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455 Pages·1995·43.458 MB·English
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A History of France, 1460-1560 The Emergence of a Nation State NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY General Editor: Maurice Keen EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAIN Unity in Diversity 400-1000 Roger Collins BEFORE COLUMBUS Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto THE MILITARY ORDERS From the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries Alan Forey MEDIEVAL THOUGHT The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century (Second edition) Michael Haren THE ORIGINS OF FRANCE From Clovis to the Capetians 500-1000 Edward James SPAIN IN THE MIDDLE AGES From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 Angus McKay A HISTORY OF FRANCE 1460-1560 The Emergence of a Nation State David Potter MEDIEVAL IRELAND The Enduring Tradition Michael Richter Forthcoming: EARLY MEDIEVAL SICILY Continuity and Change from the Vandals to Frederick II, 450-1250 Jeremy Johns THE MAKING OF ORTHODOX BYZANTIUM 600-1025 Mark Whitlow A History of France, 1460-1560 The Emergence of a Nation State DAVID POTTER New Studies in Medieval History General Editor: MAURICE KEEN M MACMILLAN © David Potter 1995 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-54123-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1995 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-54124-1 ISBN 978-1-349-23848-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23848-4 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by EXPO Holdings For Suzie Contents Preface Vll List of Maps xv Note on Money and Measures xvi INTRODUCTION: FRENCH SOCIETY AND ITS IDENTITY 1 Ideas on Society 3 Regional Diversity 4 General Social and Economic Trends 7 The Idea of France in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance 17 1 THE MONARCHY: IDEOLOGY, PRESENTATION AND RITUAL 29 2 THE COURT OF FRANCE FROM LOUIS XI TO HENRI II 57 The Royal Affinity 57 La maison du roi 61 The Courtier's Career 76 The King's Routine 83 The Keeping of Order 86 Conclusion 88 3 THE KING, HIS COUNCIL AND THE SECRETARIAT 90 The Theory of Government by Good Counsel 92 The Composition of the Council 93 Relations between Councils, Order of Business 99 The Royal Secretariat 105 4 THE CROWN, ADMINISTRATION AND THE PROVINCES llO Expansion of the Royal Domain 110 The Provincial Governors 117 Administrative Personnel: Office-holders 123 Local Administration: Lawyers and Justice 128 v vi CONTENTS The Extent of Physical Control 129 Conclusion 134 5 THE TAXATION SYSTEM AND ITS BURDENS 136 The Financial Community 138 Management of State Finance and Tax Levels 142 Consultation 149 Resistance to Taxation 156 Conclusion 163 6 THE FRENCH NOBILITY IN THE RENAISSANCE 165 Status and Wealth 165 The Nobility and Clientage 187 The Crown and the Nobility 198 Conclusion 206 7 THE FRENCH CHURCH IN THE AGE OF REFORM 207 Traditions of Reform 207 The Church and the Crown 219 The Social Context of Reform 231 The Repression of Dissent 246 Conclusion 249 8 FRENCH FOREIGN POLICY, 1460-1560 251 War and Public Opinion 278 CONCLUSION 284 Abbreviations 291 Notes 292 Appendices 351 Genealogical Tables 369 Bibliography 382 Index 414 Preface An explanation is perhaps necessary for the title of this book. It is not to be asserted that a 'nation state' in the modern sense came into being in France during the Renaissance. In fact, the political system of France was a profoundly dynastic one, an etat royal as French historians express it, in which kingship played a central role in the ideology of the nascent state. It was not, essentially, a 'proprietorial' one although an eleme'nt of dynasticism remained. It was rather a country in which the growing elements of the idea of the nation-France (a term employed by Colette Beaune and Pierre Nora) were already in place and centred on monarchy, reli gion, aristocratic honour and clientage. It was thus a very distinc tive, sui generis form of nationhood organised around loyalty to some very traditional principles that were conscripted into the formation of a much more effective state. That state was charac terised by the idea of reform (in finance and provincial adminis tration, for instance), as was the church in the same period. The result was a period of relatively harmonious order and rule that was eventually broken after 1560 by the hypertrophy of one of its vital constituent elements: the waging of 'wars of magnificence'. The century of French history before the outbreak of the Wars of Religion has seldom been surveyed as a coherent whole. Beginning with the accession, in Louis XI, of one of the most formidable rulers in French history it closes with the death of Henri II, whose reign was one of the most innovative. It was in that century that the patterns of later French public, social and political life were established. Yet the custom of viewing the later years of the fifteenth century as either the 'twilight' of the medieval era or as its culmination has become deeply rooted in general assumptions. In some senses this goes back to the idea that the impact of the Italian Renaissance in France after 1494 and particularly during the reign of Francis I, 'restorer ofletters', worked a profound transformation in French culture. In some ways, the idea of a revival of letters at that time goes back to the conscious views of humanists themselves; Joachim du Bellay announced that Francis I had 'first restored all the good arts and sciences to their ancient dignity: and our language, which before was harsh and ill-polished, he has thus rendered elegant'. So, vii viii PREFACE tenebrae are dispelled by lux and Rabelais, in the much quoted letter of Gargantua to Pantagruel, declared: 'The time was then in shadows because of the calamity of the Goths, who had destroyed all good literature. But by the grace of God, light and dignity have been restored to letters in my time.' The idea was to lead directly to the concept of the Renaissance as prelude to the Enlightenment and in turn this did much to shape the historiographical frame work built by Burckhardt and Voigt.! The subsequent revival of interest in French mediev:al learning and the debate over its autonomous tradition have tended to obscure the issue. It is clear enough from the work of Franco Simone that humanism had a powerful impact in France at the time of Petrarch, that the chaos of the earlier fifteenth century did much to interrupt this but that French humanism, of a distinctive kind shaped by the configura tions of the French learned world, was in existence well before the Italian wars. Humanists and rhetoricians in the University of Paris like Robert Gaguin and Guillaume Fichet were already thinking ofthe previous age as one of 'barbarism' in the 1470s.2 The same framework customary in cultural history, that of a reawakening, has slipped imperceptibly into the commonly accepted views of French society in general and of its political struc tures. In a survey of the historiography of the state in France, Bernard Guenee has argued against the artificial barriers which have concealed the unity of the three centuries from the mid thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The institutions of the era of Francis I, he pointed out, were rooted in the Middle Ages.3 One of the main reasons for the continuation of these barriers remains the tendency of historians to specialise as 'medievalists' or 'modernists', despite the primacy given by historians of the Annates tradition to the longue duree in historical experience. In part, this stems from the fact that the sources for social history - estate records, tax lists, population evidence - become more varied and voluminous after the beginning of the sixteenth century and gener ate new sets of problems. The emergence of the great religious fissure that was to explode in the form of a lengthy civil war also itself raises some new problems and generates new forms of criti cism and speculation. It is not the intention of this book to engage in the stale argu ment between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but rather to stress the fundamental proposition that the society, politics and PREFACE ix culture of France in the first phase of 'absolute' power and of the French Renaissance were shaped by a continuous process of change and adaptation within existing institutions begun in the fifteenth century; that the institutions, social configurations and assumptions were conditioned by deeply laid substructures and also by remarkable innovations from the late fifteenth century onwards. The century between 1460 and 1560 can be called 'the fair sixteenth century' in that it constituted a relatively unusual century of growth and, despite periodic natural calamities and rebellions, favourable conditions for the mass of the people. This was the underlying foundation of the relative quiescence of French society between the Hundred Years War and the Wars of Religion that was to prove crucial in the development of a stable polity, a focus of loyalty and a set of attitudes that allowed the sur vival of the idea of France as a nation through first the disorders and then the dire economic conditions that followed until the eighteenth century. The idea that the later fifteenth century witnessed major changes is, of course, not a new one and is clearly present also in the political history of the period, especially in the notion of the 'new monarchies' of Louis XI and his contemporaries. However, the significance of all this is now no longer so clear as it once was. It would be a foolhardy student who repeated the old ideas about a Louis XI or Ferdinand of Aragon forging alliances with the urban bourgeoisie against the 'relics' of feudalism in order to establish Absolutism.4 That such rulers found essential supporters among town oligarchies and merchant capital is evidently the case and a confrontation with networks of aristocratic opposition cer tainly took place. It should be remembered, though, that such alliances and confrontations were characteristic of Ancien Regime polities down to the end of the seventeenth century at least and, taken in the longer term, look more like endemic conflicts built into the system. There is, in addition, a danger of slipping into the view, characteristic of Roland Mousnier, that the French monarchy represented the only guarantee in a vulnerable and diverse society against 'civil war, dislocation and dismemberment by neighbouring powers'. It is too readily assumed that such a society needs a strong state in order to exist.5 Monarchical Absolutism was a polity which concentrated legitimate authority in the sacralised figure of the king, who then delegated his powers

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