The Valois Dynasty: Crisis, Triumph, and Downfall

Upon the death of Philip IV in 1314, the French Crown was the most powerful in Europe. The new king Louis X was the successor of Clovis, Charlemagne, and Saint Louis; his royal patron St Denis watched over the dynasty which had maintained an unbroken patrilineal succession for hundreds of years. The Pope resided in Avignon and was under his influence. In times of war, he could raise the sacred Oriflamme banner to rally his vassals, and upon his coronation, he was anointed with holy oil said to have been delivered for the coronation of Clovis 800 years ago. His realm had experienced a prosperous 13th century, and across northern France, soaring Gothic cathedrals stood as a testament to the prosperity and confidence that resonated through the king’s realm.

Perhaps the main strength of the Capetian Dynasty had been genetic luck. In 1314, eleven kings had held the throne since the accession of Hugh Capet in 987 (in comparison to 19 in England). Ruling for an average of 30 years, each king passed the throne onto his son.

In the reign of Louis X, this luck began to run out. Louis died in 1316 after two years on the throne, and was succeeded by his son, who was still in the womb. The infant John lived and ruled for four days. Louis’s brothers Philip V and Charles IV then ruled in succession, each ruling for six years and dying without a male heir. Just like that, the Capetian line was at an end.

The kingdom was not without male relatives capable of inheriting the throne. Yet for a monarchy that had over 300 years of direct father-to-son succession, even a relatively minor succession crisis generated a profound sense of disturbance.

Charles IV, the last Capetian, died in 1328. As the major figures of the French nobility gathered to choose Charles’s successor, they held a common understanding that the customs of the kingdom meant that women could not succeed to the throne, nor could the right to the throne pass through a woman. This made Philip of Valois, son of Charles of Valois who was brother of Philip the Fair, the rightful king. It helped that Philip was one of the most powerful nobles in France, while the man who would have been the rightful king had women been able to pass on genetic legitimacy was Edward III, then king of England.

Edward was the son of Isabella — daughter of Philip IV. Yet the nobility did not create this custom of inheritance purely to exclude Edward — the same custom had ensured that the throne passed between the sons of Philip IV rather than going to any of their daughters.

Philip was coronated at Reims in 1328. Philip’s reign is remembered chiefly for witnessing the eruption of the Hundred Years’ War. This war hinged on Gascony — the strip of territory on the southwestern coast that was the last remaining slice of what had once been the mighty Angevin Empire of Henry II.

The Capetians’ meteoric rise had seen the English monarchs become vassals to the French king for the territories they held on the continent. This state of affairs crystalized in the 1259 Treaty of Paris and left two ambitious monarchies deeply unsatisfied. Tensions that had been bubbling during the reign of Philip IV and his successors boiled over in 1337.

The Hundred Years’ War lasted as long as it did largely due to the chaos that these wars unleashed on France. From the French perspective, the period from 1337-1453 resembled a series of civil wars as much as a series of wars against England.

Through it all, the Valois kings veered from one crisis to the next, atop a realm that the Capetians had stuck together through fortune and skill in the 12th and 13th centuries, yet whose visage of unity was rapidly unfurled in the course of the 14th and early 15th. The France that emerged in the mid-15th century was more united and its monarch more powerful than ever before. But the road to this point was a perilous one.

One problem that emerged for Philip VI was that his claim to the throne was not unimpeachable. When Edward III claimed the throne of France for himself in 1340 it gave legal cover to those who rebelled against the French king. Those areas on the periphery of the French heartlands where the king’s authority had been contested—Flanders, Brittany, and the South-West—could now openly defy the king and claim legality by rallying to Edward’s side and gaining his financial and military support.

Thus conflict raged in Brittany, Flanders, and the Gascon borderlands through the 1340s and 50s as those who resented the Capetian encroachment now seized their chance to back a rival claimant across the sea.

The Kings of France ruled by the will of God. At the heart of their rule were the nobility of France. The nobles were intimately connected to the monarch — many literally connected by blood, but all connected by oaths of fealty and by their supreme purpose to fight in the armies of the king. Only by keeping all of this in mind can one appreciate the impact that the Battles of Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1355) had on the French monarchy. In these battles, Philip VI and his son John II were utterly defeated, and the latter was captured by the son of Edward III, the Black Prince. The monarchs were both on the field when God abandoned the French forces, and the nobility of France were cut down.

The loss of God’s favor, the loss of so many soldiers of the nobility (and more importantly their reputation), and the loss of the king himself to England in 1355 brought the prestige of the French Crown to such a low ebb that anarchy erupted.

The capture of John II and his removal to England left Dauphin Charles at the head of a royal government utterly bereft of prestige and a country sliding into chaos. France’s unity and coherence as a realm were utterly dependent upon a strong monarch to sit atop the kingdom. Without this, chaos ensued.

A gathering of the three estates was held in Paris to decide how to govern the realm. Yet even as the representatives of the estates sought to govern the country, crises sprung up across the land.

In Paris and the surrounding regions, a revolution was stirring, as peasants in the countryside ran riot across rural estates and attacked their lords. In Paris itself, Ettiene Marcel, provost of the powerful merchant guild, assumed the de facto governorship of the city and declared Parisian support for the rural revolt, known as the Jacquerie.

Meanwhile, armed bands often labeled as “free companies,” composed of unpaid English, Gascon, and French soldiers, swarmed throughout the south of France bringing destruction and extortion in their wake.

As the Dauphin, the estates, and Marcel jockeyed for influence the latter two were attempting to enforce substantial reforms on the royal administration, in particular over its tax-collecting apparatus. The Dauphin refused to capitulate and in the end, Marcel was brought down by a Parisian counter-revolution which put the heir to the throne back in control of Paris. Meanwhile, the rural Jacquerie was crushed by a noble army.

Charles V now oversaw a resurrection of royal fortunes. Charles avoided pitched battles against English armies but launched raids against English forces and fortifications while waging a legal offensive to win back the loyalty of lords in English-held Aquitaine. Upon his death in 1380 Charles, known as “Le Sage” (the wise), had won back all the French lands that had been lost to the English since the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War.

However, the first decades of the conflict exposed the fragility of the French kingdom once royal authority was weakened. Any hope of stability rested upon the presence of a strong and active monarch, especially with the external factors of bubonic plague and English armies bringing ruin in their wake. Worse still, in a horrible stroke of ill fortune for France the man to succeed Charles V was Charles VI — the Mad.

Charles VI was too young to rule directly in 1380, thus a regency council was formed. Here, as ever, the council became a breeding ground for noble factionalism. Noble tensions simmered down as Charles came into his majority in 1388, and began to oversee a reform of the royal government.

On August 5, 1392, the young king succumbed to a sudden fit of madness and killed four of his riding companions before he was restrained. From this day onwards the king would suffer from repeated bouts of “absences,” which has now been attributed to paranoid schizophrenia. As the king became increasingly incapable of independent rule and reliant upon his nobles, tensions mounted between elite factions vying for influence over the throne. Whereas the mighty Frankish nobles of the 10th and 11th centuries resisted the influence of the Crown, now it was the Crown that they sought to dominate.

Two great factions emerged: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. The first was led by Louis, Duke of Orleans and brother of Charles VI, and the latter by Philip, Duke of Burgundy and uncle of the king.

Political jostling erupted into civil war when Louis of Orleans, who had dominated the government since 1404, was brutally assassinated in the streets of Paris in November of 1407 by order of John of Burgundy, who had succeeded his father as Duke. This shocking event triggered over a decade of civil conflict and presented an opening through which the English would return to France.

Henry V of England resumed the war by re-issuing the English claim to the throne of France, and he further broke the prestige of French knights with his stunning victory at Agincourt, in 1415.

Four years later Duke John the Fearless, the most powerful man in France, was brutally murdered by Armagnac allies of the Dauphin Charles in the middle of peace talks. The Burgundian faction now abandoned the House of Valois altogether and sided with Henry V. The combined forces of the English and the Burgundians overwhelmed the Armagnacs and the Valois, and forced the Treaty of Troyes upon Charles. This treaty arranged for the marriage of Charles’s daughter Catherine to Henry, but most significantly it confirmed Henry Plantagenet as the heir to the throne of France.

Such an arrangement was obviously deeply unpalatable for the Dauphin Charles, and he resisted Henry and the Burgundians from his power base in central and southern France. The French monarchy had reached a perilous state in which two strong claimants to the throne tore the country in two, as the English-Burgundian forces ground down the Valois. This was uncharted territory for a Crown that had not been used to civil wars fought in its name, nor to violent seizures from rival houses.

It was at this dark stage that the French kingship would begin its path to restoration in a way so bizarre, so mystical, and yet so spiritually powerful that it seems somehow fitting for the history of the French monarchy. Enter Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc with her incredible spiritual power was an appropriate savior for a Crown whose essential power had long been its spiritual aura and holiness. The restoration of the Monarchy’s true power could not simply be won through violence but required divine rejuvenation to prove to the country and to its own kings that the Crown of France was indeed a sacred one. Joan understood better than anyone the monarchy’s sacred power, and thus she set her sights on getting the Dauphin anointed at Reims—the traditional location for royal coronations—as her primary goal.

This she achieved after helping the Valois forces to break the siege of Orleans in 1429, and Joan was present as the Dauphin was crowned as Charles VII in the place where Clovis was baptized into the Christian faith over 900 years before.

With these miraculous events, the tide began to turn in favor of the Valois, and the belief that God favored their cause helped fuel a surge in success for Charles’s forces. Joan herself would perish at the stake in 1431, after her capture by the English — though her legend and her mystery would live on, proof that the French Crown was aided by divine forces beyond understanding.

In 1435, Charles made peace with Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, ending the great French schism and isolating the English forces who still held Paris and Normandy. Now came the years of glorious victory for Charles and for France, as he retook Paris, Normandy, and Gascony. By 1453 he had expelled the English from every part of France with the exception of Calais.

In the course of these conquests, Charles reformed the military to create an enlarged army loyal directly to the king, and he asserted the Crown’s sovereignty over Brittany, Normandy, and the South-West, ensuring that the reconquest of France fed into the centralizing power of the Crown.

With the closing of the Hundred Years’ War, the Valois monarchy had withstood the greatest crises that had yet befallen the French Crown and the realm it had built. Many decades of relative peace and prosperity awaited the realm, during which the power of the monarchy would reach unprecedented heights — before plummeting to new lows.

The decades between the close of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of Religion were far from uneventful. Louis XI (known as the “universal spider”) waged fierce but successful wars against his mightiest vassals, carving up the ever-problematic duchy of Burgundy and bringing great parts of it under royal control. His successors Charles VIII and Louis XII oversaw the full absorption into the Kingdom of France of perhaps the most independent of French regions—Brittany—through a combination of armed force and marital diplomacy.

These kings also intervened in the complex politics of the Italian peninsula — bringing war and chaos there while maintaining civil peace within France. Francis I increased French activity in Italy until the disastrous Battle of Pavia in 1525, where he was captured by the Habsburg Emperor Charles V.

The kings of the Valois did not have the long-reigning, son-producing stability of the Capetians yet by the 16th century, the power of the Crown and of the realm it possessed was greater than it had ever been.

At the heart of the French king’s power was religion. One faith and one king — the king’s devotion to Catholicism in a country dominated by the faith was a central pillar of royal authority and prestige. This had been so since the baptism of Clovis. Yet a millennia on from this event the religious unity of France was to be fractured as never before.

The Protestant Reformation did not explode in France as it did in the German lands in the years following 1517. Protestantism grew in strength over a number of decades and engaged in an escalating cycle of extremism with Catholic groups. As Protestantism grew in influence, Catholic reactionaries became increasingly hostile, causing Protestants to grow bolder in kind.

Francis I engaged in light persecution of Protestants and their doctrines, though after the “Affair of the Placards” in 1534, where inflammatory Protestant slogans were put up around Paris overnight, Francis increased his suppression. By the middle of the 16th century, Protestantism had firmly implanted itself within significant swathes of the realm, and the monarchy had committed itself to suppressing it.

As Jean Calvin’s Geneva became a center of Protestant literature and as their missionaries were sent throughout France, the Crown ramped up its persecution of Protestantism, by now perceiving it as a mortal threat to the Catholic unity that underlay royal authority.

The untimely death of Henry II in 1559 brought Queen Catherine de Medici to prominence as regent and advisor for her sons — three of whom would reign before the end of the 16th century. Under Francois II (1559-60) the noble House of Guise rose to eminence at the royal court. The Guises were tenacious opponents of Protestantism, and they were soon opposed by a Protestant noble faction, led by Louis Prince of Condé from House Bourbon. Catherine did her utmost to stay above the religious factionalism, but could not prevent it from intensifying across the realm.

Though Catherine was an extremely capable regent, she could not possess the aura of an anointed monarch, and so France would once again witness the crippling effects of noble factionalism in the absence of a strong and capable king. The infusion of religious extremism only made things worse.

The first of a series of religious wars broke out in 1562 between the Catholic Guises and Huguenot Bourbons. The bloody conflict was put to an end when Catherine brought Charles IX into his majority in 1563.

However, the young king, only thirteen, could not contain the boiling pot of religious tension, and war broke out again in 1567 when Charles’s hiring of thousands of Swiss mercenaries to his personal guard provoked Protestant fears of an attack. The Huguenots struck first and attempted to seize the king and besiege Paris. A royal army eventually defeated the Huguenots in 1569 at Jarmac, and their leader Condé was killed.

A fragile peace was made in 1570, but just two years later the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre occurred when the attempted assassination of a leading noble Huguenot in Paris led to a massacre of Protestants by Catholic mobs across the country. The Crown itself was involved, taking the opportunity to destroy key Protestant leaders who were in Paris amid the chaos. That the Crown could stoop to such actions demonstrates the extent to which it was by now unable to control its own nobility.

The Massacre was a body blow to the Protestant cause in France, yet the Huguenots remained strong in their strongholds in the South and West. In 1574 Charles IX died and was succeeded by his brother Henry III, who as Duke of Anjou had been one of the foremost leaders of the militant Catholic cause.

War raged on, and in 1576 a Protestant coalition exacted a deal from the Crown allowing for freedom of worship throughout France, with the exception of Paris. Outraged by this compromise, hardline nobles (led by the Guise) formed the Catholic League, dedicated to taking a harder line against the Huguenots.

This League was a direct challenge to royal authority, opposed as it was to the conciliatory stance of the Crown. Its formation undermined the King by taking away his position as the foremost champion of Catholicism in France.

Henry III failed to produce heirs, and by the 1580s this was beginning to worry the Catholic League, who knew that the heir to the throne was Henry of Navarre, one of the foremost Protestant leaders. Their fear led to the League becoming even more assertive, diminishing the authority of the monarch in favor of the Duke of Guise.

Not since the reign of Charles the Mad was the monarchy so bereft of power — yet Henry III was in full control of his senses. The monarch had lost the ability to unite the realm, through either force or reconciliation. Yet even amid the worst crises of the Hundred Years’ War, the sacred aura of the king had prevented any harm from being committed against his person. Unlike in England, the King of France had never been deposed or killed. Yet in this climate of religious uncertainty, this invisible shield that had surrounded the French Crown would break.

In a scene reminiscent of the murder of the Duke of Burgundy at the hands of the Dauphin in 1419, in October of 1588, Henry lost all patience with the Catholic League and had his personal guard murder the Duke of Guise in the King’s chamber, and the duke’s brother was killed the following day. The last vestiges of Henry’s authority withered away with this act — as Catholic France exploded in outrage at their king.

Henry was now seen as a tyrant and an enemy of the faith. Indeed so desperate was the king that he formed an alliance with the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, and the two laid siege to Paris. Within the capital, there were calls from religious groups for Henry’s extermination — calls that were heard by a Dominican friar and extremist named Jacques Clement. On August 1, 1589, Clement managed to infiltrate the king’s camp, before stabbing the monarch in the abdomen. Henry III died hours later. The last Valois king of France was the first to die at the hands of his subjects.

The Wars of Religion were a deeper threat to the monarchy than any previous crisis in France. Even at the depths of the Hundred Years’ War, the person of the king remained inviolable, no matter his inability to seize control of events or his lack of political power. It was the shattering of his religious legitimacy that had made the monarch truly vulnerable.