The foundations

The lessons in this chapter

1. 1Alésia, the end of free GaulAlésia is a defeat the victor dispatched in a single sentence, and that France turned into a national myth nineteen centuries later.8 min
2. 2Roman Gaul, five centuries under our feetBetween Caesar and Clovis, five centuries in which Gaul turns Roman: grid-plan towns, Latin, three names per citizen, and in 212 citizenship for nearly everyone. And all of it still lies under our feet.9 min
3. 3Clovis, the baptism nobody can put a year onClovis’s baptism comes to us from a bishop born twenty-eight years after his death. One contemporary gives the day, Christmas. The year, nobody. France made it its birth certificate anyway.9 min
4. 4Poitiers 732, the battle that grew in the tellingPoitiers 732 fits in fifteen lines of a family chronicle, with no day, no place, no figure. The 375,000 dead come from Toulouse, the saving of Europe from Gibbon, and the picture from a painting of 1837.8 min
5. 5Charlemagne, the emperor who was learning to writeCharlemagne took up writing too late, and nobody knows how far he got. But he imposed on his empire a script so legible that our lower-case letters still descend from it.8 min
6. 6Hugues Capet, the king nobody noticedIn 987 the lords elect Duke Hugues: the throne “is not acquired by hereditary right”. At Christmas he has his son crowned, as Lothaire had done. Nine years later, there is nothing left to elect.9 min

The dossiers of this chapter

Free to read: a definition, a timeline, the sources.

• Alesia: where the siege was, and what was found thereAlesia is the Gallic oppidum where Julius Caesar besieged and captured Vercingetorix in 52 BC, the episode that closes the account of the Gallic War. The site is identified as Mont Auxois, at Alise-Sainte-Reine in the Côte-d’Or, where excavation has recovered both Roman lines of fortification. It became a prosperous Gallo-Roman town and was abandoned in the fifth century.
• Charlemagne: what is known, and who told usCharlemagne (c. 748-814) was king of the Franks from 768, then emperor in the West: on 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned him in Rome. He ruled from Aachen over an empire covering today’s France, Germany and northern Italy. Almost everything known about him comes from one book, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, written after his death by a man of his own court.
• Charles Martel: the master of the Franks who was never kingCharles Martel (c. 688-741) was a Frankish leader, the son of the mayor of the palace Pepin. Pushed aside when his father died, he imposed himself by force and governed the Frankish kingdoms in the name of Merovingian kings he chose himself. In 732, between Poitiers and Tours, he beat an army from al-Andalus. He died in 741 without ever having worn a crown.
• Clovis: who he was, and why France claims himClovis (c. 466-511) was a Frankish king. Around 481 he succeeded his father Childeric, eliminated the other Frankish kings, beat Syagrius at Soissons and crushed the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507. Baptised a Catholic at Reims by bishop Remigius, on a date historians still argue over, he died in Paris in 511. Almost everything known about him comes from Gregory of Tours, a century later.
• Hugh Capet: an elected king, a dynasty of eight centuriesHugh Capet (c. 941-996), duke of the Franks, was elected king in 987 by the magnates of the kingdom meeting at Senlis, after Louis V, the last Carolingian, died childless. From his father he held Neustria, carved up by principalities, and the duchy of France. By having his son Robert crowned in his own lifetime he founded the Capetian dynasty, which would rule France until 1792.
• Vercingetorix: what is really known about himVercingetorix was an Arvernian nobleman who in 52 BC led the revolt of the Gallic peoples against Julius Caesar. He drove Caesar back at Gergovia, then surrendered the same year at Alesia. One ancient author alone, Cassius Dio, says he was later displayed at a triumph and put to death. No Gallic account survives: everything comes from the Romans.