But the dauphin Louis, although a bad son and impatient for the crown,
was not dazzled by all this. With very simple tastes, an inquiring mind,
and an imagination always at work, he combined a certain easy
good-nature which inspired confidence, and though stingy in spending
money on himself, he could be lavish in buying men either dangerous or
likely to be useful. More inclined to the subtleties of diplomacy than
to the risks of battle, he had recognized and speedily grasped the
disadvantages of warfare. The duke of Burgundy, however rich and
powerful, was still the king's vassal; his wide but insecure authority,
of too rapid growth and unpopular, lacked sovereign rights. Hardly,
therefore, had Louis XI. heard of his father's death than he made his
host aware of his perfectly independent spirit, and his very definite
intention to be master in his own house.
The Leagues of the Public Weal.
But by a kind of poetic justice, Louis XI. had for seven years, from
1465 to 1472, to struggle against fresh Pragueries, called Leagues of
the Public Weal (presumably from their disregard of it), composed of the
most powerful French nobles, to whom he had set the example of revolt.
His first proceedings had indeed given no promise of the moderation and
prudence afterwards to characterize him; he had succeeded in
exasperating all parties; the officials of his father, "the
well-served," whom he dismissed in favour of inferiors like Jean Balue,
Oliver le Daim and Tristan Lermite; the clergy, by abrogating the
Pragmatic Sanction; the university of Paris, by his ill-treatment of it;
and the nobles, whom he deprived of their hunting rights, among them
being those whom Charles VII. had been most careful to conciliate in
view of the inevitable conflict with the duke of Burgundy--in
particular, Francis II., duke of Brittany. The repurchase in 1463 of the
towns of the Somme (to which Philip the Good, now grown old and engaged
in a quarrel with his son, the count of Charolais, had felt obliged to
consent on consideration of receiving four hundred thousand gold
crowns), and the intrigues of Louis XI. during the periodical revolts of
the Liégois against their prince-bishop, set the powder alight. On three
different occasions (in 1465, 1467 and 1472), Louis XI.'s own brother,
the duke of Berry, urged by the duke of Brittany, the count of
Charolais, the duke of Bourbon, and the other feudal lords, attempted to
set up six kingdoms in France instead of one, and to impose upon Louis
XI. a regency which should give them enormous pensions. This was their
idea of Public Weal.
Charles the Bold.
The interview at Péronne.
Louis XI. won by his favourite method, diplomacy rather than arms. At
the time of the first league, the battle of Montlhéry (16th of July
1465) having remained undecided between the two equally badly organized
armies, Louis XI. conceded everything in the treaties of Conflans and
Saint-Maur--promises costing him little, since he had no intention of
keeping them. But during the course of the second league, provoked by
the recapture of Normandy, which he had promised to his brother in
exchange for Berry, he was nearly caught in his own trap. On the 15th of
June 1467 Philip the Good died, and the accession of the count of
Charolais was received with popular risings. In order to embarrass him
Louis XI., had secretly encouraged the people of Liége to revolt; but
preoccupied with the marriage of Charles the Bold with Margaret of York,
sister of Edward IV. of England, he wished to negotiate personally with
him at Péronne, and hardly had he reached that place when news arrived
there of the revolt of Liége amid cries of "Vive France." Charles the
Bold, proud, violent, pugnacious, as treacherous as his rival, a hardier
soldier, though without his political sagacity, imprisoned Louis in the
tower where Charles the Simple had died as a prisoner of the count of
Vermandois. He only let him depart when he had sworn in the treaty of
Péronne to fulfil the engagements made at Conflans and Saint-Maur to
assist in person at the subjugation of rebellious Liége, and to give
Champagne as an appanage to his ally the duke of Berry.
Ruin of the feudal coalitions.
Louis XI., supported by the assembly of notables at Tours (1470), had no
intention of keeping this last promise, since the duchy of Champagne
would have made a bridge between Burgundy and Flanders--the two isolated
branches of the house of Burgundy. He gave the duke of Berry distant
Guienne. But death eventually rid him of the duke in 1472, just when a
third league was being organized, the object of which was to make the
duke of Berry king with the help of Edward IV., king of England. The
duke of Brittany, Francis II., was defeated; Charles the Bold, having
failed at Beauvais in his attempt to recapture the towns of the Somme
which had been promised him by the treaty of Conflans, was obliged to
sign the peace of Senlis (1472). This was the end of the great feudal
coalitions, for royal vengeance soon settled the account of the lesser
vassals; the duke of Alençon was condemned to prison for life; the count
of Armagnac was killed; and "the Germans" were soon to disembarrass
Louis of Charles the Bold.
Charles the Bold's imperial dreams.
Charles had indeed only signed the peace so promptly because he was
looking eastward towards that royal crown and territorial cohesion of
which his father had also dreamed. The king, he said of Louis XI., is
always ready. He wanted to provide his future sovereignty with organs
analogous to those of France; a permanent army, and a judiciary and
financial administration modelled on the French parlement and exchequer.
Since he could not dismember the kingdom of France, his only course was
to reconstitute the ancient kingdom of Lotharingia; while the conquest
of the principality of Liége and of the duchy of Gelderland, and the
temporary occupation of Alsace, pledged to him by Sigismund of Austria,
made him greedy for Germany. To get himself elected king of the Romans
he offered his daughter Mary, his eternal candidate for marriage, to the
emperor Frederick III. for his son. Thus either he or his son-in-law
Maximilian would have been emperor.
Fall of Charles the Bold.
But the Tarpeian rock was a near neighbour of the Capitol.
Frederick--distrustful, and in the pay of Louis XI.--evaded a meeting
arranged at Trier, and Burgundian influence in Alsace was suddenly
brought to a violent end by the putting to death of its tyrannical
agent, Peter von Hagenbach. Charles thought to repair the rebuff of
Trier at Cologne, and wasted his resources in an attempt to win over its
elector by besieging the insignificant town of Neuss. But the "universal
spider"--as he called Louis XI.--was weaving his web in the darkness,
and was eventually to entangle him in it. First came the reconciliation,
in his despite, of those irreconcilables, the Swiss and Sigismund of
Austria; and then the union of both with the duke of Lorraine, who was
also disturbed at the duke of Burgundy's ambition. In vain Charles tried
to kindle anew the embers of former feudal intrigues; the execution of
the duke of Nemours and the count of Saint Pol cooled all enthusiasm. In
vain did he get his dilatory friends, the English Yorkists, to cross the
Channel; on the 29th of August 1475, at Picquigny, Louis XI. bribed them
with a sum of seventy-five thousand crowns to forsake him, Edward
further undertaking to guarantee the loyalty of the duke of Brittany.
Exasperated, Charles attacked and took Nancy, wishing, as he said, "to
skin the Bernese bear and wear its fur." To the hanging of the brave
garrison of Granson the Swiss responded by terrible reprisals at Granson
and at Morat (March to June 1476); while the people of Lorraine finally
routed Charles at Nancy on the 5th of January 1477, the duke himself
falling in the battle.
Ruin of the house of Burgundy.
The central administration of Burgundy soon disappeared, swamped by the
resurgence of ancient local liberties; the army fell to pieces; and all
hope of joining the two limbs of the great eastern duchy was definitely
lost. As for the remnants that were left, French provinces and imperial
territory, Louis XI. claimed the whole. He seized everything, alleging
different rights in each place; but he displayed such violent haste and
such trickery that he threw the heiress of Burgundy, in despair, into
the arms of Maximilian of Austria. At the treaty of Arras (December
1482) Louis XI. received only Picardy, the Boulonnais and Burgundy; by
the marriage of Charles the Bold's daughter the rest was annexed to the
Empire, and later to Spain. Thus by Louis XI.'s short-sighted error the
house of Austria established itself in the Low Countries. An age-long
rivalry between the houses of France and Austria was the result of this
disastrous marriage; and as the son who was its issue espoused the
heiress of a now unified Spain, France, hemmed in by the Spaniards and
by the Empire, was thenceforward to encounter them everywhere in her
course. The historical progress of France was once more endangered.
The administration of Louis XI.
The reasons of state which governed all Louis XI.'s external policy also
inspired his internal administration. If they justified him in employing
lies and deception in international affairs, in his relations with his
subjects they led him to regard as lawful everything which favoured his
authority; no question of right could weigh against it. The army and
taxation, as the two chief means of domination within and without the
kingdom, constituted the main bulwarks of his policy. As for the
nobility, his only thought was to diminish their power by multiplying
their number, as his predecessors had done; while he reduced the rebels
to submission by his iron cages or the axe of his gossip Tristan
Lermite. The Church was treated with the same unconcerned cynicism; he
held her in strict tutelage, accentuating her moral decadence still
further by the manner in which he set aside or re-established the
Pragmatic Sanction, according to the fluctuations of his financial
necessities or his Italian ambitions. It has been said that on the other
hand he was a king of the common people, and certainly he was one of
them in his simple habits, in his taste for rough pleasantries, and
above all in his religion, which was limited to superstitious practices
and small devoutnesses. But in the states of Tours in 1468 he evinced
the same mistrust for fiscal control by the people as for the privileges
of the nobility. He inaugurated that autocratic rule which was to
continue gaining strength until Louis XV.'s time. Louis XI. was the king
of the bourgeoisie; he exacted much from them, but paid them back with
interest by allowing them to reduce the power of all who were above them
and to lord it over all who were below. As a matter of fact Louis XI.'s
most faithful ally was death. Saint-Pol, Nemours, Charles the Bold, his
brother the duke of Berry, old René of Anjou and his nephew the count of
Maine, heir to the riches of Provence and to rights over Naples--the
skeleton hand mowed down all his adversaries as though it too were in
his pay; until the day when at Plessis-les-Tours it struck a final blow,
claimed its just dues from Louis XI., and carried him off despite all
his relics on the 30th of August 1483.