Louis XI (reigned 1461–83) was shamelessly impatient for his father’s death. It must be said of this strange man that he had worthy policies to pursue: the securing of the royal domain against Burgundy, Orléans, and Brittany, among others, and the promotion of commerce and industry within national boundaries. His foreign policy was less consistent, ranging from the cautious in Italy to the chimerical in Spain; yet it was at the expense of Aragon that he regained title to Roussillon and Cerdagne. His methods rather than his ends were what made the reign of this ambitious, nervous, and capricious ruler so turbulent. No French king had ever imposed himself so totally and so tyrannically as did Louis XI. Forgetful of past loyalties, he was betrayed as often as he himself betrayed others. Toward the clergy as toward his officials, he could be brutal and vindictive. He antagonized the nobles by revoking the Valois pensions and some ceremonial trappings and by promoting the independence of seigneurial towns. As for the royal towns, Louis respected their constitutions only so far as was consistent with royal supervision and the payment of heavy taxes; he tolerated the resurgence of urban oligarchies. Fiscal pressures in support of the army, government, and diplomacy mounted fearfully.
Louis XI’s determined efforts to strengthen royal authority provoked the princes to establish the formidable League of the Public Weal, which in 1465 appealed to the people against misgovernment and proposed a regency of the princes supported by the three estates. Louis, in turn, as on later occasions, used assemblies and proclamations to divide the princes. But the settlement of October 1465 was a grave setback for the king, whose brother Charles gained title to Normandy while Charles the Bold, soon to inherit Burgundy, acquired strategic counties and towns in Artois. To the undoing of this treaty Louis devoted great energy. Fomenting strife between Brittany and Normandy, he soon recovered the latter and isolated the former. Deaths among his rivals in Gascony enabled him to secure successions that were more divided and less hostile—such as in Armagnac. Increasingly, Louis’s tortuous diplomacy fastened on Burgundy. The king succeeded in reconciling the Swiss cantons with Austria to form a coalition with France and the Rhenish cities; this coalition invaded Burgundy and defeated and killed Charles the Bold at Nancy (January 5, 1477). While the legal reversion of Burgundy to the crown could not be given practical effect, Louis prevented the emergence of a powerful state on France’s northern and eastern borders and did recover Artois. Moreover, even as he enjoyed this decisive triumph over his most dangerous rival, the entire Angevin inheritance (Anjou, Provence, and Mediterranean claims) devolved to the crown upon the death of René I of Anjou in 1480. Through accident and design and the inability of the princes to collaborate effectively, Louis had succeeded in countering the threat of a princely constitution and had considerably extended the royal domain. Economy, society, and culture in the 14th and 15th centuries
The long war against the English, fought almost entirely in France, benefited few but the captains and peculators; it injured almost everyone. Even the best-disciplined companies lived off the land, so that French peasants and defeated townsfolk in effect paid the expenses of both sides; and undisciplined mercenary bands were a wearisome scourge in times of truce after the middle of the 14th century. Economic distress
But the war alone did not cause economic distress. Even before it broke out, bad weather and commercial dislocations, together with overpopulation in some areas, resulted in worse and more frequent famines than in the past. However, what most terribly damaged life and security was sickness.
The Black Death, a pandemic of both bubonic and pneumonic plague that was carried on shipboard from the Levant, reached Provence in 1347, ravaged most of France in 1348, and faded out only in 1350. Nothing worked to check the disease in populations without immunity—neither bonfires to disinfect the air, nor collective demonstrations of penitence in northern towns, nor persecutions of Jews or friars. The mortality was staggering—the French chronicler Jean Froissart’s estimate that the first wave carried off one-third of the population was perhaps not far wrong; evidence shows that rural areas were no less afflicted than towns. And there were recurrent outbreaks of plague in later years. These afflictions and related factors were responsible for a general decline of population. Toulouse seems to have lost half of its population, which fell from 40,000 to 20,000; the population of Normandy is estimated to have declined by two-thirds between 1300 and 1450. The trend was not reversed until the middle of the 15th century.
The hard times affected classes and regions in different ways, degrees, and rhythms. Some places almost escaped the ravages that afflicted others repeatedly. In the countryside, especially—save for the greatest personages—those who had most to lose suffered most. Whether for landlords or rich peasants, surpluses became harder to obtain or preserve; to many lesser lords the dangerous fortunes of war probably seemed an attractive alternative to declining yields in money or produce. Standards of living, as measured in diets or furnishings, declined. Onerous obligations and services tended to disappear as shortages of rural labour made themselves felt; the transition from servile to rental tenures was largely completed in the 15th century. Peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie in the relatively prosperous Île-de-France and the Tuchins in Languedoc, both betrayed desperation born of recurrent taxation and were associated with the expression of egalitarian ideas; the Jacquerie coincided with a weakened grain market and may have been hastened by efforts of lords to enforce labour services and payments after the Black Death. The manor survived, but little remained of its human identity in the 15th century. Even minor lords lived away from their peasant tenants, protected them poorly if at all, and relied on salaried managers to collect payments that, in some cases, had lost all social justification; lordship had degenerated into an unsentimental economic practice. The cities
Urban society was also troubled. During the centuries of relative peace after 1000, towns had been able to neglect fortifications and surround themselves with growing suburbs; the threat of warfare required them to make heavy investments in new walls that broadened the separation between city and countryside. Royal taxation, often inequitably administered, exacerbated old tensions in the towns; fiscal policy or the regulation of wages or supplies was largely at issue in the uprisings of Flemish towns (1323–28), in Paris (1357–58, 1380–82), and in Rouen (1382). Communes continued to be revoked in the 14th century, although the kings as a rule were less interested in governing the towns than in securing their resources and fidelity. The concentration of trades and crafts in guilds became more complete and more exclusive.
Some leading commercial centres of the 13th century suffered as new trade routes developed in the empire and by sea and as textile manufactures and money markets—the latter suffering from unstable coinages—became more dispersed. The fairs of Champagne declined rapidly after 1310. Only a few capitals, such as Avignon, Bordeaux, and Paris, prospered; and even they were hard-hit by plague. Nor did the French merchant or manufacturer keep up with the new business techniques being developed in Italy and the Low Countries. His work often unspecialized, his bookkeeping old-fashioned, his tastes simple, he typically looked forward to securing his future by the purchase of land. The church
The organized church, despite losses from war and plague, continued to be better endowed economically than morally. The Avignon" class="md-crosslink">popes of Avignon were less distant and—save perhaps to their French relatives, merchants, and artists—less admirable than the reformer popes of the past; their authority was disputed by their rivals in Rome, and the French higher clergy were confirmed in their incipient Gallicanism (a movement advocating administrative independence from papal control). While organized heresy had almost disappeared, reforms intended to strengthen the parish priesthood languished. Jurisdictional disputes continued to rage between mendicants and seculars and between bishops and canons or archdeacons. Even more than in the past, Christian piety sought encouragement in mystical or individual devotions or readings and in collective observances of the Holy Spirit or the Virgin or the patron saints of the trades that promoted elementary solidarity and charity in the towns; such confraternities were not always welcome to ecclesiastical authorities, whose deportment or jurisdiction they sometimes challenged, whether directly or merely by example. The popular religion of saints—more particularly of the Virgin and the Pietà—and fear of demons worked more deeply into the collective imagination, becoming very evident in the 15th century. Associated with intensified anxieties about sin and damnation, these experiences thrived in times of recurrent and inscrutable disaster, such as the Black Death. Culture and art