Clovis: who he was, and why France claims him

A king of the Franks, not a king of France. Around 481 Clovis succeeded his father Childeric, whose tomb, found at Tournai in 1653, was overflowing with gold and weapons. Gaul at the time was shared out between Visigoths, Burgundians, still-Roman cities and Frankish kingdoms. Clovis held the one at Tournai. Gregory of Tours gives him thirty years of reign and forty-five years of life: the subtraction makes him king at about fifteen.

The rest is conquest. In the fifth year of his reign he beat at Soissons the man Gregory, in Brehaut’s English, calls “Siagrius, king of the Romans”. He then eliminated the other Frankish kings: his relatives, the chronicler specifies, by the axe or by cunning. In 507 he crushed Alaric II’s Visigoths at Vouillé and carried off the treasure of Toulouse. The next year, at Tours, letters from the emperor Anastasius brought him the purple in the basilica of Saint-Martin. He set his seat at Paris.

In July 511 he summoned the bishops of his kingdom to Orléans: thirty-two came, half the sees. This is a king calling a council, and it is his own questions the bishops deal with. That same year Clovis died in Paris, buried in the basilica of the Holy Apostles he had built with Clotilde. His four sons divided the kingdom.

The oldest document that carries his name is not a battle account: it is a letter. Remigius, bishop of Reims, congratulates a young king who has just taken Belgica Secunda, a Roman province, in hand, and slips him his advice: honour your bishops, relieve those who suffer. The letter is dated 481 or 486. Not a word about the baptism.

The only contemporary text that mentions it is another letter, from Avitus, bishop of Vienne, among the Burgundians. He congratulates Clovis, writes that his faith is everyone’s victory, and mentions a Christmas day. He does not give the year.

All the rest (Clotilde, the vow made during the battle against the Alamanni, the scene at the font, the thousands of warriors baptised afterwards) comes from the Histories of Gregory of Tours, born in 539, consecrated bishop of Tours in 573, writing in the last decades of the sixth century. Nearly a hundred years later. His Clovis is one of God’s chosen, a new Constantine, novus Constantinus in his Latin, who thrashes Arian kings: a constructed narrative, not a set of minutes.

Look for the year in Gregory: it is not there. He unrolls the whole scene (the white hangings, the candles, Remigius’s line at the edge of the font) without ever dating it, and without giving it any regnal year. The 496 carved everywhere is not his: it is an editors’ calculation, which Guizot slips into his French translation inside square brackets.

Look instead at how he counts: the fifth year of the reign for Soissons, the tenth for the war against the people of Tongres, the twenty-fifth just before Vouillé. Round numbers, a rhythm, not a calendar. Levillain argued for 498 or 499 against 496, Michel Sot sums up the historians’ range as an uncertain year between 496 and 509, and even the place has been disputed. What a contemporary gives us comes down to this: a Christmas day, with no year.

He was not converted “at Tolbiac”. Gregory never says where the battle against the Alamanni was fought. Tolbiac appears only seven chapters later, for another king, wounded in the knee.

The dove and the holy ampulla do not exist in the sixth century. They arrive in the ninth, from the pen of Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, in a Life of Saint Remigius: the chrism is missing, and a dove brings it down from heaven. That oil would serve to anoint the kings of France.

“First king of France” is a title given after the fact. Clovis ruled over Franks and Gallo-Romans, not over France: the word does not exist, and his kingdom was carved up between his sons the moment he died.

Nor is Salic law “his” code. An old Roman military regulation, or a collection compiled under Clovis? Étienne Renard puts the question in the very title of his study, and the origin of the Pactus legis Salicae was still disputed when he wrote it.

Reims above all: that is where the kings of France would be anointed, with the oil of the holy ampulla, and that is where the baptism gets its political charge.

In 1996 the Republic, the Church and the universities commemorated at Reims the fifteen hundredth anniversary of a baptism whose year nobody knows. The invitation to the press conference asserted that this baptism laid the foundations of a new state, France. The commemoration caused argument, and historians took the chance to set out again what the texts say, and what they do not.