PHILIP OF VALOIS ruled as Philip VI (1328-1350), thus founding the royal house of Valois. Philip was not allowed to take his throne peacefully, however. There were other claimants, the most formidable being Edward III of England, who demanded the succession through his mother, Isabelle, daughter of Philip the Fair and sister of the late king. Edward’s aspirations brought to pass the Hundred Years’ War whose weary length saw France overrun by foreign enemies and by French brigands, tortured by famine and plague, and her king (John the Good) a prisoner in England. With everything topsy-turvy it becomes hardly a matter of surprise to learn that a French queen mother sold her son’s birthright, that an English prince was crowned king of France in Notre Dame, that the citizens of Paris welcomed the English to help defend them against their own countrymen, and that a maid led men to battle.

As often happens with men of extraordinary force Philip the Fair did not bequeath any legacy of energy to his sons. Philip of Valois, son of Philip the Fair’s brother, had no notable inheritance of character, but he was made of livelier stuff than his cousins. Although three reigns had passed since his uncle’s death it was only a period of fourteen years, and the royal power was then at the greatest point of concentration it had yet reached. A man of but ordinary vigor and judgment, one would suppose, would have been able to entrench himself strongly. Yet the promise of Philip’s early years of victory over the Flemish was unfulfilled by his serious defeats at the hands of the English.

He jumped into the arena promptly enough. At his coronation at Rheims on Trinity Sunday, 1328, the Count of Flanders, whose duty it was to bear the great sword, did not answer the herald’s summons, although he was there in plain view. When Philip asked for an explanation his vassal answered that he had been called by his title, and, because of the disobedience of his people, his title was now but empty sound. Philip was fired with instant sympathy. “Fair Cousin,” he said, “we will swear to you by the holy oil which hath this day trickled over our brow that we will not enter Paris again before seeing you reinstated in peaceable possession of the countship of Flanders.”

He found that he had entered upon no easy task, for the Flemish burghers were both brave and obstinate. However, he won a brilliant victory at Cassel, where, according to Froissart, of sixteen thousand Flemish “all were left there dead and slain in three heaps one upon another.” So annoyed was Philip by the trouble he had been put to to save his word unbroken that he gave the Count of Flanders some rather threatening advice when he left to make his deferred entrance into Paris.

“Count,” he said, “I have worked for you at my own and my barons’ expense; I give you back your land, recovered and in peace; so take care that justice be kept up in it, and that I have not, through your fault, to return; for, if I do, it will be to my own profit, and to your hurt.”

The count, however, could not keep out of embroilment with his people. Because England supplied the wool which the Flemish looms wove it was important to the manufacturers of Flanders that peace should be preserved between the two countries. Heedless of this necessity, the Count of Flanders, in 1336, eight years after the battle of Cassel, ordered the imprisonment of all the English in Flanders. King Edward retaliated in kind and clapped into jail all the Flemish merchants in England. The people of both countries were well aware that Philip of France was the instigator of all this turmoil.

A year after Philip’s accession, Edward, as lord of Aquitaine, had gone to France and paid his feudal duty to him. The two monarchs were supposed to be friends. Friendship is hard to preserve, however, when ambitions clash and when interested people are alert to foment trouble. In 1337 war was declared, and its dragging course for the next decade was prophetic of the whole miserable century.

After nine years of desultory fighting the French suffered at CrÉcy the worst defeat the country ever had known. For the first time in history gunpowder was used in war and the innovation made apparent at once the futility of the nobles’ fortresses against the new ammunition.

A part of the English army drew dangerously close to Paris—so near that the watchmen on the towers caught the gleam of their camp-fires, and refugees brought news of burning and slaughter no farther away than Saint Denis. The city was saved from attack only because Edward was besieging Calais. It cost England a year’s fighting to capture this Channel key to France, but she held it for two hundred years, a threat to French power and a grief to French hearts.

Destructive as was the new ammunition its work could not approach the loss occasioned by the “Black Death,” the plague which swept across Europe with such might that it even put an end to war.

In 1350 Philip VI died. His body was carried to Notre Dame where it lay in state before being taken to Saint Denis. There it was buried “on the left side of the great altar, his bowels were interred at the Jacobins at Paris, and his heart at the convent of the Carthusians at Bourgfontaines in Valois.”

A month later Philip’s son, John (1350-1364) was crowned at Rheims. By way of signalizing his accession he conferred knighthood on many young men, and for a week Paris was gay with continual feasting. Perhaps it was because so many people thronged the palace at this time, perhaps it was because of the encroachments of the courts, that John did not always occupy the royal apartments on the CitÉ but lived for some time at the HÔtel de Nesle which Philip the Fair had bought for the crown.

During the next five years John showed himself entirely lacking in the discretion and calmness which the uncertainties of the time demanded. He was influenced by favorites and he was constantly quarreling with his son-in-law, Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who had caused the murder of a man whom John esteemed and who was incessantly playing fast and loose now with England, now with France. It was to consider certain charges against this undesirable connection that John held the first known lit de justice. The “bed of justice” received its name from the king’s seat, a couch raised on a dais, both covered with handsome stuffs sown with the fleur-de-lis. The king’s appearance was in harmony with his desire to accent his regal state for he wore his robes of ceremony and his crown.

With an exhausted treasury threatening the people with taxes, with the plague devastating the country, and with war imminent, it is small wonder that France was in a discouraged state. John tried to hearten his subjects by establishing subsidies and by giving festivals. By these means he won his nickname of “the Good,” but they were the cause of such impoverishment that when the English war broke out again he found himself in embarrassment for lack of money. Twice he summoned the States General, but his preparations were seriously hindered. His judgment as a general was no better than as a ruler. Inflated by some trifling successes he scorned the Black Prince’s proposals of peace and then allowed himself to be beaten ignominiously by a force much smaller than his own in one of the world’s great battles, that of Poitiers.

John’s personal courage was magnificent. Although several divisions of his army were withdrawn, including those headed by his three older sons, he fought valiantly in a hand-to-hand fight that waxed ever brisker as his opponents saw that they were dealing with some man of prominence. His fourteen-year-old son, Philip, stayed at his father’s side helping him by constant cries of warning. As a reward for his fidelity John afterwards gave him the province of Burgundy, a gift which proved to be a sore mistake for the happiness of France.

After the battle of Poitiers a burgher of Paris vowed a candle as long as the city to Notre Dame de Paris. It was to burn always. When the city grew so large as to make such a mass of wax impracticable the offering was changed (1605) to a silver lamp, and it may be seen now before the graceful figure which stands at the south side of the entrance to the choir of the cathedral.

John was gently treated in England and his presence was something of a social event. When he was held at a ransom and was returned to France while two of his sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent across the Channel to serve as hostages for the payment of the ransom, the king’s departure was a matter of regret. His welcome in France was equally warm.

The hostage sons proved themselves not more reliable as hostages than they had been as fighters. One of them, at least, yielded to the call of Paris, broke his parole and fled home. John’s paternal pride was profoundly outraged. “If honor is banished from every other spot,” he said, “it ought to remain sacred in the breast of kings.” He returned at once to London and gave himself up to king Edward.

Again he found himself popular at the English court, and he passed a gay winter, entertaining Edward at Savoy House and being entertained in turn at the palace of Westminster. Before many months, however, he was stricken with a mortal illness and died without seeing France again.

While king John was held prisoner by the English (1356-1360), his son the dauphin, afterwards Charles V, ruled or tried to rule in France. During his regency there appears one of the foremost characters known to the history of Paris, Étienne Marcel. This man belonged to an old family of drapers, and had achieved the position of the Provost of the Merchants, the chief administrative office in the city’s gift.

The burghers of Paris were restless. The establishment of the States General had given them recognition of a kind and a consequent feeling of importance. Repeated tax levies had kept them in a constant state of irritation. John had crowded them out of the army, war, according to his theory, being a matter for nobles to handle. The ignominious defeat at Poitiers made them dissent cordially from this opinion.

These were but a few of the causes stirring in the minds of the burghers. Now, with their jovial and improvident king a prisoner in England, France entrusted to an untried youth of nineteen, and England’s plans unknown but always threatening, the bourgeois felt themselves to be facing both opportunity and responsibility.

To test the prince seemed to be the first summons. Returning from Poitiers Charles took the title of Lieutenant-General, installed himself in the Louvre, summoned the States General, and entered into negotiations with Marcel. The provost either was really distrustful of the dauphin or he saw some advantage for his own ambition in setting the people against their lord. When he went to a conference with Charles he was supported by a body of men heavily armed, and a little later he expressed himself as so fearful of the prince’s integrity that he refused to go nearer to the Louvre than the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, to the east of the fortress.

Egged on by Marcel the States General did their utmost to torment the young regent. Undoubtedly they had grievances, but Charles was not at all responsible for the state of the country and the Assembly’s methods of improving conditions savored more of bullying than of coÖperation.

The body met less than three weeks after Charles’s arrival in Paris. More than eight hundred members from all northern France gathered in the Great Hall of the palace. Half of this throng was representative of the bourgeoisie, and their superiority in numbers over the nobility—depleted by its losses at Poitiers—and the clergy—naturally a lesser body, though almost every prelate of high rank was present—gave the middle class a courage they never before had assumed.

Activity against the regent was manifested promptly. The size of the Assembly being unwieldy a body of eighty was chosen from the full membership to confer and report to the whole meeting. Charles sent officers to represent his interests and to furnish information. On the second day the representatives refused to take counsel unless the officers were withdrawn. Why they wanted to be unchecked was quite evident when, a few days later, the States-General requested the dauphin to meet with them in the monastery of the Cordeliers on the left bank and hear the recommendations which had been approved by the full house. They demanded that twenty-two men of king John’s closest friends and councillors should be arrested, lose their offices and have their property confiscated, and, if trial proved them guilty of “grafting” and of giving bad advice to the king, they were to be further punished. A traveling commission was to be appointed to keep a check on all the officials of France, and a body of twenty-eight men—four prelates, twelve nobles and twelve burghers—was to have “power to do and to order everything in the kingdom just like the king himself.”

This proposition practically relegated the regent to private life. A proposal to release from prison Charles’s brother-in-law, Charles the Bad, was not only an attack on John’s management, but a threat against the dauphin’s peace, for the king of Navarre had come honestly by his nickname and was capable of fomenting endless trouble.

In return for conceding their demands the States promised the regent a force of thirty thousand men, their support to be provided by taxes of doubtful collectibility.

Charles found himself in a position of extreme difficulty. The people of Paris were clamorously in favor of the Assembly’s proposals. Everybody was ready to hit the man who seemed to have no friends. Charles sparred for time, announcing at a meeting held in the Louvre that all the matters under discussion must hold over until he had attended to some business with the German emperor and the pope which called him to Metz.

Although Paris was hostile to him Charles had friends elsewhere. He received information that the south of France was heartily royalist, and also that some of the deputies from northern towns to the Paris Assembly had been rebuked by their constituents when they returned home, for their attitude to the regent.

Unfortunately, to obtain money for his journey, Charles followed his father’s example and debased the coinage. When this became known a few days after his departure Marcel and the mob went to the Louvre and frightened Charles’s younger brother into rescinding the order. Six weeks later Charles returned and reËstablished his original order, with the result that all Paris rushed to arms and he was compelled to grant practically every demand of the Assembly.

When the Assembly met three months later its early enthusiasm had waned or else the representatives repented of their harsh demands or saw their injustice. The clergy and the nobility were fewer and there was a lack of harmony among the bourgeois, many of them objecting to the concentration of power which Marcel and a few of his friends were effecting.

Charles was clever enough to seize this time of uneasiness to announce that he “intended from now on to govern” by himself. His first efforts were not very successful, for Marcel by specious promises wheedled him into summoning the Assembly again, and then arranged for the liberation of Charles the Bad. He was welcomed by the Paris populace and had the audacity to make an address to them from the platform on the Abbey of Saint Germain-des-PrÉs from which the kings were used to watch the sports of the students on the adjoining PrÉ au Clercs.

The deputies foresaw a clash between the brothers-in-law, and it was but a small Assembly which met, some of the members having returned home after reaching Paris and recognizing the trouble that was bound to come from forcing the dauphin to accept Charles the Bad’s liberation and to receive him with a show of friendliness.

Outside of the city there was no show of friendliness between the royalists and the friends of Navarre. A lively little war was going on that sent the people from round about to seek protection within Marcel’s new wall. That Marcel was a man prompt both to see a need and to meet it is shown in his action when the news of the French defeat at Poitiers was brought to Paris. The very next day he gave orders for the rebuilding and enlargement of the wall that the English might encounter that obstacle if they advanced upon the city. The existing wall had not been changed since Philip Augustus’s time, five centuries before, and the new rampart showed one change in fashion—its towers were square instead of round. Its size indicated a distinct increase in the size of the city on the north side, for when the wall was completed by Charles V the ends on the right bank were not opposite the ends on the south bank. The south wall was made stronger, however, by a deepening of the ditches.

Charles lived much at the Louvre. Because he gathered a body of soldiers about him it was rumored that he was going to use them against the Parisians. The regent was not lacking in courage. Accompanied only by a half dozen followers he rode into one of the city squares and told the astonished crowd of his affection for Paris and its people, and of his intention of defending it against its enemies.

The people were so touched by their prince’s pluck and candor that Marcel found it prudent to stop laying charges against the dauphin and to transfer them to his councillors. After working up feeling against them for over a month he led a mob to the palace, where Charles was then staying. Together with some of his friends he pressed into the dauphin’s own room and there they killed Charles’s councillors, the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, not only in his sight but so close to him that he was splashed with their blood. Having impressed the boy with his strength he patronizingly offered to protect him and put on his head his own citizen’s cap of red and blue, the colors of Paris. Then he had the bodies flung on to Saint Louis’ huge marble table in the Great Hall, later to be exposed publicly, and made his way back to the Maison aux Piliers on the GrÈve and there addressed the people, taking great credit for the murderous deed that he had just brought to pass. The crowd approved him with vigorous shouting.

Marcel’s action with regard to the Maison aux Piliers is significant of his entire disregard of the wishes or the property of the crown prince. The house took its name from the fact that its second story, projecting over the street, was supported by columns. At this time it was over two hundred years old for it had been built in 1141. Philip Augustus bought it in 1212, but evidently he resold it, for there is a record that Philip the Fair bought it for a present for his brother. In some way Philip the Long got possession of it and gave it to one of his favorites. It seems to have returned to royal hands almost immediately, for Louis the Quarreler’s widow, ClÉmence, died there and willed it to her nephew, the dauphin of Vienne. His heir bequeathed the dauphiny and other property to Philip of Valois in trust for his grandson, the Charles of this chapter, who was the first heir apparent to wear the title of dauphin.

Marcel wanted the Maison aux Piliers for a city hall. The dauphin refused to give it up and tried various ways—even that of giving title to a private citizen—to save it from being taken from him. About six months before the murder of the marshals, however, Marcel bought it with public money, and called it La Meson de la Ville.

On the northern slope of the Mont Sainte GeneviÈve, on the site of a building of Roman construction, rose in Carolingian days the first city hall. It was clumsily made of stone and was called the Parloir aux Bourgeois. This was succeeded at some later day by a “parloir” near the Grand ChÂtelet. Marcel’s purchase decided the situation of the HÔtel de Ville for all time. It was in its logical place near the GrÈve where the very heart of the city’s business throbbed. There, rebuilt in 1540 by Francis I and in 1876 after its destruction by the communists, it has housed the city’s offices and has seen many strange and furious scenes in days of disturbance, and received many sovereigns and potentates in times of peace.

After the death of the marshals Marcel’s exactions upon the prince were grosser than ever. Charles was even forced to give Charles the Bad an annuity and to be frequently in his company. Just about a month after the assassination the dauphin managed to escape from Paris and go to Champagne where he was given cordial sympathy by the friends of the slain marshal. They urged him to besiege Paris and to kill the provost as punishment for the murder he had instigated. When the Parisians learned that the prince to whom they paid so little consideration was receiving a dangerous support in other places they begged the University of Paris to send messengers to ask him to spare the lives of the provost and his immediate following. Charles returned word that he would forgive the citizens provided a half dozen or so of their chief men were sent him as hostages. No one was willing to take the chance of surviving the “hostage” condition, and the city prepared to withstand a siege.

Immediately after Charles’s flight Marcel had removed the artillery from the Louvre to the HÔtel de Ville, and had begun to swing the new wall outside of the fortress in order to cut it off from the country. The work of wall-building went on briskly on the right bank, and the moat was deepened around the fortifications of the left bank.

Being still under the spell of Charles the Bad’s vivacity and enterprise the Parisians invited him to be their captain. Down in their hearts, though, they did not trust him, and it was not long before they made his going out of the city with his men and engaging in a shouted conversation with the regent’s men an excuse for charging him with treachery and driving him out of the city.

Once beyond the walls he promptly joined the dauphin in putting down the peasant insurrection called the Jacquerie, from the peasant’s nickname, Jacques Bonhomme. Whether or not Marcel instigated the uprising is not known with certainty, but at any rate it served the purpose of leading the prince’s army away from Paris. The insurrection was not of long duration, for it was crushed with a heavy hand and no quarter.

Again Marcel dickered with Charles the Bad who was always ready to dicker with anybody on the chance of something turning out for his own profit. He was encamped at Saint Denis. The regent’s army almost surrounded the city and was in communication with a friendly party inside of which Jean Maillard was the most prominent.

Confident that he would be put to death if he were captured by the prince, Marcel arranged to open the city to Navarre on the night of July 31, 1358. Maillard was in charge of the Porte Saint Denis and when Marcel demanded the keys he refused to give them up. Then he leaped on his horse, took the banner of the city from the HÔtel de Ville and rode through street after street shouting “Montjoie Saint Denis,” the rallying cry of the monarch from early days. There was lively fighting among the citizens throughout the evening.

Marcel had sent word to Charles the Bad that entrance might be made by the east gate, the Porte Saint Antoine. As he neared it, key in hand, about eleven o’clock that night, he was met by Maillard.

“Étienne, Étienne,” cried Maillard, “what are you doing here at this hour?”

“What business is it of yours, Jehan! I am here to act for the city whose government has been entrusted to me.”

“That is not so,” cried Jehan with an oath. “You are not here at this hour for any good end; and I call your attention,” he said to the men with him, “to the keys of the gate that he is carrying for the purpose of betraying the city.”

“Jehan, you lie!”

“Traitor, ’tis you who lie!”

A sharp fight arose between the two bands and Maillard himself killed Marcel. He explained his course the next day to the people, “and the greater part thanked God with folded hands for the grace He had done them.”

When Charles the regent rode into Paris on the second day of August he passed a churchyard where the naked bodies of Marcel and two of his companions were exposed on the same spot where the provost had exposed the bodies of the two marshals.

It is not possible to tell now—perhaps it was not possible to tell in his own day—how much of Marcel’s activity was due to a sincere desire to improve the economic and political condition of the burghers of Paris, and how much was the result of his own ambition. Perhaps he was ahead of his time; certainly he was mistaken in his methods. Whatever the judgment upon him it is undeniable that he was a man of extraordinary force and a “spellbinder” whose personality has won him admiration through the centuries. Beside the HÔtel de Ville his statue stands to-day, a stern figure looking south across the river, and mounted on a horse which has been proclaimed as the finest bronze steed in the world.

Upon his return to Paris Charles showed a forbearance unusual in those times of swift reprisals. There were confiscations of the property of some of Marcel’s friends and even the beheading of two of them on the GrÈve, but that was before the regent’s entrance into the city, and he tactfully steadied popular feeling and gave no rein to the spirit of revenge which he might have been expected to feel. He even entered into an agreement of peace with that weathercock, Charles of Navarre, and Paris and its neighborhood drew a sigh of relief.

The dauphin seized the opportunity offered by this time of quiet to make the Louvre more habitable. The ancient tower was left undisturbed except that a gallery sprang from it to the northern wall which Charles built to complete the rectangle which Philip Augustus had begun.

Marcel had met his reward in the summer of 1358. The next spring Charles received from London the terms of a treaty which his father had made with king Edward III. A large stretch of western territory was to be yielded to England and an enormous ransom to be paid for the king’s release. It is a testimony to the increased strength of the subject in France that Charles submitted this document to a gathering of deputies who surrounded the regent on the great outer staircase of the palace and filled the courtyard below. They rejected with promptness and scorn the proposal to make their enemies a gift of nearly half of France and to ruin themselves by the raising of the exorbitant sum of four million crowns of gold. If any money was to be raised they preferred to spend it in fighting the English, and they offered their services as soldiers.

When Edward learned of France’s refusal to accept the treaty he promptly crossed the Channel. He met with such small success, however, that he was glad to make a compact with Burgundy by which he promised—for a consideration—to let that province alone for two years.

Edward then pressed on to Paris which he approached on the south. Charles, learning of his coming, burned all the villages adjoining the city on that side so that the English army would have to seek far for food. He discouraged any response to Edward’s attempts to draw the French soldiers outside the walls, and at the end of a week, the English, bored and hungry, withdrew.

Not long after, Charles was able to negotiate the Peace of BrÉtigny, which was all too hard upon France in its demands for the cession of territory and of a large ransom for John, but which the people, weary of war, received with joy. The bells of Notre Dame pealed their satisfaction, and the light-hearted Parisians danced and feasted in the squares, and entertained heartily the four Englishmen who represented King Edward. Each was given a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, the choicest possession of Paris.

Charles had obtained the money to pay part of his father’s ransom from his new brother-in-law, the duke of Milan who had just married his sister Isabelle. It was to secure the payment of the remainder that John’s younger sons, the dukes of Anjou and of Berri, were sent to England as hostages.

John reËntered Paris in December, 1360, four years after the disastrous battle that had cost him his liberty but had had the result of giving his son training which went far to make him one of the greatest kings that France ever has known. Paris was glad to welcome her monarch whose charm they loved and whose weakness they forgot.

The remaining four years of John’s rule was hardly wiser than the early part. He jaunted about the country, everywhere instituting festivals and tournaments. It was now that he gave the duchy of Burgundy to prince Philip as a reward for his pluck at Poitiers.

Then came the breaking of his parole by the duke of Anjou and John’s return to England and death. The stage was clear for the reËntrance of a man who was to treat his task of rulership as one worthy of serious approach.