of the English; while Charles VII. was already sighing for the easy life of Touraine, and recurring to that policy of truce which was so strongly urged by his counsellors, and so keenly irritating to the clear-sighted Joan of Arc. A check before Paris allowed the jealousy of La Trémoille to waste the heroine for eight months on operations of secondary importance, until the day when she was captured by the Burgundians under the walls of Compiègne, and sold by them to the English. The latter incontinently prosecuted her as a heretic; they had, indeed, a great interest in seeing her condemned by the Church, which would render her conquests sacrilegious. After a scandalous four months’ duel between this simple innocent girl and a tribunal of crafty malevolent ecclesiastics and doctors of the university of Paris, Joan was burned alive in the old market-place of Rouen, on the 30th of May 1431 (see Joan of Arc).
On Charles VII.’s part this meant oblivion and silence until the day when in 1450, more for his own sake than for hers, he caused her memory to be rehabilitated; but Joan had given the country new life and heart. From 1431 to 1454 the struggle against the English went on energetically; and the king, relieved in 1433 of his evil genius, La Trémoille, then became a man once more, playing a kingly part under the guidance of Dunois, Richemont, La Hire and Saintrailles, leaders of worth on the field of battle. Moreover, the English territory, a great triangle, with the Channel for base and Paris for apex, was not a really solid position. Yet the war seemed interminable; until at last Philip of Burgundy, for long embarrassed by his English alliance, decided in 1435 to become reconciled with Charles VII. This was in consequence of the death of his sister, who had been married to Bedford, and the return of his brother-in-law Richemont into the French king’s favour. The treaty of Arras, which made him a sovereign prince for life, though harsh, at all events gave a united France the opportunity of expelling the English from the east, and allowed the king to re-enter Paris in 1436. From 1436 to 1439 there was a terrible repetition of what happened after the Peace of Brétigny; famine, pestilence, extortions and, later, the aristocratic revolt of the Praguerie, completed the ruin of the country. But thanks to the permanent tax of the taille during this time of truce Charles VII. was able to effect the great military reform of the Compagnies d’Ordonnance, of the Francs-Archers, and of the artillery of the brothers Bureau. From this time forward the English, ruined, demoralized and weakened both by the death of the duke of Bedford and the beginnings of the Wars of the Roses, continued to lose territory on every recurrence of conflict. Normandy was lost to them at Formigny (1450), and Guienne, English since the 12th century, at Castillon (1453). They kept only Calais; and now it was their turn to have a madman, Henry VI., for king.
France issued from the Hundred Years’ War victorious, but terribly ruined and depopulated. It is true she had definitely freed her territory from the stranger, and through the sorrows of defeat and the menace of disruption had fortified her national solidarity, and Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War. defined her patriotism, still involved in and not yet dissociated from loyalty to the monarchy. A happy awakening, although it went too far in establishing royal absolutism; and a victory too complete, in that it enervated all the forces of resistance. The nation, worn out by the long disorders consequent on the captivity of King John and the insanity of Charles VI., abandoned itself to the joys of peace. Preferring the solid advantage of orderly life to an unstable liberty, it acquiesced in the abdication of 1439, when the States consented to taxation for the support of a permanent army without any periodical renewal of their authorization. No doubt by the prohibition to levy the smallest taille the feudal lords escaped direct taxation; but from the day when the privileged classes selfishly allowed the taxing of the third estate, provided that they themselves were exempt, they opened the door to monarchic absolutism. The principle of autocracy triumphed everywhere over the remnants of local or provincial authority, in the sphere of industry as in that of administration; while the gild system became much more rigid. A loyal bureaucracy, far more powerful than the phantom administration of Bourges or of Poitiers, gradually took the place of the court nobility; and thanks to this the institutions of control which the war had called into power—the provincial states-general—were nipped in the bud, withered by the people’s poverty of political idea and by the blind worship of royalty. Without the nation’s concurrence the king’s creatures were now to endow royalty with all the organs necessary for the exertion of authority; by which imprudent compliance, and above all thanks to Jacques Cœur (q.v.), the financial independence of the provinces disappeared little by little, and all the public revenues were left at the discretion of the king alone (1436–1440). By this means, too, and chiefly owing to the constable de Richemont and the brothers Bureau, the first permanent royal army was established (1445).
Henceforward royalty, strengthened by victory and organized for the struggle, was able to reduce the centrifugal social forces to impotence. The parlement of Paris saw its monopoly encroached upon by the court of Toulouse in 1443, and by the parlement of Grenoble in 1453. The Monarchical centralization. university of Paris, compromised with the English, like the parlement, witnessed the institution and growth of privileged provincial universities. The Church of France was isolated from the papacy by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) only to be exploited and enslaved by royalty. Monarchic centralization, interrupted for the moment by the war, took up with fresh vigour its attacks upon urban liberties, especially in the always more independent south. It caused a slackening of that spirit of communal initiative which had awakened in the midst of unprecedented disasters. The decimated and impoverished nobility proved their impotence in the coalitions they attempted between 1437 and 1442, of which the most important, the Praguerie, fell to pieces almost directly, despite the support of the dauphin himself.
The life of society, now alarmingly unstable and ruthlessly cruel, was symbolized by the danse macabre painted on the walls of the cemeteries; the sombre and tragic art of the 15th century, having lost the fine balance shown by that of the 13th, gave expression in its Social life. mournful realism to the general state of exhaustion. The favourite subject of the mysteries and of other artistic manifestations was no longer the triumphant Christ of the middle ages, nor the smiling and teaching Christ of the 13th century, but the Man of sorrows and of death, the naked bleeding Jesus, lying on the knees of his mother or crowned with thorns. France, like the Christ, had known all the bitterness and weakness of a Passion.
The war of independence over, after a century of fatigue, regrets and doubts, royalty and the nation, now more united and more certain of each other, resumed the methodic and utilitarian war of widening boundaries. Leaving dreams about crusades to the poets, and to a papacy delivered from schism, Charles VII. turned his attention to the ancient appanage of Lothair, Alsace and Lorraine, those lands of the north and the east whose frontiers were constantly changing, and which seemed to invite aggression. But the chance of annexing them without great trouble was lost; by the fatal custom of appanages the Valois had set up again those feudal institutions which the Capets had found such difficulty in destroying, and Louis XI. was to make sad experience of this.
To the north and east of the kingdom extended a wide territory of uncertain limits; countries without a chief like Alsace; principalities like Lorraine, ecclesiastical lordships like the bishopric of Liége; and, most important of all, a royal appanage, that of the duchy of Burgundy, The House of Burgundy. which dated back to the time of John the Good. Through marriages, conquests and inheritance, the dukes of Burgundy had enormously increased their influence; while during the Hundred Years’ War they had benefited alternately by their criminal alliance with the English and by their self-interested reconciliation with their sovereign. They soon
