th€ Whys anb Ways

o~ WRltlnCj a BIOCjRaphy:
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the Case or Saint louls*

JACQUES LE GOFF

a ftera period of disfavor, we are now witnessing a revival of the

historical biography, particularly in France. There are at least
two reasons for this historiographic phenomenon. The first is
related to the evolution of historical studies. For the last fifty years, be-
cause of their affiliation with the social sciences, historical studies have
dealt primarily with abstract ideas. Hostile to events, the majority of
historians have addressed more profound levels of historical development:
beneath the rapid and superficial pace of the succession of events they
have sought to examine both the recurrence of social and economic cir-
cumstances (basing their work on the model of the history of prices),
and also extremely slow structural evolution. The latter had led Fernand
Braudel to refer to "long duration; a concept which was - and remains-
rich in significance, and of a "nearly immobile history;' a more difficult
concept, for there is no such thing as immobile history; history always
signifies movement and change. The historian may proceed as though
he were stopping time to gain insight into a historical system, but this
should only be a methodological device to locate the dynamics of histo-
ry within the structures themselves.

Exemplaria 1.1. March 1989, '"Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY
 208 WRltlnq a BloqRaphy

At these two levels of circumstance (conjoncture) and structure, the in-

dividual who lives but the brief duration of his own lifetime disappears
into society and historical systems as a whole. In the various categories
of history where more than factual history is recorded, historians have
attached only secondary importance to the individual; economic history,
history of institutions and ideologies, and even social history have not
necessarily touched upon men as individuals. In Fernand Braudel's ma-
jor work on the Mediterranean world at the time of Philip II, Philip is
but an abstract point of reference, whereas the true hero is the Mediter-
ranean. Of course, the imagination of the historian can transform an
alluring and cherished sea into a being- as Michelet transformed France,
Michelet who thought that only Man could have a history and not merely
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annals behind him: "She possessed annals but lacked history .... First
of all, I perceived her as a soul and a being."
Thus the first reason for this renewed interest in the biographical form
is a need to rediscover the living, the concrete, the terrestrial in history.
And the historian marked by the Annales school will find that the works
of its founders bear witness to this trend, for it is not quite true that the
Annales school ignored biography completely. There is Lucien Febvre, who
wrote a study of Luther, perhaps not following the lines of a biography,
but certainly producing a portrait: "If we can truly understand in depth
a figure such as Luther or Calvin, if we can comprehend the faith and
the intensity of the religious sentiment which burned within them, if we
may reconstruct behind their words the emotions which moved them,
the ideas that motivated them ... ?' Then there is Marc Bloch: "Behind
the perceptible features of a landscape, tools or machines, behind the
texts that appear the most reserved and the institutions that seem to be
so completely detached from those who founded them, are men, and it
is them that History must grasp. He who is incapable of doing so will
never be anything better than a laborer of erudition. A good historian
resembles the ogre in legends of old: where he smells human flesh, he
knows that there is his game:'
And when he writes that "the subject of history is by definition man:'
he goes further, adding "Let us say rather, men." And when Lucien Febvre
remarks, "Not man again, never man:' he does not wish to exclude the
individual from history, but that abstract idea of man - the universal man,
perpetual and unchanging, of theologians and philosophers. Fustel de
Coulanges's declaration that "history is the science of human societies"
was criticized by Marc Bloch who remarked: "This is perhaps an excessive
reduction of the individual's role in history:' and in one sentence
 Jacques le Cjo~~ 209

he distinguishes the historian from the sociologist: "men in society and

societies are not two exactly equivalent notions:'
The other consideration that may lead the historian of today towards
the biographic form stems from the manner in which he sees history
developing before his eyes. Never before has the history of states, na-
tions and peoples been so dependent on individual leaders; whether presi-
dent, prime minister, or first secretary, the heads of state in western
democracies as well as in communist countries and in the third world
seem to hold the reins of power in their hands. One is even tempted to
compare the history of science to a list of Nobel Prize winners. In every
field we are living in an era of stars, and this is true also for the writing
of history. Even prehistory has its own stars, and the anonymous Pithecan-
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thropus and Sinanthropus have faded into the background while Lucy
has risen to stardom.
This vogue may bring about the revival of the traditional biography,
but this should not mean digging up the very same individual, resurrec-
ting him only to portray him as a corpse. The historical biography must
turn away from the traditional historical biography - anachronistic,
rhetorical, superficial, anecdotal (although there are anecdotes concern-
ing historical characters that have proven to be illuminating, such as the
medieval exempla). The traditional form of biography smothers the hero
in his milieus. The present abundance of published biographies often
distresses me, either because their authors resemble those emigres after
the French Revolution "who had forgotten nothing and learned nothing:'
or because they drown the reality of their hero by blindly and clumsily
applying to him or her formulas borrowed from trendy sciences:
psychoanalysis, semiotics, sociobiology and others. Serious though they
may be in the hands of genuine scholars, these sciences are but an illu-
sion when employed by snobs and mediocre epigones, especially when
applied to historical matters.
The new historical biography should be aware of what sociology, the
communication sciences, the history of mentalities (histoire des mentalites),
political science, and other social sciences have contributed, as well as
the new directions taken by today's historians in order to understand and
explain the individual in general and great men in particular in the con-
text of history. Max Weber's theories, for example - the charismatic
authority, the role of the symbolic in power and the diffusion of images,
the structure of kinship, the perception of the individual, relations bet-
ween the public and the private - all these represent a wealth of new sub-
jects likely to transform the central issues dealt with in the biogra-
 210 WQltlnq a BloqRaphy

phy. A historical character represents a "role!' The historian-biographer

must study and present his hero in the context of his role within the society
in which he lives and interacts. A great number of characters likely to
become the object of a biography hold a predominant role in a particular
field of history: technology, economy, religion, art, culture, or war. Some
have even played several roles successively or simultaneously. But for the
most part those who have attracted the attention of historians have been
in one way or another what we would call statesmen. The revival of the
biographic form coincides with a revival of political history. Basically,
we may define the new approach to political history as a shift of interest
from what the European and American historiography of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries termed politics towards what we call today political
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power (in French from "La politique" to "Ie politique") - in other words,
the history of the power in history. The biography of a statesman would
therefore be in great part a study of his relations with political power
as a structure.
It seems to me that writing a biography today implies taking a stand
as well in regard to the much debated ways of writing history- first and
foremost in regard to narrative history. It appears for the most part that
narrative history is a thing of the past. Recounting history remains,
however, not only appropriate but in certain cases even necessary, as in
the field of education and popularization. This depends on the historical
genre adopted, and it seems to me that biography as well calls for a cer-
tain amount of narrative. I am at work now on a book that will relate
the life of Saint Louis from birth until death and, if I may dare to call
this part of his lifetime, until his canonization 27 years after his death.
The duration of a human being's existence - and all the more so when
we are dealing with a great figure - is a division of time, a measurement
of history. There is a certain level or rhythm of history where a life span
and, within this life, the period of reign is significant. Saint Louis was
born in the year of the Bouvines' victory, the great victory of his grand-
father, Philip Augustus, the first "national" French victory, but also three
years after Frederick II, the other great European figure of the thirteenth
century, became king of Germany; two years after the battle of Las Navas
de Tolosa, which ruined the Muslim domination in Spain, one year before
the Fourth Lateran Council, which decided important religious reforms,
the Magna Carta - the foundation of contractual monarchy in England-
the capture of Peking by Gengis Khan, the recognition of Hiltutmish
as sultan of Delhi by the calif of Bagdad, and so on.
 Jacques le 40~~ 211

His death is the event that marked the year 1270. The year of his canoni-
zation, 1297, was that of an important political crisis in England. In the
interval between his death and his canonization, Marco Polo went to India
and to China, and the Sicilian Vespers put an end to the French presence
in Sicily. The Helvetian Confederation was born, and the fall of Acre
marked the end of the Christian state in the Holy Land. These events
are to various degrees only remotely related to Saint Louis, but they are
not, in my opinion, simply points of reference. They enable the historian
to situate the hero within a context, and to put his life into proportion.
Before concentrating on the figure or on a given moment in the develop-
ment and study of his life, a historian must place the figure at a distance
in a historical perspective. The historian is today better equipped to make
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use of various lapses of time and duration in history. How better to apply
this knowledge than to a human life? And naturally, one must situate
the hero as well in regard to the long and intermediate duration of deep
structures in history. Saint Louis lived through the culminating point
of the economic expansion in the medieval western world, and the be-
ginning of the reversal of this tendency in the years 1260-1270-what
we traditionally call the "crisis:' a term given to various interpretations
and increasingly in need of clarification. He lived through the greatest
period of the construction of the monuments of the Gothic Age, amidst
cathedrals in the making. He witnessed the triumph of the scholastic
universities, the spectacular expansion of the mendicant orders, the great
changes in penance sanctioned by the decision of the Fourth Lateran
Council concerning the annual private confession. He lived through the
era of confession with its double character of liberation and inquisition,
through the efforts of Purgatory to find itself a place between Hell and
Paradise in the landscape of the Christian life after death.
To tell the story, then, of a life in its chronological setting- an enter-
prise that to my great surprise a large number of historians seem to un-
dertake without the slightest fear. Yet is there any task more difficult for
the historian? Within the limits of narrative, I can see two major pit-
falls. One is the tendency to fill in the gaps. For there are always parts
of an existence where information is lacking, even in the life of a famous
figure such as Saint Louis. One must write a biography which leaves
in these blanks, these holes, all part of a revealing silence in the cultural
makeup and mentality of an era. It is not the true and complete life of
Saint Louis that the historian can and should write. It is but a vain illu-
sion to strive for a complete resurrection of the figure. The biography,
 212 W~ltlnq a Bloq~aphy

at this inevitable stage of a life story retold, is a good lesson in precision,

modesty, reserve and self-discipline for the historian. What he can and
should write on are those parts of a life whose corresponding documents
have left their mark. A biography implies (and this will be the subject
of the second part of my forthcoming book) the study of the historical
writings on Saint Louis's reputation, what his contemporaries considered,
according to a term whispered in my ear by Peter Brown, memorable in
him. Note must be made as well of what time has destroyed and we know
to have existed, although there is nothing to he done in regard to infor-
mation we are not aware of. The second pitfall of the biographic nar-
rative and the one which, in my opinion, foils the naive passion of many
historians for the biographic form, is that every narration is already an
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interpretation. Thus, one must strive to be as objective as possible and

to avoid crossing the threshold of interpretation at the very outset.
And what applies to narrative history holds as well in regard to psycho-
history. In the context of this lecture I shall be brief. Although a certain
type of exploitation of psychoanalysis on the part of historians seems to
me very suspect, such as the uncontrolled and uncontrollable use ofJun-
gian archetypes, I am convinced that certain concepts and psychoana-
lytical scientific methods can and should shed light on the historian's work,
especially when it is a question of individual psychoanalysis applied to
a great figure about which we are relatively well informed. Because of
my own incompetence in the field, however, I will refrain from an analysis
that may prove to be simplistic and inaccurate. Yet one cannot help be-
ing tempted to put a figure like Saint Louis on the analyst's couch: he
was the first king of France to know his grandfather, and he spoke of
Philip Augustus as different from himself, with profound veneration; his
contemporaries and historians alike have been struck by his mother's ex-
traordinary influence over him, an influence that seemed to obscure his
judgment, and J oinville reprimanded the king for his excessive grief over
his mother's death; his relationship as well with his three brothers, his
attitude in regard to his children, the excessive asceticism which he in-
flicted upon himself-all seem to fall within the province of psychoanal-
ysis. And the same may be said of his secrecy concerning his father, whom
he no doubt knew less well than his grandfather, and his wife, the object
of a fiery temperament and a dynastic zeal which led her to become the
mother of at least eleven children - a secrecy which moved the good Join-
ville to indignation and which has intrigued historians. Professor An-
drew Lewis, in a brilliant and enlightening book, has recently demon-
strated the importance of dynastic behavior among the Capetians,
 JacQU€S l€ qo~~ 213

although in my opinion he has somewhat overestimated its impact. One

may well ask: if this behavior was that of the entire aristocracy of the
period, why then were the Capetians more successful than their contem-
poraries, and why was their success of a royal nature? But let us return
to those views which prove the most fruitful in this fine book. Dynastic
behavior, beyond simple biological chance, is obviously a result of kin-
ship structure and laws of inheritence. But is it not necessary as well to
add a study of interdynastic relationships between ancestors and descend-
ants, between spouses and siblings? Here lies another reason to hope
that other historians besides myself will be willing to collaborate with
psychoanalysts or to become competent in the field.
Before continuing this brief reflection concerning the difficulties and
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demands involved in a revival of the historical biography, I would first

like to mention the great models of this genre to whom I am indebted:
they have all lighted the way for me in my task.
The earliest work is Ernst Kantorowicz's 1927 Frederick the Second,
1194-1250, an astoundingly erudite and intelligent survey of the period
and of the knowledge surrounding this great figure. The most recent study,
although one that belongs to the early period of the author's works, is
Peter Brown's AugustiTl£ of Hippo, a Biography, a masterpiece of historical
sensibility, a chronology that slowly comes to life, weaving to perfection
the hero and his milieus, the man and his work, philosophy and thought.
And finally I would like to mention the late lamented Arsenio Frugoni's
ArTUJidodo, Brescia Tl£llefonti del secolo XII, a subtle and penetrating biography
of a figure seen through historiograph)T, from various viewpoints represen-
ting not "a complete and thus impossible biography;' but "the historical
significance of a reformer's experience?' These are all true biographies
in my opinion: they are all constructed around the man and his life while
integrating all the elements of his environment into the biography. I
categorically exclude the idea of writing "The Reign of Saint Louis" or
"Saint Louis: the Man and his Work" or "Saint Louis and his Kingdom"-
titles which are suitable for excellent historical studies but which in my
opinion can represent nothing but pseudo-biographies. But, one may well
ask, if this type of work is excluded from the present biographic produc-
tion, what then remains as true biography?
Before continuing my inquiry into the conditions and setting ap-
propriate to a modern type of biography, I would first like to stress another
difficulty involved in writing the potential biography of Saint Louis: the
bibliography related to the subject. True, as Georges Duby said at
Princeton some ten years ago, Louis IX remains "the least known" of all the
 214 WRitinG a BIOGRaphy

major kings of medieval France. Indeed, until several years ago, the num-
ber of "decent" biographies of Saint Louis amounted, paradoxically
enough, to six volumes from the seventeenth century by Le Nain de
Tillemont, and two volumes from 1875 by Henri Wallon. In the last few
years, in addition to the important articles written by Joseph Strayer,
Louis Carolus-Barre, and Elizabeth Brown, three syntheses of high quality
have been published: one by Margaret Labarge in the United States,
and two others by Jean Richard and Gerard Sivery in France. But first
and foremost, in 1979 Professor William Chester Jordan published his
Louis IX and tlu Choilenge of tlu Crusade, the most important book on Saint
Louis since those of Le Nain de Tillemont and Wallon. Part of the force
of this work stems from the author's effort to focus the entire biography
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of Saint Louis on one great theme: the Crusades. It is of course impossi-

ble to minimize the influence that the Crusades had over the life and
thought of Saint Louis, but I do think it a bit oversimplified to present
the entire personage of Saint Louis from the perspective of the Crusades.
In his introduction, Professor Jordan emphasizes, and rightly so, the
importance of unpublished documents concerning the reign of Saint Louis
which would make possible writing the synthesis that this king and reign
so justly deserve. Professor Jordan has already gone through a large num-
ber of these documents, but there is still much work to be done. I must
confess my own research concerning these unused documents has been,
and will continue to be, quite limited. Whatever the worth of the book
I plan to undertake, there will inevitably be a history of the reign of Saint
Louis left to be written. For my intention is to write the biography of Saint
Louis; and I believe the research and/or publication of unpublished docu-
ments will most certainly benefit that history more than this biography
and will shed light on the king's reign rather than on his personality.
What may still justify my endeavour to write a biography of Saint Louis
is the fact that the scope of Professor Jordan's excellent work was per-
ceived within certain limits which I think leave enough room for a biog-
raphy, even if the latter will owe much to Professor Jordan's work. Jordan
has written that on the basis of what has been published "it should be
possible to write a satisfying synthetic history of Louis' reign" and he
adds: "Indeed, this book has been undertaken with that possibility in
mind. Its scope, however, has been limited by my decision to concen-
trate only on those aspects of the reign that owe their fundamental form
and content to the king's personal attention: for this is a study of a man
and his efforts to rule well, not of the political and social history of his
reign in general."
 Jacques le Cjorr 215

Although my own definition of historical biography resembles Pro-

fessor Jordan's ideas, there is a significant difference between our posi-
tions. Indeed, Jordan declares a little later: "I have imposed one further
fundamental limitation on my work. Above all, this study is thematic. It
draws its organizing principle from the central concern of Louis' life, the
crusade." My own study is first and foremost biographical in character,
and the thematic element is but secondary, employed in an entirely
different manner from that chosen by Professor Jordan.
At present I would like to deal with a major methodological obstacle.
A medieval biography encounters a number of specific difficulties which,
in fact, enable the historian to deal more accurately with the problems
of historical sources. Because of the problem of the medieval attitude
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towards the individual, medieval sources are scarce and sparing of detail
for a biography. But it appears to me that Saint Louis is situated,
historically speaking, at the very moment when respect for the individual
is beginning to emerge in the consciousness of the medieval western world.
Several studies - notably those by Walter Ullmann, Colin Morris, Caroline
Bynum Walker, Aaron Gurevich - and my own research on private con-
fession, purgatory, and individual judgment after death, have, I think,
demonstrated the growing interest in the individual at the end of the
twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century. The entire thirteenth
century represents an incubation period for the perception of the in-
dividual. The crowning symbol of this birth is the individual "realist"
portrait that appears at the end of the thirteenth century. On the im-
aginary graph representing the emergence of this sensibility towards the
individual, Saint Louis is situated at the end of the opening phase, suc-
ceeding Frederick II and Francis of Assisi. He is still half buried under
the anonymity of the royal stereotype but is beginning to break away
from the collective mass and to emerge in his own light.
Three reasons may justify writing a biography of Saint Louis. First,
he is a king and there exists a literature of the lives of the kings of France.
In the medieval west this literature stems from two antique models: the
De vita Caesarum of Suetonius and the Libellus de vita et moribus imperatorum,
usually referred to under the title of Epitome de Caesaribus, by Aurelius
Victor (fourth century), a copy of which existed in the library of the
abbey in Fleury-sur- Loire in the eleventh century, and which no doubt
was used by Helgaud for his Vita of Robert the Pious. And then there
is Einhard and his Vita Caroli Magni imperatoris. Closer to the period of
Saint Louis, Suger had written the life of Louis VI the Fat, and the
beginning of a life of Louis VII. Rigord and Guillaume Ie Breton had
 216 W~ltlnq a BIoGRaphy

written the Gesta of Philip Augustus. A king was indeed a mi!rrwrahle figure.
Second, he was a saint, and a long tradition existed of writing the lives
of the saints. Helgaud had in fact attempted to make of Robert the Pious
a saint, and to write his biography as though it were hagiography. In-
deed, the preparations for the canonization of Louis IX which took place
relatively soon after his death (27 years) enabled those who knew him
to compile written hagiographies. Among these works of hagiography
was that of Geoffroy de Beaulieu, the king's confessor, which lifted the
curtain of secrecy surrounding his confession for us and for the investi-
gation of his canonization.
Finally, Saint Louis benefited from particular circumstances (though
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born from a historical situation: the growing culture of the laity) which
offers the historian an exceptional source: the so-called Vie de Saint Louis
by J oinville ("Ie livre des saintes paroles et des bons faiz nostre saint roy
Loays"). But, Joinville's book notwithstanding, do these sources actually
enable us to grasp the king's individuality beyond what we find in the
topoi? Did Saint Louis indeed exist? And what did the "architects of roy-
al memory" consider "memorable" in Louis IX?
For it is disconcerting to find that not only generalities have been taken
over from the vitae of kings and saints and integrated into the biogra-
phies/hagiographies of Saint Louis, but those very traits which seem the
most characteristic of Saint Louis's personal conduct as well are referred
to in earlier biographies of his ancestors or in other sources concerning
them. The episode where Saint Louis is described feeding and embrac-
ing a leprous monk is famous, and this act of mercy with its christologi-
cal reference could well be attributed to the piety typical of the thirteenth
century. Yet here is what Helgaud has to say of Robert the Pious: "This
land possesses many an invalid and particularly lepers. This man of God
does not turn away from them in horror, for in the Holy Scriptures he
has often read that Christ our Lord, in his human state, had been offered
hospitality by lepers. He eagerly approached them with a soul full of desire,
entered their homes, and with his own hand offered them a sum of deniers,
and with his own lips kissed their hands ... :'
What king could be more different from Saint Louis than his grand-
father Philip Augustus whom he venerated nonetheless? Yet Peter the
Chanter mentions that Philip Augustus as well was horrified by blasphemy,
and came himself to the rescue of the poor in times of calamity (for ex-
ample, when the Seine overflowed in Paris). His biographers credit him
with miracles, his birth and death are surrounded with marvels , and his
entourage made considerable efforts to turn him into a saint. Referring
 217

to the great work of my friend, Professor John Baldwin, on the reign

of Philip Augustus, I recently studied the dossier concerning the pseudo-
saintliness of Philip Augustus. Despite his religious piety, his persecu-
tion of heretics, and the miracles he was said to have performed, this
quick-tempered king, this lover of wine and women whom the church
had excommunicated, could not possibly have become an official saint.
For this was the period when the Church was gaining increasing control
over the canonization processes, and required practical virtues as well
as the performance of miracles (which, by the way, would have been bet-
ter accepted if they had been accomplished after his death, as Innocent
III had decreed) to justify canonization. Nor did the Church acknowledge
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any particular aptitude for saintliness on the part of kings as such, for
saintliness as well had increasingly become an affair for the individual.
Where his grandfather had failed, Saint Louis would succeed.
After this brief review of the problems involved in attempting to write
a "true" biography, I would like to study the conditions under which his
age produced the memory of Saint Louis.
A great figure is always situated within a social and political context.
What is a Christian king of the thirteenth century capable of being and
what must he be? What makes Saint Louis a typical and exceptional sub-
ject for a biography is the fact that, brought up to be a model king, he
himself willed to realize this model of the ideal Christian king.
This is the central idea behind my interpretation of the historical figure
of Saint Louis and the historiographic tradition surrounding him. There
is no clear dividing line between reality and the ideal in this figure, and
so a "true" biography of Saint Louis is possible. This is the hypothesis
I wish to add to Professor Jordan's; it includes, in fact, his thesis, for
the Crusades belong to the realm of reality and to the ideal for the Chris-
tian king embodied in Saint Louis.
The third and last part of my book will be my attempt to write the
interpretive biography of Saint Louis from the twofold perspective of,
on the one hand, the ideology and the mentality of his time, and, on
the other, political and historical anthropology.
Such a biography of Saint Louis should be on the borderline of two
medieval literary genres, the Mirrors of Princes and the vitae of king-
saints. In addition his life must be viewed in a long-term ideological
perspective, that of the Indo-European tri-functional king. The biography
must be the study of the incarnation of a typical figure in a historical
society at a historical moment, which means the biography must oscillate
between two poles: reality and the ideal. For example, while the ad-
 218 WRitinG a BIOGRaphy

mlnlstrative and political structures can provide the sources for a

biography for an "administrative" or "feudal" king, and the crusades of
Saint Louis can enable the historian to describe and to explain a "crusader"
king, the core of this biography is to be found in the images of a king
incarnating the vision of the Christian king of his age.
A great man indeed exists in his time and for posterity through the
images projected by others and by himself-and as he is perceived by
the society in which he lives. I call this part of royal ideology the ima-
gina ire royal; I plan to examine it in the light of the history of mentalities,
the history of sensibility and the history of symbols. But I will study on-
ly the imaginaire of Saint Louis's own lifetime, chronologically limited by
his birth in 1214 and his canonization in 1297. My main points of reference
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will be: the acccession to the royal dignity in 1226 (and the problems
of the "child king" which this entailed); the assumption of royal power
in 1234; the period of his first crusade, 1248-1254 (including the pro-
blems of the "roi lointain"); the transformation of the king on the biblical
model of King J osias, as described by his contemporaries; his death in
1270 (and his being abroad at the time of his death); the burial of the
royal bones in 1271 at Saint Denis, which was to become a holy shrine
where the miracles of Saint Louis were to occur; and finally, the supple-
ment to his biography represented by the expectation of his
canonization - that is, his entry into the eternal world of saints. In sum,
the theme of this ideologico-historical biography will be: Saint Louis,
the embodiment of the ideal Christian king.
One has the impression that those who were to look after him in in-
fancy "programmed" Louis to become the exemplary king. His weaknesses,
whether due to his own character or to misfortune, were merely seen
as ordeals intended to highlight all the more his virtues. He was, in fact,
as all his contemporaries were to acknowledge, the quintessence of the
"roi patient:'
At the beginning he was handicapped by his age: he was a child when
he ascended the throne. From John of Salisbury to Vincent de Beauvais,
the theoreticians of royal power weighed the dangers and chances for suc-
cess of such a situation. I have studied elsewhere the problem of the child-
king. The child is close to nature, that is, to original sin. In De civi/llft
Dei (22.22), Saint Augustine points out that a child is exposed to "all,
or at least the greater part of vice and crime!' Vested prematurely with
authority, he risks becoming, if he listens to his classmates, another
Roboam, son of Solomon, that is to say, a bad king. This pessimism is
usually borne out by history and, it should be noted, by the God of
 Jacques le qorr 219

Ecclesiastes (10.16-17): "Woe unto the land where the king is a child!"
There is, however, a chance to triumph over this dooming prediction:
the child must have a good disposition and above all must benefit from
a good education. This is exactly the case of Saint Louis under the pas-
sionate yet strict guidance of his mother, his teacher (unknown), and his
advisors. Thus was fulfilled Vincent de Beauvais's idea as expressed in
his treatise, De eruditionefiliorum nobilium (1246-1248), where he declares:
"If he is well brought up, the child is more apt [than at any other age]
to serve God and praise him, and fill [enter] Paradise." From a tender
age Louis IX's childhood was both that of a king and a saint, and he
followed the path set out for him, a path that Blanche de Castille ex-
pressed so well in her striking words quoted by Joinville: "I would rather
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a Scotsman came over from Scotland and ruled the people well, than
to have you rule badly for all to see"; and: "I would prefer him dead than
to have him commit a mortal sin?' He benefitted from an education which
Guillaume de Saint Pathus, one of his biographers, was to call "his holy
food in childhood?'
One gets the impression that this child whose fortune was mapped
out for him became aware of his mission very early in life, and
endeavoured to carry out the ideal of a long tradition of Christian princes.
We must bear in mind, however, as did his biographers/hagiographers,
that there existed two distinct stages in the development of his royal con-
duct, that is, before and after the crusade to Egypt and his sojourn in
the Holy Land (1248-54). In the year 1234, when he reached the age
of 20, married, and took over the rule of his kingdom, he endeavored
to act as a good Christian king should, concerned with peace and justice,
but ready to fight his Christian enemies (the king of England, unfaithful
vassals), finding a middle ground between an intense piety and the wish
to hold his royal rank with adequate splendor, befitting a monarch. After
the trials abroad, haunted by the obsessive desire to understand his defeat
and to prepare for its obliteration by better combatting his own sins as
well as those of his people, he moved from piety towards an asceticism
bordering on bigotry. His rule then became dominated by the idea of
strict religious and moral order. He refused battle against his fellow Chris-
tians in order to reserve all the Christian forces for the crusade. He was
no longer content to remain a very Christian king, and wished instead
to become an eschatological king whose penitence - in regard to himself
and his subjects - would prepare him for the "last times" and the last
judgement.
His will to embody the ideal Christian king sets his acts all the more
 220 W~ltlnCj a B'OCjRaphy

in a historical perspective. His present is rooted in a biblical, Christian

and dynastical past and, at the same time, bound up in future salvation.
He follows and reinforces the tendency of his time to enhance the present,
to be conscious of making history.
He carried out devoutly the three functions of the king and embodied
their synthesis: he was the sacred king, he was the thaumaturge (the prac-
tice of the kings of France of touching the ailing to heal them of scrofula
became firmly established only with Saint Louis), and he was the ad-
ministrator of justice. Some thought he would enter a mendicant order,
but this would have been unlikely for a sovereign so conscious of his roy-
al duties and so concerned that the basic distinction between clergy and
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laity be respected. And as J oinville shows us, Louis was also the warrior
king and knight, the king of the sword, happy to be among his men at
arms, "sa gent." Then, more than any other king, he was the king of good
deeds, feeding the hungry, caring for the poor; the king of peace and
prosperity in a populous kingdom; the king of wealth and of the battle
against usury.
And Saint Louis was a king surrounded with mirrors. First, Mirrors,
literary texts reflecting the images of princes, written for him at his re-
quest. There are five of them - three written by Dominicans, perhaps
members of a group gathered at a convent of the Preachers of Paris, the
Saint Jacques convent, whose most famous member, Vincent de Beau-
vais, lived in the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont so dear to Saint Louis;
one written by a Cistercian entitled Morale somnium Pharonis sive de regisdis-
ciplina; and the last, Eruditio regum et principum, written by a Franciscan,
Guibert de Tournai, in 1259. To these should be added the two Mirrors
that he himself composed at the end of his life, as a kind of testament
written while contemplating his own reflection, for his son, the future
Philip III (Les Enseignements a son fils) and for his daughter Isabelle,
queen of Navarre. There he portrays the Christian king who must ful-
fill his mission with both body and soul, promoting both piety and poli-
tics.
In these Mirrors he looked on the great model of the biblical king
defined in Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy: a king who does not engage in
hunting (rare for a French king), a monogamous king, a king who does
not hoard money, a king who respects the divine law and the priests,
a king who fears God and is without arrogance, who follows the path
of righteousness and who will live a long life. The rex paei.fieus, in the es-
chatological sense of the term, Louis was regarded by his contemporaries
not so much as a new David or Solomon, but as a new J osias, the child
 JacQues l€ (jo~r 221

king, restorer of the religious law-an idea to be taken up by Pope Boniface

VII in his bull of canonization in 1297.
In the various Mirrors, Louis discovered two primary objectives, justice
and peace. These he practiced as a king, both as administrator of justice
and as reconciler - whether in the matter of a simple complaint under the
oak at Vincennes or in the solemn verdict of the Mise of Amiens, handed
down after arbitrating between Henry III of England and his barons.
Louis is the king of Pseudo-Plutarch's treatise, Institutio najani, that
John of Salisbury introduced in his work Policraticus and which the Cister-
cian Helinand de Froidmont and the Dominican Vincent de Beauvais
refer to in their Mirrors. He is the king of the four cardinal virtues (for-
titude, justice, prudence and temperance) and of a fourfold duty: toward
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God, toward himself, toward representatives of royal power, from whom

respect for justice is required, and toward his subjects whom he loves
and in whom he must inspire love. And finally he is the king who separates
his private and public person in accordance with Roman law, revived
within the process of the creation of the State.
He is the king of the mirror of his coronation (sacre) and the ordines
which determine its liturgy and its significance. He respects the oath he
has taken toward God, the Church, and his people. He is faithful to the
three sources who granted him power: the choice of God, the dynastic
heritage which appointed him by primogeniture, and the Church which
consecrated him. He is the king by heaven, by blood and by the altar.
He is the king of the mirror of art. Suger, in the first half of the 12th
century, had made of Saint Denis the monument of royal faith. Louis
was personified in the statues of kings on the portals of Chartres and
the other great Gothic cathedrals; he was alluded to in the royal ancestry
represented by the tree of Jesse on stained-glass cathedral windows; his
royal ideal was embodied in the Dionysian light of inspiration which
bathed the Gothic monarchy. Saint Louis pursued this path. He en-
couraged throughout his entire reign what Robert Branner calls "the court
style:' turning his private chapel at the Palais- Royal, the Sainte-Chapelle,
built between 1243 and 1248, into a luminous and multicoloured casket
for the supreme royal relic, Christ's crown of thorns, bought from the
Venetians who had taken it as a token of triumph at Constantinople.
Other relics of the Passion were to be added to this purchase. Among
the luxurious manuscripts in the chapel library were psalters and other
books whose miniatures represented through David the image of royalty.
This style can be witnessed as well on the reverse side of cathedral fa~ades
where Saint Louis ordered statues to be made evoking the "royal faith."
 222 W~ltlnG a BIoGRaphy

He is, as well, the king of piety, the new faith that became widespread
in the thirteenth century through the Cistercians and above all through
the mendicant orders. He is the king of prayer, whether private or col-
lective; with the clergies of his chapel or his places of residence, or while
riding, Louis prays always for himself and his family, his dynasty and
his people. A king, too, of speech and language: a new language used
when talking with friends; the language of justice and command, used
with one's subjects; and above all the language of sermons in the cen-
tury of the revival of such language. He is the king of humility, ready
to wash his brethren's feet and to eat at the table of the poor, to give
charity to the needy and to kiss the leprous.
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And last of all he is the king of the dead, reciting numerous prayers
for the deceased, especially for his family. He is the king who in 1263-64
had all the royal tombs of the necropolis Saint Denis grouped together
in order to bring to the fore the unity and dynastic continuity from the
Merovingians to the Carolingians and the Capetians, and in order to
render visible the expectation and hope of resurrection evident in the
open eyes of the recumbent tomb statues. These dead, brought back from
the past, united in a present to continue until the Last Judgment, are
offered to the future and to eternity, manifesting command of the kingdom
of time.
Saint Louis is the king who is able to combine within a single, highly
contrasted image the new secular ideal of super-courteous "prudhom-
mie" and the monastic ideal of extreme ascetism. Although not a virgin
or totally continent, he fully respected the calendar of sexual activity for
Christian spouses defined by the Church ~'There is a time for embrac-
ing'~ as his confessor revealed. His self-flagellatory practices with por-
table whips, folded in small boxes which he had made and distributed
among his relatives and friends, bordered on the obsessive.
Above all he is the king of suffering, breaking with the feudal ideal
of the warrior's physical strength: suffering from his ailing and martyred
body, suffering for others and above all for his subjects, suffering because
of sin. Dying in Tunis on his last crusade, he took, as J oinville and his
hagiographers noted, the Eucharistic host (hostia) of a martyr's death at
the very hour of Jesus' death, three in the afternoon. From his anointing
at Rheims to his passion in Tunis, Saint Louis remains the Christian
king.
There were among his contemporaries those who reproached Saint
Louis for certain aspects of his ideal, considered archaic or exaggerated:
the time spent in the crusade away from his kingdom and his subjects;
 )acqu€s l€ qo~~ 223

a certain naivety in his pursuit of peace, as for example, in the Treaty

of Paris (1259) where he made an unnecessary cession of territory to the
King of England on the grounds that he would rather have a loyal vassal
than an enemy; excessive devotion and indulgence in regard to the reli-
gious orders. Some contemporary historians have expressed similar
opInIons.
In fact, unlike Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Saint Louis was a man of
his time. Despite the doubts and criticism, the spirit of the Crusades re-
mained very much alive and feudal ideology was not a thing of the past.
The Hundred Years' War was to prove that the problems of homage still
existed, and mendicant devotion was a modern concept with a future
before it.
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Saint Louis was successful in two exploits. First of all, he managed

to make political idealism and realism coincide. Faced with the Church,
the Empire and feudalism, he respected traditional models but advanced
the "nationalization" of the Church of France, the independence of the
kingdom in regard to the Empire, and the superiority of the royal power
and the State over feudal privileges.
Second, he won more prestige from his losses than others got from
their victories. Defeated, imprisoned, humiliated, mortified, dying finally
in a foreign land, Saint Louis not only obtained the halo of sainthood
and posterity's veneration for himself; as the embodiment of the new image
of Christ the King of Suffering, he endowed the French kingdom with
the religious and moral prestige which made it the true head and model
for Christianity. Nor would it belittle his role to point out his good for-
tune in living at the peak of Christianity's expansion in general, and in
France in particular, since the year 1000; or in ruling, despite his defeat
in the Crusades, as a king of prosperity.
Still, however deeply Louis was marked by the evolution of the politi-
cal structures and values of his age, it is true that the ideal he embodies
leans more toward the past than toward the future. Saint Louis was the
ideal king of a Christianity defined both by Latin Europe and by the
Holy Land, by the Old Testament and by the renaissance of the twelfth
century. After the age of Saint Louis, there was never again to be a king
of the Crusades, a king-saint, a king of sacrifice. Kings of law, state and
economy, Aristotelian kings, kings of crisis were to follow. Not only Saint
Louis, but also the political ideal which he represented, met their deaths
on the threshold of modernity.

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Scieru:esSociales

 224 W~ltlnq a BIOCjRaphy

*This essay was written for oral delivery and was read at the 22nd
Annual Congress on Medieval Studies of The Medieval Institute at
Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May 1987. It was submitted to EXEMPLARIA
in its original format. As a convenience to readers, the Editors have pro-
vided a list of works cited in the essay. Though we cite English transla-
tions of various works, the translations in his text are M. Le Goffs own.

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