Eight kings shared in the division of the empire through the deposition of Charles the Fat. In France it was Eudes, count of Paris, who had just defended that town against the Normans and whose glory was heightened by contrast with the ignominious conduct of Charles the Fat. The accession of Count Eudes was an important fact, although overestimated perhaps, if one wishes to regard it as a bridge between Gaul and France and between the Franks and the French. It was not the beginning of a revolution of which he was the consummation; nor yet a point of departure, for it was Frenchmen rather than Angevins who fought with Robert the Strong at Brissarthe. However, apart from the fact itself, the reign of the first French king was certainly important. The Normans, turned loose upon Burgundy by Charles the Fat, had gone still further; they threw themselves upon Champagne which they were proceeding to ruin with fire and sword when the new king attacked them in the defiles of the Argonne, near Montfaucon. A brilliant victory made a worthy beginning to his reign, but that was all. Wearied by the fruitless struggle, occupied elsewhere by the anxieties which Aquitaine gave him where through race jealousy his “usurpation,” as the monks of that time and the seventeenth century historians called it, had not been recognised, and at a time when they placed at the head of acts, _Christi regante: rege nullo_ (“in the reign of Christ and absence of the king”). Eudes finally adopted the Carlovingian policy and drove the Normans back with his purse. What brought about his ruin was that he broke too abruptly with the feudalism that made him king. His cousin Vaucher rebelled against royal authority. Eudes could not understand that this authority was no longer anything but a phantom, even in his hands, and he had his cousin’s head cut off after obtaining his submission. The people deplored the light-hearted nonentity of a Carlovingian king, but a faction which formed in favour of young Charles the Simple, youngest son of Louis the Stammerer, waxed in strength until the former count of Paris was obliged to capitulate. He admitted his rival to a sort of partnership and at his death the kingdom of France returned to Germanic dominion, if we can admit, that it is still possible to recall the Austrasian origin of Charles the Simple (898).