The attribution history of the Prayer of St Francis is now settled fact, thanks to the French historian Christian Renoux, whose 2001 study traced every known early printing. The prayer first appeared in December 1912 in La Clochette, a small devotional magazine published in Paris for a eucharistic association, under the heading of a beautiful prayer to say during Mass, with no author named. No earlier text of it exists anywhere, in French, Latin, Italian or any other language, and nothing resembling it appears in the writings of Francis of Assisi, who died in 1226, or in any Franciscan source of the following seven centuries. The association with Francis began by accident of layout. Around 1918 a French priest printed the prayer on the back of a card bearing an image of the saint, and readers began taking the picture for an attribution.
Within a decade the prayer was circulating as the Prayer of St Francis, and the label proved unshakeable, repeated in devotional books, hymnals and journalism ever since. Renoux judged that the actual author was probably connected with the magazine itself, possibly its founding editor, but no attribution can be proven, and the honest statement is that the most famous Franciscan prayer in the world is an anonymous French composition of the early twentieth century.