Keeping Joan's Military Role in Proportion
The author warns against exaggerating Joan of Arc's military importance. Dunois and La Hire might well have saved Orléans without her. Her tactic of charging boldly at the enemy won some battles and lost others.
The deeper causes of the turn lay elsewhere. England was feeling the weight of the Hundred Years' War. In 1435 Philip, Duke of Burgundy, England's ally, grew tired of the fighting and made a separate peace with France. His withdrawal loosened English control over the conquered southern towns, and they expelled the foreign garrisons one by one. In 1436 Paris, held by the British for seventeen full years, drove out their troops, and Charles VII at last began to rule from his own capital.
The King Who Learned to Govern
Charles had until then been little more than the shadow of a king. Now he learned how to govern: how to choose capable ministers, organize an army, subdue unruly barons, and do whatever was needed to free his country. Joan's inspiration explains part of this. But he was still so weak that when the brave girl was led to her death, he made no move to save her.
His formidable mother-in-law, Yolande of Anjou, helped him with valuable advice and had encouraged him to receive the Maid. According to tradition, she also gave her son-in-law a new favorite, one who held his heart for ten years.
Agnès Sorel
Agnès Sorel was the daughter of a steward from Touraine. Orphaned young, she was raised by Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine, who made her well-mannered and virtuous. In 1432, a year after Joan's death, the duchess brought her to the court at Chinon. Charles was captivated by her chestnut hair and charming laugh and set his heart on her. Yolande found her tractable and hoped to gain influence over the king through her, so she persuaded her own daughter Marie to accept her husband's last mistress with good grace.
Agnès stayed loyal to this uneasy arrangement until her death. A later king, Francis I, with plenty of experience in such matters, praised the "beautiful lady" for having served France better than any cloistered nun. The book says Charles drank "the nectar of wisdom and understanding from her lips," and she lifted him out of shame, apathy and cowardice and helped make him a diligent, determined man.
The Men Around the King
Charles gathered strong men around him:
- The Constable Richemont, who organized his army.
- Jacques Coeur, who put the treasury on a sound footing.
- Jean Bureau, whose artillery brought the proud nobles to their knees.
Together they slowly drove the English back toward Calais.
Jacques Coeur: A Merchant Builds the State's Finances
Jacques Coeur was himself a phenomenon in the economic world. He had no distinguished ancestry or aristocratic lineage and little schooling, but he was a skilled calculator. He was a Frenchman who wanted to compete with the Venetians, Genoese and Catalans in trade with the Muslim East, and he succeeded. He owned seven fully equipped merchant ships crewed by hired hands and street vagrants, and their flags bore the image of the Mother of God. He amassed the greatest fortune in the France of his day, about 27,000,000 francs, each franc worth five dollars in the book's comparison with our weaker currencies.
In 1436 Charles gave him the task of minting coin, and soon afterward the management of government income and expenditure. In 1439 the Estates-General, with great enthusiasm, backed Charles's decision to drive the English out of France. Through a series of ordinances (1443–1447) it authorized the king to collect all taxes in France, including those that subjects had previously paid to their feudal lords.
The treasury's income rose to 1,800,000 crowns (45,000,000 dollars in the book's conversion). From then on the French monarchy, unlike the English, no longer depended on the "power of the purse" of the provinces' representatives, and it could resist the growth of middle-class democracy. The national tax system paid for France's victory over England. But because the king could raise rates at will, it also became a handy instrument of royal force, and the author counts it among the causes of the Revolution of 1789.
The Fall of Jacques Coeur
Coeur played a leading role in these fiscal reforms, which won him the admiration of many and the hatred of a few powerful men. In 1451 he was arrested on a charge of hiring people to poison Agnès Sorel, a charge never proven. He was sentenced to exile and all his property was confiscated for the state. He fled to Rome, rose to command the papal fleet, and sailed to relieve Rhodes. He fell ill at Chios and died there in 1456 at the age of sixty-one.
Meanwhile, under Coeur's guidance, Charles had established honest coinage, rebuilt ruined villages, promoted industry and trade, and saved the French economy from bankruptcy.
Europe's First Standing Army
In 1439 Charles dissolved the private armies and enrolled their soldiers in his own service, creating the first standing army in Europe. He ordered that in each parish one stout citizen, chosen by his fellow townsmen and exempt from all taxes, should arm himself, practice with weapons, and be ready to join other men like him in the king's service at a moment's notice. These free archers were the ones who drove the English army out of France.
The Last Campaigns
By 1449 Charles was equipped and ready to break the truce he had signed in 1444. The English were startled and shaken. Civil war had weakened them, and they found their faded empire in fifteenth-century France, like twentieth-century India, too expensive to keep. In 1427 holding France cost England 68,000 pounds and brought in only 57,000.
The British troops fought bravely but unwisely. They relied too heavily on archers, pointed stakes and the tactics that had beaten the French cavalry at Crécy and Poitiers. At Formigny (1450) these tactics failed against Bureau's cannon. In 1449 the English evacuated most of Normandy, and in 1451 they lost its capital, Rouen.
In 1453 the great Talbot was defeated and killed at Castillon, and Bordeaux surrendered. All of Guienne returned to France. Only Calais remained to the English. On October 19, 1453, the two countries signed a peace that ended the Hundred Years' War.