Charlemagne

In her most intellectually serious pairing in the series so far, Sophie tackles  Charlemagne - medieval emperor, king, and leader of the Carolingian Renaissance.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Charlemagne and the Architecture of Ambition, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who were, on the whole, rather better behaved than tonight's subject, wear of a scarf that my college porter described this morning as very continental, which I took as a compliment, and which is, in retrospect, entirely appropriate given what we are about to discuss, and your guide today through a life so enormous, so consequential, and so thoroughly embedded in the foundations of the world we actually inhabit, that I find myself doing something I rarely do at the opening of these episodes. I find myself slightly nervous not because the material is obscure, quite the opposite. The material is so vast, so contested, so draped in the accumulated weight of twelve centuries of political appropriation, nationalist mythology, ecclesiastical legend, and genuinely contradictory primary sources, that the challenge is not finding things to say. The challenge is deciding which things to say and being honest about everything I am leaving out. When I wrote my doctoral thesis, my supervisor, a woman of formidable precision and very little tolerance for vagueness, told me that the first skill of the historian was not research but selection. You cannot tell everything, you must choose, and your choices reveal your argument. My argument today is this, that the man we are about to discuss was not merely a great king or a great conqueror, though he was both. He was the architect of an idea, the idea that Europe was a thing, a coherent thing, a civilization with a shared identity and a shared destiny, and that this idea, which he imposed with enormous violence, and pursued with genuine administrative brilliance, is still the most consequential and most contested idea in Western political life. It was contested in the ninth century. It was contested in the twentieth century, in ways that produced the worst wars in human history. It is contested today in referendum campaigns and border disputes and late night arguments between people who thought they were just arguing about trade policy. Um Charlemagne started it, or rather, he inherited a set of conditions and a set of ambitions and a set of beliefs about what a Christian king was supposed to be, and he built from them something that had never quite existed before, and has never quite gone away since that is a legacy. That is in fact a legacy of such proportions that the word legacy feels slightly insufficient for it. We should begin, as always, at the beginning, which for Charlemagne is frustratingly uncertain. He was born in seven hundred two, probably, possibly seven hundred seven. The sources do not agree, and the sources for eighth century Frankish history are, let us say, patchy in the way that sources for a largely pre-literate society operating before the widespread use of written administrative records are inevitably patchy. He was born to Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, a man whose epithet tells you everything about the insecurities of medieval chroniclers and Betrada of Lyon, known as Betrada Broadfoot, which tells you that medieval chroniclers were not when they put their minds to it, especially kind about women either. The Franks at this moment were the dominant power in what we would now call France and Western Germany, though those categories are anachronistic in ways that matter. The Frankish kingdom was not France, and it was not Germany. It was something older than both, and not quite either. It was a militarized Christian kingdom, ruling over a diverse and not always cooperative collection of peoples Franks, Aquitanians, Bavarians, Saxons on its borders, united more by conquest and conversion than by any shared sense of common identity. The idea of a coherent European Christian civilization was a theological aspiration, not yet a political reality. Pepin the Short had, in seven fifty one, done something of considerable political audacity. He had deposed the last Merovingian king, the dynasty that had ruled the Franks since Clovis, three centuries before, and had himself crowned in his place with the blessing of the Pope. This was not a minor act. The Merovingians were sacred kings in the ancient sense. Their authority was inherent, dynastic, quasi divine. Pepin's authority rested on a different foundation papal endorsement, military capacity, and the support of the Frankish nobility. In exchange for the Pope's blessing, Pepin had agreed to protect the papacy against the Lombards who were making a considerable nuisance of themselves in northern Italy. This deal, the Frankish King as protector of the Roman Church, the Roman Church as legitimizer of the Frankish King, was the political architecture Charlemagne inherited. He would expand it to a scale his father cannot have imagined, and it would define European politics for the next thousand years. Pepin died in seven hundred sixty-eight. Charlemagne and his brother Carloman inherited the kingdom jointly, which was the Frankish tradition, and which produced, as it tends to, immediate fraternal tension. Carleman died in seven seventy-one, which resolved the tension with a swiftness that medieval chroniclers recorded without evident suspicion, but which modern historians regard with the measured scepticism appropriate oh convenient deaths of political inconveniences. Charlemagne was sole king of the Franks from 771. He was, give or take, the uncertainties, twenty nine years old. He was, by the physical descriptions that survive, and the primary source here is Einhard, his biographer and courtier, which means we are dealing with a man who had professional reasons to be flattering and personal reasons to be accurate about things his patron could verify in a mirror. Tall. Remarkably tall for his era, well over six feet by the conversion of the measurements Einhard provides, which made him literally head and shoulders above the majority of his contemporaries in a way that presumably contributed to the general impression of authority. He was physically robust, a tireless horseman and hunter, energetic in a way that seems to have exhausted the people around him. He ate and drank with enthusiasm, but was apparently not prone to the kind of incapacity that excessive eating and drinking tend to produce. He bathed regularly, which in the eighth century was more noteworthy than it sounds, and rather better than Rasputin, to whom I have devoted a previous episode, and whose relationship with hygiene we have already discussed at some length. He had, at various points in his life, four official wives and a number of concubines, and he produced by these women at least eighteen children, of whom he appears to have been genuinely warmly fond. He insisted on his daughter's presence at court and refused to allow them to marry, which historians have interpreted as either affection, control, or the pragmatic avoidance of creating rival power bases through his daughter's husbands. Probably all three simultaneously, in the manner of decisions made by very powerful people who have the luxury of motives that are not mutually exclusive. He could not write he tried. Einhard records him keeping wax tablets under his pillow to practice letter formation in the night, but the fine motor skill had apparently not been cultivated in childhood, and childhood habits of this kind are unkind to late adult correction. He could read or at least he could follow a read text and respond to it intelligently. He spoke Frankish Latin, and apparently understood some Greek, though his spoken Greek was not fluid. He was, in short, a man of formidable intellect, operating in a culture where the technologies of literacy were unevenly distributed, and the relationship between intellectual capability and formal education was not the one we now assume. He was also a man who understood with exceptional clarity that the production and preservation of knowledge was a form of power, the Carolingian Renaissance, and this is one of those historical terms that sounds more glamorous than it was in practice, because the Renaissance in question involved a lot of monasteries copying manuscripts by candlelight, and a court school producing theological treatises rather than anything resembling the Italy of three centuries later, was his project, his patronage, his insistence. He brought scholars to his court at Aachen from across Europe, Alcuin of York, who was the most eminent theologian and educator of the era, and who came from Northumbria, which meant that the most important intellectual figure at the court of the King of the Franks was delightfully English in the way that things were English before England properly existed. Peter of Pisa, Theodolph of Orleans, Paul the Deacon. He built a library. He standardized the script used in manuscripts, Carolingian minuscule, a clear, consistent, legible hand that replaced the various regional scripts in use across Europe, and that is in its direct descendant forms recognizably the ancestor of the typeface you are reading right now, which I find one of the more pleasing pieces of historical continuity available to us. He reformed the administration of the church. He standardized liturgy. He promoted education for clergy. He did not do these things from pure spiritual devotion. He did them because a literate, standardized, administratively coherent church was a more effective instrument of royal authority than a fragmented, locally variant, theologically unreliable one. He was in the management of religion, as in the management of everything else, simultaneously a genuine believer, and a ruthlessly pragmatic political operator. And the two things were not in conflict because in the eighth century they did not need to be. Now we must talk about the wars because there is no understanding Charlemagne without the wars, and there is no understanding the wars without confronting aspects of his legacy that the commemorative portraits and the Charlemagne Prize and the European Union's use of him as a founding symbol tend to quietly alled. He fought continuously for most of his reign, which lasted from seven hundred sixty eight to eight hundred fourteen forty six years. He was either personally on campaign or directing one. He campaigned in Italy, deposing the Lombard King Desiderius and taking his crown. He campaigned in Spain, not successfully, as the Battle of Roncevo Pass in seven seventy eight demonstrated when a Basque ambush killed a portion of his rearguard and provided the material for the Chanson de Roland, which transformed a Basque ambush into a glorious defeat by Saracens, because medieval epic poetry was not primarily concerned with ethnographic accuracy. He campaigned in Bavaria, absorbing it into the Frankish realm. He campaigned against the Avars on the eastern frontier. But the campaign that demands the most direct reckoning is the Saxon Wars. The Saxons were the Germanic people to the northeast of the Frankish kingdom, pagan independent, periodically raiding Frankish territory, and constituting both a military problem and in Charlemagne's theological framework, a spiritual one. The conversion of the Saxons to Christianity was not, for Charlemagne, separable from their political subjugation. They were the same project. The Saxon wars lasted with interruptions from seven hundred seventy two to eight hundred four. Thirty two years? The Saxons, led at various points by a chieftain named Widakind, resisted with tenacity that would be admirable if it were not so comprehensively futile. They were defeated, converted, rebelled, were defeated again, converted again, rebelled again. In seven eighty two, following a Saxon rebellion and the ambush and destruction of a Frankish force at the Battle of Suntel, Charlemagne ordered the execution of forty five hundred Saxon prisoners at a place called Verden in a single day. The massacre of Verden is not the kind of thing that appears prominently in the official commemorations of the Father of Europe. It was, by any standard available to us, contemporary, medieval or modern, an act of mass atrocity, and the fact that it was followed within months by a capitulary offering relatively mild administrative terms to converted Saxons does not alter the nature of what happened at Verden. Charlemagne was capable of administrative sophistication and systematic mass killing, sometimes in the same season, and both were expressions of the same will to total control. The conversion of the Saxons was enforced by law. The Capitulatio de Partibus Saxonier, issued around seven hundred eighty five, imposed the death penalty for refusing baptism, for eating meat during Lent, for cremating the dead in the pagan tradition, and for a range of other practices that constituted the maintenance of Saxon religious identity. This is not metaphorical coercion. This is the state apparatus of the most powerful king in Western Europe, declaring that your ancestral religion is a capital offence. Alcuin of York, the English theologian who was one of Charlemagne's most trusted advisers, wrote to him to express concern that forced conversion was not genuine conversion, and was therefore theologically counterproductive. Charlemagne received the letter, appreciated the theology, and continued the policy. He was, as I have said, a man comfortable with the coexistence of genuine belief and complete pragmatism. And then, on Christmas Day eight hundred, in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo III placed a crown on Charlemagne's head, and the assembled congregation acclaimed him as Emperor of the Romans Carolus Augustus, Charles Augustus, the first emperor in the West since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in four hundred seventy-six, three hundred and twenty-four years before. Einhard records that Charlemagne claimed to have been surprised by this, that had he known what the Pope intended, he would not have entered the church that day. Historians have debated this claim with the enthusiasm appropriate to a statement that is either true, partially true, or a transparent piece of political theatre designed to manage the reaction of the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople, who had a somewhat proprietorial attitude toward the title of Roman Emperor, and was not going to be pleased to find it had been awarded to a Frankish king by a pope, who was technically subject to Constantinople's authority. The most probable answer, as with most questions about Charlemagne's inner life, is that the claim contained enough truth to be useful and enough calculation to be effective. The coronation mattered enormously, not because it changed what Charlemagne actually was or could do, but because it changed what he meant. It created a template, the idea that a Western European king could be emperor, could stand in the succession of Rome, could be the secular arm of a universal Christian civilization, with the Pope as its spiritual head. That idea did not exist in the same way before Christmas Day eight hundred, and it dominated European political theology for the next seven hundred years. The Holy Roman Empire, that magnificent and somewhat ramshackle institution that Voltaire would later describe as neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire, drew its founding legitimacy from the moment Leo placed that crown on Charlemagne's head. The conflict between papal and imperial authority that convulsed medieval Europe, the investiture controversy, the march to Canossa, centuries of kings and popes manoeuvring for supremacy. All of it traces back to the ambiguity built into that Christmas day ceremony. Who was the ultimate authority in Christian Europe? The Pope who crowned or the emperor who was crowned? Charlemagne had answered the question by being present for it. He had not answered it in a way that settled anything. He died at Archen on january twenty eighth, eight hundred fourteen. He was in his seventies, which was genuinely remarkable for a man who had spent the better part of five decades on military campaign and was by then suffering from pleurisy. He had already crowned his son Luis as co emperor the previous year. In a ceremony that he conducted himself without the Pope, a deliberate statement that the imperial title was his, to transmit by his own authority, not the papacy's. Even at the end he was managing the implications of what he had created. He left behind an empire that covered what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Austria, Northern Italy, and a portion of Spain. He left behind an administrative system of counts and missi Dominici, royal envoys sent to check on the counts. That was the most sophisticated governmental apparatus in post Roman Western Europe. He left behind a standardized church, a revitalized intellectual culture, and a body of law that influenced legal development across the continent for centuries. He left behind, most importantly, the idea. The idea that Europe was a Christian civilization with a common identity, the idea that a single political authority over this civilization was not only possible, but divinely ordained. The idea that the Roman heritage, the language, the law, the administrative tradition was the inheritance of whoever could claim it most convincingly. These ideas were not his alone, but he gave them a physical, institutional form that made them impossible to forget, even when it became impossible to maintain. Now the Tees picture a figure who rose to power in a context of fragmentation, not the fragmentation of post Roman Europe. We are not confined to that era, but a fragmentation of a different kind. Political fragmentation, institutional fragmentation, the sense that the established order had become incoherent, that the old structures no longer held, that someone with sufficient will and sufficient vision might step into that fragmentation and reorganise it around themselves, picture someone who understood with exceptional clarity, that power in a fragmented landscape required two things simultaneously force to compel compliance and legitimacy, to make compliance feel like choice. Someone who managed both carefully, strategically, with an instinct for when to use each that made him more effective than his rivals, who could generally manage only one. Picture someone whose project was explicitly civilizational in scope. Not merely the accumulation of power for its own sake, though the power was accumulated extensively and deliberately, but the pursuit of a particular vision of what a society should be, who should lead it, what values should organize it and where its boundaries should lie. Someone for whom the political and the moral were not separate categories, but aspects of a single project. Picture someone who was a genuine administrator, not merely a visionary, but a builder of systems, a reformer of institutions, a person who understood that durable power requires durable structures, and who invested in those structures with real patience and real intelligence, someone who brought talented people from outside the existing establishment and gave them authority because they were useful rather than because they were traditional, which is the kind of meritocratic instinct that tends to infuriate exactly the people it is designed to bypass. Picture someone whose legacy is so enormous and so structurally embedded in the institutions we inhabit that it is almost impossible to see clearly because we are inside it, someone who is simultaneously celebrated as a founding father and condemned as an architect of structures that have produced both unity and violence, someone about whom there is genuine, unresolved disagreement, not merely historical disagreement, but live political disagreement happening now about whether what they built was, on balance, a gift or a trap. Picture someone whose personal conduct was complex, whose treatment of opponents was sometimes brutal, whose use of religion as a political instrument was comprehensive, and whom history has nonetheless largely decided to admire, because the scale of what was built overwhelms the discomfort of how it was built. Who is this? It is Jean Monet. I see some of you nodding. I see others reaching somewhat understandably, for their phones to look him up. That is entirely acceptable. He is, I would argue, the most consequential European of the twentieth century and the least famous, which is either a testament to his methods or an indictment of our attention spans, or quite possibly both. Jean Monet was born on november ninth, eighteen eighty eight, in Cognac, France. Cognac. He was the son of a brandy merchant. He left school at sixteen without completing his formal education, like Charlemagne. He was not a man whose intellectual formation was primarily academic. He went to London. He learned English. He began selling his father's cognac internationally, which gave him a practical education in cross-border negotiation, in the management of relationships across linguistic and cultural difference, and in the commercial reality that national barriers are obstacles to the movement of things people want to exchange, which is an insight of apparently limitless applicability. He was not a soldier, not a politician, not a diplomat in the formal sense. He held no elected office at any point in his life. He was never a head of government, never a cabinet minister in the conventional sense, never accountable to a democratic constituency in the way that most people who change history are expected to be. What he was for most of his adult life was an advisor, a connector, a man who moved between governments, between institutions, between great powers, and who had the extraordinary gift of seeing what each of them needed, and persuading them that the way to get it was the way he was already planning. During the First World War, as a young man of twenty six with no military qualifications whatsoever, he walked into the French Prime Minister's office and told him that France and Britain needed to coordinate their supply chains or they would both lose the war. He was right. He was given a role in the Interallied Supply Commission. He was twenty six years old. This pattern, the private individual with no institutional standing, who walks into the room of power and is taken seriously because what he is saying is correct, and he is saying it with unnerving confidence. This pattern would repeat throughout his life. During the Second World War he was in Washington, part of the French delegation, working to persuade the United States to supply the Allies. He drafted, or substantially drafted, the economic memoranda that became the legal framework for the Anglo French purchasing agreement of nineteen forty. He was involved in Churchill's extraordinary offer of Franco British Union. The proposal made in june nineteen forty, as France was collapsing to merge France and Britain into a single nation. De Gaulle, who delivered the proposal by telephone to the French government, credited Monet as a primary author. The proposal was rejected. France fell, but the instinct that European nations in extremis should dissolve their boundaries rather than defend them, was Monet's instinct, and he did not abandon it when the war was over. The post war project was where Monet's career becomes, in the historical sense, Carolingian in its scope. He was the principal intellectual architect of the Schumann Plan of 1950, the proposal advanced by French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann, but substantially written by Monet, to pool the coal and steel production of France and Germany under a common authority. This is the act that created the European Coal and Steel Community, the direct institutional ancestor of the European Economic Community, the direct institutional ancestor of the European Union, which currently governs the political and economic lives of approximately four hundred and fifty million people, and which is the most ambitious attempt at supranational governance in human history. Monet's theory, and he was a man of theory as well as practice, who articulated his vision with unusual clarity for someone whose primary mode was the private memo rather than the public speech, was that nations would not unite on the basis of idealism. They would unite on the basis of shared institutions that made unity practically advantageous. You did not ask people to love their neighbours. You arranged things so that their neighbours' economic interests were aligned with their own, and then you created institutions to manage the alignment, and then you deepened the institutions until the alignment became structural, and the reversal of it became more costly than the continuation. He called this process somewhat clinically, but accurately, the transfer of sovereignty by incremental steps. He became the first president of the high authority of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. He resigned in 1955 to found the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, a private organization through which he continued to apply pressure on governments across the continent toward further integration. He had no official position, he had no elected mandate, he was a private citizen with a cognac background and a theory about institutional design that he had spent thirty years testing against the largest events of the twentieth century. He continued to be one of the most influential figures in European politics for the next twenty years. He died in 1979. The European community, soon to become the Union, continued to build on the foundations he had laid. The Maastricht Treaty, the single currency, the enlargement to the East, all of it is downstream of the Schumann Plan, which was downstream of Monet's memo, which was downstream of the insight of a sixteen-year-old from Cognac, who had decided that national borders were a problem to be solved. Now, the parallels with Charlemagne first and most fundamentally the civilizational project. Both men looked at a fragmented Europe, Charlemagne at the post Roman collection of kingdoms and peoples, Monet at the post war collection of traumatized and mutually suspicious nation states, and conceived a project of integration. Both believed with genuine conviction that the fragmentation was not the natural or desirable condition of European civilization, but a historical accident that the right institutional design could correct. Both pursued that project with a consistency and a patience that outlasted the opposition. Second, the relationship between force and legitimacy. Charlemagne used military conquest to create the conditions for administrative unity, and then used administrative unity to consolidate what military conquest had created. Monet could not use military force. He was a man of the post war era, and in any case he was a private citizen without an army, which imposes obvious constraints, but he understood the same fundamental dynamic that durable unity requires both the practical reality of shared institutions and the sense that participation in those institutions is chosen rather than compelled. His entire method was the creation of situations in which the choice to integrate was, practically speaking, more rational than the choice to remain separate. The coercion was economic rather than military, and it was structural rather than direct, but it was coercion in the sense that it made the alternative to integration increasingly costly. Third, the administrative genius. Charlemagne built institutions, the court, the Missy, Dominici, the standardized church, the palace school. That survived him and continued to shape European governance for centuries. Monet built institutions that are still operating, the high authority became the European Commission, the Assembly became the European Parliament. The incremental transfer of sovereignty that he designed is still proceeding through crises and reversals, and a British referendum that he would have considered a temporary setback, as a man whose concept of historical time was not organised around parliamentary cycles. Fourth, the use of religion or its functional equivalent. Charlemagne's integrating ideology was Catholic Christianity, the universal church as the framework within which a universal European civilization was intelligible. Monet's integrating ideology was in a sense economics. The universal market, the common interest in prosperity, as the framework within which a unified Europe was practically achievable. Both men understood that you cannot build durable political structures without an ideological framework that makes the structure feel like more than mere expediency. Charlemagne's framework was God, Monet's was prosperity and peace, different vocabularies for a similar underlying insight. Fifth, the contested legacy. Europe debates Charlemagne still, whether he was a unifier or a conqueror, whether the forced conversion of the Saxons was a civilizational project or a campaign of cultural genocide, whether the Holy Roman Empire was the foundation of Western civilization, or the origin of its most destructive political pathologies. Europe debates the European Union now, whether it is the fulfillment of a democratic ideal or a technocratic cage, whether it protects small nations or subordinates them, whether it has delivered peace or simply managed a new form of hegemony. Both Charlemagne and Monet would find these debates tiresome in similar ways. Both were men who thought the objections were less important than the project, and both built structures that have outlasted the objections while generating new ones. Where do the parallels strain? Charlemagne was a warrior king who personally led armies into battle and whose expansion of Frankish power was directly coterminous with military conquest. Monet never led an army, never held a sword, and built an empire, if we choose to call it that, entirely through the power of institutional design and private persuasion. The means were categorically different. Charlemagne's project was, in the final analysis, an extension of Frankish power in Christian costume. The beneficiary of Carolingian unity was primarily the Frankish dynasty and the Frankish nobility. Monet's project was, or was designed to be, genuinely supranational. The point was precisely that France should not dominate the European project, but that France and Germany and the other members should share sovereignty equally. Whether the practice has always matched the theory is a question I leave to my colleagues in political science, with whom I have lunch occasionally, and who are, on this subject, capable of going on at considerable length. And Charlemagne's violence. I have spoken about Verdun. I have spoken about the forced conversions. Monet's career, so far as the record shows, does not include the ordering of mass executions. The historical and moral comparison is not one of equivalence. It is one of structural rhyme, and the dissonances are as informative as the harmonies. The verdict. And I am aware, as I reach this point, that this is the most genuinely difficult verdict I have delivered in this series, because the comparison is not between a historical figure and a modern figure who are similar as individuals. It is a comparison between two people who were similar in their project, in the audacity of their civilizational ambition and the sophistication of their institutional methods, and very different in almost everything else. Charlemagne and I want to be careful and precise about why, not because Charlemagne was more admirable, he was not more admirable. Monet, by the standards I actually hold for human conduct, was considerably more admirable, his methods were nonviolent, his intentions were internationalist rather than dynastic, and he spent his life building institutions designed to make the wars that had killed tens of millions of Europeans structurally impossible. That is a life well spent, and I say so without reservation. But Charlemagne is the more compelling figure because the scale of the contradiction he embodies is more extreme and more illuminating and more humanly vertiginous to stand beside. Here is a man who could not write his own name, who ordered the execution of thousands of prisoners in a single afternoon, who used the institutional church as an instrument of political control, with a cynicism that his court theologians gently and ineffectually protested, and who built from the fragmented ruin of a post-Roman world something recognizable as the ancestor of every European institution that has since attempted to hold the continent together. He was brutal and brilliant and deeply pious and entirely pragmatic and surprisingly tender toward his children, and catastrophically violent toward his enemies, and he governed for forty six years, and he changed the world in ways that are still, in the most literal possible sense, present in the political architecture. architecture of the continent on which I teach and work and live. I grew up in Kingston upon Thames. We do not in Kingston upon Thames produce Charlemagne. We produce people who cue politely and maintain measured opinions about most things and consider grand civilizational projects slightly presumptuous unless they come with very good planning permission. There is, I confess, a part of me that finds the scale of Charlemagne's ambition, the sheer almost hallucinatory grandiosity of deciding that you are going to reconstitute the Roman Empire in the name of Christ, from a palace in Aachen, somewhere between appalling and magnificent. It is not the kind of ambition I was raised to find appropriate. It is not the kind of ambition that keeps its hands clean. It is the kind of ambition that leaves behind it. Twelve centuries later, the continent I live on, and the university I teach in, and the institutions that, for all their imperfections, have managed to prevent France and Germany from invading each other for eighty years, which by European historical standards is practically miraculous. Jean Monet understood what Charlemagne had started, and he spent his life trying to finish it by better means. That is, if anything, the more rational project. But Charlemagne is the one I cannot stop thinking about the man who tried to write in the dark and could not the man who built an empire and knew somewhere in his seventy odd years of extraordinary life that it would not hold not in the form he had built it didn't hold, it never holds quite and yet here we are Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, born probably 742, died Arken, january twenty eighth, eight fourteen, King of the Franks, King of the Lombards, Emperor of the Romans, Father of Europe, which is a title the European Union formally endorses, and which is, depending on your relationship with European history in general, and Verdon in particular, either an honour or a very complicated irony, still argued about, still invoked, still in every passport, and every open border, in every meeting of finance ministers in Brussels. Faintly, stubbornly, uncomfortably present. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you very much for being here. The Carolingian administrative system is available for your reading pleasure in any good academic library, and I recommend it with no irony whatsoever. It is honestly very good. Good night.