Kingdom of France

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of France began not with a crown placed on a French king's head, but with a treaty signed in 843 that divided a dying empire. When the Carolingian realm was carved into three at Verdun, Charles the Bald walked away with West Francia, a territory that would, over the next thousand years, become one of the most consequential states in the history of the world. What followed was a story of feudal fragility, dynastic crises, religious bloodshed, colonial ambition, and the slow accumulation of royal power that eventually turned absolutism into its own undoing. How did a patchwork of noble fiefdoms coalesce into a dominant European superpower? What forced the most powerful monarchy on the continent to abolish itself? And what role did ordinary people, Protestant minorities, and distant colonial frontiers play in that long transformation?

• 2. From Franks to France

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  Charles the Bald did not immediately rule something called France. The territory was still called Francia, and its king went by rex Francorum, meaning king of the Franks, well into the High Middle Ages. It was Philip II who first styled himself rex Francie, king of France, informally in 1190 and officially from 1204. That shift in title reflected something real: a king who had begun to pull scattered fiefdoms into a coherent realm.

  For much of the early period, the Carolingian dynasty clung to the throne despite its difficulties. A branch of that line ruled until 987, when Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris, was elected king and launched the Capetian dynasty. With its offshoots, the houses of Valois and Bourbon, the Capetian line would govern France for more than eight hundred years.

  The early Capetians controlled precious little territory. The old order left the new dynasty in direct command of little beyond the middle Seine and neighboring lands. Powerful lords elsewhere, such as the tenth- and eleventh-century counts of Blois, accumulated vast domains through marriage and private arrangements with lesser nobles.

  A turning point came with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Duke William of Normandy took possession of the Kingdom of England, making himself and his heirs the French king's equal outside France. Henry II then inherited Normandy and the County of Anjou, married the former French queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, and in effect ruled the western half of France more powerfully than the French throne itself. But disputes among Henry's descendants, combined with John of England's prolonged quarrel with Philip II, allowed Philip to recover most of that territory. After the French victory at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, English kings held power in France only in the southwestern Duchy of Aquitaine.

• 3. A Century of War and Plague

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  The death of Charles IV of France in 1328 without male heirs broke the main Capetian line and set the stage for one of Europe's most devastating conflicts. Under Salic law, the crown could not pass through a woman. Charles's daughter Isabella had a son, Edward III of England, who had his own claim. Instead the throne went to Philip VI, son of Charles of Valois. Edward III rejected that outcome, and his challenge, combined with disputes over Gascony and English ties to Flemish cloth towns, ignited the Hundred Years' War of 1337-1453.

  The war alone was catastrophic enough. But it arrived alongside the Black Death. The plague, usually identified as an outbreak of bubonic plague, reached France from Italy in 1348, spreading rapidly up the Rhône valley and then across most of the country. The 1328 hearth tax returns had suggested a French population of roughly 18-20 million. By roughly 150 years later, that figure had fallen by 50 percent or more.

  The Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War raged during the same period, and peasant revolts erupted in both France and England, including the Jacquerie of 1358 in France. Emerging from that century of devastation, France turned its ambitions southward into Italy. Charles VIII first cleared diplomatic space for the effort by signing three separate treaties with England, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the king of Aragon, at Étaples in 1492, Senlis in 1493, and Barcelona in 1493. The Italian Wars that followed lasted from 1494 to 1559 and ultimately strengthened France's rivals, the House of Habsburg, more than France itself.

• 4. Religion, Language, and Civil War

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  Francis I signed the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts into law in 1539, requiring the French language in all legal acts, notarised contracts, and official legislation. The ordinance was largely the work of Chancellor Guillaume Poyet, and its most consequential articles, numbers 110 and 111, pushed French into every corner of formal public life. The crown was building a more uniform state.

  But religious diversity threatened to tear that state apart. After the theologian and pastor John Calvin introduced the Reformation in France, the Protestant population grew to roughly 10 percent of French society, or about 1.8 million people. Under the rule of Francis I's son Henry II, this Huguenot minority faced increasingly harsh repression.

  After Henry II died in a jousting accident, his widow Catherine de' Medici governed alongside her sons Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. A massacre of Huguenots in 1572 launched the French Wars of Religion, during which English, German, and Spanish forces all intervened. The Huguenot Monarchomachs developed, during this period, political theories defending the right of rebellion and the legitimacy of tyrannicide.

  The Wars of Religion reached their peak in the War of the Three Henrys. Henry III assassinated Henry de Guise, leader of the Spanish-backed Catholic League, and was then himself murdered in retaliation. The resolution came when the Protestant king of Navarre became Henry IV, the first Bourbon king, and renounced Protestantism in 1593 before issuing the Edict of Nantes in 1598. That decree guaranteed freedom of private worship and civil equality for Huguenots. It would stand for less than a century before Louis XIV repealed it in 1685, triggering an exodus that cost France somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Protestants, including many of its artisans and intellectuals.

• 5. The Sun King's France

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  For most of the reign of Louis XIV from 1643 to 1715, France held a position of dominance in Europe that no single power had managed before. Cardinal Jules Mazarin, who served as chief minister from 1642 to 1661, oversaw the expansion of the French Royal Navy from 25 ships to nearly 200. The army was enlarged in similar proportion.

  Louis XIV advanced the theory of divine right, which held that monarchical authority derived from God and was subject to no earthly limit. He moved the court to the Palace of Versailles, built on the outskirts of Paris, and required the noble elite to reside there. By keeping the aristocracy close and dependent, he neutralized a class that had earlier revolted in the Fronde uprising of 1648-1653, when Louis was still a child.

  Territorial wars brought gains. The War of Devolution, from 1667 to 1668, and the Franco-Dutch War, from 1672 to 1678, added Artois, western Flanders, and the Free County of Burgundy to French territory. But each campaign deepened a national debt that would haunt his successors.

  In November 1700, King Charles II of Spain died without an heir, ending the Habsburg line in that country. His will left the entire Spanish Empire to Louis's grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou. Other European rulers saw this as a threat to the balance of power and refused to accept it. The resulting War of the Spanish Succession lasted from 1701 to 1714, beginning only three years after the War of the Grand Alliance had concluded. Louis XIV's long reign ended with France's dominance intact but its treasury drained and its enemies far better organized than before.

• 6. Collapse of the Monarchy

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  Louis XV reigned from 1715 to 1774 and was widely unpopular for what many perceived as personal weakness and the loss of New France to the British. That colonial defeat came through the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, which stripped France of most of its North American holdings. Louis XV died of smallpox in 1774, and, as the source records, the French people shed few tears.

  Louis XVI inherited the throne from his grandfather. French intervention in the American War of Independence was expensive and left the country deeply in debt. Louis XVI permitted the reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes, but noble resistance forced Turgot's dismissal and Malesherbes's resignation in 1776. They were replaced by Jacques Necker, who later resigned and was replaced before being recalled in 1788. A harsh winter that year produced widespread food shortages.

  On the 3rd of September 1791, an absolute monarchy that had governed France for 948 years was compelled to limit its own power and accept a constitutional framework. That arrangement lasted barely a year. On the 21st of September 1792, the French monarchy was abolished and the First Republic proclaimed. Louis XVI was executed by guillotine on Monday, the 21st of January 1793.

  The monarchy was restored by a coalition of European powers in 1814, only for Napoleon to return from Elba during the Hundred Days. After his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Bourbon monarchy was restored again under Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI. His successor Charles X issued the St. Cloud Ordinances on the 25th of July 1830 in an attempt to revive absolute rule, triggering the July Revolution. Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, was elected by the Chamber of Deputies on the 9th of August 1830 as "King of the French," a title that placed the sovereign's authority in the people rather than the territory. On the 24th of February 1848, the monarchy was abolished a final time, and the Second Republic was declared.