"Following the custom of the Franks, Pepin was elected king, anointed by the hand of Archbishop Boniface of Holy Memory and raised to the throne by the Franks in Soissons. As for Childéric, who was falsely called king, he was tonsured and sent to a monastery [1].
This famous passage of the Annals royales des Francs, a text written at the Carolingian court in the 790s, hardly differs from another story, the continuation of Frédégaire's chronicle, written shortly after the events, according to which "the eminent Pépin was elevated to the throne and to the royal dignity with Queen Bertrade, by the consecration of the bishops and the submission of the Great, as the order requires from all antiquity [2]".
The first Carolingian king was therefore elected and raised to the throne by the Franks, according to custom, and anointed on the model of Davidian royalty. It is traditionally considered that the event founded the sacral royalty in France, at the origin of the divine right royalty of the Capetians, and it is admitted that the first Carolingian sovereign needed the coronation, hitherto unknown to the Franks, to legitimize a power that was not by nature. Such an affirmation is based on at least three postulates: that the Merovingian sacral legitimacy was not based on the Christian sacred, that the Carolingian coronation transformed the nature of Frankish royal power and that, in the Christian context, royalty needed clerical mediation to be legitimate.
The sacred is what society considers to be separate, forbidden, struck with taboo, at the same time endowed with a supernatural active force. However, Jean-Claude Schmitt once emphasized that this concept, which is opposed to that of profane by using categories taken from Roman law, covered a wide variety of notions in the Middle Ages and that it had to be handled with caution by medieval historians, often inclined to lock themselves up in socio-logical models [3]. In Rome, traditional Roman law distinguished between sacer and sanctus: the sacer is what was publicly consecrated, the sanctus what was forbidden from all human attack and subject to sanction, both falling under the public register [4], while the religious (religiosus) fell under the private domain. We can clearly see that such a categorisation is only operative on the condition that public and private are clearly distinguished, which is not the case in early medieval society where the two registers are closely interpenetrated [5]. Similarly, it is equally difficult to stick to the sacred/religious opposition, since, before the Gregorian reform, the sacred remains diffuse and is not entirely mediated by the ecclesial institution. Royalty needs the sacred to base its superiority in the supernatural [6], but to consider that before the institution of the Carolingian royal consecration the Frankish royalty was not a sacred royalty, or to reduce it to a pagan survival, of an essentially magical nature, is to deny that the link between power and the sacred Christian can go through a mediation other than that of the clerics, which can only lead to contradictions for the early Middle Ages.
The sacred Merovingian royal cannot be confused with that consecrated by the clerics. The forms of legitimisation of power fall entirely under the system of representation of the societies that imagine them; they constitute a symbolic whole that is expressed through particular and changing forms of political communication. To understand the symbolic system of Frankish royalty, we must go through the historiographical works whose recent work has shown that they were themselves real ideological constructions, and that by reconstructing the past, or interpreting the present, their authors created a representation of power, intended for a specific audience. The difficulty for the historian to grasp the articulation between ideology, symbolism and power is therefore only greater.
Emphasis was placed on the importance of political rituals in the system of symbolic communication [7] and their flexibility was linked to the ability of medieval societies to forge flexible instruments that would ensure order and consensus in the absence of strong institutional regulations. However, Philippe Buc recently highlighted the political "dangers of rituals" of the early Middle Ages [8], which we only know from the stories of historiographers [9]. In fact, the Carolingian stories that served here as a starting point have integrated the coronation into the traditional rituals of accession to royalty. They insisted on respecting the custom that presupposes consensus, the latter itself based on the customary and traditional nature of the rite. But if it is true that the episcopal anointing conferred on the first Carolingian king a new form of sacral legitimacy, there is no evidence that the Greats who elected and raised Pepin in 751 according to the old order attached particular importance to the consecration, the specific meaning of which they may not understand, since, as Janet L. Nelson noted, the sources of the end of the eighth century insist little on the anointing and much on the election [10].
The Carolingian narratives created the past of the coronation, and undoubtedly manipulated the description of the ceremony of 751, in order to better establish the legitimacy of Charlemagne and that of his sons. The writing of the past serves and builds the system of legitimisation or delegitimisation, sacularisation or desacration of power. It is therefore necessary not only to question the legitimising value of communication instruments in the creation of the political order [11], but also the systems of representation expressed by historiographical narratives. However, the historiography of the 6th - 8th centuries offers vague and contradictory images of Merovingian royalty and, consequently, of the sacred foundations of royal power. Such ambiguities reveal the complexity of legitimation systems in periods of transition and must be studied from a dynamic perspective, that of the appearance and development of royalty among the Franks.
Genesis of sacred royalty?
Historians who, following Reinhard Wenskus [12] and Herwig Wolfram [13], studied the identity construction of Germanic peoples develop an "ethnogenetic" model that places royalty at the very heart of the process of formation of peoples: royalty would be the "core of tradition" (Traditionskern) around which the Germanic tribes would have gathered to form the gentes. It would be linked to a process of "political" unification of various groups into a single people [14]. The model applies to the Franks, even if the conditions for the appearance of Frankish royalty are obscure [15]. According to Gregory of Tours, who wrote his Ten Books of History at the end of the sixth century, in a perspective of political-religious ideology [16], the Franks would have instituted royalty at the beginning of the fifth century, after having broken the Rhine and settled in the Roman cities [17]. For these tribes that the Romans called Franks and who had not known the long migrations during which the unity of a gens was forged, the insertion in the Empire and the Roman model made necessary the appearance of royalty, even declined in the form of chiefdoms [18]. Established in the Empire as deditii, the Franci were in permanent contact with the Roman authorities, with whom they had to count and, for their part, the Romans had to deal with interlocutors with real authority and not simple representative power. The appearance of royalty among the Franci therefore accompanied the progressive development of an identity consciousness and a new form of political organisation that were the product of contact with Rome, integration into the Roman world and the reception of ancient cultural models. In other words, historically speaking, the Franci and their kings exist only in contact with Rome.
The ethnogenetic model, if it gives priority to the political, complements the anthropological model. Anthropologists place the appearance of royalty at the breaking point of family tradition, when a people in formation must express their unity by maintaining their diversity, including when unity is realised in the form of chiefdoms [19]. In tribal societies without royalty, where social order is most often ensured by the council of elders and by lineage leaders, power, essentially domestic in nature, is not free of sacredness, but this is only weakly concentrated in a person or institution [20]. Royalty, on the contrary, is located outside and above the kinship groups to which it does not replace, but dominates them to maintain peace between groups, while developing the forces of fertility that ensure the prosperity of the people. The foundations of royal superiority are necessarily located in a supernatural force and in an assimilation of sovereigns to the gods and the functions they assume [21].
When a process of centralisation of power occurs, the king tends to gradually concentrate the two main functions, originally devolved to two gods and two different persons, the function of jurisdiction by which one proclaims the right, renders justice, one keeps the sacred goods of the people, and the warrior function that ensures prosperity. The first is identified with heaven and the sun, while the second is linked to thunder, war and harvests. The concentration of power and functions often involves the usurpation of the first function by the warrior king [22]. When monotheism is finally imposed, the concentration of the sacred on the royal person, assimilated to the one god, becomes even stronger, and with it the increase in sovereign power [23]. However, the stories of rituals of accession to royalty and the construction of the Merovingian past in the sixth and seventh centuries reveal that the process of political unification of the Franks took place in several stages, of which the conversion to Christianity, however fundamental, is only the first and that it was accompanied by a transformation of the legitimising values of Merovingian royalty and a concentration of the sacred in the royal person.
The rituals of royalty
The historiographers of the Merovingian era insist little on the rituals of royalty, which should not lead us to accept the idea that there was no king-making ceremony, because the absence of regular succession made it necessary to go through a ritual expressing and creating consensus [24]. The stories highlight the election by the Franks, who "constitute a king above them" and who "eleve him to the kingdom". At the same time, we know that in Western culture, inspired by the ancient East, the vertical dimension implies the link with the sky, therefore with power, authority, domination [25], and that the elevation was part of a symbolic system in which the rise translated access to the divine sphere, that of the sacred. However, the ritual described is that of the elevation of the king on the bulwark, a war ritual that has been wrongly associated with the Germanic tradition while it is imperial imitation: transmitted from the East to the West in the early 4th century, it was used for emperors elected by their army, and it passed to the Germanic peoples through Roman soldiers [26]. Such a ritual does not seem to found royal sacredness in a sacred of a dynastic nature that presupposes continuity and projection into the past, but rather in a force of personal and magical character. On the other hand, the elevation, the round shape of the shield and the circles that were accomplished during the royal elevation refer directly to the sky and the sun, which Corippe underlines when he describes in the sixth century the elevation of Emperor Justin II on a huge shield by comparing the latter to the solar disk [27].
The elevation on the bulwark certainly underlines the warlike character of the Frankish royalty of the sixth century, but the stories bring out an element of the ritual that reflects the royal ability to dominate the productive forces, to multiply them: it is the circuit that the kings accomplished after their election [28]. It presents itself as a real peaceful takeover of space, with a very marked domestic character [29]. The king determines in this way a royal space [30] with which he identifies himself, which he possesses, in the anthropological sense of the term, in which he inscribes his power, where he multiplies the forces of production and fertility. Clovis made a circuit of this kind after the ceremony of Tours, and nothing prevents such a ritual from being used to inscribe in space the power of the kings of the fifth and sixth centuries. Similarly, the ritual movements of the Merovingian kings to which Eginhard, Charlemagne's biographer, refers to mock them refer to the production function that the Carolingians then reinterpreted in the enmes of gifts. Éginhard reports that the last Merovingian king, "when he had to move, got into a car harnessed with oxen, which a keeper drove in the rustic way: it was in this crew that he used to go to the palace, to go to the public assembly of his people, gathered annually to deal with the affairs of the kingdom, and then return to his home [31]". The cart pulled by oxen refers to very ancient fertility rites of which traces are found in Tacitus' Germany [32]. The peoples of the North worshipped Nerthus, representing the mother goddess who, every year, left her island in a chariot pulled by heifers. The cow and the bull were symbols of fertility, the second being venerated among the ancient peoples of Western Germans. It is also known that, according to legend, Merovee was born from her mother's contact with a bull-headed sea monster, and a bull's head is represented on the shield found in Childeric's tomb. Finally, the cult of the bull is attested among the Anglo-Saxons of the seventh century and the continental Saxons of the eighth century [33], whose traditions are close to those of the ancient Franks. We find ourselves there in the presence of cults of fertility characterizing populations as peasant as warriors. The royal movements in chariots pulled by oxen were certainly archaic in the eighth century, as are the processions of royal carriages in the streets of London in the 21st century, but they expressed the same royal majesty, the same relationship to domesticated space, and they referred to a symbolism linked to fertility.The elevation on the bulwark and the royal circuits therefore symbolized the control of the war and productive forces. But it was noted that Gregory of Tours only mentioned the elevation on the shield about elections that seemed to have been improvised [34] or that concerned illegitimate successions [35]. He mentions it only three times: for Clovis, when the latter was elected in place of Chloderic as king of the Rhine Franks around 511 [36], for Sigebert I, when he was elected king in place of his brother Chilperic in 575 [37], and for Gundovald, who claimed to be the son of Clotaire I and who was elected king in Limousin [38]. Gregory's description is particularly precise for Gundovald: "And there, placed on a shield, he was proclaimed king. But during the third round that we did with him, it was reported that he fell in such a way that those around him had trouble supporting him with their hands. He then traveled the surrounding cities. The circle refers to the sun and the number three to a Trinitarian symbolism discussed in the passage where Corippe relates the elevation of Justin II on the shield [39]. Was the elevation on the mopine a ritual reserved for dubious successions, a bad ritual in some way? Such a hypothesis does not seriously resist analysis: on the one hand, this practice was still in use in Byzantium at the end of the sixth century, in a completely Christianized context, and a Byzantine image of the mid-tenth century represents David raised on a shield [40]; on the other hand, medieval rituals were flexible and evolutionary [41]. The construction of the story of Gregory of Tours tends to accredit the idea that the warlike ritual could be used to make a king, but that it also programmed its brutal end. According to the Ten Books, the elevation of Clovis as king of the Rhine Franks according to the warrior ritual was immediately followed by the destruction of his kinship and the death of the king in Paris, as if events were linked [42]. The elevation on the bulwark of Sigebert, following the betrayal of Chilperic's leudes, caused Frédégonde's revenge and the murder of the same Sigebert. As for the end of Gundovald, it appears as the chronicle of an announced death, made evident by the pretender's difficulties to stand on the shield during his elevation. In other words, Gregory of Tours only mentions the elevation on the shield to better suggest to his readers the dangerous nature of such a ritual. The writing of the story underlines the lack of representativeness of the participants, which tends to disqualify the warrior ritual itself, since the clerics did not participate in a ceremony that should normally express the will of the Frankish people. The story of the Ten Books of Stories therefore wants to impose the idea, at the cost of manipulations, that the king raised on the shield according to an improvised and "disordered" ritual, in the absence of the legitimate representatives of the people, was not a true chosen one of God. The elevation on the shield ceases to be used in Byzantium in the seventh century, where the ritual of coronation by the patriarch is now practiced in the very church of Hagia Sophia [43], and there is no longer any question of this war ritual for the Merovingian kings of the 7th and 8th centuries. In all probability, the Franks had taken back from the Romans, perhaps from the foundation of the kingdom, another ritual of elevation, the enthronement, which made the elevation on the shield disappear in the seventh century [44]. Even if there is no account of enthronement of the Merovingian era, Carolingian sources prove the existence of an ordo in which the Grands and the bishops participated, who this time represented the entire populus [45], so that we can conclude that the performance of such a ritual was worth for itself, without it being necessary to go through the vector of written memory. The throne, known in the ancient East and in the Roman Empire, is used in the Merovingian era [46]. The monks of Saint-Denis claimed the one attributed to Dagobert, whose seat could be dated from the seventh century [47], which was considered one of the two seats manufactured by Éloi for King Clotaire II [48]. The Carolingian author of the Gesta Dagoberti describes Dagobert sitting as [49], and Eginhard draws the following portrait of the last Merovingian king: "The king," he wrote, "had, apart from the royal title (nomen), only the satisfaction of sitting on his throne, with his long hair and his hanging beard, to be a sovereign. A clever construction opposes the long hair and beard, which express the supposed archaism of the Merovingian royalty, to the new kingship, elected of God, but the throne underlines the continuity of royal symbolism and the "figure of the sovereign". Historians have made little case of Merovingian "sovereignty"; they have seen it only as a reconstruction of the past in order to legitimize Carolingian power. Éginhard was probably inspired by the passage of the Annales Mettenses Priores, written in 805, in the circles of the Carolingian court, relating to the mayor of the Pepin II palace, who died in 714:
He [Pepin II] convenes every year the general assembly of the Franks in the calendars of March, according to the custom of the ancients. There, as a sign of respect for the title of king, he placed the king before him, thus manifesting the immensity of his humility and mercy, and he ordered him to preside over the assembly, while all the Franks nobles brought the gifts, that commitments were made to ensure peace and for the defense of the churches of God, orphans and widows, that severe decrees prohibited the kidnapping of women and burning, and that also the order was given to the army that those who would be called would be ready on the said day to go where he [Pepin] would have decided. These things being done, he sent the king back to the royal villa of Montmacq to be kept there with honor and respect [50].
In this system of representation, the Merovingian king appears as a true Christian sovereign, master of the juridico-religious function with the power to make the law, to judge and defend the churches, of the war function with that of convening the army and finally of the productive function, through donations. But he only nominally exercises the powers conferred on him since he only has a royal letter. The painting thus establishes a legitimate Carolingian lineage, from Pepin II to Charlemagne, which determines a continuity in the exercise of authority.Sacred authorityFrom a political point of view, the foundation of the Frankish kingdom by Clovis and the imperial model offered the Auro-Imerovingian means to impose themselves on the various people of the Frankish kingdom, by declining the Roman notion of multi-ethnicity in a new way, the unity now being made around the royal person who guaranteed respect for differences. But it was above all the conversion to Christianity, a monotheistic religion, that allowed the king to supplant the subordinate reges by identifying himself with a single and indivisible god, superior to all other gods. Christianity, in its imperial version, has therefore conferred on Clovis and his descendants a new sacredness, in particular with the religious mission of governing the Church and ensuring order in the kingdom, but also with the assimilation of the vital principle that is the law [51]. The law is indeed a sacred thing [52], and the legislator is himself (con)sacred. This is why Clovis convened a council in Orleans in 511 and arrogated to himself the power to legislate. However, the legislative activity of the Merovingian kings testifies to the ambiguity of the royal authority in the sixth century. Clovis had the Salic law put in writing, probably before 507 [53], to act as a legislative king, like the Visigothic or Burgundian kings, but the Salic law is not a royal law, promulgated in the name of the king [54]; it does not contain all the Salic law, which remains largely unknown [55], and, of all the barbarian laws, it is certainly the one that underwent the least modifications until the ninth century [56]. However, profound transformations occurred in the second half of the sixth century and especially at the beginning of the seventh century, after the victory of the Neustrian kings. They testify to a concentration of sacred on the royal person. Clotaire II and Dagobert strongly affirmed their legal-religious authority by convening a council in Paris and promulgating the edict of 614, then the law of the Ripuaires and the first law of the Alamans. The bishops themselves then recognized Clotaire II the power to intervene even in the canon law, comparing him to David [57], and the image that now emerges from historiography is indeed that of legislative kings and judges: according to Frédégaire, the ritual journey that Dagobert made in his new kingdom was intended to do justice to the poor by punishing the powerful guilty of abuses and oppression. At this time, the ability to dominate space therefore leads to a real sacred authority that is expressed through the monastic foundations on fiscal lands, given by the king, and on the institution of immunities that Barbara H. Rosenwein compared in a very suggestive way with the power of the Melanesian chiefs to declare certain spaces tapu [58]. In fact, it was a matter of both controlling access to the sacred space of the monasteries, the sanctuary, and of assigning to religious communities the tax revenues allowing them to devote themselves to prayer for the king and the kingdom. But at the same time, the process of controlling space and the sacred was also going through a new form of instrumentalization of wild nature. The nature/culture opposition that is fundamental in the West and underlying in narratives, especially hagiographic, tends to articulate the universe between a domested part and a wild part [59] which also refers to heaven and earth. Duality presupposes that a wild, dehumanized nature, filled with sacred, superhuman energy and strength, remains and that is protected. Wild nature needs to be tamed, invested, and its sacred forces to be dominated [60]. The hunter, who is an animal among animals, therefore tends to monopolize the wild instinct of the beast; he acquires a virile energy expressed by physical and sexual prowess, and also a form of savagery necessary to control what is wild [61]. The analogy between the king and the wild animal is natural in the Middle Ages and stems from the fact that neither the animal nor the king are subordinate to anyone, if not to God [62]. But the hunter king only obtains the forces of nature in a relationship of exchange: he subtracts from game, an equivocal gesture, and he returns without counting, by creating culture [63].The institution of the forestes in the seventh century, wild spaces where the king reserves the hunt and which he excludes from common use, therefore has a very strong meaning. The Merovingian king no longer only reserves the killing of certain wild animals to appropriate the magical force, as in the sixth century [64]; he inscribes this right in a space that he dominates and limits access to. Because the king must be the master of the forest to recharge his batteries, pursue it at will and submit his prey during hunting, appropriate its sacred power, or transform wild space into a civilized space. The forest and its animals must therefore sit outside the ordinary jurisdiction of men [65], which the forests allow. The royal forest becomes a real sanctuary, a place outside the common law, privileged for all kinds of wild animals who find peace and security there, when they are not hunted by the king [66]. Alain Guerreau pointed out that in the feudal era hunting had become the only secular grand ritual that allowed the powerful to dominate the space by their rides, while the clerics inscribed the sacred power of the Church in a space circumscribed by the processions [67]. The ability of the Merovingian king to control access to the savage, on the one hand, to consecrated places, on the other, reveals a symbolic structure in which the king can create the forbidden and dominate all forms of sacred spaces. It is part of a Christianized framework that gives the Merovingian royalty of the seventh century a superior and transcendental dimension, transforming it into a sovereign and Christian royalty integrating the three functions. At the beginning of the eighth century, the portrait of King Dagobert drawn up by the Merovingian author of the Liber Historiae Francorum is indeed that of a true sovereign: "Dagobert was a very courageous king, nurturer of the Franks, very severe in his judgments, benefactor of the churches. He was indeed the first to order the distribution of tax revenues in large alms to the churches of saints. He establishes peace in his kingdom. He inspired fear and fear by traveling through all his kingdoms. As peaceful as Solomon, he ensured the tranquility of the Frankish kingdom [68]. Christian monotheism had definitively imposed that, within the framework of the land government, the Christian king would meet the three functions, including the juridico-religious function [69].The construction of legitimacyThe accession of the Merovingians to Christian sovereignty goes hand in hand with the construction of a dynastic legitimacy essential to religious sacralization. The example of African royalty has advanced the hypothesis that royalty constantly oscillates between two theoretical poles of the sacred, the magical and the religious, which are articulated in two modes of accession to royalty, election and hereditary succession. The magical king would be the elected king, the one who imposes himself because we recognize in him the supernatural energy that allows him to dominate natural powers, to bring strength, fertility and fertility to the people. He would be noted by personal exploits, constantly renewed, out of the ordinary, by which he would maintain his authority. And as society always intends to protect itself in one way or another from the excesses of a mysterious and magical force, a whole network of forbidden people would assign limits to the king's formidable power and his excesses of power would lead to his elimination [70]. When magical royalty is also a warrior royalty, the political system would tend to multiply the ruptures, discontinuity, the violence that has constantly begun again. It would thus characterize young and poorly stabilized societies. On the contrary, hereditary royalty would mean dynastic continuity, stability, gravitas, respect for commitments. It would be located this time in the order of kinship, based on the power of ancestors, submission to paternal authority, respect for the commitments involved by the fides. It would find a mode of sacralization that would place it above the people, in a different register, of a religious nature. The myth of origins, organized around a royal lineage as long as possible, founded by an ancestor whose mythical origin itself touches the supernatural, would give the descendants of the founding king the religious charisma then legitimimating the royal lineage [71]. Such an analysis cannot be applied to medieval royalty without a number of corrections. On the one hand, the mode of accession to royalty does not prejudge a specific relationship with one of the poles of the sacred because the elective principle is understood itself as a designation of God through the people and, among the Franks, it combines with heredity. On the other hand, magic and religion are social products having the same relationship to the sacred, including the Christian sacred [72]: the royal Geblüsheiligkeit, which determines an authentically religious sacralization of the royal lineage, at the same time confers on the person of the sovereign magical characters that the thaumaturgic power of the Capetians, so masterfully demonstrated by Marc Bloch as early as 1924 [73] And this "magic" of the royal blood, the Church never really questioned it, even if Gregory the Great recalled in the sixth century that the king's supernatural powers, signed them, were only valid if they were supported by divine grace [74].In the middle of the eighth century, the dynastic principle was firmly established in the Merovingian family, but the sources probably tend to accentuate and project into the past a legitimacy that was only gradually built. The latter was symbolized by royal names and long hair: when, in 715, the Franks, short of Merovingians, took out of his monastery the cleric Daniel to make him a king, they waited for his hair to have grown back and they named him Chilperic [75]. The hereditary transmission of the name translated a system of thought in which the noun not only contained the identity of the person, but also allowed attachment to an ancestor. It only imposed itself progressively, so strong was the idea among the Germans that taking up a name already worn was tantaly depriving the person of his identity. Clovis therefore used for his children the transmission of nouns by variation of the two constituent elements of the anthroponym [76]. On the other hand, his sons began to transmit whole names at the very beginning of the sixth century, closely imitating the Burgundian royal family [77]. The first examples are related to an artificial attachment to this same family: at the same time, while they sought to eliminate the Burgundian king Sigismond, Clodomir d'Orléans and Clotaire I de Soissons named one of their sons Gunthar (second son of Clodomir, born around 517/524, first son of Clotaire, born around 517/518), thus giving them the name of an ancient Burgundian king [78]. The Ansippung registered the Merovingians in the Burgundian lineage and allowed them to claim to legitimately replace the Burgundian kings. This Ansippung opens the series of Nachbenennungen: Clotaire I gave his second son, born around 519, the name of his grandfather Childéric, thus accentuating the Salian tradition linked to his territorial heritage [79]. He then named one of his sons with the name of Sigebert, carried by the king of the Rhine Franks Sigebert the Lame. On the girls' side, the first transmissions of whole names are only attested a generation later, that of the granddaughters of Clotaire I (Basine, daughter of Chilperic I, born around 555/565; Chrodichild, daughter of Charibert I, born around 560/565; Ingund, daughter of Sigebert, born around 567). The female names transmitted were those of Merovingian queens, which strengthened the cohesion of the royal patrilineal lineage while clearly separating the names of men and women.The long hair of the Frankish kings is certainly the oldest symbol of royal legitimacy [80], since Gregory of Tours tells, in the second book of his Histories, how the Franks, once settled in Toxandria, had instituted hairy kings chosen in the first and most noble of their families [81]. This custom of long hair, preserved until the end of the dynasty, was presented as an archaic survival referring to a form of pagan and magical sacredness. If we follow James George Frazer, the haircut of a person touching the sacred could prove dangerous, because the hair carried in them a magical force that was appropriated by cutting them, and the author of the Golden Branch suggests that the Merovingians would have avoided the danger by not cutting the hair of their sons. Conversely, the idea has been put forward that before the institution of royalty, all the Franks would have worn long hair and that this hairstyle would only have acquired its legitimizing value from the moment when the kings, guardians of the ancient traditions, would have been the only ones to wear it [82]. This minimalist interpretation does not resist the analysis, but that of J. G. Frazer neglects the weight of cultural representations conveyed by ancient tradition. The long Merovingian royal hair, which induces the absence of a diadem or royal crown [83], can indeed be related to the biblical tradition. In the Bible, the consecration to God implied that the Nazi gave up cutting his hair for the time of the vow, to let the strength of God act in him [84]. For ordinary men, the vow usually lasted thirty days, but for consecrated kings, such as Joseph [85] or Samson, who were inhabited by the divine strength of Yahweh, the wish had no limit. The episode of Samson, endowed with a superhuman strength that he lost when Dalila cut his hair, illustrates well the link between divine election, hair and supernatural power [86]. The Merovingian princes, like the kings of the Old Testament who had been consecrated to God, had never suffered "the first haircut": they wore long hair, curly on the shoulders, as on the effigy of King Childeric's sealing ring [87]. The long hair was an obvious sign of recognition and legitimacy that inscribed Frankish royalty in a religious structure. As in the biblical tradition, this legitimacy, expressed by designa that were easily manipulated, could itself be instrumentalized: the hair of the Merovingian kings could be cut, like that of Samson, but it could also push back and the kings regain their strength. The institution of the hairy kings, long before the conversion of the Franks to Christianity, thus reflects the integration of cultural models transmitted through the channel of Romance and taken up by Gregory of Tours, who integrates them into his narrative construction. The historiographer, who cannot ignore the biblical symbolism of royal hair, including that of disinvestiture by cutting hair, nor its links with the sacred vocation of Old Testament kings, thus appears as the true "inventor" of the criniti reges. The long hair allowed Gregory of Tours to establish a filiation between the Merovingian kings and those of the Old Testament; it became the expression of a form of divine election that conversion to Christianity was to magnify.The royal successionHowever, Merovingian historiography and genealogies give a misleading image of the royal succession: from the ancestor Chlogio/Clodio to Clovis by Mérovée and Chilperic, then from Clovis to the last Merovingian, the kings seem to have succeeded each other naturally, from father to son, within the same lineage, following a dynastic order, while in reality, the family legitimacy of the first Frankish kings did not lead to a lineage continuity, even if the kings were chosen from the first and most noble of the families, the one that Frédégaire calls the Merovingians. The stories of Gregory of Tours do not hide the difficulties of the royal succession: while there is no doubt that Childéric succeeded his father Mérovée and Clovis to Childéric, nor that Clovis' four sons succeeded him, it is not so certain that Childéric and Clovis were the only heirs of their respective fathers or even the only candidates for royalty, and it is even less certain that the successions were made "naturally". Clovis certainly wanted to found a dynasty by creating the kingdom of the Franks, but that the Franks, at his death, referred to the custom to share the kingdom is probably only a projection in the past of a practice instituted from the first partition of 511. Clovis had perhaps planned to leave all his inheritance to his eldest son Thierri, or to divide the kingdom in the manner of the emperors of the third century, or to associate his younger sons with royalty under the authority of the eldest son, on the Burgundian model. The solution of sharing brought in any case a form of regulation of the royal succession, which maintained a competition between the heirs by forcing the elimination of some of them to prevent the system from being unregulated by splitting the inheritance in excess. In a stimulating article, Michel Sot applied the categories of the sacred defined by anthropologists in Africa to the Frankish royalty before 987, suggesting that the elections of 751,888 and 987 were emergences of sacred royalty – defined as a warrior royalty – immediately leading to a work of dynastic legitimation [88]. In fact, in the sixth century, the violent competition between Merovingian heirs, which historians generally interpret in terms of political rivalry, was certainly part of a "magical" system that would upset the balance of power at each succession by forcing the heirs to prove their superiority. Some descriptions of Gregory of Tours refer to the Roman warrior king [89] who derives his prestige from his personal charisma and victories, but must also be capable of tricks and deceptions to achieve his ends, a sinful king who violates social rules [90]. But this transgression is also the sign of the savagery that characterizes the king-hunter, being out of the ordinary. The examples of deception and tricks are legion. Clovis, Gregory's "great and remarkable fighter" [91], is also the deceitf king par excellence: he buys the leudes of Ragnacar by offering them junk jewelry that he passes off as precious objects, thus detaching them from their king to better take his place [92], persuades Chlodéric to kill his father and denounces him to the Rhine Franks, who elect him in his place [93]. Clovis' sons are great fighters, but they are also capable of all deceptions, as must be the warrior kings: Thierri I tries to deceive his rival Munderic by attracting him to have him murdered [94]. Clotaire I and Childebert I deceive their mother Clotilde into giving them the sons of their brother Clodomir, whom they immediately put to death [95], the queen having preferred to see them dead rather than mown. This killing of young children (one is seven years old, the other nine), so contrary to all the laws of kinship and so far from Christian caritas, is part of the field of magical royalty of which Clotilde appears at this precise moment in Gregory's story as the guarantor [96].The sacredness of the first Merovingians came to them less from their consecration to the Christian God than from a dangerous force that required transgressing a number of rules on which the social order was based [97]. Gregory of Tours places Clovis on the side of the magical kings when he tells how he killed his consanguines and systematically destroyed his kinship. These acts, which are an absolute violation of the family order, break with culture, that is, with the order of kinship on which tribal society is based. By sheding the blood of his parents and violating the family order, Clovis performs the most dangerous social act there is, but this transgression carries in it a supernatural effectiveness [98]. In this perspective, the Merovingian murders and the brutal elimination of rivals have an obvious magical character [99]. The murder of Clodomir's sons by their uncles Clotaire I and Childebert I, and perhaps still that of Sigebert I by Chilperic, fall within this category of the sacred, such as the supervirility of the Merovingian kings and their frequent violations of sexual prohibitions which appear as so many acts of desocialization/sacralization attesting to the difference in nature between the king and the "ordinary men", and his ability to dominate the forces of fertility and fertility of the earth, embodied by women [100]. In many tribal societies, royal impurity, inherent in sacredness, is manifested by an original incest that falls within the same field of the forbidden as consanguineous murder [101]. However, if there is no question of royal incest among the Merovingians [102], the myth of origin of the Merovingian family refers to the almost "impure" birth of Merovee, who would have been born from his mother's contact with a sea monster. Merovée is not a hybrid being, like the Centaurians or the wolfmen, but its origin stems from animality, generating superhuman force. Like them, the first Merovingians stood out by their sexual sins, in particular by the practice of kidnapping girls and women [103]. Of Childéric, Gregory of Tours says that he lived in lust and deviated the daughters of the Franks, which earned him to be expelled from his kingdom. From Ragnacar, Clovis' relative and king in Cambrai, he only says that he was "unbridled in lust", which so outraged the Franks that Clovis took the pretext to eliminate him with his brother Richar [104]. Grégoire is even more precise for Chram, whom his father Clotaire I had placed at the head of the Auvergne, in an almost royal position. Moral and sexual transgressions are evident here: "He did not love any of those who could have given him good and useful advice, ext that he gathered around him bands of young and vile people, and that he loved them so much that he listened to their advice and ordered to be forcibly abducted the daughters of senators. Among these kings who violated the family order, the generating rupture of the sacred was a factor of recognition, a means of situating the being out of the ordinary, above and outside the group, the one who held an ambivalent active force - evil in the field of sexuality and lust, beneficial in the field of war -, ultimately ensuring fertility and prosperity to the people. The unbridled manners of the sons and grandsons of Clovis, their many wives and concubines, often from servile backgrounds, certainly do not testify to the social practices in force in the Merovingian Gaul of the sixth century, they are ruptures of the social order that place the king in the zone of the forbidden. To a bishop who was surprised that the male children that King Gontran had had from a servant could be called the son of the king, it was signified that it was now the rule that the king himself had imposed [106], a rule that put him out of the common law. The king drew his supernatural power in the ambivalence of the force that emanated from his person: by breaking sexual prohibitions and violating the social order, he desocialized himself to place himself outside the norms accepted by the rest of the people - ut reliqua plebs, said Gregory of Tours [107] - and to dominate the forces of fertility.The elimination of some kings is part of this same symbolic structure. The forbidden that isolated the sovereign and symbolized his long hair indeed presupposed a consensus between the sovereign and his people, but the latter had to permanently control the excess of sacred that emanated from the king. When his courage or conduct were considered failing, the link between him and the social body broke and the people, in this case the Great, could eliminate him. Gregory of Tours tells that Childéric [108], disowned by the Franks, had to flee to avoid a certain death; that Mundéric, a relative and competitor of Thierri I, was put to death by his family because they had understood that he was lost [109]; that Gundovald died of violent death in 585: "When he was killed, Grégoire wrote, the people came and, after having pierced his body with spears and tied his feet with a rope, he was dragged through the entire army camp; then, having torn off his hair and beard, he was abandoned without burial on The very place where he was killed [110]. "The people who had elected him, had then put him to death and disinvested him. Again according to Gregory of Tours, Chilperic I was murdered because of his misdeeds, because he "had never loved anyone and he was not loved by anyone", so that, "while he returned the spirit, all his people abandoned him [111]". The accounts of Gregory of Tours implicitly justify the sacrificial killing of the Merovingian kings and the symbolic system of magical royalty. But the Bishop of Tours develops in counterpoint the model of Christian royalty. In its system of representation, the transgressions of Childeric and Clovis allowed Frankish royalty, which was elected by God even before Clovis' conversion, gave birth to a legitimate and Christian dynasty. The story of Childeric's sexual sins justifies his exile among the Thuringians, but his return to the Franks also appears as an initiatory test, an extraordinary feat that then allows him to generate the one who would conquer Gaul and become the first Catholic barbarian king of the West. However, Gregory does not hide the tricks, or the deceptions of Clovis, nor his participation in the magic order when he writes: "It is reported that having once gathered his own he would have expressed himself as follows about the parents whose loss he himself had caused: "Woe to me who remained as a traveler in the middle of foreigners and I no longer have parents to be able to help me if adversity came." But it was not out of affliction for their death that he said this, but out of cunning to know if by chance he could discover others that he would kill [112]. It is indeed these same violations of the social order that allow the great magician that was Clovis to assume the imperial inheritance and to found a Christian and legitimate royal line.On the other hand, the tonsure of disqualified kings or pretenders also serves to impose the idea that the successors of Clovis, who have become Christians, have always sought to replace the physical death of their competitors with a symbolic death, used in the Christian ritual of entering the monastery; the Frankish kings, baptized, are thus part of the Old Testament tradition of the consecrated kings. The haircut, which is never discussed before Clovis, appears as a loss of divine substance, a symbolic death [113], as in the biblical tradition. The story of Gundovald's story imposes the idea that Childebert I and Clotaire I did not seek to kill the suitor but that they would have been forced to do so. Gundovald had been raised by his mother, "with the curls of hair spread on the back as is the custom of their kings". King Childebert welcomed the one who claimed to be his nephew, until Clotaire brought the young boy to him and, upon seeing him, he immediately gave the order to shear his head, saying "I did not generate him": by this rite, Gundovald was excluded from the circle of sons-heirs. After the death of King Clotaire, the young man went to another of his uncles, King Charibert, but Sigebert, who had called him home, "cut his hair again and sent him to Cologne" from where he escaped and, "having let his hair grow again, he went to Narsès, who then ruled Italy". He returned from Constantinople in 582 to claim his share of inheritance and ended up murdered, his hair torn out [114]. The haircut is sometimes interpreted as a true ecclesiastical or monastic tonsure which then appears as a symbolic castration: the third of Clodomir's sons, the future Saint Cloud, escaped his uncles but, "abandoning the earthly kingdom, he turned to the Lord, and cutting his own hair, he was made a cleric and, after many good deeds, he died a priest [115]". Gregory of Tours takes care to tell that Clovis would have proposed to his parents tonsure themselves, rather than putting them to death, even if he probably eliminated them without any other form of trial, as his son Thierri I did after him with hairy parents who claimed to have as much right to reign as the descendants of Clovis [116]. Replaced in the Christian context, the royal haircut, long considered by historians as a pagan archaism, thus appears as a symbolic death to eliminate the surplus heirs without shedding royal blood. It also makes it possible to justify a posteriori the physical killing on the pretext that the heirs or disqualified kings had refused the tonsure or broken their vows: Mérovée, son of Chilperic I, was first tonsured on the orders of his father, ordained a priest and taken to the monastery of Saint-Calais Le Mans [117], from where he escaped and was put to death.The tears of the Merovingian family at the end of the sixth and very beginning of the seventh century illustrate the difficulties in establishing a dynastic continuity but also the changes that occur then. Frédégaire reports that in 612, King Thierri II of Burgundy, conqueror of his brother Théodebert II of Austrasia, had his royal clothes torn off and that he took his horse with the royal harness, before sending him to prison in Chalon [118] where he had him put to death. Thierri had stated that Théodebert was not really the son of their father Childebert, so that the disinvestiture did not go through the haircut, but by the withdrawal of the royal and samise insignia to death, soon followed by that of his young son, Merovée. The following year, after his victory in 613, the king of Neustria, Clotaire II, had Sigebert and Corbon, two of the sons of Thierri II, killed, leaving the life only to the third, his godson Mérovée, the fourth having disappeared [119]. He reserved a horrible torment to Brunehilde, their great-grandmother, made responsible for the death of ten kings, this damnatio memoriae opening a new phase in Merovingian history. In fact, the civil wars of the late 6th and early 7th centuries had accompanied the emergence of two Merovingian lineages, one Austrasian, from Sigebert I, and the other Neustrian, from Chilperic I. Once the winner, Clotarius II of Neustria completely suppressed the Austrasian lineage and began a legitimation enterprise in which the Life of Colomban, written by Jonas de Bobbio after the Neustrian victory, and the writing of the first Merovingian genealogies participated. The insulting remarks given by the author to Saint Colomban, who would have refused to bless the young sons of Thierri II under the pretext that they were children of prostitutes, could have had the purpose of "desacralizing" the Austrasian branch [120] for the benefit of the young Neustrian dynasty which claimed to be the only legitimate one. In fact, by completely eliminating the last descendants of Sigebert of Austrasia, Clotarius II accomplished a new founding act that would ensure the Neustrian lineage the exclusivity of legitimacy. It then became possible to impose the representation of a people ordered around a royal lineage founding its supernatural power in the divine, with projection into the past and manipulation of royal origins to legitimize the power of the founder and that of his successors. All barbarian royal genealogies were written in a Christian context, after the conversion of kings to Christianity [121], and when a dynasty embodied the unity of a people, the royal lists being intimately linked to laws that expressed ethnic identity.[122]. However, the first version of the Salic law, that of Clovis, was not preceded by a royal list, as were the Burgundian law and the Lombard edict of Rothari for example, and it was probably not valid for all the Franks: the first Merovingians then lacked this religious sacredness that founded the dynastic legitimacy [123], but, in the seventh century, royal lists were added to certain manuscripts of the Salic law. The process ended when, at the beginning of the eighth century, the Liber Historiae Francorum wanted to impose the idea that the Franks had given themselves laws immediately after electing their first hairy king, Faramund [124].The Merovingian genealogia and the memoria gentis were built gradually and in parallel, both falling under the same political ideology. Gregory of Tours points out that, for a long time, the Franks used to choose their kings from the most noble of their families, without naming them. He quotes Childeric, father of Clovis, his grandfather Mérovée and goes back to his great-grandfather Clodion, but he passes over in silence the mythical origins of the Frankish kings, who do not fit into his construction [125], to develop the image of a dynasty that made the choice of God by converting. It goes back far in the past because seniority justifies the nobility of kings, but also because royal superiority is based on the sacred. Anglo-Saxon genealogies, also written in a Christian context, make Wodan the founding ancestor of the kings of Mercia. Wodan/Odin is the Germanic god of war, he embodies the furor according to Rodolphe de Fulda, who wrote in the 9th century. On the other hand, no source links Clovis' distant ascendants to any god. For his part, Gregory of Tours builds his story of Clovis' reign on the death of the king after the brutal elimination of his parents and he does not develop the idea of a break that would have been linked to conversion and royal baptism, even if he perfectly understood its importance. In his eyes, the Frankish royal sacredness is part of a divine plan that links it to the kings of the Old Testament, and the divine consecration symbolized by royal hair and victories takes on its meaning with baptism, but must continue with Christianization.The Frankish kings are only called Merohingii - literally, the descendants of Merovée - in book III of the chronicle of Frédégaire [126]. The same author also highlights the supernatural foundations of Merovingian legitimacy, by the fabulous origin of Merovée [127]. Frédégaire also operates a projection in the past by making Clodion, father of Mérovée, the son of Theudemar whose name, he writes, would suggest a link with the Trojan kings Priam, Friga and Francio. The myth of the Trojan origin of the Franks, which he takes up here, appeared for the first time in book II of the same chronicle, probably written by a first author [128]. The Trojan myth is part of the Roman traditions, but also Gallo-Roman, since the Arvernes had also claimed to descend from the Trojans and that the Quinotaur was the expression of ancient reminiscences, probably poorly assimilated [129]. These myths had developed during the sixth century, but they are not clearly expressed until the beginning of the seventh century, with the second foundation of the kingdom. The royal dynasty, now called Merovingian, now has a particular attachment to the name of Mérovée, systematically taken up with each generation [130]. It was also during the reign of Clotair II, in the entourage of Dagobert, then king of Austrasia (623-629), that the first Merovingian genealogies were written, to build the legitimacy of the Neustrian branch, victorious of the descendants of Sigebert of Austrasia. A genealogy starts from Clodion, father of Merovée, and ends with Dagobert. Another ends with Clotarius II and makes Faramund, father of Clodion, the first king of the Franks [131]. A century later, the author of the Liber Historiae Francorum, who does not know the chronicle of Frédégaire, takes up the Trojan tradition and makes Faramund the son of the Trojan Sunno [132]: the origo gentis is then completely embodied in the royal dynasty from the Trojan kings, the superiority of one being indissolably linked to that of the other. They are part of a completely Christianized scheme of representation: the Frankish people, from the Trojans as well as the Romans, have found the military strength to defeat their enemies in their faith in God, in the piety and generosity of their kings.Merovingian historiography makes it possible to dismantle part of the symbolic system of the Franks. The projection of a Merovingian dynasty dating back to the early days of Frankish royalty and that of a people with Trojan origins are certainly part of an ideology developed in Romanized environments, to legitimize the Merovingians and Frankish hegemony in Europe. But these beliefs also founded the royal sacredness and the identity of the people, as the rituals of elevation expressed the consensus between the king and his people. At the end of the sixth century, Merovingian legitimacy was firmly assured, but the rivalry between the heirs reflects a form of instability linked to a royal sacredness with a magical character still very marked, despite the emergence of two royal lineages.Gregory of Tours opposes two models that he uses alternately: that of the magical king, which he rather associates with the very first Merovingian period, with illegitimate pretenders or bad sovereigns, and that of the Christian king who is represented by Gontran of which he writes "that full of goodness, he ruled his people with the priests by behaving himself as a priest [133]". The two models allow him to integrate the history of the Franks into the same march towards salvation, erasing the deep ambiguities of the Merovingian royalty of the sixth century. The king of the conquest dominated the functions related to the earth, that is to say the war and nurturing functions, but he only partially assumed the functions related to heaven, that is to say the legal-religious functions without which there was no stability. The conversion to Christianity and the imperial model then provided the Merovingian kings with the means to gradually access a true auctoritas, according to a process that continued during the sixth century, but which did not come to an end unt the beginning of the seventh century, with the triumph of the Neustrian dynasty. The historiography of the second Merovingian period then underlines what appears as a second duroyaum foundation. The Merovingian king, representative of God on earth, integrates all the functions into a Christianized system of thought expressed both the prayers for the king and the rising kingdom of the basilicas and royal monasteries and the control of the sanctuaries and the domination of the sacred forces of nature. The texts now develop the image of a Merovingian royal sacredness intrinsically linked to the belief in a divine election of hairy kings. Consecrated to God like the kings of the Old Testament, heirs of the Trojans, endowed with a sacred legitimacy, which is deeply religious although it is not consecrated by the anointing, the Merovingian sovereigns have received a mission to realize the city of God over the ground, a mission that the ecclesial institution will then seek to control directly through the royal anointing and ministerial royalty.