FOUR
I have chased the English out of France more easily than ever my father did; for my father drove them out by force of arms whereas I have driven them out by force of venison pies and good wines.
—Louis XI
Madame, of everything there remain to me only honour and life, which are unscathed.
—François I, after the Battle of Pavia
WHEN PHILIPPE LE BEL DIED in 1314, following the terrible curse of the Templars, he had “so dominated his period” that it seemed as if “the heart of the kingdom had ceased to beat.”1 But all his good works, his institutional reforms, would soon be forgotten. In the 327 years since the election of Hugues Capet, only eleven kings had reigned over France—a prodigious dynasty. Now, over the turbulent fourteen years that followed Philippe’s death, there would be no fewer than four kings, all of them his sons, and none of them producing heirs to survive. Their short-lived reigns, at one point presided over by three rival regents, were to bring chaos and catastrophe. In the background there conspired two powerful and conniving women—the one, Isabella, only daughter of Philippe and mother of the future Edward III of England, the “She-Wolf of France,” who had exposed royal adultery and was held responsible for the murder of her homosexual husband, Edward II; the other, Mahaut of Artois, mother of the adulterous Blanche, and supposed poisoner of two heirs to the throne—the second a five-day-old infant.
The cuckolded Louis X (1314–16), “le Hutin”—“the Headstrong,” or “the Quarrelsome”—was unable even to remember his lines at his coronation; surviving just eighteen months after the death of his father in 1314, about the only notable achievement of his short rule was the execution of Enguerrand de Marigny, Philippe’s all-powerful Coadjutor, deemed responsible for his financial disasters. (Marigny, in his defence, claimed that the empty exchequer was due to his having to settle the late King’s huge debts. Indeed, he was regarded by subsequent generations as one of France’s better superintendents of finance.) In May 1316, Louis X died after a swift bout of pneumonia, though rumours of his poisoning by Mahaut were never allayed; and his posthumous son, Jean, died mysteriously six months later. The succession would have gone to Jeanne, questionable daughter of Louis and the adulterous Marguerite, but Louis’ lanky younger brother, Philippe, evoked the ancient Salic Law whereby the female line was precluded from the succession—an act of importance in the succession of future kings of France—and mounted a coup d’état. As Philippe V (“the Long”), husband of the now pardoned Queen Jeanne, he ruled for another brief period of six years, dying of tuberculosis in 1322. Then came Charles IV, for another six years (1322–28). Having divorced the hapless Blanche, he married again but produced only three daughters. Early in 1328, Charles was struck down by a mysterious illness, and died suddenly at Vincennes.
Thus, by 1328, three centuries of Capetian rule were over. The French throne now passed to a cousin, Philippe of Valois, who would begin a new dynasty as Philippe VI (1328–50). “Kings by chance,” the first Valois were scornfully dubbed by contemporaries. But as he was already acting as regent, as well as being great-grandson of Saint Louis, Philippe’s claim to the throne of France was sound. This was, however, not how it was seen by Queen Isabelle or her aggressive son, Edward III, who was about to rule England successfully for fifty years that were as good for the English as they were trying for their neighbours.
IN FRANCE IN 1315, there was a disastrous harvest, and famine settled on an unprepared Paris. Two years later, from the provinces, a new wave of half-crazed Pastoureaux flooded the capital. Unemployed youths, brigands, unfrocked priests, beggars and whores this time seized the Châtelet, assaulted the provost and pillaged the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés. They swept through the country, provoking new outrages against Jewish ghettoes that had survived Philippe IV’s expulsion orders. At Chinon all the Jews were rounded up and thrown into one huge fiery pit; in Paris they were burned—on the same site where the immolation of Jacques de Molay had taken place. Seized by crisis, Louis le Hutin, apparently seeking forgiveness of his sins (notably the murder of Queen Marguerite) and to curry favour with the populace, decided to empty the prisons—and crime took off.
To bring order to the chaos left by Louis, his successors had the gallows and scaffolds working overtime; in 1325, the famous wooden gibbet at Monfaucon was replaced by one of sixteen stone pillars over thirty feet high, and joined together by heavy beams. The corpses hung there until they disintegrated. That year a gentle spring and a brief period of prosperity under Charles IV, the last of the Capetians, lulled the people into false hopes of happy times ahead. Then came the bitterest of harsh winters; wells froze, trees cracked in the gardens, food prices rocketed, and so did the death toll. Nevertheless, at the royal court modish men took to adorning themselves with more jewellery than their women, wearing narrow-waisted tunics so saucily short that they revealed the buttocks, and such pointed shoes that they made walking a problem. The net impact (as well illustrated by Shakespeare’s Henry V) was perhaps one of déraciné foppishness, at least compared with the comportment of their more martial and virile neighbours across the Channel.
IN 1340, Edward III of tiny England arbitrarily assumed the title of King of France. He had dynastic motives, reckoning that—since Charles IV had died without heir—he had a legitimate claim, and one (in modern terminology) of straightforward commercial imperialism, based on the complementary factors of the British wool trade and the weavers of Flanders. This alone guaranteed that the war would be a popular one. Domestic chaos in France invited an invasion aimed at “regime change.” It began with the destruction of the French fleet at Sluys (Écluse) together with 20,000 French, off the Belgian coast. Edward’s expeditionary force then landed virtually unopposed in the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, just where Eisenhower’s Americans were to land almost exactly 600 years later. In 1346, the English longbowmen— possessing the most modern war weapon in all Europe of the time— won a decisive battle against the ponderous French cavalry at Crécy on the Somme. It was not far from Bouvines, but what had been gained for France in that great victory now seemed in jeopardy. In a historic scene, recorded not least by Rodin, the burghers of Calais surrendered to Edward with halters round their necks. England was to keep the port as a vital foothold for two centuries.
Despite the relative size of the English population, Edward’s small armies were highly efficient, and bursting with nationalistic spirit. Proudly the English heralded
Our King go forth to Normandy
With grace and might of chivalry, . . .2
His marauding bands continually laid waste and plundered northern France. Ten years after Crécy, the Black Prince was confronted at Poitiers by a French army that had not troubled to study the lessons of the earlier debacle. There ended another shattering defeat in which the King himself, Jean II (John the Good, 1350–64), was even taken prisoner.
AS IF THIS BLACK PRINCE WERE NOT ENOUGH, now the Black Death descended, killing an estimated one-third of the world’s population living between Iceland and India. In France perhaps half the population was wiped out by the combination of war and plague. Preceded—so legend had it—by a portentous ball of fire in the skies over the city, the Black Death reached Paris in the summer of 1348, two years after the disaster at Crécy. It then moved slowly on towards Flanders and Germany. Believing cats to be the source of plague, the populace killed off their most effective instruments for dealing with the plague-bearing rat population. By the Inquisition, the Black Death was utilised as a new pretext for tightening up the laws against heresy and, inevitably, against those Jews who had, after expulsion under Philippe the Fair, begun to return. They were blamed for poisoning Christian wells, and even the air, providing an excuse for fresh pogroms from Narbonne and Carcassonne in the south to Strasbourg in the north. Only in Avignon were the Jews safe. In Paris alone, the death rate among the population reached 800 a day, with the archives of Saint-Denis placing the death toll at about 50,000.15
In the countryside at large the Black Death gave birth to a new popular phenomenon—the Flagellants. Flagellating themselves in a zeal of religious penitence for the plague, they roamed across Europe, and France, uprooting Jewish communities as they went. Then, like the Pastoureaux before them, they disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.
The auguries for Charles V (“the Wise,” 1364–80), a small and deceptively frail man, were not encouraging upon his succession. While he was still Dauphin, his father, the ill-starred Jean II, and his brother, Philippe, were both imprisoned in London. Taking advantage of the King’s defeat, Étienne Marcel, the headstrong provost who represented the merchants of Paris, urged reforms to tame the monarchy. Marcel was harbinger of the new coming power in France, the bourgeoisie that was neither of the nobility nor of the Church, but was based on mercantile wealth—the “Third Estate.” He founded a party, to which he presented a hood dyed in the city’s colours of red and blue (if added to the white of the royal standard it would already have given birth to the tricolore). The monarchy reached one of its most perilous moments when, at a cabinet meeting, two of the Dauphin’s principal counsellors, the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, were killed before his eyes by the supporters of Marcel.
Charles decided to pull out of Paris and regroup with a view to seizing the capital by force. Around Paris the peasants, pushed over the brink by the deprivations and misery of war, rose and made common cause with Marcel. When this Jacquerie revolt was put down, Marcel over-reached himself by committing the unthinkable and allying himself with the English, at that time the occupying power in Paris. “Hooted at and censured,” he was assassinated by his own followers in July 1358. From Compiègne Charles then re-entered Paris, showing clemency and, pushing aside Marcel’s constitutional reforms, ruling as an absolute but restrained king following the death of his father in relaxed English captivity.
But France, still enfeebled, now found herself additionally menaced by the hostility of her residual enemy to the south, Burgundy. While the Burgundians made common cause with the invading English, France was torn asunder by civil strife. With no shred of legitimacy, England’s dashing Henry V now renewed the claims of Edward III. Defeats like Crécy and Poitiers were followed by Agincourt, where—at the cost of a few hundred English dead—10,000 Frenchmen under Charles VI (“the Mad,” 1380–1422) perished at the hands of Henry’s longbowmen, in one of the bloodiest battles of the Middle Ages. As the Hundred Years’ War dragged on, the new fifteenth century brought little encouragement with it for France. It was, in the words of that distinguished American historian Barbara Tuchman, “a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant.”
Indeed, it was “a bad time for humanity” as a whole. In a time of bitter cold, wolves came into Paris to keep warm. Fleeing the barren countryside, peasants sought shelter inside the girdle of walls that Charles V had built around Paris, where they occupied a tangle of reeking streets, establishing their own laws and terrorising the populace. In daytime they spilled out into the streets, transmogrifying themselves into blind or limbless beggars; by night they miraculously recovered their faculties, giving the unsavoury area the name of the Cour des Miracles.
DURING THE OCCUPATION of les goddams, as the English soldiery were called, from his palace in the Marais (on the present site of the resplendent Hôtel de Soubise), the Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V and self-proclaimed Regent of France (1420–35), governed Paris—and not badly, though few Frenchmen would admit it. King without a capital, Charles VII ruled from Bourges over a divided rump of France— comparable to the area of non-occupied Vichy France post-1940. He was pious but irresolute. Then, in March 1429, out of nowhere appeared the pucelle, the “Maid of Orléans,” Joan of Arc. With her extraordinary god-sent “voices” the simple shepherd girl managed to restore a sense of national cause and self-confidence to the French. She created an army and “liberated” Orléans, then Troyes, then Rheims. But that September she was wounded in the thigh during the assault on Paris, captured by the Burgundians, and handed over to their English allies. With support from notable lawyers of the Sorbonne, they tried and condemned her as a witch, on account of those preternatural voices—and burned her at the stake. Nevertheless, she had achieved her purpose. The fire of her funeral pyre lit a flame throughout France. The country was united as it had never been over the previous century. La pucelle had proved that, in the words of Napoleon, “there is no miracle which the French genius cannot perform given circumstances in which the national independence is threatened.”3
Down through the ages Joan of Arc was to become, for France, as Anatole France put it, “the symbol of the Fatherland ‘la patrie’ in arms.”4 National leaders down to de Gaulle, adopting her emotive “Cross of Lorraine,” would turn to her as a touchstone of faith.
In England a child-king, Henry VI, who was to become a gentle, scholarly figure—distinguished largely for founding Eton College—had succeeded his bellicose father, Henry V. Though Henry VI still bore the title of King of France, England had lost its instinct for foreign adventure.
As Bismarck once remarked of subsequent European affairs, “one generation that receives a beating is often followed by another which deals it out.” In 1435, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, nicknamed “the Good,” switched sides to join up with the King of France, and the following year Charles VII reoccupied his capital. Normandy was regained, then Aquitaine three years later. By 1453 les goddams, now riven by a combination of weak leadership and their own civil conflict—the Wars of the Roses—departed. With them also went the wolves, French historians would note. Only Calais remained in English hands.
The Hundred Years’ War might be at an end, terminating more or less on lines of mutual exhaustion, nevertheless France had been bankrupted by it; and there came more wars, internecine civil disputes and threats of invasion. Yet, for all the depredation and misery, it was to demonstrate one miraculous truth that would remain valid over many centuries of French history: France’s extraordinary capacity to recuperate following a string of disasters. Within a few years of the departure of the last English troops, France under Louis XI recovered with astonishing rapidity. It was partly owing to the fertility of her soil, coupled with the industry of her peasants; but also to what de Gaulle later mystically identified as “une certaine idée de la France,” a very distinct brand of self-assurance about being French. Hand in hand with this went a fundamental, unshakeable belief in France’s universal mission civilatrice.
CHARLES VII (1422–61), under whose reign the Hundred Years’ War petered out, was a slight man of a sallow complexion, no outstanding personality but appropriately dubbed “the Well-Served.” In his château on the Loire, he lived openly with his beautiful mistress, Agnès Sorel of the legendary and much-painted breasts, known as la dame de beauté from the domain of Beauté-sur-Marne which the King had given her. He had four daughters by her. Bold and vivacious, Agnès surrounded Charles with bright young people, while his administrators successfully reorganised the treasury, and provided France with an efficient standing army. Copying the English system, it effectively restored order to a countryside which, in the aftermath of war, was terrorised by roaming bands of brigands and pillaging free-booters. Though a powerful and troublesome Burgundy, under its independent-minded and somewhat eccentric16 duke, Philippe le Bon, continued to present a worry on his flank, Charles established a reputation outside the borders of France. “You are the pillar of Christendom!” the King of Hungary once apostrophised him. The fleur-de-lys was suddenly to be found flying from the masts of vessels all over the Mediterranean.
CHARLES’ SON LOUIS XI (1461–83) is sometimes described as the “strangest of all the Valois,” or the “Spider King.” There was something distinctly sinister about him. He had had an unsettling childhood. His “whorish” grandmother, Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of mad Charles VI, had Louis’ father, Charles VII, proclaimed a bastard; while Charles VII accused Louis of having poisoned his beloved Agnès and endeavoured to disinherit him. As a result Louis while Dauphin spent much of his early life sequestered from his father’s court in his distant and backward lands of the Dauphiné. He grew up to dress like the humblest of his subjects, while cladding his greyhounds (whom he greatly preferred to humans) with jewel-encrusted collars of Lombardy leather. Louis XI is described as “a man of no great height and with black hair, brownish countenance, eyes deep in his head, long nose, and small legs”5 and his queen, Charlotte (to whom he was unusually—for those days—faithful), was “not one of those women in whom a man would take great pleasure but in all a very good lady.” 6 When his unfriendly father died, Louis forbade any mourning, put on a red and white hat (the national colours) and went off hunting.
The most restless of the Valois to date, Louis spent half of his twenty-two-year reign wandering, or at war—much as he tried to avoid it. This meant neglecting the court. Visiting Italians were amazed at the “plainness of his establishment,” while the Milanese ambassador described him as “a man without a place,” and complained of being unable to keep up with him, “either on horseback or in vile lodgings.” Lacking in any sense of pomp and circumstance, like Philippe-Auguste, Louis surrounded himself with the bourgeois and “lesser folk”—such as the successful merchant Jacques Coeur. History has recorded his unpleasant habit of putting his enemies in cages within what Louis called his “orchard,” where they were left to starve; but he deserves a better epitaph. It was he who definitively put an end to the Hundred Years’ War, triumphantly making his joyeuse entrée into Paris in 1461.
France had been brought a long way from the spiritual authority of Saint Louis to the wily manoeuvring of Louis XI. The contemporary chronicler Philippe de Commynes claimed that he never saw Louis “when he was not preoccupied and worried,”6 habitually suspicious and in a rage against someone. But Louis XI had inherited a France everywhere outflanked and encircled, with the powerful Duke of Burgundy both to the north and east, in Picardy and Flanders—the prize that Charles VII had unwisely given him in a vain attempt to wean him away from the English. In the west there was the Duke of Brittany and the independent provinces of Maine and Anjou. Domestically, well-intended tax reforms brought an uprising of the “League of Public Weal” and saw Louis besieged in his capital, and forced—temporarily— to abandon Normandy.
The “Spider King,” however, was a Machiavelli before his time, and in the brutal fifteenth century what others sought to obtain by force he achieved through guile and stratagem. He issued probably more edicts than any French king since Charlemagne, and wove around France an elaborate web of diplomacy. First of all he was able to gain control of Roussillon and Cerdagne—for the payment of 200,000 crowns. Then, for 50,000 crowns, he bought off England’s feeble Edward IV, who was threatening to renew the Hundred Years’ War (once more in alliance with the Burgundians—who planned to have him crowned King of France). Cunningly Louis arrived in Amiens, where Edward had assembled a huge army, with a baggage train stuffed with presents, jewels and coin; as a result, for days on end Commynes found the taverns of Amiens filled with singing, snoring and drunk hostile soldiery. Louis was thus able to boast: “I have chased the English out of France more easily than ever my father did; for my father drove them out by force of arms whereas I have driven them out by force of venison pies and good wines.”7 With the advantageous Treaty of Picquigny in 1475 he drew a final line under the Hundred Years’ War.
Louis’ greatest enemy remained the rich and powerful Burgundy, which stretched from Switzerland to wealthy Flanders. Duke Charles the Bold was far more menacing than his father, Philippe, whom he succeeded in 1467. The following year, Louis rashly allowed himself to be taken prisoner by Charles at Péronne; talking his way out, it was as the “bedraggled fox makes his escape from the wolf’s den.” But the wily Louis struck back, first severing Charles’ commerce with the Low Countries, then luring him into war with the Swiss. Terrified by the blasting away of the Swiss battle horns, the Burgundian cavalry were impaled on the pikes of the sturdy Swiss infantry—in two disasters, first at Grandson, then at Morat in 1476–77. The fearsome duke was found dead, half eaten by wolves, face down on a frozen pond. For France, it was the epitome of a Cold War, fought by proxy and with minimal casualties, and resulting in the end of the state of Burgundy; a threat that had begun when Paris had rashly unleashed the Norsemen on her in the ninth century. Louis also moved into Picardy and Artois, with its prosperous capital Arras; on top of this, in 1480 another bloodless victory through marriage brought him Provence (with its magnificent port of Marseilles), Maine and Anjou, upon the deaths respectively of King René and his nephew Charles of Anjou. He also regained Normandy, and established France’s great silk industry at Lyons.
Despite his bad reputation (to some extent acquired from the novels of Walter Scott), Louis XI broke the power of feudalism to become the master of France, and his achievements during his twenty-two-year reign truly live up to his motto of “He who has success likewise has honour.”
LOUIS’ DEATH IN 1483 (the same year that Richard III seized power in England) marked the passing of medieval, feudal France, replaced by a centralised monarchy with absolutist tendencies. By now France had almost doubled its area, acquiring much of the geographical shape of the “hexagon” that it inhabits today. With Provence came also a foothold in Naples; and with Naples there opened the window that would bring great cultural wealth, but also lead to the undoing of many a subsequent French ruler—down to Napoleon III—seduced by the allure of sun and riches. For the first glimmer of a new light was beginning to illuminate France from the south-east, from Italy. Already during the reign of Charles VI contemporary paintings depict the mad King lying on his bed richly caparisoned in garments, the fabrics of which had made the wealth of Renaissance Florence. Liberated from the scourge north of the Channel, the Valois began to turn eager, and greedy, eyes towards Italy. There a complexity of rival states and petty tyrannies had sprung up. Skilfully, without becoming embroiled in war there, Louis had managed to maintain a balance of power, establishing himself as patron of the Renaissance.
The pull of Rome was hardly surprising. Its legacy had continued in France centuries after it had waned in Britain, particularly in the meridional regions where the roads, buildings and great amphitheatres—but above all the pervasive culture and literature, customs and laws—of Ancient Rome had survived its fall and the succeeding Dark Ages. To Rome, France owed her tendency to centralisation, which would grow as her monarchs accrued more power, her notions of justice. Between neighbouring territories that had once shared the same language, religion and, at times, the same ruler would spring a sense of continental unity. Under the aegis of that mission civilatrice of France, it would almost always be opposed to Anglo-Saxon interests. And of course there was the Catholic Church, binding king, state and parishioners of France to Rome itself. Here, as the fifteenth century unfolded, was to be one more major source of divergence between France and the Islanders. After Bouvines, King John’s reluctant signature of the Magna Carta reduced the political power of the English king in favour of new liberties, while a strengthened French monarchy facing the menace of external threats pointed the way towards increasing absolutism: so now in terms of religious faith—as Britain veered towards the northern influences of Martin Luther—France looked southwards.
LOUIS’ SON, CHARLES VIII (1483–98), was physically under-privileged, with an enormous head, thin, ugly to the point of being deformed, not very bright, but deeply in love with his Breton queen, Anne—who, fortunately, shared his homeliness. He inherited the throne at the age of thirteen, and with it some tiresome domestic problems. Opposing the feudal barons, in 1484 the vox populi called for a meeting of the semi-moribund Estates-General to hear their grievances. At it a delegate from Burgundy, Philip Pot, made a telling speech, revolutionary before its time, in which he declared, “The State is the thing of the people . . . the sovereign people created kings by its suffrage. . . .” The Estates-General were requested to meet every two years. They did not; and indeed few were the times when they would be convened before the fateful year of 1789.
In post-Norman England, the successors of William the Conqueror had opposed the holding of single large territories by great feudal vassals, who thus came to exercise quasi-regal prerogatives; instead they were assigned properties scattered through many counties. In contrast, France’s great lords held their lands from the king, in return for which they were only obligated for certain services, like forty days of military duty a year. Beneath them came the mass of serfs and peasants, living on a level of mere subsistence, unrepresented and all but invisible on the social landscape.
During the Hundred Years’ War, the Second Estate, the nobility— free from taxation, judged by its peers, its chief responsibility to die in battle at the side of the monarch—had become somewhat effete. It was more concerned with the chivalry of the tournament than with the reality of war, or politics. The game of courtly love was still a ritual. The father of Bayard, the legendary “Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” instructed his sons in the code inherent to their status: “Serve God. Be kindly and courteous to all men of gentle breeding. Be humble and serviceable to all people. Be neither a flatterer nor a teller of tales. Be faithful in deed and in speech. Keep your word. . . .” These fine precepts, however, waning in the reign of Louis XI, would shortly be cast aside in the brutal wars of religion that were about to engulf France, and the rest of Europe. In the semi-feudal system that still existed in provincial France, the lord also had few responsibilities towards those dependent on him. On the other hand, the archaic droit de seigneur continued to give him the right of the first night with the bride of any of his peasantry (otherwise known as the droit de jambage; the right to put a leg into the marital bed), which, in theory, guaranteed at least a genetic continuation of the line.
Then there came the clergy, the First Estate. It still lived in some feudal splendour, and wielded great powers—despite the damage done to the Church during the Great Schism, when the currency of God had been debased for the seventy years of a rival Pope at Avignon. Finally, there was the Third Estate, representing the city bourgeois (notably, in the first instance, of Paris), the wealthy merchants who had put down a marker at the time of Étienne Marcel’s brief uprising. Many bourgeois had already purchased grand seignorial domains, but they were rarely socially acceptable to the nobility, who despised anything smacking of commerce. When the Estates-General met, the Third sat in a separate section clearly apart from the others. (The system would even be visible under Napoleon’s First Empire, despite its calculated appeal to populism, when—at a great imperial ball—the bourgeois would be rigidly directed to dine in salons separate from the court and the Napoleonic nobility.) Compared with England, for all her native snobbery, barriers between classes and the importance attached to protocol always remained more imposing in France. The convocation of 1484 helped define the function of these bodies which governed the destiny of France, and which, through their implacable divisiveness, were to lead ultimately to the revolution of 1789.
MOTIVATED AT LEAST IN PART by the age-old French instinct to seek distractions abroad when the going gets rough at home, Charles VIII soon became seduced “by the phantoms and glories of Italy.” A blitzkrieg that was almost a “promenade” brought him to the very gates of Rome in 1494. Initially, the Italians seemed to welcome the French; in return Charles came home enthralled by Italian art. Alas, in 1498, the poor gangly fellow died after bashing his head on the low lintel of a door at Amboise on the Loire, the château to which he was so passionately attached, aged only twenty-eight. There had been time, though, through marriage, for Charles to add Brittany to the realm of France.
On his death, the succession went sideways, to the Orléans branch of the House of Valois. The new King, Louis XII (1498–1515), great-grandson of Charles V, was yet another enticed into the maze of Italian politics and intrigue, by a conniving Pope inspired by Machiavelli— Julius II, the builder of St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. This warrior-Pope wanted the weight of French arms as a counter-balance to his enemy, the Venetians. But the moment that Louis, occupying Milan, was too successful Julius II switched sides to be rid of the French. In 1513, Louis’ army was crushed at Novara, Milan fell and the French had to beat a desperate retreat back over the Alps. Italy was lost, but certainly not forgotten.
Aged fifty-three without an heir, Louis married a third time, to Mary, the sixteen-year-old sister of Henry VIII. Apparently trying to please his lusty young English bride, he was said to have greatly exceeded his strength and died suddenly in the middle of the night on New Year’s Day, 1515.
In France as a whole, enjoying a period of prosperity, and peace at home, the reign of Louis XII had been successful enough, though Paris virtually stagnated. When they were not away at the wars, the Valois monarchs concentrated their wealth and energies on the joys of la chasse, and on translating the marvels of the Italian Renaissance to the glorious châteaux they were building on the Loire—Amboise, Blois, Chenonceaux, Chaumont and Azay. These culminated finally in the “hunting lodge” of François I at Chambord—containing an entire village atop the roof, together with its two great interweaving circular staircases, large enough to ride a horse up and designed, supposedly, so that the Queen and François’ current mistress could pass without either encountering the other.
Anything to be away from smelly, pestilential, surly and unruly Paris! From these delightful châteaux on the gentle Loire, the absentee rulers ran France; but it was a habit that would lead the French monarchy into gravest danger in the two centuries that were to come.
DURING HIS REIGN, Charles V—despite the raging Hundred Years’ War—managed to construct a new wall round Paris, and within it transform the grim old fortress of Philippe-Auguste, the Louvre, into a handsome palace, to become the royal residence. Apart from this, there was little new building in the capital; there was just no money. But when it did start again in earnest, French architecture reflected most generously the Italian, Renaissance influence. Styles as seen, for example, in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, or in Azay-le-Rideau floating magically on its lake in the Loire, would come to England anything up to a hundred years after reaching France from her southern neighbour. In figurative art, representation was moving from the religious to the profane; where else but France, for example, could a monarch have his mistress, Agnès Sorel, painted aux seins nus,and an exquisite bust at that? French miniaturists learned their trade from Italy, and in turn passed it back. The joys of the earthly paradise, as opposed to the heavenly, were wonderfully portrayed in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, while Angers tapestries depicted the excitement of the chase. From being an anonymous decorator of cathedrals, the individual artist became famous, and relatively rich. Historians and chroniclers such as Froissart and Commynes earned distinction.
The impassioned “Mystery Plays” of the Middle Ages began to give way to a theatre of farce, presaging Molière. The printing presses of Gutenberg reached Paris by 1470. With them, as well as a new political awareness, came a replacement of the verbally inherited chanson de geste composed by nameless authors; individual poets like Villon—constantly in trouble with the police—now brought a deep pessimism about the transitory nature of life, perhaps exacerbated by an excessive intake of alcohol. From Italy, via Provence, the idyllic odes of Petrarch were rediscovered. The era of courtly love of Ronsard, the troubadours and the jongleurs moved on towards the uninhibited earthiness, spiced with serious learning, of Rabelais. With it the arts tended to move away from performances in the public square, towards the more select audience of the Renaissance, and reflected a more liberal Christian ethic that was truly Renaissance.
IN HIS VERY PHYSICAL APPEARANCE, the robust, rumbustious François I (1515–47) reflected the new-found self-confidence of France. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast, physically, than between the sickly and delicate Louis XII and his successor. Closing the door on the Middle Ages, François opened the vigorous century. Just twenty-one when he succeeded in 1515 (sideways, a cousin like the heirless Louis),17 François was a giant of over two metres tall, with long legs and arms, and huge hands and feet. Portraits show his face dominated by a large hook nose, a low forehead, a wispy moustache and a pointed beard. In his vast energies, appetites and tastes, he was every inch the Renaissance king; so too in the magnificence of his clothes (where he closely resembled his contemporary, England’s Henry VIII)—the close-fitting doublets with the slashed sleeves, the extravagant Italian shoes and feathered hats. He brought Benvenuto Cellini to France, and Leonardo died in his arms.
In terms of statecraft, however, there were omens that the melancholy prediction of Louis XII might come true: “We busy ourselves in vain . . . that big young fellow will spoil everything.” Like his two predecessors’, François’ “map of Europe” lay in Italy—so did his fate. Inheriting a country once more threatened on three sides, by Henry VIII across the Channel, Emperor Maximilian beyond the Rhine, and Ferdinand of Aragon over the Pyrenees, he lived in fear of geographic “encirclement”—a term that was to obsess latter-day German rulers from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Hitler. Almost immediately François decided to seize the initiative, by crossing the Alps to recapture Milan, lost by Louis XII. It was almost an act of frivolity. At first things went well, with François winning a glittering victory at Marignano in the same year as his accession. On the field of battle, the chivalric hero Bayard conferred a knighthood upon his sovereign for the panache he had displayed.
These were heady days for a young king of François’ temperament. In fact, early success gained with minimum effort instilled in him a kind of rash optimism. From the Pope, Leo X, nicknamed “His Cautiousness,” he was able to wring concessions which assured liberty for the French Church to nominate its own bishops—as well as providing the King with vast additional revenues at its expense. Thus it could be said that, while England’s Henry VIII broke with Rome to get his hands on Church moneys, François I did the same through agreement. In Paris conservatives in the Sorbonne protested that the Concordat was “offensive to God.”
At the resplendent Field of the Cloth of Gold, a forerunner of lavish state visits subsequently, François managed to entice Henry VIII into watchful neutrality—temporarily. To the east, however, the death of Maximilian I brought a far more redoubtable foe—Emperor Charles V (“Charles Quint,” to differentiate him from the Valois King), Holy Roman Emperor,18 Emperor of Habsburg Austria and, by succession, also King of Spain (1500–1558). He had a mouth which was always open and a weak chin, but the weakness of his features belied his outstanding intelligence and determination. He persuaded the rich bankers of Augsburg to back him in his ambitions.
In 1519, following the death of Ferdinand II of Spain (of the reyes catholicos), François rashly confronted Charles by standing himself for election as Emperor. Thereby he made a mortal enemy. Henry VIII, having at first dreamt of the empire for himself, defaulted from the tenuous alliance established at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, to give his backing to Charles. The balance of power in Europe was seriously upset; isolated, François played with outrageous schemes to gain support of the Protestant princes of Germany, even seeking common cause with Suleiman the Magnificent, the Turk threatening Vienna in the east. In various complex permutations, four more wars followed.
Thus hardly had France recovered from the Hundred Years’ War against England than this new challenge appeared; Spain, released from Moorish bondage, growing rich from her discoveries in the New World and, now, united with Habsburg power, confronted her on both sides. Here too were the beginnings of France’s ensuing four centuries of strife with the Germanic world. By the time of the death of François I in 1547, it should have been clear that the enduring problem for France was no longer Italy.
TEN YEARS INTO HIS REIGN, a grave disaster struck the hubristic François. His cousin, Charles de Bourbon, connétable (constable) of the kingdom of France and its most powerful military leader, defected to the enemy. Suddenly it looked as if the humiliations of the fifteenth century might be repeated, with enemy troops advancing to within 50 kilometres of Paris. With extraordinary rashness, François was committed to leading his army across the Alps once again. This time he met with total defeat at Pavia in 1525, crushed by the Spanish infantry. The tercios, hardened by the wars against the Moors, and armed with Toledo steel, for a brief while were the most formidable soldiery in Europe.
François himself was wounded and taken prisoner—the last French ruler to be imprisoned by a foreign power until Napoleon on Elba. Charles’ imperial forces pressed on through Provence as far as Marseilles. Paris was left all but undefended. To his mother François wrote the famous words: “Madame, of everything there remain to me only honour and life, which are unscathed.” During a harsh captivity in Madrid, he wrote some verses including the moving line: “The body conquered, the heart remains the victor.”8Meanwhile, in Paris, the Parlement—by virtue of François’ absence in captivity—began to transform its judicial power. François’ fearlessly devoted, and beautiful, sister Marguerite rushed to Spain and attempted to free him, even to the extent—apparently— of making a pass at the Emperor. She was unsuccessful. François was forced, under duress, to conclude a shameful treaty with Charles, which, on his release, he and the Pope promptly declared null and void.
It looked as though a resurgent, fiercely reactionary Catholic Spain was becoming master of Christendom. Meanwhile, across the Rhine at Wittenberg, an event that was soon to shake Christendom, and particularly France, went by almost unnoticed. In 1517, a little-known German monk called Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the local church, in protest against the sale of “indulgences” to finance the building of St. Peter’s, and the harshness of Madrid-orientated Catholicism. There followed his excommunication and his courageous appearance before the dread Charles Quint at the Diet of Worms in 1521, where he made his famous utterance: “Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me God.”
Though beset by enemies, at home and abroad, François finally defeated Charles in what was to be almost the last of France’s Italian wars—often taken as a starting point of modern history for the way it shaped Europe. François abandoned any claims to Italy, to Savoy, Piedmont and Naples, and within France to Flanders and Artois. In return Charles ceded definitively all claims to crucial Burgundy. In his wars François had at least succeeded miraculously in preserving the national integrity of France. But his breach between France and the Holy Roman Empire in effect marked an end to unity in the Catholic Church and, as François’ foreign wars ended, so the wars of religion of the sixteenth century began, leading to an epoch of appalling civil conflicts.
While in captivity in Spain, François dreamed up a “grand design” for France. Studying his captors’ success in the New World, on his release he founded the port of Le Havre for exploration and dispatched Jacques Cartier on the first of his voyages to find and found Canada. On top of his unrelenting military expenditures, François’ finances were constantly in a tangle. To meet some of his burden of debt, François introduced the principle of bonds on the Hôtel de Ville, while money moved into the hands of a bourgeoisie seeking to merge with the nobility. At the same time, by the “Ordonnance of Villers Cotterets” in 1539, he substituted French for Latin as the language of law.
DESPITE HIS MANY DISTRACTIONS AND INNOVATIONS, François I was the first king since his great-great-grandfather, Charles V, nearly two centuries previously, to undertake serious works in Paris. Bringing the Renaissance firmly to establish its ineffaceable imprint there, he razed Charles’ Louvre fortress as well as the last traces of Philippe-Auguste. Displaying its new sense of security at the heart of the nation, no longer was the Louvre to be a bastion (after his incarceration in Madrid, François had a horror of fortresses), but an elegant and majestic palace. Designed by the geniuses of Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon—“the French Phidias”—it was to possess an enchanting Renaissance grace, borrowed from Greece and Rome, but with an unmistakable Frenchness. By 1540, François’ Louvre would out-dazzle the works of his former gaoler, Emperor Charles Quint. He established the Imprimerie Nationale (national printing house), and founded the Collège de France, to compete with the Sorbonne next door, and act as a corrective to its unruliness. One of the Collège’s specific aims was to propagate the humanistic ideals of the Italian Renaissance, and for the first time lectures were given in an enriched French language.
Among François’ most portentous introductions from Italy was a daughter of the wealthy Florentine banking family, Catherine de Medici, as a bride for his heir. With her came Italian culture of the high Renaissance, intrigue—and the art of poison. In 1547, François died, worn out by war, hunting and sex. France mourned a colourful and much-loved King, who—despite all his hunting or military distractions, and a bad beginning—lent a distinction to the French crown unknown since Saint Louis; and who, truly and ineradicably, established the Renaissance in his native country. The fashion and style of the times in François’ France sprang from the top, from the court that followed the King wherever he went—a train of 12,000 horses, tents, baggage, tapestries, gold and silver plate—and women, sisters and mistresses. “A court without ladies is a springtime without roses,” he proclaimed, and later French monarchs were to follow his lead. Poetry, music, games, gallantry and revels were the order of the day in this new France, suddenly prosperous in his last years through trade with Florence and a gold-laden Spain. Whereas Louis XI (perhaps like the later sovereigns of Britain) thought that “knowledge makes for melancholy,” François was genuinely a “lover of good literature and learned men.” He was as adept in conversation about painting as war.
From Alexander Borgia’s Italy, François’ outrageous friend Benvenuto Cellini brought not only art but a new morality; in his world, la vie sexuelle was free and even murder was forgiven—if the offender was an artist. “Virtuous young people,” he boasted, “are those who give the most thrusts with the knife.” In Paris, protected by “this wonderful king,” he lived a charmed life, driving François’ tenants out of the Petit-Nesle where he had his workshop, chastising naked girls there who served both as his models and his mistresses, and insulting the distinguished judges of the Châtelet. In the world of Philippe-Auguste, let alone Philippe le Bel, Cellini would have rated the gallows and Hell; but in the sixteenth century he was befriended by princes amused by his antics. If the ideal of Frenchmen of the Middle Ages had been Philippe-Auguste’s grandson, Saint Louis, among the Valois of the sixteenth century it was Machiavelli. To quote André Maurois, the men and women of the Renaissance, in France as in Italy, “had so much animal violence that the scruples of their minds never put a check on the motions of their bodies. They were good Catholics, but they did not go abroad without a dagger in their belts.”9
WITH THE DEATH OF FRANÇOIS in 1547, one strong king followed another. Lacking his father’s charisma, Henri II (1547–59) had been a melancholy child (marked by four years’ imprisonment in Spain). He seemed cold (except to his mistress, Diane de Poitiers), not overloaded with brains, but clear-witted and ambitious. He was greatly taken to physical exercise, such as the jousting which was, so disastrously for France, to kill him. His father wedded him to Catherine de’ Medici when she was fourteen. Though an immensely strong personality, outshining her husband, she was given little opportunity to display her powers during his lifetime, for, since his teens, Henri had been madly in love with and dominated by Diane de Poitiers—a woman nearly twenty years older than he, and married to the Grand Sénéchal of France. With her motto, appropriately, ofomnium victorem vici (“I have conquered the conqueror of them all”), she was painted as the Goddess of the Chase trampling Eros underfoot, and sculpted with her stag by the great Jean Goujon. She was as beautiful as Catherine was plain—and just about as ambitious. Henri gave the exquisite Château d’Anet to her, spending a fortune on it, and handing her Chenonceaux19 as well. She knew how to make the most of her long legs and high breasts, which were the delight of her portraitists. Till her death she could boast the whitest of white skins—the result, so it was rumoured, of some special drug potion. Diane was the epitome of the French mistress, wielding great influence over her lord in all his counsels. Henri consulted and took her everywhere, and wrote frequent and passionate love letters when separated:
I beg you always to keep in memory him who has never loved, nor shall love, other than you; I beg you, my darling, to wear this ring for love of me . . .
I cannot live without you . . . I beg you to have in remembrance him who has served but one God and one love . . .
Some may think this an excessive protestation, but Henri’s dedication to his god would influence years of religious strife, while his attachment to Diane de Poitiers would last the rest of his life.
Two years after his succession, in 1549, Henri II staged his triumphal entry into Paris. The leading poets and artists were hired to decorate the route of the procession from the Porte Saint-Denis to Notre-Dame, under triumphal arches inscribed with verses in praise of the King. Jean Goujon and Philibert de l’Orme were among those employed, and their sculptural extravaganza included a Hercules with the features of François I atop a triumphal arch at the Porte Saint-Denis. Three Fortunes, in gold, silver and lead, representing the King, the nobility and the people, topped the Ponceau fountain in the Rue Saint-Denis. A tall obelisk on the back of a rhinoceros, symbolising a France triumphant over the monsters that threatened her, stood before the church of Saint-Sepulcre. The parade included representatives of all the city’s corporations— among the hordes of artisans were fifty pastry chefs, forty barrel makers, 250 printers and 200 tailors. They were followed by all of the city’s officers. It was an imposing display of optimism about France’s future, and of the royal powers that would direct it.
It was not only the institution of the Valois monarchy, but the person of the King that inspired confidence and loyalty. Despite his infidelities, Catherine adored Henri, and—through her and her Medici love of the beautiful—she continued the Italianate traditions of François I, further advancing François’ work on the Louvre; Catherine, as his widow, would commission de l’Orme to build a great new Renaissance Palace of the Tuileries, abutting the Louvre further west and perpendicular to the Seine. Under her influence French artisans simplified Florentine ornamentation, while introducing the typically Italian exterior staircase. But under Catherine there also intensified an altogether more sombre aspect of the Renaissance in France—the Wars of Religion. A special court was set up to prosecute heretics, and restrictive laws were passed against the Lutherans.
Ever mindful of the humiliating terms imposed on his father during his imprisonment in Madrid, not to mention his own miserable four years of acute deprivation in Spain, Henri hated Charles Quint with a deadly passion. Exhausted by gout, so ill that he was unable even to open a letter, having abdicated in 1556 Charles retired to a monastery to die. He handed over the Empire to his brother Ferdinand; but the throne of Spain went to an even greater threat to France, and Europe at large—Philip II. Taking advantage of Charles’ decline and death, in 1559 Henri signed the important Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis: under it France resolutely turned her back on Italy—at least until Napoleon. The military were furious, and it required considerable courage for the King to sign. Yet Queen Mary Tudor was forced to renounce for ever England’s last foothold on the French mainland—Calais—which, in English hands for over two centuries, had remained a permanent threat. The unhappy Mary Tudor (who died within days of Charles Quint) declared, “When I die you will find Calais engraved on my heart.”
It meant that England was shut out of the continent for the foreseeable future. As a consolation prize, Henri arranged the marriage of his considerably impaired heir, François, to Scotland’s Mary Stuart. At the same time, Henri, conspiring with the Protestants of Germany, secured three fortresses on her eastern marches that would play a key role in wars against a new enemy. The fortresses were the bishoprics in Lorraine of Metz, Toul and Verdun; the enemy, Germany; the wars would take place in 1870 and 1914. Towards his neighbours to the east, Henri’s policy was one that would be followed by various successors: it was, while appearing to strive in the defence of “Germanic liberties” in fact to “keep the affairs of the German in hand, and cause them as much difficulty as possible,”10 which, in effect, meant the maintenance of a divided Germany.
Henri was warmly greeted in Lorraine, where Charles had made himself unloved, and his Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis was regarded as a good deal for France. Extensive festivities were organised in Paris that summer of 1559 to celebrate both the treaty and the weddings of two royal princesses.20 Participating, the athletic Henri entered a tournament at Les Tournelles palace, where once the Duke of Bedford had held sway—now the Place des Vosges in the Marais area of Paris. But the lance of his adversary, Gabriel de Montgomery (a distant forebear of the British Field Marshal), splintered on his helmet and put out the eye of the King. After ten days of agony Henri died, aged forty, having reigned barely twelve years. Though he was wearing the colours of his mistress, sixty-year-old Diane de Poitiers, his bereaved widow, Catherine, ordered the palace to be razed to the ground. Montgomery was pardoned, then executed disgracefully, fifteen years later, on the widowed Catherine’s instructions. Denying a bereft mistress access to the King’s bedside, with the words “The dying King belongs to the Queen,” Catherine then promptly packed Diane out of her beloved Chenonceaux to her sombre fortress of Chaumont, supposedly for ever. Diane managed to escape, however, to her beloved Anet, where she spent the remaining seven years of her life under virtual house arrest.
Catherine took over, in a France that was left teetering on the brink of a crisis from which she seemed almost certain to succumb.