Childeric II was assassinated, but he refused to die. While the seventh-c. noblemen who murdered him no doubt thought that they had rid the Frankish kingdom of this Merovingian monarch, the collective memory of their act came back, eight centuries later, to trouble historians in Valois France. On the one hand, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, royalist historical propaganda held that the French past had been free of regicide. On the other, Childeric II, whom modern scholars qualify as a Frankish king of Austrasia (662–75) and Neustria (673–75), but whom medieval French historians anachronistically regarded as a French king of France, had in fact been assassinated in 675. What is more revealing, in an account written well before the absence of regicide in French history had become an ideological necessity, the Grandes Chroniques de France, the official history on which most late-medieval French historians based their own, reported that he had been murdered. Apparently caught between a contemporary propaganda campaign that denied the fact of regicide in the French past and an authoritative history that narrated the murder of a French king, the authors of latemedieval histories of France had to decide what to tell their readers about the life and death of Childeric II. In order to observe this struggle between ideology and history, to document its results, and to comment on its significance for our understanding of late-medieval French historical culture, I examined the accounts of his reign contained in twenty-three histories of France written between 1380 and 1515.

The authors of these chronicles all lived during or shortly after the Hundred Years’ War, the conflict in the context of which the supposed absence of regicide in French history became an important plank in French historical propaganda. Seeking to secure the political loyalty of the French and to harness national sentiment for the royalist cause, the Valois monarchy's propagandists formulated a series of historically-based comparisons for the purpose of enhancing the prestige of the French crown and tarnishing that of the English rival. These propagandists contrasted the unbroken dynastic continuity that they held to have characterized the history of the French royal family with the dynastic discontinuity that, they asserted, was a hallmark of English history.