This chapter opens with the murder of Étienne Marcel and the fall of Paris to the Dauphin at the end of August, and focuses on how the crown and its subjects negotiated the social and emotional—as well as the legal and political—consequences of the Jacquerie. While the crown began by enacting spectacularly harsh penalties against its enemies in Paris, it almost immediately moved to a policy of forgiveness and reconciliation. After publicly executing prominent reformers, the crown issued general pardons to those who participated in the Parisians’ treachery, the Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jacquerie. This was both a practical necessity and an astute political move that allowed the crown to place itself above the fray and to impose its own interpretation of events. But as the subsequent proliferation of individualized pardons and lawsuits show, subjects’ own stories were more varied, demonstrating different ways of thinking about the revolt. Long-running lawsuits and the failure even of extra-judicial agreements reveal enduring barriers to reconciling people to the past, as well as to one another. Relations between some individuals remained emotionally fraught, roiled by anger and anxiety for decades after the revolt, manifesting in the exchange of ‘hard words’ and homicidal quarrels.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation
