In the summer of 1815, former president John Adams mused in a letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Adams raised the same rhetorical question to other correspondents that same summer, in one case explicitly identifying the recipient of the mystical ordination: the Merovingian king Clovis I (d. 511). Clovis, for Adams, was far from an epitome of enlightened rule: in a letter written that same summer to Dutch émigré François Adriaan Van der Kemp, the former president characterized the king as “a more cruel tyrant than Frederick or Napoleon.”

Adams had referred in print to the general incompetency of the Merovingians as early as 1790. For support, he needed only to consult his personal library, which contained a number of learned volumes detailing the early history of the regnum Francorum: François-Eudes de Mézeray’s Abrégé chronologique de l’histoire de France (1676), Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers’s État de la France (1727–28), Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix (1748), Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s Observations sur l’histoire de France (1765), and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). These writers were by no means unified in their interpretations of early medieval history, including in their relative positions on the question of whether the authority of the Frankish monarchy was constitutionally limited by an equality ostensibly enjoyed by all Franks. Nevertheless, Adams would have found more than a few disapproving, even contemptuous, assessments of Clovis and his successors in those volumes contained within his library. In Boulainvilliers, for instance, Adams would have read of a Clovis who was “a heroic figure, though not a particularly likeable one.” While, in Montesquieu’s words, “Those princes were murderous, unjust and cruel because the whole nation was. If Christianity sometimes seemed to soften them, it was only through the terror that Christianity gives the guilty.”