France
France's single scene provides the play's one uncomplicated example of love without calculation - his choice to marry Cordelia the instant she has nothing left to offer by any worldly measure stands as the clearest possible contrast to the transactional love-test that opens the play.
Appears In
Who is France?
The King of France appears only in the play's opening scene, one of two suitors present for Cordelia's hand when Lear's love-test goes disastrously wrong. Where the Duke of Burgundy withdraws his suit the instant Cordelia's dowry is revoked - his interest in her having apparently extended only as far as her inheritance - France does the opposite, and does it immediately, without calculation: he takes her as his queen with nothing to gain by any ordinary reckoning, precisely because her refusal to flatter her father has revealed a worth no dowry could have priced in the first place.
His declaration is brief but absolute: Cordelia, he says, is 'most rich, being poor; / Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised,' and he will have her exactly as she stands, stripped of favour and fortune both. It is the one moment in the play's first scene where love is offered without any transaction attached to it at all, a quiet rebuke to everything Lear's ceremony has just demonstrated about how love is usually measured.
France departs from the play almost as quickly as he arrives, called back to his own kingdom on urgent business before the invasion he lends to Cordelia's cause - the army that eventually lands at Dover to attempt Lear's rescue arrives under Cordelia's banner rather than his own presence, though the forces are understood to be his. He is never seen again, his single scene enough to establish, permanently, what real love actually costs and what it actually looks like when offered honestly.
Motivation
France is motivated purely by what he perceives in Cordelia's character in the moment of her disinheritance - her honesty and the injustice of her father's rage move him to claim her precisely because she has been stripped of everything a lesser suitor would have required.
Personality
France's brief appearance establishes him as a man who reads character rather than circumstance - he sees in Cordelia's plain refusal to flatter exactly the quality Lear has just furiously rejected, and acts on that perception without hesitation or negotiation. His decisiveness in claiming her the instant she is disinherited is the play's clearest demonstration of love uncomplicated by advantage.