1515: Accession to the Throne, Coronation, and Royal Symbols

On 1 January 1515, Francis of Angoulême became king of France under the name Francis I, at the age of twenty. His coronation and his royal entry into Paris marked the beginning of a reign that would profoundly transform France.

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⚰️ The Succession of Louis XII

Louis XII died on 1 January 1515 at the Hôtel des Tournelles, in Paris. The succession passed without incident: Francis of Angoulême, the late king’s cousin and son-in-law through his marriage to Claude of France, succeeded him at once, at the age of only twenty. The great men of the kingdom, gathered at the Hôtel des Tournelles, acclaimed him without delay — a sign, already, that the change of dynastic branch met with no serious challenge.

His very first acts favoured continuity over rupture: the young king let it be known that he intended to pursue the reforms begun by his predecessor, as well as the Italian policy that had so occupied the previous reign. Nothing, in these opening weeks, yet betrayed the ambition for conquest that would soon lead him to Marignano.

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⛪ The Coronation at Reims (25 January 1515)

The coronation took place on 25 January 1515, in Reims Cathedral, according to the immemorial ritual of the French monarchy. The date was not chosen at random: it corresponded to the anniversary of a healing Francis considered miraculous, which had occurred thirteen years earlier, and which fell, by a coincidence contemporaries did not fail to turn into a symbol, on the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul. To link his own destiny to that of the apostle struck down on the road to Damascus was, for a king only just crowned, to place himself from the outset under the sign of divine protection.

The ceremony followed its traditional course: a solemn entry into the city, the oath to protect the Church and the kingdom, anointing with the Holy Ampulla, the placing of Charlemagne’s crown on the new sovereign’s head, the acclamation of the assembly — “Long live the king!” — then Mass. Nothing in this liturgy was left to improvisation: every gesture recalled that the king of France held his power not from men alone, but from God himself.

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🦎 The Salamander Emblem

It was also at this time that the emblem which would become inseparable from Francis I took hold for good: the salamander. The animal, reputed since antiquity to live unharmed at the heart of flames, was not the young king’s invention — his forebear Jean d’Angoulême had briefly used it before him — but it was Francis who, as early as 1504, while still a ten-year-old Count of Angoulême, made it a personal emblem struck on a medal, accompanied by a now-famous Italian motto: “Notrisco al buono, stingo el reo,” “I nourish the good, I extinguish the wicked.”

The choice was no accident. In the imagination of the age, the salamander possessed a dual faculty: it sustained the divine “good fire” of charity while extinguishing the infernal “wicked fire” of discord and war. Borne on monuments, woven into tapestries, engraved on coins, it told the entire kingdom what the young king intended to embody — a prince who protected good and fought evil — and it took hold so durably that, five centuries later, it remains the immediate visual signature of his reign.

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🏙️ The Royal Entry into Paris (15 February 1515)

On 15 February 1515, Francis I made his entry into Paris. The royal entry was no mere formality: since the Middle Ages, this major political rite served to present the new sovereign to his capital and to seal, through spectacle, the direct bond uniting the king to his people. Francis embraced it with a flair for showmanship that already struck contemporaries: dressed in a costume of silver cloth studded with jewels, he made his horse rear before the crowd and himself threw coins to the people along his route, while the procession halted before the city’s churches and monuments.

Tradition also had it that the king, on the occasion of his entry, granted pardons — amnesties, tax reductions — intended to win him immediate popular favour. The message was clear: the king was not merely a war leader or a distant sovereign, but also, from the very moment of his accession, a source of justice and generosity for his subjects.

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⚔️ The Pas d’Armes

In the same spirit, Francis I threw himself with gusto into a pas d’armes — a mounted joust conducted according to an elaborate scenario, in which nobles of the court and foreign knights measured themselves against one another before an audience. This taste for chivalric display was far from gratuitous: it established from the outset the image of the warrior prince, in the direct line of medieval tradition, and offered, in passing, an occasion for encounter and rivalry with the European nobility present at court.

This insistence on splendour and spectacle did not escape contemporaries, who recorded it in their chronicles, nor foreign ambassadors, who reported it attentively in their correspondence. With hindsight, one sees in it less a mere extravagance than an already conscious mastery of political communication: this twenty-year-old king, schooled in humanism, knew that the image he projected of himself in his first weeks of rule would durably shape the memory that posterity would keep of him. Indeed, the archetype of the chivalrous and cultivated Renaissance prince that he built at that moment — young, handsome, generous, brave — took hold among his contemporaries and has come down through the centuries to us, the salamander remaining, even more than the memory of his battles, the visual seal of his entire reign.

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🧠 Key Takeaways

• 1 January 1515: Francis I succeeds Louis XII at the age of 20
• 25 January 1515: coronation at Reims, date chosen for its religious symbolism
• Salamander: personal emblem adopted as early as 1504, motto “Notrisco al buono, stingo el reo”
• 15 February 1515: spectacular royal entry into Paris
• Pas d’armes: chivalric display by the new king
• A reign that opens on splendour and a carefully constructed image of the “knight king”

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Next zoom: The Battle of Marignano and the reconquest of the Milanese.