WITH the three sons of Philip who successively became kings of France, the direct line of the Capetian dynasty ends: with the accession of Philip VI. in 1328, the house of Valois opens the sad century of the English wars—a period of humiliation and defeat, of rebellious and treacherous princes, civil strife, famine and plague, illumined only by the heroism of a peasant-girl, who, when king and nobles were sunk in shameless apathy or sullen despair, saved France from utter extinction. Pope after pope sought to make peace, but in vain: Hui sont en paix, demain en guerre (“to-day peace, to-morrow war”) was the normal and inevitable situation until the English had wholly subjected France or the French driven the English to their natural boundary of the Channel.
Never since the days of Charlemagne had the French Monarchy been so powerful as when the Valois came to the throne: in less than a generation Crecy and Poitiers had made the English name a terror in France, and a French king, John the Good, was led captive to England. Once again, as in the dark Norman times, Paris rose and determined to save herself. Etienne Marcel, provost of the merchants, whose statue now stands near the site of the Maison aux Piliers, the old Hostel de Ville which he bought for the citizens of Paris, became the leader of the movement. The Dauphin,[81] who had assumed the title of Lieutenant-General, convoked the States-General at Paris, but he was forced by Marcel and his party to grant some urgent reforms, and a Committee of National Defence was organised by the provost, who became virtually dictator of Paris. The Dauphin fled to Compiègne to rally the nobles. During the ensuing anarchy the poor, dumb, starving serfs of France, in their hopeless misery and despair, rose in insurrection and swept like a flame over the land. Froissart, who writes from the distorted stories told him by the seigneurs, has woefully exaggerated the atrocities of the Jacquerie.[82] There was much arson and pillage, but barely thirty of the nobles are known to have perished. Of the merciless vengeance taken by the seigneurs there is ample confirmation. The wretched peasants were easily out-manœuvred and killed like rats by the mail-clad nobles and their men-at-arms; so many were butchered in the market-place of Meaux that weariness stayed the arms of the slaughterers, and fire completed their work. Twenty thousand are estimated to have perished between the Seine and the Marne. Meanwhile the Dauphin was marching on Paris: Marcel had seized the Louvre, repaired and extended the wall of Paris, and raised an army. The provost turned for support to the Jacques, and on their suppression essayed to win over King Charles of Navarre, whose aid would decide the issue. Plot and counterplot followed. On 31st July 1358, Marcel was inspecting the gates of Paris, and at the Bastille[83] St. Denis ordered the keys to be given up to the treasurer of the king of Navarre, who was with him. The guards refused, and Jean Maillart, Marcel’s sheriff and bosom friend, leapt on his horse, rode to the Halles, and crying;—“Au roi, au roi, mont-joie St. Denis,” called the king’s friends to arms, and hastened to intercept the provost at the Bastille St. Antoine. Marcel was holding the keys in his hand when they arrived. “Stephen, Stephen!” cried Maillart, “what dost thou here at this hour?” “I am here,” answered the provost, “to guard the city whose governor I am.” “Par Dieu,” retorted Maillart, “thou art here for no good,” and turning to his followers, said, “Behold the keys which he holds to the destruction of the city.” Each gave the other the lie. “Good people,” protested Marcel, “why would you do me ill? All I wrought was for your good as well as mine.” Maillart for answer smote at him, crying, “Traitor, à mort, à mort!” There was a stubborn fight, and Maillart felled the provost by a blow with his axe; six of the provost’s companions were slain, and the remainder haled to prison. Next day the Dauphin entered Paris in triumph, and the popular leaders were executed on the Place de Grève. The provost’s body was dragged to the court of the church of St. Catherine du Val des Ecoliers, where it lay naked that it might be seen of all: after a long exposure it was cast into the Seine. All the reforms were revoked by the king, but the remembrance of the time when the merchants and people of Paris had dared to speak to their royal lord face to face of justice and good government, was never obliterated.
Meanwhile the land was a prey to anarchy. Law there was none. Bands of routiers, or organised brigands, English and French, ravaged and pillaged without let or hindrance. Eustache d’Aubrecicourt, with 10,000 men-at-arms, raided Champagne at his will and held a dozen fortresses. The peasants posted sentinels in the church towers while they worked in the fields, and took refuge by night in boats moored in the rivers.
The English invasion of 1359 resembled a huge picnic or hunting expedition. The king of England and his barons brought their hunters, falcons, dogs and fishing tackle. They marched leisurely to Bourg-la-Reine, less than two leagues from Paris, pillaged the surrounding country and turned to Chartres, where tempest and sickness forced Edward III. to come to terms. After the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360, the Parisians saw their good King John again, who was ransomed for a sum equal to about ten million pounds of present-day value. The memory of this and other enormous ransoms exacted by the English endured for centuries, and when a Frenchman had paid his creditors he would say,—j’ai payé mes Anglais.[84] (“I have paid my English.”) A magnificent reception was accorded to the four English barons who came to sign the Peace at Paris. They were taken to the Sainte-Chapelle and shown the fairest relics and richest jewels in the world, and each was given a spine from the crown of thorns, which he deemed the noblest jewel that could be presented to him.
In 1364, after sowing dragons’ teeth in France by bestowing in appanage the duchy of Burgundy on his youngest son Philip the Bold, King John the Good returned to captivity and death at London in chivalrous atonement for the breaking of parole by his second son, Louis of Anjou, who had been interned at Calais as a hostage under the treaty of 1360. The Dauphin, now Charles V., by careful statesmanship succeeded in restoring order to the kingdom and to its finances[85] and in winning some successes against the English. The dread companies of routiers, after defeating and slaying Jacques de Bourbon and capturing one hundred French chevaliers, were bribed by Pope Innocent VI. to pass into Lombardy, or induced to follow du Guesclin, the national hero of the wars against the English, in a crusade against Pedro the Cruel in Spain.
In 1370 the English camp fires were again seen outside Paris: Charles refused battle and allowed them to ravage the suburbs with impunity. Before the army left, an English knight swore he would joust at the gates of the city, and spurred lance in hand against them. As he turned to ride back, a big butcher lifted his pole-axe, smote the knight on the neck and felled him; four others battered him to death, “their blows,” says Froissart, “falling on his armour like strokes on an anvil.”
By wise counsel rather than by war Charles won back much of his dismembered country. He was a great builder and patron of the arts. He employed Raymond of the Temple, his “beloved mason,” to transform the Louvre into a sumptuous palace with apartments for himself and his queen, the princes of the blood and the officers of the royal household. Each suite of apartments was furnished with a private chapel, those of the king and queen being carved with much “art and patience.” A gallery was built for the minstrels and players of instruments. A great garden was planted towards the Rue St. Honoré on the north, and the old wall of Philip Augustus on the east, in which were an “Hôtel des Lions,” or collection of wild beasts, and a tennis court, where the king and princes played. The palace accounts still exist, with details of payments for “wine for the stone-cutters which the king our lord gave them when he came to view the works.” Jean Callow and Geoffrey le Febre were paid for planting squares of strawberries, hyssop, sage, lavender, balsam, violets, and for making paths, weeding and carrying away stones and filth; others were paid for planting bulbs of lilies, double red roses and other good herbs. The first royal library was founded by Charles, and Peter the Cage-maker was employed to protect the library windows from birds and other beasts by trellises of wire. An interesting payment of six francs in gold, made to Jacqueline, widow of a mason “because she is poor and helpless and her husband met his death in working for the king at the Louvre,” demonstrates that royal custom had anticipated modern legislation.
