Kings of France

“ The principle of Royalty is so powerful in France that during the space of fourteen centuries the French nation has had but three Races of Kings. France should have remained and should again be "the Christian Monarchy." ”

“ I should have displayed the difference between a constitutional Emperor and a King of France. The Kings of France have never possessed any administrative or municipal institution. They have merely shown themselves great Lords who were ruined by their men of business.
“The nation itself has nothing in its character and its tastes but what is transitory and perishable. Every 97thing is done for the gratification of the moment and of caprice, nothing for duration.... That is our motto, and it is exemplified by our manners in France. Every one passes his life in doing and undoing ”

“ Philip, King of France, saw with dismay his richest province ruled by a king of England, and his own vassal wearing a crown with power superior to his own! A door had thus opened through which would enter entangling complications and countless woes in the future.
While William was trampling England into the dust, and with pitiless hand rivetting a feudal chain upon the Saxons, another and greater centre of power was developing at Rome, where the monk Hildebrand, who had now become Pope Gregory VII., claimed a universal sovereignty from which there was no appeal. Christ was King of Kings. ”

“ So our Kings did perpetually upon the Kings of France, to whom they were vassals all the while they held their territories in that kingdom. And by the law of England an inferior vassal might fight his lord in a weighty cause, even in duel. The pope seems here willing to depress the barons with low titles, that he may the better set off the presumption of their proceedings ”

“ RECENT DEATHS. LOUIS PHILIPPE, EX-KING OF THE FRENCH. The vicissitudes of kings form an impressive chapter in the history of Europe; and one of the most striking episodes in the narrative is the checkered life of the last king of France—one week among the mightiest monarchs on the loftiest pinnacle of ambition, he was, the next, an exile in a foreign land—his past supremacy almost forgotten. ”

“ Considering what France was under her Kings, what she now is, and how many troubles she has had to endure at the hands of intriguers, the conclusion in its substance, in its nudity, in its complete entirety, accepted by all men able to read French History, is surely that France always was, is at heart, and should remain what Great Britain is, and rightly wishes to remain, i.e., a Constitutional Monarchy. ”

“ At the first glance, two facts strike us in the history of the kingship in France. It was in France that it adopted soonest and most persistently maintained its fundamental principle, heredity. In the other monarchical states of Europe—in England, in Germany, in Spain, and in Italy—divers principles, at one time election, and at another right of conquest, have been mingled with or substituted for the heredity of the throne; different dynasties have reigned; and England has had her Saxon, Danish, and Norman kings, her Plantagenets, her Tudors, her Stuarts, her Nassaus, her Brunswicks. ”

“ The king's courts and the king's officers pushed their jurisdiction into a widening realm, until the king's authority had become supreme, in fact as well as in name. Even the measureless misery of a hundred years of war with English kings brought power, in the end, to the crown, by weakening the greater lords, and by bringing into existence a fixed military force. A. D. 1337-1453. Hundred Years War. Happy accidents, shrewd marriages, and cunning intrigues gathered the great dukedoms, one by one, into the royal domain, and the solidarity of modern France was attained. 16th-17th centuries. ”

“ His marvelous court at Versailles became the model and the despair of other less opulent and powerful princes, who accepted his theory of the absolute power of kings but could not afford to imitate his luxury. By his incessant wars of aggression he kept Europe in turmoil for over half a century. The distinguished generals who led his newly organized troops, and the wily diplomats who arranged his alliances and negotiated his treaties, made France feared and respected by even the most powerful of the other European states. ”

“ It is right that we should place at the head of political ceremonies those having reference to the coronation of sovereigns, which were not only political, but owed their supreme importance and dignity to the necessary intervention of ecclesiastical authority. We will therefore first speak of the consecration and coronation of the kings of France.
Pépin le Bref, son of Charles Martel and founder of the second dynasty, was the first of the French kings who was consecrated by the religions rite of anointing. ”

“ The result of this discussion has now escaped my recollection, but I know the subject was to determine that the kings of the Imperial Families, occupying foreign thrones, should leave their titles and all the etiquette of royalty on the frontier, and only resume them on quitting France. The Emperor replying to some one who had started objections to this, and at the same time explaining the motives for the measure, said: “But for these monarchs I reserve in France a still higher title; they shall be more than kings: they shall be French Princes.” ”

“ Unity and heredity, those two essential principles of monarchy, have been the invariable characteristics of the kingship in France.
A second fact, less apparent and less remarkable, but, nevertheless, not without importance or without effect upon the history of the kingship in France, is the extreme variety of character, of faculties, of intellectual and moral bent, of policy and personal conduct amongst the French kings. ”

“ By their election to the kingdom the Dukes of the French added to their duchy the small territory which up to that time had still been in the immediate possession of the West-Frankish Kings at Laon. And, with the crown and the immediate territory of those kings, the French kings at Paris also inherited their claim to superiority over all the states which had arisen within the bounds of the Western Kingdom. ♦Definition of the word France.♦ But the name France, as it was{328} used in the times with which we are dealing, means only the immediate territory of the King. ♦Two forms of growth ”

“ Louis, rise up to Heaven," said the priest [387] who assisted Louis XVI. at the baptism of blood.
If there were nothing in France save that old House of France built up by time and of astounding majesty, we could make a finer show than all the other nations in the matter of illustrious things. The Capets were reigning when the other sovereigns of Europe were still subjects. The vassals of our kings have become kings. ”

“ That Robert was himself of German descent, the son of a stranger from some of the Teutonic provinces of the Empire, [64] mattered not a whit. From the beginning 60 of their historic life the Parisian Dukes and Kings have been the leaders and representatives of the new French nationality. No royal dynasty has ever been so thoroughly identified with the nation over which it ruled, because no royal dynasty could be so truly said to have created the nation. Paris, France, and the Dukes and Kings of the French are three ideas which can never be kept asunder. ”

“ What mightst thou do, that honour would thee do, Were all thy children kinde and naturall: But see, thy fault France hath in thee found out, A nest of hollow bosomes, which he filles With treacherous Crownes, and three corrupted men: One, Richard Earle of Cambridge, and the second Henry Lord Scroope of Masham, and the third Sir Thomas Grey Knight of Northumberland, Haue for the Gilt of France (O guilt indeed) Confirm'd Conspiracy with fearefull France, And by their hands, this grace of Kings must dye. ”

“ As to any advantages which the imperial crown may bring, we think that our sovereign, the King of France, who is raised to the throne by the hereditary nobility of his royal blood, is high above an Emperor who owes his elevation to an election which may be refused. ”

“ His Royal Highness's intelligence, labours, and devotion fit him for the first place in the Royal House of France, after H. R. H. the Comte de Chambord. May the day be long distant ere H. R. H. the Comte de Paris can be King of France; but if ever His Royal Highness does wear the Crown, he will never disgrace the Throne, for few Frenchmen in the records of French History have been born with such mental gifts and such promising signs of a happy reign as the present Heir-Apparent to the French Crown. ”

“ The young duke realized at last the fierceness and relentlessness of his rivals and enemies, and, sorrowing most of all at the treachery of the lad who had been his playmate and comrade in arms in mimic fight and serious quarrel, at the chase and in the tourney, he turned reluctantly for succor to the only man to whom he might rightly look for aid—his liege lord and suzerain, Henry, King of France. ”

“ To argue in the present day that a foreign prince who is descended from Louis XIV. has therefore a better title to reign in France than a French prince who can only boast of a collateral relationship with that sovereign, but who is himself the grandson of a French king, is to attach strange importance to a mere theory spun to suit the occasion. ”

“ From here the boy merges into the man, and we must leave him. Strong of purpose, clear-headed and masterful, Louis the Fourteenth ruled as King of France for seventy-two years—the most powerful monarch in Christendom. Handsome in person, majestic in bearing, dignified, lavish, and proud; ruling France in one of the most splendid periods of its history—a period styled "the Augustan age" of France; flattered, feared, and absolutely obeyed, one would think, boys and girls, that so powerful a monarch must have been a happy man. ”

“ Are France or England for that less the good result of Monarchy? To-day France is the France of French Monarchy, the only difference being that under the First Napoleon the Allies entered Paris on the 6th of July, 1815, and that the fallen Emperor saddled France with the Treaty of Paris (1815) ; the Third Napoleon lost Alsace less Belfort; and that the Third Republic lost a large slice of Lorraine through not coming to terms with Prussia before the capitulation of Metz, French History begins not either from 1870 or 1792; and if men, strangers to History, cannot educate, let them be educated! ”

“ But the princes escaped from the net, and, leagued with Turenne, Bouillon, La Rochefoucault, and other great nobles reached Paris, and were received with acclamations of joy by the misguided people. Then, again, they obtained the ascendant. But the ascendency was no sooner gained than the victors quarrelled with themselves, and with the parliament, for whose cause they professed to contend. It was in their power, when united, to have deprived the queen regent of her authority, and to have established constitutional liberty in France. ”

“ In ceaseless conflicts and fluctuations the chiefs of the tribes, or nobles, gradually regained the power which had been wrested from them by Charlemagne. Upon the ruins of the empire arose the feudal system, and France became a monarchy but in name. The throne, shorn of its energies, retained but the shadow of power. Haughty dukes, surrounded by their warlike retainers, and impregnable in massive castles which had been the work of ages, exercised over their own vassals all the prerogatives of royalty, and often eclipsed the monarch in wealth and splendor. ”

“ This deified monarch needed a new temple, and Versailles, where everything was his creation, both men and things, adored its maker. The highest nobility of France, beginning with the princes of the blood, competed for posts in the royal household, where an army of ten thousand The forms of Louis XIV.’s monarchy. ”

“ The French nation had been so accustomed to attach an idea of everything noble, lofty, and magnificent to the royal name and person, especially during the stately and sumptuous reign of Louis XIV., that they could not at first tolerate the idea of royalty being in any degree mingled with matters of traffic and finance, and the king being in a manner a banker. It was one of the downward steps, however, by which royalty lost its illusive splendor in France, and became gradually cheapened in the public mind. ”

“ The said traitors seeing that the said Duke and his council would not aid and succour them, nor follow their ways, privily departed out of his country into France, there taking themselves to be under the obedience of the King's ancient enemy Charles, calling himself King of France ”

“ Like Louis XIV., one of the most contemptible princes that ever sat on the throne of France, his memory is glorified by the borrowed lustre of the many men of genius and distinction who flourished in his reign. ”

“ Charles II, a Stuart, alien in religion to the convictions of his people, looked to Catholic France to give him security on his throne. Before the first half of the reign of Louis XIV had ended, it was the boast of the French that the King of England was vassal to their King, that the states of continental Europe had become mere pawns in the game of their Grand Monarch, and that France could be master of as much of the world as was really worth mastering. ”

“ But far more remarkable, as a characteristic of this century, than the lowering of the rank of England in relation to foreign states, is the rise, for the first time in Europe, of a figure hitherto unknown,—a true, unshackled, and absolute king, and that in the least likely of all positions and in the person of the least likely man. This was the appearance on the throne of France of Louis the Fourteenth. ”