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By virtue of this law we read on the plains of Egypt the pride and the fall of the Pharaohs. Before the fagade of Versailles we see at a glance the grandeur of the Capetian kings and the necessity of the Revolution.
Matilda's return to her father, and Henry's evident intention to make her the heir of his dominions, of Normandy as well as of England, seem to have moved King Louis to some immediate action in opposition. The separation of the duchy from the kingdom, so important for the interests of the Capetian house, could not be hoped for unless this plan was defeated.
The Capetian kings of France had long followed the practice, but for them also it had plainly been for many generations of the utmost importance for the security of the house. There had never been any reason in Henry's reign why extraordinary steps should seem necessary to secure the succession, and there certainly was none fifteen years after its beginning.
The grandson of the Count Robert of Artois who was slain in 1302 at Courtrai, Robert of Artois was indignant that the rich county of Artois should, according to local custom, have devolved upon his aunt Maud, the wife of Otto, Count of Burgundy, or Franche Comté, and the mother-in-law of the last two kings of the direct Capetian line.
In the imagination of the Italians, to take Savonarola for an example the ideal picture of a wise, just, and powerful savior and ruler was still living, with the difference that he was no longer the emperor invoked by Dante, but the Capetian king of France.
Even the region which they were supposed to control as counts their so-called domain melted away in their hands. Everywhere hereditary lines of usurping rulers sprang up whom it was impossible to exterminate after they had once taken root. The Capetian territory bristled with hostile castles, permanent obstacles to commerce between the larger towns and intolerable plagues to the country people.
The disagreement growing out of the distribution of the spoil resulted in a war between the late allies; and it was in this wretched conflict that Bayard, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, was sacrificed. Louis died in 1515, also without an heir; and so the crown passed to still another collateral branch of the main Capetian line.
Art. France. The kingdom of France is usually dated from the accession of the first of the Capetian kings, late in the tenth century, 987. This revolution commenced on the fifth of May, 1789, in the Convocation of the States General, for the redress of grievances and the extrication of the government and nation from the difficulties under which they were laboring.
The new king was amiable and moral, and would have ruled France in peaceful times, but was unequal to a revolutionary crisis. "Of all the monarchs," says Alison, "of the Capetian line, he was the least able to stem, and yet the least likely to provoke, a revolution.
The Capetian king, master only of the narrow domains of the Isle of France, and hardly of those until the constant fighting of Louis's reign had subdued the turbulent barons of the province; hemmed in by the dominions, each as extensive as his own, of the great barons nominally his vassals but sending to his wars as scanty levies as possible, or appearing openly in the ranks of his enemies as their own interests dictated; threatened by foreign foes, the kings of England and of Germany, who would detach even these loosely held provinces from his kingdom, the Capetian king could hardly have defended himself at this epoch from a neighbour so able as Henry I, wielding the united strength of England and Normandy, and determined upon conquest.
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