Ravaillac put an end to Henri IV’s short (he was 57) but tumultuous and dangerous life. Henri de Navarre, who was to become Henri IV, could have died more than 10 times over in circumstances more critical than two stab wounds in a crowded capital street. He lived through several decades of wars in which he physically participated, and even escaped the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

A difficult context in turbulent times

France experienced a succession of dramatic events:

• Eight religious and civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots over 36 years between 1562 and 1598. Massacres on both sides.

• The absence of a direct heir to the throne for successive kings meant that Protestant Henri de Navarre became the legal heir to the throne of France.

• The revolt of the League of Intransigent Catholics, which began in the 1580s and recognized the de Guise family as its leader. It affected much of France, threatened the throne and controlled Paris. The Ligueurs even drove Henri III from Paris in 1588, and even extended to close relatives within the royal family.

• Serial assassinations became the norm, to settle disputes initiated by the king (Henri III against the de Guise League leaders), then in return by his cousins (assassination of Henri III) then that of Henri IV (by a Catholic fanatic).

• It took Henri de Navarre nine years of war to reclaim France and his throne, and the horrors that went with it.

• Continuing suspicion of Henri IV’s conversion to Catholicism

Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 was therefore not an isolated event in an exceptional context. What is more astonishing is that Henri IV, who had gone through unimaginably perilous periods in his life when he could have been killed much more safely while at war, succumbed “stupidly” to two simple stab wounds in the middle of a capital street.

Rising protests, assassination attempts and plots

Between 1594 and 1602, Henri IV escaped several assassination attempts. He was also the target of more or less well-organized plots by the nobility, and sometimes by those closest to him.

Before being loved by the people, Henri IV was one of the most hated kings of his lifetime, especially by the Catholic party, whose effigy was burned and whose name associated with the devil or the Antichrist, as in the fanatical sermons of the Ligueur Jean Boucher. As a result of the daily hammering by Liguer priests during the last War of Religion, there were no fewer than a dozen assassination attempts against him, including the Orléans boatman Pierre Barrière, arrested in Melun (armed with declared intent) on August 27, 1593, who was rolled and burned on the Place du Martroy in Melun. On December 27, 1594, a man named Jean Châtel wounded the King in the face at his mistress’s home in the rue Saint-Honoré.

In 1602, Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron and marshal of France, once close comrades-in-arms of the king, led a conspiracy. Judging that the honors he had received were insufficient, he had drawn closer to Spain and the Duke of Savoy. He brought with him the Protestant Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount de Turenne and Duc de Bouillon. They were betrayed by an adventurer, La Nocle.

Henri IV leads the investigation himself, and, faced with the Marshal’s denials, has him beheaded. The Duc de Bouillon fled, while Charles IX’s bastard son, Charles d’Auvergne, was imprisoned – but released a few months later.

In 1604, Catherine Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, disillusioned mistress of Henri IV, foments a new plot, with her father and once again with Charles d’Auvergne – her half-brother. Denounced by Marguerite de Valois (Henri IV’s first wife), she was sentenced to confinement in a convent, but eventually set free. Initially condemned to death, Charles d’Auvergne was in fact imprisoned for twelve years, and François d’Entragues was placed under house arrest in his own château.

Henri IV was both firm and merciful. He was also a shrewd politician. In 1603, he recalled the Jesuits, banished since 1594, and encouraged the “Catholic renaissance”, notably by protecting the theologian Bérulle.

In 1605, he gave in to the Paris burghers, who had entered into armed sedition over plans to reduce rents on the Hôtel de Ville, and justified himself in the following terms: “Authority does not always consist in pushing things to the limit; you have to look at the time, the people and the subject”.

The beginnings of a war that never came

In 1609, Henri IV intervened in the succession dispute between the Catholic Habsburg emperor and the Protestant German princes, whom he supported, in the succession to Cleves and Juliers. The Prince de Condé’s flight in 1609 to the court of the Infanta Isabel rekindled tensions between Paris and Brussels (controlled by the Spanish Habsburgs). Henri IV, feeling that his army was ready to resume the conflict that had ended ten years earlier, allied himself with the German Protestants of the Evangelical Union. The date of entry into the war was set for May 19, 1610, 5 days after the king’s assassination.

Henri IV decided to lead his army himself. To establish the authority of Marie de Médicis, who would exercise power in his absence, he had the queen crowned at Saint-Denis on May 13, 1610. The Regency Council was made up of fifteen members. The queen, however, did not have the casting vote.

The military campaign was perceived by the King’s opponents as a decision hostile to a monarchy that was the standard-bearer of Catholicism (the Habsburgs), and as a secondary issue in European politics. Moreover, they raised fears of a return to heavy taxation.

The assassination of the King by Ravaillac in front of 11, rue de la Ferronnerie, 75001.

On Friday May 14, at 4:00 pm, Henri IV decided to go to the arsenal to visit Sully, who was ill. Once seated in his carriage, he gave the order to remove the mantelets covering the vehicle’s openings. As the journey to the duke’s residence was short, the king did not consider it necessary to be escorted by the horse guard.

The carriage soon found itself stuck in a traffic jam created by carts carrying hay and barrels of wine.

The situation gave the 32-year-old François Ravaillac, who had been following the carriage from the start, the opportunity to pull himself inside, leaning on a stone bollard with one foot and on the rear wheel with the other, and to plunge his knife repeatedly into the king’s chest. It was in front of the n° 11 rue de la Ferronnerie.

A plaque now stands in the middle of the street at the site of this tragedy, in front of the inn “Au cœur couronné percé d’une flèche”. It features two coats of arms: one representing the Bourbon royal line (3 fleurs-de-lis) and the other that of the Kings of Navarre.

Ravaillac’s assassination of Henri IV was even seen by some as a deliverance, to the extent that rumors of a new St. Bartholomew’s Day spread in the summer of 1610.

This assassination leaves a lot to be desired. There were premonitions that the king himself seemed to have had, and the fact that the conditions of his death had been announced in various letters prior to it. Hence the hypothesis that this was not an isolated individual. Ravaillac had had a chaotic career (chambermaid to a magistrate, then lay brother at the Feuillants convent in Paris). The parliamentarians in charge of the investigation were to steer it in the direction of their Gallican convictions, seeing behind Henri IV’s murderer the hand of their favorite targets: the Jesuits, the Spanish henchmen or the Spaniards themselves. Henriette d’Entragues, her friend the Duc d’Épernon, the Concini couple, devoted to Spain, and former members of the League were all implicated. Ravaillac had certainly belonged to these circles in the past, but even after being tortured for a long time, he gave no names.

François Ravaillac: a life that fades with time

His maternal uncles, Julien and Nicolas Dubreuil, canons at Angoulême Cathedral, taught him to read and write, and instilled in him an early hatred of the Huguenots.

François Ravaillac became a court messenger for a public prosecutor in Angoulême (near La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast). As Angoulême came under the jurisdiction of the Paris Parliament, the future regicide had to travel frequently to the capital. Around 1602, aged 25, he moved to Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for his employer for four years.

A devout believer, Ravaillac gave up the job that assured him a comfortable life in 1606 to join the strict Order of the Feuillants as a lay brother. He was expelled after a few weeks for his strange writings referring to eternal Providence. He tried in vain to join the Society of Jesus on rue Saint Antoine. In the absence of the Father Superior, he could not be accepted.

Destitute, he left Paris and returned to Angoulême. There, he helped his mother obtain a separation from his father, who had squandered most of the family fortune.

To support the family, François Ravaillac became a schoolmaster, teaching catechism to 80 children. Unable to pay his mounting debts, he was sent to prison at the end of 1608.

Haunted by mystical visions since 1606, François Ravaillac seemed psychologically unstable. In the last years of his life, he repeatedly accused himself, in confession, of “intentional homicide”.

The fateful date is fast approaching for both Henri IV and Ravaillac

In the early days of 1609, according to his trial testimony, Ravaillac had a vision calling on him to purge the kingdom of the Antichrist Henri IV. From then on, he felt called to a personal holy war to spread the true word of God. Released from prison, he went up to Paris at Pentecost to convince the king to convert the Huguenots. As the King was absent from the capital, he wandered around for a few days, then returned to Angoulême. He tried again at Christmas 1609, but was unsuccessful. On April 10, 1610, the eve of Easter, he learned of Henri IV’s war plans at a meal at the home of a relative, Hélie Béliard, a former adviser to the king. He interpreted the royal decision to intervene militarily in the succession to the principalities of Cleves and Juliers as the start of a war against the Pope, which he saw as a war against God. He therefore decided to kill the King of France.

Ravaillac under questioning and subsequent quartering

Ravaillac, imprisoned at the Conciergerie, was “questioned” on the morning of May 27, and taken to the Sainte Chapelle around midday. At around 3 p.m., he was extracted from the Sainte Chapelle to the booing of the crowd, who wanted to tear him apart. He was then taken to the forecourt of Notre Dame to beg forgiveness from the King, God and justice. It then took another hour to walk the few hundred meters to the Place de Grève (now the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville), where he received the punishment for regicide: he was drawn and quartered on May 27, 1610, in excruciating agony.

The consequences of his regicide affected the entire Ravaillac family. The family’s assets were seized, and their house in Angoulême was razed to the ground, forbidden to use the land for building. The regicide’s siblings were forced to change their names on pain of death.

His parents were forced into exile. They settled in the isolated hamlet of Rosnay, now part of the commune of Lavigny in Franche-Comté. As Franche-Comté was then part of the Spanish monarchy, they escaped threats. The name Ravaillac gradually changed to Ravaillard and Ravoyard or Rafaillac.

Henri IV and his burial

Henri IV was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis on July 1, 1610. His death plunged the vast majority of his subjects into a grief commensurate with the risk it posed: a return to disorder and war. The image of “Good King Henri”, or “Henri the Great”, gradually took hold in people’s memories. Sully himself contributed to its spread, publishing his “Économies royales” in 1638. Under the Second Restoration (1815-1830), the cult of Henri IV reached its apogee, and continues to this day.

Henri IV, long after his death, makes two appearances in the pages of history.

The French Revolution

The French Revolution did not spare Henri IV. At the July 31, 1793 session of the National Convention, Barère, to celebrate the capture of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792 and to attack the “impure ashes” of tyrants under the pretext of recovering lead from coffins, made a proposal for the royal bodies in the Basilica of Saint-Denis. The decree of August 1, 1793 decided that “the tombs and mausoleums of the former kings, erected in the church of Saint-Denis, in temples and other places, throughout the republic, will be destroyed on August 10”. Dom Germain Poirier, a learned Benedictine of the Saint-Maur congregation, archivist at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, was appointed commissioner to assist with the exhumation.

Dom Poirier was the main eyewitness to the exhumation and desecration of the royal tombs.

In the Bourbon vault, 54 oak coffins lay on iron trestles gnawed by rust. He was present in the crypt from August 6 to 8 during the dismantling of the tombs and some exhumations, then from October 12 to 25, night and day.

On October 12, 1793, Henri IV’s coffin was broken with a hammer and his lead coffin opened with a chisel. According to witnesses: “His body was well preserved, and his facial features perfectly recognizable. He remained in the passageway of the lower chapels, wrapped in his equally well-preserved shroud. Everyone was free to see him until Monday morning, October 14th, when he was carried into the choir at the bottom of the sanctuary steps, where he remained until two o’clock in the afternoon, when he was buried in the Valois cemetery”. Several people took small “relics” (fingernails, locks of beard). The rumor that a Commune delegate took a plaster cast of his face is probably just a legend. Similarly, there is no record of the king’s head having been stolen. On the contrary, all witnesses speak of Henri IV’s body being thrown whole into the mass grave, then covered by those of his descendants.

Return to the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Denis

Under the Second Restoration (1815-1830), Louis XVIII (Louis XVI’s brother), on January 21, 1817 (the anniversary of Louis XVI’s death), had the remains of his predecessors returned to the crypt of the Basilica of St. Denis, recovered from the mass graves after a week’s search and placed in an ossuary, as individual identification was impossible.

Two years earlier, Louis XVIII had had the remains of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who had been buried in the Madeleine cemetery since their execution, reburied during a grandiose celebration on January 21, 1815.

Henri IV in the 20th and 21st centuries

In 1925, an article in the Gazette des Arts presented a mummified skull, then owned by Joseph-Émile Bourdais, as the found head of King Henri IV. In 1999, journalists found this head and commissioned a study that seemed to confirm its authenticity, but this was the start of quarrels (firstly between the heirs Henri de Bourbon and Henri d’Orléans) and doubts among scientists.

In 2010, a study by 19 scientists led by forensic pathologist Dr Philippe Charlier found 30 points of agreement, making the head 99.9% certain to be that of King Henri IV. First controversy in 2010, then second attestation in 2012 (following a DNA test) then second challenge in 2013 following this analysis. To date, it’s a matter of experts’ quarrels, of egos between practitioners. Nothing is certain, until the discovery of the next “scientific element” concerning the supposed skull of Henri IV. This king is truly exceptional, and has been the talk of the town long after his death – right up to the present day.