This book is the first comprehensive historical and artistic study devoted to François Poumerol, the brilliant gunsmith-poet whose creations stand at the threshold of modern France. At its heart are two extraordinary firearms: the 1602 wheellock made for Henri IV, the first Bourbon king; and the sporting wheellock made for Louis XIII, the monarch who would inaugurate Europe's first curated royal arms collection. These two guns – beautiful, symbolically charged, and technologically advanced – are revealed not merely as artifacts, but as instruments in the shaping of a nation. Beginning with the turbulent historical atmosphere of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, the book traces the cultural, political, and artistic forces that forged the rise of French gunmaking. Chapters on Henri IV's private cabinets and galleries, the evolving Royal Cabinet d'Armes, and the Louvre Logement where kings gathered the finest artists and engineers, lay the groundwork for understanding firearms as more than weapons: they were statements of kingship, diplomacy, engineering, and taste. From the Renaissance to the Baroque, the narrative follows the transformation of French design, examining the lineage from Lisieux to Paris where the decorative language of firearms matured into a uniquely French idiom. The text moves through the world of pattern designers, metal engravers, damasceners, and woodcarvers, situating French artisans within a constellation of European schools – Munich, Liège, Augsburg, Brescia – and offering comparative analyses with masters such as Sadeler, Spät, Hennequin, Piraube, and Le Page. This expansive cultural panorama reveals how French gunmaking absorbed, transformed, and eventually surpassed foreign influence. Against this background, the book presents the only detailed scholarly reconstruction to date of François Poumerol – not only as an artisan, but as a gifted writer whose quatrains illuminate his philosophy, ambitions, and disappointments. His biography is assembled from scattered archival fragments, while his stylistic evolution is unpacked through technical and decorative analyses of his surviving works. Poumerol's 1602 Henri IV wheellock pistol, centerpiece of the study, is treated in a full technical dossier: butt, pommel, lock, stock, barrel with royal portrait, fleurs-de-lis, and classical wreaths are described with minuteness befitting a royal commission. The book re-examines the pistol's sculptural iconography, its symbolic program, its provenance, and its market history, situating the piece as a foundational work of Bourbon visual culture. The companion study of Poumerol's Louis XIII wheellock fowler, a masterpiece of sporting design, illuminates the king's fascination with mechanism, geometry, and elegance, while demonstrating the transition from wheellock brilliance toward the fully matured French flintlock of Marin and Jean le Bourgeois. Through careful attribution, condition reports, and provenance reconstructions, the narrative reveals how these two guns not only served kings but shaped the collecting culture that would later blossom into Europe's great arms museums. With comparison to other weapons, extensive references, archival appendices, and scholarly endnotes, this book stands as the definitive monograph on François Poumerol and the royal wheellocks that bear his name. More broadly, it is a meditation on how art, monarchy, technology, and national destiny converge in objects of breathtaking beauty – objects that shaped history and, in their gleaming surfaces, still reflect the birth of one of Europe's greatest nations. This volume is a landmark achievement in the history of arms and decorative art. With exceptional erudition and narrative grace, Dr. Sarah Condor-Fisher restores François Poumerol to his rightful place as one of the founding masters of French gunmaking and one of the most intellectually compelling artisan-poets of the early modern age. Anchored by penetrating studies of the celebrated 1602 wheellock made for Henri IV and the magnificent sporting wheellock for Louis XIII, Dr. Fisher demonstrates - convincingly and with rare depth - that these objects are not merely masterpieces of craftsmanship, but historical landmarks, instruments of kingship, statecraft, and national identity. What distinguishes this work is its fusion of rigorous scholarship with cultural vision. The author moves effortlessly from technical analysis to symbolic interpretation, from workshop practice to court culture, situating Poumerol's arms within the broader emergence of Bourbon France. The treatment of the Henri IV wheellock is definitive, while the companion study of the Louis XIII piece illuminates the transition from Renaissance ingenuity to Baroque elegance and the birth of Europe's great royal collections. Richly documented, lucidly argued, and beautifully written, this book stands as the definitive monograph on Poumerol - and as a model for how material culture, a