Late Middle Ages

The Kingdom of France in the Late Middle Ages

The kingdom of France made a national monarchy first, and made it under the pressure of a long war and a humiliating foreign occupation. By the time the English were finally expelled from Guyenne in 1453, the Valois kings had built the institutional apparatus of the modern French state: a permanent direct tax (the taille), a salaried professional army (the compagnies d’ordonnance), a system of royal courts in the parlement of Paris and the provincial parlements, and a regional administration under the baillis and sénéchaux. The three articles in this section examine that achievement from three different angles: the slow building of the centralised state under Charles VII between 1415 and 1461; the personal monarchy of his son Louis XI (1461–1483), known to his contemporaries as the Universelle Aragne, the Universal Spider, who completed the work of centralisation by annexing the great duchies of Burgundy, Anjou, Maine, and Provence; and the Estates General as the forum in which that centralised state was both legitimated and constrained.

The making of a centralised state, 1415–1461

The first article, How France became a centralised kingdom, covers the period between the catastrophe of Agincourt (1415) and the close of the Hundred Years’ War. The Valois kings were governing a state that had nearly ceased to exist: a Burgundian faction had captured the dauphin in 1419, Henry V of England had been acknowledged as heir to the French throne by the Treaty of Troyes (1420), and the southern provinces had reverted to regional self-rule. The article follows the work of recovery: Joan of Arc at Chinon in 1429, the lifting of the siege of Orléans in May, the coronation of Charles VII at Reims in July, and the slow reconquest of Normandy (1449–1450) and Guyenne (1451–1453). Jean Favier’s La Guerre de Cent Ans and his biographies of Charles VII and Louis XI are the standard reference in French; Philippe Contamine’s longer work on the war is the more detailed treatment.

Three institutional decisions of Charles VII’s reign did most of the constitutional work. The compagnies d’ordonnance, established in 1445 from the remnants of the routier bands, were the first permanent salaried army in Western Europe. The taille, made permanent in 1439 by the assembly of Orléans, gave the crown a direct tax on the peasantry that the Estates had no standing to revoke. The parlement of Paris, in its early-modern form, was reorganised in the same decade to give the king a sovereign court of last appeal. Joseph Strayer’s On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State and Charles Tilly’s later work on state-building together provide the comparative frame; Raymond Cazelles’s biography of Charles VII is the dense French account, and Bertrand Schnerb’s work on the Burgundian state is the necessary counterweight.

Louis XI and the Burgundian inheritance

The article on Louis XI, the Universal Spider treats the reign of Charles VII’s son, who came to the throne in 1461 and ruled for twenty-two years. The sobriquet was Commines’s, in the Mémoires he wrote in the 1490s, and it captures the king’s reputation for indirect, patient, and duplicitous diplomacy. Louis entered his reign with a coalition of the great feudatories — the Ligue du Bien Public, of 1465, in which Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Francis II of Brittany, and a clutch of royal princes took up arms against him. The king broke the League at the inconclusive battle of Montlhéry in July 1465, and the next eighteen years were a long, deliberate process of bringing the great territorial princes to heel.

The two great turning points are both covered in the article. The Treaty of Picquigny (29 August 1475), by which Edward IV of England accepted a lump sum of 75,000 crowns and an annual pension to withdraw from the French campaign, ended the last English invasion of France and freed Louis to deal with Burgundy. The death of Charles the Bold at the Battle of Nancy on 5 January 1477, charging the Swiss pikemen in the snow, was the more decisive event: the duchy of Burgundy and the county of Flanders, the most formidable territorial principality in northern Europe, were now governed by Charles’s daughter Mary, and her marriage to Maximilian of Habsburg in August 1477 drew the Habsburgs into French politics for the next three centuries. Favier, Schnerb, and Contamine all treat the Burgundian inheritance as the moment at which the French national monarchy became a European great power. Richard Vaughan’s biographies of Charles the Bold and of Louis XI are the standard English-language works.

The article on the Estates General and French political life covers the assembly that has sometimes been treated, misleadingly, as a French parliament. The Estates General of France — the three estates of the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate, meeting separately and voting by head — was summoned at irregular intervals between 1302 and 1614, and its history is the history of an institution that the crown consulted when it needed money and that the crown avoided when it did not. The two great assemblies of the period, at Tours in 1468 and at Tours in 1484, are the subject of the article. The first supplied Louis XI with a subsidy during the War of the Public Weal; the second, held after the king’s death under the regency of Anne of Beaujeu, marked the first time that the third estate voted, deliberated, and signed its letters separately from the other two.

The historiographical point is that the Estates General, for all its prestige, never became a French parliament. The Crown avoided summoning it after 1484 for nearly seventy years — until the Estates of Blois in 1576 — and the institution that the third estate eventually claimed as its own in 1789 was, in important respects, an invention. Strayer and Tilly both treat the French case as the limit case of late-medieval state-building: a state that developed the capacity to tax, to wage war, and to administer justice without developing, in the same period, the representative institutions that English and Castilian kings had to accept.

Articles in this section

Articles in this chapter