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Charlemange fights the same war to unify the country after Peppin divides it, and just keeps going with the conquering, like his father and grandfather. He ends up invading Northern Italy at the behest of the Pope and conquering it. Eventually, the Pope, in an attempt to both bribe and control him, surprises him by crowning him "Holy Roman Emperor." This rather pissed him off, since he didn't want the precident of being beholden to the Church for power.

This is also important. Rulership of the Franks and the title, "Holy Roman Emperor" are seperate entities. The first is through birth and conquest. The second is through election by the Pope.

So they follow the combined patterns for a bit. 1. Divide the Empire. 2. The sons fight it out. 3. The "winner" gets to be elected Holy Roman Emperor, which later generations take increasingly more seriously as subsequent rulers take Catholicism more seriously. Sometimes they fail to conquer all of their brothers, and the Pope just picks the one most useful to him.

There was always a cultural split between Neutria and Austrasia. Neustria was a bit more Romanized than Austrasia, which is the kernal of what will one day be Germany. The Aquitaine and the ex-Visigoth kingdom were heavily Romanized with a teutonic veneer brought by the conquerors. The Western bits tended to get lumped in with Neustria over time, pulling the Neutrian based Kings toward a Latinized form of Frankish. (Eventually they moved the capital from Soissons to Paris, a way more central location if you are thinking of France as your kingdom and not Neustria). Meanwhile, the Austrasian section of the Empire stayed Teutonic, since the areas they conquered were Germanic or Slavic. The third, most Southerly section, stayed mostly Italian. The Frankish veneer was so thin here, that it had a lot less impact. (However, as a former part of the HRE, they were libal to invasion from other bits of the HRE throughout the next millenia or so on the least pretext). Eventually the bits North of the Alps got sucked into the wars between the East and west half of the Frankish Empire. This tug of war continued into the Modern Era in the form of various wars between France and Germany over ownership of Alsace/Lorraine. By the time of Charlemagne's grandsons, people in the Western and Eastern bit needed translators to talk to each other. (People in the North and South of the Western bit also had a hard time communicating, but generally managed)).

The Pope tended to favor the Easterners over time, because they were more likely to help the Pope without invading and demanding stuff in return. They were also generally less likely to argue about Papal perogatives at this early stage. After awhile, crowning the Eastern guy Emperor became a rubber stamp and ceased to personally involve the Pope as much.

Thus is France born as seperate from the Eastern half of the empire, which over time became the Holy Roman Empire.