| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Robert Morrissey. Charlemagne and France: A Thousand Years of Mythology. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. (Laura Shannon Series in French Medieval Studies.) Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2003. Pp. xxi, 391. $40.00.
In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte, frustrated by the clergy negotiating with him on behalf of the pope, angrily exploded "You wish to treat me as if I were Louis le Débonnaire. Do not confuse the son with the father ... I am Charlemagne!" In a rich and provocative study that shows his mastery of medieval and modern historiography and literature, Robert Morrissey traces the complex and contradictory place of the eighth-century Frankish king and emperor in French ideology and imagination from the ninth century to the nineteenth, when a new emperor could claim in word and deed to bring the legendary ruler to life. The book, ably translated by Catherine Tihanyi, is at once a history of French political ideology and a cautionary tale about the uses and abuses of the past.	1
Throughout the study, Morrissey locates discourses at the juncture of history, myth, and literature that, even as they attempt to instrumentalize Charlemagne for a present, were constrained by the weight of competing traditions, individual intentions, and contemporary circumstances. The result, from the terse accounts of the Royal Frankish Annales and the anecdotes of Notker to the scholarship of Gaston Paris and the poetry of Victor Hugo, is a king who is in turn avenging conqueror, civilizing founder of schools, the legislator king, the guarantor or ruler of the nobility, and the protector of the French people, images constantly contested across a thousand years of French history.	. . .

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