After the death of Louis le Debonnaire, the three sorts of royalty almost equally disappeared amid the anarchy into which Europe was plunged; everything was jumbled together. After a certain interval, when the feudal system prevailed, a fourth royalty presented itself, different from all those we have hitherto contemplated--namely, the feudal royalty. This species is very confused and difficult to define. It has been said that the king, in the feudal system, was the suzerain of suzerains, the chief of chiefs; that he was held by fixed ties, through the different degrees, to the whole society; and that in calling around him his vassals, then the vassals of his vassals, and so on, he called the whole nation, and showed himself truly a king. I do not deny that this was the theory of the feudal royalty; but it was a mere theory, which never governed facts. That general influence of the king by means of the graduated organisation, those ties which united royalty to the entire feudal society, exist only in the dreams of publicists. In fact, the majority of the feudal lords were at that epoch completely independent of royalty; many of them scarcely knew it by name, and had no, or very trifling, relations with it. All the sovereignties were local and separate. The name of king, borne by one of the feudal chiefs, expressed a thing past rather than present. {164} This is the state in which royalty presented itself in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the twelfth, in the reign of Louis the Fat, things began to change in aspect; the name of the king was more frequently invoked, his influence penetrated into places to which it had previously never approached, and in fact his part in society became decidedly more active. Yet we do not find that this increased sway was owing to any one of the titles by which royalty had been accustomed to make good its claims. It was not as inheritor of the emperors, or under colour of the imperial royalty, that it waxed in strength, and settled into a firmer consistence. Neither was it by virtue of election, or as an emanation of the Divine power; every appearance of an elective nature had vanished, and the principle of hereditary succession to the throne definitively established; and although religion sanctioned the accession of kings, the minds of men were not at all awed by any religious character in the royalty of Louis the Fat. A new element or character, hitherto unknown, came forth in royalty at that period. A new royalty commenced.