For a century the Robertian house had struggled with the house of Charles the Great. Its premature triumph under Odo and Robert had put off the final day of success. But the patient and shrewd policy of Hugh the Great and Hugh Capet was at last rewarded with victory. Louis V. left no son. His uncle Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine, was his nearest heir, but was in no position to push forward his pretensions. The pear was at last ripe, and Hugh Capet had no longer any motive for avoiding the semblance of the power, of which he had long enjoyed the reality. Adalbero and Gerbert now showed great activity. Adalbero harangued the barons and bishops on the duty that lay before them. ‘We know,’ he said, ‘that Charles of Lorraine has his partisans who pretend that the throne belongs to him by hereditary right. But we believe that kingship is not acquired by hereditary right, but that we ought only to raise to that dignity the man who is marked out, not only by nobleness of birth, but by wisdom, loyalty, and magnanimity.’ The magnates took the cue, and elected Hugh king of the French. The Church ratified the choice of the nobles by the solemn coronation of the new king at Noyon. The Duke of the Normans and the Count of Anjou lent him the support of their arms. The Emperor recognised Hugh, on condition that he waived all claims over Lotharingia. The revolution of 987 was easily accomplished, because the old order was so nearly dead. It involved no striking change in form. The Capetian kings posed as the lawful successors of the Carolingians: they had the same conceptions of sovereignty, and followed the same principles of government. [Sidenote: Its results.] Yet those are not far wrong who regard the accession of Hugh as the starting-point of all later French history. It is easy to exaggerate the nature of the change. It is unsafe to make the change of dynasty a triumph of one race over another. It has been the fashion to say that, with the last of the Carolingians, disappear the last of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul, and that their power had passed on to the Romanised Celts whom they had ruled so long. But there is no scrap of evidence to prove that the later Carolings were different in tongue, ideas, or policy from the Robertian house. There was no real national feeling in the tenth century, and, if there were, no proof that the one house was more national than the other. Nevertheless, the passing away of the line of Charles the Great does complete the process which the Treaty of Verdun had begun. The Capetian king had a limited localised power, a power that in due course could become national; and if he looked back, like the Carolings, to the traditions of imperial monarchy and order, he had no temptation to look back, as the Carolings were bound to look back, to the imperial ideas of universal dominion. He had no claim to rule beyond the limits ascribed to the West Frankish kingdom in the Treaty of Verdun. He was king of the