Epee du sacre des rois de France

Joyeuse is the sword French kings used at their own coronations, the sacre, from at least Philip III in 1271 through Charles X in 1825, the last king of France ever crowned. It is not, and does not claim to be, the single unmodified sword of Charlemagne the tradition names it for: the Musee du Louvre's own catalogue dates its pommel to 900-1100, its guard to the 12th century, its grip to the 13th or 14th century, and its blade to 1700-1900, a composite built up over roughly a millennium in which no single component was made during Charlemagne's lifetime.

It survived the French Revolution when most of the rest of the Saint-Denis treasury did not, deposited at the Louvre on 5 December 1793. It was redecorated for Napoleon's coronation in 1804 and restored to its Bourbon appearance by the crown jeweler Bapst for Charles X's coronation in 1825, then returned to the Louvre for good by 1852. It is on display today in the museum's medieval Objets d'art rooms, alongside its own scabbard and the coronation spurs deposited with it on the same day in 1793.

The name and the association with Charlemagne are the oldest and best-documented parts of the object's story. The physical continuity with him is the part the museum's own dating does not support, and this record states that plainly rather than around it.

What survives, physically

The object catalogued today as MS 84 in the Louvre's Departement des Objets d'art is a sword just over a metre in overall height by the museum's own measurement, of gold, filigree work, lapis lazuli or dark glass beads set as dragon eyes, and a steel blade. It is not, and does not claim to be, a single forging. It is an assembly: a pommel, a guard, a grip and a blade, each added in a different century, mounted together into the object that was carried at French royal coronations for over five hundred years.

The Louvre keeps the scabbard as a separate accession, MS 84 bis, and the coronation spurs as a third related object. All three came into the museum together, from the same source, on the same day in 1793, and are displayed together now.

The name, and the legend it borrows

Joyeuse is also, and first, the name of a sword in the chansons de geste, the medieval epic tradition that gave Roland his sword Durendal and gave Charlemagne his own blade a name and a set of marvellous properties: an embedded relic of the Holy Lance, a color said to change many times a day, a name meaning joyous. That sword belongs to poetry. Nothing in this record depends on it, and nothing about the physical object at the Louvre proves or requires that the epic tradition describes this exact blade.

What is documented is narrower and more interesting: French kings from at least the 13th century staged their own coronations around an actual sword kept at Saint-Denis and called it Joyeuse, deliberately invoking the legend. The invocation is the historical fact. It is a claim the monarchy attached to an object, not evidence that the object is the legend's sword.

Coronation sword of the kings of France

The French coronation ordo, the liturgical script for the sacre, already specifies by around 1200 that the king is to be made a knight before the anointing: the sword is carried into the cathedral bare and raised, and the archbishop girds it on the king along with spurs. The ordo used for Saint Louis, a manuscript of 1246, fixes this presentation of sword and spurs in the presence of the twelve peers of the realm. Some accounts push the sword's ceremonial use back to Philip Augustus in 1179, but that earlier use is not confirmed by a surviving ordo or eyewitness record consulted for this entry; it is a claim later writers make, not a documented event.

What is documented without dispute is its presence at the coronation of Philip III the Bold at Reims on 15 August 1271, the first coronation at which this specific sword, under the name Joyeuse, is attested. From that point the sources describe it as present at every subsequent coronation of a King of France through to the last one, Charles X's in 1825, a span of five and a half centuries.

In the treasury of Saint-Denis

Between coronations the sword was kept, with the rest of the regalia, in the treasury of the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the royal abbey north of Paris that also held the tombs of the kings of France. It is listed among the treasury's contents in the 1634 inventory. Michel Felibien's detailed history and inventory of the abbey, published in 1706, describes the regalia stored together in large wooden cabinets and includes an engraving in which Joyeuse appears at the left of the group.

The Revolution: what was destroyed, and what was not

The treasury did not survive the Revolution intact. From 1791 the new regime began redistributing and, in large part, destroying royal and ecclesiastical treasure: about a hundred pieces were set aside in September 1791 for the cabinet of medals at what became the Bibliotheque nationale, while a great many other objects, especially anything whose value lay chiefly in its precious metal, were melted down to strike coin or simply sold off. The Holy Ampulla used to anoint French kings was smashed by decree in 1793. The royal tombs at Saint-Denis themselves were opened and desecrated in 1793-1794, a separate and better-known episode of the same campaign to erase the physical signs of the monarchy.

Joyeuse escaped that fate. On 5 December 1793 it was deposited, with the scabbard and the coronation spurs, at the Louvre museum, spared on the same logic that preserved a smaller number of other regalia pieces judged to have artistic or historical interest worth keeping under the new regime's own museum project. Most of the treasury's other ceremonial objects were not so fortunate.

The composite object: what the Louvre's own catalogue says

This is the central fact about the object, and it is the Louvre's own published position, not a revisionist claim from outside. The museum's collections catalogue dates the sword's four principal elements separately: the pommel to 900-1100, on stylistic grounds, decorated with confronted birds in a manner the catalogue compares to Scandinavian ornament of the period; the guard, two gold quillons shaped as confronted, stylized winged dragons, to the 12th century; the grip, a gold fusee covered in a lattice of diamonds, to the 13th or 14th century; and the blade, in its present form, to 1700-1900.

Read plainly, that dating means no part of the object on display today was made during Charlemagne's lifetime. He died in 814. Even the earliest surviving element, the pommel, is dated a century or more after his death, into the late Carolingian to Ottonian-Romanesque period. The blade is later still, a product of the 18th or 19th century rather than a medieval survival at all. The sword the Louvre shows visitors cannot be, as a single unmodified artifact, the sword Charlemagne carried. It is a composite object built up and reworked across roughly a thousand years, of which the association with Charlemagne is the oldest and best-attested element and the physical continuity with him is the part that does not hold.

The modern basis for this component-by-component chronology is the catalogue of the treasury of Saint-Denis published by Blaise de Montesquiou-Fezensac and Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, issued in volumes through the 1970s and still the standard reference the Louvre's own database cites for this object. Gaborit-Chopin, a Louvre curator in the Objets d'art department, is the scholar most closely associated in the modern literature with establishing this treatment of the Saint-Denis regalia as assembled, composite objects rather than single-period survivals.

An older argument, now superseded

The composite reading is not new, though the Louvre's current dating supersedes an older debate about it. Early 20th-century writers on arms and armour disagreed sharply about the blade in particular: Martin Conway argued it could date as early as the 9th century, which would have supported a genuine Charlemagne attribution for at least that component, while Guy Laking, a keeper of the royal armoury in London, dated the same blade to the early 13th century instead. The Louvre's own current catalogue entry, dating the blade to 1700-1900, effectively resolves that older disagreement in neither writer's favor: both were arguing about a medieval blade that, on the museum's own present dating, is not the blade now on the sword at all. This detail is drawn from a tertiary encyclopedia source and would benefit from replacement with the primary Conway and Laking publications.

Napoleon's coronation, and the sword he did not wear

When Napoleon staged his imperial coronation at Notre-Dame in 1804, the ceremony's designer, the comte de Segur, initially scripted Joyeuse into the proceedings as part of a deliberately revived Charlemagne iconography. It was then decided that it would be inappropriate, on both political and costume grounds, for Napoleon himself to wear the sword; it was carried in the procession as an object of state rather than worn. The scabbard was redecorated for the occasion in green velvet embroidered with gold laurel leaves, and its fleur-de-lis ornament was covered over with other stonework, erasing the Bourbon symbolism for the length of the Empire. The sword and the rest of what was now presented as Charlemagne's regalia were kept afterward at the treasury of Notre-Dame from 1804 to 1816.

Restored for Charles X, 1825: the last coronation

For Charles X's coronation at Reims on 29 May 1825, the last coronation of a King of France, the crown jeweler Jacques-Eberhard Bapst-Meniere was commissioned to reverse Napoleon's changes to the scabbard: the green velvet and gold laurel leaves were removed and the scabbard was returned to violet velvet strewn with fleurs-de-lis, the covering that is still on the object today. The sword itself was carried in the ceremony; some accounts note that Charles X's actual investiture used a separate ceremonial sword for parts of the rite, with Joyeuse's role concentrated in the procession and presentation, though the sources consulted for this record do not fully reconcile the two roles. What is certain is that 1825 was the sword's last documented appearance at a coronation, because 1825 was the last coronation a King of France ever had.

From Reims back to the Louvre

The sword's custody in the years immediately after 1825 is not accounted for in the sources consulted for this record, a genuine gap rather than a documented quiet period. By 1848 it is recorded at the Garde-Meuble, the state furniture and regalia store, under the Ministry of Finance. It returned to the Louvre in 1852, joining the Objets d'art department where it has remained.

On display today

The sword, its scabbard and the coronation spurs are shown together in the Louvre's Richelieu wing, level 1, room 502, known as the Salle Suger, in display case 30, among the museum's medieval Objets d'art. The group has traveled for temporary exhibitions in recent decades, including the Louvre's own 1991 exhibition on the treasury of Saint-Denis, the Musee de Cluny's 2011 exhibition on the sword as an object type, Versailles's 2015-2016 exhibition on the death of the king, the Louvre's Petite Galerie program on the theater of power in 2017-2018, and a Versailles exhibition on the painter Hyacinthe Rigaud in 2020-2021, whose state portraits of Louis XIV include royal regalia of this kind.

Not to be confused with

Two other objects are routinely and wrongly folded into this one's story. The Reichsschwert, or Imperial Sword, kept in the Imperial Treasury at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, is a genuinely separate coronation sword, used at the coronations of Holy Roman Emperors rather than French kings, and dated by its own scholarship to around 1198, made for Otto IV; it has no connection to Charlemagne despite sharing the general role of a dynastic coronation blade. Also in the Vienna treasury, kept at Aachen until the French Revolutionary Wars and moved via Paderborn and Hildesheim to Vienna by 1801, is a separate object historically associated with Charlemagne under the name Sabre of Charlemagne. It, too, is not this sword, and its provenance should never be blended with Joyeuse's.

Finally, and most importantly for a reader coming to this record from the epic tradition: the sword named Joyeuse in the chansons de geste, Charlemagne's marvellous companion weapon to Roland's Durendal, is a literary object with literary properties. The physical sword at the Louvre is what medieval and early modern French kings invoked when they used that name for their coronation sword. That invocation is documented history. It is not evidence that the literary sword and this catalogued museum object are, in any physical sense, the same thing.