this burgeoning nation with a sturdy dynasty. From the election of the first Capetian up until the death of Philip the Fair, France had only eleven kings, in three and a quarter centuries, and each one left a male heir.
Oh! These sovereigns were not all blessed with genius. But the incapable or the unfortunate would so often be succeeded immediately by a monarch of great stature, or a great minister would stand in for the faltering prince and govern in his place, it was as if by the grace of God the dynasty persisted.
The fledgling France almost perished in the hands of Philip I, a man of minor vice and major incompetence. Then came the corpulent but indefatigable Louis VI, who found on his accession a country under threat just five leagues from Paris, and left it restored to its former glory, stretching as far as the Pyrenees. The undecided, inconsistent Louis VII engaged the kingdom in disastrous adventures overseas; but the Abbot Suger maintained the cohesion and activity of the country in the name of the monarch.
And France’s luck, repeatedly, was to have between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries three sovereigns of exceptional talent, each one blessed by a long reign – forty-three years, forty-one years, and twenty-nine years respectively on the throne – so that their main designs could be rendered irreversible. Three men of most different natures and virtues, but all three very much in another league compared to any other king.
Philip II Augustus, master craftsman of history, began to build the unity of his native land literally in stone, building around and beyond the royal possessions. Saint Louis, enlightened by devotion, began to establish the unity of law, building upon royal justice. Philip the Fair, superior statesman, began to lay down the unity of the state, building on royal administration. Not one of them was overly worried about pleasing the people, but more concerned with being both active and effective. Each one of them had to swallow the bitter draught of unpopularity. But they were more sorely missed after their death than they had been disparaged, mocked or hated while they were alive. And above all, what they had strived for came to be.
A country, a judicial system, a state: the defining foundations of a nation. Under these three supreme artisans of the idea of France, the country emerged from the age of potentiality. Self-aware, France was establishing itself in the western world as an indisputable, and soon to be pre-eminent, reality.
With twenty-two million inhabitants, its borders well guarded, an army that could be called up quickly, feudal lords kept at heel, constituencies perfectly controlled, roads safe, trade flourishing; what other Christian country could compare itself to France, and which would not be envious of it? The people complained of course, feeling controlled by a hand they considered too firm; later they would moan a good deal more when delivered up to hands too soft or too deranged.
With the death of Philip the Fair, suddenly the idea of France cracked. The long succession of good fortune was broken.
The three sons of the Iron King followed each other on the throne without leaving male descent. We have previously told the story of the dramas the court of France went through as its crown was repeatedly auctioned to the most ambitious bidder.
Four kings committed to the grave in the space of fourteen years; more than enough to fill minds with dismay! France was not used to rushing to Rheims quite so often. It was as if the Capetian family tree had been struck by lightning in its very trunk. And to see the crown slip into the hands of the Valois branch, the troubled branch, would reassure no one. Ostentatious, impulsive, enormously presumptuous princes, all form and no substance, the Valois imagined that all they had to do was smile to make the kingdom happy. Their predecessors mistook themselves for France itself. They mistook France for the idea they had of themselves. After the curse of rapid demise came the curse of mediocrity.
The first of the Valois, Philip VI, called ‘the found king’, in other words the upstart, had a ten-year period during which he might have been able to secure his power base, but then, at the end of this time, his first cousin Edward III of England resolved to open the dynastic feud; he declared himself entitled king of France, which allowed him to rally, in Flanders, Brittany, Saintonge and Aquitaine, all those who had grounds for complaint with the new regime, including leaders of towns and feudal overlords. Faced with a more effective monarch, the Englishman would most probably have continued to dither.
But Philip of Valois was incapable of warding off impending danger and no more capable of defeating it when it came; his fleet was annihilated at the Battle of Sluys because its admiral had been selected for his ignorance of the sea; and the king himself was guilty of letting his cavalry charge trample their own infantry, carnage he saw with his own eyes when roaming through the battlefield the night after the Battle of Crécy.
When Philip the Fair introduced taxes that the people would hold against him, it was in order to build up France’s defences. When Philip of Valois demanded even higher taxes, it was simply to pay the price of his defeats.
Over the last five years of his reign, exchange rates were adjusted one hundred and sixty times; the currency lost three quarters of its value. Foodstuffs, ruthlessly taxed, reached astronomic prices. An unprecedented inflation made the towns increasingly angry.
When misfortune seems to circle on cruel wings above a country, everything gets confused, and any natural disaster, let alone one of the worst in history, adds further insult to the injury of human error.
The plague, the Great Plague, having originated far away in Asia, hit France; no other part of Europe was hit harder. The streets of towns became places where the dying lay, the suburbs open graves. Here a quarter of the population succumbed, there a third perished. Entire villages were wiped out, and all that was left of them were dilapidated houses open to the winds on a wasteland of neglect.
Philip of Valois had a son that the plague, alas, was to spare.
France was to sink yet deeper into distress and ruin; this ultimate descent was to be the work of John II, erroneously called the Good.
This lineage of mediocre monarchs came close to cleaving apart the system that since the Middle Ages had trusted nature to produce within one and the same family the bearer of the sovereign’s power. Are peoples any more likely to win in the lottery of democracy than in the haphazardness of genetics? Crowds, assemblies, even select councils are no less likely to be in error than nature; and anyway, Providence has always been miserly with greatness.
The Cardinal of Périgord thinks …
I SHOULD HAVE BEEN pope. How can I fail to think again and again that thrice I held the tiara in my hands; three times! As much for Benedict XII and for Clement VI as for our current pontiff, it is I who decided, as the battle drew to a close, on whose head the tiara was placed. My friend Petrarch calls me pope-maker, not such a great maker, after all, as it was never upon my own head that the tiara would be set. Enfin, it is God’s will. Ah! What a strange thing is a conclave! I believe I am the only cardinal alive to have seen three of them. And maybe I will see a fourth, if Innocent is as ill as he makes out.
What are those rooftops yonder? Yes, I recognize them, Chancelade Abbey, in the Valley of Beauronne. The first time, admittedly, I was too young. Thirty-three,
