The reign of Francis I has often been interpreted as the glorious flourish of French Renaissance monarchy before its virtual collapse during the Wars of Religion. In his reign a glamorous façade of châteaux-building and military campaigns barely concealed the decay and tensions that were eventually to lead to civil war. Perhaps for this very reason, the reputation of Francis has undergone violent fluctuations. Where some early commentators looked back sentimentally upon the image of le grand roi François, others were quick to focus upon the negative aspects of the reign. In the work of two of France’s greatest nineteenth-century intellectuals, Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet, Francis emerges as a lecherous and devious king, unmoved by the finer considerations of Renaissance or Reformation thought; moved only, in Michelet’s terse phrase, by ‘war to please women’.