Nation-building

The​ unbroken succession of fifteen Capetian kings began in 987 when Hugh Capet was elected to the kingship of the Franks by his fellow magnates at Senlis, replacing the Carolingian dynasty that had ruled the kingdom of the Franks since Charlemagne’s father, Pippin III, deposed the last Merovingian king in 751. The lands the Capetian kings controlled would eventually expand far beyond the family territory of the Île-de-France, to embrace the principalities and smaller counties that would eventually become France. The publisher’s blurb for House of Lilies claims that the Capetians – Charles IV, who died in 1328, was the last king in the direct line – ‘did not simply rule France: they created it.’

To what extent does Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s book justify the claim that the dynasty can be credited with the formation of national identity as well as the territorial entity? The territory they ruled was effectively that of the Carolingian kingdom, which itself had its roots in Frankish and Roman Gaul. Before his death in 814, Charlemagne had extended the Frankish kingdom far beyond Roman Gaul, to the Elbe and Danube Bend, and across the Alps into northern Italy. During the late eighth and early ninth century, Frankish methods of government and documentary practices, a stable monetary system, ecclesiastical organisation and Christian Latin culture were established across much of what we now call Western Europe. The Church and its bishops and abbots provided support for royal government in both practical and ideological terms. This situation changed during the ninth century: the empire was divided into smaller kingdoms as a result of the Frankish practice of partible inheritance; the Carolingian line died out in the territories east of the Rhine early in the tenth century, its place taken by the Ottonian family; west of the Rhine, the kingdom of the West Franks continued to be ruled by Carolingian kings, many of whom were barely into their teens when they inherited the throne.

The need for strong rule and military leadership, especially in the face of raids from marauding Northmen and Magyars or aggressive neighbours such as the Bretons, Obodrites, Saxons and Avars, gave local magnates the opportunity to accrue lands, followers and wealth, even while acting as the king’s right-hand men. Among these lords were the Robertians, later known as the Capetians, whose power centred on Paris. Others included the counts of Flanders, Vermandois and Poitou, and the dukes of Aquitaine, Anjou, Burgundy and Normandy. All these families were connected by ties of marriage and bound by oaths of loyalty to the king, and their territories were understood to be part of the West Frankish kingdom. At moments of crisis in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, especially when the Carolingian heir was too young to lead an army, some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the young Louis V in 987, the claims of his uncle, Charles of Lorraine, were contested by Hugh Capet, count of Paris.

Hugh’s success owed much to the support of Adalbero, the archbishop of Rheims, and his protégé, Gerbert. The earliest narrative account of these events, and of the rivalries and conflicts that preceded them, was written by Richer, a monk from the abbey of Saint-Remi, just outside Rheims. Richer was taught by Gerbert, to whom he dedicated his Histories. His text emphasises that this was a process of election rather than usurpation, and stresses the importance of a strong and competent king who could bring peace to the realm. Those who supported Hugh no doubt hoped for political advantage; they may also have decided that he would be the more effective ruler. The legitimacy of his rule was challenged, not least in its first years, when a rebellion by the rejected Charles of Lorraine nearly succeeded in toppling him. But this needs to be set against the absence of contemporary complaints over the demise of the Carolingians, the widespread pragmatic support for the newly established dynasty and the Capetians’ unerring ability to produce sons to secure the succession.

Richer’s account of the beginnings of Capetian kingship had little immediate impact. Gerbert seems to have taken the only copy of the Histories with him when he relinquished his claim to the see of Rheims and moved to the court of the Saxon ruler Otto III in 997. It is assumed that the Histories were left behind in Germany and absorbed into the Ottonian rulers’ library when Gerbert left for Rome to become Pope Silvester II. Then the manuscript in effect disappeared for seven hundred years. It was rediscovered in 1833, and published six years later by Georg Pertz in the collection of primary sources known as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. In part because Richer’s record of Hugh’s election was unknown in France, other versions of the Capetian takeover were invented by chroniclers. The fate of Richer’s account, which described a legitimate election rather than the usurpation portrayed in so many subsequent chronicles, serves as a salutary reminder of the role played by historians, both medieval and modern, in the construction of the Capetian kings’ role in the formation of France.

Our knowledge of the Capetians and the expansion of their realm is particularly dependent on narratives focusing on the dynasty’s kings. These include the 11th-century Life of Robert II ‘the Pious’ by Helgaud of Fleury; the 12th-century Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis’s panegyric of Louis VI and account of the deeds of his son Louis VII; Jean de Joinville’s description of the catastrophic crusade of Louis IX, written in the early 14th century, some years after Louis’s canonisation; and the historiographical enterprise undertaken at the abbey of Saint-Denis in the 13th century that culminated in the vernacular Grandes Chroniques de France. As if to underline the importance of the Capetians’ martial activity in any history of the dynasty, the illustration on the cover of House of Lilies comes from a 14th-century manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques, a remnant from the medieval English royal library, now in the British Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.

The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their construction of a particular kind of history of the dynasty, is an underlying, if undeveloped, theme of Firnhaber-Baker’s book. The vivid character sketches, scurrilous allegations and accounts of insatiable sexual appetite that characterise House of Lilies, as well as the praise for a particular king’s martial prowess or religious devotion, have their origin in the chronicles, both contemporary and written long afterwards. It is unclear how much the chroniclers drew on anything more than rumour and hearsay. Each had his own agenda. With the Capetians, there are few examples of triumphalist court-sponsored narratives such as those promoted by the early Carolingian rulers. Instead, the chroniclers offered idiosyncratic and more regionally focused accounts. Helgaud of Fleury (on Robert II) and Suger of Saint-Denis (on Louis VI) ardently promoted their subjects. But for other chroniclers – Ralph Glaber, with his apocalyptic convictions and enthusiasm for church building and ecclesiastical reform; Odorannus of Sens, who focused on the archbishops of his see; or Orderic Vitalis, with his interest in Anglo-Norman kings and dukes – political analysis of the actions of the Capetian kings was subordinated to local preoccupations.

Skilful media exploitation, then as much as now, was a major part of public success. Long before Richer’s Histories, an understanding of rulers as the leaders and protectors of the community was embedded in political thinking. The texts of the oaths and prayers used in coronation and consecration rituals were first fully recorded in Archbishop Hincmar of Reims’s version of ordines for Carolingian kings in the later ninth century. These Frankish rituals and prayers were adapted for use in England from the tenth century onwards, most recently in last year’s coronation of Charles III. The texts summarise the obligations of the king to defend his people, the Church and the Christian faith, and to maintain good government, law and justice. They also stress that the Christian God is the ultimate source of a king’s authority. Such an understanding created ideological as well as practical expectations and assumptions, which could be exploited by any claimant to a throne and his supporters. The crowning and anointing by Adalbero of Hugh Capet at Noyon, the site of Charlemagne’s coronation as king of the Franks in 768, with the sacred chrism reserved for Frankish kings, and his symbolic burial in 996 at the royal necropolis of Saint-Denis, are two examples.

Firnhaber-Baker’s account of the fifteen kings and their many military campaigns is entertaining, unfailingly lively, occasionally a little rackety; it is in essence a collection of royal portraits, focusing more on individual lives than political processes and the wielding of authority. House of Lilies considers the ambitions, temperaments and fallibility of the kings from Hugh Capet to Charles IV. Firnhaber-Baker mines the original sources for memorable descriptions: Henry I is a ‘weak and lazy lawless hypocrite’; Philip I is not only ‘lazy, fat and unfit for war’ but ‘a particularly corruptible man’. Philip II, who reigned from 1180 to 1223, is said to have neither valued nor understood gaiety, but he did like money. He forced the Jews to leave his kingdom and confiscated their property, and claimed 20 per cent of the debts Christians owed to Jews after these were cancelled. Some of the revenue was spent on the transformation of Paris and the building of the Louvre (remnants of the massive walls from this period can still be seen in the Louvre’s underground passage). Louis VI, who was so heavy that his horses could not carry him when he was on campaign, had, Firnhaber-Baker points out, ‘a talent for the brutal flourish’. Abbot Suger reported (with evident approval) that he ordered the severing of enemy soldiers’ right hands, so that they would return to their commanders ‘carrying their fists in their fists’. One consequence of Philip IV’s ‘moral fanaticism’ and ‘pig-headed pursuit of purity’ was the gruesome public execution at Pontoise of the Aulnay brothers, who had been accused of adultery with two of Philip’s daughters-in-law. The brothers were skinned alive, castrated and decapitated, and the affair was given maximum publicity via letters circulated by the king himself. Yet Firnhaber-Baker argues that the scandals did little to enhance respect for the authority of the king or his sons, and opened the way for doubts about the legitimacy of their offspring.

House of Lilies has a clear sense of the family dynamics underlying royal power and of the potential for women to influence politics. Louis VIII’s widow, Blanche of Castile, for instance, acted as regent for her son Louis IX during his minority and was criticised for controlling the king. She also ruled in his stead from 1248 until 1254, when he was absent on a disastrous and expensive crusade in Egypt, during which he and most of the army were captured. Firnhaber-Baker doesn’t say much about how Blanche achieved this: we are told only that she ‘navigated public power through her relationships with great men’. House of Lilies does not skimp on details concerning the sexual role of royal women. A queen’s most obvious function was to produce male heirs. Marriage was of course a standard method of sealing agreements with other ruling families and gaining the wealth of a dowry, as in Henry II’s second marriage to Anne of Kiev. Princesses were also used to secure alliances. Adela, daughter of Robert II, was married to the duke of Normandy in 1027; after his death a few months later, she was married to the count of Flanders.

Marriage and divorce could also wreak political havoc, though here we are at the mercy of the often salacious speculations of a few contemporary and mostly clerical commentators on which Firnhaber-Baker is perhaps too reliant. There are abundant examples of clerical disapproval of monarchs’ marriages, adultery and divorces. Philip I destroyed all his political alliances by leaving his wife, Berthe of Holland, for Bertrada, the third wife of Fulk of Anjou. With the help of compliant bishops, Philip secured a divorce in order to marry Bertrada, but he was excommunicated three more times for adultery. As a consequence, he could not join the First Crusade to the Holy Land. To secure an alliance with King Cnut of Denmark, the long-widowed Philip II married Cnut’s 18-year-old sister, Ingeborg, but, to the lasting astonishment of all, repudiated her the day after the wedding.

The​ degree to which the Capetians themselves orchestrated the representations of their rule and their dynastic fortunes merits more attention than it gets in House of Lilies. Elements of an ideology of sacral kingship were consolidated by the ceremonies of coronation and anointing, the concentration of royal burials in the abbey of Saint-Denis, and the association of the eldest son with the kingship as a way of securing the succession. The image of the fleur-de-lis – associated with the Virgin Mary as well as evoking the Trinity – was used first by Louis VI on his coinage, and gradually became associated with the French royal house. The representation of the kings as being especially favoured by God was furthered by the elaborate ritual performed when the holy relic of the crown of thorns was brought to Paris in August 1239, and the subsequent construction of the Sainte-Chapelle to house it (it was moved to the treasury of Notre-Dame in 1806). Louis IX had bought the relic from the Venetians, to whom it had been pawned by the Byzantine emperor, but this commercial history did little to detract from the symbolic resonance of the king becoming its new guardian. This mystique was enhanced by the ostentatious piety of the crusader kings and the canonisation of Louis IX. Indeed, his principal qualification for sanctity was that he had died (of dysentery at Tunis in 1270) while on his second crusade, despite that crusade’s failure and calamitous loss of men. Other factors cited were reported miracles of healing in the presence of Louis’s viscera (still in the cathedral of Monreale in Sicily) and his bones, interred at Saint-Denis.

The interaction of France with the rest of Europe, the papacy and the Mediterranean region is only sketched here, though we observe the Capetians amassing great wealth and weaving a web of political alliances (as well as enmities) from England to Russia. Little room is given to social and religious change in France during this period, which saw the building of many castles, the oppression of local communities by their governors and the growth of the Peace of God movement, initiated by the clergy at the turn of the tenth century to constrain feuding and local violence. There are tantalising glimpses of topics such as millenarianism; the establishment of the University of Paris; the building of the Louvre; the growing importance of towns; pogroms against Jews; and the savage persecution of those designated as ‘heretics’, including the Cathars, annihilated in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29, and the immensely rich and powerful order of the Knights Templar, ruthlessly destroyed by Philip IV. (The king owed the Templars a great deal of money.)

Some Capetian kings tried hard to impose taxation and raise revenue. Having profited from expelling the Jews, Philip II in due course invited them back. Louis IX reformed government and stamped out corruption with the Grande Ordonnance of 1254, which prohibited blasphemy, prostitution, gaming, tournaments and trial by ordeal, and made initial provision for the judicial functions of the Parlement of Paris. Co-operation was necessary between the king and his subjects, especially the nobles, if he were to rule effectively. Government appears in practice not to have been royal government so much as the responsibility of the counts and dukes who owed allegiance to the king, though Philip II did establish a permanent royal administrative archive in Paris, and introduced some salaried officials to the administration. Paris in the 12th century is described by Firnhaber-Baker as a ‘teeming world of money, power, sex and scholarship’, but she says little about Philip II and Philip IV’s attempts to create and consolidate structures of government at central and regional levels. Philip IV’s ‘chief minister’, Guillaume de Nogaret, was particularly active on the king’s behalf in his bitter quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII over clerical taxation. This culminated in Boniface’s death after being arrested on Philip’s orders, the election of the Frenchman Raymond Bertrand de Got as Pope Clement V in 1305 and the establishment of a succession of French popes in a fortified palace at Avignon (an era often described as the papacy’s ‘Babylonian captivity’) for the next seventy years.

Firnhaber-Baker rightly insists on the ‘intertwining of the history’ of the Capetians with ‘that of the lands and people that they ruled’. But was this really ‘the dynasty that made medieval France’, as the subtitle of House of Lilies claims? The histories of French vernacular literature, chivalry, Gothic architecture, Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame, the crusading movement, even of the emergence of Paris as a capital city, owe little to the royal family. The association between a line of kings and the formation of a nation by wars and consolidation of territory used to be a historiographical commonplace, but in charting the emergence of a distinctive cultural and national identity the central role of rulers cannot be assumed. There are obvious questions about the imperative to represent a nation’s history and identity as being dependent on its kings, about the definition of cultural identity itself, and the degree to which archival preservation determines emphases of interpretation.

Robert Fawtier’s pioneering Les Capétiens et la France, published in Paris in 1942, is a striking response to such questions: it was subtitled ‘Leur rôle dans sa construction’. Fawtier explained in his preface that ‘in a time of national tragedy’, writing the book was ‘a source of strength, for it offered an escape from the horrors of contemporary reality and also hope for the future’. Writing of the construction of his nation’s history was at that moment an act of faith in its future as much as a scholarly enterprise: Fawtier wrote the book between the fall of France and his own deportation and imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen in Austria. He survived, and having already been awarded the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur for his service during the First World War, was promoted to the grade of Officier de la Légion d’honneur for his activity in the French Resistance in the Second. After his return to France, he became professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne in succession to Louis Halphen, the celebrated historian of the Carolingians. Fawtier was instrumental in a major shift of emphasis on the part of French medievalists to the Capetian era and the later Middle Ages as an essential phase in the building of the nation and its identity.

Fawtier, who had a deep knowledge of the financial, judicial and administrative records of the French monarchs, and of the various regions in the kingdom, argued that the king played a crucial role in determining policy and in the administrative structures of government. In this, he might have been influenced by the work of the British medievalist T.F. Tout, who taught at the University of Manchester, where Fawtier had held a lectureship for five years after the First World War. Tout was known for the Ford Lectures he had delivered in Oxford in 1913 on the reign of Edward II, and above all for his six-volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Fawtier and his own teacher, Ferdinand Lot, wrote a classic three-volume history of French government institutions in the Middle Ages, published between 1957 and 1962. Fawtier also edited many volumes of French royal fiscal accounts from the 13th and 14th centuries, as well as the register of Pope Boniface VIII’s letters. His work ostensibly presented a contrast to that of the Annales school, with their focus on close-grained social and economic history rather than the documentation of historical events. Yet lectures given in 1937 by the Annales historian Marc Bloch and published posthumously by Fernand Braudel in 1958 as France sous les derniers Capétiens (Bloch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944), similarly associate the Capetians and their administrative structures with the formation of France. Bloch integrated the history of the Capetian rulers with the development of every aspect of French society, culminating in the ‘expression of French mentality’ in literature and art.

Fawtier’s survey did not achieve wider currency until its translation into English in 1960, in a volume with the telling subtitle ‘Monarchy and Nation, 987-1328’, but his interpretation has served as a model for many subsequent studies, including Elizabeth Hallam’s Capetian France, 987-1328 (1980) and Dominique Barthélémy’s Nouvelle Histoire des Capétiens 987-1214 (2012), with its emphasis on the creation of ‘la patrimoine’ and accounts of the rule of particular monarchs. Jean Dunbabin’s France in the Making, 843-1180 (1985) is one of the few books to emphasise not only the political and institutional foundations of France laid in the Carolingian period, but also the contributions from the territories of Normandy, Flanders, Toulouse and smaller lordships. The Short Oxford History of France volumes on the central and later Middle Ages, edited by Marcus Bull and David Potter respectively, also highlight the formation of a ‘French sense of identity’. Although the role of the king in consolidating power and extending territory is emphasised in all of these books, it is seen as only one aspect of political culture, alongside the roles played by the provinces, the Church, economy and society, and intellectual and educational developments. Any consideration of the emergence of ‘France’ now also has to take account of the still lively debate about ‘the transformation of the Carolingian world’ and ‘l’an mille’: that is, the extent to which the year 1000 was a watershed in political, social, economic or religious life. This debate continues to disrupt old certainties and traditional narratives.

Such​ is the emphasis in House of Lilies on the unrestrained sexual behaviour of the Capetians that the book might almost be read as a subversive portrait of the ineffectiveness of kings. What did kingship entail? Firnhaber-Baker notes that the ‘two most important ingredients of power’ in the 12th and 13th centuries were friendly relations with influential churchmen and victorious armies. Success in annexing territory is presented in the contemporary sources as an indicator of effective military leadership. Firnhaber-Baker also observes that the Capetians had survived into the 11th century partly by relying on the ‘ritual prestige’ that came from ceremonies such as coronation, but ‘mainly through creating alliances that exploited the rivalries between other great houses’. The older historiography from Fawtier onwards remains the place to look for fuller explanations of how royal power actually worked.

Changes of dynasty often produce after-the-event justifications and representations. In the middle of the eighth century, Pippin III, father of Charlemagne, usurped the throne ‘on the advice and with the consent of all the Franks’. He was said to have deposed the reigning Merovingian, who was portrayed as a ‘do-nothing’ king: much of the riches and power of the kingdom were in the hands not of the king but of the ‘mayor of the palace’, the de facto ruler of the Franks. It was the mayor of the palace, according to Einhard in his Life of Charlemagne written between 814 and 817, who ‘took care of everything, either at home or abroad, that needed to be done and arranged for the administration of the kingdom’. Kings should be able to wield power effectively. The chronicler Regino of Prüm, writing between 900 and 908, commented on the crisis after the Emperor Charles the Fat’s death in 888:

the kingdoms which had obeyed his authority … dissolved into separate parts and, without waiting for their natural lord, each decided to create a king from its own guts. This was the cause of great wars, not because the Franks lacked leaders who by nobility, courage and wisdom were capable of ruling the kingdoms, but rather because the equality of descent, authority and power increased the discord among them; none so outshone the others that the rest deigned to submit to his rule. For Francia would have produced many leaders capable of controlling the government of the kingdom, had not fortune equipped them to destroy each other in the competition for power.

The Capetian kings did wield power, though on this book’s showing they abused it many times over. But that power and wealth rested on the cultural, social, political and administrative history of medieval France that Firnhaber-Baker implies rather than brings to the fore.

In contrast to the little kingdom to which Hugh Capet had laid claim in 987, France by 1328 was a major political presence in Europe. The Capetians had established a strong dynastic tradition with a distinctive character and a powerful network of alliances and economic connections. At the end of House of Lilies, there is a brief epilogue which considers the splintering of the family line following the death of Charles IV in 1328, when the succession moved to his Valois cousin Philip VI. Another claimant was Edward III of England, whose mother was the daughter of the Capetian king Philip IV and sister of the three last Capetian kings: one consequence of the disputed claim was the Hundred Years War between France and England, which began in 1337. Although the Capetian dynasty is usually thought to have ended with Charles IV, his successors were seen as members of the dynasty via the male line. In 1793, Louis XVI was executed as ‘Citizen Capet’.