Charlemagne: what is known, and who told us

He inherited a kingdom his father Pepin had taken from the Merovingians in 751, and he kept it forty-five years. King of the Franks in 768, at first with his brother Carloman, who died three years later; king of the Lombards in 774 after crossing the Alps; in 778 he launched an expedition into Spain that came to nothing, and on the way back his rearguard was massacred at Roncevaux. Against the Saxons it would be thirty-three years of war, says Einhard. By the end his authority ran from the Ebro to the Elbe.

His capital was not an inherited city. It is Aachen, chosen for its hot springs, where he had a palace and a chapel built, where he died on 28 January 814 and where he is buried. Twenty-nine years later, in 843, his three grandsons divided the empire at the Treaty of Verdun: a western share, an eastern share, a long strip in the middle. The first two would become France and Germany.

On 25 December 800, at Saint Peter’s in Rome, Pope Leo III set a crown on Charles’s head and made him emperor. In the West the title had been vacant, and that day the Western Empire was reborn. Einhard swears his hero did not want it: in Turner’s English, Charles “had such an aversion that he declared that he would not have set foot in the Church the day that they were conferred, although it was a great feast-day, if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope”.

Historians only half believe him. Léon Levillain, who went back over the file in 1932, holds that Charles had accepted the title before the ceremony: the assembly of 23 December 800 had offered it to him, and he had said yes. What surprised and angered him, Levillain writes, was an incident during the ceremony itself. A detail of protocol; and it is on that kind of detail that the rivalry of popes and emperors would live for centuries.

A song from 1964, Sacré Charlemagne, fixed the idea for three generations of French schoolchildren: words by Robert Gall, music by Georges Liferman, France Gall singing, and a chorus that holds the emperor responsible for inventing school.

The substance underneath is real. On 23 March 789 a capitulary of eighty-two articles, the Admonitio generalis, ordered bishoprics and monasteries to open schools: ut scolae legentium puerorum fiant, let there be schools where boys may learn to read (our English from the Latin; the BnF’s French keeps square brackets for what the Latin does not quite say). The text asks that the sons of serfs be received as well as the sons of free men, and that the books copied there be corrected with care.

Except that ordering is not inventing. Churches and monasteries were teaching before him; Charlemagne revived neglected schools and imposed a programme on them. Nothing in it resembles the school that the Ferry laws would make free in 1881 and compulsory the year after. What he really creates is a policy of the book, and a script, Carolingian minuscule, so legible that Renaissance printers copied it and our lower-case letters descend from it.

The question comes round every school year, and it is badly put: neither country exists yet. Charles is a Frank. His mother tongue is Germanic, to the point that he renamed the months of the year with Frankish words; Latin he learned. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had stopped an Arab army near Poitiers in 732. His capital, Aachen, is in Germany today; his empire straddled both.

It is the division of 843 that manufactures the question. The two kingdoms that came out of the Treaty of Verdun would each later read their birth certificate in the same emperor. In the twentieth century the quarrel turned sinister: the Hitler regime laid hands on medieval history, and the image of Charlemagne became a stake in it. Alain Brose, who has gone back over the file, warns that the weight of völkisch circles in this affair has been overestimated: a great deal of noise, little real influence.

After the war he was recycled the other way. In 1950 Aachen created a Charlemagne Prize for those who advance European unity; Mitterrand and Kohl received it together in 1988. The honest answer is one word, and it is neither French nor German: Frankish.

It all rests on one small book. Einhard, raised at the abbey of Fulda, reached the palace around 791 and served Charlemagne, then his son Louis the Pious; it was under that second reign, the emperor long dead, that he wrote the Life of Charlemagne. Michel Sot, who has retranslated it, puts the situation bluntly: most of what is known and taught about the king of the Franks comes from those fifty little pages.

And Einhard wrote with a model in front of him: Suetonius, and his Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Same plan, same headings, same omens before the death, to the point that his editor Louis Halphen could call the result the thirteenth Life of the Caesars. So the book has to be read for what it is: the portrait of a man by someone who admired him and who knew what kind of portrait an emperor is owed.

Which does not mean he lies. The capitularies, the charters, the annals and the letters allow a good part of what he tells to be checked. But every time you think you have an intimate detail (the distaste for doctors, the baths at Aachen, the writing tablets slipped under the pillow), there is only one witness, and he is on his hero’s side.