Every French King Louis was, in a sense, named after Clovis
The Frankish name of Clovis, reconstructed as Hlodowig, passed through Latin Hludovicus to become Louis, the name of 18 kings of France, as well as German Ludwig, Dutch Lodewijk and English Lewis. The warlord behind it inherited a small band of perhaps 500 fighters at age 15 and left a kingdom stretching across most of Gaul.
The name is usually read as famous warrior, combining old Germanic words for loud or renowned and for fighting. The linguist Reinder van der Meulen has challenged that. Noting that the chronicler Gregory of Tours always spelled it with an o where he wrote u for other names, he suggests the first part may come from a root meaning to plunder, making Clovis a warrior for booty.
Clovis succeeded his father Childeric I as king of the Salian Franks in 481, and he probably spoke an early form of Dutch rather than the German of later Frankish rulers. In 486, allied with two other Frankish kings, he defeated Syagrius, ruler of the last Roman enclave in northern Gaul, at Soissons, even though one ally, Chararic, sat out the fighting. Clovis later seized Chararic's lands. Paris held out against him for several years, perhaps five, before he made it his capital.
Winning over the Gallo-Roman bishops mattered as much as battles. After his troops looted churches, he returned a valuable ewer to the Bishop of Reims, and he married Clotilde, a Catholic Burgundian princess who had fled a family feud. His baptism, sometime between 498 and 506, set the Franks apart from most Germanic peoples, who followed Arian Christianity, and Clotilde is honoured as a saint by both Catholic and Orthodox churches. Reportedly more than three thousand of his companions converted with him around the time of his narrow victory over the Alamanni at Tolbiac in 496.
He married his sister to Theodoric the Great of the Ostrogoths, meddled in Burgundian succession quarrels and absorbed Armorica through diplomacy. By his death on 27 November 511 he had turned a patchwork of petty kings into a single hereditary monarchy, the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled for two centuries. Charles de Gaulle called him the first king of what would become France.
Source: Clovis I
