A History of France, 1460-1560 The Emergence of a Nation State

NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY General Editor: Maurice Keen

EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAIN Unity in Diversity 400-1000 Roger Collins

BEFORE COLUMBUS Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

THE MILITARY ORDERS From the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries Alan Forey

MEDIEVAL THOUGHT The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century (Second edition) Michael Haren

THE ORIGINS OF FRANCE From Clovis to the Capetians 500-1000 Edward James

SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 Angus McKay

A HISTORY OF FRANCE 1460-1560 The Emergence of a Nation State David Potter

MEDIEVAL IRELAND The Enduring Tradition Michael Richter

Forthcoming:

EARLY MEDIEVAL SICILY Continuity and Change from the Vandals to Frederick II, 450-1250 Jeremy Johns

THE MAKING OF ORTHODOX BYZANTIUM 600-1025 Mark Whitlow

A History of France, 1460-1560 The Emergence of a Nation State

DAVID POTTER

New Studies in Medieval History

General Editor: MAURICE KEEN

M MACMILLAN

© David Potter 1995 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-54123-4

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First published 1995 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 978-0-333-54124-1 ISBN 978-1-349-23848-4 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23848-4

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Contents

Preface Vll

List of Maps xv

Note on Money and Measures xvi

INTRODUCTION: FRENCH SOCIETY AND ITS IDENTITY 1

Ideas on Society 3 Regional Diversity 4 General Social and Economic Trends 7 The Idea of France in the Late Middle Ages and

Renaissance 17

1 THE MONARCHY: IDEOLOGY, PRESENTATION AND RITUAL 29

2 THE COURT OF FRANCE FROM LOUIS XI TO HENRI II 57 The Royal Affinity 57 La maison du roi 61 The Courtier's Career 76 The King's Routine 83 The Keeping of Order 86 Conclusion 88

3 THE KING, HIS COUNCIL AND THE SECRETARIAT 90 The Theory of Government by Good Counsel 92 The Composition of the Council 93 Relations between Councils, Order of Business 99 The Royal Secretariat 105

4 THE CROWN, ADMINISTRATION AND THE PROVINCES llO Expansion of the Royal Domain 110 The Provincial Governors 117 Administrative Personnel: Office-holders 123 Local Administration: Lawyers and Justice 128

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The Extent of Physical Control 129 Conclusion 134

5 THE TAXATION SYSTEM AND ITS BURDENS 136 The Financial Community 138 Management of State Finance and Tax Levels 142 Consultation 149 Resistance to Taxation 156 Conclusion 163

6 THE FRENCH NOBILITY IN THE RENAISSANCE 165 Status and Wealth 165 The Nobility and Clientage 187 The Crown and the Nobility 198 Conclusion 206

7 THE FRENCH CHURCH IN THE AGE OF REFORM 207 Traditions of Reform 207 The Church and the Crown 219 The Social Context of Reform 231 The Repression of Dissent 246 Conclusion 249

8 FRENCH FOREIGN POLICY, 1460-1560 251 War and Public Opinion 278

CONCLUSION 284

Abbreviations 291 Notes 292 Appendices 351 Genealogical Tables 369 Bibliography 382 Index 414

Preface

An explanation is perhaps necessary for the title of this book. It is not to be asserted that a 'nation state' in the modern sense came into being in France during the Renaissance. In fact, the political system of France was a profoundly dynastic one, an etat royal as French historians express it, in which kingship played a central role in the ideology of the nascent state. It was not, essentially, a 'proprietorial' one although an eleme'nt of dynasticism remained. It was rather a country in which the growing elements of the idea of the nation-France (a term employed by Colette Beaune and Pierre Nora) were already in place and centred on monarchy, reli­gion, aristocratic honour and clientage. It was thus a very distinc­tive, sui generis form of nationhood organised around loyalty to some very traditional principles that were conscripted into the formation of a much more effective state. That state was charac­terised by the idea of reform (in finance and provincial adminis­tration, for instance), as was the church in the same period. The result was a period of relatively harmonious order and rule that was eventually broken after 1560 by the hypertrophy of one of its vital constituent elements: the waging of 'wars of magnificence'.

The century of French history before the outbreak of the Wars of Religion has seldom been surveyed as a coherent whole. Beginning with the accession, in Louis XI, of one of the most formidable rulers in French history it closes with the death of Henri II, whose reign was one of the most innovative. It was in that century that the patterns of later French public, social and political life were established. Yet the custom of viewing the later years of the fifteenth century as either the 'twilight' of the medieval era or as its culmination has become deeply rooted in general assumptions. In some senses this goes back to the idea that the impact of the Italian Renaissance in France after 1494 and particularly during the reign of Francis I, 'restorer ofletters', worked a profound transformation in French culture. In some ways, the idea of a revival of letters at that time goes back to the conscious views of humanists themselves; Joachim du Bellay announced that Francis I had 'first restored all the good arts and sciences to their ancient dignity: and our language, which before was harsh and ill-polished, he has thus rendered elegant'. So,

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tenebrae are dispelled by lux and Rabelais, in the much quoted letter of Gargantua to Pantagruel, declared: 'The time was then in shadows because of the calamity of the Goths, who had destroyed all good literature. But by the grace of God, light and dignity have been restored to letters in my time.' The idea was to lead directly to the concept of the Renaissance as prelude to the Enlightenment and in turn this did much to shape the historiographical frame­work built by Burckhardt and Voigt.! The subsequent revival of interest in French mediev:al learning and the debate over its autonomous tradition have tended to obscure the issue. It is clear enough from the work of Franco Simone that humanism had a powerful impact in France at the time of Petrarch, that the chaos of the earlier fifteenth century did much to interrupt this but that French humanism, of a distinctive kind shaped by the configura­tions of the French learned world, was in existence well before the Italian wars. Humanists and rhetoricians in the University of Paris like Robert Gaguin and Guillaume Fichet were already thinking ofthe previous age as one of 'barbarism' in the 1470s.2

The same framework customary in cultural history, that of a reawakening, has slipped imperceptibly into the commonly accepted views of French society in general and of its political struc­tures. In a survey of the historiography of the state in France, Bernard Guenee has argued against the artificial barriers which have concealed the unity of the three centuries from the mid­thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The institutions of the era of Francis I, he pointed out, were rooted in the Middle Ages.3

One of the main reasons for the continuation of these barriers remains the tendency of historians to specialise as 'medievalists' or 'modernists', despite the primacy given by historians of the Annates tradition to the longue duree in historical experience. In part, this stems from the fact that the sources for social history - estate records, tax lists, population evidence - become more varied and voluminous after the beginning of the sixteenth century and gener­ate new sets of problems. The emergence of the great religious fissure that was to explode in the form of a lengthy civil war also itself raises some new problems and generates new forms of criti­cism and speculation.

It is not the intention of this book to engage in the stale argu­ment between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but rather to stress the fundamental proposition that the society, politics and

PREFACE ix

culture of France in the first phase of 'absolute' power and of the French Renaissance were shaped by a continuous process of change and adaptation within existing institutions begun in the fifteenth century; that the institutions, social configurations and assumptions were conditioned by deeply laid substructures and also by remarkable innovations from the late fifteenth century onwards. The century between 1460 and 1560 can be called 'the fair sixteenth century' in that it constituted a relatively unusual century of growth and, despite periodic natural calamities and rebellions, favourable conditions for the mass of the people. This was the underlying foundation of the relative quiescence of French society between the Hundred Years War and the Wars of Religion that was to prove crucial in the development of a stable polity, a focus of loyalty and a set of attitudes that allowed the sur­vival of the idea of France as a nation through first the disorders and then the dire economic conditions that followed until the eighteenth century.

The idea that the later fifteenth century witnessed major changes is, of course, not a new one and is clearly present also in the political history of the period, especially in the notion of the 'new monarchies' of Louis XI and his contemporaries. However, the significance of all this is now no longer so clear as it once was. It would be a foolhardy student who repeated the old ideas about a Louis XI or Ferdinand of Aragon forging alliances with the urban bourgeoisie against the 'relics' of feudalism in order to establish Absolutism.4 That such rulers found essential supporters among town oligarchies and merchant capital is evidently the case and a confrontation with networks of aristocratic opposition cer­tainly took place. It should be remembered, though, that such alliances and confrontations were characteristic of Ancien Regime polities down to the end of the seventeenth century at least and, taken in the longer term, look more like endemic conflicts built into the system. There is, in addition, a danger of slipping into the view, characteristic of Roland Mousnier, that the French monarchy represented the only guarantee in a vulnerable and diverse society against 'civil war, dislocation and dismemberment by neighbouring powers'. It is too readily assumed that such a society needs a strong state in order to exist.5 Monarchical Absolutism was a polity which concentrated legitimate authority in the sacralised figure of the king, who then delegated his powers

x PREFACE

to officers and bishops, in effect his own appointees. It generated a kind of politics that diverged from that of the city states and republics of the era in largely failing to take advantage of the most dynamic economic movements of the sixteenth century and instead offered war, taxation, repression and revolt. Far from being intrinsically a stable order, it was at times highly precarious. Maulde-Ia Claviere, one of the most learned nineteenth-century scholars of the age of Louis XII, painted a moving picture of the harmony of the French society in the age of the 'pere du peuple' but thought that his age and even more so that of Francis I saw the fundamental deformation of the French political system by the annexation of inordinate power over the church by the crown.6 In fact, as will be shown in chapters 1 and 7, such power was deep rooted.

Recently, the work ofJ.-P. Genet under the aegis of a thematic study programme of the Centre Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques has drawn attention to the problem of the genesis of the modern state in the late medieval and early modern periods. Perry Anderson argued forcefully, from a Marxist standpoint, that Absolute Monarchy was a development of European feudalism, that its bureaucratic and military structures, making it a machine built for the battlefield, had roots in long-established social and mental structures.7 Genet and his colleagues have advanced the subject from a more empirical point of view, arguing that the developments of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries in western Europe generally were crucial in the formation of the state. It was in the twelfth century that the extension of royal justice began to give a spatial identity to the state, in the four­teenth and fifteenth that monarchs put in place new systems for raising revenue for defence (including the convocation of assem­blies of estates), that political ideologies and nascent national identities formed for their justification and that the great eco­nomic and social crisis beginning with the Black Death churned up the channels of command characteristic of classical feudalism. Finally, the sixteenth century gave a cultural dimension to the state, articulated through classical vocabulary around the hero­prince. In this society, domination remained in the hands of the professional military class, which had originally assured the defence and economic expansion of western Europe in the early middle ages but was increasingly admixed with a wider

PREFACE xi

technocratic and literate stratum of society. War therefore remained central, providing the raison d' etre for the ruling class and the social cement for a society of 'jidelites'. 8

However, Genet and his colleagues would readily acknowledge that this genesis of modern state structures led into many differ­ent channels (limited monarchy, absolutism, republicanism, etc.) The experience of France in the century from 1350 to 1450 was one of massive economic crisis, semi-permanent war and the severe contraction of the power of the crown (manifested, for instance, in the stagnation of its financial resources). However, the view that the fifteenth century saw some fundamental shifts in direction is a persuasive one. Roland Mousnier juxtaposed 'the feudal France up until the middle of the fifteenth century' with 'the France of jidelites' which succeeded it (see chapter 6).9 Ladurie has characterised the period from 1450 to 1789 as that of the 'monarchie classique'. In this view, the political system in place from about 1460 rests on a new buoyant social and demo­graphic phase, subject to crisis certainly but never again trauma­tised in the form of a gigantic catastrophe. IO

Around 1460, as Ladurie has argued, France still remained poised in some sense between unitary and decentralised models of the state, sharing characteristics both of England and of the Empire, with a royal government at the centre and the continu­ation of important appanages. 1 1 But the massive military conflicts of the fifteenth century had generated the power of a trans­formed political elite dominated by the middle ranking nobility and the 'peuple gras' who have been called by Mikhail Harsgor 'les maitres du royaume' (see chapters 3 and 4). With the trans­formation of the army and of the role of the nobility in it, the ways in which power was manipulated and the links between those holding power began to change. The form of state regeneration which developed in France was one leading to what is sometimes called the 'second absolutism' of the seventeenth century. At any rate, the French monarchy and its servants increasingly stressed an already existing Absolutist ideology (see here chapter 1). In a kingdom where the weakness of the crown in the crucial fourteenth-fifteenth century period left it unable to establish the right to tax the nobility, the latter aimed increasingly to partici­pate in the fruits of power rather than to limit it.I2 From the 1460s, Ladurie has argued, the French monarchy was increasingly

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'administrative et taxatrice', that is, capable of moving beyond the judicial functions of the etat de justice. 13 Though still relatively lightly governed, the administrative cadre of France was propor­tionately the largest of the comparable kingdoms.

There is a contrast but also continuity between the political institutions strengthened under Louis XI, and suffused by his energy, and the state which reached its apogee in the period of the Renaissance. Without the victories of Louis XI the splendour of the age of Francis I is scarcely imaginable. Louis's methods remained a model for his successors. Louis's critic, Thomas Basin, reported that just after his accession, and faced with demands for tax reductions, he declared that 'he was king and he could do as he liked'. Francis I's reported comment to the Emperor Charles V that his revenues could amount to as much as he wished seems a curious echo. Francis is supposed also to have remarked that, though Louis XI was 'a little too cruel and bloodthirsty' yet 'he was the one who got the kings of France out of leading strings'. The poet Ronsard addressed Henri II optimistically in 1555 by pointing up the changes: 'You are not like a king Louis XI ... who had his seditious relatives and brothers.'14 The style of the two reigns is startlingly different, both in the manner of the rulers, their courts and also in policies. Louis XI, a practical ruler unim­pressed by status and show, toyed with the idea of rendering nobility fully compatible with commerce and thus encouraging the development of trade. This came to nothing and Gaston Zeller spoke of it as a 'great lost opportunity' .15 The contrast between Louis and Francis I, 'first gentleman of the kingdom', whose reign saw great changes and yet who would never have con­sidered tampering with the social order, reveals the innovative­ness of his fifteenth-century predecessor. The apogee of the monarchy in the Renaissance is unthinkable without the transfor­mations that had been going on since the middle of the fifteenth century.

Professor Knecht in his important work on the reign of Francis I has stressed the authoritarian temperament of that monarch and argued that his style of rule represented the furthest possible extent of Absolute monarchy in the sixteenth century.16 The kingdom of France in the first half of the century had productive land, people and tax resources in abundance. Yet, in comparison with the reign of Louis . XIV, the steps were tentative, the

PREFACE xiii

machinery of control and order ramshackle and society pro­foundly influenced by concepts of clientage and fidelity which were a direct continuation of the feudal age. Moreover, in com­parison with other states of the sixteenth century, Venice being the outstanding example, and despite the fourteenth-century idea of France as the best governed of all kingdoms, French public life and administration were chaotic. 17

In France the leading characteristic of public power from 1450 onwards was perhaps that of the royal office, a form of bureaucracy that was to be characteristic of the Ancien Regime. 18 Stemming originally from the view of the monarchy as an etat de justice (which France remained despite the rapid progress towards the etat de finance under Louis XI) the office was created by lettres de provision which permitted its holder to exercise a jurisdiction under the crown, often conveying personal nobility and implicitly the possibility of hereditary ennoblement. It was extremely difficult for an officier to be removed and the rapid development of venality in this period stabilised the proprietary nature of the institution. The regime of offices was an intrinsically limited one which transmitted some of the characteristics of feudal society into the modern state in France.l9 As Jean Jacquart has pointed out, hereditary office-holding was established in contradiction to the Absolutist tendency of the crown.20

But to this was added in the course of the Renaissance the network of government by royal commissaires (especially from the 1550s onwards), thus creating one of the principal tensions of the Ancien Regime. The power to appoint royal commissioners was present in the Middle Ages, but it seems that the precursors of the intendants de justice can first be seen in the 1550s.21 Whatever form it took, however, the penchant of Ancien Regime administration was for collective decision-making, government par bon conseil (see chapter 3) rather than individual administrative fiat, which remained in evidence down to the eighteenth century.22

Most general studies have tended to concentrate either on the fifteenth century, in the case of P.S. Lewis and, recently, A. Demurger23 or on the sixteenth century in the case of J. H. Salmon, H. Lloyd and, most recently, E. Le Roy Ladurie's survey of the state from Louis XI to Henri IV.24 Among works that cover part of the period of this book, that of Henri Lemonnier in the old Lavisse history is still a very serviceable narrative but covers

xiv PREFACE

only the period 1494 to 1547. Another, older history, Bridge's history from 1483 to 1515 is still of extraordinary value. More recentlyJanine Garrisson's brief survey of the period 1483 to 1559 has the merit of attributing sufficient importance to the court and to personalities as well as the continuing diversity of the kingdom.25 In addition, there are now some excellent studies of the reigns of the period: notably by Yvonne Labande-Mailfert on Charles VIII, Bernard Quilliet on Louis XII, Robert Knecht and Jean Jacquart on Francis I and Ivan Cloulas and F J. Baumgartner on Henri II.26 Representative institutions during the sixteenth century have been exhaustively studied by John Russell Major and it is not intended to cover the same ground here. 27 The work that follows is essentially one of analysis and synthesis of recent research made possible largely by the explosion of historical work over the last generation that has some bearing on the period, either by contributing important insights in the course of the study of social structures and attitudes, or as a result of the significant work of French, English and American scholars on the institutions, politics and religion of France in the period. In addi­tion some chapters are based rather more on original sources where secondary works are still lacking. There is certainly room for an attempt to make some preliminary sense of it all. Ultimately, though, this book is the product of what interests one particular writer.

In a work such as this, my principal debt is to the many histor­ians whose work has provided an inspiration and a guide. In addi­tion, specific thanks are due to Maurice Keen for valuable advice on structure, to Peter Roberts, for suggestions on chapter 2 and, above all, to Robert Knecht, who generously read the whole text and enabled me to avoid some egregious errors.

List of Maps

1 Principal royal residences 84 2 Major fiefs in late fifteenth-early sixteenth centuries 112 3 Parlements in the sixteenth century 116 4 Provincial gouvernements by the mid-sixteenth century 119 5 New genera lites in the sixteenth century 137 6 Elections and generalites around 1500-20 150 7 Battles and sieges involving French forces, 1490-1560 262

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Note on Money and Measures

French coinage in circulation was defined in terms of a notional 'money of account', the livre toumois (It.), sometimes called the franc in the reign of Louis XI. This was divided into 20 sols and 240 deniers like the old pound sterling, though the latter was worth roughly nine times its value (much as the modern pound and franc). Money of account had the advantage of providing a standardised accounting mechanism but the disadvantage that it was an artificial value created by the croWl)'s power to define the intrinsic value of the coinage it issued and, inevitably, to manipu­late it. The publicly declared value of the coinage reflected both the supply of precious metals and the crown's needs to maximise the value of the coin it was receiving in taxation. It therefore sometimes varied from the market value of the coinage. The most widely used gold coin from the late fifteenth century was the eeu d'or soleil, fixed at 36s.3d. in 1498 (it was then worth 4s.6d. ster­ling). It moved to 40s. (i.e. 2 livres) in 1516, 45s. in 1533, 50s. in 1551 and 60s. in 1574. All prices expressed in money of account need to be adjusted for this decline in its value against real cur­rency. The most widely used silver coin, the teston, was fixed at lOs. in 1498, 10s.6d. in 1541 and 12s. in 1561. Another money of account, the livre parisis, was used less in the sixteenth century. It was a larger unit (1 sol toumois = 15 deniers parisis).

Every region, and indeed locality, of France had its own units of measurement for dry goods and wine. Under Henri II the crown encouraged the adoption of the Paris measure but with very limited success. In Paris, the setierfor grain was equal to 156litres. Twelve setiers made one muid.

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