Pierre Barrière had struck no blow. When he was apprehended at Melun in August 1593, Henri IV remained whole, and the blade bore not a drop of royal blood. The enterprise that was to bring this man to the wheel was still merely an intention; yet it was an intention whose secret confessions had travelled swifter than he. He had sought from men of the cloth a balm and warrant for his conscience. One among them had resolved instead to preserve the King.
The court was not merely apprised that a peril existed; it held a precise description. Between a conversation held in Lyons and an arrest effected at Melun, words had found their courier, and that courier his destination. The Barrière affair unfolded within this quiet circulation of intelligence, far removed from the familiar tableau of a monarch taken unawares in the press of a thoroughfare. On this occasion, the alarm had outrun the deed.
A Catholic King, Catholic Enemies
Henri IV had lately abjured the Protestant faith at Saint-Denis, trusting thereby to deprive his adversaries of the religious pretext they opposed to his recognition. Yet this conversion failed to silence the League. Those who had denounced the heretic prince were now free to excoriate an insincere convert. A change of religion could not suffice to overturn the loyalties, the ambitions, and the alliances of those who still disputed his crown.
Paris had not yet opened its gates to him. Decades of civil war had habituated men to look upon an adversary as an enemy of God; certain pulpits proclaimed his removal to be an act meritorious in the eyes of the faith. The dispute no longer turned solely upon a prince’s dynastic right. Men presumed to weigh his eternal salvation, and that of any who should take up arms against him. It was a perilous doctrine for any soul disposed to translate conviction into violence.
Barrière, once a boatman and subsequently a soldier, belonged to that common multitude whereof history generally preserves only the trade and the regiment. He hailed from Orléans. His early life remains far more obscure than the indictments generated by his final design. By the time he enters the documentary record in earnest, he is intent upon slaying Henri IV, seeking interlocutors who might endow this design with the solemn gravity of a duty.
This search was vital to his mind. He was not content merely to harbour a covert malice. He spoke of it, submitted it to scrutiny, and solicited counsel. The contemplated regicide was mediated through conversations from which he expected spiritual absolution in advance. Where another would have laboured to cloak his purpose, he sought overtly to have it sanctified by men whom he deemed competent to answer for it before God.
Banchi’s Refusal
At Lyons, the Dominican friar Séraphin Banchi came to hear of the design. He laboured earnestly to dissuade Barrière. The latter proved intractable; whereupon the friar dispatched a warning to the King. Ancient accounts assign an intermediary role to one Brancaleone, who was charged with conveying the intelligence together with the particulars necessary to identify the traveller. The would-be assassin pressed onward along the road, his likeness running before him.
The exact nature of this disclosure was to ignite long dispute. The Duke of Sully, and later writers in his wake, maintained that the secret had been imparted under the seal of confession. Banchi strenuously denied this characterisation. For the churchman, the distinction was of the utmost consequence: preventing an assassination did not require him to admit having violated a sacramental bond. Long after Barrière had perished, men were still debating the channel through which his intent had been betrayed.
What remains central to the episode is the refusal of an ordained minister to bestow upon murder the benediction so eagerly sought. The very religious milieu in which Barrière had looked for encouragement produced the very warning that undid him. The division did not run merely between the devout and the ungodly; it lay between those who countenanced political murder and those who abhorred it.
At Melun, Barrière was recognised and seized. He carried a weapon; he had proclaimed his purpose; he had approached within striking distance of the King. These particulars gave his design a physical reality that mere rumour could never possess. The enterprise had been arrested in its course. It remained for justice to determine how this aborted attempt should be construed under the law, and what other names the captive would drag down with his own.
The Names Pronounced
A commission of ten magistrates sat in judgment over him. The interrogatories sought to discover who had nurtured his resolution. Barrière named, among others, Christophe Aubry, the curé of Saint-André-des-Arts, and the Jesuit Father Varade. In the early relation preserved in the Mémoires de la Ligue, Aubry was alleged to have directed him to Varade, who confirmed him in his purpose, assuring him that should he perish in the deed, he would receive the martyr’s crown.
This alleged promise lent the proceedings immense political moment. The matter was no longer confined to a lone soldier bearing a blade; it had become an indictment against those who had furnished that soldier with the doctrine capable of dissolving the divine prohibition against murder. The names of these churchmen were swept into a far vaster contest concerning the royal prerogative and those teachings held to menace the crown.
These confessions were extracted under judicial torture. They constitute historical accusations which the royal chroniclers and the adversaries of the Society of Jesus seized upon with avidity. Taken alone, they cannot reconstruct the interviews precisely as they occurred. Banchi’s undisputed role in giving the alarm and the instigations imputed to others occupy vastly different evidentiary ground: to confound them would obscure the bitter polemics that shaped the trial records themselves.
The commission condemned Barrière to be broken upon the wheel. The sentence was executed at Melun late in August 1593. This terrible retribution answered the intended violation of the King’s sacred person; it was designed to display before all the world the price of an enterprise that had come to nothing. Henri IV had suffered not a scratch. His adversary did not survive the mission wherewith he had believed himself divinely entrusted.
A Precedent Renewed
The affair did not end upon the scaffold. When Jean Châtel struck at Henri IV in December 1594, wounding him in the mouth, the depositions taken during Barrière’s trial were immediately revived. The narrative of the earlier conspiracy served not only to elucidate the second, but to justify the stern measures enacted against the Jesuits. A weapon seized before the blow had fallen thus became an exhibit in the trial of another knife that had, this time, reached its mark.
In the intervening months, Henri IV had made his solemn entry into Paris. The kingdom continued its arduous passage toward pacification, though this political triumph did nothing to dispel the persistent menaces against the royal person. Barrière had failed because his confidence had encountered a resolute refusal. In an affair wherein so many voices had claimed to promise Heaven, the only one that truly mattered was the voice that had chosen to preserve the living.