Anthere said:
He ! We indeed consider he was the first king of
France when he was made Christian by Saint Rémi (even
though we usually refer to him as King of the franks
...). He was the one who started the history of
France, and we are tought he was chosen by the tribe
of franks to be king, and gave its name to our
country. But, what do we know ? It is just what we
learn in school :-) With no proof he was indeed
considered a king at that time.
Another future info fork between the french and the
english wiki :-)
I respond:
I think this is the root of the problem -- What's in textbooks is not
always accurate! I don't know how it's done in France, but I think it's
similar everywhere in that much is decided by committee. If you
subscribe to some of the H-net mailing lists, like I do, or belong to
the American Historical Association, you know how bad it can be. Here,
the states of Texas and California have a lot of influence on what is
included or omitted, because they buy a lot of textbooks. In fact,
there are cases of textbooks being revised because Texas won't buy -- a
well-known example is a biology text that talked about evolution as
something that happened, rather than as a theory along with creationism.
I think it's not unlikely that many countries provide their children
with history that often does more to uphold a national mythos than
troublesome historical fact!
In the French case, what Anthere says, is kinda, sorta right ;-) Clovis
was the first Orthodox Christian King of a consolidated Frankish kingdom
-- and the name France is derived from Francia, the Latin name for the
Frankish kingdom. Where it gets funny is that Francia is also the root
for the German land of Franken ... or that (and here's where I find it
odd) the Carolingians are much later, yet both Germans and French people
consider Charlemagne "theirs." SO what I've been trying to do is to
explain why the French school version isn't exactly wrong, but that it's
an over generalization -- maybe like remembering that Kozsiuszko
(spelling probably way wrong) and DeKalb were heroes in the American
Revolution and assuming that made them Americans. BTW (pax to Erik), I
was at a conference in March and brought up this issue. There were
scholars there from all over, and they all specialized in the period
between 300 and 800. Not one of them, including the nice lady from the
Sorbonne, said that they would consider the Merovingians to be Kings of
France, or even French.
Back until I run screaming ;-)
Jules