The issues
Charles VII had managed to maintain the precarious balance between royal sovereignty and princely polyarchy which had been struck after the defeat of the Praguerie in 1440. This sovereignty was exercised throughout the kingdom, in theory a territory whose eastern boundaries were defined by four rivers (the Escaut, the Meuse, the Saone and the Rhone), seen as so many natural frontiers until, before long, the Rhine was to relieve them of this role. In practice, however, it was only over some two-thirds of this territory that the king was able to further royal policy unchallenged. None the less, he could rely upon an established doctrine of unity under the crown which, from the reign of Louis XII, would be summarised in the adage ‘One God, one king, one faith, one law’ (‘Un Dieu, un roi, une foi, une lot). On his side the king had a formidable weapon in his arsenal, one which had been tested against the duke of Alengon in 1458: trial for high treason which was at once felony, lese-majeste and sacrilege.
In the remaining third of the kingdom, however, royal authority had to come to terms with the existence of principalities which, far from being relics of a long-dead feudal past, were genuine, well-organised states. Some (Burgundy, Bourbon, Anjou, Orleans and Alengon) were ruled over by individuals of royal descent. Others were in the hands of princes who, through marriage alliances, came near to being so, whether within the kingdom (Brittany, Foix-Bearn, Armagnac and Albret) or outside it (Lorraine and Savoy). Such princes could thus claim a share of the prerogatives attendant upon royal blood, that mystical symbol which, in the fifteenth century, denoted an aptitude for governing the kingdom. Louis XI himself thought no differently: indeed, his final advice to his son was to conduct himself ‘according to the counsel, opinions and government of our next of kin and kindred lords’ (‘par le conseil, advis et gouvernement de noz parens et seigneurs de nostre sang’). Thus the doctrine of government under the king had to come to terms with one in which the highest nobility participated, a system which the League of Nevers had clearly expounded in 1442, and which may have shown the influence of parliamentary government on the English model, particularly in the appeal to the estates general which it encouraged.
However, almost all the princes also held fiefs outside the kingdom, while some had claims to thrones: Burgundy in the Low Countries; Bourbon in Dombes; Anjou in Provence as well as the throne of Naples; Orleans in Asti, with the anticipation of the duchy of Milan; Foix in Navarre, his wife’s kingdom. These might provide useful opportunities for the king to operate outside the country in support of princes of the blood; at the same time they constituted a considerable danger for the monarchy should it become weak. Indeed, the princes, all capable of negotiating as equals with their counterparts throughout Christendom, were risking the dismemberment of the kingdom, which could thus have become the mirror-image of the Empire. Any support for the princes’ cause was thus enough to make the king’s supporters suspicious; for them, royal authority appeared all the more sacrosanct in that its defence was synonymous with the protection of their own interests.
Life-and-death struggle between king and princes, 1465-83
Yet, somewhat ironically, on 22 July 1461 there succeeded to the throne in the person of Louis XI the very man who had assumed the leadership of the insurgent princes. Before long he managed to antagonise everybody by the inconsistencies of his actions: his former allies, the princes, by his arrogant insistence on the crown’s privileges; his father’s old retainers, devoted monarchists, by harrying them with the peevishness of a former rebel; and others whom he alarmed by the breadth of his projected reforms. The result was a serious uprising in March 1465, led by the princes under the pretext of defending the ‘Public Weal’ (the ‘Bien Public’) or, to put it differently, aristocratic self-interest. The league was organised by three dukes: Burgundy (through his heir, Charles), Bourbon and Brittany. It set against the king his younger brother, Charles, the heir presumptive, and it fielded forces capable of holding him in check on the ground: witness the indecisive battle of Montlhery fought on 15 July 1465. Indeed Louis XI was only saved from disaster by the loyalty of the bonnes villes (towns enjoying both wealth and the means of defending themselves, as well as the right to be represented in the estates), by the enforced neutrality of the English king (another candidate for the French throne), and by his own almost abject surrender.
This unresolved crisis was to inaugurate a period of ruthless struggle between the king and his opponents. Far from being the ‘universal spider’ of Jean Meschinot’s over-celebrated phrase, entangling the enemy in the web of his intrigues, more often than not during this period Louis lived in fear of being overthrown or assassinated, a terror which was to lead to the execution of, among others, the constable, Saint-Pol, in 1475, and that of the duke of Nemours in 1477. The princes, for their part, were no less fearful, both for their positions, should they fail to maintain a united front, and for their lives, should they show their hands too soon.
The years 1465 to 1477 thus constituted a period of high political tension. Shortly after having installed Charles as duke of Normandy, and regardless of a solemn undertaking made to him, Louis XI evicted his brother who, packed off to Guyenne, conveniently died in 1472. The king was also able to hold in check the princes, who lacked any kind of unity of purpose. None the less, Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, had grown impatient of so many plots and displays of bad faith. When, too sure of himself, Louis came to Peronne in October 1468 thinking that he could win over the duke of Burgundy, he was compelled to make major concessions. The political situation was once again in the melting pot.
Political bargaining and shows of force allowed Louis to maintain a precarious balance between himself and the princes; he also appealed to public opinion, such as when he took the initiative by calling the estates general in 1468. These difficult years were further characterised by wars which, however brief, proved fatal to the count of Armagnac, ruinous to the duke of Brittany and fruitless for the duke of Burgundy. At last, in 1475, a covert coalition was formed among the king’s opponents. This has not been accorded the significance it deserves for it could have been more dangerous than that of 1465, given the presence among the conspirators of the constable of France and the part played by England in it all. Yet, once again, the procrastination of the plotters retrieved the situation, and Louis was thus in a position to buy peace with Edward IV at Picquigny (29 August 1475) and to inflict his terrible justice upon the other conspirators. As for Charles the Bold, he had abandoned his allies in favour of war against the Rhenish towns, Austria, Switzerland and the duke of Lorraine, thus turning himself into the ‘grave-digger of his dynasty’, a further stroke of luck for the king who had little to do with it all.
The tragic death of the duke of Burgundy outside the walls of Nancy on 5 January 1477 was to deliver Louis from danger. But it also presented him with a difficult choice: should he offer peace to Mary, Charles’s daughter and heir and his own godchild, or should he brazenly try to crush the house of Burgundy by force and, with it, all its potential allies in the kingdom? He opted for the second choice, one which would bring him the duchy of Burgundy, but at the cost of a long war along France’s north-eastern frontiers with Maximilian of Habsburg, whom Mary had married as a means of escaping potential disaster. In the end a settlement proved inevitable, and was negotiated in unfavourable circumstances. The Treaty of Arras (23 December 1482) provided for the marriage of the infant dauphin, Charles, to Margaret, young daughter of Mary and Maximilian, whose dowry comprised a part of her Burgundian inheritance (Artois and Franche-Comte). As for the policy of systematic intimidation employed against the princes, it had resulted in the neutralisation of the house of Orleans through the enforced marriage, in 1476, of Duke Louis to Jeanne, one of Louis’s daughters, who was probably barren. In 1481 it had also caused the patrimony of the house of Anjou to fall into the king’s hands; this brought him the duchy of Anjou, the county of Maine, as well as Provence, Barrois and rights, still to be enforced, to the kingdom of Naples.
Conflict within the aristocracy: European conflict, 1483—91
Despite these successes, and contrary to some opinion, when Louis XI died on 31 August 1483, the contest between the monarchy and the principalities had not yet run its course. Certainly the new king, Charles VIII, being very young, was no longer perceived as the target; the problem was who would rule on his behalf? His sister, Anne, had entered the lists along with her husband, Pierre de Beaujeu, who became duke of Bourbon in 1488. In so doing, the princely couple never for a moment lost sight of the particular interests of their own house. Indeed, at the end of her life Anne even advised her son-in-law, the constable, Bourbon, to ally himself with the emperor, head of the house of Burgundy, against the French king. For the moment, though, the Beaujeu cause and that of the monarchy were one and the same; as usual, the adversary was the heir presumptive, Louis, duke of Orleans, who, backed by the majority of the other princes, laid claim to the regency. Conflict was now to divide the aristocracy itself.
In 1484 confrontation unfolded first before the estates general which decided in favour of Beaujeu, and then on the battlefield. In the name of the ‘Public Weal’ the conspirators continued to advocate struggle against a tyrannical government and action to reform the kingdom. In the following year the ‘Guerre Folle’ occurred. The uprising was swiftly subdued, but its lesson for the rebels was plain: as a result of Louis XI’s policy of building up his army, no princely coalition would in future be capable of effective resistance. Members of such a coalition were dependent on the army of Brittany, a virtually independent state, and even more on foreign assistance, which was certainly offered, for Louis XI’s power politics had left a legacy. For his part, Maximilian of Habsburg always considered it vital to defend the integrality of his children’s rights to the Burgundian inheritance. When, in 1487, Louis of Orleans fled to Brittany, a bitter war had already broken out again on the northern front. Close at hand, at Calais, the king of England was an ever-present threat; while, at the southern end of the kingdom, Spain was manoeuvring to obtain the restoration of Roussillon, ill-gotten by Louis XI in 1462. For the Beaujeu, this was the signal to pursue afresh the ruthless struggle to crush the duke of Orleans and to destroy for good the house of Brittany whose head, Francis II, had but two daughters as his heirs. The victory of Saint-Aubin-du-Cormier (23 July 1488) was decisive; the duke of Orleans was taken prisoner, the Breton army broken. However, it had also been necessary to fight against Castilian, English and German contingents which had come to their aid. Power politics within the kingdom was leading to a foreign war against a triple coalition which was strengthened by the marriage of Anne, heiress to the duchy of Brittany, to Maximilian of Habsburg, now a widower. In 1489 and 1490, the French king’s army was victorious in almost the whole of Brittany: Alain d’Albret, one of the conspirators of 1485, surrendered Nantes, and Rennes was forced to capitulate. Finally, in order to extricate herself honourably from a desperate situation, the young duchess Anne was driven to break with Maximilian and marry the king of France (6 December 1491). The Beaujeu had crushed their rivals, but not the triple coalition of England, Spain and the house of Austria. Thus the war continued.
Change of course, 1491—1520
On assuming the royal authority, however, the young Charles VIII was to view developments differently. Now a grown man, he chose to abandon the former ‘royal’ policy of uncompromising insistence on the rights of the crown and the defence of the kingdom’s unity at the cost of weakening the princes and their foreign allies. On 28 June 1491 he took the initiative himself, setting free his cousin, Louis of Orleans, thus effecting a reconciliation between them. This event, often insufficiently appreciated, was a genuine coup d’etat? Rejecting the vindictive policies of both his father and his sister, Charles strove to unite the nobility of France around the throne. He should, therefore, have married Margaret of Austria, daughter of Maximilian and grand-daughter of Charles the Bold, in order to secure peace with the house of Burgundy. Instead he agreed, although without enthusiasm, to the Breton marriage thrust upon him, while making every effort to ensure the end of power politics by making treaties with England (Etaples, 3 November 1492), with Spain which, at last, regained Roussillon (Barcelona, 19 January 1493) and with Maximilian (Senlis, 23 May 1493), returning to him both his daughter and her dowry, Artois and Franche-Comte.
The young king had in mind a different policy which might be termed both ‘aristocratic’ and ‘imperial’. It consisted of Charles setting himself up as heir to the house of Anjou by laying claim to Naples and even to Jerusalem, and dragging the flower of the aristocracy headlong into a ‘war of magnificence’, that is to say not a domestic war but one undertaken ‘to make conquests in distant and foreign countries or to fight for the catholic faith’ (‘conquerir en loingtaing et estrange pais ou soy combatre pour la foy catholique deffendre ou eslargir’).
The accession to the throne, in 1498, of his successor, Louis of Orleans, showed even more clearly the two different paths open to the French monarchy at that time, for, once again, it was the former rebel leader of the aristocratic party who became king under the title of Louis XII. First, after divorcing Jeanne de France, he married his predecessor’s widow, Anne of Brittany. Was this a definite step in favour of furthering a ‘royal’ policy? Probably not, for the king’s actions between 1501 and 1506 reflect his hesitation and doubts as to which road, ‘aristocratic’ or ‘imperial’, to follow. Accordingly, he retained under his control his county of Blois, and set off to make good his claim first to his duchy of Milan, and then to the kingdom of Naples. From 1501 he was to promise all these, as well as Brittany, together with the hand of his daughter, Claude, to Charles (the future emperor, Charles V), heir to the house of Burgundy. Such a settlement would have had unfortunate effects upon the unity of France, but was doubtless beneficial in terms of bringing peace to Europe. However, he was also secretly contemplating the marriage of this same Claude to his cousin, Francis of Angouleme, heir to the throne, so as to ensure the unity of his own house and the perpetual union of France and Brittany. The Treaty of Blois of 1504, which clearly had the support of the queen, Anne, approved the first outcome, but in the end, in 1506, it was the second which, with the backing of the estates general, was to prevail.
Under these circumstances Francis I, who became king in 1515, should have remained faithful to a ‘royal’ policy. On the contrary, he believed it possible to renew the ‘war of magnificence’ in Italy. Yet, very shortly afterwards, intent upon fostering the interests of his own dynasty as much as those of the kingdom, he decided to confiscate the lands of Charles, head of the house of Bourbon, whom he had created constable. Outraged, Bourbon made an alliance in 1523 with the emperor, head of the house of Burgundy. Although he had visions of a new ‘Public Weal’, none would lend him support, not even the count of Albret who had been badly treated by the crown which had not helped him regain his trans-Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, lost to Castile in 1512. Times had changed. Henceforth, the aristocracy would believe that its best chance of self-preservation lay within the bosom of the monarchy.