(1120–1180). King of France. Crowned in 1137, Louis, the son of Louis VI, continued his father’s expansion of royal power, extending his authority beyond the Île-de-France. He cleverly utilized marriage alliances and relations with the French church and with the papacy as instruments of royal policy, notably during the second half of his reign.
Louis’s reign to ca. 1152 was not auspicious, characterized by blundering relations with important barons and with the church, a failed marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and an inept crusade. Pacaut, the most perceptive historian of his reign, argues that its unhappy first fifteen years were due primarily to the king’s youth and lack of training for the kingship, to which he became heir only upon the death of his older brother. Certainly, these years were marked by impetuosity and bad judgment; but Louis grew to his responsibilities and passed the monarchy to his son, Philip II Augustus, with enhanced prestige and power.
That the monarchy survived the first half of the reign indicates some political ability on the part of the king and his advisers; his domain was surrounded by powerful and dangerous neighbors, the most threatening of which was Normandy (by 1154 united with Anjou), the kingdom of England, and the duchy of Aquitaine. Henry II of England, his continental possessions vastly augmented by his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Louis’s first wife, posed a threat, but he was distracted by internal problems and perhaps uninterested in pushing hostilities with Louis, his feudal overlord, to the point of serious conflict.
Pacaut explained that Louis depended upon cooperation with the church, with the nobility, and with the territorial and administrative base of the Île-de-France to maintain, and eventually to enhance, the royal authority. There were faltering beginnings toward converting the rights of the monarch as feudal overlord to the rights of the king as sovereign, from the powers of the king as a private source of authority to the king as a public authority figure. At the close of his reign, the court was dominated by the relatives of his third wife, Adèle (his second wife, Constance of Castile, had died in childbirth), the counts of Champagne and their entourage. His son by Adèle, Philip II Augustus, associated in the rule of France in 1179, here began his political experience. The kingdesignate was now introduced to his need to grow in cunning and in manipulation of family relationships in order to enhance the royal authority. Louis VII was not a great king, but he was a successful one.
Bur, Michel. Suger, abbé de Saint-Denis, régent de France. Paris: Perrin, 1991.
Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Fawtier, Robert. The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy and Nation (987–1328), trans. Lionel Butler and R.J.Adam. London: Macmillan, 1960.
Hallam, Elizabeth. Capetian France, 987–1328. London: Longman, 1980.
Pacaut, Marcel. Louis VII et son royaume. Paris: SEVPEN, 1964.
Petit-Dutaillis, Charles. The Feudal Monarchy in France and England from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century, trans. E.D.Hunt. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.
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