be quite as sophisticated as Tony's, so maps I have modified may not look as professionally done as his originals.
The flags are also based on several sources. Flags Through the Ages and Across the World, by Whitney Smith [McGraw-Hill, 1975], is a splendid book, as is The International Flag Book in Color, by Christian Fogd Pedersen, Wilhelm Petersen, and Lieu.-Commander John Bedells, Hon. F.H.S., R.N. [William Morrow & Company, 1971]. These books were originally recommended to me by Professor Norman Martin (1924-2016), for whom I was a teaching assistant in symbolic logic at the University of Texas. Besides being a professor of philosophy (logic), computer science, and electrical engineering, Professor Martin was expertly knowledgeable about flags and military uniforms. Professor Martin had landed at Normandy in World War II, was at the Battle of the Bulge, helped interogate German prisoners because he had taught himself German, courted his Dutch wife at the University of Amsterdam, while on a Fulbright Scholarship, in the Dutch he had, again, taught himself, and in 2013 was made a Chavalier of the Legion of Honor by the Government of France for his wartime services.
More recent developments are covered by Flags, The Illustrated Identifier to flags of the world, by Eve Devereux [Chartwell Books, 1994, 1998]. I have been unable to reproduce some flags with complete accuracy, given the limitations of my graphics programs and artistic ability. On the Internet, almost all flags can be found at Flags of the World, with considerable history and discussion of each. At times, this site seemed to have moved around or changed identies, but I am still getting a return at the link given.
The Franks [Φράγγοι] are not nomads [νομάδες], as some barbarians [βάρβαροι] are, but their politeia [πολιτεία, res publica] and laws are modeled on the Roman pattern, apart from which they uphold similar standards with regard to contracts, marriage and religious observance. They are in fact all Christians and adhere to the strictest orthodoxy. They also have magistrates in their cities and priests and celebrate the feasts in the same way as we do; and, for a barbarian people, strike me as extremely well-bred and civilized and as practically the same as us except for their uncouth [βαρβαρικὸν] style of dress and peculiar [ἰδιάζον] language. I admire them for their other attributes and especially for the spirit of justice and harmony which prevails amongst them. [p.67, Greek text in footnote p.222] Agathias of Myrina (c.532-c.582 AD), Histories, 1.2.3-5, quoted by Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic, People and Power in New Rome [Harvard University Press, 2015, pp.67 & 222], cf. Gibbon on the "Greeks." The foundation of Frankish power, and of the future identity of Francia, was laid by Clovis (Chlodwig, whose name independently, by way of Ludwig, also gives us the modern names "Louis" and "Lewis"). Some Franks had long been living in Roman territory. After the Caesar and future Emperor Julian defeated them in 358, he had settled some on the left bank of the Rhine as foederati of Rome. As the Western Empire collapsed, they expanded slowly at first. Then Clovis not only occupied northern Gaul (486), absorbed the Alemanni (505), and defeated the Visigoths (507), but actually converted to orthodox Catholicism, making the Franks the first major German tribe to accept the spiritual authority of the Roman Church (others were Arian Christians) and so, as the closest Patriarch, the Pope in Rome itself. This was later viewed as a portent for Frankish greatness, and it was later believed that a vial of oil descended from heaven to anoint and sanctify Clovis as King. The thus "anointed" Kings of France later stoutly maintained that their authority was directly from God, without the mediation of either the Emperor or the Pope (both of whom had different ideas).
Since the Merovingian dynasty had been hallowed by time, and the kingship was consequently not thought of as elective, a change of dynasty was not a step to be undertaken lightly -- but the last King is so ephemeral that it is not even certain who his parents were. Beginning as full pagans, the Merovingians maintained an aura of the numinous and divine. They wore their hair long, and this became a characteristic of their status. The Carolingians had a great deal to overcome in replacing them. Getting the sanction of the Pope helped, though this might dangerously imply a Papal derivation of royal authority.
Curiously, now that the Merovingians are as long gone and forgotten as anything in history, their numinosity has been revived: It is already a matter of popular culture, thanks to a book, a mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown [2003]. There we get the story that traditional Christianity has perpetrated a fraud. The truth is that Jesus wasn't God, that he married Mary Magdalene, and that they had children who subsequently became, or married, the Merovingian Kings. This "bloodline" was the true meaning of the Holy Grail (Sang Real, "royal blood," instead of San Greal). In bringing the Holy Grail to Gaul and Britain, Joseph of Arimathea was not bringing a cup or bowl, as is the old Grail legend, but Mary Magdalene herself. This "bloodline" story now seems to be a popular take on the Grail legends.
As part of a story that debunks traditional Christianity, the "bloodline" legend curiously and ironically implies that there is some mystical quality or status to the descendents of Jesus and Mary, as though they are the proper rulers of France or the world ("her family's rightful claim to power," in Brown's words), or at least numinous authorities in true religion, like the Imāms of Shi'ite Islām. Either way, it would put the Merovingians in a very different light. Without this mystical quality, or without an ideology of the Divine Right of Kings, it is not clear why the "bloodline" is important, except as a historical curiosity.
Even if Jesus was married and had children, it is not obvious why this would prevent him from being the Savior and the Son of God -- though when Brown says that Jews in his day were expected to marry, this is false, since we know of virtual monasticism among the Essenes. The evidence for any of this, however, is slim to none; and Brown's clear ignorance of the Jewish sects and their practices at the time of Jesus does not inspire confidence.
Part of the argument is the importance given to Mary Magdalene in the Gnostic Gospels, but then their interpretation is ambiguous and disputed -- and they mention no children. The Merovingian Kingdom itself is fully part of the Dark Ages. Its history is thinly documented and obscure. Where the "bloodline" legend depends on Merovingian marriages, the marriages are in fact very poorly attested. While there may be some historical information on descendants of the Merovingians, people who would continue the "bloodline," I haven't noticed any in reputable sources.
This is especially striking in relation to the Carolingians. The long years of association between the Merovingian Kings and the Carolingian Mayors of the Palace should have resulted in some intermarriage -- it would have at any other point in European history -- but I do not see anything of the sort in, for instance, the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte. The absence of information, of course, makes it possible to claim anything, or to imagine possibilities and become convinced of their truth. If the Merovingians were indeed the family of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, it does seem like they should have behaved in some way different from other Dark Age German tribal rulers. It isn't discernable that they did. They were better at killing and conquest (for a while), but this might not be the difference we would expect.
The "bloodline" legend continues with the idea that Godfrey (or Godefroi) of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade and first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, was himself a descendant of the Merovingians, specifically of Dagobert II. Brown even identifies Godfrey as a "King of France." Unfortunately for our confidence in Brown's scholarship, already shaken, Godfrey was not a King of France (that would have been the Capetian Philip I), simply the Duke of Lower Lorraine. There is no evidence that Godfrey was of royal descent, or, for that matter, that there were any descendants of Dagobert II at all -- the Merovingian succession passes to his cousins, even as some writers remarkably seem to think he was the last Merovingian.
All in all, much of the "bloodline" legend, including unattested genealogies of the Merovingians, apparently is the fraudulent invention of a single crackpot French anti-Semite and monarchist named Pierre Plantard (d.2000), who finally had to admit before a French judge in 1993 that he had made it all up. The implication that the "bloodline" descendants ought to be the Kings of France is perfectly consistent with this, and perhaps Plantard expected himself to be recognized as a Merovingian, and to be offered the Throne, which he would then humbly accept. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the wild claims now have taken on a life of their own, with the eagerness of the modern atheist and conspiracy theorist to discredit all things Christian. At the same time, this has all made the fortune of Dan Brown, whose financies suffer not the least from the problems with his stories.
These tables are based on Edward James, The Franks [Basil Blackwell, 1988], and Patrick J. Geary, Before France & Germany [Oxford U. Press, 1988]. Merovingian genealogy is also covered in the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume I, Part 1, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997].
are considered separately as the 
Periphery of Francia. Charlemagne himself ruled modern France, northern Italy, and most of modern Germany. After the death of Charles the Fat in 888, the imperial title was fitfully conferred on Kings of Italy, and then lapsed entirely in 922. The descent of King Otto I of Germany into Italy ushered in new combinations of territory and a new line of Emperors, as the Pope crowned Otto in 962.
A duke is only inferior to a sovereign prince. The next highest title, marquis or margrave (Markgraf), signified the count (comes, Graf, or "earl" in English) of a march (Mark) territory. The marches were border territories that involved a great deal of fighting. In Charlemagne's day, that included marches in Spain contesting the Islāmic advance. Later, the German marches north and south of Bohemia extended German settlement far to the east. Brandenburg became the most famous northern march, remaining a margravate until becoming the Kingdom of Prussia. Austria (Österreich, the "eastern realm") was the most famous southern march, becoming a duchy, then the only "archduchy," and finally an empire.
)
this flow chart. Of the eight modern states of the region (not counting Monaco, San Marino, and Liechtenstein), France has the most continuous historical tradition. The Mediaeval Empire at one point drew in all of Francia Media, except for the French Duchy of Burgundy, but then slowly broke up. Parts of Lower Lorraine, assembled by the Dukes of Burgundy, have come down as the Low Countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
Index
Sources
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
The Merovingian Franks, 447-751
εἰσὶ γὰρ οἱ Φράγγοι οὐ νομάδες, ὥσπερ ἀμέλει ἔνιοι τῶν βαβάρων, ἀλλὰ καὶ πολιτείᾳ ὡς τὰ πολλὰ χρῶνται Ῥωμαϊκῇ καὶ νόμοις τοῖς αὐτοῖς καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ὁμοίως ἀμφί τε τὰ συμβόλαια καὶ γάμους καὶ τὴν τοῦ θείου θεραπείαν νομίζουσιν. Χριστιανοὶ γὰρ
ἅπαντες τυγάνουσιν ὄντες καὶ τῇ ὄρθοτατῃ χρώμενοι δόξῃ. ἔχουσι δὲ καὶ ἄρχοντας ἐν ταῖς πόλεσι καὶ ἱερεῖς καὶ τὰς ἑορτὰς ὁμοίως ἡμῖν ἐπιτελοῦσι καὶ ὡς ἐν βαρβάρῳ γένει ἔμοιγε δοκοῦσι σφόδρα εἶναι κόσμιοί τε καὶ ἀστειότατοι καὶ οὐδέν τι ἔχειν τὸ διαλλαττόν ἢ μόνον τὸ βαρβαρικὸν τῆς στολῆς καὶ τὸ τῆς φωνῆς ἰδιάζον. ἄγαμαι γὰρ αὐτοὺς ἐς τὰ μάλιστα ἔγωγε τῶν τε ἄλλων ὧν ἔχουσιν ἀγαθῶν καὶ τῆς ἐς ἀλλήλους διακαιοσύνης τε καὶ ὁμονοίας.
FRANKS, MEROVINGIAN KINGS Merovech (Meerwig) 447-458 Childerich I 458-481 Clovis I (Chlodwig) 481-511 Chlothar I 511-561 Chlodomer 511-524 Childebert I 511- 558 Theuderich I 511- 534 Charibert I 561-567 St. Guntram,
Gunthchramn,
GuntramnusBurgundy, 561-592 Sigibert I Aus, 561- 575 Theudebert I 534- 548 Chilperich I Neu, 561-584 Chlothar II Neu, 584-629; Aus, 613-629; Bur, 613-629 Childebert II Aus, 575- 595; Bur, 592- 595 Theudebald 548- 555 Dagobert I Aus, 623-638; Neu & Bur, 629-638 Charibert II Aquitaine, 629-632 Theudebert II Aus, 595- 612 Theuderich II Bur, 595- 613; Aus, 612- 613 Clovis II Neu & Bur, 638-657 Sigibert III Aus, 634-656 Sigibert II Aus, 613 Chlothar III Neu & Bur, 657-673 Childerich II Aus, 662-675 Dagobert II 656 Childebert Adoptivus, Carolingian 656- 661 Theuderich III Neu & Bur, 673-691;
Aus, 687-691Clovis III 675- 676 Clovis IV 691-695 Childebert III 695- 711 Chlothar (Lothair) IV Aus, 717- 720 Dagobert III 711-715 Chilperich II Neu, 715- 721 Theuderich IV 721-737 interregnum, Carolingian mayors rule, 737-743 Childerich III 743-751 Deposed with permission of Pope Zacharias, 751 
The division of the Kingdom, in time honored Germanic fashion, between the four sons of Clovis, fragmented Frankish power and slowed its growth. In the table above, sub-domains are abbreviated, "Aus" for Austrasia, "Neu" for Neustria, and "Bur" for Burgundy. After the conquest of the Thuringians (531), the Burgundians (534), Provence (536), and the Bavarians (555), there was little expansion of the Kingdom for the remaining period of the Merovingian Dynasty. As external threats appeared, like the inroads of Islām from Spain, power began to pass to the Mayors of the Palace like Charles Martel, who retroactively can be called "Carolingian," though this, of course, is to name them after Charlemagne, who hasn't lived yet.
| FRANKS, CAROLINGIAN MAYORS, KINGS, & EMPERORS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pepin I | Mayor, 628-639 | |
| Pepin II | Mayor, 687-714 | |
| Charles Martel | Mayor, 714-741 | |
| Battle of Tours, Poitiers, with Odo of Aquitaine, Arabs defeated, 732 | ||
| Carloman | Mayor, 741-747 | |
| Pépin III le Bref, the Short | Mayor, 747-751; King, 751-768 | |
| Crowned King by Boniface of Crediton, with permission of Pope Zacharias, 751 | ||
| Carloman I | 768-771 | I of France |
| Charles I the Great, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, Karl der Große | King, 768-;Roman Emperor, 800-814 | I of France, Germany, Burgundy, Italy, & Empire |
| Conquest of Lombardy, 774; conquest of Saxony, 777-778, 785-790, 790-804; annexation of Bavaria, 788; Viking sack of Noirmoutier monastery (founded 674), mouth of the Loire, 799; annexation of the Alemanni, 806; Danish raid on Friesland/Frisia, 810 | ||
The legitimacy, as it happened, was conveniently provided by the Pope. Appeals from Pope Gregory III to Charles Martel himself for help against the Lombards in 739 and 740 had gone unheeded; but when Pope Stephen III travelled to meet Pepin III in 753-754, he procured Pepin's promise of help and sealed the pact by formally anointing Pepin King of the Franks. Pepin defeated the Lombards in 754 and 756 and delivered to the Pope, over the protests of Roman officials from Constantinople, the "Exarchate of Ravenna" corridor from Rome to Ravenna. This established the form, or at least claims, of the Papal States for the next 1100 years.
The Lombards would not stay defeated, and Pepin's son Charles eventually had to conquer them and annex their kingdom (774). His conquest of the pagan Saxons (782-804) and expansion in other directions began to turn the Frankish Kingdom into a superstate. This gave Charles and the Pope ideas, especially when the Empress Irene deposed and blinded her son, Constantine VI, in 797, assuming sole rule: the first time a woman ruled Romania in her own name. The Westerners were little disposed to regard a woman as a legitimate emperor -- women could not rule in the law of the Salic Franks (hence the "Salic Law" against female succession). So, on Christmas Day in the year 800 (this may actually mean 799 -- when 800 began is a little fluid), the Pope crowned Charles Roman Emperor, taking for himself a role and an authority that he had never had anything to do with before. In taking the title from the Pope, Charles (now "the Great," "Carolus Magnus," or "Charlemagne") fatefully assumed both pretensions, to Empire, and an obligation, to Popes, that would prove a source of endless dispute, grief, and hybris in the future.
In the tables of rulers an icon is used of an imperial crown with a yellow nimbus: . This indicates Emperors crowned by the Pope. This is not used in the genealogical tables until the German Emperors, since it is only then that we begin to speak of "Emperors" even if they were never crowned by the Pope. This is discussed below. While Charlemagne probably was not going to think of the Imperial dignity as contingent on the approval of the Pope, this is how the matter developed, in line with increasing claims of Papal authority.
While Charlemagne himself supposedly never quite learned to read and write, there was a revival of learning at his Court, enough to earn the characterization "Carolingian Renaissance." One permanent effect that could not have been anticipated at the time is that when printing was invented centuries later in the actual Renaissance (1440's), the uncial characters written in the Carolingian period would be adopted as the font for lower case letters (minuscules) in printing, while block Latin characters became upper case letters (majuscules). Written characters as they actually developed during the Middle Ages are now dismissed as "Gothic" and used only for special purposes -- although they were widely used in Germany (Fraktur) until recently.
While aspects of the Carolingian Renaissance look ahead to the future, other things remind us that the decline from Rome hasn't quite bottomed out yet. One of these was the 
coinage introduced by Charlemagne. This consisted of two coins, a silver denarius and half-denarius, the obolus -- which see at left in their later, British, copper versions. The most obvious and important thing about this, symbolic and substantive, is that both gold and copper coinage is missing. The lack of the former means that large capital transactions don't exist, and of the latter that a cash economy simply doesn't exist either for the daily life of most people. A cash economy, indeed, had been collapsing, in a wave spreading from West to East, since the 5th century. Nevertheless, German states, like Lombardy, had maintained a gold coinage. What finally drove things down to the bottom was the Arab Conquest, which crippled or destroyed trade in the Mediterranean, as this had been carried on by Romania. In Charlemagne's world, Francia was cut off from most international trade, in an economy of subsistent agriculture and taxes in produce and labor. Neither serious nor trivial money was necessary. With Charlemagne's coins, the denarius borrows its name from the silver coin of the early Empire, which had long been debased to nothing, while the obolus was originally a division of the Athenian drachma. The standard gold coin, the "dollar of the Middle Ages," had been the Roman solidus, which was minted without debasement from the days of Constantine until the reign of the Emperor Michael IV, in Constantinople, in the 11th century. There were supposed to be 12 denarii of Charlemagne for one gold solidus from Romania (i.e. 12d = 1s, twelve pence to a shilling). A practical gold coinage would not be revived in Francia until the 13th century.
Athough Charlemagne's obolus was soon forgotten, the denarius long survived, as the denier in France until the French Revolution. A different word was used in the Germanic languages, penny in English and Pfennig in German. The English penny was the direct descendant of the Carolingian denarius until, of all things, 1970. The character, history, and values of these coins and their successors is examined elsewhere.
The breakup of Charlemagne's kingdom was fateful to the history of Western Europe for centuries to come. Although soon surrounded by independent Christian states, in Britain and Ireland to the northwest, Spain in the southwest, Hungary and Poland in the east, and the Scandinavian states in the north (i.e. the Periphery of Francia), the Frankish kingdoms remained the central tentpole (we might even say the axis mundi) of European politics (axis Franciae). As neat halves of Charlemagne's empire eventually formed, France in the West and Germany in the East, the stage for the greatest battles of modern war in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries would be set along the seam, from Nieuwpoort (1600) to Ramillies (1706), Waterloo (1815), Verdun (1916), and the Bulge (1944).
| Carolingians, Empire & Italy | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Louis I the Pious | France, Italy, Germany, Burgundy, & Empire,814-840 | Pepin | Italy, 781-810 | ||
| Bernard | Italy, 810-818 | ||||
| Lothar I | Italy, Burgundy, Lorraine, & Empire, 840-855 | ||||
| Vikings appear in the Seine, 841; sack of Ostia & Rome by the Aghlabids, 846 | |||||
| Lothar II | Lorraine 855-869 | Charles of Burgundy | Burgundy 855-863 | Louis II | Italy & Burgundy, & Empire 855-875 |
| Resident at Benevento, 866-871; ejects Arabs from Bari, 871; ejected from Benevento, 871; dies at Capua, 875 | |||||
Charles the Bald and Louis the German combined against their brother Lothar to produce a more equal division of the Empire. They defeated him in 841 and then pledged a common front against him with the Oaths of Strasbourg in 842. The Oaths provide us with one of the most striking documents of European history. Charles and Louis each swore their Oath in the spoken language of the domain of the other, and then the retainers of each swore an oath in their own language to honor the Oaths even if their own ruler broke them. I give the oaths sworn by the retainers here.
The text derives from the historian Nithard (790-845), who of course was writing otherwise in Latin, where Charles is Karolus, Louis Lodhuvicus and Lothar Lodharius. Strasbourg itself, in Alsace, was Argentaria in Latin, but Nithard notes that it is already being called Strazburg ("town," burg, at the "[cross-]roads," Modern German Straße). Charles' men spoke a language Nithard calls the Romana lingua, the "Roman tongue." This looks like a remarkable combination of Latin and some sort of Proto-French. Now it gets called "Gallo-Romance," and isn't quite Old French yet. Louis' men spoke Old High German, which Nithard calls the Teudisca lingua. The -isc ending makes adjectives in Germanic languages. It has become -ish in Modern English and -isch in Modern German.
Teud- means "people" and Teudisca is semantically equivalent to Deutsch in Modern German. However, the consonants are not those of High German. The word was þeoda (theoda) in Old English, and the language of the original Franks, Old Franconian, would have had those consonants. So Nithard's version looks like a Latinization of that, perhaps influenced by Latin Teutones. By now, Charles and Louis certainly spoke these languages of their domains. Did they still speak their own older Frankish language? Perhaps not. What language did the Carolingians speak at home? We may not know.
The text and translation here are taken off Wikipedia, which does not credit the original translator. It was frustrating over the years to have European history books that would talk about the Oaths but then not quote them in the original languages.
The Men of Charles the Bald The Men of Louis the German Romana lingua, Gallo-Romance Teudisca lingua, Old High German Si Lodhwigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo jurat conservat, et Karlus, meos sendra, de suo part n lostanit, si io returnar non l'int pois, ne io ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, in nulla ajudha contra Lodhuwig nun li iu er.
Oba Karl then eid, then er sînemo bruodher Ludhuwîge gesuor, geleistit, indi Ludhuwîg mîn hęrro then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es irwenden ne mag: noh ih noh thero nohhein, then ih es irwenden mag, widhar Karlo imo ce follusti ne wirdhit. If Louis keeps the oath that he has sworn to his brother Charles, and Charles, my lord, on the other hand breaks it, and if I cannot dissuade him from it — neither I nor anyone that I can dissuade from it — then I shall not help him in any way against Louis.
If Charles keeps the oath that he has sworn to his brother Louis, and Louis, my lord, on the other hand breaks the oath he has sworn, and if I cannot dissuade him from it — neither I nor anyone that I can dissuade from it — then I shall not follow him against Charles. 
| Carolingians, Francia Orientalis, Germany | Louis II the German | Germany, 843-876 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany, 876-887; Italy, 879-888; Emperor,881-888 | Charles III the Fat | Carloman of Bavaria | Germany, 876-880; Italy, 877-879 | Louis III | Germany, 876-882 |
| Germany, 880/882-887; Italy, 879-888 | |||||
| Viking sack of Ghent, 879; sack of Cologne & Trier, 882; siege of Paris, 885-886, plunder of Burgundy, 886; Charles discredited, deposed, 887 | |||||
| Arnulf of Carinthia | Germany, 887-899; Italy & Emperor, 896-899 | ||||
| Louis IV the Child | Germany, 899-911 | ||||
Soon enough this combination led to a settlement, the Treaty of Verdun (843), heavy with portent for the future. The division was equal enough, Charles the Bald in the West (Francia Occidentalis), Louis the German in the East (Francia Orientalis), and Lothar in the Middle and South (Francia Media).
The domain of Charles would become France, and that of Louis Germany. It was a while, however, before the arrangement would evolve into such modern identities. All Charles and Louis were really doing was enforcing the ancient Frankish rules of succession. It need not have been permanent, as indeed it would not look to be when Charles III reunited nearly the whole Empire. His incompetence, however, allowed the reassertion of the centrifugal forces already evident at Strasbourg.
Italy and Burgundy were prestigious possessions for Lothar, but they were not centers of Frankish power, and the northern area looks precariously and ominously sandwiched between the compact realms of his brothers. This turned out to be especially unfortunate when Lothar not only predeceased his brothers by a good margin but left behind him his own problem of multiple sons. Natural fragments were distributed between them. 
Louis, who now became the Emperor Louis II, needed to have Rome and so received Italy. Charles got Burgundy, and Lothar got the rest, i.e. that precarious northern area, with which Lothar's name was now permanently associated: It became Lotharingia, reduced to Lothringen in German and Lorraine in French (and, usually, English).
None of the sons of Lothar I managed to outlive their uncles. But the older men pounced even while the Emperor Louis II still lived, dividing Lorraine between them and depriving Louis of part of Burgundy. All of Lorraine and Burgundy, of course, should have reverted to him. This reveals the relative strength of the Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms, and the persistent ruthlessness of Charles the Bald and Louis the German. When the Emperor Louis then died, Charles got into Italy, to Rome, and to the Imperial crown first.
| Carolingians, Francia Occidentalis, France | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Charles II the Bald | France, 843-877;Emperor, 875-877 |
||
| Viking sack of Nantes, on the Loire, 843; defeat of Charles, sack of Paris, 845 | |||
| Louis II the Stammerer | France, 877-879 |
||
| Louis III | France, 879-882 | Carloman II | France, 879-884 |
| Defeat of Vikings at Sancourt by Louis III, 881 | |||
| Charles III the Fat (Germany, no # for France) | Emperor, 881; France, 884-888 | ||
| siege of Paris, 885-886, plunder of Burgundy, 886; Charles discredited | |||
| Odo (Eudes/Otto), Count of Paris | France, 888-898 | ||
| Charles III the Simple | France, 898-922 | ||
| grants Normandy to the Viking Rollo, 911 | |||
| Robert I, Count of Paris | France, 922-923 | ||
| Rudolf/Raoul, Duke of Burgundy | France, 923-936 | ||
| Louis IV d'Outremer | France, 936-954 | ||
| Lothair V | France, 954-986 | ||
| Louis V | France, 986-987 | ||
Germany was divided between three brothers, and the West Frankish kingdom, after the brief reign of Louis (II) the Stammerer, passed to his two young sons. Again, this was bad news for the strength and stability of the Frankish realm.
Italy ended up in the hands of one of the German heirs, Charles the Fat, who attained the Imperial honor after a brief hiatus (877-881). 
Meanwhile, part of Burgundy had been detached by a son-in-law of the Emperor Louis II. It is a sad comment on the state of the Carolingian dynasty that Charles the Fat should have ended up as the most vigorous and successful member of his generation.
With the deaths of his brothers, Charles the Fat ended up with all of Germany and Italy. Then the deaths of his young cousins, from whom he had already extorted part of Lorraine, left no one but an even younger brother as the heir to the West Frankish kingdom. This young Charles (later "the Simple") was set aside, and Charles the Fat managed to reassemble the entire Empire of Charlemagne -- except for Burgundy (but he also does not figure in the actual count of French kings -- Charles the Bald was Charles II of France, and Charles the Simple would be Charles III of France, though sometimes different numberings are seen).
This apparent triumph was in fact hollow. The now Emperor Charles III was nowhere near up to the task of holding off the Vikings and Arabs who were currently ravaging even the inner parts of the realm. The Germans became so disgusted with him that he suffered the ignominy of being deposed as East Frankish king.
The Germans elected an illegitimate nephew of Charles, Arnulf of Carthinthia, as the East Frankish king. The West Frankish nobility elected a non-Carolingian, Odo of Paris. 
This is the family that would soon become the long lasting Capetian house of France. Feeling for the Carolingian house, however, was still strong, and although the West Franks turned to Odo's family again before the end of the Carolingian period, he was followed by the last son of Louis the Stammerer, Charles (III) the Simple.
Meanwhile, Burgundy and Italy spun off to more local Carolingian in-laws, among whom the title of Emperor was passed around for a time. After Berengar (I of Italy), however, the title simply lapsed. Since the Popes could have bought some influence with an Imperial coronation, it is a good question why they stopped bothering. There was thus an Imperial interregnum from 922 to 962.
With the last of the main lines of the Carolingians, one connection that intrigued me involved the sister of Otto of Lorraine. Most histories don't even show a sister (if they even show Otto), but she originally came to my attention in From Scythia to Camelot by C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor [Garland Publishing, Inc., New York, 1994, p.298].
Littleton and Malcor identify her as "Irmengard," who married Albert of Namur. Their daughter, Hedwig, then marries Gerhard, Duke of Upper Lorraine; and their son, Dietrich, marries Gertrude, heiress of Flanders. Their descendants are subsequent Counts of Flanders.
For some time this was the only source where I found this connection attested. Now, however, I have found it in the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume I, Part 1, Deutsche Kaiser-, Königs-, Herzogs- und Grafenhäuser I [Andreas Thiele, Third Edition, R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1997, p.64]. There the sister of Otto is given as "Adelheid," not "Irmengard," but the marriage to Albert, Count of Namur, is shown. Their daughter, Hedwig (with a question mark), is then shown on page 66, married to Gerhard of Lorraine, as in Littleton and Malcor.
Charles the Simple's most famous and important deed was to cede some land, which became Normandy, to the Norse chieftain Rollo in 911 -- an infamously humiliating business for Charles. This was also about the time that the last Carolingian in Germany, Louis the Child, died, and the Germans turned to Conrad of Franconian. That was the end of the Carolingians in East Francia.
The nobility of Lorraine decided to uphold Carolingian legitimacy by attaching themselves to the Western kingdom; but soon it looked like West Francia would follow the East, when Charles, as much over his head as his cousin Charles the Fat had been, was deposed and Robert of Paris, Odo's brother, was elected. Robert was followed by his son-in-law, Rudolf of Burgundy, but then the West Franks turned to the Carolingians again, bringing Louis IV back from exile in England ("outre mer").
This started to look like Carolingians getting established again, since one of Louis's son, Charles, even became the ruler of the new "duchy" of Lorraine (no longer a separate kindom, and in fact now divided; the Carolingians got Lower Lorraine). But these were not strong rulers, and the monarchy itself was becoming weaker and weaker.
| Carolingians, Francia Media, Lorraine | |
|---|---|
| Zwentibold of Lorraine | King, 895-900 |
| Charles of Lorraine | Duke, Lower Lorraine, 977-991 |
| Otto of Lorraine | Duke, Lower Lorraine, 991-1012 |
The Carolingians of Lorraine did not last much longer than the royal lines, though their blood continued in their in-laws among the local nobility, most importantly the house of Alsace, which succeeded to the Duchy of Lorraine and the County of Flanders.
The Carolingians of Lorraine were not alone as the last Carolingians. A line descended from Bernard, King of Italy, who had been killed in 818, became the Counts of Vermandois.
I was unaware of the descendants of Bernard of Italy until finding the book The Carolingians, A Family Who Forged Europe, by Pierre Riché [University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, translated by Michael Idomir Allen from Les Carolingiens, une famille qui fit l'Europe, Hachette, 1983]. Brian Tompsett confirmed the descent of the Counts of Vermandois as Carolingians, but WW-Person, A WWW Data base of European nobility did not.
Riché ends the male descent of Vermandois with Herbert III of Vermandois, Herbert the Younger of Troyes, and Herbert of Meaux, which left Otto of Lorraine in place as the last Carolingian. However, both Tompsett and WW-Person list Stephen Count of Champagne, Meaux, and Troyes (Tompsett twice, as son of both Herbert the Elder and Herbert, Count of Meaux, identified as "Herbert the Younger"). Stephen beats out Otto.
But WW-Person shows Carolingian descent even beyond this, with descendants of Herbert III of Vermandois all the way down to the heiress Adelaide who marries Hugh, a son of King Henry I of France. There is also a line shown of Counts of Soissons, beginning with Guy I, given as a brother of Herbert III. This also ends with an heiress named Adelaide. If this is all correct, then the Carolingians continue for a century longer than I would have previously thought.
I have now been able to compare this previous information with the Erzählende genealogische Stammtafeln zur europäischen Geschichte, Volume II, Part 1, Europäiche Kaiser-, Königs- und Fürstenhäuser I Westeuropa [Andreas Thiele, R. G. Fischer Verlag, Part 1, Third Edition, 2001]. The Carolingian descent is confirmed. Guy I of Soissons is given, but with a note of uncertainty. Most importantly, many more descendants of Adelaide and Hugh the Great are given, including Capetian Counts of Vermandois down to 1214.
The many heiresses in this diagram, of course, continue Carolingian descent through their marriages, especially to the houses of Anjou, Flanders, and Blois. Descendants of all of these marriages continue until the present day.
| Divisions of Francia | |
|---|---|
| Francia Occidentalis, France | |
| Francia Media | Lorraine |
| Burgundy | |
| Italy | |
| Papacy | |
| Francia Orientalis, Germany | |
Auch jetzt noch ist Frankreich der Sitz der geistigsten und raffinirtesten Cultur Europa's und die hohe Schule des Geschmacks: aber man muß dies »Frankreich des Geschmacks« zu finden wissen.
European noblesse -- of feeling, taste, mores, in short in every superior sense -- is the work and invention of France; European commoness, the plebeianism of modern ideas, belongs to England.
Even today France is still the seat of the most intellectual and sophisticated culture of Europe, and the school of taste, but -- one must know how to find the "France of taste." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan, Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p.191, translation modified; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, pp.175-176 [muß restored for muss], color added.FRANCIA OCCIDENTALIS,
FRANCE...die europäische noblesse -- des Gefühls, des Geschmacks, der Sitte, kurz, das Wort in jedem hohen Sinne genommen -- ist Frankreich's Werk und Erfindung, die europäische Gemeinheit, der Plebejismus der modernen Ideen -- Englands. --
The western part of the great Frankish kingdom is the domain to which the Frankish name ended up sticking, as "France" -- even rendered faithfully as Frankreich in German. There is some irony in this, since the Germanic Franks there came to speak the local Romance language, descended from Latin, a language which then took its name, like the kingdom, from the Franks, as Français ("French" in English).
The Frankish identity of France was not conceded without comment by the Eastern Franks, i.e. Germans; but the East Frankish Kings forfeited the issue by beginning to claim Roman heritage rather than Frankish -- the "Holy Roman Empire," Imperium Romanum Sacrum. The retention of the Frankish name by the western kingdom is also ironic considering the Roman identification of the French themselves, who have always yearned for the full Rhine frontier of Roman Gaul and became increasingly contemptuous and then fearful of Germany and its sense of its own history. Thus, Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus) can be claimed, and named, as a French King, but there is no doubt that he was a German -- Karl der Große.
Except for the catastrophic defeat early in World War II, however, France historically did rather well against Germany. Capetian France began as one of the weakest countries in Europe.
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| Sainte-Chapelle, The Chapel of Louis IX, 1248, 1969 |
Although the France of Louis XIV threatened the Balance of Power of Europe, with the annexation of Alsace seen by all as embodying French aggression, the Balance was only really upended during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Eras. Through annexations and vassal states, Napoleon briefly reassembled the Empire of Charlemagne, and more -- Charlemagne never conquered Egypt (though St. Louis had tried) or stood, even briefly, victorious in Moscow. Napoleon thus had ambition and reach unlike conquerors within European memory. Although he (and the Revolution) failed, the history and consciousness of Europe were permanently altered, so I've called the period the "French Upheaval."
| HOUSE OF PARIS | |
|---|---|
| Odo (Eudes), Count of Paris | 888-898 |
| Robert I, Count of Paris | 922-923 |
| Rudolf/Raoul, Duke of Burgundy | 923-936 |
| CAPETIAN KINGS | |
| Hugh Capet | 987-996 |
| Robert II the Pious | 996-1031 |
| Henry I | 1031-1060 |
| Philip I | 1060-1108 |
| Louis VI | 1108-1137 |
| Louis VII | 1137-1180 |
| Second Crusade, 1147-1149 | |
| Philip II Augustus | 1180-1223 |
| Fiefs of John declared forfeit, 1202; Battle of Bouvines, fiefs north of Loire secured, 1214; Albigensian Crusade, 1209-1229 | |
| Louis VIII | 1223-1226 |
 St. Louis IX | 1226-1270 |
| Albigensian Crusade ends, much of Toulouse ceded, 1229; Sixth/Seventh Crusade, 1248-1254; England abandons claims outside Aquitaine & Gascony, 1259; Seventh/Eighth Crusade, Louis dies, 1270, Crusade continued by Edward of England, 1270-1272 | |
| Philip III | 1270-1285 |
| Toulouse reverts to crown, 1271 | |
| Philip IV the Fair, I, of Navarre | 1285-1314 |
| King of Navarre, jure uxoris 1384-1305 | |
| Pope Boniface VIII captured, beaten, humiliated, and terrorized, 1303; Templars suppressed, arrested, 1307; last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, tortured & burned, curses Philip and Pope Clement V, 1314 | |
| Louis X | 1314-1316 |
| King of Navarre, 1305-1314 | |
| Beginning of Little Ice Age, heavy rain for five years, famine, 1315-1320 | |
| John I | 5 days, 1316 |
| Navarre | |
| Philip V, II, of Navarre | 1316-1322 |
| Navarre, 1314-1322 | |
| Charles IV, I, of Navarre | 1322-1328 |
| Navarre, 1322-1328 | |
The Capetians are usually reckoned to begin with Hugh Capet, but his family (the house of Paris or "Robertians," after Robert the Strong) had been nudging the Carolingians for some time, and his uncle (by marriage), grandfather, and great uncle had already been Kings of France. The line now, however, derives its name from an epithet of Hugh himself, "Capet" (Latin capa) being his, apparently, distinctive cape.By the time the Carolingians died out and Hugh was elected, little remained of the Royal Domain but the miniscule Île de France. However, this was held together and, without succession problems, the Capetians settled into legitimacy and bided their time.
The payoff came with Philip Augustus, who had the combination of patience and brilliance that was called for in the circumstances. The patience was needed during the reign of Henry II of England, who was brilliant enough in his own right and whose possessions took up the majority of the land area of France. 
We see a fictional version of Philip's interactions with Henry's family in The Lion in Winter. We even get the sense there that Philip was ready to take advantage of Henry's lesser sons, once Henry was gone.
The map at right, showing the full extent of what Philip was up against, gives dates at least by which the indicated territories, those of England and of Toulouse, were recovered by the Crown. The boundaries south of the Loire should be taken as approximate, since I find disagreements in my sources -- at best an indication that boundaries were often redrawn during the period, at worst that they are not well understood.
After Henry's death King Richard was soon embroiled in the Third Crusade. Philip's participation was perfunctory, and he was soon back home taking the measure of Richard's Regent, his foolish brother Prince John. Meanwhile, there had been an agreement that led to the historic flags of France and England. 
Initially, however, it was the French flag that was the red cross on white, which later fell to England. Some people have found this very confusing. See below for the subsequent evolution of the French flag, which changed its colors more than once, settling, before the Revolution, on the white of the Bourbons.
After Richard's death, and John's problems with his own nobles (leading to the Magna Carta, 1215), and the Pope (after John murdered his nephew, Arthur of Brittany), he was perhaps an easy target for Philip. However, it all came down to a battle. Philip defeated John and his allies, including the Papal counter-Emperor, Otto (IV) of Brunswick, at Bouvines (1214), the English lost their possessions north of the Loire and thereafter steadily retreated in the south, until much diminished holdings were confirmed in 1259. John became John "Lackland," losing Normandy, Anjou, and much else. Philip earned his own sobriquet "Augustus."
Philip had his own problems with the Pope, however, over a marriage to Ingeborg of Denmark (d.1237), whom he decided, on their wedding day, that he didn't like. After various misadventures, including an intermediate marriage (with children), he accepted her as Queen, but he never had children by her.
But Philip wasn't done with Henry II's family. The Dowager English Queen, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, journeyed to Spain to choose a granddaughter to marry Philip's son, who became Louis VIII. The early death of Louis launched her, Blanche of Castile, triumphantly into the maelstrom of French politics, as Regent, on several occasions, for her great son, St. Louis IX, initially to fend of rebellious nobles and the English during Louis's minority. Later, she governed France in his absences.
The map at right shows the vast domains conferred on the brothers, Charles and Alphonse, of Louis IX. Charles of Anjou acquired Provence by his marriage, and he conquered much in Italy by invitation of the Pope -- with a hope of conquering Romania, until the Sicilian Vespers (1282). Nevertheless, the Anjevian House of Charles spread, briefly, as far as Hungary and Poland.
Meanwhile, Pope Innocent III had declared a "Crusade" against the heretical Cathari (or Albigensians) in the south of France (or Languedoc). One of the most infamous episodes of the Middle Ages, the Crusade was largely against and at the expense of the Count of Toulouse. In the settlement of 1229, much of the Count's land reverted to the Crown and his daughter and heiress, Joanna, married Alphonse. When they died without issue, all of Toulouse reverted to the Crown. Meanwhile, much of the distinctive and thriving Provençal culture had been destroyed.
The success and prestige of Louis IX was matched only by his reputation for holiness, which won him canonization as early as 1297. His life ended, however, on one of his ill-advised and unsuccessful Crusades.
While Louis was the most serious and powerful Crusader in a long time, he fell prey to some confused strategic ideas that long before had already weakened the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was a tempting idea, that Jerusalem would only really be secure if the Crusaders could conquer Egypt on its flank.
Unfortunately, the conquest and occupation of Egypt would require a level of commitment of manpower and resources that the Crusaders had never done a very good job of marshalling, not even a King of France, and certainly not to the distance and unfamiliar conditions of Egypt. Also, the Crusaders did not have a very good track record of defeating Muslim armies in open battle, and St. Louis himself was not exactly a hardened veteran of military campaigns.
All this spelled disaster in Egypt, with Louis himself captured and only ransomed at great expense. This was the last serious effort of Crusaders that had anything to do with Jerusalem, and the last of the Kingdom, at Acre, would fall to the Mamlūks little more than twenty years later (1291).
Louis's final Crusade, numbered the 7th or 8th, even if successful, would really contribute nothing in the quest for Jerusalem. With a landing in Tunisia, it was more to secure the flank and the domains of his brother Charles in Italy. As such, it was pointless and Quixotic, and Louis paid for it with his life. He was lucky that his body could be returned to France -- to be desecrated and destroyed, of course, by the fanatics of the French Revolution.
Soon a very different kind of King was on the Throne: Philip IV, "the Fair." Both the ruthlessness and success of Philip were extraordinary. In 1306, Philip arrested all the Jews of France, seized all their property, and expelled them from the Kingdom. This was, of course, merely to get their wealth, since anyone who owed debts to the Jews now owed them to the King. The aim of this is obvious, since Philip had already dispossessed and expelled Lombard bankers, to whom, of course he owed money.
Like many rulers, including modern governments, Philip did not reckon that wealth was volatile and that in the absence of incentives and transactions, it simply evaporates. Philip's understanding was of a Cargo Cult kind of economics, which is still popular among the "educated" elites of today. It was certainly easier in the Middle Ages to think of wealth as a great hoard of coins; but there is no excuse now. Louis X would think better of the business in 1315, inviting the Jews back -- although they were then expelled in 1322 by Philip V. Jews were not again part of France until Louis XIV annexed Alsace.
Having robbed the Jews, Philip quickly turned on the Crusading Order of the Knights Templar, who had essentially become bankers. The Order was destroyed, its wealth seized, and its members tortured and judicially murdered (1307-1314). In that respect, the Jews and Lombards got off lucky.
Meanwhile, Pope Boniface VIII had been asserting the strongest claims yet of Papal supremacy and power. Philip sent agents to capture and humiliate the Pope. Rescued by the villagers at his summer residence, Boniface nevertheless soon died (1303).
The election of a French Pope then led to the relocation of the Papacy to Avignon (1309) and the beginning of the "Babylonian Captivity" (1309-1377), during which few were deceived that the Popes had essentially become agents of the French Crown.
If not entirely a puppet of Philip, Pope Clement V nevertheless went along with Philip's suppression of the Templars, even though the Order was under direct Papal jurisdiction and Philip did not have the right to arrest, hold, or judge any of them. The Pope was hoping to tempt Philip into another Crusade. Since Crusading held not the slightly attraction to Philip, the naiveté of the Pope served no good purpose for him, even as it abandoned the Templars to the torturers and executioners of Philip. About to be burned at the stake, Grand Master Jacques de Molay invited both Philip and the Pope to meet him before God. As it happened, they were both dead within the year -- Nietzsche would blame us if we relish the subsequent scene of the Divine Judgment.
If the crimes of Philip IV merited divine retribution, on earth this was visited only in the form of the extinction of his heirs, at least the male heirs. Thus, following the Salic Law, the French succession eventually jumped to Philip's nephew, Philip (VI) of Valois.
However, Philip IV had married Jeanne I, the Queen of Navarre, and his grand-
daughter, Jeanne II, inherited that Kingdom. There was some protest in Navarre over how this played out, since Jeanne should have inherited at the death of her brother John I, while the succession was delayed through two more French reigns, with the brothers of Philip IV. Nevertheless, she finally came to her Throne. Her descendants would eventually return to the Throne of France through the Bourbons. Philip IV's daughter Isabelle, married to Edward II of England, would also be the ancestor of subsequent Kings of England. So divine retribution seems somewhat imperfect in this respect.
| VALOIS KINGS | |
|---|---|
| Philip VI of Valois | 1328-1350 |
Battle of Crécy, 1346;  the Black Death arrives in Paris, 1348; Dauphiné sold to France, by last Count of Vienne, 1349; "Dauphin" becomes title of Crown Prince | |
| John II le Bon | 1350-1364 |
| Battle of Poitiers, King John captured & held for ransom, 1356 | |
| Charles V | 1364-1380 |
| Charles VI | 1380-1422 |
| Battle of Agincourt, 1415 | |
| Charles VII | 1422-1461 |
| Louis XI | 1461-1483 |
| Charles VIII | 1483-1498 |
| Invasion of Italy, 1494-1495, occupies Pisa, Florence, Naples; Battle of Fornovo, July 1495, evacuates Italy | |
Seeming to lose every major battle (Crécy, 1346, Poitiers, 1356, Agincourt, 1415), and with large parts of France sometimes occupied, the smart money for many years would have been on the English. Henry V was conceded the French Crown in 1420. But things turned around, Joan of Arc relieved Orléans in 1429, and England lost ground steadily afterwards. With all this not long out of the way, however, Charles VIII was predeceased by all his children. The succession passed, without too much dispute, to the Duke of Orléans.
Meanwhile, however, other mischief had been done. The brothers of Charles V had all been given major Duchies to rule, and the Royal cousins in Burgundy soon proved themselves a Royal pain for the Monarchy, attempting to reconstruct Francia Media, often as allies of the English. There would be hell to pay for this; but, strangely enough, by the end of the Valois period France was larger and stronger than at the beginning.
Even during the reign of Philip VI a major step was taken in chipping away at the Empire to the east. Later France would take most of the 18th century to acquire Alsace and Lorraine, but most of the Imperial Kingdom of Burgundy would be acquired by the reign of Henry IV (numbers in blue are the dates of acquisition by France). The greatest and most fateful early French acquisition was of the Dauphiné. In 1349 Count Humbert II (d.1355), the "Dauphin," simply sold the territory to the grandson of Philip VI, the prince who would later become Charles V. Thus, Charles became the first "Dauphin" of France, and as he was the Crown Prince from 1350-1364, this now became the traditional title of the Heir Apparent of France.
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| "The Battle of Poitiers," by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), 1830; King John about to be captured |
Amid all the setbacks of the Hundred Years War, this was a portent for the future. The biggest break came when Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was killed in 1477 and Louis XI was able to secure the return of large parts of the Burgundian domain to France, since the heiress Mary of Burgundy would not inherit under the Salic Law. Mary's husband, however, the Emperor Maximillian of Hapsburg, was going to contest this. He was successful in the return of the Free County (Franche Comté) of Burgundy, which was not a fief of France, and of Artois, which was. In fact, Flanders, which had always been a fief of France, was now lost forever. 
Later, Louis XIV got back the Free County and part of Artois but failed to secure more of what later became Belgium. The Hapsburgs became the principal enemy of France until 1756.
Other major fiefs accrued to the French Crown by the end of this period. After the deaths of René the Good (1480), whose male heirs had predeceased him, and of Charles III, René's nephew, Louis XI secured the return of the Duchy of Anjou, the County of Provence, and, according to some sources, the French part of the Duchy of Bar. Provence was not a fief of France but, like the Dauphiné, of the Kingdom of Burgundy; but René's grandfather, Duke Louis I, had it gotten from Joanna I of Anjou. René's heirs were left with the (Imperial) Duchy of Lorraine, the (Imperial) Duchy of Bar, and the County of Guise. Anne, heiress and Duchess of Brittany (1488-1514), married King Charles VIII in 1491 and then Louis XII in 1499. The understanding was that Brittany would be enfeoffed to a junior line; but after Anne's daughter Claudia (Claude) died in 1524, her husband, King Francis I, kept the Duchy and incorporated it into the Royal domain in 1532.
In 1494 Charles VIII invaded Italy in order to retrieve the Kingdom of Naples for France.
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| Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, 1260 |
| VALOIS KINGS, Orléans & Angloulême | |
|---|---|
| Louis XII of Orléans | 1498-1515 |
| Francis I of Angloulême | 1515-1547 |
| Henry II | 1547-1559 |
| defeat by Spain, St. Quentin, bankruptcy, 1557; Calais taken from English, 1558; Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, 1559 | |
| Francis II | 1559-1560 |
| Charles IX | 1560-1574 |
| Huguenot Civil War, 1562-1563, 1567-1568, & 1568-1570 | |
| Henry III | King of Poland 1573-1574 |
| 1574-1589 | |
| assassinated | |
)
The succession of Louis XII of Orléans and Francis I of Angoulême brought the possessions of their houses with them. During the reign of Francis I, the line of the Dukes of Bourbon then died out with the Duchess Suzanne and her cousin Charles III, returning their domains. Finally, the succession of Henry IV, to anticipate a bit, brings with it the remaining possessions of the Kingdom of Navarre and the Duchy and Counties of Vendôme, Foix, Albret, etc. By then, few fiefs within West Francia were left outside the control of the King. One noteworthy territory was that around Avignon, which had never been a fief of France (Imperial Burgundy, again), was the seat of the Papacy from 1309 to 1377, had been bought outright in 1348 by Pope Clement VI from Queen Joanna I of Naples, and remained a Papal State until nationalized by Revolutionary France in 1791. Encompassed by the Papal enclave was the Principality of Orange, independent until 1713, significant as one source of the house that would come to champion and then rule the Netherlands.
Although the Orléans and Angoulême Kings are usually still considered part of the House of Valois, they were nevertheless more distantly related to the last Kings of the main succession than Philip VI was to the last Capetians. Francis I was only a third cousin of Charles VIII, marrying his second cousin, Claudia, the daughter of Louis XII. The House of Orléans was also descended from the Visconti of Milan, which helped motivate Louis XII's and Francis I's invasions of Italy, pursuing a claim to Milan. Louis's sister Marie married into the House of Foix and Navarre, but then his brilliant nephew, Gaston de Foix, was killed in what was actually a French victory at Ravenna in 1512. Amazingly, the many children of Henry II were mostly childless. This set the stage for a succession crisis with the largest element of civil war.
Following the precedent of Charles VIII, Louis XII invaded Italy again in 1499 to press his claim to Milan as well as to Naples. This was at first successful. The French held Milan 1499-1512. Louis then went on against Naples and obtained an agreement in 1500 to divide the Kingdom. But Ferdinand of Aragón was not going to leave that alone. He deposed his cousin, Frederick IV of Naples, in 1501 and then defeated the French at Garigliano in 1503. Louis was driven out of Italy altogether in 1512. When Francis I became King in 1515, he immediately invaded Italy again, defeating the Swiss, and occupying Milan (1515-1522, 1524-1525). French possession of Milan was confirmed by Spain with the Treaty of Noyon in 1516. However, the new King of Spain, Charles I (in 1519 Emperor Charles V), repudiated the Treaty. In 1525 Charles not only defeated but captured Francis at the Battle of Pavia. Francis agreed to the Peace of Madrid in 1526, was released, and immediately broke the treaty, as well as his parole, and went back to war. The mutinous Spanish army sacked Rome in 1527 (Pope Clement VII was allied to the French), Francis again occupied Milan in 1528, but then Charles crushed the combined French forces at Landriano in 1529. The French adventure in Italy, and one of the first great exercises in modern power politics, was largely over. There were, indeed, some further wars until the French defeat at St. Quentin in 1557 and Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, but this netted France only Calais and some toeholds in Lorraine (garrisons at Metz, Toul, & Verdun), not any gains in Italy (though Savoy was occupied, 1536-1559).
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| "Gabrielle d'Estrées et une de ses soeurs," c. 1594; Gabrielle, mistress of King Henri IV, at right, with the King's ring |
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Meanwhile, Henry had had a number of children by his mistress, Gabrielle Estrées (d.1599). Gabrielle appears, together with her sister in their bath, in an intriguing painting in the Louvre. There are obscure allegorical features to this painting, but what probably catches the attention of the modern is that Gabrielle, who holds Henry's ring, is having her nipple pinched by her sister. It is not clear to me what contemporaries would have thought of this, or if the casual depiction of the women's breasts, let alone some sort of sexual contact, would have seemed improper.
| BOURBON KINGS |
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Not just civil war was the problem, but invasion by Spain.
Since I have rarely come across the full illustration of Bourbon descent, it is given here. The line of the Kings of Navarre, although going all the way back to King Louis X of France, is given separately under Spain as a note on "The French Kings of Navarre."
Henry of Guise was of the house of Anjou and Lorraine, descendants of King John II of France. Henry of Navarre's connection was more distant, as the Dukes of Bourbon were descendants of King St. Louis IX, but their line was then more senior. The Catholics also put hope in Navarre's uncle, Charles the Cardinal of Bourbon, but he died just a year after the King. The line of the Bourbon House of Condé is continued in a separate popup.
Henry of Navarre had a much more immediate claim on the throne than Guise. His grandmother was a sister of King Francis I, so he was actually the second cousin of the Kings Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III, all brothers. Although the female connections couldn't pass muster of the Salic Law governing the French succession, the close relationships helped, as was confirmed when he married Margaret, sister of the then King Charles IX. But this reconciliation was followed shortly by the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, when perhaps as many as 10,000 French Protestants were killed. Civil war raged again. In 1588, just as the Catholics and the Duke of Guise seized Paris and humiliated King Henry, the Duke and his brother, the Cardinal of Guise, were murdered on the King's orders. The King himself was then assassinated (1589), and Henry of Navarre became King, followed by a Spanish invasion of France.
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| Sainte-Chapelle, The Chapel of Louis IX, 1248, 1969 |
Henry then suddenly (1593) disarmed the opposition by converting to Catholicism. Cynicism was widely suspected -- Paris vaut bien une messe, "Paris is worth a Mass" -- but the move was effective, especially as the opposition was seen as agents of Spain.
A similar bon mot is attributed to Henry, although I am unable to verify it or even find an original version in French. This was supposed to have been Henry saying, "No one believes that Elizabeth of England is a virgin, that the Archduke Albert is a good general, or that I am a Catholic." Whether or not this was really said by Henry, it should have been.
The idea of "a chicken in every pot," a political slogan associated with Herbert Hoover or Franklin Roosevent, actually originated with Henry of Navarre. It is variously quoted. One version is, Si Dieu me donne encore de la vie je ferai qu’il n’y aura point de laboureur en mon Royaume qui n’ait moyen d’avoir une poule dans son pot, "If God grant me life, I will see that every laborer in my kingdom shall have a chicken to put in his pot."
Although Henry himself was subsequently assassinated, the Bourbons were firmly on the Throne -- with some gliches like the Fronde civil conflict, 1648-1653 -- until the fateful events of 1789. At the same time, theories exist that the assassination of Henry was arranged by the old Catholic faction, with the participation of no less than Queen Marie herself, who stood to rule, as she did, for many years as Regent (1610-1617) -- until Louis XIII was of an age to express his duty to the State over his mother. Henry's cynicism, or pragmatism, or statecraft were not forgotten or forgiven. Yet, in the end, Marie was rebuked by her own son, Louis XIII, who allowed the full flood of Realpolitik of Richelieu.
| BOURBON KINGS | |
|---|---|
| Henry IV of Bourbon | 1589-1610 |
| War with Spain, 1595-1598; Edict of Nantes, 1598 | |
| Louis XIII | 1610-1643 |
| Thirty Years War, 1618-1648 | |
| Louis XIV | 1643-1715 |
| Treaty of Westphalia, 1648; War of Devolution, 1667-1668; Dutch War, 1672-1678; Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685; War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697; War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1713 | |
| Louis XV | 1715-1774 |
| War of the Polish Succession, 1733-1735; War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-1748; Seven Years War, 1756-1763; Corsica ceded by Genoa, 1768 | |
| Louis XVI | 1774-1792; d.1793 |
| War of American Independence, 1778-1783; French Revolution, 1789; First Republic, 1792-1804; the Convention, 1792-1795; King & Queen executed, 1793; Reign of Terror, 1793-1794; The Directory, 1795-1799; Consulate, 1799-1804; First Empire, 1804-1814, 1815 | |
| Louis XVIII | 1814-1824 |
| Charles X | 1824-1830 |
| Revolution of 1830, ORLÉANist KING | |
| Louis Philippe of Orléans | 1830-1848 |
| Second Republic, 1848-1852; Second Empire, 1852-1870 | |
Under the Bourbons, France rose to be the most powerful state in Europe, and a paradigm of Royal Absolutism. Troubled by episodes of Huguenot and noble opposition under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the Monarchy nevertheless went from success to success. Entering the Thirty Years War on the side of the faltering Protestants, under the advice of the Cardinal Richelieu, it became clear that raison d'état had trumped loyalty to the Catholic cause.
Louis XIV, who completed and consolidated France's position, foreign and domestic, and under whom the prosperity, power, and splendor of the country, and his Court, became the envy and admiration of Europe, nevertheless began to dissipate and undermine these achievements, mainly through the series of incessant wars that he began in 1667 and that continued nearly to his death. These wars in fact resulted in permanent additions of territory to the Kingdom (and the installation of a Bourbon line in Spain), long the object of French policy, but the cost was permanent damage to the prosperity of the country and the finances of the government -- and Louis topped it off, forgetting raison d'état, by revoking the Edict of Nantes (1685) and expelling the Huguenots, who immediately added their considerable enterprise to his Protestant enemies.
The France of Louis XV then had nothing like the position in Europe that Louis XIV had once had. Now England was waxing in power. French naval power and colonial possessions in America and India were permanently broken and subordinated in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). France had shifted alliances from Prussia to Austria, as part of the design of Maria Theresa to surround Prussia with enemies and retrieve Silesia, which Frederick the Great had snatched in the War of the Austrian Sucession. This looked good on paper, but it did not add any strength to France vis à vis Britain, while it could not reckon with the military genius of Frederick, for whom the war was a near run thing -- but still a victory.
The most famous mistress of King Louis XV was the Madame de Pompadour, made the Marquise de Pompadour, born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson (Miss "Fish," 1721-1764). Her run as the King's mistress was from 1745 to 1751. However, she then preserved her status at Court by becoming the King's Procuress. She developed for the King a veritable production line of young mistresses, whom he would visit at the notorious "Deer Park" (Parc aux Cerfs), with their many bastards pensioned off with minor titles.
Some now dispute that Pompadour actually had this role, but her place at the Court, and the system of the Dear Park, don't seem to have any other explanation. This is echoed in the movie Winter Kills [1979], a "satirical black comedy thriller" about the Kennedy assasination, where Elizabeth Taylor makes an uncredited appearance as "the President's Procuress" -- since, by 1979, it had become public knowledge that women were indeed procured for President Kennedy, and brought into the White House, while he was President.
The real world relationship of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) itself echoes the Bourbon scandal, since, when Sartre tired of de Beauvoir sexually, she directed some of her own young students to him. She was prosecuted for this and lost her teaching credential. Nevertheless, she is remembered as an icon of "feminism." There was further betrayal from Sartre that, having promised that de Bouvoir would be his heir, he instead left his estate to his current young mistress. This was certainly consistent with Sartre's "Existential" philosophy, that there is no objective morality and that "all is permitted." This is celebrated in the Nihilism of our age.
But the Madame de Pompadour was not King Louis XV's first mistress. Previously, he tended to favor aristocratic women, none more astrocratic, or infamous, than the daughters of Louis de Mailly, the Marquis de Nesle et de Mailly, Prince d'Orange (1689 - 1767). Three or four daughters of the Marquis became Royal mistresses, one after another.
The mistress daughters were:
This was a serious scandal at the time, not only that the King was openly committing adultery, but that running through women who were sisters sounded like some kind of incest to many people -- although even marrying sisters is not unheard of in the Bible. Because of this, the King was actually denied Confession and Absolution by the Church, which rendered him unfit to bestow the "King's Touch," which was supposed to be healing (just like in The Lord of the Rings) -- Queen Anne was the last English Monarch to exercise the "Touch," although one of the recipients was no less than the young Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).
The frivolity and depravity of the behavior of Louis XV, especially involving the Deer Park, seriously eroded the moral standing of the French monarchy (although Kings having mistresses and illegitimate children, perhaps more discretely, was nothing unusual). The consequence of all this was expressed in a statement attributed to the King: Aprčs moi, le déluge. A form of this was also attributed to Madame de Pompadour herself: Aprčs nous, le déluge. And, indeed, the deluge would come, unfortunately visiting its fury on what appear to have been more innocent heads. Indeed, we might wonder if specific priests who had denied the King Absolution were themselves murdered by the fanatics of the French Revolution.
Helping the Americans against Britain retrieved some of the humiliation of the Seven Years War; but the cost of the continuing wars was ultimately beyond the resources of the government, and the French Revolution began when Louis XVI merely called the Estates General to try and get more revenue (1789). New revenue there would be, the first example of national mobilization for total war, but Louis XVI would derive no benefit from it. Republican France then lept into European hegemony, of a kind that had not been seen in many centuries, perhaps not since Charlemagne, a precedent not lost on Napoleon. The opposition, however, still led by England, ground this down. The Bourbons were restored, to rather underwhelming enthusiasm. They could never again be accepted as truly representing the Nation, rather than an imposition on it. The "bourgeois" King, Louis Philippe, with the Liberal tradition of the House of Orléans behind him, was one way of trying to resolve this, but the Royal monarchy ended with its failure in 1848.
| Celui qui n'a pas vécu au dix-huitième siècle avant la Révolution ne connaît pas la douceur de vivre --
Those who didn't live in the eighteenth century before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living. |
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| Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838) |
Today there are three lines of Pretenders to the French Monarchy. There are, of course, the Bonapartists, claiming to be Emperors, as we will see below. 
From the Bourbons, we get two lines. The direct male line of Bourbons in France died out with Henry the Duke of Bordeaux in 1883. His claim was better than that of King Louis-Phlippe; but at this death, Orléans became the senior male line, with claimants beginning with a grandson and namesake of Louis-Philippe in 1848. For a couple of days, it looked like he might actually succeed his grandfather as King. That didn't happen, and we are now to the 8th Orléanist Pretender, Jean.
The cause of the Bourbons, and certainly the Orléanists, might be helped by theoretical critiques of democracy (cf. Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy and Natural Order, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Routledge, 2001). There are far fewer apologies, if any, to be made for the tenure of Louis-Philippe than for previous Bourbons -- certainly since Henry IV. But it is not clear that they attach themselves to such a cause.
Little else remains to recommend any kind of monarchy today, apart from those that are merely symbolic, as in Japan, or which have been practically reduced to that status, as in Britain. "Divine Right" is a non-starter. At the very least, Monarchists of any kind should produce a model Constitution to suggest how they would remedy the problems both of democracy and of any kind of absolutist royal government. This would be a valuable contribution to political science, however remote, at the moment, any practical application might be. And if Jean, the Count of Paris, or one of his adherents, became a political commentator or philosopher, the Orléanist cause could be taken seriously for something. At the very least, any moral faults of Monarchy will be different from the venality and mendacity obvious in the politicians of democracies.
Meanwhile, there are Spanish Bourbons who claim succession from the Duke of Bordeaux. This can be examined on the chart there. This began among the "Carlists," the partisans of Carlos, the Count of Molina, who was disputing the succession of Queen Isabella II in Spain. He failed at that, but then his son, Juan, apparently realized that he could claim the Throne of France, failing that of Spain. After the end of the Carlist male line, the claim was taken up by King Alfonso XIII of Spain himself. All of this violated the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. King Philip V renounced claims to the Throne of France, for himself and for his descendants. And the Treaty specifically prohibited the Thrones of Spain and France ever being united, as they would have been by Alfonso XIII. So the Orléanists have no difficulty dismissing the Pretenders of the Spanish Bourbons. Nevertheless, we are up to Louis XX, the 10th Bourbon Pretender, in the claimed Spanish line of succession, with a large family to continue the business. Probably, not many people are paying attention. It all seems more than a little bit silly.
More prudent than many others, including the Vicomte de Calonne, below, who died on the guillotine, Vigée Le Brun promptly decamped for Italy, where her ability continued in demand. She then moved on to St. Petersburg, to similar success. Returning to France under Napoleon, When for example an aristocracy, such as that of France at the start of the Revolution, throws away its privileges with a sublime disgust, and sacrifices itself to an extravagance of its moral feelings, that is corruption... But the essential nature of a good and healthy aristocracy is that it does not consider itself as a function (whether of royalty or of the community) Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p.200], translation modified; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.51; daß restored for dass]; color added. Nietzsche describes an ideal aristocracy that fits the actual nobility of Poland, crushing the masses beneath them and rendering impotent the King above, earning partition and annihilation by Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Good work. For Werkzeug, compare Confucius, "The superior man is not a tool [ In 1803 Napoleon began handing out new Imperial Electorships to his supporters (e.g. Baden, Württemberg) in Germany, perhaps looking forward to being elected Holy Roman Emperor. However, his patience with this didn't last more than a year. He would have had a long time to wait, since the Emperor Francis II lived until 1835 (though, to be sure, he might have been deprived of his crown, or his life, a bit earlier if Napoleon had really wanted either). Instead, with the blessing, but not the authority, of the Pope, At right was see Thérèse Tallien (1773-1835, née Cabarrús) in the Greek revival clothing that soon became the Empire style of high waisted dresses. Tallien is a good representative of the influence of French woman on both culture and politics in both the Ancien Régime and the Revolutionary period.
In the Court of Louis XVI was the court painter Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), one of the great artists of the day. Le Brun lived a long and fascinating life. Of humble origin, her talent vaulted her to the most rarified level of portrait painting. The patronage of Marie Antoinette herself made her the principle Court artist but also put her in danger once the Revolution started.
she did a fine portrait of one of Napoleon's sisters but otherwise did not seem to be a favorite, or perhaps a fan, of the Bonapartes. Her long life left a body of hundreds of extraordinary images of her contemporaries.
Her portrait at left is of Charles Alexandre, Vicomte de Calonne (1734-1802). When I first saw this painting, it struck me that de Calonne was a dead ringer for political comedian Bill Maher, at right. Separated at birth? Reincarnation? You never know. The nose and mouth are a little different. Maher diverges from Leftist orthodoxy often enough that he might be in danger, from some, of the modern equivalent of the guillotine. Since Maher is willing to criticize ʾIslām as harshly as Christianity, the threats are not always theoretical.
Wenn zum Beispiel eine Aristokratie, wie die Frankreichs am Anfange der Revolution, mit einem sublimen Ekel ihre Privilegien wegwirft und sich selbst einer Ausschweifung ihres moralischen Gefühls zum Opfer bringt, so ist dies Corruption... Das Wesentliche an einer guten und gesunden Aristokratie ist aber, daß sie sich nicht als Funktion (sei es des Königthums, sei es des Gemeinwesens), sondern als dessen Sinn und höchste Rechtfertigung fühlt, -- daß sie deshalb mit guten Gewissen das Opfer einer Unzahl Menschen hinnimmt, welche um ihretwillen zu unvollständigen Menschen, zu Sklaven, zu Werkzeugen herabgedrückt und vermindert werden müssen.
but rather as its meaning, its highest justification. Therefore it accepts with a clear conscience the sacrifice of an enormous number of men who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to incomplete men, to slaves, to tools.
]," Analects, II:12.
The French Revolution had two major unexpected results, the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon. Thomas Jefferson thought that the violence might actually be worth it, if only one man and woman were left, to get rid of the Old Regime. However, he then realized that the power of the Terrorists was not, after all, being used for any worthy end. Napoleon at first "saved the Revolution" but then produced his own version of the Old Regime. Beethoven, who had dedicated the Third Symphony to Napoleon, tore off the dedication and almost destroyed the whole work. It seems unlikely that the extraordinary dirge in the second movement was part of the original idea.
he crowned himself Emperor, as the new Charlemagne, in 1804. He soon abolished the old Empire (1806), gave his supporters elevated titles (Baden became a Grand Duchy, Württemberg a Kingdom, etc.), and established other monarchies, often for his relatives, in the territories brought under the control of France. The Revolution had already begun to radically transform the map of Europe, but under Napoleon especially the familiar boundaries of European states appeared to melt and run with an alarming fluidity and frequency.
The symbolism of the new tricolore flag of the Republic can have many explanations. However, one coincidence is that the three colors match the colors of the three principal dynasties in French history. The banner of Charlemagne and so the Carolingians was the red oriflamme. The Capetians may have begun with red, but blue became the background of their "Banner of France." Finally, the Bourbons quite formally and explicitly used white, even for military uniforms. 
It seems improbable that the Revolutionaries wanted a flag to commemorate the French monarchy, and they may have just liked the colors, but then the Kings had liked these colors also.
| French Revolution, 1789; First Republic, 1792-1804; the Convention, 1792-1795; King & Queen executed, 1793; Reign of Terror, 1793-1794 | |
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| Directory, 1795-1799 | |
| Étienne-François Le Tourneur | 1795-1797 |
| Jean-François Rewbell | 1795-1799 |
| Louis-Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux | 1795-1799 |
| Paul Barras | 1795-1799 |
| Lazare Carnot | 1795-1797 |
| François Barthélemy | 1797 |
| Coup of 18 Fructidor | |
| Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai | 1797-1799 |
| François de Neufchâteau | 1797-1798 |
| Jean-Baptiste Treilhard | 1798-1799 |
| Directory of 30 Prairial | |
| Paul Barras | 1795-1799 |
| Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès | 1799 |
| Louis-Jérôme Gohier | 1799 |
| Pierre-Roger Ducos | 1799 |
| Jean-François- Auguste Moulin | 1799 |
| Consulate, 1799-1804 | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | First Consul |
| Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès | Second Consul |
| Charles-François Lebrun | Third Consul |
| BONAPARTE EMPERORS | |
| First Empire, 1804-1814, 1815 | |
| Napoleon I | Emperor, 1804-1814, 1815; last Emperor crowned by Pope, d.1821 |
| Second Republic, 1848-1852; Second Empire, 1852-1870 | |
| Napoleon III | President, 1848-1852 |
| Emperor, 1852-1870; last French Emperor, d.1873 | |
| Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871; Emperor defeated at Sedan, abdicates, 1870 | |
French power had shaken Europe under Louis XIV, but Louis himself ran up against the limits to which French power could be mobilized, and his wars damaged the basis of that power. For the rest of the century, France declined in its ability to focus its resources, until the Revolution began as the King simply appealed for more taxes. The Revolution then introduced two specifically modern innovations: (1) the destruction of all traditional limitations on power; and (2) the total subordination of all activity to politics and the state. This was the essence of modern totalitarianism, already implied by Rousseau, later theoretically formulated by Hegel and Marx, and practiced by Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin. It enabled France to wash over her enemies -- all except England, which had had its Revolutions back in the 17th century, and Russia, which was simply too big and inert to be conquered in Napoleon's fashion. Napoleon, although reconciling with the Pope (until annexing Rome and arresting him in 1809), supposedly reintroducing some of the limitations on government of traditional society, marrying a Hapsburg and producing a half-Hapsburg heir (Napoleon II), nevertheless was still ruthless beyond most precedent.
BONAPARTE EMPERORS Welche Wohlthat, welche Erlösung von einem unerträglich werdenden Druck trotz Alledem das Erscheinen eines unbedingt Befehlenden für diese Heerdenthier-Europäer ist, dafür gab die Wirkung, welche das Erscheinen Napoleon's machte, das letzte große Zeugniss: -- die Geschichte der Wirkung Napoleon's ist beinahe die Geschichte des höheren Glücks, zu dem es dieses ganze Jahrhundert in seinem werthvollsten Menschen und Augenblicken bebracht hat Such a blessing, such a relief from steadily more unendurable pressure, in spite of everything, is the appearance of an absolute commander for these herd-animal-Europeans, such as last dislayed in the grand manner by the rise of Napoleon. The history of Napoleon's effectiveness is almost the history of the higher happiness which this whole century attained in its most valuable men and moments.Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p.108], and translated by Helen Zimmern [Prometheus Books, 1989, p.121], translations modified; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1885 [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.102; große restored for grosse; question about Zeugniss], color added.
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| Henri-Paul Motte (1846-1922), Napoléon au trône de Charlemagne, "Napoleon at Charlemagne's Throne," 1898, detail |
The 19th century image of Napoleon at right has the Emperor contemplating Charlemagne's Throne at Aachen, with Charlemagne's crown, the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, which is of Byzantine form, on the seat . Actually, this crown is either imaginary or a copy, since the original remained in the hands of the Hapsburgs. While Napoleon did explicitly see himself as Charlemagne's successor, it is not clear that this particular moment occurred. He abolished the Empire rather than arranging for his own election, as seemed likely for a while.
A memorable example of Napoleon's ruthlessness was his kidnapping and execution of the Duke of Enghien, the heir of the Bourbon House of Condé. Enghien was a young, handsome, appealing, and largely apolitical Royal, living quietly in neutral Baden (which was itself was made one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803). Frustrated over Royalist plots, Napoleon decided, or was misinformed, that Enghien was involved in them, and sent a force secretly to get him. Fetched to Vincennes, Enghien, after a perfunctory "trial," was shot and buried.
Napoleon Bonaparte, |
Even Napoleon, however, began to run up against the limits of French power. The British "nation of shopkeepers" frustrated him at sea and poured arms, money, and men into Spain to help in the 1808 national rising against the French -- something rather like the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. Looking to perfect his Continental boycott of Britain, Napoleon unfortunately (for him) turned on an uncooperative Russia. The size of Russia and the punishing winter (or, as it happens, just the autumn -- by December Napoleon was already back in France) destroyed Napoleon's Grande Armée. While the parallel with Hitler's invasion of Russia is oft noted, it is less often recognized that each of them, wanting to ultimately defeat Britain, nevertheless turned resources away from active combat with the British. 
In Napoleon's case this was in Spain, as in Hitler's it was in North Africa. The result in each case was to forfeit the Mediterranean theater of the general European War while taking on an impossible strategic task in Russia.
With everyone allied against Napoleon, and losing the "Battle of the Nations" at Leipzig in 1813, the collapse then came rapidly enough. Abdicating, Napoleon was unhappy as the Prince of Elba (1814-1815), tried to return to power, and was defeated at Waterloo after only 100 days. His few remaining days were then spent on distant St. Helena, dying in only his 52nd year (1769-1821).
In 1840 Napoleon's body was brought back from St. Helena and enshrined in the Hôtel des Invalides, Louis XIV's home for disabled veterans. Napoleon II, the "King of Rome," was only 21 when he died of tuberculosis. Buried with his Hapsburg family in Vienna, France vainly sought reburial with his father. This was finally effected, in a remarkable show of Imperial collegial affection, by no less than Adolf Hitler, who united son with father in December 1940.
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| The Arc de Triomphe, 1836 |
Newfoundland and Acadia (henceforth Nova Scotia) were ceded to Britain in 1715. All of New France (except two islands) and Louisiana were lost, however, in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The British only demanded Louisiana east of the Mississippi, but France ceded the western part to Spain in compensation for Spanish losses in the war. To this day, however, a French speaking state remains in Quebec, and a smaller French speaking community remains in southern Louisiana (the Cajuns). The various demands of French Canadians trouble the unity of that country.
The Seven Years War also broke the French position in India, where the project of establishing French control over native states was then taken over by Britain. France retained five cities in India, however, until surrendering them to the Republic of India in the 1950's.
Although little of the French position was redeemed, French arms made a more creditable showing, and British interests were gravely damaged, when France went to war in 1778 in league with the American Revolutionaries. Although finally defeated in the classic battle of The Saintes in 1782, the French Navy gave the British as hard a time as they had ever had. Most noteworthy was the brilliant campaign of Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, a Knight of Malta, for two years in the Atlantic and then in Indian waters. Aggressive as only a British admiral was expected to be, Suffren's greatest problem was infusing his own spirit into his captains.
| French Colonial Possessions |
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The 19th century French colonial activity was mainly in Africa and East Asia. A fateful move came in 1830, when forces began to occupy Algeria, in great measure to end the piracy that had plagued the Mediterranean for decades. In time this led to the settlement of a French colonial population. A few French possessions on the coast of West Africa led, in the "scramble for Africa" in the 1880's to the huge domains of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Notions that these West African territories might be linked to French Somaliland led to the confrontation of an expedition under Jean Baptiste Marchand with the British at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898. The British, however, had an army, Lord Kitchener's, on the spot, and there was little France could do.
Another focus of French activity was in Indochina. Involvement in Vietnam even at the beginning of the century was extended to control, not just over Vietnam but, at the expense of Siam, over Cambodia and Laos. This all would come to a catastrophic end at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
In the Pacific, France came into possession of the heart of Polynesia -- Tahiti and all the surrounding islands. When independence was offered in 1960, French Polynesia voted to remain part of France.
The New Hebridies had one of the most curious arrangements in all of imperialism, the Anglo-French "Condominium," or join rule. The islands became independent in 1980 as Vanuatu. Nearby New Caledonia remains part of France.
Some final additions to French possessions came with the end of World War I. The German colonies of Togo and Cameroon were both divided between Britain and France, with the French getting the larger shares (since Tanganyika went to Britain and Southwest Africa to South Africa). Similarly, the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement with Britain gave the French a free hand in Syria, which the British had taken from Turkey. The French regarded themselves as the particular protectors of Lebanese Christians. In 1920 they occupied all of Syria by force, and
| Kings of Tahiti | |
|---|---|
| Tu-nui-ea-i-te Atua-i-Tarahoi Vaira'atoa Taina [Outu] Pomare I | 1791-1803 |
| Tu Tunuiea'aite-a-tua Pomare II | 1803-1821 |
| Te-ri'i-ta-ria Pomare III | 1821-1827 |
'Aimatta Pomare IV Vahine-o- Punuateraitua  | 1827-1877 |
| French Protectorate, 1842 | |
| Teri'i Taria Te-ra-tane Pomare V | 1877-1880, d.1891 |
| Sovereignty surrendered to France, 1880; Overseas Territory, 1956 | |
While French colonialism may have had less of the racism and racial separateness that now seem characteristic of British practice, it nevertheless was rather more intent on imposing French "civilization" and less tolerant of taking "no" for an answer -- while the British condescended to allow quaint native customs and institutions to survive, within limits. Thus, the French history with Syria contrasts with the British relationship to Egypt, where the British penchant for indirect rule reached its highest state (Egypt was thus never more than a British Protectorate, and that only from 1914-1922 -- the military occupation of 1882 had not ended de jure Ottoman suzerainty and the pretext of local Egyptian autonomy). France, to be sure, had tolerated the continuation of
| Kings of Madagascar | |
|---|---|
| Adriantsimitoviaminandriana | 1710-1735 |
| Andriambelomasina | 1735-1760 |
| Andrianjafy | 1760-1783 |
| Andrianampoinimerina | 1783-1809 |
| Radama I | 1809-1828 |
| Ranavalona I | 1828-1861 |
| Radama II | 1861-1863 |
| Rasoherina | 1863-1868 |
| Ranavalona II | 1868-1883 |
| Ranavalona III | 1883-1896, d.1917 |
| French Protectorate, 1895-1958; Overseas Territory, 1958-1960 | |
The Kings of Tahiti are from a website of Tatihian history by Christopher Buyers. The Kings of Madagascar are from the Oxford Dynasties of the World, by John E. Morby [Oxford University Press, 1989, 2002, p.237]. Although the names do not look very similar, the languages of Tahiti and Madagascar are actually, like Hawaiian, Malayo-Polynesian
| Governors of Kwangchouwan | |
|---|---|
| Charles Louis Théobald Courrejolles | 1898-1900 |
| Gustave Alby | 1900-1902, 1903-1906 |
| Théophile Henri Bergès | 1902-1903 |
| Jean Edme Fernand Gautret | 1906-1908 |
| Henri Victor Sestier | 1908-1910 |
| Paul Edgard Dufrénil | 1910-1911 |
| Jean Ernest Moulié | 1911-1912 |
| Pierre Stéphane Salabelle | 1912 |
| Henri Jean Auguste Caillard | 1912-1915 |
| Marius Albert Garnier | 1915-1919 |
| Jean-Félix Krautheimer | 1919-1922, 1922-1923 |
| Paul Marie Alexis Joseph Blanchard de la Brosse | 1922, 1925-1927 |
| Paul Michel Achille Quesnel | 1923-1925 |
| Louis Félix Marie Édouard Rivet | 1927-1929 |
| Achille Louis Auguste Sylvestre | 1929-1932 |
| Pierre Charles Edmond Jabouille | 1932-1933 |
| Paul Delamarre | 1933-1934 |
| Maurice Émile Henri de Tastes | 1934-1936 |
| Camille Fernand Chapoulart | 1936-1937 |
| Jacques Henri Paul Le Prevôt | 1937-1942 |
| Louis Frédéric Claire Guillaume Marty | 1942 |
| Pierre Marie Jean Domec | 1942-1943 |
| Japanese occupation, 1943-1945; returned to China, 1946 | |
At left we have the French governors of Kwangchouwan (Kuang-chow-wan, Guangzhouwan, modern Chankiang or Zhanjiang), which France leased from China in 1898. This anchored the French sphere of influence and Treaty Ports in southern China. After the fall of France in 1940, the Governor placed his loyalty in the Free French. The Japanese weren't going to like that, but then it didn't make much difference anyway. The Japanese also occupied Vichy controlled territories, and eventually they got around to occupying Kwangchouwan. After the War, the city was simply returned to China. The list of Governors is from a page at the World Statesmen site.
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| The Arc de Triomphe, 1836 |
A curious survival of French colonialism is the French Foreign Legion, the Légion Etrangère. This was formed in 1831, soon after the occupation of Algeria, and its headquarters remained in Algeria as long as that was a French possession. It is now based in the south of France, but with installations in French Guiana, Djibouti (no longer a French colony, but requiring French protection from claims by surrounding countries, Ethiopia and Somalia), and elsewhere. French nationals are not allowed to enlist in the Legion, although it is mostly commanded by French officers. Up to one hundred different nationalities are found among the men. Knowledge of French is not necessary, but the men are expected to learn French quickly, under the Legion's demanding instruction. On entering the Legion, one is given a new identity, and this has always meant that anyone with a criminal background could find sanctuary. A harsh kind of sanctuary, since enlistment is for five years, discipline is harsh, and the danger is considerable. France, even now, feels less concern about sending the Legion into dangerous situations, rather than French Army units consisting of French citizens. Historically, about 10% of the Legion have died in service. Although much of the 19th century romance of the Legion is associated with its desert duty in the Sahara (as in the many movie versions of the novel Beau Geste, 1926, 1933, & 1966, at least), its most famous battle has probably been the catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Nevertheless, now it has the reputation of an elite and tough unit without peer. It was among French forces in the Gulf War that liberated Kuwait. On completion of successful service, a Legionaire can return to his former national identity, or he can claim French citizenship under the new identity. Reenlistment and career service can lead to retirement at the Legion's own soldiers home.
The French Second Empire developed when Napoleon's nephew, Louis Napoleon, transformed himself from the President of the Second Republic to the Emperor of the Second Empire. Napoleon III's France was a much more conventional, politic, and durable state than Napoleon I's. Napoleon III ironically obtained territorial additions to France from his ally, Sardinia, after defeating their mutual enemy, Austria. He was even an ally of England in the Crimean War (1853-1856), though there was otherwise a great deal of friction with France's ancient enemy. In short, the Second Empire was no upheaval of Europe the way that the First Republic and the First Empire had been. The end of Napoleon III, however, was the consequence of Otto von Bismarck's plan for the coming German upheaval. Defeated by Prussia, Napoleon abdicated and left France to its fate, but at least his last years of exile, in England itself, were rather more comfortable and honorable than Napoleon I's had been; but his son, sadly, died fighting the Zulus in the British Army.
We are now down to Napoleon VIII, with a dispute about the succession. The father of Charles (Napoleon VII) disinherited him in a will, charging that he had "republican" sentiments and violated House law by divorcing and remarrying. His son, Jean-Christophe (Napoleon VIII), is the rightful successor. The will is disputed for various reasons; but, of course, this is all about essentially nothing. Charles will die and Jean-Christophe will be the heir anyway. Jean-Christophe recently married, and we can hope that there will be more little Napoleons running around soon.
We might reflect, in turn, that the Bonapartist cause for the Throne of France may itself amount to little more than broken statues.
With the given name Eugène, he was known as "Loulou" to his family. Fleeing France and joining his parents in England in 1870, Eugène was well educated and entered the British Military Academy at Sandhurt. He was able to join British forces in South Africa during the Zulu wars, thanks to the support of his mother and even Queen Victoria. He was, however, supposed to be watched, guarded, and kept away from the fighting. These precautions, however, were undone, partly by chance, but also because of the Prince's own impetuosity. He was killed in a skirmish with the Zulus, separated from his companions, and suffering no less than 18 wounds from the Zulu assegai. He was only 23 years old. The Zulus treated his body with some respect, as they would honor a brave enemy; and they later claimed that, had they known who he was, they would not have killed him.
the brother of King Constantine I of 
akowski (1927-2009), Is God Happy? Selected Essays, Basic Books, 2013, p.47)
Laetitia Casta
)
Prussian police state
The central kingdom of the Emperor Lothar I did not survive him. Divided between his three sons, each part went its separate way. All, as it happened, end up for a while in the hands of the German Emperors, but only parts of Lower Lorraine are today part of Germany,
In his The Holy Roman Empire [1904, Schocken Books, 1961, 1964], James Bryce lists ten different applications. Bryce's list of ten Burgundies has been expanded to fifteen by 
They even had ambitions of reviving the Arelate Kingdom proper and being crowned monarchs -- an aspiration that died on the battlefield at Nancy in 1477. Because of this period, Burgundian identity came to overlay much of what was properly 
That was the extent of his good fortune, however. He lost the throne of Italy to one of the local players, Berengar I (a grandson of Louis the Pious), who also blinded him. Living out his years in Burgundy, he was unable to pass the throne to his son; and Lower Burgundy went to a cousin, Hugh of Arles (928). Meanwhile, Rudolf II of Upper Burgundy had entered Italy himself and overthrown Berengar (922), and Hugh had already made his own claim there too (926).
The conflict between Rudolf and Hugh was fixed up amicably enough (933). Hugh kept Italy, Rudolf got Lower Burgundy, and Hugh's son married Rudolf's daughter. Ruldolf, however, seems to have been slow to exert authority over Lower Burgundy, where Hugh's brother Boso ruled as Count of Arles. After Hugh's death, however, Rudolf's son, Conrad, reunited the Kingdom (often called the "Arelate" after the new capital of Arles). 
Hugh also ended up with a 
polygamous 
it also made Burgundy a peripheral concern of its titular ruler.
(named after the word for "yes" which has become oui) of the North, we get the standard Parisian dialect of Modern French. The Langue d'oc, as "Languedoc," gave its name to a province or even to the whole South, particularly associated with the literary culture of the Provençal dialect and the political culture of the County of )
map
The comparison with the Sierra Nevada is interesting. The most famous Sierra pass is Donner Summit, at 7239 ft. This, however, is north of the really high parts of the Sierra. There, the last usable pass before a very long stretch south is Tioga Pass, at 9941 ft., which leaves Yosemite National Park to the east. I have driven across that and the Monitor Pass, at 8314 ft., which is roughly halfway between Yosemite and Lake Tahoe.
reestablished a bit of an independent identity that had been lost when Charlemagne conquered the Lombards in 774. This continued to be complicated by the interests of the 
become the nearly permanent protectors and/or antagonists of the Popes, mainly serving in the long run to inhibit the growth of local power that might threaten Papal independence. This also served to keep Italy split between North and South, with the 
Italy remained divided until the 19th century, when unification was brought about by 
While Savoy was French speaking, this was in its own non-metropolitan, Franco-Provençal 
Florence became the capital of a united Italy, as Victor Emanuel II of Sardinia became the first King of an independent Italy since Berengar II in 961 -- exactly 900 years before. The country was not completely unified, however. The Pope still held out in Rome with the protection of the French Army. Napoleon III may even have thought of this as helping to secure the legitimacy of his Imperial crown. Venice also remained in the hands of Austria.
Thus, although one might think that Corsica would count as the last remaining part of historic Italy to acquire (not to mention Savoy and Nice), and even though Italy was actually an ally of Austria and Germany, it was Austria against which demands were made at the outset of World War I -- namely that any place in the Adriatic that had ever had an Italian name should be turned over. This absurd demand was rejected, and so Italy came in on the side of the Allies -- after all that Italy actually owed Prussia/Germany over the years.
Because of this, it is hard to know exactly how large the economy is and what the true level of employment is. On the other hand, this does not make for as secure an environment as would be necessary for Italy to reach its true potential.
white, and green elements symbolic of the flag of Italy. As with the history of many items of food, the legend does not seem to match the reality, or at least matters remain in dispute. There seem to have been pizzas, and pizzas of this type, well before the tenure, or even the life, of Queen Margherita. As a popular item of food, however, historical records about this may be thin -- although, since tomatoes come from the New World, we cannot have had tomato sauce back in the Middle Ages. Flat breads with toppings, however, can be very old, and still exist as things like the 
The Italians had their hands full just subduing the Libyans. This turned out to be a mixed blessing.
His granddaughter Alessandra, interestingly, has become active in Italian politics.
which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion. This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries."
flows in its fortunes, in its borders, in its identity, and in its reputation -- alternatively admired as a source of the highest culture (Mozart, 
St. Henry II "the Saint"
The weak start of East Francia, however, seemed to be soon remedied. Henry I and Otto I asserted Royal authority over the great nobles and gained great prestige, as well as an experienced fighting force, by defeating the Magyars, who had been raiding deep into Francia for years. This was one of the tribulations of the 
The crown of the Holy Roman Empire is of particular interest. We see it at left, as it is preserved in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna -- since the last Emperors holding it were Hapsburgs. The oldest part of the crown seems to date from the era of the Saxon Emperors -- 
although it is often said to be the Crown of Charlemagne -- and the design of the basic body of the crown is clearly of a Byzantine type, with eight vertical panels, some with images, with rounded tops.
But it is impossible that an Emperor of Romania would have made such a crown for the Ottonians, whose (Papal) claims to universal rule were not accepted. The cross seems to have been added later, and the arched bar on top no earlier than the 10th or 11th centuries. The arch was to signify, for the other monarchs of Francia, that this was an Imperial, and not just a Royal, crown. Of course, eventually the other monarchs added arches also, usually more than one, and this is now typical.
Henry V achieved what looked like a favorable compromise to the Controversy, but the damage had been done and the precedents set. The Imperial grip in both Germany and Italy had been loosened, many concerns neglected, and the Popes knew what they could do to preserve their independence and powers, however little they were able to maintain themselves sometimes even against the people of the city of Rome.
In the 12th century, which probably means under the Hohenstaufen, we get the appearance of the Vexillum Roseum Imperiale, the Blutfahne or Blutbanner, a red banner that signified the Blutgerichtsbarkeit (Jus Gladii, "Right of the Sword"), or the judicial and penal jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire. By the 13th century, the banner and its authority were bestowed on the Princes of the Empire, the feudal vassals and representatives of the Empire, but whose power, of course, would grow in time into virtual and then actual sovereignty. This authority was extended to the Free Cities of the Empire, and to the Canton of Schwyz in 1240 (which became the core and the eponym of the 
Free Cities of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Danzig -- although Danzig itself was otherwise subject to the 
and then to 
The end of the Hohenstaufen makes a natural break in the history of Germany and Italy. The German princes did not want to elect a new Emperor, and the Popes would just as soon not deal with one again. Also, the genealogy of all the Emperors to this point forms a natural unit, since they are all related, at least by marriage.
Philip of Swabia, son of Frederick Barbarossa, who contended with Otto of Brunswick for the Empire, had no sons; but the marriages of his four daughters are among the most interesting in European history. In a reconciliation of their feud, his oldest daughter, Beatrice, married Otto himself. But they had no children.
First Swiss Cantons, 1291
With the Elective principle of the German Monarchy now firmly established, Charles IV, through the Golden Bull, at least rendered the process regular and comprehensible. Seven Electors were specified, four secular and three ecclesiastical. As noted below, the )
and soon were able to defeat them at Morgarten (1315). This may have seemed like a fluke, but then the Duke Leopold III was actually killed at the Battle of Sempach (1386).
Uri, 1291
Schwyz, 1291
Luzern, Lucerne, 1332
Obwalden
Nidwalden
Zürich, 1351
Glarus, 1352
Zug, 1352
Bern, Berne, 1353
Fribourg, Freiburg, 1481
Solothrun, Soleure, 1481
Basel-Stadt, 1832
Basel-Landschaft, 1832
Schaffhausen, 1501
Appenzell-Innerrhoden, 1597
Appenzell- Ausserhoden, 1597
St. Gallen, 1803
Graubünden, Grigioni, Grischun, 1803
Aargau, 1803
Thurgau, 1803
Ticino, Tessin, 1803
Vaud, Waadt, 1803
Valais, Wallis, 1815
Geneva, Genève, Genf, 1815
Jura, 1979
The principal rivals of the Hapsburgs turned out to be the house of 
These expressions, so full of portent for the future, are nevertheless ironic and misdirected for Maximilian, who moved the Hapsburg Court to the Low Countries -- the inheritance of his wife, 
with Emperors (Charles V, Ferdinand I) whose first language was not even German. Also, Maximilian, with no intention of being crowned Emperor by the Pope, received permission to call himself Imperator Electus, which was the de jure status of all subsequent Emperors, except, of course, Charles V.
)
, Majrīṭ) is uncertain. This place had little to recommend it, except that it was centrally located. And Charles thought it would be healthy. Others weren't even sure about that, saying that it had "nine months of winter, three of hell."
One is of the immortal Prince Eugène of Savoy, the other is of the Archduke Charles. Charles was the commander of Austrian armies against the French revolutionaries and against Napoleon. He was successful with the former and actually defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809. Shortly afterwards, Charles was then defeated by Napoleon at Wagram. If one is going to be defeated by Napoleon, however, Wagram was not a bad way for it to happen. The Austrians were able to retreat in good order, and the causality count, perhaps 80,000 altogether, made the clash close to a Pyrrhic Victory for the French.
In the Balkans, Austria initially was unable to successfully invade Serbia -- a testament to weakness if ever we wanted one. German help was required; but then Austria and Bulgaria managed to occupy most of Romania and Albania, all of Serbia and Montenegro, and a bit of Greece.
although this was not always to good effect. The Logical Positivism of the "Vienna Circle," although of substantial and formative influence, was no blessing; and the heritage of 
He was a 
a short and inconspicuous street tucked away by the Beethovenplatz -- with the irony, of course, that Kant probably would have been bewildered by Beethoven's music. The intersection of the Fichtegasse and Kantgasse may imply the derivation of Fichte's philosophy from Kant's, with the Schellinggasse and Hegelgasse then crossing the Fichtegasse, perhaps implying that those two follow along behind Fichte. That is one way to look at the history, which may imply the progress of the Idealists over Kant -- a most mistaken construction of the business. So somebody with the ear of City government liked the Idealists, and there is no doubt that they have been idealized at different times and places, often for the worst reasons.
This leads to the substantial 
At left is the oldest part of the crypt, directly under the church. The 17th and 18th century Hapsburgs are lined up left and right, culminating in the larger lead sarcophagi of the Emperor Charles VI on the right and his wife, the Empress Elizabeth Christina, on the left. The burials are increasingly modest as we progress back, towards the front of the crypt. Margarita Teresa of Spain, discussed 
From where that photograph was taken, if we turn entirely around, we look into the next section of the crypt and see what is in the photograph at right. This largely consists of the sarcophagus of Maria Theresa, daughter of Charles VI, and her husband, Francis I of Lorraine. This is by far the largest monument in the crypt, with its top above head high, which is not obvious from the image. Figures of the Empress and Francis repose, lifelike, on top, something we otherwise do not see in the Hapsburg burials. The impression we are left with is that this represents a kind of acme of Hapsburg achievement. The reality was rather different, but it is hard not to see the reign of Maria Theresa as embodying a certain dignity, nobility, and even personality that later Hapsburgs lack. Maria Theresa's own son, Joseph II, himself exhibited the more modest self-regard of the Enlightment by chosing a simple copper coffin, which we see in the photo at the foot of the tomb of his parents, draped with Austrian colors.
This was grandly named Franz Josef Land, but its value seems commensurable with all the other absurdities customarily associated with the Dual Monarchy. For Franz Josef Land, as it happens, was a group of Arctic islands almost entirely above 80 degrees latitude, at the northern end of the Barents Sea, beyond Norwegian Spitsbergen and the long Russian island of Novaya Zemlya. This is about the same latitude as the northern end of Greenland and cannot have offered any advantages to its owner, unless as an advanced base for Arctic exploration. Merely surviving the winter would be a challenge for anyone staying there. After the breakup of the Austrian state, Franz Josef Land fell to the Soviet Union, and now to Russia.
HOHENZOLLERN EMPERORS,
Prussia, which became a Great Power as the nemesis of Austria, eventually came to dominate post-Napoleonic 
There, the most extensive acquisitions were simply a purchase from Spain of her three islands groups, the Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls, east of the Philippines (which the United States took in 1898). In 1884 Germany divided eastern New Guinea with Britain, taking the northeastern part, renamed Kaiser Wilhelmsland. The adjacent island group then became the Bismarck Archipelago, a name that has stuck since. To the Bismarcks Germany was able to attach the northernmost of the Solomon Islands, Bougainville. In World War I, most German possessions were rapidly overrun. An exception was Tanganyika, where the German commander, Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (d.1964), managed to elude defeat or capture for the entire period of the war, raiding into Portuguese Mozambique when the British made Tanganyika itself too hot for him, and in the process of invading Rhodesia when the war ended. This little known but striking episode bespeaks a remarkable devotion on the part of his African troups, whom otherwise we do not gather were treated so well by Germans. That the Japanese scooped up most German islands in the Pacific was bad news for the future, since it gave them a strategically advanced position for expansion in World War II. Also, when the Japanese occupied the formerly German Bismarcks and Bougainville in that later war, they found the locals less hostile, as having only recently come under British rule (after World War I, of course), than further down in the Solomons.
Indeed, the representatives of German democracy were not even allowed to attend at Versailles, and the Treaty was subsequently presented to them, in the words of people like Hitler, as a Diktat whose rejection would precipitate a renewal of the War, while meanwhile the blockade remained in effect and Germans went hungry.
There actually had not been much call for such a symbol before the introduction of aircraft. Armies and navies had always used flags for recognition, as with the Imperial German Naval Ensign at right. A flag, however, is not going to work very well on an aircraft, and during World War I we see the introduction of special insignia painted on wings and fuselage. Considering the radical changes in regime, from Empire, to Republic, to Dictatorship, to Republic again, the Iron Cross represents an extraordinary constant in Germany identity despite all the other changes in symbolism. 
As it happens, however, the Iron Cross has nothing to do with the earlier history of Germany in general. It was inherited by the Margravate of 
, or white on black, 
. There was no particular symbolism in the choice of colors for the Teutonic Knights. The only symbolism it would ever have, a particularly unfortunate one, would be for the Nazis with death. This has now been conveniently, and not inappropriately, forgotten.
Napoleon III foundered on its own foolish adventure in the uncharted realm of 20th century warfare. The bitterness of German defeat and the willingness of the Germans to accept dictatorship, since they had never known real democracy [
(as Fascist Franco did in the "Kingdom" of Spain), even though Wilhelm II was still alive at Apeldoorn in the Netherlands until 1941 and the former Crown Prince Wilhelm would live until 1951 -- and a direct Hohenzollern heir still lives. When Germany occupied the Netherlands in 1940, contact with the Kaiser was carefully prevented lest Monarchist sentiment be aroused. Wilhelm sent a telegram to Hitler that said, "I congratulate you and hope that under your marvelous leadership the German monarchy will be restored completely." Hitler's reported reaction was, "What an idiot!"
Comparisons are also easy between Hitler and the mirror image leftist dictator and mass murderer of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin -- see Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, by Alan Bullock [Alfred A. Knopf, 1992] and The Dictators, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, by Richard Overy [W.W. Norton & Company, 2004].
in the Communist "
The fatal accident of James Dean occurred on what was then 
The book was set in Britain, but the movie in Canada. Neither, of course, was in California.
Within a short walk of the junction of highways 41 and 46 is the turnoff to Cholame Valley Road, which then becomes Cholame Road as it passes from San Luis Obispo County into Monterey County, on the way to Parkfield, California. Cholame Valley is actually the scar where the San Andreas Fault runs from Southern California to Northern California.
of the World," as we see emblazoned on the old watertank at the Parkfield Cafe. With only 18 residents, this is the town's claim to fame. There is a moderately large 
The actual trace of the San Andreas Fault is along the bed of Cholame Creek, which, it being California, is dry most of the year. Leaving town, to the West, a bridge crosses the Creek and is marked at both ends with signs advising that one is crossing the Fault and entering the tentonic Pacific Plate, to the West, or the tectonic North American Plate, to the East. There are few places in California where the Fault is so well defined and marked -- although one dramatic location is along California Highway 14 (formerly 
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