VOLUME X SLICE VII Fox, George to France (continued 5)

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.

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 The House of Capet. 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.

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; Hugh Capet (987-996). 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, 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 Robert the Pious (996-1031). 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., 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 Henry I. (1031-1060). 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. 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 Philip I. (1060-1108). 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.

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, Louis VI. the Fat (1108-1137). 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.

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 Louis VII. the Young (1137-1180). 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 The second crusade. 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.

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 Rivalry of the Capets and Angevins. 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, 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 Philip Augustus (1180-1223). 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).

The defection of his favourite son John gave Henry his deathblow, and Philip Augustus found himself confronted by a new king of England, Richard Cœur de Lion, as powerful, besides being younger and more energetic. Philip’s Philip Augustus and Richard Cœur de Lion. 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).

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 Philip Augustus and John Lackland. 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.

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 Coalition against Philip Augustus. (1214). 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.

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 Administration of Philip Augustus. 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.’s short reign was but a prolongation of Philip’s in its realization of his two great designs: the recovery from Louis VIII. (1223-1226). 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.

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 Universal French activity. 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.

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 Intellectual development. 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.

By the beginning of the 13th century the Capet monarchy was so strong that the crisis occasioned by the sudden death Louis IX. (1226-1270). 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 Blanche of Castile. 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.

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 Louis IX.’s policy of arbitration. 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.

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. Louis IX. and Henry III. 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.

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 The crusade of Tunis. 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.

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 Philip III., the Bold (1270-1285). 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.

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 Philip IV. the Fair (1285-1314). 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.

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 Litigious character of Philip the Fair’s reign. 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.

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 Philip the Fair and the Papacy. 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.

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. Philip the Fair and the Templars. 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.

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 Philip the Fair and Edward I. 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).

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 Philip the Fair and Flanders. 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).

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, Eastern policy of Philip the Fair. 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.

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 The sons of Philip the Fair (1314-1328). 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.

During three centuries and a half they had effected great things: they had founded a kingdom, a royal family and civil institutions. The land subject to Hugh Capet in 987, barely representing two of the modern departments The royal house of Capet. of France, in 1328 covered a space equal to fifty-nine of them. The political unity of the kingdom was only fettered by the existence of four large isolated fiefs: Flanders on the north, Brittany on the west, Burgundy on the east and Guienne on the south. The capital, which for long had been movable, was now established in the Louvre at Paris, fortified by Philip Augustus. Like the fiefs, feudal institutions at large had been shattered. The Roman tradition which made the will of the sovereign law, gradually propagated by the teaching of Roman law—the law of servitude, not of liberty—and already proclaimed by the jurist Philippe de Beaumanoir as superior to the customs, had been of immense support to the interest of the state and the views of the monarchs; and finally the Capets, so humble of origin, had created organs of general administration common to all in order to effect an administrative centralization. In their grand council and their domains they would have none but silent, servile and well-disciplined agents. The royal exchequer, which was being painfully elaborated in the chambre des comptes, and the treasury of the crown lands at the Louvre, together barely sufficed to meet the expenses of this more complicated and costly machinery. The uniform justice exercised by the parlement spread gradually over the whole kingdom by means of cas royaux (royal suits), and at the same time the royal coinage became obligatory. Against this exaltation of their power two adversaries might have been formidable; but one, the Church, was a captive in Babylon, and the second, the people, was deprived of the communal liberties which it had abused, or humbly effaced itself in the states-general behind the declared will of the king. This well-established authority was also supported by the revered memory of “Monseigneur Saint Louis”; and it is this prestige, the strength of this ideal superior to all other, that explains how the royal prerogative came to survive the mistakes and misfortunes of the Hundred Years’ War.

On the extinction of the direct line of the Capets the crown passed to a younger branch, that of the Valois. Its seven representatives (1328-1498) were on the whole very inferior to the Capets, and, with the exception of Advent of the Valois. Charles V. and Louis XI., possessed neither their political sense nor even their good common sense; they cost France the loss of her great advantage over all other countries. During this century and a half France passed through two very severe crises; under the first five Valois the Hundred Years’ War imperilled the kingdom’s independence; and under Louis XI. the struggle against the house of Burgundy endangered the territorial unity of the monarchy that had been established with such pains upon the ruins of feudalism.

Charles the Fair having died and left only a daughter, the nation’s rights, so long in abeyance, were once more regained. An assembly of peers and barons, relying on two precedents under Philip V. and Charles IV., declared Philip VI. (1328-1350). that “no woman, nor therefore her son, could in accordance with custom succeed to the monarchy of France.” This definite decision, to which the name of the Salic law was given much later, set aside Edward III., king of England, grandson of Philip the Fair, nephew of the late kings and son of their sister Isabel. Instead it gave the crown to the feudal chief, the hard and coarse Philip VI. of Valois, nephew of Philip the Fair. This at once provoked war between the two monarchies, English and French, which, including periods of truce, lasted for a hundred and sixteen years. Of active warfare there were two periods, both disastrous to begin with, but ending favourably: one lasted from 1337 to 1378 and the other from 1413 to 1453, thirty-three years of distress and folly coming in between.

However, the Hundred Years’ War was not mainly caused by the pretensions of Edward III. to the throne of the Capets; since after having long hesitated to do homage to Philip VI. for his possessions in Guienne, Edward at The Hundred Years’ War. last brought himself to it—though certainly only after lengthy negotiations, and even threats of war in 1331. It is true that six years later he renounced his homage and again claimed the French inheritance; but this was on the ground of personal grievances, and for economic and political reasons. There was a natural rivalry between Edward III. and Philip VI., both of them young, fond of the life of chivalry, festal magnificence, and the “belles apertises d’armes.” This rivalry was aggravated by the enmity between Philip VI. and Robert of Artois, his brother-in-law, who, after having warmly supported the disinheriting of Edward III., had been convicted of deceit in a question of succession, had revenged himself on Philip by burning his waxen effigy, and had been welcomed with open arms at Edward’s court. Philip VI. had taken reprisals against him in 1336 by making his parlement declare the forfeiture of Edward’s lands and castles in Guienne; but the Hundred Years’ War, at first simply a feudal quarrel between vassal and suzerain, soon became a great national conflict, in consequence of what was occurring in Flanders.

The communes of Flanders, rich, hard-working, jealous of their liberties, had always been restive under the authority of their counts and the influence of their suzerain, the king of France. The affair at Cassel, where Philip VI. had avenged the injuries done by the people of Bruges in 1325 to their count, Louis of Nevers, had also compromised English interests. To attack the English through their colonies, Guienne and Flanders, was to injure them in their most vital interests—cloth and claret; for England sold her wool to Bruges in order to pay Bordeaux for her wine. Edward III. had replied by forbidding the exportation of English wool, and by threatening the great industrial cities of Flanders with the transference to England of the cloth manufacture—an excellent means of stirring them up against the French, as without wool they could do nothing. Workless, and in desperation, they threw themselves on Edward’s mercy, by the advice of a rich citizen of Ghent, Jacob van Artevelde (q.v.); and their last scruples of loyalty gave way when Edward decided to follow the counsels of Robert of Artois and of Artevelde, and to claim the crown of France.

The war began, like every feudal war of that day, with a solemn defiance, and it was soon characterized by terrible disasters. The destruction of the finest French fleet that had yet been seen, surprised in the port of The defeat at Sluys. Sluys, closed the sea to the king of France; the struggle was continued on land, but with little result. Flanders tired of it, but fortunately for Edward III. Brittany now took fire, through a quarrel of succession, analogous to that in France, between Charles of Blois (who had married the daughter of the late duke and was a nephew of Philip VI., by whom he was supported) and John of Montfort, brother of the old duke, who naturally asked assistance from the king of England. But here, too, nothing important was accomplished; the capture of John of Montfort at Nantes deprived Edward of Brittany at the very moment when he finally lost Flanders by the death of Artevelde, who was killed by the people of Ghent in 1345. Under the influence of Godefroi d’Harcourt, whom Philip VI. had wished to destroy on account of his ambitions with regard to the duchy of Normandy, Edward III. now invaded central France, ravaged Normandy, getting as near to Paris as Saint-Germain; and profiting by Philip VI.’s hesitation and delay, he reached the north with his spoils by dint of forced marches. Having been pursued and encountered at The defeat at Crécy and the taking of Calais. Crécy, Edward gained a complete victory there on the 26th of April 1346. The seizure of Calais in 1347, despite heroic resistance, gave the English a port where they could always find entry into France, just when the queen of England had beaten David of Scotland, the ally of France, at Neville’s Cross, and when Charles of Blois, made prisoner in his turn, was held captive in London. The Black Death put the finishing touch to the military disasters and financial upheavals of this unlucky reign; though before his death in 1350 Philip VI. was fortunate enough to augment his territorial acquisitions by the purchase of the rich port of Montpellier, as well as by that of Dauphiné, which extended to the Alpine frontier, and was to become the appanage of the eldest son of the king of France (see Dauphiné and Dauphin).

Philip VI.’s successor was his son John the Good—or rather, the stupid and the spendthrift. This noble monarch was unspeakably brutal (as witness the murders, simply on John the Good (1350). suspicion, of the constable Raoul de Brienne, count of Eu, and of the count of Harcourt) and incredibly extravagant. His need of money led him to debase the currency eighty-one times between 1350 and 1355. And this money, so necessary for the prosecution of the war with England, which had been interrupted for a year, thanks to the pope’s intervention, was lavished by him upon his favourite, Charles of La Cerda. The latter was murdered in 1354 by order of Charles of Navarre, the king’s son-in-law, who also prevented the levying of the taxes voted by the states in 1355 with the object of replenishing the treasury. The Black Prince took this opportunity to ravage the southern provinces, and then marched to join the duke of Lancaster and Charles of Defeat at Poitiers. Navarre in Normandy. John the Good managed to bring the English army to bay at Maupertuis, not far from Poitiers; but the battle was conducted with such a want of intelligence on his part that the French army was overwhelmed, though very superior in numbers, and King John was made prisoner, after a determined resistance, on the 19th of September 1356.

The disaster at Poitiers almost led to the establishment in France of institutions analogous to those which England owed to Bouvines. The king a prisoner, the dauphin discredited and deserted, and the nobility decimated, The states of 1355-1356. the people—that is to say, the states-general—could raise their voice. Philip the Fair had never regarded the states-general as a financial institution, but merely as a moral support. Now, however, in order to obtain substantial help from taxes instead of mere driblets, the Valois needed a stronger lever than cunning or force. War against the English assured them the support of the nation. Exactions, debasement of the currency and extortionate taxation were ruinous palliatives, and insufficient to supply a treasury which the revenue from crown lands and various rights taken from the nobles could not fill even in times of peace. By the 14th century the motto “N’impose qui ne veut” (i.e. no taxation without consent) was as firmly established in France as in England. After Crécy Philip VI. called the states together regularly, that he might obtain subsidies from them, as an assistance, an “aid” which subjects could not refuse their suzerain. In return for this favour, which the king could not claim as a right, the states, feeling their power, began to bargain, and at the session of November 1355 demanded the participation of all classes in the tax voted, and obtained guarantees both for its levy and the use to be made of it. A similar situation in England had given birth to political liberty; but in France the great crisis of the early 15th century stifled it. It was with this money that John the Good got himself beaten and taken prisoner at Poitiers. Once more the states-general had to be convoked. Confronted by a pale weakly boy like the dauphin Charles and the remnants of the discredited council, the situation of the states was stronger Robert le Coq and Étienne Marcel. than ever. Predominant in influence were the deputies from the towns, and above all the citizens of the capital, led by Robert le Coq, bishop of Laon, and Étienne Marcel, provost of the merchants of Paris. Having no cause for confidence in the royal administration, the states refused to treat with the dauphin’s councillors, and proposed to take him under their own tutelage. He himself hesitated whether to sacrifice the royal authority, or else, without resources or support, to resist an assembly backed by public opinion. He decided for resistance. Under pretext of grave news received from his father, and of an interview at Metz with his uncle, the emperor Charles IV., he begged the states to adjourn till the 3rd of November 1356. This was a political coup d’état, and when the time had expired he attempted a financial coup d’état by debasing the currency. An uprising obliged him to call the states-general together again in February 1357, when they transformed themselves into a deliberative, independent and permanent assembly by means of the Grande Ordonnance.

In order to make this great French charter really effective resistance to the royal authority should have been collective, national and even popular, as in the case of the charters of 1215 and 1258 in England. But the lay and ecclesiastical The Grande Ordonnance of 1357. feudal lords continued to show themselves in France, as everywhere else except across the Straits of Dover, a cause of division and oppression. Moreover, the states were never really general; those of the Langue d’oc and the Langue d’oil sometimes acted together; but there was never a common understanding between them and always two Frances within the kingdom. Besides, they only represented the three classes who alone had any social standing at that period: the nobles, the clergy, and the burgesses of important towns. Étienne Marcel himself protested against councillors “de petit état.” Again, the states, intermittently convoked according to the king’s good pleasure, exercised neither periodical rights nor effective control, but fulfilled a duty which was soon felt as onerous. Indifference and satiety spread speedily; the bourgeoisie forsook the reformers directly they had recourse to violence (February 1358), and the Parisians became hostile when Étienne Marcel complicated his revolutionary work by intrigues with Navarre, releasing from prison the grandson of Louis X., the Headstrong, an ambitious, fine-spoken courter of popularity, covetous of the royal crown. The dauphin’s flight from Paris excited a wild outburst of monarchist loyalty and anger against the capital among the nobility and in the states-general of Compiègne. Marcel, like the dauphin, was not a man to turn back. But neither the support of the peasant insurgents—the “Jacques”—who were annihilated in the market of Meaux, nor a last but unheeded appeal to the large towns, nor yet the uncertain support of Charles the Bad, to whom Marcel in despair proposed to deliver up Paris, saved him from being put to death by the royalist party of Paris on the 31st of July 1358.

Isolated as he was, Étienne Marcel had been unable either to seize the government or to create a fresh one. In the reaction which followed his downfall royalty inherited the financial administration which the states had set up to check extravagance. The “élus” and the superintendents, instead of being delegates of the states, became royal functionaries like the baillis and the provosts; imposts, hearth-money (fouage), salt-tax (gabelle), sale-dues (droits de vente), voted for the war, were levied during the whole of Charles V.’s reign and added to his personal revenue. The opportunity of founding political liberty upon the vote and the control of taxation, and of organizing the administration of the kingdom so as to ensure that the entire military and financial resources should be always available, was gone beyond recall.

Re-establishing the royal authority in Paris was not enough; an end had to be put to the war with England and Navarre, and The treaty of Brétigny. this was effected by the treaty of Brétigny (1360). King John ceded Poitou, Saintonge, Agenais, Périgord and Limousin to Edward III., and was offered his liberty for a ransom of three million gold crowns; but, unable to pay that enormous sum, he returned to his agreeable captivity in London, where he died in 1364.

Yet through the obstinacy and selfishness of John the Good, France, in stress of suffering, was gradually realizing herself. More strongly than her king she felt the shame of Charles V. (1364-1380). defeat. Local or municipal patriotism waxed among peasants and townsfolk, and combined with hatred of the English to develop national sentiment. Many of the conquered repeated that proud, sad answer of the men of Rochelle to the English: “We will acknowledge you with our lips; but with our hearts, never!”

The peace of Brétigny brought no repose to the kingdom. War having become a congenial and very lucrative industry, its cessation caused want of work, with all the evils that entails. For ten years the remnants of the armies The “Grandes Compagnies.” of England, Navarre and Brittany—the “Grandes Compagnies,” as they were called—ravaged the country; although Charles V., “durement subtil et sage,” succeeded in getting rid of them, thanks to du Guesclin, one of their chiefs, who led them to any place where fighting was going on—to Brittany, Alsace, Spain. Charles also had all towns and large villages fortified; and being a man of affairs he set about undoing the effect of the treaty of Brétigny by alliances with Flanders, whose heiress he married to his brother Philip, duke of Burgundy; with Henry, king of Castile, and Ferdinand of Portugal, who possessed fine navies; and, finally, with the emperor Charles IV. Financial and military preparations were made no less seriously when the harsh administration of the Black Prince, to whom Edward III. had given Guienne in fief, provoked the nobles of Gascony to complain to Charles V. Cited before the court of Paris, the Black Prince refused to attend, and war broke out in Gascony, Poitou and Normandy, but with fresh tactics (1369). Whilst the English adhered to the system of wide circuits, under Chandos or Robert Knolles, Charles V. limited himself to defending the towns and exhausting the enemy without taking dangerous risks. Thanks to the prudent constable du Guesclin, sitting quietly at home he reconquered bit by bit what his predecessors had lost upon the battlefield, helm on head and sword in hand; and when he died in 1380, after the decease of both Edward III. and the Black Prince, the only possessions of England in a liberated but ruined France were Bayonne, Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg and Calais.

The death of Charles V. and dynastic revolutions in England stopped the war for thirty-five years. Then began an era of Charles VI. (1380-1422). internal disorder and misery. The men of that period, coarse, violent and simple-minded, with few political ideas, loved brutal and noisy pleasures—witness the incredible festivities at the marriage of Charles VI., and the assassinations of the constable de Clisson, the duke of Orleans and John the Fearless. It would have needed an energetic hand to hold these passions in check; and Charles VI. was a gentle-natured child, twelve years of age, who attained his majority only to fall into a second childhood. Thence arose a question which remained without reply during The king’s uncles and the Marmousets. the whole of his reign. Who should have possession of the royal person, and, consequently, of the royal power? Should it be the uncles of the king, or his followers Clisson and Bureau de la Rivière, whom the nobles called in mockery the Marmousets? His uncles first seized the government, each with a view to his own particular interests, which were by no means those of the kingdom at large. The duke of Anjou emptied the treasury in conquering the kingdom of Naples, at the call of Queen Joanna of Sicily. The duke of Berry seized upon Languedoc and the wine-tax. The duke of Burgundy, heir through his wife to the countship of Flanders, wanted to crush the democratic risings among the Flemings. Each of them needed money, but Charles V., pricked by conscience on his death-bed, forbade the levying of the hearth-tax (1380). His brother’s attempt to re-establish it set The revolt of the Maillotins. Paris in revolt. The Maillotins of Paris found imitators in other great towns; and in Auvergne and Vivarais the Tuchins renewed the Jacquerie. Revolutionary attempts between 1380 and 1385 to abolish all taxes were echoed in England, Florence and Flanders. These isolated rebellions, however, were crushed by the ever-ready coalition of royal and feudal forces at Roosebeke (1382). Taxes and subsidies were maintained and the hearth-money re-established.

The death of the duke of Anjou at Bari (1384) gave preponderant influence to Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, who increased the large and fruitless expenses of his Burgundian policy to such a point that on the return of a last unfortunate Madness of Charles VI. expedition into Gelderland Charles VI., who had been made by him to marry Isabel of Bavaria, took the government from his uncles on the 3rd of May 1389, and recalled the Marmousets. But this young king, aged only twenty, very much in love with his young wife and excessively fond of pleasure, soon wrecked the delicate poise of his mental faculties in the festivities of the Hôtel Saint-Paul; and a violent attack of Pierre de Craon on the constable de Clisson having led to an expedition against his accomplice, the duke of Brittany, Charles was seized by insanity on the road. The Marmousets were deposed, the king’s brother, the duke of Orleans, set aside, and the old condition of affairs began again (1392).

The struggle was now between the two branches of the royal family, the Orleanist and the Burgundian, between the aristocratic south and the democratic north; while the deposition of Richard II. of England in favour of Struggle between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. Henry of Lancaster permitted them to vary civil war by war against the foreigner. Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, the king’s uncle, had certain advantages over his rival Louis of Orleans, Charles VI.’s brother: superiority in age, relations with the Lancastrians and with Germany, and territorial wealth and power. The two adversaries had each the same scheme of government: each wanted to take charge of Charles VI., who was intermittently insane, and to exclude his rival from the pillage of the royal exchequer; but this rivalry of desires brought them into opposition on all the great questions of the day—the war with England, the Great Schism and the imperial election. The struggle became acute when John the Fearless of Burgundy succeeded his father in 1404. Up to this time the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, had been held in a kind of dependency upon Philip of Burgundy, who had brought about her marriage; but less eager for influence than for money, since political questions were unintelligible to her and her situation was a precarious one, she suddenly became favourable to the duke of Orleans. Whether due to passion or caprice this cost the duke his life, for John the Fearless had him assassinated in 1407, and thus let loose against one another the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, so-called because the son of the murdered duke was the son-in-law of the count of Armagnac (see Armagnac). Despite all attempts at reconciliation the country was divided into two parties. Paris, with her tradesmen—the butchers in particular—and her university, played an important part in this quarrel; for to be master of Paris was to be master of the king. In 1413 the duke of Burgundy gained the upper hand there, partly owing to the rising of the Cabochiens, i.e. the butchers led by the skinner Simon Caboche, partly to the hostility of the university to the Avignon pope and partly to the Parisian bourgeoisie.

Amid this reign of terror and of revolt the university, the only moral and intellectual force, taking the place of the impotent states-general and of a parlement carefully restricted to the judiciary sphere, vainly tried to re-establish a firm The Ordonnance Cabochienne, 1413. monarchical system by means of the Ordonnance Cabochienne; but this had no effect, the government being now at the mercy of the mob, themselves at the mercy of incapable hot-headed leaders. The struggle ended in becoming one between factions of the townsmen, led respectively by the hûchier Cirasse and by Jean Caboche. The former overwhelmed John the Fearless, who fled from Paris; and the Armagnacs, re-entering on his exit, substituted white terror for red terror, from the 12th of December 1413 to the 28th of July 1414. The butchers’ organization was suppressed and all hope of reform lost. Such disorders allowed Henry V. of England to take the offensive again.

The Armagnacs were in possession of Paris and the king when Henry V. crushed them at Agincourt on the 25th of Agincourt. October 1415. It was as at Crécy and Poitiers; the French chivalry, accustomed to mere playing at battle in the tourneys, no longer knew how to fight. Charles of Orleans being a captive and his father-in-law, the count of Armagnac, highly unpopular, John the Fearless, hitherto prudently neutral, re-entered Paris, amid scenes of carnage, on the invitation of the citizen Perrinet le Clerc.

Secure from interference, Henry V. had occupied the whole of Normandy and destroyed in two years the work of Philip Augustus. The duke of Burgundy, feeling as incapable of coming to an understanding with the masterful The Treaty of Troyes, 1420. Englishman as of resisting him unaided, tried to effect a reconciliation with the Armagnacs, who had with them the heir to the throne, the dauphin Charles; but his assassination at Montereau in 1419 nearly caused the destruction of the kingdom, the whole Burgundian party going over to the side of the English. By the treaty of Troyes (1420) the son of John the Fearless, Philip the Good, in order to avenge his father recognized Henry V. (now married to Catherine, Charles VI.’s daughter) as heir to the crown of France, to the detriment of the dauphin Charles, who was disavowed by his mother and called in derision “the soi-disant dauphin of Viennois.” When Henry V. and Charles VI. died in 1422, Henry VI.—son of Henry V. and Catherine—was proclaimed at Paris king of France and of England, with the concurrence of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Thus in 1428 the English occupied all eastern and northern France, as far as the Loire; while the two most important civil powers of the time, the parlement and the university of Paris, had acknowledged the English king.

But the cause of greatest weakness to the French party was still Charles VII. himself, the king of Bourges. This youth of nineteen, the ill-omened son of a madman and of a Bavarian of loose morals, was a symbol of France, Charles VII. (1422-1461). timorous and mistrustful. The châteaux of the Loire, where he led a restless and enervating existence, held an atmosphere little favourable to enthusiasm and energy. After his victories at Cravant (1423) and Verneuil (1424), the duke of Bedford, appointed regent of the kingdom, had given Charles VII. four years’ respite, and these had been occupied in violent intrigues between the constable de Richemont30 and the sire de la Trémoille, the young king’s favourites, and solely desirous of enriching themselves at his expense. The king, melancholy spectacle as he was, seemed indeed to suit that tragic hour when Orleans, the last bulwark of the south, was besieged by the earl of Salisbury, now roused from inactivity (1428). He had neither taste nor capacity like Philip VI. or John the Good for undertaking “belles apertises d’armes”; but then a lack of chivalry combined with a temporizing policy had not been particularly unsuccessful in the case of his grandfather Charles V.

Powerful aid now came from an unexpected quarter. The war had been long and cruel, and each successive year naturally increased feeling against the English. The damage done to Burgundian interests by the harsh yet impotent Joan of Arc. government of Bedford, disgust at the iniquitous treaty of Troyes, the monarchist loyalty of many of the warriors, the still deeper sentiment felt by men like Alain Chartier towards “Dame France,” and the “great misery that there was in the kingdom of France”; all these suddenly became incarnate in the person of Joan of Arc, a young peasant of Domrémy in Lorraine. Determined in her faith and proud in her meekness, in opposition to the timid counsels of the military leaders, to the interested delays of the courtiers, to the scruples of the experts and the quarrelling of the doctors, she quoted her “voices,” who had, she said, commissioned her to raise the siege of Orleans and to conduct the gentle dauphin to Reims, there to be crowned. Her sublime folly turned out to be wiser than their wisdom; in two months, from May to July 1429, she had freed Orleans, destroyed the prestige of the English army at Patay, and dragged the doubting and passive king against his will to be crowned at Reims. All this produced a marvellous revulsion of political feeling throughout France, Charles VII. now becoming incontestably “him to whom the kingdom of France ought to belong.” After Reims Joan’s first thought was for Paris, and to achieve the final overthrow of the English; while Charles VII. was already sighing for the easy life of Touraine, and recurring to that policy of truce which was so strongly urged by his counsellors, and so keenly irritating to the clear-sighted Joan of Arc. A check before Paris allowed the jealousy of La Trémoille to waste the heroine for eight months on operations of secondary importance, until the day when she was captured by the Burgundians under the walls of Compiègne, and sold by them to the English. The latter incontinently prosecuted her as a heretic; they had, indeed, a great interest in seeing her condemned by the Church, which would render her conquests sacrilegious. After a scandalous four months’ duel between this simple innocent girl and a tribunal of crafty malevolent ecclesiastics and doctors of the university of Paris, Joan was burned alive in the old market-place of Rouen, on the 30th of May 1431 (see Joan of Arc).

On Charles VII.’s part this meant oblivion and silence until the day when in 1450, more for his own sake than for hers, he caused her memory to be rehabilitated; but Joan had given the country new life and heart. From 1431 to 1454 the struggle against the English went on energetically; and the king, relieved in 1433 of his evil genius, La Trémoille, then became a man once more, playing a kingly part under the guidance of Dunois, Richemont, La Hire and Saintrailles, leaders of worth on the field of battle. Moreover, the English territory, a great triangle, with the Channel for base and Paris for apex, was not a really solid position. Yet the war seemed interminable; until at last Philip of Burgundy, for long embarrassed by his English alliance, decided in 1435 to become reconciled with Charles VII. This was in consequence of the death of his sister, who had been married to Bedford, and the return of his brother-in-law Richemont into the French king’s favour. The treaty of Arras, which made him a sovereign prince for life, though harsh, at all events gave a united France the opportunity of expelling the English from the east, and allowed the king to re-enter Paris in 1436. From 1436 to 1439 there was a terrible repetition of what happened after the Peace of Brétigny; famine, pestilence, extortions and, later, the aristocratic revolt of the Praguerie, completed the ruin of the country. But thanks to the permanent tax of the taille during this time of truce Charles VII. was able to effect the great military reform of the Compagnies d’Ordonnance, of the Francs-Archers, and of the artillery of the brothers Bureau. From this time forward the English, ruined, demoralized and weakened both by the death of the duke of Bedford and the beginnings of the Wars of the Roses, continued to lose territory on every recurrence of conflict. Normandy was lost to them at Formigny (1450), and Guienne, English since the 12th century, at Castillon (1453). They kept only Calais; and now it was their turn to have a madman, Henry VI., for king.

France issued from the Hundred Years’ War victorious, but terribly ruined and depopulated. It is true she had definitely freed her territory from the stranger, and through the sorrows of defeat and the menace of Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War. disruption had fortified her national solidarity, and defined her patriotism, still involved in and not yet dissociated from loyalty to the monarchy. A happy awakening, although it went too far in establishing royal absolutism; and a victory too complete, in that it enervated all the forces of resistance. The nation, worn out by the long disorders consequent on the captivity of King John and the insanity of Charles VI., abandoned itself to the joys of peace. Preferring the solid advantage of orderly life to an unstable liberty, it acquiesced in the abdication of 1439, when the States consented to taxation for the support of a permanent army without any periodical renewal of their authorization. No doubt by the prohibition to levy the smallest taille the feudal lords escaped direct taxation; but from the day when the privileged classes selfishly allowed the taxing of the third estate, provided that they themselves were exempt, they opened the door to monarchic absolutism. The principle of autocracy triumphed everywhere over the remnants of local or provincial authority, in the sphere of industry as in that of administration; while the gild system became much more rigid. A loyal bureaucracy, far more powerful than the phantom administration of Bourges or of Poitiers, gradually took the place of the court nobility; and thanks to this the institutions of control which the war had called into power—the provincial states-general—were nipped in the bud, withered by the people’s poverty of political idea and by the blind worship of royalty. Without the nation’s concurrence the king’s creatures were now to endow royalty with all the organs necessary for the exertion of authority; by which imprudent compliance, and above all thanks to Jacques Cœur (q.v.), the financial independence of the provinces disappeared little by little, and all the public revenues were left at the discretion of the king alone (1436-1440). By this means, too, and chiefly owing to the constable de Richemont and the brothers Bureau, the first permanent royal army was established (1445).

Henceforward royalty, strengthened by victory and organized for the struggle, was able to reduce the centrifugal social forces to impotence. The parlement of Paris saw its monopoly encroached upon by the court of Toulouse in 1443, Monarchical centralization. and by the parlement of Grenoble in 1453. The university of Paris, compromised with the English, like the parlement, witnessed the institution and growth of privileged provincial universities. The Church of France was isolated from the papacy by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) only to be exploited and enslaved by royalty. Monarchic centralization, interrupted for the moment by the war, took up with fresh vigour its attacks upon urban liberties, especially in the always more independent south. It caused a slackening of that spirit of communal initiative which had awakened in the midst of unprecedented disasters. The decimated and impoverished nobility proved their impotence in the coalitions they attempted between 1437 and 1442, of which the most important, the Praguerie, fell to pieces almost directly, despite the support of the dauphin himself.

The life of society, now alarmingly unstable and ruthlessly cruel, was symbolized by the danse macabre painted on the walls of the cemeteries; the sombre and tragic art of the 15th century, having lost the fine balance Social life. shown by that of the 13th, gave expression in its mournful realism to the general state of exhaustion. The favourite subject of the mysteries and of other artistic manifestations was no longer the triumphant Christ of the middle ages, nor the smiling and teaching Christ of the 13th century, but the Man of sorrows and of death, the naked bleeding Jesus, lying on the knees of his mother or crowned with thorns. France, like the Christ, had known all the bitterness and weakness of a Passion.

The war of independence over, after a century of fatigue, regrets and doubts, royalty and the nation, now more united and more certain of each other, resumed the methodic and utilitarian war of widening boundaries. Leaving dreams about crusades to the poets, and to a papacy delivered from schism, Charles VII. turned his attention to the ancient appanage of Lothair, Alsace and Lorraine, those lands of the north and the east whose frontiers were constantly changing, and which seemed to invite aggression. But the chance of annexing them without great trouble was lost; by the fatal custom of appanages the Valois had set up again those feudal institutions which the Capets had found such difficulty in destroying, and Louis XI. was to make sad experience of this.

To the north and east of the kingdom extended a wide territory of uncertain limits; countries without a chief like Alsace; principalities like Lorraine, ecclesiastical lordships like the bishopric of Liége; and, most important of The House of Burgundy. all, a royal appanage, that of the duchy of Burgundy, which dated back to the time of John the Good. Through marriages, conquests and inheritance, the dukes of Burgundy had enormously increased their influence; while during the Hundred Years’ War they had benefited alternately by their criminal alliance with the English and by their self-interested reconciliation with their sovereign. They soon appeared the most formidable among the new feudal chiefs so imprudently called into being by Louis XI.’s predecessors. Fleeing from the paternal wrath which he had drawn down upon himself by his ambition and by his unauthorized marriage with Charlotte of Savoy, the future Louis XI. had passed five years of voluntary exile at the court of the chief of the House of Burgundy, Philip the Good; and he was able to appreciate the territorial power of a duchy which extended from the Zuyder Zee to the Somme, with all the country between the Saône and the Loire in addition, and its geographical position as a commercial intermediary between Germany, England and France. He had traversed the fertile country of Flanders; he had visited the rich commercial and industrial republics of Bruges and Ghent, which had escaped the disasters of the Hundred Years’ War; and, finally, he had enjoyed a hospitality as princely as it was self-interested at Brussels and at Dijon, the two capitals, where he had seen the brilliancy of a court unique in Europe for the ideal of chivalric life it offered.

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 Louis XI. (1461-1483) 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.

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 The Leagues of the Public Weal. 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.

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 Charles the Bold. 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 The interview at Péronne. 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.

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 Ruin of the feudal coalitions. 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 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 Charles the Bold’s imperial dreams. 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.

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 Fall of Charles the Bold. 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.

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 Ruin of the house of Burgundy. 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 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 The administration of Louis XI. 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.