Armagnacs et Bourguignons: La fabrique de la guerre civile, 1407–1435, by Joël Blanchard

Joël Blanchard has made a distinguished contribution the history of late medieval France, as the editor of some of the major sources and the biographer of Louis XI and Philippe de Commynes. Armagnacs et Bourguignons is a narrative of the thirty-year civil war which began with the murder in November 1407 of Louis I, duke of Orléans in the streets of Paris by the agents of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. It joins a crowded field. In French there is the excellent modern account by Bertrand Schnerb as well as classic narratives by Jacques d’Avout, originally published in 1943, and by Coville and Petit-Dutaillis in Lavisse’s multi-volume history of France. In English there is the more analytical study by Richard Vaughan in his four-part history of Valois Burgundy.

What is puzzling about Blanchard’s version is the extraordinarily narrow range of sources on which it is based. It is essentially an account of the civil war as seen by the propagandists of the two camps and the three main French chroniclers, Michel Pintoin and Jean Juvenal des Ursins up to 1422 and Enguerrand de Monstrelet for the whole period. Only limited use has been made of other important chronicles, such as Guillaume Gruel, the contemporary biographer of Richemont, or the well-informed herald of Charles VII, Gilles le Bouvier. No use has been made of the administrative records of France and Burgundy. The copious English material is ignored. This leads to some factual mistakes, for example the extravagant figures given for the size of English armies.

More significant is the failure to address major questions on which the chroniclers and propagandists are silent, which leads to a very incomplete account of the origins and progress of the wars. There was a lot more than personal animosity behind the mutual hostility of Louis of Orléans and John the Fearless. They were engaged in a contest for the patronage and revenues of the French Crown at a time when the king, Charles VI, was incapable of managing them himself. Philip the Bold had liberally helped himself from the French treasury in his lifetime, in order to build up his transnational empire. When the Duke of Orléans took control of the finances of the French state after his death, he prevented John the Fearless from doing the same. It was an existential threat to the house of Burgundy. The two seminal volumes by Maurice Rey on the finances of the monarchy and the excellent study by the Swedish historian Michael Nordberg (the former not included in the bibliography) do much to explain the quarrels of the princes. The powerful movement to eliminate corruption in the royal administration, which John the Fearless cynically exploited for his own purposes, receives little attention. Yet it was the main reason for the militant support that he received from Paris and its university. Paris was, none the less, always the heart of the Burgundian party in France, and veterans of the Cabochian revolution of 1413 were to be found among the servants of the Anglo-Burgundian regime to the end. Perhaps most curious of all, Blanchard has little to say about the role of the English. Their ability to exploit the divisions of France and draw major players such as John VI, duke of Brittany and Charles of Orléans to their side was a major destabilising factor in French politics. Their occupation of much of northern and western France after 1417 largely accounts for the inability of the two camps to reach an accommodation even after it became clear that the civil war was ruining them both. Yet Blanchard’s narrative effectively ends with the treaty of Troyes in 1420, the next fifteen years being covered in forty breathless pages. It is as if the civil war was a purely French affair.

This is a useful book for those who want a straightforward, blow-by-blow account of what happened, but it will disappoint scholars looking for a more profound explanation of events. A definitive account of this important but exceptionally complex crisis of the medieval French state has yet to be written.