In the annals of Christendom, the Kingdom of France holds a uniquely privileged position. Known as the Eldest Daughter of the Church, France was considered the cultural center of Western Christianity for centuries throughout the Middle Ages. Its kings, monastics, and theologians have played a pivotal role in the development of Catholicism. The story of France’s ascendancy is fascinating and complex, but it all goes back to a single man—Clovis I, the first Christian King of France, who reigned from 481 to 511.
In those days, France was called Gaul, the name given it by the ancient Romans. Clovis was a Frank, one of the Germanic tribes who had settled along west bank of the Rhine in the waning days of the Roman Empire. At the outset, there is little in the backstory of Clovis that would suggest a future as a pillar of Christian France. Clovis was descended from a long line of warrior-chieftains, battle-hardened brutes whose preferred method of getting things done was by smashing someone’s skull with an axe. Violence ran deep in the blood of the Franks.
Clovis’s dynasty, known as the Merovingians, had risen to power as allies of Rome in the final decades of the Western Roman Empire. Clovis’s father, Childeric, was recognized as a king (rex) among the Franks by the Romans—though in the chaotic world of pagan Franks and shifting alliances of the late Roman Empire, his power was certainly tenuous. Clovis’s grandfather, Merovech—from whom the Merovingians were named—had won renown fighting with the Romans in their victory over Attila the Hun at the Battle of Châlons in 451. Clovis was thus no stranger to the life of war. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that he had already held military command in a mixed Romano-Frankish army beside his father before he had turned fifteen.
It was in his fifteenth year—around 481—that Clovis’s father Childeric died, and Clovis was proclaimed rex of the Salian Franks, ruling from the Salian capital of Tournai. Gaul at the time was a scattered mess of peoples and kingdoms: the north divided between the Salian and Ripuarian Franks, the Visigoths entrenched in the south, the Alemanni and Burgundians in the east, and an old Roman governor named Syagrius clinging to power in the region of Soissons, what is now greater Paris. In addition to this, Clovis’s own family was rent by division, with a legion of uncles, cousins, and rival chieftains vying for power. With scarcely a thousand warriors under his command, the young king’s future prospects seemed precarious.
Clovis, however, faced this challenge with remarkable tactfulness that would serve him well throughout his reign. He cobbled together an alliance of relatives by convincing them that their interests would be better served uniting against outside enemies rather than squabbling amongst themselves. With his forces strengthened, Clovis directed the Frankish warrior-energy against the Roman Syagrius, ruler of Soissons. As the Western Empire had fallen in 476, Syagrius represented the last vestige of Roman power in the west, ruling a rump state that had survived Rome’s collapse. Clovis and his alliance proved triumphant; Syagrius was defeated and fled, yielding Soissons to the Franks. With Salian power now extended down into what is now northern France, Clovis had greatly improved his standing and demonstrated that he was a force to be reckoned with.
Clovis proved himself adept at power politics, continuing to grow his territory by playing his enemies off against one another and then eliminating them when their usefulness ran out—and in this he was ruthless. Clovis once convinced a rival prince to murder his own father so the two could split up the wealth—and then, once the deed had been done, Clovis murdered the son in turn. As Clovis grew, he went from strength to strength with the ruthless efficiency of a mafia boss, eliminating his rivals one by one. Even his relatives who had helped him defeat Syagrius were eventually liquidated.
As Clovis’s profile grew, he sought a wife to secure his dynasty and was able to negotiate a union with Clotilde, daughter of the King of Burgundy, as part of a military alliance. Clotilde, however, was a devout Christian, and her marriage to Clovis in 493 introduced Christianity into the Frankish court. The relational dynamic between the pious Burgundian princess and the brutal Frankish king must have been tense at times. Clotilde had prevailed upon Clovis to allow their firstborn son to be baptized, but when the child died shortly thereafter, he exploded in anger, blaming the ritual and swearing he’d never allow another of his children near the magical Christian water. It was only with great reluctance that she convinced him to allow his second son to be brought to the sacred font. The second son, Chlodomer, survived, but Clovis was still skeptical of the new faith.
This changed in 496 when Clovis led his Franks in battle against the Alemanni, the savage pagan tribe who lived along the Rhine near what is now the German-Belgian border. The Franks and Alemanni clashed at a place called Tolbiac, near the modern German town of Zülpich. The battle began to go poorly for Clovis, and seeing his Franks being pushed back and slain all around him, in desperation he cried out to the Christian God for assistance. Clovis’s biographer Gregory of Tours relates that Clovis prayed, invoking Christ as the God of his wife:
O Jesus Christ, you who as Clotilde tells me are the son of the Living God, you who give succor to those who are in danger, and victory to those accorded who hope in Thee, I seek the glory of devotion with your assistance: If you give me victory over these enemies, and if I experience the miracles that the people committed to your name say they have had, I believe in you, and I will be baptized in your name. Indeed, I invoked my gods, and, as I am experiencing, they failed to help me, which makes me believe that they are endowed with no powers, that they do not come to the aid of those who serve. It’s to you I cry now, I want to believe in you if only I may be saved from my opponents. (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, Book II)
This is undoubtedly a pious paraphrase, as it’s unlikely the rustic Frankish war chief spoke with such impassioned eloquence. Still, we may presume the content, if not the form, of the prayer is recorded accurately, and the Lord heeded his cry. No sooner had Clovis prayed to Christ than the Alemanni king was suddenly struck down with a battle-axe; the Alemanni were thrown into disorder, allowing Clovis’s troops to rally and rout them. The Battle of Tolbiac became one of Clovis’s most glorious victories.
Clovis was not a man of many virtues, but he knew the power of the divine when he saw it, and the victory at Tolbiac convinced him that the Christian faith was true. He arranged to be baptized along with three thousands of his warriors at Reims by the hand of its bishop, St. Remigius, on Christmas Day. The Frankish histories tell us it was a festive occasion—the city of Reims was decorated lavishly in white banners as the king and his men progressed up the main thoroughfare to the church for the sacred rite. (There is some disagreement about when the ceremony occurred; the traditional date is 496, while modern historians prefer 506 or even 508.) As the king approached the font to renounce the worship of Frankish idols, Bishop Remigius memorably told him, “Bow thy head…adore which thou hast burned, and burn what thou has adored!” (The Chronicle of St. Denis, I.18-19, 23).
There is a charming legend about the baptism of Clovis, which tells us that, in the haste to accommodate the king and the thousands seeking baptism, St. Remigius had forgotten to bring the holy chrism needed for the baptism rite. But at the moment when the holy chrism was required, a dove flew into the church, carrying a glass vial of oil in its talons. This sacred vessel and its contents were known as the Sainte Ampoule (“Holy Vial”); this sacred relic was used in the coronation of every French monarch from at least 1131 (it’s first attestation) to the coronation of the ill-fated Louis XVI in 1775.
After the baptism of Clovis, the Frankish people embraced Christianity eagerly. This was no doubt in part due to the good example of holy men and women like Remigius and Clotilde, but it can also be attributed to the intense tribal loyalties of the Franks, who felt duty-bound to follow their chieftain wherever he led them, both in matters of warfare and religion. The Franks thus began their transition towards Christianity under the firm hand of King Clovis and his saintly wife.
The latter years of Clovis’s reign thus saw a middling progress towards a more Christian society. In 507 he came to the aid of the Christians of southern Gaul who were suffering under the yoke of the Visigoths, who were Arians. Clovis’s victory over the Visigoths extended his power to the shadows of the Pyrenees and led Clovis to consider himself a kind of protector and liberator of the Christians of western Europe.
In deliberate imitation of Emperor Constantine—who had also experienced a battlefield conversion—Clovis summoned an ecclesiastical council to establish the role of the Church within his domains. The First Council of Orleans, summoned in 511, regularized the relationship of the Church with the throne, and established the basic privileges of the Church which could not be thwarted by the state. Most importantly, the Clovis’s Council of Orleans ordained that all the varied peoples united under his reign should be treated equally before the laws of Church and state—that Alemanni, Visigoths, Romans, and Franks should all be considered one. In mandating this legal equality for all Frankish subjects, Clovis was laying the foundations of the medieval kingdom of France.
Clovis died in 511, the same year the Council of Orleans crowned the achievements of his reign. As a monarch, Clovis was successful, but how can we assess him as a Christian? It is questionable to what degree Clovis ever understood the theological subtleties of the new religion he had adopted. Gregory of Tours tells us that once, when St. Remigius was explaining the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ to Clovis, the king grasped his battle-axe and cried out, “If I had been there with my Franks, I would have revenged his wrongs!”
His relentless and often savage warfare against his rivals continued unabated after his conversion. Grace builds on nature, and there’s only so much progress a man with the temperament and upbringing of Clovis could be expected to make. Whatever he lacked, he had the sense to recognize a good thing when he saw it and lend his support to the new faith.
Clovis did not attain sainthood in this life, but he did establish the foundations of Christian culture in France in such a way that the holiness of others might be made possible through the society he constructed—in this endeavor he was triumphant.
Clovis’s success can be seen in the longevity of his name among the kings of France; as the French language developed, the C was eventually dropped from Clovis, becoming Louis, the name borne by eighteen French monarchs, universally identifiable as the most French of all names. Such is the lasting legacy of this dauntless Frankish warrior-king.
Image from Wikipedia
