III. Louis the Debonnair (814-840). As soon as Louis became emperor, he lost the success which had attended him as king of Aquitaine. Facts soon gave proof of that tendency to dissolution which pervaded the empire of Charlemagne, and which dispersed the authority which he had been able to retain entire in his own hands. Louis gave kingdoms to his sons, and they were continually in revolt against him. The great landholders, the clergy, and the pope--those three social forces which Charlemagne had so ably managed and restrained--escaped from the yoke of Louis the Debonnair, and acted sometimes in his favour, and sometimes against him. {99} The clergy loaded him with reproaches, and forced him to do public penance at Worms, in 829. An attempt was made, in 830, to make him a monk, after the assembly at Compiègne, where he had confessed his faults; and he was deposed, in 833, by another assembly at Compiègne, in pursuance of a conspiracy into which Pope Gregory IV. had entered. During the whole course of this reign, nothing held together, everything was disjoined; both the states which constituted the empire, and the great social forces, lay and ecclesiastical, in each state. Each of these forces aspired to render itself independent. Louis the Debonnair presents a singular spectacle, in the midst of this dissolution, attempting to practise as a scholar the maxims of government laid down by Charlemagne, enacting general laws against general abuses, prescribing rules for the guidance of all those forces which had escaped from his hands, and even endeavouring to correct the particular acts of injustice which had been committed under the preceding reign. But the kings, the great landowners, the bishops,--all had acquired a feeling of their own importance, and refused to obey an emperor who was no longer Charlemagne. Charles The Bald. IV. Charles the Bald (840-877). The dissolution which had commenced under Louis the Debonnair continued under his son Charles the Bald. His three brothers, [Footnote 12] relying alternately upon the pretensions of the clergy and of the large landholders, disputed with him for the vast empire of Charlemagne. [Footnote 12: Lothaire, Pepin, and Louis the Germanic, the three elder sons of Louis the Debonnair.]