The First French Revolution Happened During the Middle Ages - An interview with Justine Firnhaber-Baker
▻https://jacobin.com/2024/09/jacquerie-france-revolt-middle-ages
Etching of the Jacquerie in Beauvaisis, France, in May–June, 1358
9.3.2024 Interview by Daniel Finn - Four centuries before the storming of the Bastille, the French peasantry rose up in a great revolt known as the Jacquerie. France’s ruling class drowned the revolt in blood and demonized all those who took part in it.
If you think about the French revolutionary tradition, you’re most likely to picture the storming of the Bastille and the overthrow of the monarchy. But that wasn’t the first time there was a major uprising against the established order in France.
In the second half of the fourteenth century, there was a popular revolt known as the Jacquerie, which terrified the French ruling class. They drowned the revolt in blood and set about demonizing the peasants who took part in it. It was only in the wake of a successful revolution four centuries later that historians began taking a fresh look at the Jacquerie.
Justine Firnhaber-Baker is a professor of history at the University of St Andrews and the author of The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt, the first major study of the Jacquerie since the nineteenth century. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.
Daniel Finn
What was the nature of the political system and the wider social order in France during the fourteenth century?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Politically, there was a centralized system in the sense that you had a king and royal government. By the mid-fourteenth century, when the Jacquerie happened, there was an elaborate bureaucracy supporting a central royal government at all levels. But the power structure was also decentralized, because local and regional lordships were very important.
When we talk about medieval lords, we are talking about people who had jurisdiction and fiscal rights over a particular territory. We used to think about the royal government and the lords as opposing forces, with a zero-sum game between them: as royal power increased, lordly power must have decreased.
But increasingly, we are coming to understand that these two levels of power actually worked together. The crown was not interested in getting rid of the lords, and the lords saw many advantages in cooperating with royal government. I should also say, for clarification, that the lords included the clergy: bishops, monasteries, and nunneries, with properties where they exercised lordship in the same way as lay lords.
Connected with that was the social order. In the Middle Ages, a very popular way of thinking about the social order was that it was divided into three orders. The first order was the clergy — those who prayed; the second order was the nobles — those who fought; and the third order consisted of everybody else — those who worked.
There was an idea that this division was based on a social contract: those who worked gave over the fruits of their labor to those who prayed in exchange for intercession with God and to those who fought in exchange for protection. Those first two orders of clerics and nobles often also held positions of lordship as well as having that social status.
Daniel Finn
What impact did the Black Death have on French society in the fourteenth century?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
It’s hard to overstate the impact. The Black Death reached France in the winter of 1348, and estimates of mortality range from about 30 percent to about 60 percent. We are now fairly comfortable in saying that it was probably on the higher end of that scale, around 50 percent. You can imagine the impact of losing half your population in such a short period of time.
The first wave of plague took about two years to run its course. Losing that amount of the population in that amount of time was incredibly disturbing in the short term. It interrupted the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War, which had been going on since 1338. For a couple of years after 1348, there was a truce during the plague.
The longer-term impacts were even more profound. One of the important effects was that it halved the tax base. The crown and the lords were getting their money from the workers, and there were now many fewer of them around. If you were going to continue paying for warfare, which was increasingly expensive in the mid-fourteenth century, you were going to have to push your taxpayers even harder.
There was also a social impact because of the way that social and political elites hoarded resources. A simplistic way to think about the Black Death and the economy is that the population was reduced but the resources stayed the same, so everybody was better off. In practice, it didn’t work that way.
We did see some absolute improvement in everybody’s quality of life, but relative inequality probably increased. Although there should have been more resources available, in practice, those resources weren’t shared out equally because of the way taxation and labor laws were enacted and also because land market worked in a way that privileged noble ownership over ownership by commoners.
Daniel Finn
How did the Anglo-French conflict that became known to historians as the Hundred Years’ War affect the people of France?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
You’re right to qualify it in that way, because “Hundred Years’ War” is a term that was only applied to it much later, from the nineteenth century. At the time, people obviously didn’t know that it was going to last for a hundred years. It was part of an ongoing conflict between England and France that can be traced back to the thirteenth century if not before.
If we focus on the two decades after 1338, which is when we conventionally date the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, the conflict had been much more intense than anything that French people were used to living through before. Although it was a war between England and France, it was mostly waged on French soil.
One major way that the war affected the people of France was through the greater frequency of violence that they experienced. For the most part, warfare in the Middle Ages was not waged in the form of pitched battles between opposing armies. It largely took the form of raiding on the open countryside against noncombatants.
Many French commoners suffered the effects of the war as victims, but they also had a new experience of military violence as perpetrators. There was a militarization of society as a whole during the Hundred Years’ War because commoners were increasingly called up to fight in the royal army.
As infantry became more important to medieval armies in the fourteenth century, meaning that you had many more commoners in the army than in previous centuries, that shift had logistical effects. Commoners developed the capability to fight. They possessed weapons, armor, and leadership skills, which also had a social and psychological effect. They realized that the nobles were supposed to be the fighters, but now the workers were fighting, too, and might even be better at it than the nobles.
At this point, the war had been going very badly for the French army, with the king and the nobles in charge of its command structures. Two years before the Jacquerie in 1356, there was a major battle at Poitiers, where the French king was taken captive by the English forces and brought to London. They demanded a huge ransom for him, and the realm fell into a period of political conflict and chaos because he left the dauphin, his eighteen-year-old son Charles, in charge.
By the time the Jacquerie broke out two years later, the dauphin had lost control of Paris and much of northern France to a bourgeois rebellion led by the head of the Parisian merchants. This bourgeois rebellion started out in partnership with the dauphin, but soon they entered into conflict with him over their desire to reform the governing structures of the realm. They also clashed with the dauphin’s noble supporters, who objected to their efforts to control the army and tax the nobles at the same rate (at least) as the commoners.
By the winter of 1358, the bourgeois rebellion and the dauphin were engaged in a very serious, violent conflict. The leader of the rebellion had two of the army’s noble marshals murdered in front of the dauphin in his bedroom, at which point the split became irreconcilable.
The dauphin withdrew from Paris and started making plans with his noble supporters to retake the city by force. They garrisoned a couple of big castles on two of the three major rivers supplying Paris with food. It was at that moment, with the dauphin and his noble supporters staring down at Paris while Paris was not sure what to do next, that the Jacquerie began.
Daniel Finn
When did the Jacquerie itself begin, and was it a spontaneous event or something that had been planned in advance?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
It was a bit of both. The first incident, which took place on May 28, 1358, was certainly not spontaneous. The sources all agree that the rebels first assembled from several different villages, and then went to a town on the River Oise — the one river that the dauphin had not blockaded — where they attacked nine noblemen.
This target was carefully chosen. The noblemen were led by a knight by the name of Raoul de Clermont-Nesle, who was related to one of those noble marshals that the bourgeois rebels had killed in front of the dauphin several months earlier. The motivation becomes quite clear once you know what the local geography looks like.
I went there and I walked around the area, thinking, “Why here?” At first glance, the town looks like a random place to have chosen. But they were trying to prevent Raoul de Clermont-Nesle, the eight noblemen accompanying him, and probably a number of troops as well from crossing the river there and garrisoning a castle a little way up the river. That would have allowed them to block the Oise in the same way that the dauphin and his noble supporters were blocking the other two rivers.
That first incident looks to have been planned, and it clearly had connections with the bourgeois rebellion in Paris, although I don’t think that the first incident was planned by those in Paris, because it seems to have taken them by surprise. I think that the commoners and the peasants were doing this off their own back, because we know that people in the countryside had a very good idea of what was happening in Paris, and many of them approved of it. What they understood about what was happening there was that in Paris, they killed noblemen — specifically these marshals who had been killed in front of the dauphin.
That first incident looks to have been carefully targeted as a military, strategic attack. What grew out of that, in some ways organically, was linked to it but distinct. The revolt that unfolded afterward began at a second assembly held in the aftermath of the first attack. That was the point at which the peasants chose a leader, a captain called Guillaume Calle.
It looks as if Guillaume Calle and the men around him (perhaps some of the women as well) had a plan. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the plan was in the minds of everyone who later joined the Jacquerie. It’s important to remember that it was not a single movement. It was made up of thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of people who had different ideas about what they were doing. They weren’t all in contact with one another, and their ideas and objectives changed over the course of the six to eight weeks that the revolt unfolded.
Daniel Finn
As the revolt spread, becoming a convergence of many different revolts, as you point out, how did the rebels organize themselves, and what were some of the key demands that they put forward?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Guillaume Calle, who they elected after the first incident, was known as the general captain of the countryside — the captain of the area around the city of Beauvais, which was the Jacquerie’s heartland. Calle seems to have had some top lieutenants who rode with him, gave him advice, and were available to bring messages to other areas involved in the Jacquerie.
Underneath that top level, you had a layer of village captains. There is some evidence that each village had its captain and that the captain also had a subordinate, so there was probably a captain and a lieutenant in each village. There was a sort of hierarchy with two levels — though not a very strict hierarchy. We have a lot of evidence that people could just go and talk to Calle, and that they did not necessarily always do what he told them to do.
It was a grassroots movement, because Calle was chosen from the bottom up rather than being imposed upon the movement. Those village captains were mostly chosen by their own villages. That was a strength of the revolt, but it also led to a tug of war over authority.
There was a sense in which leaders would say, “I am the captain, we should pursue my objectives,” but the rank and file would reply, “We made you our captain so that you would do the things we want to do.” There was a degree of push and pull there.
When it comes to some revolts in medieval Europe, we know a lot about specific demands because the rebels left behind a list of them. However, we don’t have anything like that for the Jacquerie. We know that at one point, there were written documents being passed back and forth, with letters sent to cities that the Jacques wanted to be involved in the revolt and so on. But none of that material survived, whether by accident or design, so we are left to discern their motives in a couple of different ways.
One way is by looking at what chroniclers from the time had to say. The chronicles say that when the Jacques articulated a motive in words, it was to destroy the nobles, who were not defending the realm and the peasants as they were supposed to but rather taking all of their possessions.
It was a criticism based on the social contract of the three orders. The peasants were supposed to hand over their produce because the nobles protected them, but in this case the nobles weren’t protecting them. They were also losing the Hundred Years’ War very badly, so they didn’t deserve their noble status and the luxury goods that came with it.
I should say here that the name of the revolt itself came from the name given to the common-born soldiers: “Jacques Bonhomme” was originally a derisory nickname, but the common-born soldiers had taken it up with pride. Some of the rebels called themselves Jacques Bonhomme with a certain sense that they could be in charge of the kingdom now since they were better at warfare than the nobles. There might also have been an overlap between the men in the army who were called Jacques Bonhomme and the men who were in leadership positions during the revolt.
That’s what the chronicles say, and it makes a lot of sense, but you also need to be somewhat critical, because that motive is the one ascribed to all peasant revolts in the Middle Ages. It made the revolts intelligible to elites in terms of the social theory of the three orders that they embraced. It’s not surprising that they embraced the theory, since it was very helpful to them. It provided an explanation for why they could take the fruits of peasant labor.
To the extent that this explanation allowed criticism of the nobility to come through, it was not criticism of the unequal social order itself. It was merely that the nobles were not fulfilling their part of the bargain. If they went back to fulfilling it, then it would be fine for them to extract surplus from the peasantry.
The other way we can examine what the Jacques were looking for and why is to extrapolate motives from their actions. The chroniclers focus on the Jacques killing nobles. But if we look at what they actually did, except for the first incident where they killed nine noblemen, they didn’t kill people all that often. Those nine nobles on that single day constitute a third of the identifiable nobles that we know to have been killed during the revolt.
What the Jacques focused their violence on was destroying noble fortresses and houses. There are three points to consider here. First of all, we can see that as a form of support for Paris — a diversionary tactic, moving the nobles away from the army that the dauphin was gathering to attack Paris.
He wanted to gather the army to the south of Paris, but the Jacquerie broke out to the north of the city, so it drew some of the forces allied to the dauphin back toward the north and delayed the attack on Paris. There were also moments when the Jacques joined with the Parisian militia who tried to recapture one of the river fortresses that the dauphin was occupying.
However, a lot of the violence by the Jacques seems to have been much more social than military or political. This is the second thing to consider. They focused on the noble fortresses and houses because of the way those buildings advertised the social status of the nobles and their excessive wealth. It’s important to note that some of the structures nobles referred to as castles in the mid-fourteenth century had derisory military capabilities — they were really just buildings for the display of wealth and status.
It’s also important to note that they were attacking nobles, not lords. The Jacquerie was not an anti-seigneurial revolt. They didn’t attack their own lords, which is very interesting. We can tell that lordship per se, as opposed to nobility, was not the target because none of the clerical lordships were attacked. Bishops and monasteries owned extensive lordships, yet they were not targets at all.
The third point is that there is an interesting way in which the anti-noble animus of the Jacquerie overlapped with the Parisian motivation, because Paris was the great enemy of the dauphin and the dauphin’s supporters were the nobles. There is a way in which we can think about the revolt not merely as an anti-noble revolt, but also as an anti-royal revolt, or at least a revolt against the Valois dynasty, because of how closely intertwined the nobles were with the dauphin and the royal state.
Daniel Finn
Was there support for the revolts in the towns and cities of what was then urban France?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
Yes, absolutely. I’ve talked a lot about Paris, but there were a number of other provincial cities in northern and eastern France like Amiens, Beauvais, Caen, and Senlis. There was a clear distinction between cities and the countryside in this period. Cities were distinguished in particular by the possession of walls, and because their political status was somewhat different, they were more involved in the politics of the realm. They were called upon to go to the assemblies of the three estates in a way that country dwellers were not.
At the same time, there was a lot of interpenetration between town and countryside. Town dwellers would own estates in the countryside, and people from the country would come into the cities all the time for work, commerce, entertainment, and administrative business.
When the revolt broke out on May 28, extending at least until the middle of June, the towns were at first quite supportive. They opened up their gates and allowed the Jacques in, putting out tables with wine and food to refresh them on their way. Citizens and even town militias joined in the attacks on nearby castles and manners. This was part of their preexisting alliance with the bourgeois rebellion in Paris.
Again, we can see that interpenetration of the Parisian rebellion, which was related but distinct, with the Jacquerie. But with the exception of Senlis, all of these cities abandoned the Jacquerie when things started to go pear-shaped around the middle of June. This was a fatal problem for the Jacques because the city walls were the only defensive architecture available to them. They needed to be able to retreat behind those walls.
The other form of defensive architecture would have been the castles, but the Jacques had been destroying the castles rather than occupying them. In any case, the rebels were composed of very large groups, so few castles would have been able to accommodate that many people. When the cities closed their gates and said, “We don’t want to be a part of this anymore,” the Jacques were left on the open fields to face noble armies, and they were slaughtered.
Daniel Finn
Could you tell us in a little more detail about how the military events of the Jacquerie unfolded and how it was eventually defeated?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
From the outbreak on May 28 to June 10, the Jacques were effectively masters of the countryside. They attacked more than a hundred castles. By June 5, the Parisian militia marched out to join the Jacquerie. Again, I don’t think the Parisians were the originators of the revolt, but they were ready to join forces with the Jacques.
By June 9, there were Jacquerie forces across the countryside north of Paris, probably extending toward an area of the country called Picardy, almost up to Belgium. In the east of the countryside, you had a combined army of Jacques and Parisians who were heading to a castle at Meaux, a city that controlled the River Marne flowing into Paris. Their intention was to attack that castle and bring it under Parisian control.
On June 10, the combined army attacked the castle at Meaux, and they were destroyed. They were slaughtered like pigs in the streets of Meaux because of the castle’s defensive architecture. They were hoping to overwhelm it with numbers, but the design of the castle meant that it could be defended by a very small number of men.
Probably on the same day, north of Paris, there was a big Jacquerie army led by Guillaume Calle facing off against a noble army led by Charles, who was the king of the Spanish country of Navarre. Charles also had some claim to the French throne, and he was a major Norman lord, which is why he was there. In addition, this noble army included a lot of Englishmen.
The army led by Charles completely overwhelmed the Jacques, and in a very dishonorable way. Charles had sent a messenger to Guillaume Calle and said, “I would like to parlay.” This was entirely normal on the eve of battle. But when Calle went to meet the king of Navarre, he was seized and beheaded, probably along with some of his captains. The nobles then attacked the leaderless Jacquerie army and destroyed them.
This all happened on June 10, which you will often see given as the date for the end of the Jacquerie, although it continued for another six weeks afterward, well into July and even beyond that point in some places. However, we can see the beginning of a counterinsurgency from June 10, which we call the Counter-Jacquerie. Many of the nobles who had been hiding out got their courage back and started to take revenge.
In the east of the country, the dauphin was leading a campaign of nobles who were taking vengeance more or less at will. In the west, it was Charles, the king of Navarre. Originally, the Jacques had thought that Charles might help them, because he was allied with the Parisians, but that turned out not to be the case. The Jacques did fight back, so it wasn’t simply a question of the tables being turned. But after June 10, a social revolt of non-nobles against the nobility became a social war between nobles and non-nobles.
We can say that the Jacquerie was definitely spent by the end of July. There was a countercoup in Paris on July 31, and the leader of the bourgeois rebellion was killed. The dauphin reentered Paris and ordered the spectacular execution of the remaining prominent rebels, but then he drew a line under it all and began issuing pardons for anyone involved in the bourgeois rebellion, the Jacquerie, or the noble effort to suppress it afterward.
I would say that moment marks the end of the Jacquerie. You still had scattered echoes in different parts of the kingdom, but they were not really linked to the original movement — they were imitations of it. You also had conflicts that were later referred to as being part of the Jacquerie because of when they took place rather than because they actually formed part of the revolt.
Daniel Finn
Did the revolt leave behind any tangible legacy for France after its defeat?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
For a few decades, yes, it did. We can trace the legacy of the revolts through lawsuits, mainly between those who were damaged in the revolt or its noble suppression and those who they held responsible for the damage. A wonderful thing about legal documents, particularly medieval ones, is that they often tell you great stories about everything that led up to the lawsuit and all the bad blood that affected its course.
It’s clear that many people did not accept the idea of drawing a line under these events — they were still angry. There were non-nobles being killed decades after the revolt because of their association with it, and lawsuits that went on for thirty years. There were also physical reminders of the revolt. We know from later inventories of noble holdings that even by the turn of the fifteenth century, there were still buildings listed as ruined because of the “time of the commotions,” which is what they called the Jacquerie.
For a while, “jacquerie” became a word that was used as an insult. It was a coinage of the mid-fourteenth century, and the revolt was referred to as the Jacquerie at the time. But a few decades later, it was the sort of thing that a person might say after getting into a fight in a tavern: “You are just a waste of space — go off to your jacquerie.”
By the end of the fourteenth century, the memory had faded. In northern France, you didn’t see another major peasant rebellion for a very long time. The cities, particularly Paris, rose again and again, and most urban rebellions in medieval Europe would have had some kind of rural counterpart, but that didn’t happen in northern France.
I wonder if that might have been a legacy of the fourteenth-century revolt in its own way. People in the cities might have said, “The last time the countryside was involved, we lost control, so we’re going to avoid that in future.” But apart from its inclusion in one of the most popular chronicles of the Middle Ages, there wasn’t much memory of the revolt until the end of the eighteenth century.
Daniel Finn
How has the Jacquerie been remembered and interpreted by historians over the course of subsequent centuries?
Justine Firnhaber-Baker
As I said, it was forgotten for a long time. We see the word “jacquerie” first reappear in English as well as in French at the end of the eighteenth century, around the time of the French Revolution. That was when historians started to become interested in the common people in a way they never had been before. It was very much a reflection of what was happening in their own time period, as they started looking for the seeds of 1789 in the much earlier medieval rebellions.
The first book on the Jacquerie — and indeed the last one until my own book was published in 2021 — appeared in 1859. That was partly a legacy of social and political movements of the nineteenth century. It was also related to the professionalization of history and the discovery of new sources, particularly legal sources, which allowed the author Siméon Luce to write a much broader history of the revolt.
Luce’s book was based on those legal documents, as well as the very stereotypical accounts that we get from the chronicles. It argued that the Jacquerie was organized, political, and linked to the Parisian revolt. But soon there was a reaction against that interpretation, arguing that it couldn’t possibly have been like that, because the peasants were rude, uneducated, drunken louts, incapable of planning, let alone organized political action that was coordinated with a great city like Paris.
This rival interpretation presented the Jacquerie as a spontaneous eruption of peasant hatred that was completely irrational. There was no planning — it just exploded. Those two schools of thought have continued to frame discussion of the revolt. Everyone who writes about it takes one side or the other.
A recent book on the Hundred Years’ War, for example, says that the Jacquerie was the result of peasants being brutalized by war: in their fog, they could no longer distinguish friends from foe — the only enemy was a nobleman. My book definitely comes down much more on the side of arguing that the Jacquerie was organized, political, and linked to the Parisian revolt. But one of the things I wanted to emphasize was that this was a heterogeneous movement.
I don’t think any of the people involved in the Jacquerie were stupid or incapable of planning; there’s also no evidence that they were drunk. But the revolt wasn’t all about the specific military and political aims of Paris. A lot of it was much more organic and much more critical of nobility from an economic, social, and even aesthetic standpoint than it was about the conflict between the noble party and the bourgeois party in Paris.
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