French III

Who Were the French?

The France that entered the fourteenth century was the richest and most populous kingdom in Christendom. The France that emerged from the sixteenth century was something harder and more modern: a centralized state with a standing army, a professional bureaucracy, and a monarchy that had survived English invasion, bubonic plague, peasant revolts, aristocratic rebellion, and religious civil war. The process of survival reshaped every institution the kingdom possessed.

The Hundred Years' War with England, stretching from 1337 to 1453, began with catastrophic French defeats at Crecy and Poitiers where the flower of French chivalry was slaughtered by English longbowmen. The lesson was expensive: heavy cavalry charging uphill into prepared positions died regardless of lineage or courage. The French learned slowly, but they learned.

Homeland and Way of Life

The Black Death struck France in 1348 and killed perhaps a third of the population. Villages were abandoned. Fields reverted to scrub. Labor became scarce and expensive, which shifted the balance of power between lord and peasant in ways that took generations to settle. A widow farming a strip field outside Rouen in 1360, her husband dead of plague and her eldest son killed at Poitiers, worked land that was suddenly worth less than the hands needed to work it.

Recovery was slow and uneven. The fifteenth century saw gradual repopulation, renewed agricultural production, and the growth of towns. Paris remained the largest city in northern Europe. Lyon emerged as a center of banking and silk production. The Atlantic ports, Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, connected France to the expanding maritime trade of the age. By the sixteenth century French agriculture was productive enough to support a population of perhaps fifteen million, the largest in Europe.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The transformation of French military power was the defining story of these centuries. The feudal cavalry that had been massacred at Crecy and Agincourt gave way to the compagnies d'ordonnance, permanent companies of men-at-arms paid by the crown and answerable to royal officers rather than feudal lords. Artillery, developed during the final campaigns of the Hundred Years' War, became a French specialty. The cannon that battered down English-held castles in Normandy in the 1440s ended the war and announced that stone walls no longer guaranteed safety.

Joan of Arc's intervention in 1429, lifting the siege of Orleans and crowning Charles VII at Reims, provided the psychological turning point that no military reform could have achieved alone. A teenage peasant girl who claimed divine guidance and wore armor into battle was impossible to explain by the conventions of the age, and her execution by the English only amplified her effect. The war ended with France victorious and England expelled from all continental territory except Calais.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

The Wars of Religion that tore France apart between 1562 and 1598 were as destructive as the English invasion had been. Catholic and Huguenot factions fought eight wars in thirty-six years, punctuated by massacres, sieges, and assassinations. The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, when Catholic mobs killed thousands of Huguenots in Paris and across France, demonstrated that religious conviction could override every other social bond.

The conflict ended with the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which granted Huguenots limited toleration and fortified cities as guarantees of their safety. The solution was pragmatic rather than principled: France was too exhausted to keep fighting, and the new king, Henry IV, was a former Huguenot who had converted to Catholicism with the reported observation that Paris was worth a mass. A Huguenot merchant in La Rochelle, reopening his warehouse after years of intermittent siege, resumed business in a kingdom that had decided tolerance was cheaper than war.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

France's external ambitions revived as internal conflicts subsided. The Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries carried French armies across the Alps and brought Renaissance art and ideas back to France. Chateaux along the Loire valley blended Italian architectural elegance with French scale. Francis I patronized Leonardo da Vinci and founded the College de France. French became the international language of diplomacy, a status it would hold for three centuries.

The kingdom that emerged from the Wars of Religion was battle-hardened, centralized, and possessed of a standing army that answered to the crown rather than to feudal magnates. The foundations of the absolutist state that Louis XIV would build were laid in these brutal centuries, hammered out on battlefields and in besieged cities by a people who had learned that survival required a strong king, a professional army, and a willingness to compromise on everything except the unity of the state.