CHAPTER III
France Besieged
1300–1461

I. THE FRENCH SCENE

THE France of 1300 was by no means the majestic realm that today JL reaches from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and from the Vosges and Alps to the Atlantic. On the east it reached only to the Rhone. In the southwest a large area—Guienne and Gascony—had been added to the English crown by the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine (1152); in the north England had taken the county of Ponthieu, with Abbeville; and though the English kings held these lands as fiefs of the French monarchs, they maintained over them an effectual sovereignty. Provence, the Dauphiné, and Franche-Comté (“free county”) belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, whose heads were usually Germans. The French kings ruled indirectly, through their close kin, the princely appanages of Valois, Anjou, Bourbon, and Angoulême. They ruled directly, as royal domains, Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Poitou, Auvergne, most of Languedoc, and the Ile-de-France the “island” of north central France centering about Paris. Artois, Blois, Nevers, Limoges, Armagnac, and Valentinois were governed by feudal lords who alternately lip-served and fought the kings of France. Brittany, Burgundy, and Flanders were French fiefs, but they were, as Shakespeare called them, “almost kingly dukedoms,” behaving as virtually independent states. France was not yet France.

The most vital and volatile of the French fiefs at the opening of the fourteenth century was the county of Flanders. In all Europe north of the Alps only Flanders rivaled Italy in economic development. Its boundaries fluctuated confusingly in time and space; let us denote it as the region enclosing Bruges, Ghent, Y pres, and Courtrai. East of the Scheldt lay the duchy of Brabant, then including Antwerp, Mechlin (Malines), Brussels, Tournai, and Louvain. To the south of Flanders lay the independent bishoprics of Liége and Cambrai, and the county of Hainaut, around Valenciennes. Used loosely, “Flanders” included Brabant, Liège, Cambrai, and Hainaut. On the north were seven little principalities roughly composing the Holland of today. These Dutch regions would not reach their flowering till the seventeenth century, when their empire would stretch, so to speak, from Rembrandt to Batavia. But already in 1300 Flanders and Brabant throbbed with industry, commerce, and class war. A canal twelve miles long joined Bruges to the North Sea; a hundred vessels sailed it every day, bringing merchandise from a hundred ports in three continents; Aeneas Sylvius ranked Bruges among the three most beautiful cities in the world. The goldsmiths of Bruges made up an entire division of the town’s militia; the weavers of Ghent provided twenty-seven regiments of its armed forces, which totaled 189,000 men.

The medieval guild organization, which had dowered the craftsman with the dignity of freedom and the pride of skill, was now giving way, in the textile and metal industries of Flanders and Brabant, to a capitalist system* in which an employer supplied capital, materials, and machinery to shop-workers paid by the piece and no longer protected by the guild. Admission to a guild became ever costlier; thousands of workers became journeymen—day laborers—who went from town to town, from shop to shop, getting only temporary employment, with wages that forced them to live in slums and left them little property beyond the clothes they wore.¹ Communistic ideas appeared among prolétaires and peasants; the poor asked why they should go hungry while the barns of barons and bishops creaked with grain; and all men who did not work with their hands were denounced as parasites. The employers in their turn complained of the risks their investments ran, the uncertainty and periodicity of supplies, the foundering of their cargoes, the fluctuations of the market, the tricks of competitors, and the repeated strikes that raised wages and prices, unsettled the currency, and narrowed some employers’ profits to the edge of solvency.² Louis de Nevers, Count of Flanders, sided too strongly with the employers. The populace of Bruges and Ypres, supported by the neighboring peasantry, rose in revolt, deposed Louis, plundered abbeys, and slew a few millionaires. The Church laid an interdict upon the revolted regions; the rebels nevertheless forced the priests to say Mass; and one leader, stealing a march of 450 years on Diderot, vowed he would never be content till the last priest had been hanged.³ Louis appealed to his liege lord, the French king; Philip VI came, defeated the revolutionary forces at Cassel (1328), hanged the burgomaster of Bruges, restored the count, and made Flanders a dependency of France.

France in general was much less industrialized than Flanders; manufacturing for the most part remained in the handicraft stage; but Lille, Douai, Cambrai, and Amiens echoed the textile busyness of the near-by Flemish towns. Internal commerce was hampered by bad roads and feudal tolls, but favored by canals and rivers that constituted a system of natural highways throughout France. The rising business class, in alliance with the kings, had attained by 1300 to a high position in the state and to a degree of wealth that shocked the land-rich, money-poor nobility. Merchant oligarchies ruled the cities, controlled the guilds, and jealously restricted production and trade. Here, as in Flanders, a revolutionary proletariat simmered in the towns.

In 1300 an uprising of poor peasants, known to history as Pastoureaux—shepherds—surged through the cities as in 1251, gathering resentful prolétaires in its wake. Led by a rebel monk, they marched southward, mostly barefoot and unarmed, proclaiming Jerusalem as their goal. Hungry, they pillaged shops and fields; resisted, they found weapons and became an army. In Paris they broke open the jails and defeated the troops of the king. Philip IV shut himself up in the Louvre, the nobles retired to their strongholds, the merchants cowered in their homes. The horde passed on, swelled by the destitute of the capital; now it numbered 40,000 men and women, ruffians and pietists. At Verdun, Auch, and Toulouse they slaughtered all available Jews. When they gathered in Aiguesmortes, on the Mediterranean, the seneschal or sheriff of Carcassonne surrounded them with his forces, cut off their supplies, and waited till all the rebels had died of starvation or pestilence except a few, whom he hanged.⁴

What kind of government was it that left France at the mercy of greedy wealth and lawless poverty? In many ways it was the ablest government in Europe. The strong kings of the thirteenth century had subjected the feudal lords to the state, had organized a national judiciary and administration with a trained civil service, and had on occasion summoned an Estates-or States-General: originally a general gathering of estate owners, then a consultative assembly of delegates from the nobility, the clergy, and the burgesses or middle class. All Europe admired the French court, where powerful dukes, counts, and knights mingled with silk-robed women in elegant festivities and graceful cuckoldry, and clashing jousts in glittering tournaments sustained the glamour of chivalry. King John of Bohemia called Paris “the most chivalrous residence in the world” and avowed that he could not bear to live outside it.⁵ Petrarch, visiting it in 1331, described it less romantically:

Philip IV, despite his quasi-piratical confiscations from Templars and Jews, bequeathed an almost empty treasury to his son (1314). Louis X died after a brief reign (1316), leaving no heir but a pregnant wife. After an interval his brother was crowned as Philip V. A rival faction sought the throne for Louis’ four-year-old daughter Jeanne; but an assembly of nobles and clergy issued the famous ruling (1316) that “the laws and customs inviolably observed among the Franks excluded daughters from the crown.”⁷ When Philip himself died sonless (1322), this ruling was repeated to bar his own daughter from the throne, and his brother was proclaimed king as Charles IV.* Very probably the decisions aimed also to exclude from the succession the sister of Philip IV, Isabelle, who had married Edward II of England and had borne Edward III (1312). The French were resolved that no English king should rule France.

When Charles IV died without male issue (1328) the direct line of Capetian kings came to an end. Edward III, who had become King of England the year before, presented to the assembled aristocracy of France his claim to the French throne as a grandson of Philip IV and the most direct living descendant from Hugh Capet. The assembly denied his claim on the ground that Edward’s mother could not transmit to him a crown from which she herself had been excluded by the rulings of 1316 and 1322. The barons preferred a nephew of Philip IV, a count of Valois; so Philip VI began that Valois dynasty which ruled France till Henry IV inaugurated the Bourbon line (1589). Edward protested, but in 1329 he came to Amiens and did homage, and pledged full loyalty, to Philip VI as his feudal lord for Gascony, Guienne, and Ponthieu. As Edward grew in years and wile, he repented his homage, and dreamed again of sitting on two thrones at once. His advisers assured him that the new Philip was a weakling, who planned to leave soon on a crusade to the Holy Land. It seemed a propitious time to begin the Hundred Years’ War.

II. THE ROAD TO CRÉCY: 1337–47

In 1337 Edward formally renewed his claim to the French crown. The rejection of his claim was only the proximate cause of war. After the Norman conquest of England, Normandy had for 138 years belonged to the English kings; Philip II had reconquered it for France (1204); now many English nobles of Norman descent could look upon the coming war as an attempt to regain their motherland. Part of English Guienne had been nibbled away by Philip IV and Charles IV. Guienne was fragrant with vineyards, and the wine trade of Bordeaux was too precious a boon to England to be lamely lost merely to defer by a few years the death of 10,000 Englishmen. Scotland was a burr in England’s side; and the French had repeatedly allied themselves with Scotland in its wars with England. The North Sea was full of fish; the English navy claimed sovereignty in those waters, in the Channel, in the Bay of Biscay, and it captured French ships that flouted this first proclamation of English rule over the waves. Flanders was a vital outlet for British wool; English nobles whose sheep grew the wool, English merchants who exported it, disliked the dependence of their prime market on the good will of the King of France.

In 1336 the Count of Flanders ordered all Britons there to be jailed; apparently Philip VI had recommended this as a precaution against English plots. Edward III retaliated by ordering the arrest of all Flemings in England and forbidding the export of wool to Flanders. Within a week the Flemish looms stopped for lack of material; workers darkened the streets crying for employment. At Ghent artisans and manufacturers united in renouncing allegiance to the count; they chose an alleged brewer, Jacob van Artevelde, as governor of the city, and approved his policy of seeking the friendship and wool of England (1337). Edward lifted the embargo; the count fled to Paris; all Flanders accepted Artevelde’s dictatorship and agreed to join England in war on France. On November 1, 1337, Edward III, following the custom of chivalry, sent to Philip VI a formal declaration that after three days England would begin hostilities.

The first major encounter of the Hundred Years’ War was a naval engagement off the Flemish coast at Sluis (1340), where the English navy destroyed 142 of the 172 vessels in the French fleet. Later in that year Joan of Valois, sister of Philip and mother-in-law of Edward, left her convent at Fontenelle and induced the French King to commission her as an emissary of peace. Proceeding through many perils to the camp of the English leaders, she won their consent to a conference, and her heroic mediation persuaded the kings to a nine-month truce. By the efforts of Pope Clement VI peace was maintained till 1346.

During this lucid interval class war seized the stage. The well-organized weavers of Ghent were the aristocracy of labor in the Lowlands. They denounced Artevelde as a cruel tyrant, an embezzler of public funds, a too] of England and the bourgeoisie. Artevelde had proposed that Flanders should accept the Prince of Wales as its ruler, and Edward III came to Sluis to confirm the arrangement. When Artevelde returned from Sluis to Ghent his house was surrounded by an angry crowd. He pleaded for his life as a true Flemish patriot, but he was dragged into the street and hacked to death (1345).⁹ The weavers established a proletarian dictatorship in Ghent, and sent agents through Flanders to urge the workers to revolt. But the Ghent fullers fell out with the weavers, the weavers were deposed and many of them were massacred, the people tired of their new government, and Louis de Male, now Count of Flanders, brought all its cities under his rule.

The truce having expired, Edward III invaded and devastated Normandy. On August 26, 1346, the English and French armies met at Crécy and prepared for a decisive battle. Leaders and men on both sides heard Mass, ate the body and drank the blood of Jesus Christ, and asked His aid in dispatching one another.¹⁰ Then they fought with courage and ferocity, giving no quarter. Edward the Black Prince earned on that day the praise of his victorious father; Philip VI himself stood his ground till only six of his soldiers were left on the field. Thirty thousand men, in Froissart’s loose estimate, died in that one engagement. Feudalism almost died there, too: the mounted chivalry of France, charging gallantly with short lances, stopped helpless before a wall of long English pikes pointed at their horses’ breasts, while English bowmen on the wings scattered death among the chevaliers. The long heyday of cavalry, which had dawned at Adrianople 968 years before, here began to fade; infantry came to the fore, and the military supremacy of the aristocracy declined. Artillery was used at Crécy on a small scale, but the difficulties of moving and reloading it made it more troublesome than effective, so that Villani limited its usefulness to its noise.* ¹¹

From Crécy Edward led his army to the siege of Calais, and there employed cannon against the walls (1347). The town held out for a year; then, starving, it accepted Edward’s condition that the survivors might leave in peace if six principal citizens would come to him with ropes around their necks and the keys of the city in their hands. Six so volunteered, and when they stood before the King he ordered them beheaded. The Queen of England knelt before him and begged for their lives; he yielded to her, and she had the men escorted to their homes in safety. The women stand out with more credit than the kings in history, and fight bravely a desperate battle to civilize the men.

Calais became now, and remained till 1558, a part of England, a strategic outlet for her goods and troops upon the Continent. In 1348 it rebelled; Edward besieged it again, and himself, incognito, fought in the assault. A French knight, Eustace de Ribeaumont, twice struck Edward down, but was overpowered and made prisoner. When the city had been retaken, Edward entertained his noble captives at dinner; English lords and the Prince of Wales waited on them, and Edward said to Ribeaumont:

Removing from his head a rich chaplet that he wore, the English King placed it upon the head of the French chevalier, saying:

Here and there, amid greed and slaughter, chivalry survived, and the legends of Arthur came close to living history in the pages of Froissart.

III. BLACK DEATH AND OTHER: 1348–49

The Great Plague fell impartially upon an England prosperous with French spoils and a France desolate in defeat. Pestilence was a normal incident in medieval history; it harried Europe during thirty-two years of the fourteenth century, forty-one years of the fifteenth, thirty years of the sixteenth; so nature and human ignorance, those resolute Malthusians, cooperated with war and famine to counteract the reproductive ecstasies of mankind. The Black Death was the worst of these visitations, and probably the most terrible physical calamity in historic times. It came into Provence and France from Italy, and perhaps more directly from the Near East through Oriental rats landing at Marseille. In Narbonne, said a dubious tradition, 30,000 persons died of it; in Paris, 50,000;¹⁴ in Europe, 25,000,000;¹⁵ perhaps, altogether, “one fourth of the population of the civilized world.”¹⁶ The medical profession was helpless; it did not know the cause of the disease (Kitazato and Yersin discovered the bacillus of the bubonic plague in 1894), and could only recommend bleedings, purges, cordials, cleanliness of home and person, and fumigation with vapors of vinegar.¹⁷ A few physicians and priests, fearing infection, refused to treat the sick, but the great majority of them faced the ordeal manfully; thousands of doctors and clergymen gave their lives.¹⁸ Of twenty-eight cardinals alive in 1348 nine were dead a year later; of sixty-four archbishops, twenty-five; of 375 bishops, 207.¹⁹

The epidemic had effects in every sphere of life. As the poor died in greater proportion than the rich, a shortage of labor followed; thousands of acres were left untilled, millions of herring died a natural death. Labor enjoyed for a while an improved bargaining power; it raised its wages, repudiated many surviving feudal obligations, and staged revolts that kept noble teeth on edge for half a century; even priests struck for higher pay.²⁰ Serfs left farms for cities, industry expanded, the business class made further gains on the landed aristocracy. Public sanitation was goaded into moderate improvements. The immensity of the suffering and the tragedy weakened many minds, producing contagious neuroses; whole groups seemed to go mad in unison, like the Flagellants who in 1349, as they had done in the thirteenth century, marched through the city streets almost naked, beating themselves in penitence, preaching the Last Judgment, utopias, and pogroms. People listened with more than customary eagerness to mind readers, dream interpreters, sorcerers, quacks, and other charlatans. Orthodox faith was weakened; superstition flourished. Strange reasons were given for the plague. Some ascribed it to an untimely conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars; others to the poisoning of wells by lepers or Jews. Jews were killed in half a hundred towns from Brussels to Breslau (1348–49). Social order was almost destroyed by the death of thousands of police, judges, government officials, bishops, and priests. Even the business of war suffered a passing decline; from the siege of Calais to the battle of Poitiers (1356) the Hundred Years’ War dallied in reluctant truce, while the decimated ranks of the infantry were replenished with men too poor to value life at more than a few shillings above death.

Philip VI consoled himself for plague and defeat by marrying, at fifty-six, Blanche of Navarre, eighteen, whom he had intended for his son. Seven months later he died. This son, John II, “the Good” (1350–64), was good indeed to the nobles; he absolved them from taxes, paid them to defend their lands against the English, and maintained all the forms and graces of chivalry. He also debased the currency as an old way to pay war debts, repeatedly raised taxes on the lower and middle classes, and marched off in splendor to meet the English at Poitiers. There his 15,000 knights, Scots, and servitors were routed, slain, or captured by the 7,000 men of the Black Prince; and King John himself, fighting lustily, leading foolishly, was among the prisoners, along with his son Philip, seventeen earls, and countless barons, knights, and squires. Most of these were allowed to ransom themselves on the spot, and many were freed on their promise to bring their ransom to Bordeaux by Christmas. The Prince treated the King royally, and took him leisurely to England.

IV. REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL: 1357–80

All France fell into chaos after the disaster at Poitiers. The dishonesty and incompetence of the government, the depreciation of the currency, the costly ransoms of King and knights, the desolations of war and plague, and the discouraging taxes laid upon agriculture, industry, and trade, brought the nation to desperate revolt. A States-General of the northern provinces, summoned to Paris by the nineteen-year-old Dauphin,* Charles of Valois, to raise new taxes, undertook to establish a parliamentary government in France. Paris and other cities had long had parlements, but these were small appointive bodies, usually of jurists, normally limited to giving legal advice to the local ruler or the king, and registering his decrees as part of French law. This States-General, controlled by a transient coalition of clergy and bourgeoisie, demanded of the royal council why the vast sums raised for war had produced only undisciplined troops and shameful defeats; it ordered the arrest of twenty-two governmental agents, and commanded the administrators of the treasury to return the sums they were accused of embezzling; it imposed restrictions on the royal prerogative; it thought even of deposing John the Good, barring his sons from the succession, and giving the throne of France to King Charles the Bad of Navarre, a lineal descendant of Hugh Capet. Appeased by the prudent humility of the Dauphin, it recognized him as regent, and voted him funds for 30,000 men-at-arms; but it bade him dismiss corrupt or ignorant officials, warned him against tampering with the coinage, and appointed a committee of thirty-six men to keep an eye on the operations and expenditures of the government. Judges were condemned for their extravagant equipage, their dilatory idleness, their calendars twenty years behind; hereafter they were to begin their sessions at sunrise, at the same hour when honest citizens went to their shops or their fields. This “Great Ordinance” of 1357 also forbade nobles to leave France or to wage private war, and instructed the local authorities of the towns to arrest any noble violating this edict. In effect the aristocracy was to be subject to the communes, the nobles to the business class; king, prince, and barons were to obey the chosen representatives of the people. France was to have a constitutional government four centuries before the revolution.²¹

The Dauphin signed the ordinance in March, and began to evade it in April. The English were demanding a ruinous ransom for his father, and were threatening an advance upon Paris. The people were slow in paying taxes, on the novel ground that these could properly be levied only by the States-General. Hard pressed for cash, Charles called this body to reassemble on February 1, 1358; meanwhile he further debased the currency to increase his funds. On February 2 Étienne Marcel, a rich merchant who, as head of the merchant guilds, had played a leading part in formulating the “Great Ordinance,” and had been governing Paris for a year, led an armed band of citizens—all wearing hoods of the city’s official colors, blue and red—into the royal palace. He rebuked Charles for disobeying the instructions of the States-General; and when the Prince would not pledge obedience Marcel had his men kill two chamberlains who guarded the Dauphin, so that their blood spurted upon the royal robe.²²

The new States-General was horrified by this audacious violence; nevertheless it advanced the revolution by decreeing (May 1358) that thereafter only the States-General should enact laws for France, and that in all important matters the king was to act only with the approval of the Estates.²³ Many members of the nobility and clergy fled from Paris; many administrative officials abandoned their posts in fear of their lives. Marcel replaced them with burgesses, and for a time the merchants of Paris attempted to rule France. The Dauphin took refuge with nobles in Picardy, raised an army, and called upon the people of Paris to surrender to him the leaders of the revolt. Marcel organized the capital for defense, ringed it with new walls, and occupied the Louvre, then the seat and symbol of sovereignty.

While revolution captured Paris the peasants of the countryside thought it an opportune time to revenge themselves on their masters. Still mostly serf,²⁴ taxed to equip their lords, taxed to ransom them, pillaged by soldiers and brigands, tortured to disclose their laborious savings, decimated by plague and starved by war, they rose in uncalculating fury, forced their way into feudal castles, cut all the noble throats their knives could reach, and relieved their hunger and thirst in baronial hoards and cellars. The nobles had traditionally given the typically good-natured peasant the nickname of Jacques Bonhomme—James Goodman; now thousands of such Jacques, their patience spent, plunged into ferocious jacqueries, slew their lords, violated the ladies, murdered the heirs, and dressed their own wives in the finery of the dead.²⁵

Hoping that this rural revolution would divert the Dauphin from attacking Paris, Marcel sent 800 of his men to aid the peasants. So reinforced, they marched upon Meaux. The Duchesses of Orléans and Normandy, and many other women of lofty pedigree, had sought refuge there; now they saw a mob of serfs and tenants pouring into the town, and gave themselves up as lost in both virtue and life. Then, miraculously, as in some Arthurian romance, a knightly band returning from a crusade galloped into Meaux, fell upon the peasants, killed thousands of them, and flung them by heaps into neighboring streams. The nobles came out of hiding, laid punitive fines upon the villages, and went through the countryside massacring 20,000 rustics, rebel or innocent (June 1358).²⁶

The forces of the Dauphin approached Paris, and cut off its food supply.

Despairing of successful resistance by other means, Marcel offered the crown to Charles the Bad and prepared to admit his forces into the city. Rejecting this plan as treason, Marcel’s aide and friend, Jean Maillart, made a secret agreement with the Dauphin, and on July 31 Jean and others slew Marcel with an ax. The Dauphin entered Paris at the head of the armed nobility. He behaved with moderation and caution, and set himself to ransom his father and to restore the morale and economy of France. The men who had tried to create a sovereign parliament retreated into obscurity and silence; the grateful nobles rallied around the throne; and the States-General became the obedient instrument of a strengthened monarchy.

In November 1359, Edward III landed with a fresh army at Calais. He avoided Paris, respecting the walls recently raised by Marcel, but he subjected the surrounding country, from Reims to Chartres, to so systematic a destruction of crops that Paris again starved. Charles pleaded for peace on abject terms. France would yield Gascony and Guienne to England, free from all feudal bond to the French king; it would also cede Poitou, Périgord, Quercy, Saintonge, Rouergue, Calais, Ponthieu, Aunis, Angoumois, Agenois, Limousin, and Bigorre; and it would pay 3,000,000 crowns for the return of its king. In return Edward renounced, for himself and his descendants, all claim to the throne of France. This Peace of Brétigny was signed on May 8, 1360, and one third of France fretted and fumed under English rule. Two sons of King John—the Dukes of Anjou and Berry—were sent to England as hostages for French fidelity to the treaty; John returned to Paris amid the ringing of bells and the joy of the noble and the simple. When the Duke of Anjou broke parole and escaped to join his wife, King John returned to England to replace his son as hostage, and in the hope of negotiating a milder peace. Edward received him as a guest, and feted him daily as the flower of chivalry. John died in London in 1364, and was buried in St. Paul’s, captive in death. The Dauphin, aged twenty-six, became Charles V of France.

He deserved the name le Sage, the Wise, which his people gave him, if only because he knew how to win battles without raising a hand. His right hand was perpetually swollen and his arm was limp, so that he could not lift a lance; it was said that he had been poisoned by Charles the Bad. Half forced to a sedentary life, he gathered about him prudent councilors, reorganized every department of the government, reformed the judiciary, rebuilt the army, encouraged industry, stabilized the currency, supported literature and art, and collected in the Louvre the royal library that provided classic texts and translations for the French Renaissance, and formed the nucleus of the Bibliothèque Nationale. He yielded to the nobles in restoring feudal tolls, but he went over their heads to appoint as constable—commander-in-chief of all French armies—a swarthy, flat-nosed, thick-necked, massive-headed Breton, Bertrand Du Guesclin. Faith in the superiority of this “Eagle of Brittany” to all English generals shared in determining Charles to undertake the redemption of France from English rule. In 1369 he sent Edward III a formal declaration of war.

The Black Prince responded by subduing Limoges and massacring 3,000 men, women, and children; this was his conception of political education. It proved inadequate; every city in his path fortified, garrisoned, and provisioned itself to successful defense, and the Prince was reduced to laying waste the open country, burning the crops, and razing the deserted homes of the peasantry. Du Guesclin refrained from giving battle, but harassed the princely rear, captured foragers, and waited for the English troops to starve. They did, and retreated; Du Guesclin advanced; one by one the ceded provinces were reclaimed; and after two years of remarkable generalship, and the mutual loyalty of commander and King, the English were driven from all of France except Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg, and Calais; France for the first time reached to the Pyrenees. Charles and his great constable could die with honors in the same year (1380) on the crest of victory.

V. THE MAD KING: 1380–1422

The gamble of hereditary monarchy now replaced a competent ruler with a lovable idiot. Charles VI was twelve when his father died; his uncles acted as regents till he was twenty, and allowed him to grow up in irresponsible debauchery while half of Europe marched to the brink of revolution. In 1359 the workingmen of Bruges, wearing red hats, stormed the historic hôtel de ville in transient revolt. In 1366 the lower classes of Ypres rose in rebellion, preaching a holy war against the rich. In 1378 the Ciompi established in Florence the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1379 the starving peasants of Languedoc—south-central France—began six years of guerrilla warfare against nobles and priests under a leader who gave orders to “kill all who have soft hands.”²⁷ Workers revolted in Strasbourg in 1380, in London in 1381, in Cologne in 1396. From 1379 to 1382 a revolutionary government ruled Ghent. In Rouen a stout draper was crowned king by an uprising of town laborers; and in Paris the people killed with leaden mallets the tax collectors of the King (1382).

Charles VI took the reins of government in 1388, and for four years reigned so well that he won the name of Bien-Aimé, Well-Beloved. But in 1392 he went insane. He could no longer recognize his wife, and begged the strange woman to cease her importunities. Soon only the humblest servants paid any attention to him. For five months he had no change of clothes, and when at last it was decided to bathe him a dozen men were needed to overcome his reluctance.²⁸ For thirty years the French crown was worn by a pitiful imbecile, while a virile young king prepared to renew the English attack upon France.

On August 11, 1415, Henry V sailed from England with 1,300 vessels and 11,000 men. On the fourteenth they landed near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine. Harfleur resisted gallantly and in vain. Jubilant with victory and hurried by dysentery, the English marched toward Calais. The chivalry of France met them at Agincourt, close to Crécy (October 25). The French, having learned nothing from Crécy and Poitiers, still relied on cavalry. Many of their horses were immobilized by mud; those that advanced met the sharp stakes that the English had planted at an angle in the ground around their bowmen. The discouraged horses turned and charged their own army; the English fell upon this chaotic mass with maces, hatchets, and swords; their King Hal led them valiantly, too excited for fear; and their victory was overwhelming. French historians estimate the English loss at 1,600, the French loss at 10,000.

Henry returned to France in 1417, and besieged Rouen. The citizens ate up their food supply, then their horses, their dogs, their cats. To save food, women, children, and old men were thrust forth beyond the city walls; they sought passage through the English lines, were refused, remained foodless and shelterless between their relatives and their enemies, and starved to death; 50,000 French died of starvation in that merciless siege. When the town surrendered, Henry restrained his army from massacring the survivors, but he levied upon them a fine of 300,000 crowns, and kept them in prison till the total was paid. In 1419 he advanced upon a Paris in which nothing remained but corruption, destitution, brutality, and class war. Outdoing the humiliation of 1360, France, by the Treaty of Troyes (1420), surrendered everything, even honor. Charles VI gave his daughter Katherine to Henry V in marriage, promised to bequeath to him the French throne, turned over to him the governance of France, and, to clear up any ambiguity, disowned the Dauphin as his son. Queen Isabelle, for an annuity of 24,000 francs, made no defense against this charge of adultery; and, indeed, in the royal courts of that age it was not easy for a woman to know who was the father of her child. The Dauphin, holding south France, repudiated the treaty, and organized his Gascon and Armagnac bands to carry on the war. But the King of England reigned in the Louvre.

Two years later Henry V died of dysentery; the germs had not signed the treaty. When Charles VI followed him (1422), Henry VI of England was crowned King of France; but as he was not yet a year old, the Duke of Bedford ruled as his regent. The Duke governed severely, but as justly as any Englishman could govern France. He suppressed brigandage by hanging 10,000 bandits in a year; judge therefrom the condition of the land.

Demobilized soldiers —écorcheurs (skinners), coquillards (shellmen)—made the highways perilous, and terrorized even large cities like Paris and Dijon. Over Normandy the ravage of war had passed back and forth like an infernal, murderous tide; even in luckier Languedoc a third of the population had disappeared.²⁹ Peasants fled to the cities, or hid in caves, or fortified themselves in churches, as armies or feudal factions or robber bands approached. Many peasants never returned to their precarious holdings, but lived by beggary or thievery, or died of starvation or plague. Churches, farms, whole towns, were abandoned and left to decay. In Paris in 1422 there were 24,000 empty houses, 80,000 beggars,³⁰ in a population of some 300,000.³¹ People ate the flesh and entrails of dogs. The cries of hungry children haunted the streets.

VI. LIFE AMONG THE RUINS

Morals were such as any country might expect from so long and tragic a disablement of economy and government. Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, about 1372, wrote two books to guide his children in the chaos; only that which he addressed to his daughters survives. It is a gentle and tender volume warm with parental love, and disturbed by solicitude for a virginity especially unstable in a time when many women came through generous sins to ungenerous contumely. Against such temptations, the good knight thought, the best protection was frequent prayer.³² The book reflects an age still clinging to civilized sentiments and moral sense. Seventy years later we come to the gruesome figure of the Maréchal de Rais or Retz, a great and wealthy lord of Brittany. It was his custom to invite children into his castle on pretense of training them for the chapel choir; one by one he killed them and offered them in sacrifice to demons of whom he begged magic powers. But also he killed for pleasure and (we are told) laughed at the cries of his tortured or dying choristers. For fourteen years he followed this routine, until at last the father of a victim dared to indict him; he confessed all these details and was hanged (1440), but only because he had offended the Duke of Brittany; men of his rank could seldom be brought to justice whatever their crimes.³³ Yet the aristocracy to which he belonged produced heroes in abundance, like King John of Bohemia, or the Gaston Phoebus de Foix so loved and lauded by Froissart. The final flowers of chivalry blossomed in this mire.

The morality of the people shared in the common debacle. Cruelty, treachery, and corruption were endemic. Commoner and governor were alike open to bribes. Profanity flourished; Chancellor Gerson complained that the most sacred festivals were passed in card-playing,* gambling, and blasphemy.³⁵ Sharpers, forgers, thieves, vagabonds, and beggars clogged the streets by day, and gathered at night to enjoy their gleanings, at Paris, in the Cours des Miracles, so called because the mendicants who had posed as cripples during the day appeared there marvelously sound in every limb.³⁶

Sodomy was frequent, prostitution was general, adultery was almost universal.³⁷ A sect of “Adamites” in the fourteenth century advocated nudism, and practiced it in public till the Inquisition suppressed them.³⁸ Obscene pictures were as widely marketed as now; according to Gerson they were sold even in churches and on holy days.³⁹ Poets like Deschamps wrote erotic ballads for noble dames.⁴⁰ Nicolas de Clémanges, Archdeacon of Bayeux, described the convents of his district as “sanctuaries devoted to the cult of Venus.”⁴¹ It was taken as a matter of course that kings and princes should have mistresses, since royal—and many noble—marriages were political matches involving, it was held, no due of love. Highborn ladies continued to hold formal discussions on the casuistry of sexual relations. Philip the Bold of Burgundy established a “court of love” in Paris in 1401.⁴² Amid or beneath this moneyed laxity there were presumably some virtuous women and honest men; we catch a fleeting glimpse of them in a strange book written about 1393 by an anonymous sexagenarian known as the Ménagier, or householder, of Paris:

Persecutions of Jews (1306, 1384, 1396) and lepers (1321), trials and executions of animals for injuring or copulating with human beings,⁴⁴ public hangings that drew immense crowds of eager spectators, entered into the picture of the age. In the cemetery of the Church of the Innocents at Paris so many newly dead sought admission that bodies were exhumed as soon as the flesh might be expected to have fallen from the bones; the bones were indiscriminately piled in charnel houses alongside the cloisters; nevertheless, these cloisters were a popular rendezvous; shops were set up there, and prostitutes invited patronage.⁴⁵ On a wall of the cemetery an artist labored for months in 1424 to paint a Dance of Death, in which demons, pirouetting with men, women, and children, led them step by merry step to hell. This became a symbolic theme of a desperate age; a play presented it at Bruges in 1449; Dürer, Holbein, and Bosch would illustrate it in their art. Pessimism wrote half the poetry of the period. Deschamps reviled life in almost all its parts; the world seemed to him like a weak, timorous, covetous old man, confused and decayed; “all goes badly,” he concluded. Gerson agreed with him: “We lived in the senility of the world,” and the Last Judgment was near. An old woman thought that every twitch of pain in her toes announced another soul heaved into hell. Her estimate was moderate; according to popular belief no one had entered paradise in the past thirty years.⁴⁶

What did religion do in this collapse of an assaulted nation? In the first four decades of the Hundred Years’ War the popes, immured at Avignon, received the protection and commands of the French kings. Much of the revenues drawn from Europe by the popes of that captivity went to those kings to finance the struggle of life and death against Britain; in eleven years (1345–55) the Church advanced 3,392,000 florins ($84,800,000?) to the monarchy.⁴⁷ The popes tried again and again to end the war, but failed. The Church suffered grievously from the century-long devastation of France; hundreds of churches and monasteries were abandoned or destroyed; and the lower clergy shared in the demoralization of the age. Knights and footmen ignored religion until the hour of battle or death, and must have felt some qualms of creed at the maddening indifference of the skies. The people, while breaking all the commandments, clung fearfully to the Church and the faith; they brought their pennies and their griefs to the comforting shrines of the Mother of God; they rose en masse to religious ecstasy at the earnest preaching of Friar Richard or St. Vincent Ferrer. Some houses had statuettes of the Virgin so contrived that a touch would open her abdomen and reveal the Trinity.⁴⁸

The intellectual leaders of the Church in this period were mostly Frenchmen. Pierre d’Ailly was not only one of the most suggestive scientists of the time; he was among the ablest and most incorruptible leaders of the Church; and he was one of the ecclesiastical statesmen who, at the Council of Constance, healed the schism in the papacy. As director of the College of Navarre in Paris he had among his pupils a youth who became the outstanding theologian of his generation. Jean de Gerson visited the Lowlands, and was much impressed by the mysticism of Ruysbroeck and the moderna devotio of the Brethren of the Common Life. When he became chancellor of the University of Paris (1395) he sought to introduce this form of piety into France, even while censuring the egoism and pantheism of the mystic school. His six sisters were overcome by his arguments and example, and we are told that they remained virgins to the end of their lives. Gerson condemned the superstitions of the populace, and the quackeries of astrology, magic, and medicine; but he admitted that charms may have efficacy by working upon the imagination. Our knowledge of the stars, he thought, is too imperfect to allow specific predictions; we cannot even reckon a solar year precisely; we cannot tell the true positions of the stars because their light is refracted, as it passes down to us, through a variety of mediums. Gerson advocated a limited democracy, and the supremacy of the councils, in the Church, but favored a strong monarchy in France; perhaps his inconsistency was justified by the condition of his country, which needed order more than liberty. He was a great man in his fashion and generation; his virtues, as Goethe would have said, were his own attainment, while his delusions were infections from the age. He led the movement to depose rival popes and reform the Church; and he shared in sending John Huss and Jerome of Prague to the stake.

Amid the destitution of their people the upper classes glorified their persons and adorned their homes. Common men wore simple jerkins, blouses, culottes or trousers, and high boots; the middle classes, imitating the kings despite sumptuary laws, wore long robes, perhaps dyed in scarlet or edged with fur; noble lords wore doublets and long hose, handsome capes, and feathered hats that swept the earth in courtly bows. Some men wore horns on the toes of their shoes, to correspond with less visible emblems on their heads. Highborn ladies affected conical hats like church steeples, straitened themselves in tight jackets and colorful pantaloons, trailed furry skirts over the floor majestically, and graciously displayed their bosoms while enhancing their faces with veils. Buttons were coming into fashion for fastenings,⁴⁹ having before been merely ornaments; we are reversing that movement now. Silks, cloth of gold, brocade, lace, jewelry in the hair, on neck and hands and dress and shoes, made even stout women sparkle; and under this protective brilliance nearly all upper-class women developed a Rubensian amplitude.

The homes of the poor remained as in former centuries, except that glass windows were now general. But the villas and town houses (hotels) of the rich were no longer gloomy donjons; they were commodious and well-furnished mansions, with spacious fountained courts, broad winding stairs, overhanging balconies, and sharply sloping roofs that cut the sky and sloughed the snow; they were equipped with servants’ rooms, storerooms, guard room, porter’s room, linen room, laundry, wine cellar, and bakery, in addition to the great hall and bedrooms of the master’s family. Some châteaux, like those of Pierrefonds (c. 1390) and Châteaudun (c. 1450), already presaged the regal castles of the Loire. Better preserved than any palace of the time is the house of the great capitalist Jacques CŒur at Bourges, a full block long, with Gothic tower of carved stone, ornate cornices and reliefs, and Renaissance windows, the whole costing, we are told, some $4,000,000 in the money of today.⁵⁰ Interiors were now sumptuously furnished: magnificent fireplaces, which could warm at least one side of a room and its occupants; sturdy chairs and tables indefatigably carved; cushioned benches along tapestried walls; gigantic dressers and cupboards displaying gold and silver plate, and far lovelier glass; thick carpets, and floors of polished oak or enameled tiles; and high canopied beds vast enough to hold the lord, his lady, and a child or two. On these recumbent thrones the men and women of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries slept naked;⁵¹ nightgowns were not yet an indispensable impediment.

VII. LETTERS

Among the ruins men and women continued to write books. The Postillae perpetuae (1322–31) of Nicholas of Lyra were major contributions to the textual understanding of the Bible, and prepared the way for Erasmus’ New Testament and Luther’s German translation. The fiction of the period favored light erotic tales like the Cent nouvelles nouvelles—one hundred novel novels—of Antoine de la Salle, or romances of chivalry like Flore et Blanchefleur. Almost as fictitious was the book of a Liége physician, Jehan à la Barbe, who called himself Sir John Mandeville, and published (c. 1370) an account of his alleged travels in Egypt, Asia, Russia, and Poland. John claimed to have visited all the places named in the Gospels: “the house where the sweet Virgin went to school,” the spot where “the water was warmed with which Our Lord washed the feet of the Apostles,” the church in which Mary “hid herself to draw milk from her worthy breasts; in this same church is a marble column against which she leaned, and which is still moist from her milk; and wherever her worthy milk fell the earth is still soft and white.”⁵² John of the Beard is at his best in describing China, where his eloquence was least cramped by erudition. Now and then he verges on science, as when he tells how a “man traveled ever eastward until he came to his own country again,” like Jules Verne’s M. Passepartout. He drank twice at the Fountain of Youth, but returned to Europe crippled with arthritis, which perhaps he had caught by never leaving Liége. These Travels, translated into a hundred languages, became one of the literary sensations of the later Middle Ages.

By far the most brilliant production of French literature in the fourteenth century was the Chronicles of Jean Froissart. Born at Valenciennes in 1338, he lapsed into poetry at an early age; and at twenty-four he crossed to London to lay his verses at the feet of Edward Ill’s wife, Philippa of Hainaut. He became her secretary, met English aristocrats, and admired them too frankly to be impartial in his history. Lust for travel soon uprooted him, and drew him to Scotland, Bordeaux, Savoy, and Italy. Returning to Hainaut, he became a priest and canon of Chimay. Now he decided to rewrite his book in prose, and to extend it at both ends. He traveled again in England and France, sedulously gathering material. Back in Chimay he dedicated himself to finishing “this noble and pleasant history .... which will be much in request when I am gone... to encourage all valorous hearts, and to show them honorable examples.”⁵³ No romance could be more fascinating; he who begins these 1,200 ample pages with intent to leap from peak to peak will find the valleys inviting too, and will move gladly and leisurely to the end. This priest, like Julius II, loved nothing so much as war. He was allured by action, gallantry, aristocracy; commoners enter his pages only as victims of lordly strife. He did not inquire into motives; he relied too trustfully on embellished or prejudiced accounts; he made no pretense of adding philosophy to narrative. He was only a chronicler, but of all chroniclers the best.

Drama marked time. Mysteries, moralities, “miracles,” interludes, and farces occupied the stages temporarily erected in the towns. Themes were increasingly secular, and the humor was often scandalous; but religious subjects still predominated, and the people never tired of spectacles representing the Passion of Christ. The most famous theater guild of the time—the Parisian Confrairie de la Passion de Nôtre Seigneur—specialized in acting the story of Christ’s brief stay in Jerusalem. One such Passion Play, by Arnoul Greban, ran to 35,000 lines.

Poetry, too, had its guilds. Toulouse set up in 1323 a Consistori de la gaya sciensa, or Academy of the Gay Science; under its auspices public competitions in poetry sought to revive the art and spirit of the troubadours. Similar literary societies were formed at Amiens, Douai, and Valenciennes, preparing for the French Academy of Richelieu. Kings and great lords had poets as well as minstrels and buffoons attached to their households. The “good René,” Duke of Anjou and Lorraine, and titular King of Naples, supported a bevy of poets and artists at his courts in Nancy, Tarascón, and Aix-en-Provence, and so rivaled the best of his rhymers that he received the title of “Last of the Troubadours.” Charles V took care of Eustache Deschamps, who sang the beauty of women, married, denounced matrimony in a 12,000-line Le Miroir de mariage, and bemoaned the misery and wickedness of his time:

Christine de Pisanu reared in Paris as the daughter of Charles V’s Italian physician, was left with three children and three relatives to support when her husband died; she did it miraculously by writing exquisite poetry and patriotic history, she deserves a passing obeisance as the first woman in Western Europe to live by her pen. Alain Chartier was more fortunate; his love poems—like La belle dame sans merci, which melodiously chided women for hoarding their charms—so captivated the aristocracy that a future queen of France, Margaret of Scotland, was said to have kissed the lips of the poet as he slept on a bench. Étienne Pasquier, a century later, told the legend charmingly:

The finest French poet of the age did not have to write poetry, for he was the nephew of Charles VI and the father of Louis XII. But Charles, Duke of Orléans, was taken prisoner at Agincourt, and spent twenty-five years (1415–40) in genteel captivity in England. There, heavy of heart, he consoled himself by writing tender verses about the beauty of women and the tragedy of France. For a time all France sang his song of spring:

Even in England there were pretty girls, and Charles forgot his griefs when modest loveliness passed by:

Allowed at last to return to France, he made his castle at Blois a happy center of literature and art, where Villon was received despite his poverty and his crimes. When old age came, and Charles could no longer join in the revels of his young friends, he made his excuses to them in graceful lines that might have served as his epitaph:

VIII. ART

The artists of France were in this epoch superior to her poets, but they too suffered from her bitter impoverishment. No lavish patronage supported them, of city, Church, or king. The communes, which had expressed the pride of their guilds through majestic temples to an unquestioned faith, had been weakened or destroyed by the extension of royal authority, and the enlargement of the economy from a local to a national frame. The French Church could no longer finance or inspire such stupendous structures as had risen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from the soil of France. Faith as well as wealth had declined; the hope that in those centuries had undertaken at once the Crusades and the cathedrals—the enterprise and its prayer—had lost its generative ecstasy. It was more than the fourteenth century could do to finish, in architecture, what a more sanguine era had begun. Even so, Jean Ravi completed Notre Dame in Paris (1351), Rouen added a “Lady Chapel” (1302) to a cathedral already dedicated to Our Lady, and Poitiers gave her cathedral its proud west front (1379).

The Rayonnant style of Gothic design was now (1275 f.) gradually yielding to a Geometrical Gothic that stressed Euclidean figures instead of radiating lines. In this manner Bordeaux built her cathedral (1320–25), Caen raised a handsome spire (shattered in the second World War) on the church of St. Pierre (1308), Auxerre gave her cathedral a new nave (1335), Coutances (1371–86) and Amiens (1375) added lovely chapels to their historic shrines, and Rouen enhanced her architectural glory with the noble church of St. Ouen (1318–1545).

In the final quarter of the fourteenth century, when France thought herself victorious, her architects displayed a new Gothic, joyous in spirit, exuberant in carved detail, fancifully intricate in tracery, reveling recklessly in ornament. The ogive, or pointed arch of a continued curve, became now an ogee, or tapered arch of a reversed curve, like the tongue of flame that gave the style its Flamboyant name. Capitals fell into disuse; columns were fluted or spiraled; choir stalls were profusely carved, and were closed with iron screens of delicate lacery; pendentives became stalactites; vaults were a wilderness of intertwined, disappearing, reappearing ribs; the mullions of the windows shunned the old solid geometrical forms, and flowed in charming frailty and incalculable willfulness; spires seemed built of decoration; structure vanished behind ornament. The new style made its debut in the chapel of St. Jean-Baptiste (1375) in the cathedral of Amiens; by 1425 it had captured France; in 1436 it began one of its fragile miracles, the church of St. Maclou at Rouen. Perhaps the revival of French courage and arms by Joan of Arc and Charles VII, the growth of mercantile wealth as instanced by Jacques Cœur, and the inclination of the rising bourgeoisie to luxurious ornament helped the Flamboyant style to its triumph in the first half of the fifteenth century. In that feminine form Gothic survived till French kings and nobles brought back from their wars in Italy the classical architectural ideas of the Renaissance.

The growth of civil architecture revealed the rising secularism of the time. Kings and dukes thought there were churches enough, and built themselves palaces to impress the people and house their mistresses; rich burghers spent fortunes on their homes; municipalities announced their wealth through splendid hotels-de-ville, or city halls. Some hospitals, like Beaune’s, were designed with a fresh and airy beauty that must have lulled the ill to health. At Avignon the popes and cardinals gathered and nourished a diversity of artists; but the builders, painters, and sculptors of France were now usually grouped about a noble or a king. Charles V built the chateau of Vincennes (1364–73) and the Bastille (1369), and commissioned the versatile André Beauneveû to carve figures of Philip VI, John II, and Charles himself for the imposing array of royal tombs that crowd the ambulatory and crypt of St. Denis (1364). Louis of Orléans raised the chateau of Pierrefonds, and John, Duke of Berry, though hard on his peasants, was one of the great art patrons of history.

For him Beauneveû illustrated a Psalter in 1402. It was but one in a series of illuminated manuscripts that stand near the top in what might be called the chamber music of the graphic arts. For the same discriminating lord, Jacquemart de Hesdin painted Les petites heures, Les belles heures, and Les grandes heures, all illustrating books of “hours” for the canonical daily prayers. Again for Duke John the brothers Pol, Jehannequin, and Herman Malouel of Limburg produced Les tres riches heures (1416)—sixty-five delicately beautiful miniatures picturing the life and scenery of France: nobles hunting, peasants working, a countryside purified with snow. These Very Rich Hours, now hidden even from tourist eyes in the Condé Museum at Chantilly, and the miniatures made for Le bon roi, René of Anjou, were almost the last triumphs of illumination; for in the fifteenth century that art was challenged both by wood-block engraving and by the development of thriving schools of mural and easel painting at Fontainebleau, Amiens, Bourges, Tours, Moulins, Avignon, and Dijon, not to speak of the masters who worked for the dukes of Burgundy. Beauneveû and the Van Eycks brought Flemish styles of painting to France; and through Simone Martini and other Italians at Avignon, and the Angevin rule in Naples (1268–1435), Italian art influenced the French long before French arms invaded Italy. By 1450 French painting stood on its own feet, and marked its coming of age with the anonymous Pietà of Villeneuve, now in the Louvre.

Jean Fouquet is the first clear personality in French painting. Born at Tours (1416), he studied for seven years in Italy (1440–47), and returned to France with that predilection for classical architectural backgrounds which in the seventeenth century would become a mania with Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Nevertheless he painted several portraits that are powerful revelations of character: Archbishop Juvénal des Ursins, Chancellor of France—stout and stern and resolute, and not too pious for statesmanship; Etienne Chevalier, treasurer of the realm—a melancholy man troubled by the impossibility of raising money as fast as a government can spend it; Charles VII himself, after Agnès Sorel had made a man of him; and Agnès in the rosy flesh, transformed by Fouquet into a cold and stately Virgin with downcast eyes and uplifted breast. For Chevalier, Jean illuminated a Book of Hours, brightening the tedium of ritual prayer with almost fragrant scenes from the valley of the Loire. An enameled medallion in the Louvre preserves Fouquet as he saw himself—no princely Raphael riding high, but a simple artisan of the brush, dressed for work, eager and diffident, worried and resolved, bearing the mark of a century of poverty on his brow. However, he passed without mishap from one reign to another, and rose at last to be peintre du roi for the incalculable Louis XI. After many years of labor comes success, and soon thereafter death.

IX. JOAN OF ARC: 1412–31

In 1422 the repudiated son of Charles VI had himself proclaimed king as Charles VII. In her desolation France looked to him for help, and fell into deeper despair. This timid, listless, heedless youth of twenty hardly credited his own proclamation, and probably shared the doubts of Frenchmen as to the legitimacy of his birth. Fouquet’s portrait of him shows a sad and homely face, pockets under the eyes, and an overreaching nose. He was fearfully religious, heard three Masses daily, and allowed no canonical hour to pass without reciting its appointed prayers. In the intervals he attended to a long succession of mistresses, and begot twelve children upon his virtuous wife. He pawned his jewels, and most of the clothes from his back, to finance resistance to England, but he had no stomach for war, and left the struggle to his ministers and his generals. Neither were they enthusiastic or alert; they quarreled jealously among themselves—all but the faithful Jean Dunois, the natural son of Louis, Duke of Orléans. When the English moved south to lay siege to that city (1428), no concerted action was taken to resist them, and disorder was the order of the day. Orléans lay at a bend in the Loire; if it fell, all the south, now hesitantly loyal to Charles VII, would join the north to make France an English colony. North and south alike watched the siege, and prayed for a miracle.

Even the distant village of Domremy, half asleep by the Meuse on the eastern border of France, followed the struggle with patriotic and religious passion. The peasants there were fully medieval in faith and sentiment; they lived from nature but in the supernatural; they were sure that spirits dwelled in the surrounding air, and many women vowed that they had seen and talked with them. Men as well as women there, as generally throughout rural France, thought of the English as devils who hid their tails in their coattails. Someday, said a prophecy current in the village, God would send a pucelle, a virgin maid, to save France from these demons, and end the long Satanic reign of war.⁶⁰ The wife of the mayor of Domremy whispered these hopes to her goddaughter Joan.

Joan’s father, Jacques d’Arc, was a prosperous farmer, and probably gave no mind to such tales. Joan was noted among these pious people for her piety; she was fond of going to church, confessed regularly and fervently, and busied herself with parochial charities. In her little garden the fowls and the birds ate from her hand. One day, when she had been fasting, she thought she saw a strange light over her head, and that she heard a voice saying, “Jeanne, be a good obedient child. Go often to church.”⁶¹ She was then (1424) in her thirteenth year; perhaps some physiological changes mystified her at this most impressionable time. During the next five years her “voices”—as she called the apparitions—spoke many counsels to her, until at last it seemed to her that the Archangel Michael himself commanded her: “Go to the succor of the King of France, and thou shalt restore his kingdom.... Go to M. Baudricourt, captain at Vaucouleurs, and he will conduct thee to the King.” And at another time the voice said: “Daughter of God, thou shalt lead the Dauphin to Reims that he may there receive worthily his anointing” and coronation. For until Charles should be anointed by the Church, France would doubt his divine right to rule; but if the holy oil should be poured upon his head France would unite behind him and be saved.

After a long and troubled hesitation Joan revealed her visions to her parents. Her father was shocked at the thought of an innocent girl undertaking so fantastic a mission; rather than permit it, he said, he would drown her with his own hands.⁶² To further restrain her he persuaded a young villager to announce that she had promised him her hand in marriage. She denied it; and to preserve the virginity that she had pledged to her saints, as well as to obey their command, she fled to an uncle, and prevailed upon him to take her to Vaucouleurs (1429). There Captain Baudricourt advised the uncle to give the seventeen-year-old girl a good spanking, and to restore her to her parents; but when Joan forced her way into his presence, and firmly declared that she had been sent by God to help King Charles save Orléans, the bluff commandant melted, and, even while thinking her charmed by devils, sent to Chinon to ask the King’s pleasure. Royal permission came; Baudricourt gave the Maid a sword, the people of Vaucouleurs bought her a horse, and six soldiers agreed to guide her on the long and perilous journey across France to Chinon. Perhaps to discourage male advances, to facilitate riding, and to win acceptance by generals and troops, she donned a masculine and military garb—jerkin, doublet, hose, gaiters, spurs—and cut her hair like a boy’s. She rode serene and confident through towns that vacillated between fearing her as a witch and worshiping her as a saint.

After traveling 450 miles in eleven days she came to the King and his council. Though his poor raiment gave no sign of royalty, Joan (we are told—for how could legend keep its hands from her history?) singled him out at once, and greeted him courteously: “God send you long life, gentle Dauphin.... My name is Jeanne la Pucelle. The King of Heaven speaks to you through me, and says that you shall be anointed and crowned at Reims, and be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of France.” A priest who now became the Maid’s chaplain said later that in private she assured the King of his legitimate birth. Some have thought that from her first meeting with Charles she accepted the clergy as the rightful interpreters of her voices, and followed their lead in her counsel to the King; through her the bishops might displace the generals in forming the royal policies.⁶³ Still doubtful, Charles sent her to Poitiers to be examined by pundits there. They found no evil in her. They commissioned some women to inquire into her virginity, and on that delicate point too they were satisfied. For, like the Maid, they held that a special privilege belonged to virgins as the instruments and messengers of God.

Dunois, in Orléans, had assured the garrison that God would soon send someone to their aid. Hearing of Joan, he half believed his hopes, and pleaded with the court to send her to him at once. They consented, gave her a black horse, clothed her in white armor, put in her hand a white banner embroidered with the fleur-de-lis of France, and dispatched her to Dunois with a numerous escort bearing provisions for the besieged. It was not hard to find entry to the city (April 29, 1429); the English had not surrounded it entirely, but had divided their two or three thousand men (less than the Orléans garrison) among a dozen forts at strategic points in the environs. The people of Orléans hailed Joan as the Virgin incarnate, followed her trustfully even into dangerous places, accompanied her to church, prayed when she prayed, wept when she wept. At her command the soldiers gave up their mistresses, and struggled to express themselves without profanity; one of their leaders, La Hire, found this impossible, and received from Joan a dispensation to swear by his baton. It was this Gascon condottiere who uttered the famous prayer: “Sire God, I beg Thee to do for La Hire what he would do for Thee wert Thou a captain and La Hire were God.” ⁶⁴

Joan sent a letter to Talbot, the English commander, proposing that both armies should unite as brothers and proceed to Palestine to redeem the Holy Land from the Turks; Talbot thought that this exceeded his commission. Some days later a part of the garrison, without informing Dunois or Joan, issued beyond the walls and attacked one of the British bastions. The English fought well, the French retreated; but Dunois and Joan, having heard the commotion, rode up and bade their men renew the assault; it succeeded, and the English abandoned their position. On the morrow the French attacked two other forts and took them, the Maid being in the thick of the fight. In the second encounter an arrow pierced her shoulder; when the wound had been dressed she returned to the fray. Meanwhile the sturdy cannon of Guillaume Duisy hurled upon the English fortress of Les Tourelles balls weighing 120 pounds each. Joan was spared the sight of the victorious French slaughtering 500 Englishmen when that stronghold fell. Talbot concluded that his forces were inadequate for the siege, and withdrew them to the north (May 8). All France rejoiced, seeing in the “Maid of Orléans” the hand of God; but the English denounced her as a sorceress, and vowed to take her alive or dead.

On the day after her triumph Joan set out to meet the King, who was advancing from Chinon. He greeted her with a kiss, and accepted her plan to march through France to Reims, though this meant passing through hostile terrain. His army encountered English forces at Meung, Beaugency, and Patay, and won decisive victories, tarnished with vengeful massacres that horrified the Maid. Seeing a French soldier slay an English prisoner, she dismounted, held the dying man’s head in her hands, comforted him, and sent for a confessor. On July 15 the King entered Reims, and on the seventeenth he was anointed and crowned with awesome ceremonies in the majestic cathedral. Jacques d’Arc, coming up from Domrémy, saw his daughter, still in her male attire, riding in splendor through the religious capital of France. He did not neglect the occasion, but through her intercession secured a remission of taxes for his village. For a passing spell Joan considered her mission accomplished, and thought, “If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.” ⁶⁵

But the fever of battle had entered her blood. Acclaimed as inspired and holy by half of France, she almost forgot now to be a saint, and became a warrior. She was strict with her soldiers, scolded them lovingly, and deprived them of the consolations that all soldiers hold as their due; and when she found two prostitutes accompanying them she drew her sword and struck one so manfully that the blade broke and the woman died.⁶⁶ She followed the King and his army in an attack upon Paris, which was still held by the English; she was in the van in clearing the first foss; approaching the second, she was struck in the thigh by an arrow, but remained to cheer on the troops. Their assault failed, they suffered 1,500 casualties, and cursed her for thinking that a prayer could silence a gun; this had not been their experience. Some Frenchwomen, who had jealously waited for her first reverse, censured her for leading an assault on the feast of the Virgin’s birth (September 8, 1429). She retired with her detachment to Compiègne. Besieged there by Burgundians allied with the English, she bravely led a sally, which was repulsed; she was the last to retreat, and found the gates of the town closed before she could reach them. She was dragged from her horse, and was taken as a captive to John of Luxembourg (May 24, 1430). Sir John lodged her honorably in his castles at Beaulieu and Beaurevoir.

His good fortune brought him a dangerous dilemma. His sovereign, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, demanded the precious prize; the English urged Sir John to surrender her to them, hoping that her ignominious execution would break the charm that had so heartened the French. Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had been driven from his diocese for supporting the English, was sent by them to Philip with powers and funds to negotiate the transfer of the Maid to British authority, and was promised the archbishopric of Rouen as the reward of his success. The Duke of Bedford, controlling the University of Paris, induced its pundits to advise Philip to hand over Joan, as a possible sorceress and heretic, to Cauchon as the ecclesiastical head of the region in which she had been captured. When these arguments were rejected, Cauchon offered to Philip and John a bribe of 10,000 gold crowns ($250,000?). This too proving inadequate, the English government laid an embargo on all exports to the Low Countries. Flanders, the richest source of the Duke’s revenue, faced bankruptcy. John, over the entreaties of his wife, and Philip, despite his Good name, finally accepted the bribe and surrendered the Maid to Cauchon, who took her to Rouen. There, though formally a prisoner of the Inquisition, she was placed under English guard in the tower of a castle held by the Earl of Warwick as the governor of Rouen. Shackles were put on her feet, and a chain was fastened around her waist and bound to a beam.

Her trial began on February 21,1431, and continued till May 30. Cauchon presided, one of his canons served as prosecutor, a Dominican monk represented the Inquisition, and some forty men learned in theology and law were added to the panel. The charge was heresy. To check the monstrous regiment of magic-mongers that infested Europe, the Church had made the claim to divine inspiration a heresy punishable with death. Witches were being burned for pretending to supernatural powers; and it was a common opinion, among churchmen and laymen, that those who made such claims might actually have received supernatural powers from the Devil. Some of Joan’s jurors seem to have believed this in her case. In their judgment her refusal to acknowledge that the authority of the Church, as the vicar of Christ on earth, could override that of her “voices” proved her a sorceress. This became the opinion of the majority of the court.⁶⁷ Nevertheless they were moved by the guileless simplicity of her answers, by her evident piety and chastity; they were men, and seem at times to have felt a great pity for this girl of nineteen, so obviously the prey of English fear. “The king of England,” said Warwick, with soldierly candor, “has paid dearly for her; he would not on any consideration whatever have her die a natural death.” ⁶⁸ Some jurors argued that the matter should be laid before the pope—which would free her and the court from English power. Joan expressed a desire to be sent to him, but drew a firm distinction that ruined her: she would acknowledge his supreme authority in matters of faith, but as concerned what she had done in obedience to her voices she would own no judge but God Himself. The judges agreed that this was heresy. Weakened by months of questioning, she was persuaded to sign a retraction; but when she found that this still left her condemned to lifelong imprisonment within English jurisdiction, she revoked her retraction. English soldiers surrounded the court, and threatened the lives of the judges if the Maid should escape burning. On May 31 a few of the judges convened, and sentenced her to death.

That very morning the faggots were piled high in the market place of Rouen. Two platforms were placed near by—one for Cardinal Winchester of England and his prelates, another for Cauchon and the judges; and 800 British troops stood on guard. The Maid was brought in on a cart, accompanied by an Augustinian monk, Isambart, who befriended her to the last, at peril to his life. She asked for a crucifix; an English soldier handed her one that he had fashioned from two sticks; she accepted it, but called also for a crucifix blessed by the Church; and Isambart prevailed upon the officials to bring her one from the church of Saint Sauveur. The soldiers grumbled at the delay, for it was now noon. “Do you intend us to dine here?” their captain asked. His men snatched her from the hands of the priests, and led her to the stake. Isambart held up a crucifix before her, and a Dominican monk mounted the pyre with her. The faggots were lighted, and the flames rose about her feet. Seeing the Dominican still beside her, she urged him to descend to safety. She invoked her voices, her saints, the Archangel Michael, and Christ, and was consumed in agony. A secretary to the English king anticipated the verdict of history: “We are lost,” he cried; “we have burned a saint.”

In 1455 Pope Calixtus III, at the behest of Charles VII, ordered a reexamination of the evidence upon which Joan had been condemned; and in 1456 (France being now victorious) the verdict of 1431 was, by the ecclesiastical court of review, declared unjust and void. In 1920 Benedict XV numbered the Maid of Orléans among the saints of the Church.

X. FRANCE SURVIVES: 1431–53

We must not exaggerate the military importance of Joan of Arc; probably Dunois and La Hire would have saved Orléans without her; her tactics of reckless assault won some battles and lost others; and England was feeling the cost of a Hundred Years’ War. In 1435 Philip of Burgundy, England’s ally, tired of the struggle and made a separate peace with France. His defection weakened the hold of the English on the conquered cities of the south; one by one these expelled their alien garrisons. In 1436 Paris itself, for seventeen years a captive, drove out the British, and Charles VII at last ruled in his capital.

Strange to tell, he who had for so long been a do-nothing shadow of a king, had learned by this time to govern—to choose competent ministers, to reorganize the army, to discipline turbulent barons, to do whatever was needed to make his country free. What had wrought this transformation? The inspiration of Joan had begun it, but how weak he still seemed when he raised not a finger to save her! His remarkable mother-in-law, Yolande of Anjou, had helped him with wise counsel, had encouraged him to receive and support the Maid. Now—if we may trust tradition—she gave her son-in-law the mistress who for ten years ruled the heart of the King.

Agnès Sorel was the daughter of a squire in Touraine. Orphaned in childhood, she had been brought up to good manners by Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine. Isabelle took her, then twenty-three, to visit the court in Chinon (1432) in the year after Joan’s death. Snared in the girl’s chestnut tresses, and in love with her laughter, Charles marked her out as his own. Yolande found her tractable, hoped to use her in influencing the King, and persuaded Marie, her daughter, to accept this latest of her husband’s mistresses.⁶⁹ Agnès remained till death faithful in this infidelity, and a later king, Francis I, after much experience in such matters, praised the “Lady of Beauty” as having served France better than any cloistered nun. Charles “relished wisdom from such lips”; he allowed Agnès to shame him out of indolence and cowardice into industry and resolution. He gathered about him able men like Constable Richemont, who led his armies, and Jacques Cœur, who restored the finances of the state, and Jean Bureau, whose artillery brought recalcitrant nobles to heel and sent the English scurrying to Calais.

Jacques Cœur was a condottiere of commerce; a man of no pedigree and little schooling, who, however, could count well; a Frenchman who dared to compete successfully with Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans in trade with the Moslem East. He owned and equipped seven merchant vessels, manned them by hiring convicts and snatching vagrants from the streets, and sailed his ships under the flag of the Mother of God. He amassed the greatest fortune of his time in France, some 27,000,000 francs, when a franc was worth some five dollars in the emaciated currency of our day. In 1436 Charles gave him charge of the mint, soon afterward of the revenues and expenditures of the government. A States-General of 1439, enthusiastically supporting Charles’s resolve to drive the English from French soil, empowered the King, by a famous succession of ordonnances (1443–47), to take the whole taille of France—i.e., all taxes hitherto paid by tenants to their feudal lords; the government’s revenue now rose to 1,800,000 crowns ($45,000,000?) a year. From that time onward the French monarchy, unlike the English, was independent of the Estates’ “power of the purse,” and could resist the growth of a middle-class democracy. This system of national taxation provided the funds for the victory of France over England; but as the King could raise the rate of assessment, it became a major tool of royal oppression, and shared in causing the Revolution of 1789. Jacques Cœur played a leading role in these fiscal developments, earning the admiration of many and the hatred of a powerful few. In 1451 he was arrested on a charge—never proved—of hiring agents to poison Agnès Sorel. He was condemned and banished, and all his property was confiscated to the state—an elegant method of exploitation by proxy. He fled to Rome, where he was made admiral of a papal fleet sent to the relief of Rhodes. He was taken ill at Chios, and died there in 1456, aged sixty-one.

Meanwhile Charles VII, guided by Cœur, had established an honest coinage, rebuilt the shattered villages, promoted industry and commerce, and restored the economic vitality of France. He compelled the disbandment of private companies of soldiers, and gathered these into his service to form the first standing army in Europe (1439). He decreed that in every parish some virile citizen, chosen by his fellows, should be freed from all taxation, should arm himself, practice the use of weapons, and be ready at any moment to join his like in the military service of the King. It was these francs-tireurs, or free bowmen, who drove the English from France.

By 1449 Charles was prepared to break the truce that had been signed in 1444. The English were surprised and shocked. They were weakened by internal quarrels, and found their fading empire in France relatively as expensive to maintain in the fifteenth century as India in the twentieth; in 1427 France cost England £68,000, brought her £57,000. The British fought bravely but not wisely; they relied too long on archers and stakes, and the tactics that had stopped the French cavalry at Crécy and Poitiers proved helpless at Formigny (1450) against the cannon of Bureau. In 1449 the English evacuated most of Normandy; in 1451 they abandoned its capital, Rouen. In 1453 great Talbot himself was defeated and killed at Castillon; Bordeaux surrendered; all Guienne was French again; the English kept only Calais. On October 19, 1453, the two nations signed the peace that ended the Hundred Years’ War.