Introduction

Summary

It must have been with a mixture of pride and awe that in the latter years of the nineteenth century French children learned from their textbooks about the Battle of Tolbiac; of how Clovis lifted his hands to Heaven, promising God that if he were granted victory he would accept baptism, and how, the divine pact having worked, the Alamanni fled. Had those children delved deeper into their Première année d’histoire de France, their delight would certainly have been compounded when they read about King Pepin and his beheading of a lion and a bull with a single blow of his sword – a deed that, it is easy to suppose, many of those eight- and nine-year-olds mimicked, impersonating their king. No doubt they would have been equally impressed to learn from their textbook that, as her body was burned at the stake, the soul of Joan of Arc was miraculously borne up to Heaven by a white dove – the just reward for the sacrifices she had made for France and the Church.