House of Lilies, an immensely readable history of the Capetian dynasty, is worth thumbing through for the names alone. Henry the Quarreller, Charles the Fat, Louis the Do-Nothing—men and women like these loom large in Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s far-ranging narrative, which traces the contours of the rise of a family that was martial and devout, revolutionary and reactionary, and from which sprung so many features of that thing we now call France. And the author could have carried on past 1328, when historians generally call a stop to the dynasty. For the crown in that year passed to a cousin of the ruling Capet king, so that when Louis XVI died at the guillotine in 1793, more than 400 years later, he was still called ‘Capet’: “Capet was never out of our sight up till the guillotine,” writes the Enragé Jacques Roux. “He wanted to speak to the people but Santerre wouldn’t allow it. His head fell. The citizens dipped their pikes and their handkerchiefs in his blood.”
This gives us more than a sense of how central the Capetians are to the story of France. Yet even if we follow the historical convention, as Firnhaber-Baker does, and end the Capetian tale in 1328, the story is still a remarkable one. It begins with Hugh, a descendent of Charlemagne. Charles the Great had been the first recognised emperor to rule in Western Europe following the fall of Rome, and having united much of the continent, presided over a period of cultural and political flourishing. But his son, Louis the Pious, whose rule was marked by embarrassments, tragedies, and civil war, could cling onto his father’s legacy for just three decades before he was deposed, and the empire subsequently crumbled. The kingdom to which Hugh Capet was elected was not, then, a strong Frankish state. Rather, it was “a loose confederation of semi-autonomous territories,” the rulers of which were often richer and more powerful than their king. Hugh “of the short cloak” may not quite have been, as Dante puts it in his Purgatorio, “the son of a Parisian butcher.” Nor was he even the first Capet to hold the West Frankish throne. But his grip on power was certainly weak, and he ruled only through small holdings in the Île-de-France and the Orléanais. He and his descendants therefore had some work on their hands to consolidate their power so that Hugh, “wailing like a woman giving birth will do,” could tell Dante’s pilgrim: “From me were born the Philips and Louis by whom France in recent times is ruled.”
The earliest reigns of the Capetian kings were shambolic, marked by bickering between counts and rulers, sundry schemes, battles, back-stabbings, and unhappy accidents. This was a time when babies were married off to foreign rulers so as to stave off wars or form alliances (often without success). Robert II, Hugh’s son, may have enjoyed an unusually long reign; but he got by more thanks to grand displays of religious devotion and supposed miracle-working than military prowess or political nous. He was a paradoxical character, too, marrying three times, including to a second cousin, which drew anathemas from Popes Gregory V and Sylvester II. Robert’s son, Henry I, was hardly more potent. Having rebelled against his father, he now had to deal with his brother (also called Robert) and his shrewd mother, Constance, who wasted no time in declaring open war against him, their kin and king. It was not until the start of the 12th century, nearly 200 years after Hugh Capet took the throne, that something approaching the France we know was beginning to appear.
That period began with the ascension of Louis VI, who showed skill on the battlefield and diplomacy with the Church. Louis was an active king. Indeed “‘Action,’” writes Firnhaber-Baker, “could have been Louis’s middle name.” Louis the Fat (or, rather more kindly, ‘the Fighter’) was both a knight and a monarch at a time when the former was a relative novelty, and he had already won the title of ‘defender of the realm’ before his father’s death in 1108. Louis sparred with rebellious barons, warred with Henry I of England over the contested possession of Normandy, and tamed the unruly castellans, giving later Capetian kings “the leisure to expand their territory, to raise taxes to pay for it, and to create the ideological juggernaut that justified and extended their power.” More than any Capetian king before him, Louis centralised and shored up the institutions of royal French power.
By the time of Philip IV, who ascended to the throne in 1303, France was starting to look quite different. One contemporary account of Philip’s reign describes the avenues of Paris like this:
Hung with banners of every colour and lit up night and day with thousands of candles paid for by rich citizens … a fountain of wine, decorated with mermaids, leopards, lions, civet-cats, and other ‘fabulous beasts’, gushed freely for the inebriation of all, nobles changed their outfits three times a day, while wealthy burgers’ wives sang and spain in their finery and rowdy boys danced in their shirts.
Such was the power of Philip IV that he could freely circulate a public letter describing Pope Boniface as an “utmost fool” and whip up such a frenzy that the Pope’s very legitimacy came into question. Some 300 men under the fleur-de-lys took it upon themselves to ride against Boniface, crying “Long live the King of France!” and lay siege to the papal palace. Firnhaber-Baker tells us that after gaining entry, they found the Pope “majestically enthroned with a cross and the keys of Saint Peter in his hands” or, perhaps, “weeping miserably in despair” (“accounts differ,” Firnhaber-Baker notes wryly). This episode is a small indication of how the Capetians and France were beginning to see themselves: as divinely charged with carrying out the heavenly plan. With Philip IV’s annihilation of the Knights Templar, the “toast of Christendom for nearly two hundred years,” he finally asserted, in grand and brutal fashion, his perceived authority “over matters spiritual as well as temporal.” By the time the last Capetian, Charles IV, had perished 20 years later, France had risen to become the pre-eminent kingdom in Europe, one whose rulers could rout the English, push around the Papacy, build spectacular cathedrals and proudly, if not entirely accurately, pose as “the world’s most Christian kings.”
What was perhaps most striking about the Capetians was their uncanny ability to carry on their line—to produce male heirs, train them to some degree in the art of ruling, and marry them off promptly to an appropriate bride. Only a tiny number ascended to the throne in childhood. For 11 generations, there was an unbroken passing of the crown from father to son (and, towards the end, brother to brother), which began with Hugh’s death in 996 and ended with Charles IV’s demise. The Capetians were fortunate, of course; but they also made a skill of institutional continuity. Many married intelligent and resolute women who had influential roles in affairs of state, shared (or, at times, challenged) their husband’s power, ruled on behalf of sons, or governed their own lands. As Firnhaber-Baker writes, these were “literate and highly cultured women, too, whose patronage lies behind some of the most important artistic achievements of Capetian France.”
Moreover, the Capetians had a knack for branding. Louis VI (on the advice of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, according to some chroniclers) adopted the ancient, three-petalled fleur-de-lis, which was traceable to the Carolingians and possibly also the Merovingians. He thereby gave his dynasty a powerful symbol, long associated with the Virgin Mary, and one that connected his right to rule with the divine at a time when the cult of the Virgin was exploding. His stamping of coins, with his image on one side and the fleur on the other, “encapsulated the Capetians’ claims about their right to rule France not only by right of blood but also through divine favour.” The fleur-de-lys was zealously taken up and spread by the Capetians’ supporters, who used it to summon up an “ideology of sacred Capetian kingship.” A later Louis—Louis IX—would found an asylum for the blind, whose inmates wore a fleur-de-lys badge on their tunics as a sign of Capetian patronage.
The Capetians did, at times, evince a genuine piety that had nothing to do with politics. Two of their name—siblings Louis IX and Isabelle—were canonised. The dynasty promoted the creation of almshouses and patronised the construction of cathedrals like Notre-Dame de Paris, Chartres, Reims, and Sainte-Chapelle. Each is a Gothic masterpiece of pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and large stained glass windows, arguably among the greatest creations of human and not just mediaeval history. But the Capetians’ grandest displays of religious zeal were, more than not, bound up with bloodletting. They consistently encouraged violence and extreme prejudice against Jewish people, burned heretics alive, set fire to churches (Robert II, ‘the Pious,’ actually torched a monastery) and produced five consecutive crusader-kings. Thus their relationship with religion was (as was typical of the time, of course) somewhat complex.
All of this is rendered in tight, direct prose which is to the massive credit of Firnhaber-Baker. She has a good sense of humour, too: liable to seem almost amused, rather than appalled, by the violently bloody episodes that punctuate (or perhaps characterise) the Capetians’ history. She has a fondness for the bizarre and the macabre. She writes of how the wife of Robert II, his second cousin, gave birth to a “goose-headed monster baby.” And how, during a terrible famine in 1031, a “wild man” in Burgundy “decorated his hut with the heads of those he devoured.” She enjoys citing the rather feline chroniclers and contemporaries who, for example, dismissed one ambitious cleric as a “skirt-chasing chancer” and Philip I as “lazy” and “fat.”
These details bring vibrant colour to what, it has to be said, is a very ambitious undertaking, given that the author canters—nay, gallops—through 15 reigns and 400 years of mediaeval history. If Firnhaber-Baker, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews, seems to take all this in her stride, then it is because late mediaeval France is her speciality. (In her previous book, The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt, she describes an episode in which angry farmers, like a mass of bloodthirsty Gilet Jaunes, rounded up knights and roasted them on spits.) But there are many books of history by equally erudite people who fail to make it look quite so easy.
This group biography of a series of mediaeval French kings is a rare thing: a book that manages at once to be scholarly and highly entertaining. In short, it’s fun. Indeed, almost every page furnishes us with an amusing or interesting detail (and sometimes both), which makes Firnhaber-Baker very good company on the page. It is edifying, as well as satisfying, to read such an excellent book as this one, about how France got to where she is today.
