Towns and Princely Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century France: The War of the Public Weal, 1465^*

Abstract

On 3 March 1465, Charles of France, duke of Berry and brother to Louis XI, fled to Brittany from the royal court at Poitiers. While tensions between the king and the princes had been building since late 1464, Charles’s flight is typically taken as marking the beginning of the War of the Public Weal, which pitted the bulk of the princes of France—including the dukes of Berry, Bourbon, Brittany, Calabria and Nemours, and the counts of Armagnac, Dunois, Charolais and Saint-Pol—against the Valois monarch. Although the princes sought to depose the king and replace him with his more pliable brother, they justified their rebellion by claiming that they were acting to reform the government of the kingdom for the wider public weal. While the princes hoped that their reforming programme would have a broad appeal, historians have customarily seen the War of the Public Weal as simply a conflict between princes and lacking in wider support. Central to this is the argument that the kingdom’s urban communities stood resolutely with the monarch against the princes.¹ For Bernard Chevalier, the Valois monarchs from the mid-fifteenth century entered into an ‘entente cordiale’ with the bourgeoisie, who worked with them against the princes to create a strong and centralised royal state. He claimed that the first manifestation of this union came in 1440, when urban communities remained loyal to Charles VII during the princely revolt known as the Praguerie, and then again during the War of the Public Weal.²

Yet the pronouncements made by Chevalier and others regarding the urban dimension of the War of the Public Weal are out of proportion to the amount of research done on the rebellion. There is no book on the War of the Public Weal and only a handful of articles, most of which say little about the towns.³ In contrast to the large amount of work done on popular revolts in later medieval France, hardly anything has been written about the princely rebellions of the fifteenth century. This is probably because these conflicts sit uncomfortably within the overarching narrative of French history, which finds that the monarchy emerged triumphant from the Hundred Years War and embarked on a centralising programme which laid the foundations for the emergence of absolutism. Where revolts such as those of the 1350s are seen as popular movements with reforming programmes, the princely rebellions of the fifteenth century are characterised as reactionary and lacking in wider support.

Taking the War of the Public Weal as a case-study, this article shows that an oppositional discourse calling for the reform of government remained vibrant throughout the fifteenth century and helped to generate significant levels of popular support for princely rebellions. It situates the events of 1465 within a longer tradition of urban opposition to the Crown, which saw townspeople in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France support princes who promised that they would eliminate corruption in the royal government and abolish unjust taxes. In the late 1350s, numerous towns supported Charles of Navarre—who postured as the champion of the reforming programme initiated by the Estates in the wake of John II’s capture at Poitiers in 1356—in his struggle against the Valois monarchy.⁴ In the early fifteenth century, urban communities across the kingdom allied themselves with John the Fearless—who, like Charles of Navarre, positioned himself as the promoter of a reform programme—in his struggle against the Armagnac-dominated royal government.⁵ While Chevalier asserted that this union between towns and princes was severed with the end of the civil war and the resurgence of royal power in the 1430s, this article shows that urban support for princely rebellions remained strong far into the fifteenth century.⁶

During the War of the Public Weal, the king and the princes deployed rival ideologies to try to win townspeople to their cause. Yet while a large body of work examines the development of a centralising royal ideology based on the sacral person of the king, the princely ideologies devised in opposition to this conception of monarchical power have received little attention.⁷ Late medieval French princes espoused an ideology which was grounded in the maintenance of traditional regional liberties and resistance to oppressive manifestations of monarchical power, especially the imposition of unfair taxes. Manifestos to townspeople were the principal means French princes used to promote this ideology and they were designed to create common ground between different social classes over a shared set of issues. The origins of these manifestos can be found principally in the civil war of the early fifteenth century, when John the Fearless successfully employed this form of propaganda to win urban support. In his 1417 manifesto, for instance, the duke repeatedly emphasised that he was acting for the ‘public good’ and called for the reform of government and the abolition of taxes—themes which the princes employed again in 1465.⁸

Manifestos became associated with the articulation of reform programmes across Europe during the fifteenth century. Bohemian nobles who rebelled against Emperor Sigismund in the early fifteenth century (after which the Praguerie of 1440 was named) issued manifestos proclaiming the justness of their cause, while rebellions in England of the mid-fifteenth century, such as those of Jack Cade and Richard, duke of York, were accompanied by manifestos listing their grievances against the Lancastrian government, which were designed to encourage popular support for the risings.⁹ On the other side of the Channel, in the early fifteenth century the Lancastrian monarchs had offered the people of France an alternative to the Valois monarchy’s centralising programme. They targeted their propaganda efforts at townspeople, offering them both the restoration of their traditional privileges—which, they argued, the Valois monarchy had abrogated—as well as new liberties.¹⁰ These were similar to the pledges that the French princes made to urban populations during the War of the Public Weal. Indeed, in 1465 the princes gained considerable support in regions which had given their allegiance to the Lancastrian monarchy earlier in the century, such as Normandy. As we shall see, moving away from focusing primarily on the expression of Valois ideology allows us to observe the multiple competing political discourses operating in fifteenth-century France, when rebellious princes made effective use of propaganda to highlight alternatives to Valois rule.

To understand better the extent of popular support for these competing ideologies, it is important to study urban communities collectively rather than focus on individual towns. To that end, this article is based on an examination of more than 120 towns situated across the kingdom, from Languedoc to Picardy and from the Loire to the Saône. It encompasses both large cities, such as Paris, Lyon and Rouen, and small towns, such as Pont-Sainte-Maxence and Mortagne, which are often overlooked but played significant roles in conflicts because of their strategic importance. The article begins by highlighting regional patterns of support for the king and the princes during the War of the Public Weal, before moving on to examine the reasons why towns favoured one side over the other. After establishing a broad overview of the nature of urban support during the war, it shows that the reality was even more complex because towns were rarely entirely pro-king or pro-league. The article shows that the disputes between rival urban factions, which continued long after the end of the civil war in the 1430s, were not simply incoherent local disputes but struggles with an ideological base which existed within a national context. It then goes on to consider what townspeople hoped to gain from their actions during the War of the Public Weal, taking particular account of the competition for urban privileges. This is important because commercial and political privileges were integral to townspeople’s understanding of the public weal. The study thus contributes to wider debates on the importance of ideology, propaganda and the concept of the common good in late medieval Europe, when both monarchs and their overmighty subjects sought to co-opt urban populations to join their respective causes.

I

Towns lay at the very heart of the War of the Public Weal. Military actions were overwhelmingly focused on gaining possession of them, while the war’s one major pitched battle—Montlhéry, 16 July 1465—was part of the struggle for Paris. Louis XI’s first action upon learning of his brother’s flight to Brittany was to write to the towns.¹¹ He tried to prevent urban communities from joining the rebellion and asked them to remain loyal and keep their gates closed to the princes. During the Hundred Years War, the Valois monarchy’s propagandists had developed an ideology centred on the idea of loyalty to the Crown, which Louis redeployed to good effect during the War of the Public Weal. He used letters to advance a narrative which emphasised that the princes had seduced his brother with false words and were breaking the peace of the kingdom. Louis rejected the princes’ claims that they were acting for the good of the realm and presented himself as the true guardian of the public weal, asking towns to help him resist the princes from achieving the ‘total destruction’ of the kingdom.¹² He fused traditions of loyalty to the Crown with the prosecution of a defensive war, again drawing on a royal ideology focused on nationalism and loyalty to the monarch first devised in response to the English invasions of the Hundred Years War.¹³

Bernard Chevalier essentially saw the kingdom’s urban communities as being of little importance in the struggles between the monarch and the princes, but it was precisely because towns were so important that the king and princes went to great lengths to seek their support in 1465. As well as possessing walls and artillery, towns functioned as supply centres, while their networks of brokerage and position as information nodes made them essential in rallying support. Louis XI drew on networks between the royal administration and the towns when he sent to Amiens the chancellor, Philippe de Morvilliers, cousin to the mayor, to persuade the municipal council to remain loyal. Louis fabricated a royalist history of France in which urban loyalty to the Valois monarchy was central, instructing Morvilliers to declare to a general assembly of Amiens’s elite that the town had, from the reign of Charles V, remained ‘good, true and loyal to the French crown’ against all its enemies.¹⁴ Yet during Charles V’s regency the rulers of Amiens had supported Charles of Navarre in his conflict with the Valois monarchy, following which they joined John the Fearless in 1417, and then acknowledged the Lancastrians as the rightful rulers of France in the 1420s and 1430s. Nonetheless, Louis invented long-standing links between the Crown and the townspeople.¹⁵ Similarly, when receiving the submission of ‘our dear and much loved consuls and inhabitants of Aigueperse’ in May 1465, Louis noted how the inhabitants of the town had long remained loyal to his predecessors in their times of adversity, including during the Praguerie of 1440. He asked them to continue to give their support to the Crown against the princes who had risen now against him in rebellion, entirely omitting that he himself had joined the princes in their rebellion against his father in 1440.¹⁶

The princes poured the bulk of their propaganda efforts into trying to win urban communities to their cause. The dukes of Bourbon, Brittany and Berry and the count of Charolais all addressed their manifestos to townspeople, with these texts setting out the justifications for their rebellion and emphasising their reforming programme. As we have seen, by issuing manifestos to townspeople in 1465, the princes were drawing on the success in 1417 of John the Fearless in winning towns to his cause by issuing a manifesto calling for reform of the government and the abolition of taxes.¹⁷ When John, duke of Bourbon, rose in rebellion against Charles VII in 1440, he too issued a manifesto to towns making similar claims, including the promise of tax reduction.¹⁸ Throughout the fifteenth century, French princes continued to issue manifestos to townspeople drawing on these established tropes, which proved successful in winning townspeople to their cause.¹⁹

John the Fearless’s manifesto of 1417 was effective because it followed three years of heavy taxation. In 1465, similarly, the princes’ promise to abolish taxes provided a stark contrast with Louis XI’s imposition of heavy taxes on urban communities in the early years of his reign. The princes’ manifestos forced Louis XI to write to towns to justify the taxes he had levied.²⁰ He explained that he needed the sums to pay for the conquest of Roussillon, the repurchase of the Somme towns, and other things ‘which greatly affect the good of the kingdom’.²¹ Yet Louis’s urban subjects could read this as a catalogue of ill-chosen policies intended to fulfil his personal ambitions rather than acts undertaken for the wider good of the kingdom, the consequences of which had inflicted financial misery on them. As Christine de Pisan noted in her Livre de Paix, a king was acting against the common good when he put his own ambitions above those of the wider good of the kingdom;²² and it was a characteristic of tyrants that they overburdened their subjects with taxes in pursuit of their own interests and thereby acted against the public weal.²³ Throughout the fifteenth century, urban populations invoked the principle of the public weal in their negotiations with the king about taxation.²⁴ To avoid damage to the public weal, taxes levied by the monarchy should be fairly distributed and not overburden particular groups, such as townspeople. In addition, taxes needed to be approved by representative assemblies. The levying of taxes by the Crown without the consultation of such assemblies had provoked urban revolts in the 1350s, the 1380s and again in the early fifteenth century. In 1417, John the Fearless’s successful manifesto included the point that heavy taxes had been imposed on urban populations without consultation.²⁵ In 1465, princes again focused on the issues of taxation and consultation in their manifestos, claiming that they would both abolish Louis XI’s financial impositions and summon a meeting of the Estates General.

II

Given the central role that towns played in the propaganda strategies employed by both the king and the princes in 1465, we must consider how successful their respective efforts were in winning urban populations to their cause. The current consensus in the historiography is that urban communities overwhelmingly backed the king during the War of the Public Weal, a feat which would be especially significant if the towns of the princely states attached themselves to the royal cause. To begin with Brittany, the administrative records of towns such as Nantes and Rennes show that the duchy’s urban populations worked closely with Duke Francis against Louis XI during the War of the Public Weal.²⁶ But the king expected no support from the Breton towns and he made no effort to seek their assistance. In contrast, Louis believed he could win Burgundian towns to his cause. For instance, he wrote to the mayor and échevins of Auxerre twice in early April 1465 calling on their loyalty.²⁷ Yet Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, had already written to Auxerre and asked for its support in the conflict, including preparing its defences against the king. The townspeople took an oath to support the princes through the hands of Philbert de Jaucourt, captain of the town, in response to which Louis XI stripped Jaucourt of his office and had John, count of Nevers, write to the population to ask them to defend the town against the princes and always to remain loyal to the king. Nevertheless, the princes retained the support of Auxerre and indeed all the Burgundian towns, many of which had already started to prepare for war against the king even before the flight of Charles of France.²⁸

In the centre of France, in regions which comprised the heartlands of the power of Charles of France as duke of Berry and John, duke of Bourbon, there was clear urban support for the princes. Bourges, the capital of the duchy of Berry, joined the rebellion. The royal standard was taken down from the town’s main tower and the ducal banner raised in its place.²⁹ The loss of Bourges (a town which under his father had stood at the very heart of Valois power) was a significant blow to Louis XI, particularly because it was located in a strategically important location close to centres of royal power, such as Tours and Poitiers. The town functioned as a military and administrative centre for the princes in 1465, with league soldiers using it as a base of operations for military expeditions against neighbouring royalist strongholds such as Dun-sur-Auron.³⁰ Henri Stein and Jean Favier used the presence of league soldiers in Bourges to explain why the town joined the rebellion:³¹ Bourges was under military occupation and the townspeople were powerless to resist. In fact, the municipal council asked league soldiers into the town to defend it from the royal army. In early May, Louis XI noted that ‘those of the said town of Bourges who support the party opposed to us’ had invited Louis de Bourbon and his soldiers into the town.³² Louis informed the chancellor, Philippe de Morvilliers, of how ‘some [people] from the town of Bourges, adhering to our brother [i.e. Charles of France] and those of his band had sent quickly to fetch the bastard of Bourbon and the lord of Beauvoir with one hundred lances [around 600 men] to enter into the said town of Bourges’.³³ Rather than get drawn into a long siege of a well-defended town, Louis bypassed Bourges and pushed into the Bourbonnais in the hope that a successful campaign there would persuade it to capitulate.³⁴

In the Bourbonnais, the urban populations held for the princes; indeed, Louis XI directed his first campaign of the war specifically against the towns of this region. After attacking the town of Saint-Amand, which fell on 9 May after an assault by royal soldiers, Louis moved on to besiege Montluçon, which he noted was the second most important town in the Bourbonnais. Louis treated the townspeople mercifully and, in return for this clemency, they swore to be loyal and never to take up arms against him again.³⁵ Louis’s favourable treatment of Montluçon persuaded many of its neighbours, such as Aigueperse, Varennes and Vichy, to surrender in expectation of receiving royal mercy, which the king granted in order to encourage other towns to surrender, particularly Bourges.³⁶ Yet other towns held out against the king and some of those who had surrendered to Louis soon returned to the league. As he marched to Auvergne to besiege Riom, Louis sent part of his army to attack the towns of Verneuil-en-Bourbonnais and Ganat. While the inhabitants of Ganat had submitted to Louis XI after the fall of Montluçon and had sworn not to take up arms against him, they had then rejoined the rebellion. When a royal herald now summoned Ganat to surrender, they declared that they neither recognised nor knew the king and would not obey him, stating instead that ‘the duke of Bourbon was their lord and that they would hold the place well for him’.³⁷ After taking Ganat by assault, Louis XI marched to besiege Moulins, the ducal capital. Seeing the continued success of the royal army, Moulins wavered in its loyalty to the duke of Bourbon and, under threat of siege, the townspeople informed the king that they had deliberated and agreed ‘to serve you well and take no other obedience than to you’.³⁸

On 23 March, Pierre Mandonnier, royal receveur in Auvergne, informed Louis XI that he could be sure of the loyalty of Clermont, Montferrand, Ussel, Saint-Pourçain, Issoire, Brioude, Billom and other towns in the region.³⁹ Yet the situation was more complex than Mandonnier allowed for in his report, and Louis had to make considerable efforts to win over the region’s towns. In his manifesto, John, duke of Bourbon, focused on Louis’s heavy taxes and called on these populations not to take oaths of loyalty to the king.⁴⁰ As well as writing to the Auvergne towns to explain why the taxes were necessary, Louis sent Bertrand de La Tour, count of Auvergne and Boulogne, who had remained loyal, to inform the townspeople that the princes sought to deceive them with false words and that they would increase taxes if they succeeded in their rebellion.⁴¹ The Auvergne towns were divided in their support for the princes and the king, which in some instances led to violent struggles. Men from Le Puy, which remained loyal to Louis, led by Rauffet de Balsac, sénéchal of Beaucaire, attacked the neighbouring town of Espaly, which had declared for the princes.⁴² Riom, the principal town in Auvergne, provided a base for the princes during the royal campaign in the Bourbonnais. Although Louis brought his army against it, the town was spared a siege because the dukes of Bourbon and Nemours reached an agreement with Louis XI, which the king believed was the first step in creating a wider peace. Yet the princes deceived the king in order to buy time to allow the Burgundian and Breton armies to march on Paris.⁴³

The towns of the Nivernais, which lay between the royal heartlands and the Burgundian and Bourbon dominions, were also subject to pressure from both the king and the princes. While John, count of Nevers, took the king’s side in the war, the loyalty of the region’s towns was less certain. Although the count’s officers worked to persuade urban communities to remain loyal to the Crown, Philip the Good sent men to urge the towns to join the league.⁴⁴ The geopolitical situation of the Nivernais placed the urban communities of the region in a precarious situation. On one side, they had the royal army, while on the other, at the neighbouring town of Autun, a Burgundian army was massing under Thibaut de Neuchâtel, marshal of Burgundy.⁴⁵ The loyalty of these towns to the Crown was suspect and Louis XI accused Nevers and Decize of giving passage to the Burgundian army, though the entry of Charles the Bold’s army into Picardy drew the king’s attention north before he could attack them.

To the west of the Nivernais lay the heartlands of Valois power, including towns such as Amboise, Orléans, Poitiers and Tours, all of which remained loyal to the king.⁴⁶ Louis put considerable trust in the populations of these towns. On 24 April 1465, for instance, he removed the captain of the royal castle at Amboise, Jean de Bar, seigneur de Baugy, whom he probably suspected of being sympathetic to the princes, and entrusted its defence to the townspeople.⁴⁷ South of the Loire, Bergerac and Périgueux remained loyal to Louis, though their support for the Crown was not unequivocal.⁴⁸ At Bergerac, residents who failed to join the royal army were threatened with treason, while the conflict between the king and the princes intersected with disturbances at Périgueux in 1464–5.⁴⁹ Other towns in the south-west were more enthusiastic in their backing of the king during the conflict. In particular, Louis received offers of considerable support from Bordeaux to help ensure that he won the war. On 28 March, the jurade wrote to Louis wishing him a ‘good and quick victory over your enemies’ and offered to send 2,000 men to the royal army.⁵⁰ While Bordeaux had been under English rule in the preceding decades, with the collapse of Lancastrian France the population now lacked a prince who could protect them and thus Louis XI may have appeared the best guarantor of their security.

Louis XI used the loyalty of towns such as Bordeaux (which might have cause to oppose him) as propaganda to try and secure the loyalty of other urban places. He wrote to Lyon’s échevins on 6 April to inform them that Bordeaux had ‘decided to serve him with body and goods, and to live and die for us’, and that he had received similar declarations of support from Paris, Rouen and the other towns of Normandy, as well as Picardy, Champagne and Languedoc.⁵¹ The support of these towns provided Louis with valuable propaganda to use against the princes: the more support he had, the stronger his position looked. Yet, while many towns in these regions backed the king during the War of the Public Weal, the situation was not as straightforward as Louis’s letter suggests. In theory, the towns of Languedoc supported the king, though what this meant in practice is less certain. The town of Rodez sent just one man to the royal army and while the Estates of Languedoc approved the levying of subsidies by the king to support the cost of his war, many communities refused to pay these sums, claiming that Louis had already overtaxed them. Moreover, the duke of Bourbon, who had a support base in Languedoc, acted to prevent the collection of these taxes, in what was arguably a demonstration of his manifesto promises.⁵² More generally, much of Languedoc, especially the central and western parts, lay far from the fighting and major cities such as Montpellier and Toulouse were not greatly troubled by the conflict, particularly in comparison to towns in regions such as Picardy, where municipal business throughout 1465 was dominated by the war.

North-eastern France was a zone of intense military activity in 1465. Louis found considerable backing from urban populations in this region, with towns such as Abbeville, Amiens and Tournai remaining bastions of support.⁵³ While none of these towns were attacked by Charles the Bold, others, such as Corbie and Ribemont, remained loyal to the king despite the use of threats of force against them, while Ardres, Arleux, Athies and Crèvecoeur all had to be taken by force. Péronne was one of the first places Charles the Bold attacked, and even after the royal garrison withdrew from the town the inhabitants continued to hold out against a Burgundian siege in the early summer, though the town eventually fell in October.⁵⁴ Although Noyon admitted Burgundian soldiers, it did so only after the threat of force.⁵⁵

While there was thus considerable urban support for the king in the north-east of the kingdom, this is only part of the picture, as many other towns in this highly urbanised region joined the rebellion. In Artois, Douai and other towns followed their lord, Philip the Good, into rebellion.⁵⁶ Montdidier used the rebellion to throw off the rule of the count of Étampes, who supported Louis XI in the war, and the townspeople willingly opened their gates to Anthony, bastard of Burgundy, and took an oath placing themselves under Burgundian rule.⁵⁷ The population of Bray-sur-Somme also used the War of the Public Weal as an opportunity to put themselves under Burgundian rule, welcoming Charles the Bold with an entry ceremony and offering him the keys of the town in recognition of their adoption of Burgundian lordship. Other towns in the north-east, including Ancre and Roye, also opened their gates to the Burgundians and took oaths to become Burgundian subjects.⁵⁸ At Mortagne, the townspeople took an oath to Charles the Bold swearing that they would be ‘good and loyal subjects’.⁵⁹ As new subjects of the duke of Burgundy, these towns looked to their new master for protection during the War of the Public Weal. When, in the wake of the battle of Montlhéry, garrisons based in the royalist towns of Clérmont, Compiègne, Creil and Senlis started to take actions against Montdidier and Roye, the latter sent delegations to Philip the Good requesting that he send soldiers to protect them from Louis XI’s soldiers.⁶⁰

While the Champagne towns of Reims and Troyes remained loyal to the king, as did their neighbours at Compiègne, several towns in the Île-de-France opened their gates to the Burgundians. The population of Lagny-sur-Marne welcomed Charles the Bold and were repaid with economic benefits for having willingly put themselves under his rule.⁶¹ Although towns in the Île de-France tended to be small (as a consequence of the presence of the metropolis of Paris in the region), they nonetheless played key roles in the progress of the rebellion. Ultimately, it mattered little that major towns such as Abbeville and Amiens remained loyal to Louis XI, as Charles the Bold simply marched past them with his army. Yet, while considerably smaller, the delivery of the small town of Pont-Sainte-Maxence to Charles the Bold with no apparent opposition from its people was of major significance, because it controlled an important bridge over the Seine and opened up the lands south of Paris.⁶² Crucially, it brought the Burgundian army to the walls of Paris, with the city becoming the focus of the war during the summer of 1465.

Despite being attacked by combined Burgundian and Breton armies, Paris remained loyal to Louis XI. This was of fundamental importance to the progress of the war, and had the city joined the rebellion it is difficult to see how Louis could have recovered his position. Yet Paris’s loyalty to the Crown was not certain and there was a significant body of people in the city, especially among the elite, who supported the princes. To the north of Paris, while Beauvais remained loyal to the king (although it was not approached by league representatives calling for its surrender until October), Saint-Denis opened its gates to the league.⁶³ Although Saint-Denis was a small town, its loss was symbolically significant as its basilica housed the mausoleum of the Valois kings. While Pontoise fell to the princes on 21 September, this was a result of treason by Louis Sorbier, lieutenant of the marshal, Joachim Rouault, and against the will of the townspeople, who were permitted to depart with their goods. When Sorbier attempted to win Meulan for the princes in the same way, the townspeople, who had learned of the events at Pontoise, refused him entry.⁶⁴

Although Pontoise went over to the princes as a result of scheming rather than through urban support, when Rouen joined the league a week later townspeople were at the forefront of the rebellion. Henri Stein, Urbain Legeay and Alfred Canel took the view that, as with Bourges, the Rouennais were forced to open their gates by the duke of Bourbon.⁶⁵ Yet for the population of Rouen the war provided an opportunity to compel the king to reinstall an independent duchy of Normandy with Charles of France as duke of this nascent princely state.⁶⁶ The duchy of Normandy had been united with the Crown during the reign of John II, but there remained a wider and persistent desire among its population to re-establish a strong regional principality. Certainly, there was a longer tradition of opposition to the Crown from the Rouennais. In 1382, there was an anti-fiscal revolt by the city’s textile workers, which included attacks on Charles VI’s officers, while the publication of John the Fearless’s manifesto in the city in 1417 led to further riots and violence against the royal tax collectors.⁶⁷ In 1465, following Rouen’s example, towns across Normandy joined the rebellion and placed themselves under the rule of Charles of France. The actions of the Norman towns came at a critical moment in the rebellion and changed the course of the war. By mid-September, the king and the princes had fought to a standstill and Louis was on the verge of brokering a peace.⁶⁸ When the league princes learnt of the events in Rouen, they disavowed the terms of the peace they were making with Louis. As a result of the rebellion of the Norman towns, the princes were able to impose considerably more severe terms on Louis in the treaties of Conflans and Saint-Maur, which brought an end to the main conflict in October 1465.⁶⁹

The only Norman town which did not immediately join the rebellion was Évreux, which was taken by subterfuge on 9 October when a large number of the inhabitants marched out of one gate in procession to celebrate the feast of St Denis, while at the same time a Breton garrison entered by another. In contrast to towns which voluntarily joined the rebellion, the populations of which received various benefits, many of the inhabitants of Évreux were treated badly by the garrison imposed on them.⁷⁰ Yet some townspeople turned the situation to their advantage and used the league’s control of the town as a means to increase their position.⁷¹ While the knight Jean Lebeuf was blamed for allowing the league forces into Évreux, the manner in which the town was taken suggests a degree of complicity from at least some of the townspeople. As we shall now see, there were factions of townspeople in royalist towns who sought to join the princes in rebellion.

III

It has already been demonstrated that there was extensive urban involvement in the War of the Public Weal. Yet the situation is made more complex still when we move away from the binary position of seeing towns as entirely pro-king or pro-league to look instead for the presence of factions. The civil war of the early fifteenth century had created rival Burgundian and Armagnac factions in towns across France. Following the proclamation of John the Fearless’s 1417 manifesto, Burgundian factions in towns such as Rouen and Troyes secured these places for the duke.⁷² While the civil war formally ended with the peace of Arras in 1435, the evidence from the War of the Public Weal shows that urban political factions created by the Armagnac–Burgundian conflict persisted for decades beyond this. At Mortagne a Burgundian faction overruled the captain, who wanted to keep the gates of the town closed, and joined the league, following which they took an oath to Charles the Bold.⁷³ At Rouen in January 1466, a ‘party of bourgeois and merchants and guildsmen’ rose against townspeople who had held the city for Charles of France.⁷⁴ At Selles-sur-Cher, a faction of townspeople led by the popular public notary Louis de Tilliers wanted to join the league. This insurrection was halted when Tilliers was shot by an archer from the royalist faction as he opened the door of his house one night in July 1465.⁷⁵ Even key royal towns had inhabitants suspected of supporting the princes. Louis XI ordered the arrest of the Poitiers échevin, Denis Dausseurre, in whose house Charles of France had stayed before fleeing into Brittany, along with his fellow townsman Jean Chèvredent (mayor in 1453–4) on charges of being complicit in the rebellion.⁷⁶ While the Somme towns were bastions of royal support, we find clear evidence of urban factions supporting the princes. On 11 June, Louis instructed Saint-Quentin’s municipal council to punish those who wanted to hand the town to Charles the Bold.⁷⁷ Towns such as Amiens and Abbeville had long-standing, powerful Burgundian factions. In 1417, the Burgundian factions were supreme and the towns joined John the Fearless.⁷⁸ While these factions were not as dominant in 1465, nonetheless they remained an important element of the civic body. As such, Charles the Bold did not need to attack Abbeville and Amiens in 1465 (indeed, unlike strongly royalist towns in the north-east such as Péronne, he avoided besieging them) as he knew he could probably reach an accommodation with these populations later. While Lyon was notable for remaining loyal to the king during the war when the population of the Lyonnais overwhelmingly backed the princes, a faction within the consulate was sympathetic to the duke of Bourbon.⁷⁹ Similarly, while the rulers of Le Puy favoured the king, the duke of Bourbon had support amongst the lower classes.⁸⁰

Although Paris remained loyal to the king during the war, it was riven with factions. As in other northern towns, such as Amiens and Rouen, there was a long-standing Burgundian faction in the city.⁸¹ This was particularly significant in 1465 because, while the duke of Burgundy had been allied with the king in the thirty years following the treaty of Arras in 1435, at the onset of War of the Public Weal Charles the Bold hoped to harness his support in the city to win the capital to the league cause—a moment of real danger for the Crown. The factionalism of the 1410s, which had paved the way for Paris to give its allegiance to the Lancastrian monarchy, now threatened to hand the city to the princes. On 22 July 1465, the princes sent a delegation to Paris calling on representatives of the bourgeois, the university, the clergy and the parlement to meet them at the castle of Beauté to hear their justifications for having gone into rebellion against the king.⁸² Henri de Livres, the prévôt des marchands, called a meeting of the municipal elite at the town hall at 8 a.m. on 24 August to decide how to respond to the princes. While de Livres and the Parisian échevins were firm supporters of the king, there were many members of the Burgundian faction present at the meeting and they favoured the princes. Seeing the mood in the room, Livres terminated the meeting and called for it to reconvene in the afternoon in a smaller room with a more restricted audience. Although he sought to use this second meeting to obtain a more favourable outcome for the king, a significant body of people still wanted to open the city’s gates to the princes.⁸³ Given the apparent support for the league in town, de Livres went to Charles de Melun, count of Eu and lieutenant of Paris, who commanded the royal soldiers in the city. As a result, the king won the day and the bishop of Paris, Guillaume Chartier, informed the princes that the city’s gates would remain closed.⁸⁴

While the assemblies were taking place in August to discuss the city’s response to the overtures from the princes, a riot was fomented in a bid to assassinate Henri de Livres.⁸⁵ The contemporary chronicler Jean de Maupoint noted that when word spread that many of the Parisian elite participating in these assemblies wanted to open the city’s gates to the league, the ‘common people’ wanted to kill the ambassadors who had received the proposals from the princes at Beauté. Maupoint stated that during the night which followed the assemblies, the popular classes, who favoured the royal cause, planned ‘great murders’ amongst the Parisian elites whom they believed favoured the league.⁸⁶ There was an occupational element to these factional struggles; Arnoul Boucher, leader of the Parisian butchers, was identified as one of the leading opponents of Henri de Livres’s royalist faction. In the trials which came in the aftermath of the War of the Public Weal, Charles de Melun, lieutenant of Paris, accused Boucher of seeking to deliver the city to the princes. He alleged that Boucher ‘had made a great assembly of people in order to kill him [i.e. Charles de Melun] and the said provost [i.e. Henri de Livres]’.⁸⁷ While Boucher denied this accusation and managed to avoid prosecution (probably because his accuser was executed on the false charge of having favoured the princes during the war), other evidence points to the involvement of the butchers with the princes. For instance, Richard Macé was stripped of his étal in the boucherie of Paris for having supported the league, and his stall given to an archer named Jacques Barbier who had fought in the royal army at Montlhéry.⁸⁸ The fact that Barbier served in the retinue of the count of Armagnac and was given a shop taken from a Burgundian-supporting Parisian butcher harked back to the city’s factions during the civil war of the early fifteenth century.

Support for the princes grew in Paris after Montlhéry when it became clear that this was not the royal victory Louis had made it out to be. As the battle took place just outside the city the Parisians were well placed to grasp this, not least because they remained besieged by league forces throughout the summer. Given Louis’s inability to obtain a decisive victory, it began to appear that the princes might succeed in their rebellion, which we see in the interrogations of people arrested in Paris during this time.⁸⁹ This was an especially dangerous moment for Louis XI, who perhaps feared a repeat of the situation in 1418 when members of the Burgundian faction in Paris secretly admitted John the Fearless into the city after he failed to take it by force.⁹⁰ Certainly, there were numerous attempts by Burgundians in Paris in 1465 to admit Charles the Bold secretly into the town. For instance, a son of a prominent Parisian family was caught working with clerks from the parlement and Châtelet to admit league soldiers into the city through a postern gate.⁹¹ There were numerous executions of league supporters in the city and Parisian craftsmen were caught carrying messages to the princes. The plots, arrests and expulsions extended into the mercantile and administrative elite.⁹² In a bid to halt the growing manifestations of league support in Paris, prominent persons suspected of being favourable to the princes were expelled from the city. These included several members of the Parisian delegation which went to the princes at Beauté, most notably three brothers from the city’s prominent Luillier family, as well as the lawyers Jean Choart and François Halle who worked respectively at the prévôté and the parlement.⁹³ Many Parisians who worked in the various organs of the royal administration based in the city were expelled at this time, including prominent individuals such as Jean Compaing, général conseiller sur le fait de la justice et des aides.⁹⁴ There was, indeed, a long tradition of members of the government based in the city supporting the duke of Burgundy. Many of the plots of the early fifteenth century to admit John the Fearless had been led by Parisians who worked in the royal administration.⁹⁵

As well as factions of league supporters in towns such as Paris, there were royalist factions in towns which supported the rebellion. In early May 1465, Louis XI noted how ‘those of the said town of Bourges who supported the party contrary to us’ had led the town into rebellion.⁹⁶ The rival factions at Bourges continued to exist after the war, spilling into revolt and violence again in 1474 as they competed for ascendancy in the town.⁹⁷ In Auxerre, while the ducal faction was most numerous and held the key positions in the civic administration, the city was divided and many townspeople did not take the oath of loyalty that Philip the Good’s representative requested from the inhabitants at the beginning of the rebellion of 1465.⁹⁸ Although Dijon’s town council remained loyal to the duke, significant elements among the townspeople favoured the king. The defensive measures the échevins took in spring 1465 were as much to defend against a feared pro-royalist rising in the town as they were to repel an attack from a royal army. Members of the urban population were vocal in their support for the king, and the fleur-de-lis and the Crown were worn openly as symbols of support for Louis XI, while words ‘against the honour of Monseigneur of Charolais [Charles the Bold]’ were heard in the streets.⁹⁹ The continuing presence of urban factions posed a problem in the aftermath of the War of the Public Weal, because, while the king made peace with the princes, factional divisions posed a threat to urban security. Dijon’s town council had supported the princes during the war, but with the establishment of peace they banned in early 1466 a song about the battle of Montlhéry which claimed that Charles the Bold had won a victory over the king. Anyone caught singing this song was to be punished ‘so as to be an example to others’.¹⁰⁰

A range of factors led to the emergence of these factions. First, as we saw above, ideology played an important role in the War of the Public Weal. Many of the messages contained in the princes’ manifestos were tailored to resonate with townspeople, particularly those regarding the abolition of taxes and governmental reform. Furthermore, while it would be easy to play down the relevance for urban populations of the aspects of the manifestos which focused more squarely on matters relating to princely power, these too could have a wider currency. Although Bordeaux remained loyal to the king, its jurades sent a delegation to Louis XI at the beginning of the war to declare that Charles of France should be given lands more appropriate to his position as the king’s brother.¹⁰¹ The jurades may have hoped that the king could prevent the outbreak of civil war by resolving this issue. In some towns we find manifestations of popular support for both princely and royal ideologies. While Dijon’s town council organised processions in support of the ‘princes of royal blood assembled for the good of the kingdom’, one townsman spoke out against Charles the Bold’s right to take up arms against the monarch, declaring that he did not have the right to involve himself in the affairs of the king ‘because the king is king of his kingdom and sovereign’ and the duke of Burgundy was the king’s subject.¹⁰² This was an expression of a belief in the ultimate power of the king over the princes and an articulation of the royal ideology that the king is emperor in his own domains. In response, Dijon’s town council gave an exposition of the princes’ authority to act in the wider good of the kingdom, drawing on the oppositional ideology put forward by the princes in their manifestos.¹⁰³

Members of municipal councils of provincial towns such as Dijon often had close links to ducal administrations, which may have made them inclined to favour the princes. While Lyon supported the king during the war, a faction in the consulate supported the princes. Many of these men had made their careers in the service of the duke of Bourbon, either through employment in the ducal administration or by selling goods to the duke’s household.¹⁰⁴ Links between princes and urban governments were especially strong in towns which served as the capitals of princely states. The merchants who dominated the government of Bourges profited considerably from selling goods to the ducal household, while Rouen’s resurgence as the capital of an independent duchy of Normandy stood to benefit the city’s elites, both through having access to the ducal court and by providing him with the goods his household required. The outbreak of the conflict between the king and princes brought commercial benefits to some townspeople. The Bourges merchants Martin Leroy and Martin Anjorrant used the rebellion to avoid a summons to the Chambre de Comptes in Paris regarding payments they owed on silk and other luxury goods.¹⁰⁵ These men were key supporters of Charles of France; Anjorrant was one of the bankers who financed the rebellion.¹⁰⁶ The economic benefits of the war extended beyond the elite, especially for residents of ducal capitals, and the financial accounts kept by Charles of France’s treasurer show that numerous townspeople from Bourges from a range of trades benefited from the purchases the duke made during the war.¹⁰⁷

As well as the advantages which could accrue from living close to the centres of princely power, urban populations could have cause to fear incurring the displeasure of the princes. As we saw above, while Lyon remained loyal to the king there was a faction in the consulate favourable to John, duke of Bourbon. This existing body of support was strengthened by the échevins, who feared the harm the princes could do to the city. In early April, the royal bailli confiscated the corn a merchant was bringing from Provence to the army of John, duke of Calabria, who had joined the rebellion. The échevins protested against the bailli’s actions because the duke of Calabria had threatened to take reprisals against the city if they did not allow the corn to continue its journey. Fear of being blamed by the duke for the confiscation of these goods prompted the échevins to have a notary put down in writing that they had opposed the arrest of these goods and that the bailli was entirely to blame.¹⁰⁸ The longer the war continued—and the more it looked as if the princes might win—the more Lyon’s échevins feared reprisals for having supported the king. Early in the war, the échevins had called on the king’s officers in the city to arrest and imprison the duke of Bourbon’s physician on charges of spying. Yet when the duke threatened actions against the city if they did not release his physician, the échevins did a volte-face, claiming that they had no part in the physician’s arrest, which they now entirely blamed on royal officials, and calling for his release.¹⁰⁹

IV

Although Lyon’s échevins feared economic reprisals from the dukes for having remained loyal to the Crown, others saw the conflict as an opportunity to acquire commercial rights. Urban economic aims were intermeshed with both ideological discourses regarding the common good and political realities. While Charles Petit-Dutaillis claimed that urban support for the king was strong in 1465 because urban elites had a ‘terror of seeing the civil war continue’, in fact the experience of the Hundred Years War had shown townspeople that war could provide an opportunity to win liberties which would otherwise be hard to obtain.¹¹⁰ In early 1465, a delegation from Paris attended Louis XI’s entry into Poitiers to petition the king for new rights. However, they received nothing besides the ‘taxe foraine’—the tax foreign merchants paid in the city—which the Parisian chronicler Jean de Roye commented was a ‘little thing’. In any case, the Chambre de Comptes refused to register the king’s letters of exemption, which meant that even this meagre grant was not awarded.¹¹¹ Yet three months later, at the beginning of the rebellion, Louis abolished the tax placed on wine sold in the city.¹¹² This was a major concession because in the first year of his reign Louis XI had stripped from the Parisians the right to sell retail wine without having to pay the quatriesme, which had been a significant source of displeasure towards the Crown from the townspeople. While this grant was registered at the Chambre des Aides on 3 April, Jean de Maupoint noted that it was proclaimed throughout the city’s streets in late July. This was perhaps to give a further official public validation to the act, or to ensure that it was broadcast again during this moment of danger for the Crown, when the princes were besieging the city and many of its inhabitants (especially among the elite, who stood to benefit most from the abolition of the tax) were sympathetic towards the league.¹¹³ Indeed, several days later, on 3 August, before he left for Normandy, Louis ‘with a particular desire to do good to his town of Paris and to its inhabitants’ made further widescale reductions on taxes on a range of goods sold in the city specifically to make the population more inclined to favour the royalist cause with Denis Hesselin, élu sur le fait des aides, announcing these tax reductions throughout the streets of the city.¹¹⁴

Obtaining lucrative commercial grants was particularly important in the mid-1460s because Louis XI had taxed the towns heavily in the early years of the reign. As tensions grew between the king and the princes in late 1464, Louis placed further heavy taxes on urban populations to raise funds for the anticipated war. On 24 December 1464, the Amiens town council met and declared that they were unable to find any means to raise the sums the king had levied on the town. Over the course of the next three months, all their efforts to have the king remove or reduce this tax failed.¹¹⁵ On 1 March, Amiens appointed a delegation to go to court and petition the king directly for a reduction of the tax.¹¹⁶ The town’s position was considerably strengthened two days later when Charles of France fled from his brother’s court. On 4 March, Louis wrote to Amiens, calling on the town to remain loyal and reducing the taille of 20,000 écus by half; by the end of the month, he had entirely remitted the full sum and declared that they would not pay any further taxes.¹¹⁷ Fear of the princes gaining the support of key towns was pushing Louis into making the very abolition of taxes which the princes were calling for in their manifestos.

Beyond Amiens, at the beginning of the war Louis made significant tax remissions to other towns lying on the strategically important north-eastern frontier, including Abbeville and Montreuil-sur-Mer.¹¹⁸ Given that Louis expected the Burgundian army to enter France through this region, he wanted to ensure that its towns remained loyal. As well as annulling taxes, he also offered these towns the prospect of obtaining future privileges and favours by remaining loyal to him. When Saint-Quentin sold goods to Burgundian troops, and looked on the verge of opening its gates to Charles the Bold, Louis wrote to them with the promise of good favour for remaining loyal.¹¹⁹ During his campaign in the Bourbonnais in May 1465, Louis wrote to Péronne, the frontier town which could expect to encounter the Burgundian army first, to commend the townspeople for their loyalty and assure them that he would keep their interests in his ‘special recommendation’.¹²⁰

Towns at the centre of the kingdom also used the threat to the Crown at the beginning of the rebellion, when Louis XI needed to assure himself of their support, as an opportunity to obtain new privileges. When Louis wrote to Poitiers in early March to ask for their loyalty, the municipal council replied by sending Jean de Janoilhac, a member of one of the city’s leading families, to court to hand the king twenty requests alongside a letter assuring him of the town’s support. As well as granting all of these requests, Louis affirmed that in return for their support he would particularly favour their affairs.¹²¹ Similarly, a delegation from Issoudun travelled to Amboise on 26 April both to offer Louis its loyalty and to ask him to grant them seven fairs. This formed part of the town’s commercial competition with their neighbours at Bourges, who had been granted seven fairs by Charles VII in 1440 in return for staying loyal to the Crown during the Praguerie. Now Bourges was in rebellion and Issoudun was seeking an equivalent reward for remaining loyal.¹²²

The princes also sought to use the granting of liberties and abolition of taxes to win the support of urban populations, drawing on a key element of the oppositional ideology they had formulated.¹²³ On 4 June 1465, Thibaut de Neufchâtel, marshal of Burgundy, learning that Langres was planning to admit a royal garrison, wrote to the municipal council to encourage them to join the rebellion by stating that the princes were acting for the wider good of the kingdom and would abolish taxes and maintain them in their rights and privileges.¹²⁴ While Langres remained loyal to the king despite the appeals of the princes, other towns joined the rebellion. The memoirist Jacques Du Clerq noted that messengers from Charles of France and Charles the Bold went to Montdidier, Péronne and Pont-Sainte-Maxence and proclaimed that they would abolish a range of taxes, including the quatriesme.¹²⁵ That two out of these three towns joined the rebellion suggests that this strategy had some purchase with urban communities. By focusing on tax concessions, the princes targeted an issue which had led several towns to go into revolt against Louis XI at the beginning of his reign.¹²⁶ In his manifesto of 13 March 1465, John, duke of Bourbon, used tax concessions to try to push the towns of the Auvergne into rebellion, while his uncle, the bishop of Puy-en-Velay, sent messengers from Charles of France to towns throughout the region to make public proclamations that he would abolish an array of taxes, echoing the claims John the Fearless had made to the towns in the manifesto of 1417.¹²⁷

While the royal government’s response to this effective Burgundian propaganda in the 1410s was lacklustre, Louis XI—who, as noted above, had joined the princes against his father during the Praguerie and knew well the power of manifestos in promoting an ideology of reform—wrote to the towns in 1465 both to justify his levying of taxes and to discredit the claims the princes put forward about tax abolition in their manifestos.¹²⁸ Where the dukes of Bourbon and Berry claimed to the Auvergne towns that on ‘their personal authority and by their letters patent’ they would make good on these tax reductions, Louis replied that the princes had lied to the towns in order to win them to their cause and argued that if they succeeded in their rebellion they would have to increase levels of taxation.¹²⁹ In the north of the kingdom, when Charles the Bold sent his manifesto to Amiens in June 1465 promising the same tax reductions, Guillaume Hugonet immediately wrote to the échevins cautioning them not to believe the princes as they had no regard for their interests.¹³⁰

While the king had the advantage over the princes in that their promises of kingdom-wide tax reductions were dependent on winning the war, in some instances they could issue with immediate effect grants to individual towns, particularly those lying in their domains. In the same way that royalist towns made clear to the king what grants they expected in return for their loyalty, urban communities in princely states used the rebellion to win economic benefits. The delegation Auxerre sent to Philip the Good to declare its support for his son against the king in the war also requested—and obtained—the abolition of taxes as well as the annulment of loans they had taken from John, bastard of Burgundy.¹³¹ Even beyond their domains, the princes acted to demonstrate their good intentions to towns which joined the rebellion. At Lagny-sur-Marne, Charles the Bold burnt all the papers detailing the taxes levied on the town, as well as taking the salt contained in the grenier à sel and dividing it among the townspeople.¹³² The distribution of salt was a good way to try to win the support of urban populations, for whom the salt tax was a burden. When Vendôme refused to open its gates to the dukes of Berry and Brittany, the princes threatened to burn the town and put its population to the sword. As a result, the population opened the gates and allowed the princes to enter.¹³³ Having secured the town, the dukes sought to win the population to their side by taking the salt from the grenier à sel and selling it cheaply to them.¹³⁴ Similarly, at Évreux, which the league took by plot, they distributed salt as a way to try and win round the population.¹³⁵

Rather than wait for the princes to win the war and make good on the promises contained in their manifesto, some towns used the rebellion to have extensive new privileges granted with immediate effect. After taking an oath to Charles of France through the hands of the duke of Bourbon, Rouen’s échevins encouraged their new master to visit the city as soon as possible so that they could obtain the promised privileges.¹³⁶ While Charles waited in the monastery of Mont-Sainte-Catherine, which lay just outside of Rouen, for the townspeople to prepare his entry, Francis, duke of Brittany, planned to lead him away from the city before he could be formally installed as duke of Normandy in the cathedral—an act necessary to make his grants legal. Learning of this, the town council descended, heavily armed, upon the monastery, forcibly separated Charles from the duke of Brittany and compelled him immediately to make his entry into the city as duke of Normandy.¹³⁷ At his ducal coronation, which took place in Rouen’s cathedral on 1 December, Charles swore to respect and observe the Charte aux Normands, the special set of privileges the Normans had possessed before becoming attached to the royal domain in the fourteenth century.¹³⁸ Rouen’s actions in going into rebellion to gain extensive new privileges played a key role in encouraging the other Norman towns to join the league. Pont-Audemer’s municipal council paid two Carmelites from Rouen to obtain from Charles the same privileges for the town as those he had granted to Rouen, particularly the abolition of the taille.¹³⁹

The Norman towns could also have expected that, even if the war ultimately went against the princes, the king would confirm the liberties Charles of France had granted them, despite their having joined the rebellion. Indeed, towns could use the moment of surrender as an opportunity to negotiate for further privileges. Although Rouen’s municipal council poured considerable effort and resources into defending the fledgling duchy against royal invasion, by early January 1466 it had become clear that they could not hope to hold out against the king. Yet Rouen’s experiences during the fifteenth century had shown the city council that it could turn this type of situation to its advantage. After Rouen joined John the Fearless in 1417, the dauphin led a royal army to assault the city. Yet the townspeople were able to negotiate a general amnesty despite having murdered the royal bailli and taken up arms against the Crown.¹⁴⁰ In 1449, Rouen’s leaders again negotiated a favourable accommodation with Charles VII, who had brought another royal army to lay siege to the city, which had given its allegiance to the Lancastrian monarchy for three decades.¹⁴¹ The Rouennais employed a similar strategy during Louis XI’s reconquest of the duchy following the War of the Public Weal, initiating negotiations with the king three days after the neighbouring town of Pont-de-l’Arche fell to royal troops on 11 January 1466. Yet rather than cowering before an all-powerful monarchy, the city council felt strong enough to negotiate substantial concessions from Louis XI in return for their surrender, including commercial privileges, control over fairs, and the right to acquire noble lands in the surrounding region. Furthermore, the Rouennais used their capitulation to strengthen their hand in their long-standing competition with Paris, by requesting that Louis ‘grant them the same privileges as he had granted to Paris’.¹⁴² This undoubtedly came as a blow to Paris’s municipal council, which had played a major role in Louis XI’s reconquest of the duchy.¹⁴³ If the Parisians had hoped to use the war to impose their dominance over Rouen, the Rouennais were able to use their expertise at negotiating submissions to emerge from the conflict stronger than ever before. As we saw above, the Parisians had obtained a substantial extension of their privileges by remaining loyal to the king and providing him with considerable support. Now the Rouennais were demanding the same privileges for having gone into rebellion against him.¹⁴⁴ Indeed, it is striking that, while Louis executed royal officers in Rouen and expelled cathedral canons, similar measures were not taken against the bourgeois despite the fact that they had placed themselves at the forefront of support for Charles of France in the rebellion.¹⁴⁵

Many other Norman towns also fared well during Louis XI’s reconquest. On 26 December, John, duke of Bourbon, who had now switched sides, appeared before the walls of Vernon and assured the townspeople that Louis XI would confirm their privileges if they returned to royal obedience.¹⁴⁶ Similarly, before opening their gates to the king, the inhabitants of Louviers negotiated a pardon for their actions and ensured that the king confirmed their privileges.¹⁴⁷ Louis made a range of other concessions to towns across Normandy, including granting Gisors and Pont-Audemer the right to keep the profits from the salt tax. Honfleur received an exemption from all tailles despite being one of the final towns to return to royal obedience during the reconquest.¹⁴⁸ It was not just the Norman towns which received royal confirmation of their privileges in return for surrendering. During his conquest of the Bourbonnais, the towns which capitulated to Louis used the moment of surrender to obtain lucrative new privileges. When Aigueperse capitulated to Louis following the fall of Montluçon, he granted the population exemption from all tailles and from paying the franc-fief, which, as a tax non-nobles paid on the purchase of land, was of particular relevance for the urban elite.¹⁴⁹ Similarly, when the duchy of Berry returned to direct royal rule after Charles of France’s installation as duke of Normandy, Louis pardoned the inhabitants of Bourges and confirmed their privileges.¹⁵⁰

The towns which did best out of the war were those that either went into rebellion against the king or, as in the case of Paris, looked to be on the verge of rebellion. The same was not true for many of the towns that remained loyal throughout the war. Amiens and Abbeville were given to Charles the Bold by the terms of the treaty of Conflans in November 1465, an action which led the royalist factions in these towns to fear reprisals and the loss of rights for having supported the king during the war. The ruling council of Abbeville was especially concerned because some inhabitants had spoken defamatory words against Charles the Bold during the rebellion and now feared his wrath.¹⁵¹ Lyon, which had remained loyal to the king in spite of its growing fear of the princes in the summer of 1465, was repaid for this loyalty in January 1466 by being stripped of two of its fairs—the lifeblood of the city—which Louis gave to Geneva because he wanted to keep Amadeus, duke of Savoy, from favouring the Burgundians.¹⁵² The Champagne towns such as Troyes, which remained loyal throughout the war and suffered from heavy fighting in their regions, were offered to Charles of France in the September negotiations, while Beauvais, which had refused Burgundian demands to surrender, was offered to Charles the Bold.¹⁵³ Finally, the Gascon towns, which had remained loyal to the Crown, were given to Charles of France following Louis XI’s reconquest of Normandy. This action was so unpopular with the townspeople of the region that when these lands returned to the royal domain after Charles’s death in 1472, La Rochelle demanded that Louis take an oath during his entry that they would never again be alienated from the Crown.¹⁵⁴ Loyalty to the Crown did not necessarily work in the best interests of townspeople in fifteenth-century France.

V

This analysis of urban participation in the War of the Public Weal has demonstrated the complex range of factors which shaped urban participation in the princely rebellions. The article has highlighted the important role which an oppositional ideology played in fomenting opposition to the Crown, something often overlooked in the historiography of later medieval France. While an examination of the other major princely rebellions in fifteenth-century France is beyond the scope of this article, they too witnessed significant levels of urban participation. Many of the towns which played a role in the War of the Public had also participated in the Praguerie, particularly those in the Bourbonnais, which was the centre of the rebellion in 1440. Charles VII laid siege to towns such as Vichy and Varennes in 1440, as well as sacking Cusset as a warning to others (an act which led to the surrender of several towns), and suppressing Niort’s municipal council and stripping the town of its privileges.¹⁵⁵ In Auvergne, Riom joined the Praguerie while Clermont-Ferrand remained loyal to the Crown—a division which we see again in the War of the Public Weal.¹⁵⁶ Further research may reveal similar traditions of towns joining successive princely rebellions. Moreover, it is misleading to say that towns across the kingdom did not join the rebellion in 1440, given that vast swathes of the kingdom—including Gascony, Normandy and Maine—had already rebelled against the French crown by acknowledging the Lancastrian monarch as the king of France. If the Burgundian towns did not join the Praguerie in 1440, this was because their master, Philip the Good, did not support the rebellion (and the evidence from 1465 shows that Burgundian towns were quick to follow their duke into rebellion).

The Chevalier model of an entente cordiale developing between towns and the Crown in the century after 1440 has been the orthodoxy since it was first proposed four decades ago, and it has not received a sustained challenge. Rather, recent studies, such as those by David Rivaud and Gisela Naegle, develop Chevalier’s thesis and support his assertion that urban and royal interests fused during this period.¹⁵⁷ Yet this is only part of the picture, and the extent of the union between town and Crown in the century following 1440 is in danger of being overstated. Part of the problem is that Chevalier based his ideas on the towns which lay at the heart of royal power during this period. Yet a different picture emerges when we look more broadly across the kingdom, and particularly at the princely states. Even with the end of the Hundred Years War, French towns continued to have to deal with various rulers—and the princes were often stronger figures in the regions than the king.

It was not just the royal state which was employing ideology to attempt to co-opt towns into its centralising project in the fifteenth century. The princes of the kingdom were also seeking to expand the limits of their authority, and towns played as important a role in this process as they did for the king.¹⁵⁸ This is seen clearly in the War of the Public Weal, which saw a coming together of princely power with regional identity. Towns in royal France, such as Montdidier and Mortagne, used the rebellion to attach themselves to princely states, while the urban populations of Normandy—part of the royal domain since the mid-fourteenth century—were instrumental in resurrecting the duchy as a princely state in 1465. Princes won urban support for the rebellion by appealing to a form of national sentiment in the guise of reforming the government and reducing taxes, objectives which they made the cornerstones of their ideology. Yet these aims had a strongly regional character, especially as royal demands for taxation were seen to infringe on local or regional privileges—and in Normandy the rebellion movement coalesced around the idea of special Norman privileges which had been abolished by the Crown but which were a key part of the region’s identity.

For André Leguai, the ‘presence of officers and financial representatives of the king at Moulins, Montluçon, Vichy and other “bonnes villes” is an important fact because it attested in [front of] the eyes of the Bourbonnais that the duke of Bourbon was not their sovereign and recalled to them that they belonged to the kingdom of France as much as the duchy of Bourbon’.¹⁵⁹ Yet when the princes rose in rebellion against the king in 1465 the towns of the Bourbonnais did not hesitate to back their duke against the king. Urban populations were clear that they belonged to the kingdom of France but that they were nonetheless acting against their king. When Auxerre sent a delegation to give their oath of allegiance to the duke of Burgundy, they reminded the ducal officers that the town was part of the kingdom of France as set down in the treaty of Arras (1435). Such as position could sit comfortably within the ideology of princely rebellion in the War of the Public Weal, as a move against the king by his own declared subjects was justified by the princes’ claim that it was their duty to remove an incompetent king.¹⁶⁰

While Jacques Krynen argued that the character of the War of the Public Weal was different from previous revolts, including the challenges of the 1350s and the Parisian revolt of the early fifteenth century (in the sense that the princes in 1465 were seeking to reform the entire government of the realm), in terms of urban participation we can detect more of a continuity of purpose across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was a period when rebellious princes developed an oppositional ideology based around the reform of government and the public good, and promoted it through an effective use of propaganda to win townspeople to their side. More widely, the history of pre-modern France is marked by unions of towns with the princes against the Crown. Townspeople played a key role in the Wars of Religion, when Protestant and then Catholic League towns backed princes in their struggles against the monarchy, while in the seventeenth century French towns such as Paris and Bordeaux joined the princes against Louis XIV in the Fronde.¹⁶¹ Rather than towns joining forces with the king to create a centralised royal state, urban populations continued to put themselves in opposition to the Crown when they felt that their particular interests were threatened.

In a series of important articles, Peter Lewis argued for the decentralisation of power in later medieval France.¹⁶² Similarly, J. Russell Major argued that from the 1440s the French monarchy was forced to decentralise power.¹⁶³ Major’s ideas were especially controversial and met with considerable opposition, particularly in the francophone historiography of later medieval France, largely because this view stood at odds with the great centralising narrative of French history which found that the Valois monarchy, emerging victorious from the Hundred Years War, in the second half of the fifteenth century gained popular support in its drive to break the power of the great princes and establish a centralised royal state. On the occasions when historians have questioned the Jacobin model of centralisation to consider a more nuanced decentralised model, this devolution of authority is itself portrayed as manifestation of royal power, with the monarchy co-opting local institutions—and particularly towns—to support its aims.¹⁶⁴ Yet a study of the ideology of opposition and urban participation in the War of the Public Weal supports Major’s view that the decentralisation of power was a manifestation of the ongoing limitations of French royal power at the end of the Middle Ages.

Footnotes