During three centuries and a half they had effected great things: they had founded a kingdom, a royal family and civil institutions. The land subject to Hugh Capet in 987, barely representing two of the modern departments The royal house of Capet. of France, in 1328 covered a space equal to fifty-nine of them. The political unity of the kingdom was only fettered by the existence of four large isolated fiefs: Flanders on the north, Brittany on the west, Burgundy on the east and Guienne on the south. The capital, which for long had been movable, was now established in the Louvre at Paris, fortified by Philip Augustus. Like the fiefs, feudal institutions at large had been shattered. The Roman tradition which made the will of the sovereign law, gradually propagated by the teaching of Roman law—the law of servitude, not of liberty—and already proclaimed by the jurist Philippe de Beaumanoir as superior to the customs, had been of immense support to the interest of the state and the views of the monarchs; and finally the Capets, so humble of origin, had created organs of general administration common to all in order to effect an administrative centralization. In their grand council and their domains they would have none but silent, servile and well-disciplined agents. The royal exchequer, which was being painfully elaborated in the chambre des comptes, and the treasury of the crown lands at the Louvre, together barely sufficed to meet the expenses of this more complicated and costly machinery. The uniform justice exercised by the parlement spread gradually over the whole kingdom by means of cas royaux (royal suits), and at the same time the royal coinage became obligatory. Against this exaltation of their power two adversaries might have been formidable; but one, the Church, was a captive in Babylon, and the second, the people, was deprived of the communal liberties which it had abused, or humbly effaced itself in the states-general behind the declared will of the king. This well-established authority was also supported by the revered memory of “Monseigneur Saint Louis”; and it is this prestige, the strength of this ideal superior to all other, that explains how the royal prerogative came to survive the mistakes and misfortunes of the Hundred Years’ War.
On the extinction of the direct line of the Capets the crown passed to a younger branch, that of the Valois. Its seven representatives (1328-1498) were on the whole very inferior to the Capets, and, with the exception of Advent of the Valois. Charles V. and Louis XI., possessed neither their political sense nor even their good common sense; they cost France the loss of her great advantage over all other countries. During this century and a half France passed through two very severe crises; under the first five Valois the Hundred Years’ War imperilled the kingdom’s independence; and under Louis XI. the struggle against the house of Burgundy endangered the territorial unity of the monarchy that had been established with such pains upon the ruins of feudalism.
Charles the Fair having died and left only a daughter, the nation’s rights, so long in abeyance, were once more regained. An assembly of peers and barons, relying on two precedents under Philip V. and Charles IV., declared Philip VI. (1328-1350). that “no woman, nor therefore her son, could in accordance with custom succeed to the monarchy of France.” This definite decision, to which the name of the Salic law was given much later, set aside Edward III., king of England, grandson of Philip the Fair, nephew of the late kings and son of their sister Isabel. Instead it gave the crown to the feudal chief, the hard and coarse Philip VI. of Valois, nephew of Philip the Fair. This at once provoked war between the two monarchies, English and French, which, including periods of truce, lasted for a hundred and sixteen years. Of active warfare there were two periods, both disastrous to begin with, but ending favourably: one lasted from 1337 to 1378 and the other from 1413 to 1453, thirty-three years of distress and folly coming in between.
However, the Hundred Years’ War was not mainly caused by the pretensions of Edward III. to the throne of the Capets; since after having long hesitated to do homage to Philip VI. for his possessions in Guienne, Edward at The Hundred Years’ War. last brought himself to it—though certainly only after lengthy negotiations, and even threats of war in 1331. It is true that six years later he renounced his homage and again claimed the French inheritance; but this was on the ground of personal grievances, and for economic and political reasons. There was a natural rivalry between Edward III. and Philip VI., both of them young, fond of the life of chivalry, festal magnificence, and the “belles apertises d’armes.” This rivalry was aggravated by the enmity between Philip VI. and Robert of Artois, his brother-in-law, who, after having warmly supported the disinheriting of Edward III., had been convicted of deceit in a question of succession, had revenged himself on Philip by burning his waxen effigy, and had been welcomed with open arms at Edward’s court. Philip VI. had taken reprisals against him in 1336 by making his parlement declare the forfeiture of Edward’s lands and castles in Guienne; but the Hundred Years’ War, at first simply a feudal quarrel between vassal and suzerain, soon became a great national conflict, in consequence of what was occurring in Flanders.
The communes of Flanders, rich, hard-working, jealous of their liberties, had always been restive under the authority of their counts and the influence of their suzerain, the king of France. The affair at Cassel, where Philip VI. had avenged the injuries done by the people of Bruges in 1325 to their count, Louis of Nevers, had also compromised English interests. To attack the English through their colonies, Guienne and Flanders, was to injure them in their most vital interests—cloth and claret; for England sold her wool to Bruges in order to pay Bordeaux for her wine. Edward III. had replied by forbidding the exportation of English wool, and by threatening the great industrial cities of Flanders with the transference to England of the cloth manufacture—an excellent means of stirring them up against the French, as without wool they could do nothing. Workless, and in desperation, they threw themselves on Edward’s mercy, by the advice of a rich citizen of Ghent, Jacob van Artevelde (q.v.); and their last scruples of loyalty gave way when Edward decided to follow the counsels of Robert of Artois and of Artevelde, and to claim the crown of France.
The war began, like every feudal war of that day, with a solemn defiance, and it was soon characterized by terrible disasters. The destruction of the finest French fleet that had yet been seen, surprised in the port of The defeat at Sluys. Sluys, closed the sea to the king of France; the struggle was continued on land, but with little result. Flanders tired of it, but fortunately for Edward III. Brittany now took fire, through a quarrel of succession, analogous to that in France, between Charles of Blois (who had married the daughter of the late duke and was a nephew of Philip VI., by whom he was supported) and John of Montfort, brother of the old duke, who naturally asked assistance from the king of England. But here, too, nothing important was accomplished; the capture of John of Montfort at Nantes deprived Edward of Brittany at the very moment when he finally lost Flanders by the death of Artevelde, who was killed by the people of Ghent in 1345. Under the influence of Godefroi d’Harcourt, whom Philip VI. had wished to destroy on account of his ambitions with regard to the duchy of Normandy, Edward III. now invaded central France, ravaged Normandy, getting as near to Paris as Saint-Germain; and profiting by Philip VI.’s hesitation and delay, he reached the north with his spoils by dint of forced marches. Having been pursued and encountered at The defeat at Crécy and the taking of Calais. Crécy, Edward gained a complete victory there on the 26th of April 1346. The seizure of Calais in 1347, despite heroic resistance, gave the English a port where they could always find entry into France, just when the queen of England had beaten David of Scotland, the ally of France, at Neville’s Cross, and when Charles of Blois, made prisoner in his turn, was held captive in London. The Black Death put the finishing touch to the military disasters and financial upheavals of this unlucky reign; though before his death in 1350 Philip VI. was fortunate enough to augment his territorial acquisitions by the purchase of the rich port of Montpellier, as well as by that of Dauphiné, which extended to the Alpine frontier, and was to become the appanage of the eldest son of the king of France (see [Dauphiné] and [Dauphin]).
Philip VI.’s successor was his son John the Good—or rather, the stupid and the spendthrift. This noble monarch was unspeakably brutal (as witness the murders, simply on John the Good (1350). suspicion, of the constable Raoul de Brienne, count of Eu, and of the count of Harcourt) and incredibly extravagant. His need of money led him to debase the currency eighty-one times between 1350 and 1355. And this money, so necessary for the prosecution of the war with England, which had been interrupted for a year, thanks to the pope’s intervention, was lavished by him upon his favourite, Charles of La Cerda. The latter was murdered in 1354 by order of Charles of Navarre, the king’s son-in-law, who also prevented the levying of the taxes voted by the states in 1355 with the object of replenishing the treasury. The Black Prince took this opportunity to ravage the southern provinces, and then marched to join the duke of Lancaster and Charles of Defeat at Poitiers. Navarre in Normandy. John the Good managed to bring the English army to bay at Maupertuis, not far from Poitiers; but the battle was conducted with such a want of intelligence on his part that the French army was overwhelmed, though very superior in numbers, and King John was made prisoner, after a determined resistance, on the 19th of September 1356.
The disaster at Poitiers almost led to the establishment in France of institutions analogous to those which England owed to Bouvines. The king a prisoner, the dauphin discredited and deserted, and the nobility decimated, The states of 1355-1356. the people—that is to say, the states-general—could raise their voice. Philip the Fair had never regarded the states-general as a financial institution, but merely as a moral support. Now, however, in order to obtain substantial help from taxes instead of mere driblets, the Valois needed a stronger lever than cunning or force. War against the English assured them the support of the nation. Exactions, debasement of the currency and extortionate taxation were ruinous palliatives, and insufficient to supply a treasury which the revenue from crown lands and various rights taken from the nobles could not fill even in times of peace. By the 14th century the motto “N’impose qui ne veut” (i.e. no taxation without consent) was as firmly established in France as in England. After Crécy Philip VI. called the states together regularly, that he might obtain subsidies from them, as an assistance, an “aid” which subjects could not refuse their suzerain. In return for this favour, which the king could not claim as a right, the states, feeling their power, began to bargain, and at the session of November 1355 demanded the participation of all classes in the tax voted, and obtained guarantees both for its levy and the use to be made of it. A similar situation in England had given birth to political liberty; but in France the great crisis of the early 15th century stifled it. It was with this money that John the Good got himself beaten and taken prisoner at Poitiers. Once more the states-general had to be convoked. Confronted by a pale weakly boy like the dauphin Charles and the remnants of the discredited council, the situation of the states was stronger Robert le Coq and Étienne Marcel. than ever. Predominant in influence were the deputies from the towns, and above all the citizens of the capital, led by Robert le Coq, bishop of Laon, and Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris. Having no cause for confidence in the royal administration, the states refused to treat with the dauphin’s councillors, and proposed to take him under their own tutelage. He himself hesitated whether to sacrifice the royal authority, or else, without resources or support, to resist an assembly backed by public opinion. He decided for resistance. Under pretext of grave news received from his father, and of an interview at Metz with his uncle, the emperor Charles IV., he begged the states to adjourn till the 3rd of November 1356. This was a political coup d’état, and when the time had expired he attempted a financial coup d’état by debasing the currency. An uprising obliged him to call the states-general together again in February 1357, when they transformed themselves into a deliberative, independent and permanent assembly by means of the Grande Ordonnance.
In order to make this great French charter really effective resistance to the royal authority should have been collective, national and even popular, as in the case of the charters of 1215 and 1258 in England. But the lay and ecclesiastical The Grande Ordonnance of 1357. feudal lords continued to show themselves in France, as everywhere else except across the Straits of Dover, a cause of division and oppression. Moreover, the states were never really general; those of the Langue d’oc and the Langue d’oil sometimes acted together; but there was never a common understanding between them and always two Frances within the kingdom. Besides, they only represented the three classes who alone had any social standing at that period: the nobles, the clergy, and the burgesses of important towns. Étienne Marcel himself protested against councillors “de petit état.” Again, the states, intermittently convoked according to the king’s good pleasure, exercised neither periodical rights nor effective control, but fulfilled a duty which was soon felt as onerous. Indifference and satiety spread speedily; the bourgeoisie forsook the reformers directly they had recourse to violence (February 1358), and the Parisians became hostile when Étienne Marcel complicated his revolutionary work by intrigues with Navarre, releasing from prison the grandson of Louis X., the Headstrong, an ambitious, fine-spoken courter of popularity, covetous of the royal crown. The dauphin’s flight from Paris excited a wild outburst of monarchist loyalty and anger against the capital among the nobility and in the states-general of Compiègne. Marcel, like the dauphin, was not a man to turn back. But neither the support of the peasant insurgents—the “Jacques”—who were annihilated in the market of Meaux, nor a last but unheeded appeal to the large towns, nor yet the uncertain support of Charles the Bad, to whom Marcel in despair proposed to deliver up Paris, saved him from being put to death by the royalist party of Paris on the 31st of July 1358.