Verdun's western third became a kingdom that lasted to 1848
Historians bundle medieval and early modern French polities as the Kingdom of France—an heir of Charles the Bald's share after the 843 Treaty of Verdun. Capetian election in 987 opened a line that centralised, colonised, and finally yielded to revolution before restoration ended in 1848.
West Francia passed to Charles the Bald at Verdun; Carolingians ruled until Hugh Capet's 987 election founded the Capetian dynasty. For centuries the realm stayed a patchwork of fiefs: royal writ barely reached Brittany or Normandy, and provinces from Lorraine to Aquitaine often ignored Paris. Early West Frankish rulers were chosen by secular and church magnates before Capetian heredity hardened into custom.
Early modern kings built the Ancien Régime's absolutist administration even as tax and law remained irregular by region. Colonial contests with Britain cost most North American holdings by 1763; aid to the American Revolution hurt French finances more than it repaid. The 1789 Revolution produced a 1791 constitution, then abolished the kingdom for the First Republic; great-power restoration in 1814, aside from the Hundred Days, lasted until the 1848 dissolution the umbrella term remembers.
Its birth was violent at the edges. After Charlemagne died in 814 his heirs could not hold the empire together, and Viking fleets pushed up the Loire and the Seine; under Charles the Simple, who reigned from 898 to 922, Rollo's Scandinavians settled downstream of Paris in the region later called Normandy. When Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, took the throne in 987, he directly held little beyond the middle Seine valley, while lords such as the counts of Blois assembled rival domains through marriage and private pacts. Even so, the Capetians and their Valois and Bourbon offshoots kept the crown for more than 800 years. The senior Capetian line ended in 1328 when Charles IV died without sons; because Salic law barred a claim through Isabella, mother of Edward III of England, Philip VI of Valois was crowned instead, one spark of the Hundred Years' War. Plague reaching France from Italy in 1348 helped cut a population estimated at 18 to 20 million by half or more over the following 150 years.
Source: Kingdom of France
