Eight hundred years of royal blood began with a single ceremony. On July 3, 987, Hugh Capet knelt before the Archbishop of Reims and rose as King of France, launching the Capetian dynasty that would hold the French throne, in one branch or another, until 1792. Hugh was no titan at the moment of his crowning: he controlled little land beyond the Île-de-France, and powerful regional lords dwarfed him in wealth. Yet his political cunning held the fractured kingdom together, and the habit he started of crowning his heir during his own lifetime guaranteed an unbroken succession. His line produced Louis IX (Saint Louis), Philip II Augustus, and eventually the Bourbon kings who built Versailles and shaped the modern European state system. The Capetians fused French royal identity with the Catholic Church, centralized power against feudal fragmentation, and defined what it meant for a king to rule by divine right, ideas that echoed from Paris to every court in Europe and still reverberate in debates about sovereignty and nationhood today.