For the western Frankish kingdom, Odo's reign initiated the era of principalities: hegemonies over cultural or ethnic entities which revived the former territorial units making up the regnum Francorum. Sources from north of the Loire largely ignore what was happening in the south: the Annales of Flodoard contain only a few scattered references to southern events, mainly during Radulf's reign. Gascony soon became a 'national' principality, in which a culturally and linguistically homogeneous population was subject only to the authority of native chieftains. The tenth century was the age of the principalities: still in formation in 900, they were in decline before 1000. Catalonia in the second half of the tenth century does, however, answer to the definition of a territorial principality. The decades around the millennium were a turning point in the history of the southern principalities. The southern princes thus forcibly declared an independence hitherto restrained by their loyalty to the Carolingian order.

The tenth century was crucial in the evolution of the west Frankish kingdom. Whereas in 898 its future was uncertain, with either reabsorption into a larger empire or disintegration into smaller units clearly possible, by 898 it was firmly on the map, albeit with ill-defined frontiers and a debatable political character. In 898, the wind seemed set fair for Charles the Simple. If the victory at Chartres did not put an end to invasions on west Frankish soil, it did create a substantial breathing space. Immediately Charles determined to exploit this by attempting to reverse the 880 restoration of Lotharingia to the east Frankish crown. The west Frankish realm was riven by Carolingian pretensions in Lotharingia. Thereupon a council of the west Frankish aristocrats, guided by Adalbero of Rheims, rejected the claims of Charles of Lotharingia to the throne, and elected Hugh Capet. Any history of the west Frankish kingdom inevitably highlights the king's relations with his princes.

Charles the Fat had been able to reunite the Carolingian kingdoms and, apart from Provence, had exercised direct rule over all of them. Unlike Charles, who had accepted the west Frankish crown offered him in 885, Arnulf of Carinthia rejected a corresponding offer from the west Frankish magnates. Franconia and Lotharingia were former royal provinces, whose political organisation stemmed from the Carolingians; Suabia, Bavaria and Saxony were ethnically defined regions. The phrase Francia et Saxonia, used by Otto I and later by Widukind of Corvey and Adalbert of Magdeburg, corresponds to the actual structure of the Reich. Instead of the device renovatio imperii Romanorum used by Otto III Henry adopted the formula renovatio regni Francorum, which had already been used on the imperial bulls of Louis the Pious, Charles III, Arnulf and Wido of Spoleto. Acomparison of the Rheims electoral dispute of 989-97 with that of 940-48 shows how France and the Ottonian Reich had developed away from each other.