by the Holy Roman Empire to reunify the old Frankish Empire by conquering France. Since the name Francia Orientalis had disappeared, there arose the habit to refer to Francia Occidentalis as Francia only, from which the word France is derived. The French state has been in continuous existence since 843 (except for a brief interruption in 885–887), with an unbroken line of heads of states since the first king of Francia Occidentalis (Charles the Bald) to the current president of the French Republic (Emmanuel Macron). Notably, in German, France is still called Frankreich, which literally means "Reich (empire) of the Franks". In order to distinguish it from the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne, France is called Frankreich, while the Frankish Empire is called Frankenreich. The name of the Franks itself is said to come from the Proto-Germanic word *frankon which means "javelin, lance". Another proposed etymology is that Frank means "the free men", based on the fact that the word frank meant "free" in the ancient Germanic languages. However, rather than the ethnic name of the Franks coming from the word frank ("free"), it is more probable that the word frank ("free") comes from the ethnic name of the Franks, the connection being that only the Franks, as the conquering class, had the status of freemen. In a tradition going back to the 7th-century Chronicle of Fredegar, the name of the Franks itself is taken from Francio, one of the Germanic kings of Sicambri, c. 61 BCE, whose dominion extended all along those lands immediately joining the west-bank of the Rhine River, as far as Strasbourg and Belgium. This nation is also explicitly mentioned by Julius Caesar in his Notebooks on the Gallic War (Commentarii de Bello Gallico). The name of the former French currency, the franc, comes from the words engraved on the coins of the Frankish King, Rex Francorum, meaning "King of the Franks" or "Roi des Francs" in French. France In most of the Romance languages, France is known by the word "France" or any of its derivatives, for example Francia in Italian and Spanish. This is also the origin of its name in English, "France", which derived from Old French. In most of the Germanic languages (though notably not in English), France is known as the historical "Land of the Franks", for example Frankreich (Reich of the Franks) in German, Frankrijk (Rijk of the Franks) in Dutch,