A Distant Mirror (34 page)

As the rampage spread against all landowners’ estates, the Jacques, when asked why they did these things, replied “that they knew not but they saw others do it and they thought they would thus destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would be none any more.” Whether or not the peasants really envisaged a world without nobles, the gentry assumed they did and felt the hot breath of annihilation. Seized by that terror the mass inspires when it overthrows authority,
they sent for help from their fellows in Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant.

At a critical moment for Marcel, the rage of the Jacquerie offered him an added weapon, which he seized in a fatal choice that was to lose him the support of the propertied class. At his instigation, the estates of the hated royal councillors were made the targets of a band of Jacques organized in the environs of Paris under the command of two merchants of the capital. The properties of the King’s chamberlain, Pierre d’Orgement, and of those two inveterate peculators, Simon de Buci and Robert de Lorris, were sacked and destroyed. Breaking into the castle of Ermenonville, one of the many benefits of royal favor bestowed on Robert de Lorris, a combined force of bourgeois and Jacques cornered the owner inside. On his knees before his enemies, he was forced to take an oath to disown the “gentry and nobility” and swear loyalty to the commune of Paris.

Compromised by murder and destruction, Marcel had mounted the tiger. The royal family at Meaux was the next target of the band from Paris. Enlarged as they marched along the Marne by bands of Jacques coming from many places and by many paths, the combined group numbering “9,000” reached Meaux on June 9 “with great will to do evil.” Prospects of rape and death filled the fortress called the Market of Meaux, where the Dauphin’s wife, sister, and infant daughter with some 300 ladies and their children were guarded by a small company of lords and knights. The Mayor and magistrates of Meaux, who had sworn loyalty to the Dauphin and promised to allow no “dishonor” to his family, crumbled before the invaders. Either in fear or in welcome, the citizens opened the gates and set out tables in the streets with napkins and bread, meat and wine. On approaching a town, the marauding Jacques customarily let it be known that they expected such provisions. Pouring into the city, the fearful horde filled the streets with “savage cries” while the ladies in the fortress, say the chroniclers, trembled in anguish.

At that moment, knighthood errant galloped to the rescue in the persons of that glittering pair, the Captal de Buch and Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Although one owed fealty to England and the other to France, they were cousins who were riding home together from a “crusade” in Prussia, where they had gone to keep themselves occupied during the truce after Poitiers. Neither was a friend of the Valois, but noble ladies in danger were every knight’s cause, and these two from the south did not share the initial paralysis of the northerners under the onslaught of the Jacques. Nor had either been involved in the shame of
Poitiers. Learning of the peril at Meaux, they hastened to the relief with a company of forty lances (120 men), reaching the Market of Meaux on the same day the commoners entered the city. Connected by a bridge to the city, the fortress, surrounded by walls and towers, was situated on a strip of land between the river and a canal.

At the head of twenty-five knights in bright armor with pennants of argent and azure displaying stars and lilies and couchant lions, the Captal and the Count rode through the portcullis onto the bridge. In its narrow confines where superiority of numbers could not be mustered, the commoners unwisely chose to fight. Wielding weapons from horseback, the knights cut down their opponents, trampling them, toppling bodies into the river, forcing the rest back across the bridge, and opening the way to carnage. Despite some hard hand-to-hand fighting, the “small dark villeins poorly armed” recoiled before the lances and axes of the mailed warriors and, succumbing to terrorized retreat, were butchered. The knights charged, hacking furiously, killing the commoners like beasts, until exhausted from the slaughter.

“Several thousand” were slain, according to the chroniclers’ impossible figures, which testify nevertheless to an appalling toll. Fleeing remnants were chased through the countryside and exterminated. The knights lost but a few, one with an arrow through his eye. Their fury, growing by what it fed on, was unleashed in vengeance upon the town, which was put to pillage and flames. Houses and even churches were sacked, leaving nothing of value behind; the Mayor was hanged, many of the citizens massacred, others imprisoned, others burned inside their houses. Meaux burned for two weeks and was afterward condemned for
lèse majesté
and suppressed as an independent commune.

Meaux was the turning point. Gaining courage from the conquest, French nobles of the area joined in desolating the surrounding country, wreaking more damage on France, said Jean de Venette, than had the English. From there, the suppression of the Jacquerie followed, and in its train the fall of Marcel.

Charles of Navarre led the counter-action in Picardy and the Beauvais region, pushed thereto by the nobles of his party. They went to him saying that “if those who are called Jacques continue for long they will bring the gentry to nothing and destroy everything.” As one of the great nobles of the world, he must not suffer his own kind to be so reduced. Knowing that he could gain the crown, or the power he wanted, only with the support of the nobility, Charles was persuaded. With a force of several hundred including the “baron de Coussi,” he marched against the Jacques gathered at Clermont under Guillaume
Cale. Cale sensibly ordered his army of several thousand to fall back upon Paris for the support and aid of the city, but the Jacques, eager for a fight, refused to obey. Cale then deployed them in the traditional three battalions, of which two, led by archers and crossbowmen, were stationed behind a line of baggage wagons. The third, of 600 horsemen poorly mounted and many without arms, was held in support.

Sounding trumpets and shouting battle cries, with tattered banners flying, the peasants faced the enemy. Surprised by this organized resistance, Navarre preferred guile and treachery. He invited Cale to parley, and upon this invitation from a king, Cale’s common sense apparently deserted him. Considering himself an opponent in war to whom the laws of chivalry applied, he went to the parley without a guard, whereupon his royal and noble opponent had him seized and thrown into chains. The capture of their leader by such easy and contemptuous treachery drained the Jacques’ confidence and hope of success. When the nobles charged, the commoners succumbed like their fellows at Meaux and suffered equal slaughter. Only a few who hid among the brush escaped the swords of the searching horsemen. Surrounding villages handed over fugitives to the nobles. Pursuing the attack elsewhere in the region, Navarre and his company massacred “3,000” more peasants, including 300 burned alive in a monastery where they had taken refuge. To consummate his victory, Charles of Navarre beheaded Guillaume Cale after reportedly crowning him, in wicked mockery, King of the Jacques with a circlet of red-hot iron.

As the savage repression swept north, its new leader emerged in Enguerrand de Coucy, whose domain had been at the center of the storm. The Jacques were never able to reassemble, says Froissart, because “the young sire de Coucy gathered a great number of gentlemen who put an end to them wherever they found them without pity or mercy.” That so young a man should have taken the leadership bespeaks a strong personality, but nothing more about him can be learned from the episode. The
Chronique Normande
and other accounts also mention his hunting down peasants through hamlets and villages and hanging them from trees while his neighbor the Comte de Roussi hung them from the doors of their cottages. The totality of what is known is fixed by the 19th century authority Père Denifle: “It was chiefly Enguerrand VII, the young seigneur de Coucy, who, at the head of the gentry of his barony, completed the extermination of the Jacques.”

Reinvigorated by the blood of Meaux, the nobles of that region finished off the Jacquerie between Seine and Marne. “
They flung themselves upon hamlets and villages, putting them to the flame and
pursuing poor peasants in houses, fields, vineyards and forest to be miserably slaughtered.” By June 24, 1358, “20,000” Jacques had been
killed and the countryside converted to a wasteland.

The futile rising was over, having lasted, despite its long shadow, less than a month, of which two weeks were taken up by the repression. Nothing had been gained, nothing changed, only more death. Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantage of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents. Reckless of consequence, the landowners, who were already suffering from the shortage of labor after the plague, let revenge take precedence over self-interest.

Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and an end. Since the day after Poitiers, Marcel had kept men at work extending the walls, strengthening the gates, building moats and barriers. Now fully enclosed and fortified, the capital was the key to power. From Vincennes on the outskirts, the Regent with assembled nobles was probing for an entry; Marcel, who had lost sight of every purpose but overpowering the Regent, was planning to deliver the capital to Charles of Navarre; the eel-like Navarre was negotiating with both sides and was in contact with Navarrese and English forces outside the walls.

At a mass meeting staged for him by Marcel in the Place de Grève, he told the crowd that “he would have been King of France if his mother had been a man.” Planted demonstrators responded with shouts of “Navarre! Navarre!” While the majority, shocked by the disloyalty, remained silent, he was elected by acclamation Captain of Paris. His acceptance of the office on the side of the people alienated many of his noble supporters, for they did not wish to be “against the gentry.” Probably at this time Enguerrand de Coucy fell away from the Navarrese party, for he soon afterward appeared in opposition to it.

Under Marcel too the ground was breaking away like ice in a river. His connivance with the Jacques frightened many of the “good towns” and, more seriously, caused the disaffection of the upper bourgeois in his own city. In the chaos and scarcities and disruption of trade, they veered toward the Regent as the only focus in the desperate need for authority. Paris was coming apart in furious factions, some for fighting to the end behind Marcel, some for deposing Navarre, some for admitting the Regent, all fired by hatred of the English, who were ravaging the outskirts with daily atrocity. With his support waning,
Marcel was reduced to the naked need of armed force. On July 22, in the act that turned sentiment against him, he allowed Charles of Navarre to bring a band of English men-at-arms into the city. Aroused and armed Parisians fell upon them with such effect that they had to be locked up in the fortress of the Louvre for protection.

Meanwhile the prosperous bourgeois feared that if the Regent succeeded in taking the city by force instead of surrender, all citizens alike would be subjected to punishment and plunder. Unable to force Marcel to yield the city, they determined to dispose of him on the theory that “it was better to kill than be killed.” Amid cabals and enemies and inexplicable events, the citizens were easy prey to whispers of treachery on the part of the Provost.

On July 31 the end came when Marcel appeared at the Porte St. Denis and ordered the guards to deliver the keys of the gate to officers of the King of Navarre. The guards refused, shouting betrayal of the city. Weapons flashed, and a draper named Jean Maillart, evidently pre-equipped, unfurled the royal banner, mounted his horse, and raised the royal battle cry “Montjoie–St. Denis!” Crowds took up the cry, clashes and confused alarms erupted. Marcel next appeared across the city at the Porte St. Antoine, where he again demanded the keys and met the same response, which was led by a certain Pierre des Essars, a knighted bourgeois and cousin by marriage of both Maillart and Marcel. In a rush upon the Provost, the guards of St. Antoine struck him down, and when the bloodstained weapons had lifted and the melee had cleared, the body of Etienne Marcel lay trampled and dead in the street.

Two of his companions were also killed, and others of his party were stripped, beaten, and left naked under the walls. “Then the people rushed off to find others to treat the same way.” More of the Provost’s partisans were murdered and dumped naked in the streets. While Charles of Navarre escaped to St. Denis, the royalist faction took control and two days later, on August 2, 1358, opened the city to the Regent.

He at once proclaimed a pardon for the citizens of Paris except for close associates of Marcel and Navarre, who were executed or banished, and their confiscated property turned over to the Regent’s party. But the spirit of the blue-and-red hoods remained strong enough to cause angry demonstrations when more of Marcel’s adherents were arrested. The situation was sullen and dangerous. On August 10 the Regent issued a general amnesty and ordered nobles and peasantry to pardon each other so that the fields might be cultivated and the harvest brought in. The extermination of the Jacques was making itself felt.

With Marcel’s death the reform movement was aborted; the
glimpse of “Good Government” was to remain only a glimpse. After Artevelde and Rienzi, Marcel was the third leader of a bourgeois rising within a dozen years to be killed by his own followers. The people of France on the whole were not ready for an effort to limit the monarchy. They blamed all their troubles—heavy taxes, dishonest government, debased coinage, military defeats, banditry of the companies, the fallen condition of the realm—on the crown’s evil councillors and the caitiff nobles, not on the King, who had fought bravely at Poitiers, or even on the Dauphin. No political movement sprang from Marcel’s bones. The right of the Estates General to convene at will was lost, the provisions of the Grand Ordinance largely, though not entirely, discarded. The crown was left free for the period of royal absolutism that history held in waiting.