Recovery and reunification, 1429–83

The coronation of Charles VII was the last pivotal event of the Hundred Years’ War. From Reims the king’s army moved on triumphantly, winning capitulations from Laon, Soissons, and many lesser places and even threatening Paris before disbanding. The popular devotion to monarchy that had produced Joan was undermining English positions almost everywhere in France; the urgent necessity to discredit her explains the callous efficiency of the inquisition to which she was subjected, upon being captured by the Burgundians and turned over to the English in 1430. Under duress, she confessed to heresy, then boldly retracted her confession. She was burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431.

Charles and his party made no move through ecclesiastical channels to save Joan. They then proceeded deliberately to make peace with Burgundy. In the Treaty of Arras (September 21, 1435), Philip the Good bargained strongly; confirmed in the possession of domains ceded by the English, he also obtained Charles’s humiliating disavowal of the murder of the duke’s father, John the Fearless. The act, however damaging to the royal vanity, set Charles free from political obligation to the Armagnacs; the factional king now became the supreme king of France. Within a year, English support collapsed in the Île-de-France, and royal soldiers entered Paris. The Truce of Tours (1444) provided for a marriage between Henry VI and the niece of Queen Mary of France; extensions of the truce gave Charles time to strengthen his military resources. War flared again in 1449, when England intervened against a duke of Brittany who had done homage to Charles VII. In 1449–50 a vigorous campaign resulted in the French conquest of Normandy, and in 1451 most of Guyenne fell to the French.

When the English lost the minor Battle of Castillon in 1453, the Hundred Years’ War was over. That fact was not altogether clear to contemporaries, for no treaty was concluded and skirmishes were to recur for many years to come. But only Calais, enclosed in the Burgundian domains, remained of English possessions in France. Charles VII issued medals to commemorate his soldiers, and he ordered a review of Joan of Arc’s trial, which resulted in a verdict of rehabilitation in 1456.

Governmental reforms

As hostilities were waning (1435–49), Charles VII presided over a major reorganization of government. Tested by adversity and strengthened by fortune, he had grown in political competence. The principal administrative services—chancery, Parlement, accounts—were reestablished at Paris. The replacement of Burgundian sympathizers, notably in Parlement, seems to have been accomplished with moderation and tact; in local offices no purges were necessary. But it quickly became evident that the reunited country was now too large and its officials too numerous to get along very well with a government as centralized as Parisian bureaucrats preferred.

Remedial legislation was consistent with tendencies long apparent. Revenues from the domain were collected in the treasury, the work of which Charles VII reorganized in four regional offices. Extraordinary revenues had been administered since the 1350s in districts (élections), whose numbers had vastly increased since the time of Charles V. The élections were now subordinated to four regional généralités, corresponding to the offices of treasury. The old Chambre des Comptes had lost parts of its jurisdiction to more specialized courts in 1390, of which the Cour des Aides (board of excise) had provincial divisions set up at Toulouse in 1439 and at Rouen in 1450. A provincial parlement was definitively established at Toulouse in 1443, and there were to be others at Grenoble and Bordeaux. With all these changes, the conciliar structure of government survived; policy continued to be made by the king in concert with favourites, whose numbers had not been limited by reforms. The proliferation of lesser offices, many filled by lawyers, created a new stratum of gentlemen who enjoyed the king’s privilege.

While the reform of offices did nothing to obliterate the older distinction between ordinary and extraordinary revenue, the work of Charles VII effectively belied the notion that the monarchy should subsist on its domain alone. That the king as lord could no longer pay his officers and soldiers was apparent to almost everyone. Early in his career Charles had resorted to the Estates to raise aides and tailles (as the old levies on sales and hearths were now called), but after convocations in the 1430s he continued these taxes through annual ordinances no longer sanctioned by the Estates. Moreover, the preparation of annual budgets for ordinary and extraordinary revenues gave way in 1450 to a single “general statement” of finance, which, being related to demonstrable necessities, effectively institutionalized taxation in France. As the Middle Ages ended, France comprised a central core of élections, where local Estates, when they met at all, had little to do with fiscal matters, and a surrounding belt of “lands of Estates” (e.g., Languedoc, Brittany, Normandy, and Burgundy), where custom continued to allow for the administration of taxes. Having originated in times of fiscal demands thought uncustomary and excessive, representative institutions could not generally survive once the royal impositions, from very repetition, had ceased to seem arbitrary; even where Estates persisted, their votes were more like approval than sovereign consent.