ETIENNE MARCEL.
The hopeless minority in which the bourgeoisie found itself in the
States General rendered its participation in government a fiction. It
remained for a great man and the proper juncture in order to turn the
fiction into a reality. The juncture set in during the year 1355, when
King John II found his treasury empty through his ruinous prodigalities,
and Gaul in flames through the pretensions of the King of England to the
ownership of the country and his efforts to reconquer it, while in the
south Charles the Wicked, King of Navarre, whom John II. had given his
daughter in marriage, was arms in hand, capturing several provinces to
which he laid claim as part of his wife's dower. The man of the occasion
arose in Etienne Marcel.
With the country torn up by war and his treasury bankrupt, John II
convoked the States General. He needed stout levies of men and stouter
levies of money. The Archbishop of Rouen, then the royal chancellor,
haughtily presented the King's demands. But the imperious chancellor had
counted without Etienne Marcel, one of the greatest men who ever added
luster to the name of Gaul. The great commoner, deputed to the States
General by the city of Paris and indignant at seeing the nobility and
clergy disregard the just protests of the deputies of the bourgeoisie,
thundered against the odious practice, and, sustained by the menacing
attitude of the Parisians, he uttered the memorable declaration that
_the alliance of the nobility and the clergy was no longer to be of
controlling force upon the deputies of the bourgeoisie_, and that if,
contrary to the vote of the bourgeoisie, the seigneurs and prelates
granted levies of men and moneys to the King without any guarantee as to
the proper employment of such forces and funds for the public welfare,
the towns would have to refuse obedience to such decrees and furnish
neither men nor moneys to the crown.
These energetic and wise words, never heard before, imposed upon the
States General. In the name of the deputies of the bourgeoisie, Marcel
submits to the crown the conditions under which the third estate would
consent to grant the men and subsidies asked for; and the crown accepts,
knowing the people of Paris stood ready to sustain their spokesman.
Unfortunately, and the experience was to be more than once made by
Marcel, he soon realized the hollowness of royal promises. The moneys
granted by the national assembly are insanely dissipated by the King and
his courtiers. The levies of men, instead of being employed against the
English, whose invasion spread over wider areas of the national
territory, are turned to the private wars of the King against some of
the seigneurs, and intended either to protect or enlarge his own
domains. The audacity of the English redoubles; they break the truce and
threaten the very heart of the land; and King John then hastily summons
his faithful and well-beloved nobility to join him in the defence of the
nation.
The reception given to the royal herald by the valiant jousters, warm
from the passage of arms at the tourney of Nointel, has been narrated.
Nevertheless, with good or ill will, the majority of the gallants, all
of whom were made to fear for their own estates by the foreign invasion,
dragged their vassals after them, and joined John II near Poitiers. At
the first charge of the English archers the brilliant gathering of
knights turn their horses' heads, ply their spurs, cowardly take to
flight, and leave the poor people that they had compelled to follow them
at the mercy of the invader who falls upon them and ruthlessly puts them
to the sword. King John himself remains a prisoner on the field, while
his son Charles, Duke of Normandy, a stripling barely twenty years of
age, escapes with his brothers the disgraceful defeat of his father only
by riding full tilt to Paris, where, in his capacity of Regent, he
convokes the States General for the purpose of obtaining fresh sums to
ransom the seigneurs who remained in the hands of the enemy.
Without Etienne Marcel, the draper, Gaul would have been lost; but the
ascendancy of his genius and patriotism dominated the assembly. In
answer to the chancellor, who conveyed the demands of the Regent, Marcel
declared that before attending to the ransom of the King and knights,
the nation's safety demanded attention. The nation's safety demanded
urgent and radical reforms. He recited them. And, losing sight of
nothing, but developing superhuman activity, he caused Paris to be
protected with new fortifications in order to render the town safe from
the English who had advanced as far as St. Cloud. He armed the people;
organized the street police; made provisions for food by large
importations of grains; calmed and reassured the alarmed spirits; by his
example imparted a similar temper to the other towns; and, faithful in
the midst of all other cares to the plan of reform that he had pursued
and ripened during the long years of his obscure and industrious life,
he caused the appointment of a committee of twenty-four bourgeois
deputies charged with the drafting of the reforms that were to be
demanded from the Regent. The deputies of the nobility and the clergy
withdrew disdainfully from the national assembly, shocked at the
audacity of the bourgeois legislators. These, however, masters of the
situation and laboring under the high inspiration of Etienne Marcel,
drew up a plan of reforms that in itself meant an immense revolution. It
was the republican government of the ancient communes of Gaul, now
extended beyond the confines of the town and made to cover the entire
nation; it was the substitution of the power of deputies elected by the
whole country for the absolute power of the crown. The King becomes
merely the chief agent of the States General, and he has no power
without their sovereign consent to dispose of a single man, or a single
florin. These reforms, the fruit of many vigils on the part of Etienne
Marcel, were accepted and solemnly sworn to by Charles, Duke of
Normandy, in the capacity of Regent for his father, then a prisoner in
the English camp, and they were promulgated in the principal towns of
Gaul with the sound of trumpets, under the title of "Royal Ordinance of
the 17th day of January, 1357." The ordinance was as follows:
The States General shall henceforth meet whenever they may think
fit and without requiring the consent of the King, to deliberate
upon the government of the kingdom, and the vote of the nobility
and clergy shall have no binding power over the deputies of the
communes.
The members of the States General shall be under the protection of
the king, the Duke of Normandy and their successors. And,
furthermore, members of the States General shall be free to travel
throughout the kingdom with an armed escort that shall be charged
with causing them to be respected.
The moneys proceeding from the subsidies granted by the States
General shall be levied and distributed, not by royal officers, but
by deputies elected by the States General; and they shall swear to
resist all orders of the King and his ministers, in case the King
or his ministers wish to turn the moneys to other expenses than
those provided for by the States General.
The King shall grant no pardon for murder, rape, abduction or
infringement of truce.
The offices of justice shall not be sold or farmed out.
The costs of processes, inquests and administration in the chambers
of parliament and of accounts shall be lowered, and the officials
of those departments who may refuse, shall be expelled as
extortionists of the public fund.
All seizures of food, clothing or money in the name and for the
service of the King or of his family shall be forbidden; and power
is given to the inhabitants to gather at the call of their town
bell and to pursue the seizers.
To the end of avoiding all monopoly and extortion, no officer of
the King shall be allowed to carry on any trade in merchandise or
money.
The expenses of the household of the King, the Dauphin and of the
princes shall be moderated and reduced to reasonable bounds by the
States General; and the stewards of the royal households shall be
obliged to pay for what they buy.
Finally, the King, the Dauphin, the princes, the nobility, the
prelates of whatever rank, shall bear the burden of taxation the
same as all other citizens, as justice requires.
Compared with the Fields of May of olden days, where the conquering
Franks and their bishops disposed of the people of Gaul like cattle,
the national assemblies, held under the ordinance that Etienne Marcel
had wrung from the crown--assemblies dominated by the industrious class
which by its labor, commerce, trades and arts enriched the country while
the royalty, nobility and clergy devoured it--the progress was gigantic.
No less distinguished were the services of Etienne Marcel at this
juncture against the foreign invader, who was advancing with rapid
marches upon the capital of the land. Paris, originally circumscribed to
the island that is washed by the two arms of the Seine, extended itself
from century to century beyond its original cradle to the right and to
the left, until under the reign of John II it had grown to a town of
large proportions. The old part of the city, that which is bounded by
the two arms of the river, continued at this time to be called the Cite
and served as the headquarters of the clergy, whose houses seemed to
cuddle under the shadow of the high towers of the tall church of Notre
Dame. The Bishop of Paris had almost the entire Cite for his
jurisdiction. On the right bank of the Seine and at the place where rose
the thick tower of the gate of the Louvre, began the fortified premises
of what was generally called the town. It was peopled with merchants,
artisans and bourgeois, and it contained the square at one end of which
stood the pillory, where malefactors were exposed or executed before
taking their corpses to the gibbets of Montfaucon. The girdle of
fortresses that surround Paris to the north extends from the thick tower
of the Louvre to the gate of S. Honore. From there, the wall winding
towards the Coquiller gate, reaches the gate of Mont Martre, makes a
curve near St. Denis street, continues in the direction of the gate of
St. Antoine, and arrives at the Barbette gate, which is flanked by the
large tower of Billy, built on the borders of the Seine opposite Notre
Dame and the isle of Cows. The girdle of the ramparts, interrupted at
this spot by the river, is resumed on the left bank. It skirts the
quarter of the University, which is inhabited by the students and which
has for its issues the gates of St. Vincent, St. Marcel, St. Genevieve,
St. James and St. Germain. Thence it flanks the palace of Nesle and runs
out into the tower of Philip-Hamelin, built on the left bank opposite
the tower of the Louvre, which rises on the right bank. This vast
enclosure which insured the defense of Paris was completed by arduous
labors of fortification due to the genius and the prodigious activity of
Etienne Marcel. He caused the ramparts to be equipped with numerous
engines of war of the new kind that then began to come in vogue named
_cannons_--tubes made of bars of iron held fast by rings of the same
metal. By means of a powder recently invented by a German monk, these
cannons expelled stone and iron balls with what was then considered
marvelous velocity, force and noise, and to a then equally marvelous
distance. Without those immense works, all of which were executed within
three months, the capital of Gaul would have inevitably fallen into the
hands of the English.