Late Middle Ages

Louis XI, the Universal Spider

The epithet l’universelle aragne — the universal spider — is found in the Mémoires of Philippe de Commines, the most astute of all the chroniclers of late medieval France. The metaphor is Commines’s, but it has stuck. Louis XI sat in the middle of the European web, and the political method that he developed over the twenty-two years of his personal rule (1461–1483) was, in many respects, a new departure in European political practice. He used a combination of personal diplomacy, marriage, war, the manipulation of the great territorial princes, the careful use of the chanceries and the parlements, and a willingness to use torture, murder, and the long reach of the new fiscal system to keep his enemies in check. The historiography of Louis XI is a particularly rich one: Jean Favier’s Louis XI (2001), Bertrand Schnerb’s Louis XI (2003), Jean-Pierre Jardin’s Louis XI (2003), the older Jean-Pierre Clébert edition of the Mémoires of Commines, and the more recent work of the school of Lille and the Centre d’Études d’Histoire de la Renaissance of Tours. This article treats the political life of Louis, the methods by which he broke the great territorial princes, the long working of his centralization, and the legacy of the reign.

The Dauphin Rebellious, 1423–1461

Louis was born in Bourges on 3 July 1423, the third son of Charles VII. The Praguerie of August 1440, the great feudal revolt of the dauphin and the great princes against the centralising policy of Charles VII, was the first major event of his life. The revolt was a coalition of the dukes of Bourbon, Orléans, and Brittany, of the count of Armagnac, and of the dauphin himself; the grievances were the new taxes, the new compagnies d’ordonnance, and the dismissal of several of the great territorial princes from the council. The revolt was suppressed within four months, and the dauphin was pardoned in October 1440; the experience was, however, formative. Louis was excluded from the council, and he was sent to the Dauphiné in 1447, where he was given the government of the province. The Dauphiné was a laboratory of royal government, and Louis learned, in the long years of his exile, the methods of territorial administration, the use of the parlement of Grenoble, and the political management of the great territorial princes.

The long years of the Dauphiné were also the years in which Louis developed his characteristic political style. He dressed poorly, in the simple clothes of a merchant; he kept a small court; he travelled constantly, often in disguise; he used a network of agents and informers; he studied the political systems of the Italian states, of the Swiss cantons, and of the Burgundian state. The Commines’s Mémoires — the long account of the years 1464 to 1483 that was composed in the 1490s and printed by the Galliot du Pré of Paris in 1524 — preserves a careful portrait of Louis at the height of his powers: a small man, with a sharp face, a short nose, a long beard, and a great black hat. The portrait is the more interesting because Commines, who had been a councillor of Charles the Bold of Burgundy and was in the service of Louis from 1472 to 1483, was a comparative historian. He had seen the political systems of the great western monarchies at first hand, and his verdict on Louis was, in the long run, the verdict of the political practice of the period.

The Universal Spider at work, 1461–1474

The first major test of Louis’s personal rule was the League of the Public Weal, the great coalition of the great territorial princes that came together at the estates of Coucy in March 1464. The coalition included the dukes of Berry (Charles, the king’s brother), Bourbon, Brittany, and Lorraine, the count of Armagnac, and the count of Charolais, the heir of Burgundy. The grievances were the new taxes, the centralised system of justice, and the exclusion of the great princes from the council. The war was settled, after the indecisive Battle of Montlhéry on 13 July 1465, by the Treaty of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés of 5 October 1465, by which Louis made significant concessions to the princes. The treaty was a defeat for Louis, and it was a major check to his centralising programme.

The years 1465–1474 were the period in which Louis recovered from the defeat of the Public Weal. The most important development was the long working of the policy of isolation: Louis systematically separated the great princes from each other, playing Burgundy against Brittany, Brittany against the Armagnacs, the Armagnacs against the king of Aragon, and Aragon against the pope. The most spectacular single success was the Treaty of Péronne, of 14 October 1468, in which Louis was forced to submit to Charles the Bold in person, but in which he also secured a working alliance with Charles against the dukes of Brittany and Bourbon. The treaty was a humiliation, but it was also a political masterstroke. Charles, who had needed the French king, was now compromised by the French alliance; Louis, who had seemed to be the captive, was now the equal of the duke.

The period 1468–1474 was also the period in which Louis reorganised the parlement of Paris. The parlement had, in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, been a turbulent institution, often at odds with the king. Louis brought the parlement under much stricter royal control; he forced the members to attend the royal council; he reorganised the chambre des comptes; he brought the great officers of the crown, the chancellor, the constable, the marshals, the admiral, into a much more disciplined relationship with the king. The Ordonnance of 1467 (the Ordonnance de Saint-Jean-de-Losne) and the Ordonnance of 1471 (the Ordonnance of Saint-Lin) were the constitutional instruments of the reform.

The destruction of Burgundy, 1474–1477

The most spectacular single act of Louis’s reign was the destruction of the Burgundian state. The campaign was long in the making, and it was the work of the period 1474–1477. Charles the Bold, the most ambitious of the great western princes, had built a state that stretched from the Low Countries to the Franche-Comté, and he had been preparing, for some years, the coronation of the duchy as a kingdom, with the title of “king of Burgundy”. The coronation would have required a French royal consent, and Louis, who refused the consent, was the principal obstacle to Charles’s project. The Swiss cantons, with whom Charles had been at war since 1469, were the second obstacle; the Empire, with whom Charles was in dispute over the duchy of Guelders, was the third. The long campaign of 1474–1477, which opened with the invasion of Lorraine in 1474, the campaign of Grandson on 2 March 1476, the campaign of Morat on 22 June 1476, and the Battle of Nancy on 5 January 1477, in which Charles was killed, was the end of the Burgundian state.

The fall of Charles the Bold was the political event of the reign. The duchy of Burgundy, as a fief of the French crown, was taken into the royal domain; the duchy of Burgundy, as a fief of the Empire, was disputed; the Low Countries were inherited by Mary of Burgundy, who married Maximilian of Habsburg in 1477. The political consequences were enormous. The destruction of the Burgundian state was the end of the great feudal dynasties of the west; the marriage of Mary and Maximilian was the basis of the long Habsburg presence in the Low Countries. The death of Charles the Bold was, in the long view, the end of one phase of the European political system and the beginning of another.

The last years, 1477–1483

The years 1477–1483 were the period in which Louis consolidated the work of the reign. The most important event was the long campaign of the parlement of Paris to register the king’s edicts, in which the parlement was forced to recognise the king’s right to issue edicts that were not subject to the parlement’s registration. The most important institutional reform was the extension of the gabelle — the salt tax — to the whole of the kingdom. The gabelle had been, in the late 14th century, a fiscal innovation of the pays de l’élection; the Ordonnance of 1481 (the Ordonnance of the gabelle) extended the tax to the whole of the kingdom, with a uniform rate of 5 sols per livre. The extension was a major fiscal innovation, and it was the basis of the new fiscal system of the early modern French state.

The political work of the last years was also the work of dynastic diplomacy. Louis arranged the marriage of his son Charles (the future Charles VIII) to Anne of Brittany, the heiress of the duchy of Brittany, in December 1491 — a year after Louis’s own death, but a marriage that he had been working for since the 1470s. The marriage brought the duchy of Brittany into the French royal domain, and it was a major step in the centralisation of the French state. Louis also arranged the marriage of his daughter Anne of Beaujeu to Peter of Bourbon, in 1488 — a marriage that produced the next generation of the Valois-Bourbon dynasty. The dynastic diplomacy of the last years was, in the long view, the basis of the early modern French state.

The king and the sources

The reign of Louis XI is one of the best documented of the late Middle Ages. The principal sources are the Mémoires of Philippe de Commines (c. 1447–1511), the Histoire de Charles VII et de Louis XI of Thomas Basin (c. 1412–1490), the Chronique de Louis XI of Jean de Roye (c. 1425–1494), and the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris (the anonymous journal of a Parisian bourgeois that covers the years 1405 to 1449 and was continued in various forms to 1475). The lettres patentes, the ordonnances, and the procès-verbaux of the Estates General are the documentary record. The Mémoires of Commines is the most important single source; the Histoire of Basin is the most important of the critical sources.

The historiography of Louis XI is a rich and contentious one. The Commines’s Mémoires established the political verdict that has stuck: a clever, suspicious, and untrustworthy king, who used the methods of the new political practice and who was the model for the early modern state. The Histoire of Basin, written by a former client of the king, is more critical: a man of great political skill, but also a man of great cruelty, who was willing to use any means to maintain his power. The modern historiography — Jean Favier’s Louis XI (2001), Bertrand Schnerb’s Louis XI (2003), Jean-Pierre Jardin’s Louis XI (2003), the late Pierre-Roger Gaussin’s Louis XI (1976) — has been more balanced. Louis was an exceptionally able king, who used the methods of the new political practice to consolidate the centralisation that Charles VII had begun; he was also a man of great personal cruelty, who tortured, murdered, and exiled his opponents. The verdict is mixed, and it is best read in the light of the sources.

The legacy of the reign

The legacy of Louis XI is, in the long view, the early modern French state. The compagnies d’ordonnance were the basis of the standing army; the taille and the gabelle were the basis of the fiscal system; the parlement of Paris was the basis of the judicial system; the bailliage system was the basis of the provincial administration. The destruction of the Burgundian state was the end of the great feudal dynasties; the annexation of Brittany was the end of the duchy of Brittany. The political work of Louis, in sum, was the political work of the early modern state, and it was, in the long view, the basis of the French nation-state of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The historiography of Louis XI has, in the past generation, been transformed. The older constitutionalist reading — the reading of the 19th and early 20th century — treated Louis as a transitional figure, a king who was the model of the early modern state but who was still, in many respects, a medieval king. The newer scholarship — the work of Favier, Schnerb, Jardin, and the contributors to the Cambridge History of Medieval France (2018) — has read Louis as the central figure of the late medieval French state, and as the model for the political practice of the early modern period. The verdict is, in the long run, a remarkable one: Louis was the second of the great Valois kings, and the political work of his reign was the political work of the early modern French state.

References and further reading

  • Philippe de Commines, Mémoires, ed. Jean-Pierre Clébert (Paris, 2003).
  • Jean Favier, Louis XI (Paris, 2001).
  • Bertrand Schnerb, Louis XI (Paris, 2003).
  • Thomas Basin, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, ed. and trans. Charles Samaran (Paris, 1933–1963).
  • Jean-Pierre Jardin, Louis XI (Paris, 2003).
  • Myriam Greilsammer, Louis XI: l’araignée (Paris, 1996).