This restoration was no more peaceful than its predecessor. The
Carolingians had as it were a fresh access of energy, and the struggle
against the Robertinians went on relentlessly. Both sides employed
similar methods: one was supported by Normandy, the other by Germany;
the archbishop of Reims was for the Carolingians, the Robertinians had
to be content with the less influential bishop of Sens. Louis soon
proved to Hugh the Great, who was trying to play the part of a mayor of
the palace, that he was by no means a _roi fainéant_; and the powerful
duke of the Franks, growing uneasy, allied himself with Herbert of
Vermandois, William of Normandy and his brother-in-law Otto I. king of
Germany, who resented the loss of Lorraine. Louis defended himself with
energy, aided chiefly by the nobles of the South, by his relative
Edmund, king of the English, and then by Otto himself, whose
brother-in-law he also had become. A peace advantageous to him was made
in 942, and on the deaths of his two opponents, Herbert of Vermandois
and William of Normandy, all seemed to be going well for him; but his
guardianship of Richard, son of the duke of Normandy, aroused fresh
strife, and on the 13th of July 945 he fell into an ambush and suffered
a captivity similar to his father's of twenty-two years before. No one
had befriended Charles the Simple, but Louis had his wife Gerberga, who
won over to his cause the kings of England and Germany and even Hugh.
Hugh set him free, insisting, as payment for his aid, on the cession of
Laon, the capital of the kingdom and the last fortified town remaining
to the Carolingians (946). Louis was hardly free before he took
vengeance, harried the lands of his rival, restored to the
archiepiscopal throne of Reims Artald, his faithful adviser, in place of
the son of Herbert of Vermandois, and managed to get Hugh excommunicated
by the council of Ingelheim (948) and by the pope. A two years' struggle
wearied the rivals, and they made peace in 950. Louis once more held
Laon, and in the following year further strengthened his position by a
successful expedition into Burgundy. Still his last years were not
peaceful; for besides civil wars there were two Hungarian invasions of
France (951 and 954).
Lothair (954-986).
Louis's sudden death in 954 once more placed the Carolingian line in
peril, since he had not had time to have his son Lothair crowned. For a
third time Hugh had the disposal of the crown, and he was no more
tempted to take it himself in 954 than in 923 or 936: it was too
profitless a possession. Thanks to Hugh's support and to the good
offices of Otto and his brother Bruno, archbishop of Cologne and duke of
Lorraine, Lothair was chosen king and crowned at Reims. Hugh exacted, as
payment for his disinterestedness and fidelity, a renewal of his
sovereignty over Burgundy with that of Aquitaine as well; he was in fact
the viceroy of the kingdom, and others imitated him by demanding
indemnities, privileges and confirmation of rights, as was customary at
the beginning of a reign. Hugh strengthened his position in Burgundy,
Lorraine and Normandy by means of marriages; but just as his power was
at its height he died (956). His death and the minority of his sons,
Hugh Capet and Eudes, gave the Carolingian dynasty thirty years more of
life.
For nine years (956-965) Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, was regent of
France, and thanks to him there was a kind of _entente cordiale_ between
the Carolingians and the Robertinians and Otto. Bruno made Lothair
recognize Hugh as duke of France and Eudes as duke of Burgundy; but the
sons preserved the father's enmity towards king Louis, despite the
archbishop's repeated efforts. His death deprived Lothair of a wise and
devoted guardian, even if it did set him free from German influence; and
the death of Odalric, archbishop of Reims, in 969, was another fatal
loss for the Carolingians, succeeded as he was by Adalbero, who, though
learned, pious and highly intelligent, was none the less ambitious. On
the death of Otto I. (973) Lothair wished to regain Lorraine; but his
success was small, owing to his limited resources and the uncertain
support of his vassals. In 980, regretting his fruitless quarrel with
Otto II., who had ravaged the whole country as far as Paris, and fearing
that even with the support of the house of Vermandois he would be
crushed like his father Louis IV. between the duke of France and the
emperor, who could count on the archbishop of Reims, Lothair made peace
with Otto--a great mistake, which cost him the prestige he had gained
among his nobles by his fairly successful struggle with the emperor,
drawing down upon him, moreover, the swift wrath of Hugh, who thought
himself tricked. Otto, meanwhile, whom he was unwise enough to trust,
made peace secretly with Hugh, as it was his interest to play off his
two old enemies one against the other. However, Otto died first (983),
leaving a three-year-old son, Otto III., and Lothair, hoping for
Lorraine, upheld the claims of Henry of Bavaria, who wished to oust
Otto. This was a war-signal for Archbishop Adalbero and his adviser
Gerbert, devoted to the idea of the Roman empire, and determined that it
should still be vested in the race of Otto, which had always been
beneficent to the Church.
Louis V. (986-987).
They decided to set the Robertinians against the Carolingians, and on
their advice Hugh Capet dispersed the assembly of Compiègne which
Lothair had commissioned to examine Adalbero's behaviour. On Lothair's
death in 986, Hugh surrounded his son and successor, Louis V., with
intrigues. Louis was a weak-minded and violent young man with neither
authority nor prestige, and Hugh tried to have him placed under
tutelage. After Louis V.'s sudden death, aged twenty, in 987, Adalbero
and Gerbert, with the support of the reformed Cluniac clergy, at the
Assembly of Senlis eliminated from the succession the rightful heir,
Charles of Lorraine, who, without influence or wealth, had become a
stranger in his own country, and elected Hugh Capet, who, though rich
and powerful, was superior neither in intellect nor character. Thus the
triple alliance of Adalbero's bold and adroit imperialism with the
cautious and vacillating ambition of the duke of the Franks, and the
impolitic hostility towards Germany of the ruined Carolingians, resulted
in the unlooked-for advent of the new Capetian dynasty.
Dismemberment of the kingdom.
This event completed the evolution of the forces that had produced
feudalism, the basis of the medieval social system. The idea of public
authority had been replaced by one that was simpler and therefore better
fitted for a half-civilized society--that of dependence of the weak on
the strong, voluntarily entered on by means of mutual contract.
Feudalism had gained ground in the 8th century; feudalism it was which
had raised the first Carolingian to the throne as being the richest and
most powerful person in Austrasia; and Charlemagne with all his power
had been as utterly unable as the Merovingians to revive the idea of an
abstract and impersonal state. Charlemagne's vassals, however, had
needed him; while from Charles the Bald onward it was the king who
needed the vassals--a change more marked with each successive prince.
The feudal system had in fact turned against the throne, the vassals
using it to secure a permanent hold upon offices and fiefs, and to get
possession of estates and of power. After Charles the Bald's death
royalty had only, so to speak, a shell--administrative officialdom. No
longer firmly rooted in the soil, the monarchy was helpless before local
powers which confronted it, seized upon the land, and cut off connexion
between throne and people. The king, the supreme lord, was the only lord
without lands, a nomad in his own realms, merely lingering there until
starved out. Feudalism claimed its new rights in the capitulary of
Quierzy-sur-Oise in 857; the rights of the monarchy began to dwindle in
877.
But vassalage could only be a cause of disintegration, not of unity, and
that this disintegration did not at once spread indefinitely was due to
the dozen or so great military commands--Flanders, Burgundy, Aquitaine,
&c.--which Charles the Bald had been obliged to establish on a strong
territorial basis. One of these great vassals, the duke of France, was
amply provided with estates and offices, in contrast to the landless
Carolingian, and his power, like that of the future kings of Prussia and
Austria, was based on military authority, for he had a frontier--that of
Anjou. Then the inevitable crisis had come. For a hundred years the
great feudal lords had disposed of the crown as they pleased, handing it
back and forward from one dynasty to another. At the same time the
contrast between the vast proportions of the Carolingian empire and its
feeble administrative control over a still uncivilized community became
more and more accentuated. The Empire crumbled away by degrees. Each
country began to lead its own separate existence, stammering its own
tongue; the different nations no longer understood one another, and no
longer had any general ideas in common. The kingdoms of France and
Germany, still too large, owed their existence to a series of
dispossessions imposed on sovereigns too feeble to hold their own, and
consisted of a great number of small states united by a very slight
bond. At the end of the 10th century the duchy of France was the only
central part of the kingdom which was still free and without
organization. The end was bound to come, and the final struggle was
between Laon, the royal capital, and Reims, the ecclesiastical capital,
the former carrying with it the soil of France, and the latter the
crown. The Capets captured the first in 985 and the other in 987.
Thenceforth all was over for the Carolingians, who were left with no
heritage save their great name.
The House of Capet.
Was the day won for the House of Capet? In the 11th century the kings of
that line possessed meagre domains scattered about in the Île de France
among the seigniorial possessions of Brie, Beauce, Beauvaisis and
Valois. They were hemmed in by the powerful duchy of Normandy, the
counties of Blois, Flanders and Champagne, and the duchy of Burgundy.
Beyond these again stretched provinces practically impenetrable to royal
influence: Brittany, Gascony, Toulouse, Septimania and the Spanish
March. The monarchy lay stifling in the midst of a luxuriant feudal
forest which surrounded its only two towns of any importance: Paris, the
city of the future, and Orleans, the city of learning. Its power,
exercised with an energy tempered by prudence, ran to waste like its
wealth in a suzerainty over turbulent vassals devoid of common
government or administration, and was undermined by the same lack of
social discipline among its vassals which had sapped the power of the
Carolingians. The new dynasty was thus the poorest and weakest of the
great civil and ecclesiastical lordships which occupied the country from
the estuary of the Scheldt to that of the Llobregat, and bounded
approximately by the Meuse, the Saône and the ridge of the Cévennes; yet
it cherished a great ambition which it revealed at times during its
first century (987-1108)--a determination not to repeat the Carolingian
failure. It had to wait two centuries after the revolution of 987 before
it was strong enough to take up the dormant tradition of an authority
like that of Rome; and until then it cunningly avoided unequal strife in
which, victory being impossible, reverses might have weakened those
titles, higher than any due to feudal rights, conferred by the heritage
of the Caesars and the coronation at Reims, and held in reserve for the
future.
Hugh Capet (987-996).
The new dynasty thus at first gave the impression rather of decrepitude
than of youth, seeming more a continuation of the Carolingian monarchy
than a new departure. Hugh Capet's reign was one of disturbance and
danger; behind his dim personality may be perceived the struggle of
greater forces--royalty and feudalism, the French clergy and the papacy,
the kingdom of France and the Empire. Hugh Capet needed more than three
years and the betrayal of his enemy into his hands before he could parry
the attack of a quite second-rate adversary, Charles of Lorraine (990),
the last descendant of Charlemagne. The insubordination of several great
vassals--the count of Vermandois, the duke of Burgundy, the count of
Flanders--who treated him as he had treated the Carolingian king; the
treachery of Arnulf, archbishop of Reims, who let himself be won over by
the empress Theophano; the papal hostility inflamed by the emperor
against the claim of feudal France to independence,--all made it seem
for a time as though the unity of the Roman empire of the West would be
secured at Hugh's expense and in Otto's favour; but as a matter of fact
this papal and imperial hostility ended by making the Capet dynasty a
national one. When Hugh died in 996, he had succeeded in maintaining his
liberty mainly, it is true, by diplomacy, not force, despite opposing
powers and his own weakness. Above all, he had secured the future by
associating his son Robert with him on the throne; and although the
nobles and the archbishop of Reims were disturbed by this suspension of
the feudal right of election, and tried to oppose it, they were
unsuccessful.
Robert the Pious (996-1031).
Robert the Pious, a crowned monk, resembled his father in eschewing
great schemes, whether from timidity or prudence; yet from 996 to 1031
he preserved intact the authority he had inherited from Hugh, despite
many domestic disturbances. He maintained a defiant attitude towards
Germany; increased his heritage; strengthened his royal title by the
addition of that of duke of Burgundy after fourteen years of pillage;
and augmented the royal domain by adding several countships on the
south-east and north-west. Limited in capacity, he yet understood the
art of acquisition.
Henry I. (1031-1060).
Henry I., his son, had to struggle with a powerful vassal, Eudes, count
of Chartres and Troyes, and was obliged for a time to abandon his
father's anti-German policy. Eudes, who was rash and adventurous, in
alliance with the queen-mother, supported the second son, Robert, and
captured the royal town of Sens. In order to retake it Henry ceded the
beautiful valley of the Saône and the Rhône to the German emperor
Conrad, and henceforth the kingdom of Burgundy was, like Lorraine, to
follow the fortunes of Germany. Henry had besides to invest his brother
with the duchy of Burgundy--a grave error which hampered French politics
during three centuries. Like his father, he subsequently managed to
retrieve some of the crown lands from William the Bastard, the
too-powerful duke of Normandy; and he made a praiseworthy though
fruitless attempt to regain possession of Lorraine for the French crown.
Finally, by the coronation of his son Philip (1059) he confirmed the
hereditary right of the Capets, soon to be superior to the elective
rights of the bishops and great barons of the kingdom. The chief merit
of these early Capets, indeed, was that they had sons, so that their
dynasty lasted on without disastrous minorities or quarrels over the
division of inheritance.
Philip I. (1060-1108).
Philip I. achieved nothing during his long reign of forty-eight years
except the necessary son, Louis the Fat. Unsuccessful even in small
undertakings he was utterly incapable of great ones; and the two
important events of his reign took place, the one against his will, the
other without his help. The first, which lessened Norman aggression in
his kingdom, was William the Bastard's conquest of England (1066); the
second was the First Crusade preached by the French pope Urban II.
(1095). A few half-hearted campaigns against recalcitrant vassals and a
long and obstinate quarrel with the papacy over his adulterous union
with Bertrade de Montfort, countess of Anjou, represented the total
activity of Philip's reign; he was greedy and venal, by no means
disdaining the petty profits of brigandage, and he never left his own
domains.
Louis VI. the Fat (1108-1137).
After a century's lethargy the house of Capet awoke once more with Louis
VI. and began the destruction of the feudal polity. For thirty-four
years of increasing warfare this active and energetic king, this brave
and persevering soldier, never spared himself, energetically policing
the royal demesne against such pillagers as Hugh of Le Puiset or Thomas
of Marle. There was, however, but little difference yet between a count
of Flanders or of Chartres and Louis VI., the possessor of a but small
and perpetually disturbed realm, who was praised by his minister, the
monk Suger, for making his power felt as far as distant Berril. This was
clearly shown when he attempted to force the great feudal lords to
recognize his authority. His bold endeavour to establish William Clito
in Flanders ended in failure; and his want of strength was particularly
humiliating in his unfortunate struggle with Henry I., king of the
English and duke of Normandy, who was powerful and well served, the real
master of a comparatively weak baronage. Louis only escaped being
crushed because he remembered, as did his successors for long after him,
that his house owed its power to the Church.
The Church has never loved weakness; she has always had a secret
sympathy for power, whatever its source, when she could hope to capture
it and make it serve her ends. Louis VI. defended her against feudal
robbers; and she supported him in his struggles against the nobles,
making him, moreover, by his son's marriage with the heiress of
Aquitaine, the greatest and richest landholder of the kingdom. But Louis
was not the obedient tool she wished for. With equal firmness and
success he vindicated his rights, whether against the indirect attacks
of the papacy on his independence, or the claims of the ecclesiastical
courts which, in principle, he made subordinate to the jurisdiction of
the crown; whether in episcopal elections, or in ecclesiastical reforms
which might possibly imperil his power or his revenues. The prestige of
this energetic king, protector of the Church, of the infant communes in
the towns, and of the peasants as against the constant oppressions of
feudalism, became still greater at the end of his reign, when an
invasion of the German emperor Henry V. in alliance with Henry Beauclerk
of Normandy (Henry I. of England), rallied his subjects round the
oriflamme of St Denis, awakening throughout northern France the
unanimous and novel sentiment of national danger.
Louis VII. the Young (1137-1180).
The second crusade.
Unfortunately his successor, Louis VII., almost destroyed his work by a
colossal blunder, although circumstances seemed much in his favour.
Germany and England, the two powers especially to be dreaded, were busy
with internal troubles and quarrels of succession. On the other hand,
thanks to his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, Louis's own domains
had been increased by the greater part of the country between the Loire
and the Pyrenees; while his father's minister, the monk Suger, continued
to assist him with his moderation and prudence. His first successes
against Theobald of Champagne, who for thirty years had been the most
dangerous of the great French barons and had refused a vassal's services
to Louis VI., as well as the adroit diplomacy with which he wrested from
Geoffrey the Fair, count of Anjou, a part of the Norman Vexin long
claimed by the French kings, in exchange for permitting him to conquer
Normandy, augured well for his boldness and activity, had he but
confined them to serving his own interests. The second crusade,
undertaken to expiate his burning of the church of Vitry, inaugurated a
series of magnificent but fruitless exploits; while his wife was the
cause of domestic quarrels still more disastrous. Piety and a thirst for
glory impelled Louis to take the lead in this fresh expedition to the
Holy Land, despite the opposition of Suger, and the hesitation of the
pope, Bernard of Clairvaux and the barons. The alliance with the German
king Conrad III. only enhanced the difficulties of an enterprise already
made hazardous by the misunderstandings between Greeks and Latins. The
Crusade ended in the double disaster of military defeat and martial
dishonour (1147-1149); and Suger's death in 1151 deprived Louis of a
counsellor who had exercised the regency skilfully and with success,
just at the very moment when his divorce from Eleanor was to jeopardize
the fortunes of the Capets.
Rivalry of the Capets and Angevins.
For the proud and passionate Eleanor married, two months later (May
1152), the young Henry, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, who held,
besides these great fiefs, the whole of the south-west of France, and in
two years' time the crown of England as well. Henry and Louis at once
engaged in the first Capet-Angevin duel, destined to last a hundred
years (1152-1242). When France and England thus entered European
history, their conditions were far from being equal. In England royal
power was strong; the size of the Angevin empire was vast, and the
succession assured. It was only abuse of their too-great powers that
ruined the early Angevin kings. France in the 12th century was merely a
federation of separate states, jealously independent, which the king had
to negotiate with rather than rule; while his own possessions, shorn of
the rich heritage of Aquitaine, were, so to speak, swamped by those of
the English king. For some time it was feared that the French kingdom
would be entirely absorbed in consequence of the marriage between
Louis's daughter and Henry II.'s eldest son. The two rivals were typical
of their states, Henry II. being markedly superior to Louis in political
resource, military talent and energy. He failed, however, to realize his
ambition of shutting in the Capet king and isolating him from the rest
of Europe by crafty alliances, notably that with the emperor Frederick
Barbarossa--while watching an opportunity to supplant him upon the
French throne. It is extraordinary that Louis should have escaped final
destruction, considering that Henry had subdued Scotland, retaken Anjou
from his brother Geoffrey, won a hold over Brittany, and schemed
successfully for Languedoc. But the Church once more came to the rescue
of her devoted son. The retreat to France of Pope Alexander III., after
he had been driven from Rome by the emperor Frederick in favour of the
anti-pope Victor, revived Louis's moral prestige. Henry II.'s quarrel
with Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, which ran its course in
France (1164-1171) as a struggle for the independence and reform of the
Church, both threatened by the Constitutions of Clarendon, and ended
with the murder of Becket in 1172, gave Louis yet another advantage over
his rival. Finally the birth of Philip Augustus (1165), after thirty
years of childless wedlock, saved the kingdom from a war of succession
just at the time when the powerful Angevin sway, based entirely upon
force, was jeopardized by the rebellion of Henry II.'s sons against
their father. Louis naturally joined the coalition of 1173, but showed
no more vigour in this than in his other wars; and his fate would have
been sealed had not the pope checked Henry by the threat of an
interdict, and reconciled the combatants (1177). Louis had still time
left to effect the coronation of his son Philip Augustus (1179), and to
associate him with himself in the exercise of the royal power for which
he had grown too old and infirm.
Philip Augustus (1180-1223).
Philip Augustus, who was to be the bitterest enemy of Henry II. and the
Angevins, was barely twenty before he revealed the full measure of his
cold energy and unscrupulous ambition. In five years (1180-1186) he rid
himself of the overshadowing power of Philip of Alsace, count of
Flanders, and his own uncles, the counts of Champagne; while the treaty
of May 20th, 1186, was his first rough lesson to the feudal leagues,
which he had reduced to powerlessness, and to the subjugated duke of
Burgundy and count of Flanders. Northern and eastern France recognized
the suzerainty of the Capet, and Philip Augustus was now bold enough to
attack Henry II., the master of the west, whose friendly neutrality
(assured by the treaty of Gisors) had made possible the successive
defeats of the great French barons. Like his father, Philip understood
how to make capital out of the quarrels of the aged and ailing Henry II.
with his sons, especially with Richard, who claimed his French heritage
in his father's lifetime, and raised up enemies for the disunited
Angevins even in Germany. After two years of constant defeat, Henry's
capitulation at Azai proved once more that fortune is never with the
old. The English king had to submit himself to "the advice and desire of
the king of France," doing him homage for all continental fiefs
(1187-1189).
Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion.
The defection of his favourite son John gave Henry his deathblow, and
Philip Augustus found himself confronted by a new king of England,
Richard Coeur de Lion, as powerful, besides being younger and more
energetic. Philip's ambition could not rest satisfied with the petty
principalities of Amiens, Vermandois and Valois, which he had added to
the royal demesne. The third crusade, undertaken, sorely against
Philip's will, in alliance with Richard, only increased the latent
hostility between the two kings; and in 1191 Philip abandoned the
enterprise in order to return to France and try to plunder his absent
rival. Despite his solemn oath no scruples troubled him: witness the
large sums of money he offered to the emperor Henry VI. if he would
detain Richard, who had been made prisoner by the duke of Austria on his
return from the crusade; and his negotiations with his brother John
Lackland, whom he acknowledged king of England in exchange for the
cession of Normandy. But Henry VI. suddenly liberated Richard, and in
five years that "devil set free" took from Philip all the profit of his
trickery, and shut him off from Normandy by the strong fortress of
Château-Gaillard (1194-1199).
Philip Augustus and John Lackland.
Happily an accident which caused Richard's death at the siege of Chalus,
and the evil imbecility of his brother and successor, John Lackland,
brilliantly restored the fortunes of the Capets. The quarrel between
John and his nephew Arthur of Brittany gave Philip Augustus one of those
opportunities of profiting by family discord which, coinciding with
discontent among the various peoples subject to the house of Anjou, had
stood him in such good stead against Henry II. and Richard. He demanded
renunciation on John's part, not of Anjou only, but of Poitou and
Normandy--of all his French-speaking possessions, in fact--in favour of
Arthur, who was supported by William des Roches, the most powerful lord
of the region of the Loire. Philip's divorce from Ingeborg of Denmark,
who appealed successfully to Pope Innocent III., merely delayed the
inevitable conflict. John of England, moreover, was a past-master in the
art of making enemies of his friends, and his conduct towards his
vassals of Aquitaine furnished a judicial pretext for conquest. The
royal judges at Paris condemned John, as a felon, to death and the
forfeiture of his fiefs (1203), and the murder of Arthur completed his
ruin. Philip Augustus made a vigorous onslaught on Normandy in right of
justice and of superior force, took the formidable fortress of
Château-Gaillard on the Seine after several months' siege, and invested
Rouen, which John abandoned, fleeing to England. In Anjou, Touraine,
Maine and Poitou, lords, towns and abbeys made their submission, won
over by Philip's bribes despite Pope Innocent III.'s attempts at
intervention. In 1208 John was obliged to own the Plantagenet
continental power as lost. There were no longer two rival monarchies in
France; the feudal equilibrium was destroyed, to the advantage of the
duchy of France.
But Philip in his turn nearly allowed himself to be led into an attempt
at annexing England, and so reversing for his own benefit the work of
the Angevins (1213); but, happily for the future of the dynasty, Pope
Innocent III. prevented this. Thanks to the ecclesiastical sanction of
his royalty, Philip had successfully braved the pope for twenty years,
in the matter of Ingeborg and again in that of the German schism, when
he had supported Philip of Swabia against Otto of Brunswick, the pope's
candidate. In 1213, John Lackland, having been in conflict with Innocent
regarding the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, had made submission and
done homage for his kingdom, and Philip wished to take vengeance for
this at the expense of the rebellious vassals of the north-west, and of
Renaud and Ferrand, counts of Boulogne and Flanders, thus combating
English influence in those quarters.
Coalition against Philip Augustus. (1214).
This was a return to the old Capet policy; but it was also menacing to
many interests, and sure to arouse energetic resistance. John seized the
opportunity to consolidate against Philip a European coalition, which
included most of the feudal lords in Flanders, Belgium and Lorraine, and
the emperor Otto IV. So dangerous did the French monarchy already seem!
John began operations with an attack from Anjou, supported by the
notably capricious nobles of Aquitaine, and was routed by Philip's son
at La Roche aux Moines, near Angers, on the 2nd of July 1214.
Twenty-five days later the northern allies, intending to surprise the
smaller French army on its passage over the bridge at Bouvines,
themselves sustained a complete defeat. This first national victory had
not only a profound effect on the whole kingdom, but produced
consequences of far-reaching importance: in Germany it brought about
Otto's fall before Frederick II.; in England it introduced the great
drama of 1215, the first act of which closed with Magna Carta--John
Lackland being forced to acknowledge the control of his barons, and to
share with them the power he had abused and disgraced. In France, on the
contrary, the throne was exalted beyond rivalry, raised far above a
feudalism which never again ventured on acts of independence or
rebellion. Bouvines gave France the supremacy of the West. The feudalism
of Languedoc was all that now remained to conquer.
The whole world, in fact, was unconsciously working for Philip Augustus.
Anxious not to risk his gains, but to consolidate them by organization,
Philip henceforth until his death in 1223 operated through diplomacy
alone, leaving to others the toil and trouble of conquests, the
advantages of which were not for them. When his son Louis wished to
wrest the English crown from John, now crushed by his barons, Philip
intervened without seeming to do so, first with the barons, then with
Innocent III., supporting and disowning his son by turns; until the
latter, held in check by Rome, was forced to sign the treaty of Lambeth
(1217). When the Church and the needy and fanatical nobles of northern
and central France destroyed the feudal dynasty of Toulouse and the rich
civilization of the south in the Albigensian crusade, it was for Philip
Augustus that their leader, Simon de Montfort, all unknowing, conquered
Languedoc. At last, instead of the two Frances of the _langue d'oc_ and
the _langue d'oïl_, there was but one royal France comprising the whole
kingdom.
Administration of Philip Augustus.
Philip Augustus was not satisfied with the destruction of a turbulent
feudalism; he wished to substitute for it such unity and peace as had
obtained in the Roman Empire; and just as he had established his
supremacy over the feudal lords, so now he managed to extend it over the
clergy, and to bend them to his will. He took advantage of their
weakness in the midst of an age of violence. By contracts of "pariage"
the clergy claimed and obtained the king's protection even in places
beyond the king's jurisdiction, to their common advantage. Philip thus
set the feudal lords one against the other; and against them all, first
the Church, then the communes. He exploited also the townspeople's need
for security and the instinct of independence which made them claim a
definite place in the feudal hierarchy. He was the actual creator of the
communes, although an interested creator, since they made a breach in
the fortress of feudalism and extended the royal authority far beyond
the king's demesne. He did even more: he gave monarchy the instruments
of which it still stood in need, gathering round him in Paris a council
of men humble in origin, but wise and loyal; while in 1190 he instituted
_baillis_ and seneschals throughout his enlarged dominions, all-powerful
over the nobles and subservient to himself. He filled his treasury with
spoils harshly wrung from all classes; thus inaugurating the monarchy's
long and patient labours at enlarging the crown lands bit by bit through
taxes on private property. Finally he created an army, no longer the
temporary feudal _ost_, but a more or less permanent royal force. By
virtue of all these organs of government the throne guaranteed peace,
justice and a secure future, having routed feudalism with sword and
diplomacy. Philip's son was the first of the Capets who was not crowned
during his father's lifetime; a fact clearly showing that the principle
of heredity had now been established beyond discussion.
Louis VIII. (1223-1226).
Louis VIII.'s short reign was but a prolongation of Philip's in its
realization of his two great designs: the recovery from Henry III. of
England of Poitou as far as the Garonne; and the crusade against the
Albigenses, which with small pains procured him the succession of Amaury
de Montfort, and the Languedoc of the counts of Toulouse, if not the
whole of Gascony. Louis VIII. died on his return from this short
campaign without having proved his full worth.
Universal French activity.
But the history of France during the 11th and 12th centuries does not
entirely consist of these painful struggles of the Capet dynasty to
shake off the fetters of feudalism. France, no longer split up into
separate fragments, now began to exercise both intellectual and military
influence over Europe. Everywhere her sons gave proof of rejuvenated
activity. The Christian missions which others were reviving in Prussia
and beginning in Hungary were undertaken on a vaster scale by the
Capets. These "elder sons of the Church" made themselves responsible for
carrying out the "work of God," and French pilgrims in the Holy Land
prepared the great movement of the Crusades against the infidels.
Religious faith, love of adventure, the hope of making advantageous
conquests, anticipations of a promised paradise--all combined to force
this advance upon the Orient, which though failing to rescue the
sepulchre of Christ, the ephemeral kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus, the
dukedom of Athens, or the Latin empire of Constantinople, yet gained for
France that prestige for military glory and religious piety which for
centuries constituted her strength in the Levant (see CRUSADES). At the
call of the pope other members of the French chivalry also made
victorious expeditions against the Mussulmans, and founded the Christian
kingdom of Portugal. Obeying that enterprising spirit which was to take
them to England half a century later, Normans descended upon southern
Italy and wrested rich lands from Greeks and Saracens.
Intellectual development.
In the domain of intellect the advance of the French showed a no less
dazzling and a no less universal activity; they sang as well as they
fought, and their epics were worthy of their swordsmanship, while their
cathedrals were hymns in stone as ardent as their soaring flights of
devotion. In this period of intense religious life France was always in
the vanguard. It was the ideas of Cluniac monks that freed the Church
from feudal supremacy, and in the 11th century produced a Pope Gregory
VII.; the spirit of free investigation shown by the heretics of Orleans
inspired the rude Breton, Abelard, in the 12th century; and with Gerbert
and Fulbert of Chartres the schools first kindled that brilliant light
which the university of Paris, organized by Philip Augustus, was to shed
over the world from the heights of Sainte-Geneviève. In the quarrels of
the priesthood under the Empire it was St Bernard, the great abbot of
Clairvaux, who tried to arrest the papacy on the slippery downward path
of theocracy; finally, it was in Suger's church of St Denis that French
art began that struggle between light against darkness which,
culminating in Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle, was to teach the
architects of the world the delight of building with airiness of effect.
The old basilica which contains the history of the monarchy sums up the
whole of Gothic art to this day, and it was Suger who in the domain of
art and politics brought forward once more the conception of unity. The
courteous ideal of French chivalry, with its "delectable" language, was
adopted by all seigniorial Europe, which thus became animated, as it
were, by the life-blood of France. Similarly, in the universal movement
of those forces which made for freedom, France began the age-long
struggle to maintain the rights of civil society and continually to
enlarge the social categories. The townsman enriched by commerce and the
emancipated peasant tried more or less valiantly to shake off the yoke
of the feudal system, which had been greatly weakened, if not entirely
broken down, by the crusades. Grouped around their belfry-towers and
organized within their gilds, they made merry in their free jocular
language over their own hardships, and still more over the vices of
their lords. They insinuated themselves into the counsels of their
ignorant masters, and though still sitting humbly at the feet of the
barons, these upright and well-educated servitors were already dreaming
of the great deeds they would do when their tyrants should have vacated
their high position, and when royalty should have summoned them to
power.
Louis IX. (1226-1270).
Blanche of Castile.
By the beginning of the 13th century the Capet monarchy was so strong
that the crisis occasioned by the sudden death of Louis VIII. was easily
surmounted by the foreign woman and the child whom he left behind him.
It is true that that woman was Blanche of Castile, and that child the
future Louis IX. A virtuous and very devout Spanish princess, Blanche
assumed the regency of the kingdom and the tutelage of her child, and
carried them on for nine years with so much force of character and
capacity for rule that she soon impressed the clamorous and disorderly
leaders of the opposition (1226-1235). By the treaty of Meaux (1229),
her diplomacy combined with the influence of the Church to prepare
effectually for the annexation of Languedoc to the kingdom,
supplementing this again by a portion of Champagne; and the marriage of
her son to Margaret of Provence definitely broke the ties which held the
country within the orbit of the German empire. She managed also to keep
out of the great quarrel between Frederick II. and the papacy which was
convulsing Germany. But her finest achievement was the education of her
son; she taught him that lofty religious morality which in his case was
not merely a rule for private conduct, but also a political programme to
which he remained faithful even to the detriment of his apparent
interests. With Louis IX. morality for the first time permeated and
dominated politics; he had but one end: to do justice to every one and
to reconcile all Christendom in view of a general crusade.
Louis IX.'s policy of arbitration.
The oak of Vincennes, under which the king would sit to mete out
justice, cast its shade over the whole political action of Louis IX. He
was the arbiter of townspeople, of feudal lords and of kings. The
interdiction of the judicial duel, the "quarantaine le roi," i.e. "the
king's truce of forty days" during which no vengeance might be taken for
private wrongs, and the assurement,[29] went far to diminish the abuses
of warfare by allowing his mediation to make for a spirit of
reconciliation throughout his kingdom. When Thibaud (Theobald), count of
Champagne, attempted to marry the daughter of Pierre Mauclerc, duke of
Brittany, without the king's consent, Louis IX., who held the county of
Champagne at his mercy, contented himself with exacting guarantees of
peace. Beyond the borders of France, at the time of the emperor
Frederick II.'s conflict with a papacy threatened in its temporal
powers, though he made no response to Frederick's appeal to the civil
authorities urging them to present a solid front against the pretensions
of the Church, and though he energetically supported the latter, yet he
would not admit her right to place kingdoms under interdict, and refused
the imperial crown which Gregory IX. offered him for one of his
brothers. He always hoped to bring about an honourable agreement between
the two adversaries, and in his estimation the advantages of peace
outweighed personal interest. In matters concerning the succession in
Flanders, Hainaut and Navarre; in the quarrels of the princes regarding
the Empire, and in those of Henry III. of England with his barons; it
was because of his justice and his disinterestedness that he was
appealed to as a trusted mediator. His conduct towards Henry III. was
certainly a most characteristic example of his behaviour.
Louis IX. and Henry III.
The king of England had entered into the coalition formed by the
nobility of Poitou and the count of Toulouse to prevent the execution of
the treaty of 1229 and the enfeoffment of Poitou to the king's brother
Alphonse. Louis IX. defeated Henry III. twice within two days, at
Taillebourg and at Saintes, and obliged him to demand a truce (1242). It
was forbidden that any lord should be a vassal both of the king of
France and of the king of England. After this Louis IX. had set off upon
his first crusade in Egypt (1248-54), and on his return he wanted to
make this truce into a definite treaty and to "set love" between his
children and those of the English king. By a treaty signed at Paris
(1259), Henry III. renounced all the conquests of Philip Augustus, and
Louis IX. those of his father Louis VIII.--an example unique in history
of a victorious king spontaneously giving up his spoil solely for the
sake of peace and justice, yet proving by his act that honesty is the
best policy; for monarchy gained much by that moral authority which made
Louis IX. the universal arbitrator.
The crusade of Tunis.
But his love of peace and concord was not always "sans grands despens"
to the kingdom. In 1258, by renouncing his rights over Roussillon and
the countship of Barcelona, conquered by Charlemagne, he made an
advantageous bargain because he kept Montpellier; but he committed a
grave fault in consenting to accept the offers regarding Sicily made by
Pope Urban IV. to his brother the count of Anjou and Provence. That was
the origin of the expeditions into Italy on which the house of Valois
was two centuries later to squander the resources of France
unavailingly, compromising beyond the Alps its interests in the Low
Countries and upon the Rhine. But Louis IX.'s worst error was his
obsession with regard to the crusades, to which he sacrificed
everything. Despite the signal failure of the first crusade, when he had
been taken prisoner; despite the protests of his mother, of his
counsellors, and of the pope himself, he flung himself into the mad
adventure of Tunis. Nowhere was his blind faith more plainly shown,
combined as it was with total ignorance of the formidable migrations
that were convulsing Asia, and of the complicated game of politics just
then proceeding between the Christian nations and the Moslems of the
Mediterranean. At Tunis he found his death, on the 25th of August 1270.
Philip III., the Bold (1270-1285).
The death of Louis IX. and that of his brother Alphonse of Poitiers,
heir of the count of Toulouse, made Philip III., the Bold, legitimate
master of northern France and undisputed sovereign of southern France.
From the latter he detached the _comtat_ Venaissin in 1274 and gave it
to the papacy, which held it until 1791. But he had not his father's
great soul nor disinterested spirit. Urged by Pope Martin IV. he began
the fatal era of great international wars by his unlucky crusade against
the king of Aragon, who, thanks to the massacre of the Sicilian Vespers,
substituted his own predominance in Sicily for that of Charles of Anjou.
Philip returned from Spain only to die at Perpignan, ending his
insignificant reign as he had begun it, amid the sorrows of a disastrous
retreat (1270-1285). His reign was but a halting-place of history
between those of Louis IX. and Philip the Fair, just when the transition
was taking place from the last days of the middle ages to the modern
epoch.
Philip IV. the Fair (1285-1314).
The middle ages had been dominated by four great problems. The first of
these had been to determine whether there should be a universal empire
exercising tutelage over the nations; and if so, to whom this empire
should belong, to pope or emperor. The second had been the extension to
the East of that Catholic unity which reigned in the West. Again, for
more than a century, the question had also been debated whether the
English kings were to preserve and increase their power over the soil
of France. And, finally, two principles had been confronting one another
in the internal life of all the European states: the feudal and the
monarchical principles. France had not escaped any of these conflicts;
but Philip the Fair was the initiator or the instrument (it is difficult
to say which) who was to put an end to both imperial and theocratic
dreams, and to the international crusades; who was to remove the
political axis from the centre of Europe, much to the benefit of the
western monarchies, now definitely emancipated from the feudal yoke and
firmly organized against both the Church and the barons. The hour had
come for Dante, the great Florentine poet, to curse the man who was to
dismember the empire, precipitate the fall of the papacy and discipline
feudalism.
Litigious character of Philip the Fair's reign.
Modern in his practical schemes and in his calculated purpose, Philip
the Fair was still more so in his method, that of legal procedure, and
in his agents, the lawyers. With him the French monarchy defined its
ambitions, and little by little forsook its feudal and ecclesiastical
character in order to clothe itself in juridical forms. His aggressive
and litigious policy and his ruthless financial method were due to those
lawyers of the south and of Normandy who had been nurtured on Roman law
in the universities of Bologna or Montpellier, had practised chicanery
in the provincial courts, had gradually thrust themselves into the great
arena of politics, and were now leading the king and filling his
parlement. It was no longer upon religion or morality, it was upon
imperial and Roman rights that these _chevaliers ès lois_ based the
prince's omnipotence; and nothing more clearly marks the new tradition
which was being elaborated than the fact that all the great events of
Philip the Fair's reign were lawsuits.
Philip the Fair and the Papacy.
The first of these was with the papacy. The famous quarrel between the
priesthood and the Empire, which had culminated at Canossa under Gregory
VII., in the apotheosis of the Lateran council under Innocent III., and
again in the fall of the house of Hohenstaufen under Innocent IV., was
reopened with the king of France by Boniface VIII. The quarrel began in
1294 about a question of money. In his bull _Clericis laicos_ the pope
protested against the taxes levied upon the French clergy by the king,
whose expenses were increasing with his conquests. But he had not
insisted; because Philip, between feudal vassals ruined by the crusades
and lower classes fleeced by everybody, had threatened to forbid the
exportation from France of any ecclesiastical gold and silver. In 1301
and 1302 the arrest of Bernard Saisset, bishop of Pamiers, by the
officers of the king, and the citation of this cleric before the king's
tribunal for the crime of _lèse-majesté_, revived the conflict and led
Boniface to send an order to free Saisset, and to put forward a claim to
reform the kingdom under the threat of excommunication. In view of the
gravity of the occasion Philip made an unusually extended appeal to
public opinion by convoking the states-general at Notre-Dame in Paris
(1302). Whatever were their views as to the relations between
ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction, the French clergy, ruined by
the dues levied by the papal court, ranged themselves on the national
side with the nobility and the _bourgeoisie_; whereupon the king, with a
bold stroke far ahead of his time, gave tit for tat. His chancellor,
Nogaret, went to Anagni to seize the pope and drag him before a council;
but Boniface died without confessing himself vanquished. As a matter of
fact the king and his lawyers triumphed, where the house of Swabia had
failed. After the death of Boniface the splendid fabric of the medieval
theocracy gave place to the rights of civil society, the humiliation of
Avignon, the disruption of the great schism, the vain efforts of the
councils for reform, and the radical and heretical solutions of Wycliffe
and Huss.
Philip the Fair and the Templars.
The affair of the Templars was another legal process carried out by the
same Nogaret. Of course this military religious order had lost utility
and justification when the Holy Land had been evacuated and the crusades
were over. Their great mistake had lain in becoming rich, and rich to
excess, through serving as bankers to princes, kings and popes; for
great financial powers soon became unpopular. Philip took advantage of
this hatred of the lower classes and the cowardice of his creature, Pope
Clement V., to satisfy his desire for money. The trial of the order
(1307-1313) was a remarkable example of the use of the religious
tribunal of the Inquisition as a political instrument. There was a
dramatic completeness about this unexpected result of the crusades. A
general arbitrary arrest of the Templars, the sequestration of their
property, examination under torture, the falsifying of procedure,
extortion of money from the pope, the _auto-da-fé_ of innocent victims,
the dishonest pillaging of their goods by the joint action of the king
and the pope: such was the outcome of this vast process of
secularization, which foreshadowed the events of the 16th and 18th
centuries.
Philip the Fair and Edward I.
External policy had the same litigious character. Philip the Fair
instituted suits against his natural enemies, the king of England and
the count of Flanders, foreign princes holding possessions within his
kingdom; and against the emperor, whose ancient province of Lorraine and
kingdom of Arles constantly changed hands between Germany and France.
Philip began by interfering in the affairs of Sicily and Aragon, his
father's inheritance; after which, on the pretext of a quarrel between
French and English sailors, he set up his customary procedure: a
citation of the king of England before the parlement of Paris, and in
case of default a decree of forfeiture; the whole followed by
execution--that is to say by the unimportant war of 1295. A truce
arranged by Boniface VIII. restored Guienne to Edward I., gave him the
hand of Philip's sister for himself and that of the king's daughter for
his son (1298).
Philip the Fair and Flanders.
A still more lengthy and unfortunate suit was the attempt of Philip the
Fair and his successors to incorporate the Flemish fief like the English
one (1300-1326), thus coming into conflict with proud and turbulent
republics composed of wool and cloth merchants, weavers, fullers and
powerful counts. Guy de Dampierre, count of Namur, who had become count
of Flanders on the death of his mother Margaret II. in 1279--an
ambitious, greedy and avaricious man--was arrested at the Louvre on
account of his attempt to marry his daughter to Edward I.'s eldest son
without the consent of his suzerain Philip. Released after two years, he
sided definitely with the king of England when the latter was in arms
against Philip; and being only weakly supported by Edward, he was
betrayed by the nobles who favoured France, and forced to yield up not
only his personal liberty but the whole of Flanders (1300). The
Flemings, however, soon wearying of the oppressive administration of the
French governor, Jacques de Châtillon, and the recrudescence of
patrician domination, rose and overwhelmed the French chivalry at
Courtrai (1302)--a prelude to the coming disasters of the Hundred Years'
War. Philip's double revenge, on sea at Zierikzee and on land at
Mons-en-Pévèle (1304), led to the signing of a treaty at Athis-sur-Orge
(1305).
Eastern policy of Philip the Fair.
The efforts of Philip the Fair to expand the limits of his kingdom on
the eastern border were more fortunate. His marriage had gained him
Champagne; and he afterwards extended his influence over Franche Comté,
Bar and the bishoprics of Lorraine, acquiring also Viviers and the
important town of Lyons--all this less by force of arms than by the
expenditure of money. Disdaining the illusory dream of the imperial
crown, still cherished by his legal advisers, he pushed forward towards
that fluctuating eastern frontier, the line of least resistance, which
would have yielded to him had it not been for the unfortunate
interruption of the Hundred Years' War.
The sons of Philip the Fair (1314-1328).
His three sons, Louis X., Philip V. the Tall, and Charles IV., continued
his work. They increased the power of the monarchy politically by
destroying the feudal reaction excited in 1314 by the tyrannical conduct
of the jurists, like Enguerrand de Marigny, and by the increasing
financial extortions of their father; and they also--notably Philip V.,
one of the most hard-working of the Capets--increased it on the
administrative side by specializing the services of justice and of
finance, which were separated from the king's council. Under these mute
self-effacing kings the progress of royal power was only the more
striking. With them the senior male line of the house of Capet became
extinct.
The royal house of Capet.
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 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.
Advent of the Valois.
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 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.
Philip VI. (1328-1350).
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 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.
The Hundred Years' War.
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 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 defeat at Sluys.
The defeat at Crécy and the taking of Calais.
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 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 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).
John the Good (1350).
Defeat at Poitiers.
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 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 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 states of 1355-1356.
Robert le Coq and Étienne Marcel.
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 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 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_.
The Grande Ordonnance of 1357.
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 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.
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.
The treaty of Brétigny.
Re-establishing the royal authority in Paris was not enough; an end had
to be put to the war with England and Navarre, and 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.
Charles V. (1364-1380).
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 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!"