Late Middle Ages

The rise of French national feeling

By the autumn of 1453, when the cannon of the French francs-archers had cut down the English army of John Talbot at Castillon, the kingdom of France had acquired a sense of itself that it had not possessed in 1337. A literature of national feeling had been written. A new royal administration, supported by direct taxation, was reaching into the provinces. And around the figure of a peasant girl from Domrémy, dead in 1431 and tried in 1456, a cult of national salvation had been quietly assembled. The Hundred Years’ War made France; the cliché, owed to Jean Favier, is not too strong.

The Valois inheritance and the politics of humiliation

The first half of the war was a long sequence of disasters. The Genoese crossbowmen cut down at Crécy, 26 August 1346, with King Philip VI barely escaping with his life; the capture of King John II at the battle of Poitiers, 19 September 1356; the loss of the Ponthieu, of the Aunis, of much of the south-west after the Treaty of Brétigny, 8 May 1360. The dauphin Charles, who took over the regency in 1356 and reigned as Charles V from 1364, had to forge a new political community out of a humiliated kingdom. The instruments of that forging were three: a propaganda of legitimation, a fiscal-military reform, and a literature of moral recovery.

Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430), in her Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V of 1404, was the first French writer to set out the dauphin’s policy as a moral achievement. She described a king “moult sage et moult prudent,” a redeemer of the realm; her patron Jean de Berry sat at the head of the council that had restored the finances. The image she projected was not simply of royal virtue but of a collective French project: the king, the princes, the gens des trois états, working together to throw off the English. The chronicler Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405), whose Chroniques were written for a Burgundian patron, took a different line, glorifying the chivalric enterprise of the war; but the Châtillon continuator of the Grandes Chroniques de France, working in Paris in the 1380s, and the Norman chronicler who completed the Chronique des quatre premiers Valois in the 1390s, all present the reconquest of 1369–1380 as a national recovery.

Voices from the court: Christine, Deschamps, Gerson

The voices of the Valois recovery are concentrated in a remarkable generation of writers around Charles V. Christine de Pizan, the Italian-born daughter of an astrologer to Charles V, wrote in French the Epistre Othéa, the Livre de la Cité des Dames, the Livre des Trois Vertus, and the Trésor de la Cité des Dames: a literature of moral counsel in French, addressed to women and to princes, and steeped in the vocabulary of la chose publique — the public thing, the French res publica. The vernacular is no longer a private language of romance; it is the language in which the kingdom thinks.

Eustache Deschamps (c. 1346–c. 1406), a soldier-poet from Champagne who served Charles V and the dukes of Orléans, left a corpus of more than a thousand ballades in which the war is constantly present. He laments the battle of Nicopolis (1396), in which his friend Boucicaut was taken prisoner, and celebrates the sieges and skirmishes of the reconquest; his poem on the state of France, “Mémoire du grantダメージ de France,” reads the disasters of 1346 and 1356 as providential trials. The ballade is itself a public genre, with its refrain taken up by the audience: a poetry of communal feeling in which the king and the pays are co-protagonists.

The chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson (1363–1429), added the religious note. His Vivat Rex, written for the coronation of the dauphin as Charles VII in 1429, presents the king as the vicar of God in the French polity: a Gallican note that, in the next century, will become the doctrine of the monarchy’s independence of Rome. The Hundred Years’ War produced a theology of the kingdom as well as a literature of it.

The Bureau brothers and the artillery nation

The French reconquest of 1369–1380 was, in part, a war of evasion. Charles V and his constable Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320–1380) refused open battle and harried the English garrisons into surrender. The politics were republican in spirit: the francs-archers of the rural communes, first legislated by Charles V in 1368 and again by Charles VII in 1448, supplied the infantry backbone. The taxation was direct and heavy: the fouage of 1369, the aides on the sale of goods, the gabelle on salt, all collected through the new royal bureaucracy of élus and généraux des finances.

The most striking military reform, however, was the creation of a permanent artillery arm. Jean Bureau and his brother Gaspard, finance and war ministers of Charles VII, took the bronze foundries of Meuse and Berry and made them into a French state enterprise. The cannon that ended the war at Castillon in 1453 was, in the strict sense, a Bureau cannon. The new taxes of the taille (1439, made permanent in 1445), the gabelle (extended under Charles VII), and the gageries provided the cash; the Compagnies d’ordonnance of 1445, fifteen thousand men in fifteen companies of a hundred lances, gave the king a standing army. Philippe Contamine, in his Guerre, État et société à la fin du Moyen Âge, called the result “the first modern state.”

From Maid to martyr: the making of Joan of Arc

The Valois recovery needed a face, and it got one. Joan of Arc, born c. 1412 at Domrémy in the duchy of Bar, presented herself to the garrison at Vaucouleurs in 1428, reached the dauphin at Chinon in early 1429, was examined at Poitiers, led the relief of Orléans in May 1429, and saw the king crowned at Reims on 17 July 1429. A year later, in May 1430, she was captured before Compiègne, sold to the English by Jean de Luxembourg, tried for heresy at Rouen under the bishop Pierre Cauchon, and burned at the stake in the Place du Vieux-Marché on 30 May 1431.

She was nineteen. The English believed that her ashes, thrown into the Seine, would erase her memory; they were wrong. The verdict of 1431 was reversed on 7 July 1456 by a process of rehabilitation under the authority of Pope Calixtus III, and Joan’s two surviving brothers, Jean and Pierre, were at the ceremony. The French church and the French state were unanimous in seeing the case as a miscarriage of justice. In 1909 Pius X beatified Joan; in 1920 Benedict XV canonized her. Her feast, 30 May, became a national holiday; her image, from the Bourbon restoration onward, served every French regime that needed a saviour: the Republic, the Occupation, the Liberation. Régine Pernoud, in the great edition of the Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, made the documentation famous; the historiography of the Maid remains one of the most active fields of French medieval history.

The language of the king: French as a political instrument

The French language itself was a weapon of state. Charles V set up a scriptorium at the Louvre to translate the great works of antiquity and of contemporary government into French: the Propriétés des choses of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, the De Re A Militari of Vegetius. Aristocratic French, the language of the Île-de-France and the Valois court, was deliberately extended as a chancery language. By the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539) the language of legal record would be French, not Latin; but the process had been under way since the 1370s, and it was a piece of the national project.

The expansion of French as a literary and administrative language also brought to the front a tension that the war had sharpened. The French of the chancery and of the poets was a Parisian French, the francien of the dukes of Capet and of Valois. The languages of the south, the langue d’oc, and of the east, the Franco-Provençal of Savoy and Lyon, were different. The kingdom was made, in part, by the suppression of those differences. The ordinances of Charles V and Charles VII consistently use the francien forms; the chronicles of the south, like the Chronique de Béziers of 1362 or the chronicle of Guillaume de Cunho, are translated into French. France as a national project was a language as well as a kingdom.

The new royal iconography

The Valois recovery had, in addition to its literature and its fiscal-military apparatus, a new iconography. The painting of the king, the seal of the king, the coin of the king, all changed in the period. Charles V, in the great panel painting of c. 1370, is shown in a blue robe with golden fleurs-de-lis, holding a book, and with the hand of justice at his side. The image is not the mounted knight of the previous century; it is the king of law, the king of order, the king of the new French state. The famous lost cycle of paintings of the life of Charles V, commissioned by the Bureau brothers and executed by the painter Jean de Bondol in the 1370s, was a similar statement. The iconography of the French monarchy, in short, was reinvented in the period, and the reinvention was a piece of the national project.

The new iconography was matched by a new ceremonial. The coronation of Charles VI at Reims on 4 November 1380, the sacre of the king of France, was a ceremony in which the pair de France, the twelve peers of the realm, performed the homage and the service of the king. The peers were both the great lay aristocrats of the kingdom and the great prelates of the church. The ceremonial, in short, was a piece of the political theology: the king, the peers, the people, the kingdom. The same theology was at work in the ceremony of the joyeuses entrées of the king into his good cities, which the new monarchy developed in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

The English in French memory

The Hundred Years’ War, in French memory, has had a long and complicated afterlife. The English were, in the chroniclers of the fourteenth century, the Anglais, the ennemis du royaume, the invaders. The English were, in the chroniclers of the fifteenth century, the Anglois, the héritiques, the devils. The English were, in the popular memory of the 1450s and 1460s, the Anglais, the gros ventres, the fils de putain. The English, in the propaganda of the Hundred Years’ War, were all of these things. The English, in the scholarship of the late twentieth century, were the enemy of the French monarchy. The scholarship of the early twenty-first century, however, has become more nuanced. The English, after all, were not the only enemy. The Burgundians, the Bretons, the Armagnacs, were all enemies of the French monarchy at some point in the war. The English, in the long view, were simply the most persistent.

The most enduring image of the English in French memory is that of the longbow. The longbow, in the French chronicles, is the weapon that killed the French knights. The longbow, in the French memory, is the weapon that won the war. The French, in the long view, had to find a way to overcome the longbow, and they did. The Bureau brothers, in the 1440s and 1450s, found a way. The French monarchy, in the 1450s, was a centralised state with a permanent army and a permanent artillery. The English, in 1453, were a defeated power, and the longbow, in 1453, was a weapon of a defeated army. The new French state, the France moderne of the late medieval period, was the result.

References and further reading

  • Jean Favier, Charles V (Paris: Fayard, 1984) and Le roi René (Paris: Fayard, 2008).
  • Philippe Contamine, Guerre, État et société à la fin du Moyen Âge: Études sur les armées des Valois, 1364–1494 (Paris: École pratique des hautes études, 1972).
  • Régine Pernoud, ed. and trans., Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, 5 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1960–1989).
  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, 5 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1990–2021), vols. III–V.
  • Philippe Salvadori, La chasse aux sorcières: essai sur l’imaginaire du démon and his essays on memory and national identity in the Revue historique.