Mind of an Assassin: Ravaillac and the Murder of Henry IV of France

Abstract

On 14 May 1610 François Ravaillac stabbed to death Henry IV in a narrow Parisian street. From his responses to his interrogators, it is clear that Ravaillac was only confusedly aware of why he had committed this crime. Using early modern concepts of mental illness and its genesis, together with insights from others’ psychological and sociological analyses of modern assassins, this article argues from a close reading of Ravaillac’s interrogations, framed in the trajectory of his life and the context of his times, that there were motives both liminal and unconscious which drove him to symbolic parricide. Born into a bourgeois family economically ruined and emotionally fragmented by his brutal and rejecting father, Ravaillac, an unmarried social isolate, found compensation in a profound religiosity which expressed itself in visions. Rebuffed in his attempts to join an ascetic religious order because of these visionary experiences, further marginalized economically and socially by a term in prison, and unable to direct his frustration and rage at their proper targets, Ravaillac had grandiose visions, based on the earlier apocalyptic propaganda of the Catholic league. He imagined himself chosen by God to convince Henry IV to force France’s Huguenots to convert. Thwarted in his attempts to tell the king his prophetic message, Ravaillac thought Henry had rejected him. He interpreted the king’s willingness in early 1610 to go to war in the Netherlands as Henry’s decision to make war on the pope, and envisioned himself as God’s instrument in defense of the Holy Father against the evil Father of the kingdom. The assassination of Henry at once vented Ravaillac’s rage, assured him necessary expiation through torture and execution, and brought him instant and lasting notoriety as the murderer of France’s greatest king.