But there is yet another distinction of greater practical importance. France was so early detached from the rest of the elder Frankish dominions that it was able to form from the first a nation as well as a power. Its separation happened at the time when the European nations were forming. The other powers did not split off till long after those nations were formed, and they did not in any strict sense form nations. But France is a nation in the fullest sense. Its history is therefore different from the history of Austria, of Burgundy, of Switzerland, or even of Italy. As a state which had become wholly distinct from the Empire, which was commonly the rival and enemy of the Empire, which largely grew at the expense of the Empire, above all, as a state which won for itself a most distinct national being, France fully deserves a chapter, and not a mere section. Still that chapter is in some sort an appendage to that which deals with the Imperial kingdoms of the West. It naturally follows on our survey of those kingdoms, before we go on further to deal with the European powers which arose out of the dismemberment of the Empire of the East. * * * * * ♦Extent of the royal domain at the accession of the Parisian house. 987.♦ We left Karolingia or the Western Kingdom at that point where the modern French state took its real beginning under the kings of the house of Paris. Their duchy of France had since its foundation been cut short by the great grant of Normandy, and by the practical independence which had been won by the counts of _Anjou_, _Maine_, and _Chartres_. By their election to the kingdom the Dukes of the French added to their duchy the small territory which up to that time had still been in the immediate possession of the West-Frankish Kings at Laon. And, with the crown and the immediate territory of those kings, the French kings at Paris also inherited their claim to superiority over all the states which had arisen within the bounds of the Western Kingdom. ♦Definition of the word _France_.♦ But the name _France_, as it was used in the times with which we are dealing, means only the immediate territory of the King. ♦Two forms of growth; annexation of fiefs of the French crown and of lands altogether beyond the kingdom.♦ The use of the name spreads with every increase of that territory, whether that increase was made by the incorporation of a fief or by the annexation of territory wholly foreign to the kingdom. These two processes must be carefully distinguished. Both went on side by side for some centuries; but the incorporation of the vassal states naturally began before the annexation of altogether foreign territory. ♦Various feudal gradations.♦