Of such a mission we may be sure Charles the Bald and his successors never dreamed. The chances are that those to whom that mission really fell dreamed of it just as little. We must never forget that the national movements of those days were for the most part instinctive and unconscious; but they were all the more powerful and lasting for being instinctive and unconscious. An act of Charles the Bald, one of the ordinary grants by a King to one of his vassals, created the French nation. The post from which the King himself shrank was entrusted to a valiant subject, and Robert the Strong, the mightiest champion of the land against the heathen invader, received the government of the whole border land threatened by the Breton and the Northman.[62] We may be sure that the thoughts of the King himself did not reach at the most beyond satisfaction at having provided the most important post in his realm with a worthy defender. To shield himself from the enemy by such a barrier as was furnished by Robert's country, it was worth while to sacrifice the direct possession even of the fair lands between the Loire and the Seine. His dominion was a _mark_;[63] his truest title a _marquis_. But the Mark of France, like the Mark of Brandenburg and the Mark of Austria, was destined to great things. Robert no doubt, like the other governors and military chiefs, who were fast growing from magistrates into Princes, rejoiced in the prospect of becoming the source of a dynasty, a dynasty which could not fail to take a high place among the princes of Gaul. But he hardly dreamed of founding a line of Kings, and a line of Kings the most lasting that the world ever saw. Still less did he dream of founding a nation. But he did both. The Counts who held the first place of danger and honour soon eclipsed in men's eyes the Kings who had retired to the safer obscurity of their eastern frontier. The city of the river became a national centre in a way in which the city of the rock could never be. The people of the struggling Romance speech of northern Gaul found a centre and a head in the rising city and its gallant princes. That Robert was himself of German descent, the son of a stranger from some of the Teutonic provinces of the Empire,[64] mattered not a whit. From the beginning of their historic life the Parisian Dukes and Kings have been the leaders and representatives of the new French nationality. No royal dynasty has ever been so thoroughly identified with the nation over which it ruled, because no royal dynasty could be so truly said to have created the nation. Paris, France, and the Dukes and Kings of the French are three ideas which can never be kept asunder. A true instinct soon gave the ruler of the new state a higher and a more significant title. The Count of Paris was merged in the Duke of the French, and the Duke of the French was soon to be merged in the King. The name of _Francia_, a name whose shiftings and whose changes of meaning have perplexed both history