It is considered by M. Thierry, who has been in general followed by modern French historians, that the principal cause which about this time led to the enthronement of Hugh Capet as king of France or of the French, in place of the Carlovingian princes, was the antipathy of race, and especially that of French against Germans, which prompted the chiefs and the population of the central provinces to throw off the yoke of the Germans, which the Lorraine or Belgian princes were to a certain degree. A study of the records and chronicles of the time does not lead to this conclusion. On the contrary, they prove beyond a question that the personages and the party which were most influential in awarding the crown definitively to Hugh Capet were precisely Belgian or Lorraine, and attached moreover to German interests. Hitherto the Carlovingian princes had maintained their hold and influence in their own circumscribed territories by the support of the archiepiscopal church of Rheims, which maintained its jealousy both of the duke of Paris and of the German emperor, labouring at the same time to save and to recover its church property, as best it might, from the counts ever ready to despoil it. Adalbero, son of Godfrey, count of the Ardennes, had been promoted to that see, and had laboured to reform and restore it. The prelate Adalbero was not what his predecessor had been, a devoted partisan of the Carlovingian princes. He saw that they were too weak to protect the church, especially that of Rheims, which, situated between the frontiers of two great nations, was continually the spoil of both. Adalbero, connected with all the German noblesse and princely families of Lorraine, was for preserving that province for the young emperor Otto; and his letters of exhortation written by Gerbert, addressed to all the prelates and counts of the border region, entreat them to resist all the efforts of Lothair and Louis, whilst recommending that they make a friend of Hugh, duke of France.