Succession to the French throne

The Merovingians were a Salian Frankish dynasty that came to rule the Franks in a region (known as Francia in Latin) largely corresponding to ancient Gaul from the middle of the 5th century.

Because they were able to worship with their Catholic neighbors, the newly-Christianized Franks found much easier acceptance from the local Gallo-Roman population than did the Arian Visigoths, Vandals or Burgundians.

Although this prevented the kingdom from being fragmented into numerous parts, this practice weakened royal power, for they had to make concessions to the nobility to procure their support in war.

According to ancient custom, Pepin was then elected King of the Franks by an assembly of Frankish nobles, with a large portion of his army on hand (in case the nobility inclined not to honor the Papal bull).

In 751 the Lombards had conquered the Exarchate of Ravenna, the center of Byzantine government in Italy, were demanding tribute from the pope, and threatened to besiege Rome.

Following Pepin's coronation, the pope secured the new ruler's promise of armed intervention in Italy and his pledge to give the papacy the Exarchate of Ravenna, once it was conquered.

Known as the "Donation of Pepin," the gift made the pope a temporal ruler over the Papal States, a strip of territory that extended diagonally across northern Italy.

Following the death of Louis the Pious, the surviving adult Carolingians fought a three-year civil war ending only in the Treaty of Verdun, which divided the empire into three regna while imperial status and a nominal lordship was accorded to Lothair I.

The Carolingians differed markedly from the Merovingians in that they disallowed inheritance to illegitimate offspring, possibly in an effort to prevent infighting among heirs and assure a limit to the division of the realm.

Though they asserted their prerogative to rule, their hereditary, God-given right, and their usual alliance with the Church, they were unable to stem the principle of electoral monarchy and their propagandism failed them in the long run.

After Lothair's son Louis V died in May 987, Adalberon and Gerbert of Aurillac convened an assembly of nobles to elect Hugh Capet as their king.

King Henry formed an alliance with the powerful duke of Normandy, Robert, by granting him the French Vexin, or the lands between the rivers Epte and Oise.

The French Vexin was granted away to the duke of Normandy, the duchy of Burgundy, a substantial part of the royal demesne, was given away to Robert, the king's younger brother.

The arguments they invoked in favor of Joan were in full conformity with feudal law which had always authorized a daughter to succeed to the fief in the absence of sons.

Opposed by the Duke of Burgundy, and his own brother, Charles, Count of La Marche, it was thought prudent to shut the gates of the town during the ceremony.

Back at Paris, an assembly of prelates, barons and burgesses acknowledged Philip as their sovereign, and asserted that "women do not succeed to the French throne."

Despite two successive marriages with Marie of Luxembourg and Joan of Évreux, Charles the Fair, as his brother Philip the Tall, left only daughters when he died in 1328.

And, instead of proposing a daughter of Philip V or Charles IV, they decided that women should be excluded from succession to avoid endless squabbles of law.

Yet in the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V of England, great-grandson of Edward III, became the heir to the French throne in accordance to the Treaty of Troyes.

He was formally received into the Catholic Church in 1593, and was crowned at Chartres in 1594 as League members maintained control of the Cathedral of Rheims, and, skeptical of Henry's sincerity, continued to oppose him.

The validity of the renunciations was not debated in public until the French Revolution, when the National Assembly first addressed this issue in a three-day session beginning on 15 September 1789.

The Spanish Ambassador, the Count of Fernan Nuñez wrote to the Spanish Prime Minister, the Count of Floridablanca, that same date: "All the clergy and the major part of the nobility and also of the Third Estate has pronounced for the resolution favorable to the House of Spain… by 698 votes to 265 the majority had concluded the question in a sense again most advantageous for us...." In 1791 the French National Assembly drew up a new, written Constitution to which the King gave his assent, and which governed France for the last year of the 18th century monarchy.

For the first time it was necessary to define formally, as a matter of statutory constitutional law, the system of succession, and the titles, privileges and prerogatives of the Crown.

[1] As a consequence, the chamber proclaimed the vacancy of the throne and designated Louis Philippe, who for eleven days had been acting as the regent for his small cousin, as the new French king, displacing the senior branch of the House of Bourbon.

Linking the monarchy to a people instead of a territory (as the previous designation King of France and of Navarre) was aimed at undercutting the legitimist claims of Charles X and his family.

According to Charles Dumoulin, a French jurist of the sixteenth century, treason is one case wherein a person of the royal blood could be deprived of his succession to the throne.

[4] For Orléanists the treaty is a valid alteration to the French law of succession, viewing it as a Force majeure necessary for France to make peace with the rest of Europe.

[5] They also cite that Philips actual renunciations were made in perpetuity, suggesting that his instituting of semi-Salic law within Spain was a personal condition rather than a legal one.

[6] Further, the Dukes of Orleans from 1709 to 1830 held the title, First Prince of the Blood, who were, by tradition, the first in line to the throne after the sons and male-line grandsons of the King and/or Dauphin.

They also cite the opinion of Charles Dumoulin, a French jurist of the sixteenth century: Common sense requires that princes of the blood who have become foreigners be excluded from the throne just as the male descendants of princesses.