Complaints

This chapter opens with the background to the Hundred Years War preceding the French defeat and capture of King Jean II at the Battle of Poitiers in September 1356. The first section explains how that defeat fostered hatred of the nobility, and how that opprobrium was transmitted and amplified in learned and popular culture in the years preceding the Jacquerie. The next two sections follow the formation of Étienne Marcel and Robert le Coq’s reform party at the assembly of the Estates General in Paris, and the eventual triumph of their efforts with the Estates’ promulgation of a Grande ordonnance in March 1357. The reformers’ efforts to protect this victory from conservative Valois loyalists led them to make a dangerous alliance with King Charles II of Navarre, a sovereign king unamenable to outside control who possessed many soldiers and a claim to the French throne. Conflict over how to address military insecurity in the countryside to Paris’s west deepened the fissures between the reformers and the Dauphin’s noble councillors, leading Marcel to undertake a spectacularly violent solution.

Good Love and Hard Words

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.

An Unheard of Thing

This chapter focuses on the objectives and logistics behind the massacre of nine noblemen at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent on 28 May 1358, the first incident in what became the Jacquerie. This attack was carefully planned and enacted by a geographically diverse group who came together for that purpose. It was not a spontaneous uprising in that village by its normal population. Strategic interests linked to the military and political predicament of Paris clearly motivated the attack: the nobles killed included the nephew of one of the murdered marshals, and his entourage was probably headed for Creil, a fortress allowing the Dauphin to block the Oise River. This attack may have been carried out on the villagers’ own initiative, rather than at Marcel’s order. Close relations between town and countryside meant that there were many opportunities for cooperation, and villagers were certainly aware of the situation in Paris. But whether anyone envisaged the confrontation at Saint-Leu as the opening salvo in a massive, inter-regional uprising is unclear, especially as rural revolts were still uncommon. Rather, the events in Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and environs may have been conceived as a limited operation to accomplish a particular aim, which took on a different character afterward.

The Non-Nobles

Although the sources only offer information about a relatively small number of individual rebels, it is possible to surmise a great deal about the rebels, their families, and their communities, as well as the pre-existing relationships that both made the revolt possible and contributed to its eventual failure. The Jacquerie could not have taken place without the support of the rebels’ families, especially their wives, for someone had to look after the livestock, the crops, and the children. This means that women were vital to the revolt, even though the sources only name a few female individuals. While a significant minority of Jacques were artisans (or at least had artisanal surnames), a much greater proportion farmed or tended vines for a living. There were, however, significant differences of education and fortune between the revolt’s leaders and its rank-and-file members, which may have contributed to tensions within the movement. Provincial towns, especially Senlis, Beauvais, and Amiens, provided support to the Jacques, but urban–rural cooperation nevertheless rested on major inequalities and belied mutual suspicion. Most cities’ support was ambivalent and melted away when the tide turned against the Jacques after their defeats at Mello-Clermont and Meaux.

Conclusion

Memories of revolt marked people for a generation afterward. When he came into his kingdom, Charles V built a miniature fortress at Vincennes. Walled around with defences and impossible to enter at speed or in number, this was not the old hunting-lodge of his Capetian forebears but a testament to his need for security. From his study window, he could see anything coming from Paris a long way off. In the countryside, some manors and castles lay in ruins for decades, still described as ‘destroyed at the time of the commotions’ nearly 20 years later....

All Masters

This chapter looks at the causes and methods behind the Jacquerie’s sudden emergence after 28 May. The massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent was a watershed moment that enabled the rapid transformation of latent resentments into large-scale, violent rebellion. Due both to recent military developments and economic dislocation connected with the Black Death, rural commoners in northern France were experiencing a crisis of the ‘moral economy’ severe enough to make some of them undertake previously unimagined action. But immediate mobilization required previous preparation. As sociologists have demonstrated, rebellion is not a process that happens by chance even if it is made possible by opportunity. It appears that the Jacquerie’s leaders were able to take advantage of pre-existing efforts to ready the countryside’s defences, as well as social and professional networks among commoners in the Beauvaisis. By 31 May, the rebellion was sufficiently organized to capture a traitor and transfer him to a local captain elsewhere who carried out a public execution attended by hundreds of witnesses. The story of this ‘traitor’ is indicative of the kinds of relationships that facilitated the revolt’s almost instantaneous mobilization, as well as the individual and accidental trajectories that led people to join or to eschew the Jacquerie, and how their paths might change over time.

New Marvels

This chapter begins with Marcel’s decision on 22 February 1358 to murder two noble marshals of the royal army in the Dauphin’s bedchamber. It follows the story through the consolidation of a noble faction in reaction to this shocking event and the Dauphin’s recruitment to their cause at a meeting of nobles at Provins in April. After this meeting, the Dauphin garrisoned the castles of Montereau and Meaux on the Rivers Yonne and Marne, allowing him to blockade the fluvial routes that supplied Paris from the south and east. With the west occupied by Anglo-Navarrese troops and freebooters, all parties turned their attention north, where the towns were closely allied with the reformers and where the Oise River remained the only shipping route to or from Paris. On the eve of the Jacquerie, the territory that would soon see the majority of rebellious action was the only area that remained in contest. A final meeting of the Estates, now dominated by noble Valois loyalists, was held, issuing an ordonnance on 14 May that departed significantly from the reformers’ programme, especially regarding fiscal and military matters. The next day, news of peace with England reached Paris, up-ending the political calculus. No sources report what happened in the fortnight before the Jacquerie broke out on 28 May, but that (probably deliberate) silence must mask considerable activity on all sides.

Slaughtered like Pigs

With this chapter, the book returns to a chronological structure, following the revolt from around 5 June, when Étienne Marcel’s army probably marched out of Paris to join the Jacques, to the rebels’ double defeats at Meaux and near Mello on 9–10 June. It follows the progress of the Parisian army from Saint-Denis toward Meaux and its leaders’ divisive efforts to punish the reformers’ enemies and to press villagers into service along the way. A new telling of the famous battle at Meaux, where a few dozen noblemen defeated hundreds of commoners, comprises the second section. The latter half of the chapter covers the Jacques’ defeat near Mello and Clermont at the hands of Charles of Navarre. It explains how the battle unfolded, as well as how Charles of Navarre came to be the fatal enemy of the Jacques despite being the ally of the Jacques’ allies in Paris and other cities. Here, again, it is demonstrated that the revolt’s participants had heterogenous, and sometimes conflicting, programmes and that their relationships and objectives shifted over time in response to changing events.

Noisy Terrors

Focusing on the violent actions of the Jacques, this chapter shows that the revolt was directed against the nobility as a social group, rather than against the rebels’ lords. Although some chroniclers depicted the Jacques’ violence as inhumanely cruel, accusing them of indiscriminate killing of women and children and gruesome rapes, the judicial sources suggest a much less violent picture. While over two dozen nobles perished at the Jacques’ hands, they were almost exclusively adult men. There is almost no judicial evidence of rape, though given the near certainty of under-reporting, it cannot be ruled out. Property damages, especially the destruction of nobles’ houses and fortresses, was the primary objective of the Jacques’ violence. Some of this was directed against the Dauphin’s partisans, destroying their infrastructural advantage and diverting forces away from an assault on Paris. Some of it, perhaps especially later in the revolt, was directed against supporters of Navarre. But not all Jacques were united behind—or perhaps even aware of—these objectives, and there is evidence of disagreement amongst the rebels over targets and tactics. Much of the violence also had a dimension of social criticism linked to the nobility’s military failures and its members’ conspicuous consumption, and some of it had a festive element, involving dancing and dressing up.

Introduction: Telling Stories

The introduction traces the divide in scholars’ views of the Jacquerie as either a spasmodic explosion or a carefully directed movement, and sets forth the book’s understanding of the revolt as heterogenous and fluid. It introduces the main chronicle and documentary sources for the Jacquerie and discusses their interpretative difficulties, paying specific attention to the problems of retrospection, composition, and the over-representation of some kinds of rebels. The methodology adopted combines the analysis of collective data and the close reading of individual texts in order to tell a story about how individuals reacted to a specific set of circumstances, how events both planned and accidental altered their course, and what and how they chose to remember (or to forget) in its aftermath.