Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

The hostage sons proved themselves not more reliable as hostages than they had been as fighters. One of them, at least, yielded to the call of Paris, broke his parole and fled home. John’s paternal pride was profoundly outraged. “If honor is banished from every other spot,” he said, “it ought to remain sacred in the breast of kings.” He returned at once to London and gave himself up to king Edward.

Again he found himself popular at the English court, and he passed a gay winter, entertaining Edward at Savoy House and being entertained in turn at the palace of Westminster. Before many months, however, he was stricken with a mortal illness and died without seeing France again.

While king John was held prisoner by the English (1356-1360), his son the dauphin, afterwards Charles V, ruled or tried to rule in France. During his regency there appears one of the foremost characters known to the history of Paris, Étienne Marcel. This man belonged to an old family of drapers, and had achieved the position of the Provost of the Merchants, the chief administrative office in the city’s gift.

The burghers of Paris were restless. The establishment of the States General had given them recognition of a kind and a consequent feeling of importance. Repeated tax levies had kept them in a constant state of irritation. John had crowded them out of the army, war, according to his theory, being a matter for nobles to handle. The ignominious defeat at Poitiers made them dissent cordially from this opinion.

These were but a few of the causes stirring in the minds of the burghers. Now, with their jovial and improvident king a prisoner in England, France entrusted to an untried youth of nineteen, and England’s plans unknown but always threatening, the bourgeois felt themselves to be facing both opportunity and responsibility.

To test the prince seemed to be the first summons. Returning from Poitiers Charles took the title of Lieutenant-General, installed himself in the Louvre, summoned the States General, and entered into negotiations with Marcel. The provost either was really distrustful of the dauphin or he saw some advantage for his own ambition in setting the people against their lord. When he went to a conference with Charles he was supported by a body of men heavily armed, and a little later he expressed himself as so fearful of the prince’s integrity that he refused to go nearer to the Louvre than the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, to the east of the fortress.

Egged on by Marcel the States General did their utmost to torment the young regent. Undoubtedly they had grievances, but Charles was not at all responsible for the state of the country and the Assembly’s methods of improving conditions savored more of bullying than of coöperation.

The body met less than three weeks after Charles’s arrival in Paris. More than eight hundred members from all northern France gathered in the Great Hall of the palace. Half of this throng was representative of the bourgeoisie, and their superiority in numbers over the nobility—depleted by its losses at Poitiers—and the clergy—naturally a lesser body, though almost every prelate of high rank was present—gave the middle class a courage they never before had assumed.

Activity against the regent was manifested promptly. The size of the Assembly being unwieldy a body of eighty was chosen from the full membership to confer and report to the whole meeting. Charles sent officers to represent his interests and to furnish information. On the second day the representatives refused to take counsel unless the officers were withdrawn. Why they wanted to be unchecked was quite evident when, a few days later, the States-General requested the dauphin to meet with them in the monastery of the Cordeliers on the left bank and hear the recommendations which had been approved by the full house. They demanded that twenty-two men of king John’s closest friends and councillors should be arrested, lose their offices and have their property confiscated, and, if trial proved them guilty of “grafting” and of giving bad advice to the king, they were to be further punished. A traveling commission was to be appointed to keep a check on all the officials of France, and a body of twenty-eight men—four prelates, twelve nobles and twelve burghers—was to have “power to do and to order everything in the kingdom just like the king himself.”

This proposition practically relegated the regent to private life. A proposal to release from prison Charles’s brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, was not only an attack on John’s management, but a threat against the dauphin’s peace, for the king of Navarre had come honestly by his nickname and was capable of fomenting endless trouble.