kingship occupied an important place and played an important
part in the history of France is an evident and universally recognized
fact. But to what causes this fact was due, and what particular
characteristics gave the kingship in France that preponderating influence
which, in weal and in woe, it exercised over the fortunes of the country,
is a question which has been less closely examined, and which still
remains vague and obscure. This question it is which we would now shed
light upon and determine with some approach to precision. We cannot
properly comprehend and justly appreciate a great historical force until
we have seen it issuing from its primary source and followed it in its
various developments.

At the first glance, two facts strike us in the history of the kingship
in France. It was in France that it adopted soonest and most
persistently maintained its fundamental principle, heredity. In the
other monarchical states of Europe--in England, in Germany, in Spain, and
in Italy--divers principles, at one time election, and at another right
of conquest, have been mingled with or substituted for the heredity of
the throne; different dynasties have reigned; and England has had her
Saxon, Danish, and Norman kings, her Plantagenets, her Tudors, her
Stuarts, her Nassaus, her Brunswicks. In Germany, and up to the
eighteenth century, the Empire, the sole central dignity, was elective
and transferable. Spain was for a long while parcelled out into several
distinct kingdoms, and since she attained territorial unity the houses of
Austria and Bourbon have both occupied her throne. The monarchy and the
republic for many a year disputed and divided Italy. Only in France was
there, at any time during eight centuries, but a single king and a single
line of kings. Unity and heredity, those two essential principles of
monarchy, have been the invariable characteristics of the kingship in
France.

A second fact, less apparent and less remarkable, but, nevertheless, not
without importance or without effect upon the history of the kingship in
France, is the extreme variety of character, of faculties, of
intellectual and moral bent, of policy and personal conduct amongst the
French kings. In the long roll of thirty-three kings who reigned in
France from Hugh Capet to Louis XVI. there were kings wise and kings
foolish, kings able and kings incapable, kings rash and kings slothful,
kings earnest and kings frivolous, kings s