Isolated as he was, Étienne Marcel had been unable either to seize the government or to create a fresh one. In the reaction which followed his downfall royalty inherited the financial administration which the states had set up to check extravagance. The “élus” and the superintendents, instead of being delegates of the states, became royal functionaries like the baillis and the provosts; imposts, hearth-money (fouage), salt-tax (gabelle), sale-dues (droits de vente), voted for the war, were levied during the whole of Charles V.’s reign and added to his personal revenue. The opportunity of founding political liberty upon the vote and the control of taxation, and of organizing the administration of the kingdom so as to ensure that the entire military and financial resources should be always available, was gone beyond recall.
Re-establishing the royal authority in Paris was not enough; an end had to be put to the war with England and Navarre, and The treaty of Brétigny. this was effected by the treaty of Brétigny (1360). King John ceded Poitou, Saintonge, Agenais, Périgord and Limousin to Edward III., and was offered his liberty for a ransom of three million gold crowns; but, unable to pay that enormous sum, he returned to his agreeable captivity in London, where he died in 1364.
Yet through the obstinacy and selfishness of John the Good, France, in stress of suffering, was gradually realizing herself. More strongly than her king she felt the shame of Charles V. (1364-1380). defeat. Local or municipal patriotism waxed among peasants and townsfolk, and combined with hatred of the English to develop national sentiment. Many of the conquered repeated that proud, sad answer of the men of Rochelle to the English: “We will acknowledge you with our lips; but with our hearts, never!”
The peace of Brétigny brought no repose to the kingdom. War having become a congenial and very lucrative industry, its cessation caused want of work, with all the evils that entails. For ten years the remnants of the armies The “Grandes Compagnies.” of England, Navarre and Brittany—the “Grandes Compagnies,” as they were called—ravaged the country; although Charles V., “durement subtil et sage,” succeeded in getting rid of them, thanks to du Guesclin, one of their chiefs, who led them to any place where fighting was going on—to Brittany, Alsace, Spain. Charles also had all towns and large villages fortified; and being a man of affairs he set about undoing the effect of the treaty of Brétigny by alliances with Flanders, whose heiress he married to his brother Philip, duke of Burgundy; with Henry, king of Castile, and Ferdinand of Portugal, who possessed fine navies; and, finally, with the emperor Charles IV. Financial and military preparations were made no less seriously when the harsh administration of the Black Prince, to whom Edward III. had given Guienne in fief, provoked the nobles of Gascony to complain to Charles V. Cited before the court of Paris, the Black Prince refused to attend, and war broke out in Gascony, Poitou and Normandy, but with fresh tactics (1369). Whilst the English adhered to the system of wide circuits, under Chandos or Robert Knolles, Charles V. limited himself to defending the towns and exhausting the enemy without taking dangerous risks. Thanks to the prudent constable du Guesclin, sitting quietly at home he reconquered bit by bit what his predecessors had lost upon the battlefield, helm on head and sword in hand; and when he died in 1380, after the decease of both Edward III. and the Black Prince, the only possessions of England in a liberated but ruined France were Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.
The death of Charles V. and dynastic revolutions in England stopped the war for thirty-five years. Then began an era of Charles VI. (1380-1422). internal disorder and misery. The men of that period, coarse, violent and simple-minded, with few political ideas, loved brutal and noisy pleasures—witness the incredible festivities at the marriage of Charles VI., and the assassinations of the constable de Clisson, the duke of Orleans and John the Fearless. It would have needed an energetic hand to hold these passions in check; and Charles VI. was a gentle-natured child, twelve years of age, who attained his majority only to fall into a second childhood. Thence arose a question which remained without reply during The king’s uncles and the Marmousets. the whole of his reign. Who should have possession of the royal person, and, consequently, of the royal power? Should it be the uncles of the king, or his followers Clisson and Bureau de la Rivière, whom the nobles called in mockery the Marmousets? His uncles first seized the government, each with a view to his own particular interests, which were by no means those of the kingdom at large. The duke of Anjou emptied the treasury in conquering the kingdom of Naples, at the call of Queen Joanna of Sicily. The duke of Berry seized upon Languedoc and the wine-tax. The duke of Burgundy, heir through his wife to the countship of Flanders, wanted to crush the democratic risings among the Flemings. Each of them needed money, but Charles V., pricked by conscience on his death-bed, forbade the levying of the hearth-tax (1380). His brother’s attempt to re-establish it set The revolt of the Maillotins. Paris in revolt. The Maillotins of Paris found imitators in other great towns; and in Auvergne and Vivarais the Tuchins renewed the Jacquerie. Revolutionary attempts between 1380 and 1385 to abolish all taxes were echoed in England, Florence and Flanders. These isolated rebellions, however, were crushed by the ever-ready coalition of royal and feudal forces at Roosebeke (1382). Taxes and subsidies were maintained and the hearth-money re-established.
The death of the duke of Anjou at Bari (1384) gave preponderant influence to Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, who increased the large and fruitless expenses of his Burgundian policy to such a point that on the return of a last unfortunate Madness of Charles VI. expedition into Gelderland Charles VI., who had been made by him to marry Isabel of Bavaria, took the government from his uncles on the 3rd of May 1389, and recalled the Marmousets. But this young king, aged only twenty, very much in love with his young wife and excessively fond of pleasure, soon wrecked the delicate poise of his mental faculties in the festivities of the Hôtel Saint-Paul; and a violent attack of Pierre de Craon on the constable de Clisson having led to an expedition against his accomplice, the duke of Brittany, Charles was seized by insanity on the road. The Marmousets were deposed, the king’s brother, the duke of Orleans, set aside, and the old condition of affairs began again (1392).
The struggle was now between the two branches of the royal family, the Orleanist and the Burgundian, between the aristocratic south and the democratic north; while the deposition of Richard II. of England in favour of Struggle between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. Henry of Lancaster permitted them to vary civil war by war against the foreigner. Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, the king’s uncle, had certain advantages over his rival Louis of Orleans, Charles VI.’s brother: superiority in age, relations with the Lancastrians and with Germany, and territorial wealth and power. The two adversaries had each the same scheme of government: each wanted to take charge of Charles VI., who was intermittently insane, and to exclude his rival from the pillage of the royal exchequer; but this rivalry of desires brought them into opposition on all the great questions of the day—the war with England, the Great Schism and the imperial election. The struggle became acute when John the Fearless of Burgundy succeeded his father in 1404. Up to this time the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, had been held in a kind of dependency upon Philip of Burgundy, who had brought about her marriage; but less eager for influence than for money, since political questions were unintelligible to her and her situation was a precarious one, she suddenly became favourable to the duke of Orleans. Whether due to passion or caprice this cost the duke his life, for John the Fearless had him assassinated in 1407, and thus let loose against one another the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, so-called because the son of the murdered duke was the son-in-law of the count of Armagnac (see [Armagnac]). Despite all attempts at reconciliation the country was divided into two parties. Paris, with her tradesmen—the butchers in particular—and her university, played an important part in this quarrel; for to be master of Paris was to be master of the king. In 1413 the duke of Burgundy gained the upper hand there, partly owing to the rising of the Cabochiens, i.e. the butchers led by the skinner Simon Caboche, partly to the hostility of the university to the Avignon pope and partly to the Parisian bourgeoisie.
Amid this reign of terror and of revolt the university, the only moral and intellectual force, taking the place of the impotent states-general and of a parlement carefully restricted to the judiciary sphere, vainly tried to re-establish a firm The Ordonnance Cabochienne, 1413. monarchical system by means of the Ordonnance Cabochienne; but this had no effect, the government being now at the mercy of the mob, themselves at the mercy of incapable hot-headed leaders. The struggle ended in becoming one between factions of the townsmen, led respectively by the hûchier Cirasse and by Jean Caboche. The former overwhelmed John the Fearless, who fled from Paris; and the Armagnacs, re-entering on his exit, substituted white terror for red terror, from the 12th of December 1413 to the 28th of July 1414. The butchers’ organization was suppressed and all hope of reform lost. Such disorders allowed Henry V. of England to take the offensive again.
The Armagnacs were in possession of Paris and the king when Henry V. crushed them at Agincourt on the 25th of Agincourt. October 1415. It was as at Crécy and Poitiers; the French chivalry, accustomed to mere playing at battle in the tourneys, no longer knew how to fight. Charles of Orleans being a captive and his father-in-law, the count of Armagnac, highly unpopular, John the Fearless, hitherto prudently neutral, re-entered Paris, amid scenes of carnage, on the invitation of the citizen Perrinet le Clerc.
Secure from interference, Henry V. had occupied the whole of Normandy and destroyed in two years the work of Philip Augustus. The duke of Burgundy, feeling as incapable of coming to an understanding with the masterful The Treaty of Troyes, 1420. Englishman as of resisting him unaided, tried to effect a reconciliation with the Armagnacs, who had with them the heir to the throne, the dauphin Charles; but his assassination at Montereau in 1419 nearly caused the destruction of the kingdom, the whole Burgundian party going over to the side of the English. By the treaty of Troyes (1420) the son of John the Fearless, Philip the Good, in order to avenge his father recognized Henry V. (now married to Catherine, Charles VI.’s daughter) as heir to the crown of France, to the detriment of the dauphin Charles, who was disavowed by his mother and called in derision “the soi-disant dauphin of Viennois.” When Henry V. and Charles VI. died in 1422, Henry VI.—son of Henry V. and Catherine—was proclaimed at Paris king of France and of England, with the concurrence of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Thus in 1428 the English occupied all eastern and northern France, as far as the Loire; while the two most important civil powers of the time, the parlement and the university of Paris, had acknowledged the English king.