History of the French line of succession

This article covers the mechanism by which the French throne passed from the establishment of the Frankish Kingdom in 486 to the fall of the Second French Empire in 1870.

The Merovingians were a Salian Frankish dynasty that came to rule the Franks in a region (known as Francia in Latin) largely corresponding to ancient Gaul from the middle of the 5th century.

Clovis I was the first Germanic ruler to convert to Roman Catholicism. The Franks began to adopt Christianity following the baptism of Clovis, an event that inaugurated the alliance between the Frankish kingdom and the Roman Catholic Church. Even so, the Merovingian kings were largely beyond the control of the Pope. Because they were able to worship with their Catholic neighbors, the newly-Christianized Franks found much easier acceptance from the local Gallo-Roman population than did the Arian Visigoths, Vandals or Burgundians. The Merovingians thus built what eventually proved the most stable of the successor-kingdoms in the west.

Following Frankish custom, the kingdom was partitioned among Clovis' four sons, and over the next century this tradition of partition continued. Even when several Merovingian kings simultaneously ruled their own realms, the kingdom — not unlike the late Roman Empire — was conceived of as a single entity. Externally, the kingdom, even when divided under different kings, maintained unity and conquered Burgundy in 534. After the fall of the Ostrogoths, the Franks also conquered Provence. Internally, the kingdom was divided among Clovis' sons and later among his grandsons which frequently saw war between the different kings, who allied among themselves and against one another. The death of one king created conflict between the surviving brothers and the deceased's sons, with differing outcomes. Due to frequent warfare, the kingdom was occasionally united under one king. Although this prevented the kingdom from being fragmented into numerous parts, this practice weakened royal power, for they had to make concessions to the nobility to procure their support in war.

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