With the help of his faults he created modern France. He found it a loose association of feudal and ecclesiastical principalities; he made it a nation, the most powerful in Latin Christendom. He brought in silk weavers from Italy, miners from Germany; he improved harbors and transport, protected French shipping, opened new markets to French industry, and allied the government of France with the rising mercantile and financial bourgeoisie. He saw that the extension of commerce across local and national frontiers required a strong central administration. Feudalism was no longer needed for the protection and management of agriculture; the peasantry was slowly freeing itself from a stagnant serfdom; the time had passed when the feudal barons could make their own laws, mint their own coins, play sovereign in their domains; by fair means or foul he would bring them, one by one, to submission and order. He restricted their right to trespass on peasant properties in their hunts, established a governmental postal service that ran through their estates (1464), forbade them to wage private wars, and demanded of them all the back dues they had failed to pay to their liege lords, the kings of France.
They did not like him. Representatives of 500 noble families met in Paris and formed the Ligue du bien public (1464) to uphold their privileges in the sacred name of the public good. The Count of Charolais, heir to the throne of Burgundy, joined this League, eager to add northeastern France to his duchy. Louis’ own brother, Charles, Duke of Berry, decamped to Brittany and headed the revolt. Enemies and armies rose against the King on every side. If they could unite he was lost; his only hope was to defeat them piecemeal. He dashed south across the Allier River and compelled a hostile force to surrender; he rushed back north just in time to prevent a Burgundian army from entering his capital. Each side claimed victory in the battle of Montlhéry; the Burgundians retreated, Louis entered Paris, the Burgundians returned with allies and laid siege to the city. Unwilling to risk rebellion by Parisians too intelligent to starve, Louis yielded by the treaty of Conflans (1465) almost all that his foes demanded—lands, money, offices; brother Charles received Normandy. Nothing was said about the public good; the people had to be taxed to raise the required sums. Louis bided his time.
Charles soon slipped into war with Duke Francis of Brittany, who captured him; Louis marched into Normandy and regained it bloodlessly. But Francis, rightly suspecting that Louis wanted Brittany too, joined with the Count of Charolais—who had now become Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy—in an offensive alliance against the irrepressible King. Louis strained every nerve of diplomacy, made a separate peace with Francis, and agreed to a conference with Charles at Péronne. There, in effect, Charles took him prisoner, and compelled him to cede Picardy and share in the sack of Liège. Louis returned to Paris at the nadir of his power and repute; even the magpies were taught to mock him (1468). Two years later, in this reciprocation of treachery, Louis took advantage of Charles’s preoccupation in Gelderland, and marched his troops into Saint-Quentin, Amiens, and Beauvais. Charles persuaded Edward IV to unite with him against France, but Louis bought Edward off. Knowing Edward’s keen appreciation of women, he invited him to come and divert himself with the ladies of Paris; moreover, he would assign to Edward, as royal confessor, the Cardinal of Bourbon, who “would willingly absolve him if he should commit any sin by way of love or gallantry.”7 He maneuvered Charles into war with Switzerland; and when Charles was killed Louis took not only Picardy but Burgundy itself (1477). He soothed the Burgundian nobles with gold, and pleased the people by taking a Burgundian mistress.
Now he felt strong enough to turn upon the barons who had so often fought him, and had so seldom obeyed his summons to come out and fight for France. Many of the lords who had conspired against him in 1465 were dead, or incapacitated by age. Their successors had learned to fear a king who cut off the heads of traitorous aristocrats and confiscated their estates, who had built a strong army of mercenaries, and seemed always able to raise immense sums for purchases and bribes. Preferring to spend his subjects’ money rather than their lives, Louis bought Cerdagne and Roussillon from Spain. He acquired Rochelle through his brother’s death; he took Alençon and Blois by force; he persuaded René to bequeath Provence to the French crown (1481); a year later Anjou and Maine reverted to the monarchy; in 1483 Flanders, seeking the aid of Louis against the Holy Roman Empire, ceded to him the county of Artois, with the thriving cities of Arras and Douai. With the barons subdued, and the municipal parlements and communes submitting to the King, Louis accomplished for France that national unification and centralized administration which, a decade later, Henry VII was to achieve for England, Ferdinand and Isabella for Spain, and Alexander VI for the Papal States. Though this substituted one tyranny for many, it was at the time a progressive move, enhancing internal order and external security, standardizing currency and measurements, molding dialects into a language, and furthering the growth of vernacular literature in France. The monarchy was not absolute; the nobles retained large powers, and the consent of the States-General was usually required for new taxes. The nobles, the officials, and the clergy were exempt from taxation: the nobles on the ground that they fought for the people, the officials because they were so poorly paid and bribed, and the clergy because they protected king and country with their prayers. Public opinion and popular customs checked the King; the local parlements still claimed that no royal edict could become law in their districts until they had accepted and registered it. Nevertheless the path had been opened to Louis XIV and L’état c’est moi.
Amid all these triumphs Louis himself decayed in body and mind. He imprisoned himself at Plessis-les-Tours, fearing assassination, suspicious of all, seeing hardly anyone, punishing faults and defections cruelly, and now and then dressing himself in robes whose magnificence contrasted with the poor garb of his early reign. He became so gaunt and pale that those who saw him could hardly believe that he was not already dead.8 For years he had suffered agonies from piles,9 and had had occasional apoplectic strokes. On August 25, 1483, another attack deprived him of speech; and five days later he died.
His subjects rejoiced, for he had made them pay unbearably for his defeats and victories; the people had grown poorer, as France had become greater, under his merciless statesmanship. Nevertheless later ages were to benefit from his subordination of the nobles, his reorganization of finance, administration, and defense, his promotion of industry, commerce, and printing, his formation of a modern unified state. “If,” wrote Comines, “all the days of his life were computed in which joys and pleasures outweighed his pains and trouble, they would be found so few that there would be twenty mournful ones to one pleasant.” 10 He and his generation paid for the future prosperity and splendor of France.
II. ITALIAN ADVENTURE
Charles VIII was thirteen when his father died. For eight years his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, only ten years his elder, wisely ruled France as regent. She reduced governmental expenditures, forgave the people a quarter of the poll tax, recalled many exiles, freed many prisoners, and successfully resisted the attempt of the barons, in their Guerre Folle or Foolish War (1485), to regain the semi-sovereignty that Louis had overthrown. When Brittany joined with Orléans, Lorraine, Angoulême, Orange, and Navarre in a further revolt, her diplomacy and the generalship of Louis de la Trémouille defeated them all, and she ended the turmoil triumphantly by arranging the marriage of Charles to Anne of Brittany, who brought her great duchy as dowry to the crown of France (1491). The Regent then retired from the government, and lived her remaining thirty-one years in peaceful oblivion.
The new queen was quite another Anne. Short, flat, thin, and lame, with a stubby nose over a spacious mouth on a Gothically elongated face, she had a mind of her own, as shrewd and parsimonious as any Bretonne’s should be. Though she dressed simply in black gown and hood, she could, on occasions of state, gleam with jewelry and cloth of gold; and it was she, rather than Charles, who favored artists and poets, and commissioned Jean Bourdichon to paint Les heures d’Anne de Bretagn
e. Never forgetting her beloved Brittany and its ways, she hid her pride in modesty, sewed industriously, and struggled to reform the morals of her husband and his court.
Charles, says the gossipy Brantôme, “loved women more than his slight constitution could endure.” 11 After his marriage he restricted himself to one mistress. He could not complain of the Queen’s looks; he himself was a macrocephalic hunchback, his features homely, his eyes big and colorless and myopic, his underlip thick and drooping, his speech hesitant, his hands twitching spasmodically.12 However, he was good-natured, kindly, sometimes idealistic. He read chivalric romances, and conceived the notion of reconquering Naples for France, and Jerusalem for Christendom. The house of Anjou had held the Kingdom of Naples (1268–1435) until evicted by Alfonso of Aragon; the claims of the Anjou dukes had been bequeathed to Louis XI; they were now proclaimed by Charles. His council thought him the last person in the world to lead an army in a major war; but they hoped that diplomacy might ease his way, and that a captured Naples would allow French commerce to dominate the Mediterranean. To protect the royal flanks they ceded Artois and Franche-Comté to Maximilian of Austria, and Cerdagne and Roussillon to Ferdinand of Spain; they thought to get half of Italy for the parings of France. Heavy taxes, pawned gems, and loans from Genoese bankers and Lodovico, Regent of Milan, provided an army of 40,000 men, one hundred siege guns, eighty-six ships of war.
Charles set out gaily (1494), perhaps not loath to leave two Annes behind. He was welcomed in Milan (which had a score to settle with Naples), and found its ladies irresistible. He left a trail of natural children on his march, but handsomely refused to touch a reluctant maiden who had been conscripted to his pleasure by his valet-de-chambre; instead, he sent for her lover, presided over their betrothal, and gave her a dowry of 500 crowns.13 Naples had no force capable of resisting his; he entered it in easy triumph (1495), enjoyed its scenery, cuisine, women, and forgot Jerusalem. He was apparently one of the lucky Frenchmen who did not contract, in this campaign, the venereal disease that was later called morbus gallicus because it spread so rapidly in France after the troops’ return. A “Holy Alliance” of Alexander VI, Venice, and Lodovico of Milan (who had changed his mind) forced Charles to evacuate Naples and retreat through a hostile Italy. His reduced army fought an indecisive engagement at Fornovo (1495), and hastened back to France, carrying with it, among other contagions, the Renaissance.
It was at Fornovo that Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard, then twenty-two, first displayed the courage that earned him half the famous title of le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. Born in the Chateau Bayard in the Dauphiné, he came of a noble family every head of which, for two centuries past, had died in battle; and in this encounter Pierre seemed bent on continuing the tradition. He had two horses killed under him, captured an enemy standard, and was knighted by his grateful King. In an age of coarseness, promiscuity, and treachery he maintained all the virtues of chivalry—magnanimous without display, loyal without servility, honorable without offensive pride, and carrying through a dozen wars a spirit so kindly and gay that contemporaries called him le bon chevalier. We shall meet him again.
Charles survived his Italian journey by three years. Going to watch a game of tennis at Amboise, he struck his head against a loosened door, and died of a cerebral lesion at the age of twenty-eight. As his children had predeceased him, the throne passed to his nephew the Duke of Orléans, who became Louis XII (1498). Born to Charles of Orléans when the poet was seventy, Louis was now thirty-six, and already in feeble health. His morals were abnormally decent for the time, and his manners were so frank and amiable that France learned to love him despite his futile wars. He seemed guilty of discourtesy when, in the year of his accession, he divorced Jeanne de France, daughter of Louis XI; but he had been forced by that pliantly inflexible king to marry the unprepossessing girl when he was but eleven years old. He could never develop affection for her; and now he persuaded Alexander VI—in return for a French bride, county, and pension to the Pope’s son, Caesar Borgia—to annul that marriage on grounds of consanguinity, and to sanction his union with the widowed Anne of Brittany, who carried her duchy in her trousseau. They took up their abode at Blois, and gave France a royal model of mutual devotion and loyalty.
Louis XII illustrated the superiority of character to intellect. He had not the shrewd mind of Louis XI, but he had good will and good sense, and wit enough to delegate many of his powers to wisely chosen aides. He left administration, and most policy, to his lifelong friend Georges, Cardinal d’Amboise; and this prudent and kindly prelate managed affairs so well that the whimsical public, when any new task arose, would shrug its shoulders and say, “Let Georges do it.”14 France was astonished to find its taxes reduced, first by a tenth, then by a third. The King, though reared in riches, spent as little as possible on himself and his court, and fattened no favorites. He abolished the sale of offices, forbade the acceptance of gifts by magistrates, opened the governmental postal service to private use, and bound himself to choose, for any administrative vacancy, one of three men nominated by the judiciary, and not to remove any state employee except after open trial and proof of dishonesty or incompetence. Some comedians and courtiers made fun of his economies, but he took their humor in good spirit. “Amongst their ribaldries,” he said, “they may sometimes tell us useful truths; let them amuse themselves, provided they respect the honor of women.... . I had rather make courtiers laugh by my stinginess than make my people weep by my extravagance.”15 The surest means of pleasing him was to show him some new way of benefiting the people.16 They expressed their gratitude by calling him Père du Peuple. Never in its memory had France known such prosperity.
It was a pity that this happy reign tarnished its record with further invasions of Italy. Perhaps Louis and other French kings undertook these sallies to occupy and decimate the quarrelsome nobles who might otherwise have harassed France with civil war, threatening the still unstable monarchy and national unity. After twelve years of victory in Italy, Louis XII had to withdraw his troops from the peninsula, and then lost to the English at Guinegate (1513) an engagement derisively called the Battle of the Spurs because the French cavalry fled from the field in such unwonted haste. Louis made peace, and was content thereafter to be only King of France.
The death of Anne of Brittany (1514) completed the cycle of his woes. She had given him no heir, and it was with little pleasure that he married his daughter Claude to Francis, Count of Angoulême, now next in line for the throne. His aides urged him, at fifty-two, to take a third wife and cheat the ebullient Francis by begetting a son. He accepted Mary Tudor, the sixteen-year-old sister of Henry VIII. She led the ailing King a merry and exhausting life, insisting on all the attentions due to beauty and youth. Louis died in the third month of his marriage (1515), leaving to his son-in-law a defeated but prosperous France that remembered with affection the Father of the People.
III. THE RISE OF THE CHTEAUX
Every French art but ecclesiastical architecture now felt the influence of the strengthened monarchy and its Italian forays. Church building kept to Flamboyant Gothic, declaring its own decadence through extravagant decoration and prodigal detail, but dying like an operatic courtesan with all the fascination of feminine delicacy, adornment, and grace. Even so, some splendid churches were begun in this age: St. Wulfram at Abbeville, St. Étienne du Mont at Paris, and the perfect little shrine raised at Brou by Margaret of Austria to the memory of her husband Philibert II of Savoy. Old structures received new charms. Rouen Cathedral called its north portal the Portail des Libraires from the bookstalls that stood in the court; money contributed for indulgences to eat butter in Lent financed the lovely south tower, which French humor therefore named the Tour de Beurre; and Cardinal d’Amboise found funds for the west front in the same Flamboyant style. Beauvais gave its unfinished masterpiece a south transept whose portal and rose window excel most main façades; Senlis, Tours, and Troyes improved their fanes; and at Chartres Jean
le Texier built a luxuriant northwest steeple and a gorgeous choir screen that showed Renaissance ideas impinging upon Gothic lines. At Paris the exquisite Tour St. Jacques is the restored survivor of a church raised in this period to St. James the Greater.
Noble civic buildings redeemed the strife and chaos of the age. Stately city halls rose in Arras, Douai, Saint-Omer, Noyon, Saint-Quentin, Compiègne, Dreux, Evreux, Orléans, Saumur. Grenoble built a Palais de Justice in 1505, Rouen a still more resplendent one in 1493; Robert Ango and Rolland Leroux designed it in ornate Gothic, the nineteenth century redecorated it, the second World War gutted it.
This was the first century of the French châteaux. The Church had been made subject to the state; the enjoyment of this world encroached upon preparation for the next; the kings would themselves be gods, and make for their leisure a Mohammedan paradise along the Loire. Between 1490 and 1530 the château fort or castle changed into the château de plaisance. Charles VIII, returning from his Neapolitan campaign, demanded of his architects a palace as splendid as those that he had seen in Italy. He brought back with him the architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo, the sculptor and painter Guido Mazzoni, the woodworker Domenico Bernabei “Boccador,” and nineteen other Italian artists, even a landscape architect, Domenico Pacello.17 He had already restored the old castle at Amboise; now he commissioned these men, aided by French builders and artisans, to transform it “in the style of Italy” into a luxurious logis du roi, a royal lodge.18 The result was superb: a mass of towers, pinnacles, cornices, corbels, dormers, and balconies, rising imperially on a slope overlooking the peaceful river. A new species of architecture had come to birth.