I've just finished reading Chris Wickham's Inheritance of Rome, which while I found it a tricky read, was exceptional in the breadth of detail.
However, one thing that slightly irked me is that he simply states, when talking about the 11th century, that "we can call it France now", and for that matter he said the same thing about East Francia suddenly becoming Germany.
Earlier on in the book he makes it absolutely clear why it became West Francia / East Francia instead of Gaul etc, but I'm left wondering why the shift in the 11th century.
Is it simply (in the case of West Francia) that by this point people were naturally abbreviating to France?
With East Francia I'm aware that the region was known as various things previously such as Germania, but why the sudden (or maybe it wasn't sudden?) switch away from East Francia back to Germany?
Was there an intentional break from the Frankish/Carolingian world for some reason?
Thanks,
Zebra.
The short answer: it didn't.
The long answer: it couldn't, because it was never West Francia in the first place. While the word Francia and variations are found in the Early Middle ages, it's not really used in a formal sense to mean the kingdom. Charlemagne was 'King of the Franks' after all, not 'King of Francia'. West and East Francia were never used as terms in the early Middle ages for the divided Carolingian Kingdom after 841 - they're entirely the invention of modern historians. (From memory when chroniclers do refer to them they talk about 'kingdom of Charles [the Bald]' for West Francia or the 'kingdom of Louis [the German]' for East Francia.) The reason Chris Wickham (and practically every other medievalist) continues to use them is that calling these kingdoms 'France' or 'Germany' in the ninth century is incredibly anachronistic - they saw themselves as the eastern and western halves of a single whole (albeit a whole which was incessantly at war with itself). This is borne out by the (brief) reunion of the kingdoms under Charles the Fat from 884-888. By the beginning of the eleventh century, this isn't the case anymore - it's clear to everyone that these were two separate kingdoms, although it was remembered that they had common roots. There is a clear link to the later Kingdom of France and the German Empire/HRE, and so it becomes easier to justify just calling them 'France' and 'Germany'.
So that's the why. The when is trickier, and you'll notice I kinda skipped very quickly from 888 to the eleventh century. It's very difficult to put an exact date on it, to be honest, and most historians will usually fudge it one way or another, often using dynastic changes as useful turning points - the accessions of Odo (888) or Hugh Capet (986) in West Francia/France or the accessions of Henry I (919) or Conrad II (1024) in East Francia/Germany. The real question is when in the tenth century these kingdoms stopped being 'Carolingian' and started being 'medieval' (or 'feudal'). Which means you need to decide what exactly made the Carolingians so 'Carolingian'.
Obviously this, like most attempts at periodisation (hello Fall of the Roman Empire!), gets very messy very quickly. The 'post-Carolingian' era (very roughly 888 - c. 1050) is a hot area of research at the moment, but the fundamental questions are no closer to being resolved. Chris talks about quite a few of the (often pretty radical) changes going on during this period in the final few chapters of Inheritance, but sort of brushes it off saying 'it's really complicated and to follow through properly you need to go way past 1000, so we're just going to stop here'. Honestly, his approach is probably that which most other historians would take too - whenever you get a convenient break in your book/article/whatever, switch over to the other one, because there's no right answer on exactly when!