France

C1

a

Serfdom

A weak monarchy made it easier for the magnates to consolidate their hold on the lives and properties of their underlings. Although slavery, a vestige of the Roman Empire, slowly disappeared, serfdom arose in its place, especially in the north, where land held as alods became less common than in the South. Serfs were legally bound to live and work on specific territories and were required to pay their lords in the form of money, or, more typically, labor services, including work on the lord’s lands.

Limited though their liberty was, serfs should not be confused with slaves. In exchange for their services, they retained precious rights, including the right to exploit land and the right to their lord’s protection. Legally, they could not be sold, and if lordship of an estate to which serfs were attached changed hands, the new lord was expected to respect the traditional rights of the serfs. In an age when law and order was in short supply and economic opportunities were limited, the concrete rights of the serfs to work the land and to protection undoubtedly appeared more important to most people than the abstract condition called freedom. Serfdom became an inheritable legal condition in the 10th and 11th centuries.

Paradoxically, at the same time, the economic forces that would eventually undermine serfdom were gathering strength. First among these forces was a steady growth of population, which increased demand and prompted greater production. The population of the area constituting present-day France grew from an estimated 5 million to 6 million people in 1000 to 18 million to 21 million by the early 14th century. As the population grew, people cleared forested areas to increase the amount of arable land, a process that also expanded supplies of timber. Timber was especially important for the medieval economy as a source of energy and building material. In addition, agricultural productivity increased. This increase was due to a warming climate that lengthened the growing season, modest technological improvements, such as heavier plows, and the three-field system, which allowed land to lie fallow for one of every three years, rather than one of every two years. Finally, trade expanded, enabling peasants to cultivate cash crops to exchange for other products in the great markets, such as the fairs of Champagne. Trade and cash crops encouraged the development of regional specialization.

Trade also promoted the growth of towns and cities. Paris was the most spectacular example. It grew from between 15,000 and 20,000 people under the Carolingians to between 150,000 and 200,000 people by 1300. The growth of trade and urban areas encouraged the decline of serfdom. By the 13th century, the population had reached the saturation point in some areas of the countryside, so not all laborers could be productively employed. Some serfs ran away to the towns and cities in search of work, and lords were not inclined to chase after them because their labor was not much needed. Indeed, given the high death rates in the unhealthful cities, urban populations could grow only if people migrated to cities from the countryside.

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C1

b

Resurgent Church

The revival of the economy coincided with a major movement to reform the Church. During the early Middle Ages, the church had lost a great deal of its independence. Many of the church’s most critical offices and sources of income were controlled by the magnates, who used them for their own political purposes. Beginning in the early 10th century, a movement to free the church of control by laymen emerged from the Benedictine monastery in Cluny (see Benedictines). By the end of the 11th century, 1,500 monasteries supported Cluny’s reforms, and in the 12th century, the austere Cistercian order joined Cluny’s reform efforts (see Cistercians). Nearly from the start, the papacy had maintained close ties to the Cluniac movement. Popes such as Gregory VII (1073-1085) tied the reform movement to the authority of the papacy over secular rulers.

The reformers sought to recruit the ablest people, not the wellborn, to fill high church offices, and, as a result, they strengthened the church as a whole. During the High Middle Ages from about 1050 to about 1300, the Church expanded its presence in society. The number of monastic orders multiplied, and the church promoted arts, education, and scholarship and encouraged the use of canon law and ecclesiastical courts.

C

2

Growth of Royal Power: The Later Capetians

The resurgent economy and church contributed to the slow growth of royal power starting in the reign of Louis VI, who became king in 1108. The expanding economy eventually allowed the kings to tap into new sources of wealth, and they were able to build armies and a new bureaucratic administration. The rising influence of the church and Christian religion strengthened the religious basis of the Capetian monarchy. Henceforth, French kings were crowned in formal ceremonies at Reims, where Clovis had been baptized. They acquired the title Most Christian King. The French kings claimed to have the power to cure a disease related to tuberculosis called scrofula. The Capetians also benefited from the Crusades, the military campaigns called by the church to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. Participation in the Crusades enhanced the Capetians’ prestige. It also allowed them to redirect the warring tendencies of the magnates outside the country; approximately half of the magnates participated in the Crusades. Despite occasional differences and disputes, the Capetians were on much better terms with the papacy in the 12th and 13th centuries than were the dynasties ruling England or Germany.

Louis VI and Louis VII, who ruled between 1137 and 1180, pacified their domain, which had been overrun by marauding bandits during the reigns of their predecessors. But the real challenge they faced was the rising power of the Plantagenet dynasty. This aristocratic family had strong bases in both England and France. Henry II, who became the first Plantagenet king of England in 1154, had been duke of Normandy. He had also acquired a claim to all of Aquitaine when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. Eleanor had been married to Louis VII, but he had annulled his marriage to Eleanor for her alleged adultery. In the 1180s the Plantagenets also came to control Brittany.

Louis VII’s son, Philip Augustus, ruled as Philip II from 1180 to 1223. He maintained surprisingly cordial relations with both Henry II and his successor, Richard I, until the 1190s, when the rising Plantagenet threat erupted in conflict. Philip broke with Richard while both were on the Third Crusade. Richard was able to gain the upper hand until his death in 1199, but Philip gained the advantage after Richard was succeeded by his brother, John.

By 1206 Philip had overrun Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, Poitou, Auvergne, and Brittany. In 1214 he won a crushing victory over John and his allies at the Battle of Bouvines and then nearly invaded England. With the Plantagenets suppressed, the battle determined which dynasty predominated in France for the next two centuries. In that regard, it was a critical event in the long history of national consolidation, even though another desperate struggle with the ruling house of England lay in the future. During Philip’s reign, the royal domain expanded several fold in size, and for a time, the Capetians were the dominant power in Europe.

Louis VIII, king between 1223 and 1226, continued to build the royal domain. Philip II had already allowed a group of knights led by Simon IV de Montfort to attack the Albigenses, members of a heretical Christian sect in the south of France. The campaign against them was blessed by the pope. Louis VIII himself went south to capitalize on Montfort’s bloody assaults and placed all Languedoc, where the sect was strong, under his rule. Although Louis died in 1226, he had established the right of the Capetian kings and their families to rule over much of the south. He had incorporated into the Capetian sphere of influence areas that had been virtually autonomous since the 9th century.

Under Louis IX, who ruled from 1226 to 1270, the Capetians added luster to their power. Louis, a faithful son of the church, was so personally pious that he was eventually made a saint by the church. A committed Crusader, he was a prominent collector of holy relics, which he housed in the luminescent church of Sainte-Chapelle built in Paris under his direction. But he was also an effective administrator. He extended and enforced law and order through the royal courts and the legal system. He stabilized the currency and built the royal bureaucracy. His prestige was so high that for centuries he was held up as a model king, and his sainthood strengthened the cult of the king as a godlike figure.

Louis IX’s successor was Philip III, who became king in 1270. He was a far weaker and paler king, whose reign was dominated by factions. He was followed in 1285 by Philip IV the Fair, who was very different. Philip was the most brutal of the Capetians in using the growing power of the monarchy to bludgeon his enemies. Although generous to religious foundations, Philip came to blows with the papacy in defense of his right to tax church property. He thereby jeopardized the monarchy’s historic alliance with Rome, one of the principal sources of its success. During this struggle, Philip’s agents broke into the papal residence and sacked it. Soon thereafter, the papacy moved to Avignon, where it stayed for nearly a century. To many contemporaries, the papacy’s agreement to relocate indicated that it had fallen under the control of the French kings, and the papacy’s prestige suffered.

Philip IV risked destroying the alliance with Rome over finances because royal power was coming to depend on money. Philip took other measures to gain revenue, including destroying the Knights Templar—a rich crusading order—and expelling the Jews from France. In both cases, the king seized the assets of his victims. In addition, Philip debased the currency. He was succeeded by the last three Capetians—Louis X (1314-1316), Philip V (1316-1322), and Charles IV (1322-1328).

C

3

Legacy of the Capetians

Aside from building the royal domain and uprooting the Plantagenets, the Capetians contributed to the formation of the French nation by developing a set of core political institutions, many of which would last until 1789. Among them was a local administration composed of judicial officials variously called prévôts, baillis, and sénéchaux. In Paris, which gradually emerged as the country’s capital, a central administration began to develop. Administrative and judicial duties that had previously been performed by the royal council were assigned to other bodies, such as the parlements, courts with wide-ranging jurisdiction, and the more specialized Chambres de Comptes, which heard fiscal cases. Loosely associated with these courts was the Estates-General, an assembly composed of representatives from the three estates, or legally defined social classes: clergy, nobility, and commoners. These representatives were elected throughout the realm. The Estates-General counseled the king and consented to important initiatives of the crown. The crown also developed a rudimentary tax system. This system enabled the crown to tap the expanding wealth of the nation, although taxes were always controversial and often fiercely resisted.

When it functioned, this machinery and the institutions of the church no doubt reduced the levels of violence and disorder that had existed in earlier periods. Yet these administrative mechanisms were also used to exclude and to repress. The king and the papacy tried to enforce religious orthodoxy, which led to the bloody repression of nonorthodox believers such as the Albigenses. The rights of Jews, who were associated with heretics and lepers, eroded, and they were eventually expelled from the kingdom. Homosexuals and prostitutes also appear to have suffered increasing persecution. And although it is risky to generalize in this matter, some evidence suggests that the general reform movement of the church wresting control of church lands from lay lords caused their families to try to keep their remaining properties intact by granting women smaller shares of family estates than they had received during the Early Middle Ages. In sum, processes that led to the building of the nation were hardly cost-free.

D

France in the Late Middle Ages

In 1328 the Valois dynasty replaced the Capetians. By this time, the royal government that controlled the territories constituting “France” was arguably the most powerful in Europe. During the next century, two major crises tested its creativity and endurance to the limit. One was the socioeconomic crisis of the 14th century, which resulted from the inability to meet the material needs of an expanded population and from the effects of the plague. The other was a political crisis that emerged from the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between the Valois and the English royal house, a conflict that grew into a French civil war. This war indicates that a strong, pervasive national sentiment had not yet emerged.

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