France

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The Hundred Years’ War

The despair wrought by the plague was enhanced by the devastation of the Hundred Years’ War, which dominated the French political scene for more than a century, from 1337 to 1453. The war originated in the Plantagenets’ efforts to make good on their claims to French territory. Indeed, the Plantagenets suggested that they had a claim to the French crown because the mother of the Plantagenet king of England, Edward III, was Isabella, daughter of the French king, Philip IV. To counter this claim, the Valois floated the idea that the Salic law, dating back to early Frankish times, prohibited women from inheriting the French throne and from passing on the right to inherit the throne to their sons. Although denounced by the Plantagenets and others as a historical fiction, the Salic law became one of the firmest, most widely respected French constitutional traditions.

The Hundred Years’ War began in Flanders and soon moved to other areas, notably Gascony, which the Plantagenets controlled before the war, and Normandy. During the reigns of Philip VI and John II the Good between 1328 and 1364, the Plantagenets clearly had the upper hand, winning major victories at Sluys in 1340, Crécy in 1346 (Crécy, Battle of), and Poitiers in 1356. Faced with military setbacks, the effects of the plague, peasant and urban uprisings, and his own capture, John signed the Peace of Brétigny in 1360, in which he ceded a third of his kingdom to Edward III.

Under Charles V, who ruled from 1364 to 1380, the Valois regrouped. The crown was assisted by Bertrand du Guesclin, an able military leader who pushed back the Plantagenets on the battlefield. The Valois also benefited from conflicts within the English royal house. By 1380 most Plantagenet gains had been wiped out.

But under Charles VI, who became king in 1380, the French position again deteriorated, as did the king, who suffered from periodic bouts of insanity beginning in 1392. Two competing aristocratic factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, sought to dominate Charles, and they brought France to the verge of civil war. Both factions solicited support from the English, who clearly benefited from their rivalry. In 1415 the new king of England, Henry V of the house of Lancaster, landed in France and defeated French forces at the Battle of Agincourt, which secured Plantagenet control of areas north of the Loire. Four years later, the English allied with the Burgundians, who forced Charles VI to give his daughter in marriage to Henry V and to sign the devastating Treaty of Troyes in 1420. This treaty disinherited Charles’s son, the future Charles VII, and recognized Henry’s claims to the French throne. Although many future historians would denounce it as an act of betrayal, contemporary reaction to the treaty was by no means uniformly hostile in France, especially north of the Loire. Paris, in particular, supported the Anglo-Burgundian union until late in the war, and the university and the Parlement of Paris, the presiding sovereign court, recognized Henry V as their legitimate king when Charles VI died in 1422.

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From the 1420s on, however, the tide once again turned in favor of the Valois for several reasons. First, the English sometimes treated their French subjects with brutality and made heavy financial demands on the French. The English had to extort even more money from their French subjects than did the kings of France because resources coming from England were inadequate. Second, the war—a dynastic conflict that had become a civil war—gradually changed again, into a war of national liberation. Although the notion of a French nation remained embryonic, the French tended to blame the hardships of the war on the English. Royal propagandists exploited this tendency, emphasizing the need for a king who was “one of our kind.” Third, the Anglo-Burgundian alliance began to develop ultimately fatal strains. After 1435 the Burgundians threw their weight behind the Valois, decisively shifting the balance of power.

Finally, there was the mission of Joan of Arc, a young woman so romanticized in her own and later times that even today it is hard to dispel the mythology spun around her. Joan was born to relatively comfortable peasants from Lorraine. She was dismayed by the hardships her people had suffered in the war and sought an end to the conflict. She tried to reinvigorate the Valois dynasty so that it could remove the English from French soil. Contrary to the popular image, Joan of Arc was never a military commander, but she did help inspire a fighting spirit among the troops of the dauphin Charles, the eldest son of the king and the heir apparent.

Charles, the disinherited Valois prince, had remained morose, lethargic, and uncrowned before Joan arrived on the scene in 1428. In 1429 Joan helped lift the English siege of Orléans, which opened the way for the dauphin to be crowned as Charles VII at Reims, the traditional site of royal coronations. The coronation was critical at this juncture, because it undercut Charles’s disinheritance in the Treaty of Troyes by emphasizing the divine, rather than the legal, basis of royal authority.

Seized by the English, Joan was tried for heresy and witchcraft. The English wanted not only to justify her execution but also to make the French believe the coronation had been the work of the devil. Upon her conviction, which was a foregone conclusion, she was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431.

Partly as a result of Joan’s mission, partly as a result of the other factors indicated above, Charles was able to put the English on the defensive until the end of the war. France was nearly cleared of English forces by 1453, when the fighting finally ceased. Despite the armistice, the English and the French viewed each other as mortal enemies for many centuries.

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Foundations of the Old Regime

The Hundred Years’ War not only bled France white materially, it nearly extinguished the Valois dynasty. But the Valois were able to use the war as the springboard for another century-long round of building royal institutions, expanding their power in the process. This expansion of power underlay the emergence of the Old Regime, a complex structure of political and social institutions dominated by an increasingly absolute monarchy.

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Population Growth

Once the conflict was over, the French population rebounded. Historians generally agree that from the 1450s until around 1620, the French population expanded considerably. This growth was probably due to a drop in the average age at marriage, which meant more marriages and births. The death rate also declined, especially among children, as epidemics became less frequent. The population of cities such as Lyon, Bordeaux, and Rouen grew between 50 and 100 percent from 1500 to 1600. By the late 16th century, the population of Paris reached about 300,000, and the French population as a whole once again stood at the high level of the early 14th century.

Production methods changed relatively little during this period. But rising domestic demand and increasing foreign trade through France’s coastal cities promoted product diversification. These changes can be seen in the growth of textile trades in northern France and the expansion of commercial wine production in the south.

The growth of the labor supply eventually depressed wages. In addition, larger families meant that estates were divided into smaller, less viable homesteads. Increasing demand drove up prices over the long term. The standard of living gradually declined, and population growth leveled off about 1620.

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Strengthening of State Institutions

The resurgence of population and economic growth were accompanied by the political revival of the state. The scope of royal justice widened as parlements (royal courts) were established in Toulouse in 1443, Grenoble in 1456, Dijon in 1477, Aix-en-Provence in 1501, Rouen in 1515, and Rennes in 1551. In addition to hearing cases and overseeing local administration, the parlements were charged with registering, or officially adopting, royal edicts. Kings expected registration to be more or less automatic, since in their view the procedure did not involve anything like legislative approval. But the parlements sometimes used such occasions to protest against edicts they found objectionable by issuing formal dissents called remonstrances. In addition to expanding the judiciary, the royal government also compiled local customary laws and extended the system of royal administration by establishing baillis and sénéchaux, royal administrators who supervised the prevots, in areas that now fell within the expanding royal domain. To meet the demands of war, the crown expanded its military capacity by recruiting mercenaries.

In periods of war, the crown needed to expand its taxing power, and it did so by levying extraordinary wartime taxes, including indirect (sales) taxes and the taille, a tax paid by nonnobles on their personal wealth. These taxes were gradually levied on a more routine basis. To gain consent for them, the crown summoned a variety of local and regional assemblies, in addition to the kingdom-wide assembly, the Estates-General. In general, these assemblies approved royal initiatives, facilitating the expansion of royal power. At the same time, however, the assemblies ventilated grievances against the king, and they sometimes refused to consent to fresh taxes. For these reasons, the monarchy gradually sought to dispense with assemblies, arguing that the king’s right to tax unilaterally had become customary. But this right continued to be contested, as were the amount and nature of the taxes themselves.

This opposition was one factor that prevented the monarchy from establishing a uniform tax code before the French Revolution (1789-1799), despite its rising power. Another was that the monarchy granted permanent exemptions from some taxes to certain groups and bodies for both political and fiscal reasons. Nobles were free from paying the taille on the grounds that they provided military service to the king. Some localities were similarly exempt because at some time in the past they had bought a permanent exemption through a single large contribution. Some provinces were partially shielded from taxes because they retained the right to negotiate the size and nature of their tax burden with the crown through their provincial assemblies. The Catholic Church, a major landholder in the kingdom, also acquired tax advantages. Rather than pay the standard rate, the church was permitted to make a “free gift” to the crown. This amount was much smaller than what the church would have owed if it paid taxes like other groups. Such exemptions meant that the tax system was far from equitable and weighed most heavily on those who lacked the political influence to gain exemptions, notably the peasantry.

To cover the costs of government, the crown sold state offices, a practice known as venality of office. By the early 16th century, an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 offices had been sold; by the late 16th century, the number had increased to about 15,000; by the 1660s, to about 50,000. By the late 18th century, about 70,000 offices were venal, meaning that roughly one percent of all adult Frenchmen owned one. Although not all state offices were venal, some of the most important positions, including judgeships in the parlements, were. Venality limited the crown’s ability to control the quality of its own officials. Offices were resold to the highest bidder, and the crown could not fire officers without repaying the capital they had invested in their offices, a luxury that the state could hardly ever afford.

Yet by selling offices, the crown increased the loyalty of its servants: Normally few officials would revolt against a state they partially owned. Moreover, venality allowed the monarchy to make money. The crown not only profited from the initial sale of offices but also acquired further revenue by annually charging officeholders a sixtieth of their office’s value to ensure inheritability. Established in the early 17th century, this charge, called the paulette, yielded more revenue than did indirect taxes. In addition, venality occasionally resulted in officeholders being forced to lend the state money. Venality was crucial for the state because it provided an administrative apparatus at relatively low cost. Venality was also the most important mechanism for ennobling wealthy commoners. Some of the costliest offices not only paid yearly dividends gauged on their value but also conferred noble status if held by a family for four generations.

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From the Hundred Years’ War to the Wars of Religion

Profiting from a somewhat healthier economy and a more muscular royal administration, the monarchy built on the momentum it had acquired at the end of the Hundred Years’ War to expand control over remaining noble enclaves. In 1461, the year Louis XI became king, the Valois-Burgundian alliance collapsed. The duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, was attempting to reconstitute the kingdom of Lotharingia. He made another alliance with the English and also allied with French nobles who were antagonistic to the new French king. This faction organized a league, to which Louis was forced to make concessions in 1465. In 1467 Charles the Bold succeeded Philip, and in 1472 he led an Anglo-Burgundian force against Louis. Louis responded by buying off England and forming his own coalition of powers that were threatened by Charles. Although Louis was slow to capitalize on his strategic advantage as king, Charles was killed in battle in 1477. Louis might have annexed all of Charles’s large inheritance, but in the end, Charles’s sole heir, Mary, wedded Maximilian I of the Habsburg family, giving the Habsburgs a major claim on her inheritance.