Hugh Capet: an elected king, a dynasty of eight centuries

Louis V is hunting on foot, at Senlis. He falls, injures his liver, and blood comes from his nose and his mouth. He dies on 22 May 987, a year after his father Lothair, childless. It is Richer, a monk of Reims, who tells the scene. With him the line of Carolingian kings stops. The magnates of the kingdom meet at Senlis to find him a successor, and they set aside the one Carolingian available: Charles, the dead king’s uncle, whom the emperor Otto I had made duke of Lower Lorraine.

The man they elect is the duke of the Franks, Hugh: in his forties, son of Hugh the Great, who left him Neustria between Loire and Seine and the duchy of France between Seine and Somme. He is also lay abbot of Saint-Martin of Tours. Elected at Senlis in 987, anointed at Noyon the same year, he reigns nine years, until his death in October 996. Nine years, not one conquest: on paper, a reign without relief.

The most famous sentence of the affair may be nobody’s. Richer, writing after the fact, puts into the mouth of the archbishop of Reims, Adalbero, a speech to the assembly at Senlis. Charles’s supporters claim the throne is his by right of birth; but the throne is not acquired by right of inheritance, and no one should be raised to it who is not marked out by wisdom of mind as well as by the advantages of birth (our English from the French edition of 1855). The speech is a reconstruction, not a shorthand record.

The argument is not disinterested, and it does not describe the law of the time. For contemporaries only kings of the Carolingian family are legitimate, and this election strikes them as irregular. Adalbero, to set Charles aside, reproaches him with his absence, his dissolute life and his poverty; others cannot forgive him for having become the man of France’s enemies. Hugh is elected, Richer writes, by general consent. There is the irony of it: this king they voted for would spend his reign making sure nobody voted again.

Count the peoples his title gives him at the anointing: Gauls, Bretons, Normans, Aquitanians, Goths, Spaniards, Gascons. Seven. The reality is a great deal less. He sends his messengers from Orléans, he has his son crowned there, he goes to deliberate at Senlis with his own men, he adds Senlis to the royal domain and holds Dreux for a time. And in his own Neustrian lands his authority is already eaten into by smaller principalities: the counties of Anjou, Chartres and Blois.

Laon, the old royal town, resists him. He besieges it in the autumn of 988, leaves because the days are too short, comes back in the spring of 989 with eight thousand men and a ram that the steepness of the hill makes useless. He gets the place only in 991, when the bishop of Laon has Charles arrested by treachery and hands him over with the town. People like to tell here the retort of the count of Périgueux: the king asks him who made him a count, and Aldebert answers, who made you a king? Richer says not a word of it. The scene comes from Adémar of Chabannes, and Richer’s editor quotes it only in a note: a good story, not a record.

His real political act is a ceremony. Barely anointed, Hugh wants his son Robert crowned in his own lifetime. Adalbero objects: one cannot reasonably make two kings in the same year. Hugh then puts before him a letter from Borrell, duke of Hither Spain, asking for help against the barbarians. If one of the two kings falls in the war, he argues, the army must still have a leader to count on. The archbishop gives way. At Christmas 987, Robert is crowned in the basilica of Sainte-Croix, at Orléans.

Nobody that day sees what has just happened. By having his son anointed in his own lifetime, in 987, Hugh founded dynastic heredity: when he died nine years later there was nothing left to elect, Robert was already king. The house begun at Senlis would rule through its direct line until 1328, then through the Valois and the Bourbons, until 1792. When the Convention tried Louis XVI, it called him in mockery Louis Capet, after the founder of the dynasty.

Almost all of this account comes from one man. Richer, a monk of Saint-Remi of Reims and a pupil of Gerbert of Aurillac, the man Michel Parisse calls the pope of the year 1000, wrote his Histories under his master’s pontificate, between 992 and 995, because his master asked him to. His autograph notebook, written out in full and reworked in his own hand, slept more than eight hundred years in a library at Bamberg, in Bavaria, before Pertz brought it out in August 1833.

Richer writes in the antique manner, as a reader of Sallust: the speeches he lends Adalbero are reconstructions, not shorthand. And he is not neutral. His father had served the last Carolingians; his master Gerbert was tutor to Robert, Hugh’s son. He chooses what he tells: to his own journey from Reims to Chartres, made about a fortnight before Charles was captured, he gives a whole chapter. To Hugh’s death he gives one line.

Hence a disagreement historians have not finished settling: the date of the anointing. Richer and Gerbert put it on the calends of June, 1 June 987; Parisian and Sens sources say 3 July. The place moves too: Richer crowns Hugh at Noyon, while his editor notes that every other chronicler puts the election at Noyon and the anointing at Reims. Faced with two sets of arguments of much the same weight, Jean-François Lemarignier proposed in 1966 going back to Julien Havet’s view: there were two anointings.

And there is the reputation. Hugh Capet is an unloved king, and was one from the day after his death, Michel Parisse wrote in 1987, the year of the millennium. The image he describes is all of a piece: a usurper, ruling by cunning and winning through treachery. He found it in the school textbooks of the first half of the twentieth century, in France as in England, Belgium, Germany and Italy. The millennium served above all to reopen the file, because this unremarkable nine-year reign is the moment the crown of France stopped being elective, and nobody noticed at the time.