The really big one (part 3)
A peasant uprising tries to exterminate the aristocracy and the mayor of Paris tries to harness it against the captive king.
Missed an earlier post? Here’s part 1 and part 2. Read this already? Here’s part 4 and part 5.
Marcel and the Jacques
The Church and secular authorities soon got a handle on the situation and suppressed the flagellants with predictably medieval brutality. Plague-born challenges to the powers that be would continue, however. Within a few years of the flagellants’ pogroms, another outbreak of peasant violence—combined with a challenge to royal authority by the Paris bourgeoisie—would roil France.
The flagellants had directed their symbolic and rhetorical assaults at the princes of the Church (and their actual assaults at Jews). By contrast the Jacques—as the participants in France’s brief but tumultuous peasant uprising were called—took aim squarely at the secular nobility.
Aside from the plague, the main precipitating event behind the Jacquerie was France’s disastrous loss to the English at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, when English forces captured King Jean II (“the Good”) and held him for years in captivity in London.
France’s Third Estate (the peasantry and bourgeoisie, that is, everyone but the First Estate clergy and Second Estate nobility) blamed this travesty on the knights.
This was precisely the class Don Quijote’s antics were written to mock, and the armed aristocracy’s shtick was starting to try society’s collective patience: gargantuanly vain, extravagant in proportion to their vanity, obsessed with glory in battle, bizarrely intent on raising platonic cuckoldry to high art in the form of “courtly love,” the seigneurs were at the same time intolerably cruel and rapacious towards the peasants—the meek salt of the earth who, as ostentatious Christians, the knights vowed and vowed again to protect. Instead they wrung the poor of spirit dry, in the very midst of the apocalypse, to fund their playboy warlordry.
And now, on top of all that, they turned out to be terrible at their one real job: waging war on behalf of the king.
All this the peasantry could not abide. The Jacquerie began at a meeting after sundown in a graveyard (because the middle ages were metal) in the village of St. Leu on the Oise river. “They shamed and despoiled the realm,” indignant peasants said of the nobles, “and it would be a good thing to destroy them all.”
The participants agreed and killed the local lord and his family and burned his manor down. That night. They proceeded to a castle, where they dispatched another noble family—raping the lord’s wife and children in front of him before killing them all—and razed the building.
Before a month had passed, peasants had destroyed a likely-exaggerated 160 aristocratic homes across northern France, committing likely-exaggerated atrocities—like roasting a knight on a spit and force-feeding his flesh to his wife—and expressing the likely-exaggerated goal to “destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would be none any more.”
In the meantime, a portion of the Jacques had allied with or been coopted into a bourgeois challenge to royal authority. The decapitated crown—led in bon roi Jean’s absence by his son and heir Charles (later crowned Charles V “the Wise”)—needed additional revenue and summoned the Estates General to raise it.
The Third Estate, in view of the disaster at Poitiers, had leverage. Led by Étienne Marcel, provost of the Paris merchants (more or less the mayor), the rich commoners made demands of Charles that would have increased their power while making his job much harder. He refused and dismissed the Estates General, but the commoners refused to go.
Charles left Paris, where a still-assembled group of delegates speechified about reining in the monarchy. Charles tried devaluing the coinage to raise the funds he needed, prompting Marcel to call a strike, ordering guilds to stop work and take up arms. The Dauphin (that is the heir to the throne, Charles) called the Estates again.
In this session, Marcel drew up a grand plan to reform the monarchy, including granting the Estates the right to veto any new taxes and to assemble at will. By convening ever more menacing mobs, Marcel forced the Dauphin to sign.
Good King John, about to be shipped into English captivity, let it be known that the monarchy had agreed to nothing of the sort—not that it mattered much. In April 1357, the Estates convened once again, this time with hardly any noble representation. The aristocracy had taken the crown’s side and boycotted the session. In August the Dauphin reneged on his concessions to the Estates.
In January, Marcel responded by leading a mob to the royal palace and murdering the Dauphin’s two marshals (knights of hyper-exalted status)—in his bedroom, right in front of his face.
The Dauphin was cowed into submission to Marcel’s newly created 36-member Council of the Estates. Four months later, the Jacquerie erupted, and Marcel embraced it as a way to crush his noble opponents. Around 800 bourgeois and Jacques* besieged the Dauphin and his retinue in a fortress at Meaux, around 25 miles from Paris.
Here the knights, terrorized by torch-wielding peasants and hemmed in by canny bourgeois, regained their mojo. Taking up position on a narrow bridge, they skewered the Third Estate attackers, putting an end to both the bourgeois and peasant uprisings.
That encounter—and the massacre of thousands of peasants that followed—secured four more centuries of haughty aristocratic dominion over France.
Next time, The really big one (part 4): the flayers—the knights descend into mercenary anarchy.
Notes
* The chronicler Jean Froissart, betraying a wider medieval disdain for quantitative niceties, estimated this 800-man force at 9,000.