In order to see the growth of a national consciousness, nurtured by a long history and now enriched by the ideas of a rediscovered humanism, one must take as one’s vantage point the heart of this society, political in the broadest sense of the word. It was this growing consciousness that formed the link between the over-remoteness of the state and the various sections of local civil society.
The arts
National unity in the cultural sphere was not really of the kind that can be easily recognised in a French artistic school. Painters and sculptors, if they outgrew their reputations as local artists, worked for princely courts which supported them. Tours and Blois, Moulins and Aix-en-Provence were so many separate centres, while the Burgundian (i.e. Flemish) school was the most brilliant of them all. In the case of music, it was not so much a question of Burgundian supremacy as of a monopoly. The dominance of northern styles was to be little changed by the arrival, at the turn of the century, of a few Italian artists, whose presence was to exert even less influence on a blossoming of architecture unequalled in western Christendom, which took as its model the French chateau, that combination of stronghold and aristocratic abode which was the perfect expression of seignorial power regained. As an innovative style, it culminated on the banks of the Loire in the creations of the king and his greatest courtiers.
Literature, language and history
It is rather in works of literature that one must seek a national culture, principally in the art of the royal and princely courts, but also in that of the grands rhetoriqueurs so unjustly disparaged. This was an art divided among the various princely houses, among which that of Burgundy, with George Chastellain (d. 1475) and Jean Lemaire des Belges (d. 1524) was paramount. At the same time it was a form profoundly united by the subtle use of the raw material: the French language.
This was the language of the king, his court and his capital and, at the time under consideration, the language spoken on the banks of the Loire. Since the end of the fourteenth century it had won its place beside Latin as the language of culture; it was extolled by scholars for its ‘Trojan’ antiquity; and it was acknowledged by the whole of political society, both socially and geographically. By 1450 it had conquered the Rhone valley, by about 1490 Bas-Languedoc, in 1520 Bordeaux. There was no trace here of cultural imperialism, but evidence, instead, of a pride that was national as well as linguistic. To adopt the language of the king was to render oneself better able to serve him; it was also to acknowledge oneself as French.
The humanist rhetoriqueurs were not only the best propagandists for the nation’s language, they were also pioneers in the history of its foundation. Court poets and pamphleteers who tailored their work to suit the occasion, they turned themselves as need arose into chroniclers or even historians in the classical manner. They were joined in this task by religious scholars of reputation, men such as Robert Gaguin, whose Compendium (1495) or short history of France enjoyed considerable success, and by notaries and secretaries of the royal chancery, such as Nicole Gilles, author of the Annales et chroniques de France (1492), for whom history was a tool of the trade. These men were much read by a widely based readership for whom the Grandes chroniques de France had constituted almost a bible. It was not simply a matter of the written word; pictures, devices and symbolic representations, all products of the same ambience, circulated widely in the bonnes villes through the ceremonies of the royal entrees. All these works helped disseminate, as if through a sort of Vulgate, a universal concept of the nature of monarchy and the glorious origins of the nation. The myth of Trojan origins had been attacked by scholars, but was revived by the discovery of the Gauls who, with their direct descent from Noah, were neither Roman nor Germanic. It was known that some of them had travelled in Italy and the east; it was they who arrived in Troy before returning with Francus to rejoin those compatriots who had remained in their native land. Everywhere they spread wisdom, knowledge and just laws, of which the Salic Law, attributed to the Merovingian king, Pharamund, became about 1500 the perfect symbol. After being baptised as Christians these Gauls, alongside the Frankish warriors, had been kept perfectly orthodox by a saintly dynasty whose symbolic figures were St Clovis, St Charlemagne and St Louis. The Most Christian kings were now the leaders of a new chosen people, destined by providence to safeguard the defence of the Church and the triumph of the intellect, as the trans-latio studii, the transfer of Greek knowledge to the Gallo-Franks, guaranteed for all humanists, from Robert Gaguin to Guillaume Bude, the superiority of their country over Italy.
Imperial vocation
This budding national consciousness incorporated an imperial vocation, a resurgence of the ancient concept of the holy and universal monarchy. Louis XI, who, in the face of the princes, needed to assert himself as emperor within the kingdom (empereur dans son royaume), was not the least of its devotees. He deliberately proclaimed his sacred mission to reform the Universal Church by convening a General Council, a threat which the Papacy would not take lightly, neither at the time of the Pazzi conspiracy (1478) nor when Alexander VI saw Charles VIII arrive in Rome at the end of 1494. The Italian faction of the Sacred College also took it seriously when, in 1503, it was faced with the candidature of Louis XII’s principal counsellor, Georges d’Amboise, at two separate papal elections. So did Julius II when, at last, on 1 November 1511, the long-promised council (whose lack of success was to be purely the result of the defeat of French arms) opened at Pisa. It has been said, and not without good reason, that these were simply diplomatic intrigues. Yet it is difficult to attribute to political considerations alone initiatives first encouraged by kings whose spiritual devotion was hardly in doubt, and then pursued by bishops not all of whom were men totally lacking in religious sensitivities.
It was always in the context of Italian affairs that France flaunted this desire to reform the Church. Not without reason, for Italy, as well as being the country where the Roman pontiff had his seat, was also the ‘garden of the empire’ once glorified by Dante. The Italian Wars were not the exploits of monarchs wandering in a chivalric Utopia indifferent to national interests, but were inseparable from this national and imperial perception of Gallo-Frankish history. Concerns of princely houses, defence of ancient rights fiercely pursued, results of international politics, the wars reflected all these factors. Above all else, however, they were wars of magnificence pursued in accordance with France’s imperial vocation. Louis XI had kept a close eye on Italian affairs, and had even gone so far as to set himself up as the guarantor of peace in the peninsula in the face of Neapolitan and papal hostility in 1478. He was unable to take matters further, however, owing to the vengeful policy he was pursuing against the house of Burgundy. Charles VIII, relieved of any such concerns and anxious to counter the glory won before Granada by the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, dedicated himself to the restoration of his princely rights and the fulfilment of his duties as Most Christian king in his kingdom of Naples and, hence, of Jerusalem too. The expedition was presented in good faith as the prelude to a crusade against the Turks, whatever Commynes might say. The vast number of messianic prophecies, associated in France with Jean Michel, but likewise in Italy and Spain, put the finishing touches to the significance of the expedition. After the solemn entry of the king into Naples (12 May 1495), the league formed by the pope, Venice and Aragon put political realism back on the agenda, but the battle of Fornovo, fought on 6 July 1495, showed that France could also justify her claims to supremacy by armed force. Louis XII, not satisfied with avenging his predecessors as dukes of Orleans by evicting Ludovico Sforza from Milan and subsequently capturing him, retook Naples in conjunction with Ferdinand, king of Aragon (1500—1). At the same time he, in his turn, launched the last of the crusades as far as the island of Mytilene, making an alliance against the Turks with King Vladislav of Bohemia. If, after 1504, he lost Naples, Louis did successfully defend Lombardy (well remembered as once having been Cisalpine Gaul) against the rebellious Genoese in 1507 and the Venetians at Agnadello in 1509. The display of a complete range of imperial symbolism enlarged the significance of these campaigns. The closed imperial crown now bore the stamp of the arms of the king, who presented himself in Italy as the avenger of his Trojan ancestors (ultus avos Trojae). The title of father of the country (pater patriae), conferred on him in 1506 by the estates general, made him a new Augustus. Even in Italy, iconography celebrated his triumphs in the classical style and portrayed him surrounded by the nine ‘worthy’ Roman emperors from Augustus to Justinian. On this field of battle Louis had essentially only one true rival, equally of imperial stature, and that was the other Caesar, Pope Julius II, who, ironically, organised the Holy League against the Most Christian king in order to ‘protect the Church’ and to save Italy, land of the Empire, from the barbarian. Although defeated at Ravenna in 1512, Julius finally triumphed over his adversary. Novara in 1513 was Julius’s posthumous victory, although Marignano in 1515 was to overshadow it. Once again, everything was in the melting pot.
It remains to consider whether, in the midst of these wars which no Frenchman ever denounced as futile, the Most Christian king was dreaming only of Italian conquest, of reforming the Holy See, of leading a crusade, or whether his true ambition was to win the imperial crown itself. Despite what has long been said, Charles VIII, during the whole of his campaign, carefully refrained from hinting that he wanted it. But after 1491 Maximilian of Habsburg (who was never able to receive it) constantly proclaimed the reverse to the whole of Germany, and thus to the whole of Europe. No French king replied to these insinuations, other than when, in 1501, Louis XII promised to do nothing to secure the Empire nor give the impression that he desired to be Emperor (‘pour occasion que puissions avoir ou imaginer d’estre empereur’). It is enough to show that Francis I’s enthusiastic response to invitations from Germany after 1516 was not a pipe-dream without precedent. On the contrary, it was the inevitable outcome of Maximilian’s rash campaigns, and the result of a policy of hegemony of which the plans for crusades in 1517—18 and the Concordat of 1516 were the manifestations. In the eyes of the electors, Francis I as a candidate for the Empire had arguments on his side that compared not unfavourably with those of Charles, his rival, who was more Burgundian than German.
There is nothing to tell us whether the kingdom of France or Europe as a whole would have gained a great deal had Francis I been successful in 1519. Yet, as Jean Thenaud wrote about 1523, the facts demonstrate well enough the apogee reached by a renascent France and her sovereign, ‘the most Christian and most Serene king and emperor of the sacred Gallican monarchy’ (‘le tres chretien et tres serenissime roy et empereur de la sacree monarchie gallicane’).