An Admired History of France

By John Miller

"In 1841, in his reception speech at the french academy, victor hugo had evoked the "populace" to designate the people of the poor districts of paris. Vinçard having vigorously protested in an article in la ruche populaire, hugo was very embarrassed. He realized at that time that he had readers in popular circles and that they felt humiliated by his demeaning vocabulary. Gradually the word "miserable", which he used at the beginning of his novels to describe criminals, changed meaning and designated the little people of the unfortunate. The same shift in meaning is found in the mysteries of paris by eugène sue. Thanks to the voluminous letters sent to him by his working-class readers, eugène sue discovered the realities of the social world he evoked in his novel. The former legitimist thus became a spokesman for popular circles. The little people of paris then ceased to be described as a race to become a social class. France is here all the territories (colonies included) which have been placed, at one time or another, under the control of the french state. In this sum, the author wanted to shed light on the place and role of the people in all the great events and the great struggles that have punctuated its history since the end of the middle ages: wars, the affirmation of the state, the revolts and revolutions, economic changes and crises, slavery and colonization, migrations, social and national issues france is here all the territories (colonies included) which have been placed, at one time or another, under the control of the french state. In this sum, the author wanted to shed light on the place and role of the people in all the great events and the great struggles that have punctuated its history since the end of the middle ages: wars, the affirmation of the state, the revolts and revolutions, economic changes and crises, slavery and colonization, migrations, social and national issues france is here all the territories (colonies included) which have been placed, at one time or another, under the control of the french state. In this sum, the author wanted to shed light on the place and role of the people in all the great events and the great struggles that have punctuated its history since the end of the middle ages: wars, the affirmation of the state, the revolts and revolutions, economic changes and crises, slavery and colonization, migrations, social and national issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Oct 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215994047

Book preview

Foreword

There are two main ways of writing the history of France. The first is collective. It consists in bringing together a large number of specialists under the aegis of a historian, well placed at the crossroads of academic institutions, publishing and journalism, to present to the educated public a state of historical knowledge from a thread rather loose conductor, so as to unite the small independent producers that we are around a common work. Ernest Lavisse, Pierre Nora and today Patrick Boucheron are part of this long tradition. The second way is individual. It characterizes historians who have reached the home stretch of their careers and who present their vision of the history of France based, in particular, on their own work. Jules Michelet, Fernand Braudel or, more recently, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel have embodied this approach. It is the one that I have adopted myself in this book, which is the culmination of the forty years that I have devoted to historical research.

When the Agone editions offered me this ambitious project, about ten years ago, the great reference that imposed itself on me was, of course, Howard Zinn 's Popular History of the United States , which this publisher had made known to the French public. However, as soon as I got down to work, I was seized with doubts about my ability to carry out such an undertaking. That's one of the reasons it took me a decade to figure it out.

The first edition of Howard Zinn's book was published in 1980, a date which for me constitutes, as we will see in the last chapter of this book, a major turning point in the history of France and even of the world. The goal of this great American historian was to propose a history from below making a real place for those whose textbooks did not speak or little about: the Amerindians, the slaves, the women, the labor unionists, the hostile conscientious objectors Vietnam War, etc. The project of such an alternative history was unheard of thirty-five or forty years ago. It is much less so today because it would not be honest to make the general public believe that university history would still conceal all the excluded from the past. Thanks to the work and efforts of committed historians like Howard Zinn, these research gaps have largely been filled.

Zinn wrote his People's History at the end of the decade following the events of May-June 1968. It was a happy time, perhaps the happiest the world has known. Progressive forces were then on the rise and they were united enough to promote the convergence of struggles and good causes. For reasons I attempt to explain in the final chapter, this perspective crumbled over the following decades. The crisis of the labor movement has considerably weakened social struggles in favor of identity conflicts. The project of writing a popular history from the point of view of the vanquished has been monopolized by the spokespersons of minorities (religious, racial, sexual) to feed feminist, multiculturalist or postcolonial histories, which have contributed to marginalizing the history of popular classes.

This book follows in the footsteps of Howard Zinn in the sense that he has always endeavored, in his work, to articulate the different forms of domination suffered by those excluded from history by preserving the primacy of the class struggle. However, unlike Zinn, I do not think that one can write a global history (in this case national) by taking up only the point of view of the vanquished because the historian who engages in this always runs the risk of leaving forgotten forms of social misfortune in the shadows. This is why, rather than adopting the point of view of the dominated, I favored the analysis of domination , understood as the set of power relations that bind people together.

This socio-historical approach owes a great deal to Norbert Elias, who saw history as a multi-millennial process during which individuals have forged increasingly extensive links of interdependence, links which are also power relations. The word power is not used here as a value judgment. This is an observation that can be applied just as much to the relations between parents and children as to those that bind a boss to his workers, even if the social effects are not the same in the two cases. Any power relationship can generate forms of domination or solidarity between people. This relational perspective explains why, for me, the popular is not to be confused with the popular classes. As we will see amply in this book, the definition of popular has been a constant issue of struggle. The collective identity of the working classes has been partly fabricated by the rulers and, conversely, the forms of resistance developed over time by those from below have played a major role in the upheavals of our common history.

This perspective led me to begin this history of France at the end of the Middle Ages, that is to say at the time when the monarchical State imposed itself, within the framework of international relations which constantly affected its development. . Seen from this angle, the French people designates all the individuals who have been linked together because they have been placed under the dependence of this sovereign power, first as subjects and then as citizens.

Another essential dimension of socio-history lies in the articulation it proposes between the past and the present. The historical approach makes it possible to retrace the genesis of the major problems with which we are confronted today. This is why, in this popular history of France, I have given priority to issues that are at the center of our current affairs, such as the transformations of work, migrations, social protection, the crisis of political parties, the decline of the labor movement, the rise of identity claims. The latter having pushed memory controversies to a climax, I have addressed these issues in several chapters of the book, showing what differentiated history and memory.

Among the multiple references that I have mobilized to make this story intelligible, I have tried to articulate those that mattered most in my intellectual formation, namely Karl Marx and Pierre Bourdieu. However, as I explained in my book Thinking With, Thinking Against , I did not seek them out as mentors. I contented myself with drawing from their works the tools I needed for my own research.

The goal being to put this vast reflection at the disposal of the widest public, I adopted the form of the narrative by striving to present in a simple form sometimes very complicated questions. I gave priority to substantive work, in particular doctoral theses which are not easily accessible. One of the thorniest problems posed by this kind of synthesis is due to the multitude of readings it requires. I have often felt a feeling of injustice towards those who I have not mentioned, although their work has been of great use to me. I finally gave up the footnotes, because that would not have solved the problem, given the extraordinary profusion of research that the history of France has aroused for thirty years. I therefore contented myself with a short indicative bibliography, chapter by chapter.

Explaining the point of view from which one examines the past also requires saying a word about one's personal history because it is certain that this orients the way one looks at the world. My interest in the working classes comes largely from my own trajectory, typical of those social miracles of which Pierre Bourdieu spoke. Coming from a modest background, as they say, I climbed the ladder one by one from the normal school of teachers in the Vosges to the most prestigious French and American academic institutions, driven by an intense quest for truth. and convinced that it was in science.

As far as I can be lucid on the subject, I would say that this lived experience guided my view of history on three levels. First of all, as I was confronted very early on with the violence and internal stigmatization of the working classes, I could never believe that domination was reduced to the exploitation of the poor by the rich, even if it this is an essential dimension. So I never shared the romantic vision of the people that dominates among intellectuals. This is one of the reasons that explain the importance that I have given in this book to the problem of nationality , since since the nineteenth century the cleavage between nationals and foreigners has been one of the most powerful power relations that allowed the dominant to widen the gap separating the different components of the working classes.

Like many social defectors, I also frequently felt a certain guilt about living in the world I was not programmed for. Charles Péguy pointed out that such moral scruples often lead defectors to stay away from the places where power and glory are made. There is nothing heroic about this because it is an exceptional privilege to be able to spend one's life in the shelter, under the protection of the holy scriptures. The downside, when we nevertheless defend the social function of history, is that by agreeing to remain on the margins we have little chance of reaching the readers we would like to reach. This is why it is sometimes necessary to know how to do violence to oneself in order to be heard in the public space.

My social trajectory has also played a large role in the importance that I attribute to science on a civic level. Given that the research allowed me to free myself from the main determinisms that weighed on me at the start, I would like the greatest number of my fellow citizens to be able to benefit from it as well. Emancipation through knowledge is an ideal which was defended by the Enlightenment and which was once part of what are called republican values. The ultimate ambition of this Popular History of France is to help readers, not only to think for themselves, but to become strangers to themselves, because it is the best way not to let themselves be confined in identity logics.

I. Why Joan of Arc, despite everything?

Of such people, it's only shit.

Christine de Pisan

The Book of Changes of Fortune (1400-1403)

From the day a mysterious force pushed this eighteen-year-old girl to leave her father, her mother and her village to save France, objections abounded. They never discouraged her. Those who believed in her, the people first, were right against the reasoners. And even those who had no faith, but who wanted the good of the kingdom, said to themselves that after all business was so low that there was no risk in trying this providential competition. The Dauphin's cause could only count on a miracle. And this miracle, France was waiting for it, because barely had Joan of Arc left Vaucouleurs to go to Charles VII when her name flew from mouth to mouth and gave courage to the besieged of Orléans. [...] "Deliver Orléans and consecrate the Dauphin in Reims. This was Joan of Arc's mission and she fulfilled it. For France, it was salvation. By universal consent, there is never in any time, in any country, so pure a heroine, a more marvelous story. No one will be able to hear her until her eyes fill with tears.

This quote is taken from the history of France published in 1924 by Jacques Bainville, a monarchist historian who actively campaigned in the 1930s within the Action française. His book, constantly republished since that date, is still on sale today. William Blanc, Aurore Chéry and Christophe Naudin have shown in a recent book the role played by the media, including public service channels, in the resurgence of this reactionary history.

I think that this return can be explained as much by economic as political reasons. As we will see in the last chapter of this book, France today ranks first in the world in the tourism and luxury industry (haute couture, local products, good wine, etc.). The France brand is sold all over the world thanks to its aristocratic past. Its castles, its palaces, its churches have become the best advertising arguments to sell high-end products and to attract all foreigners in the world, provided that their bank account is well supplied. The return to favor of this monarchist history is in line with recent developments in patrimonial capitalism.

It is true that this vision of the past is popular in the sense that the masters of ratings give to this word. The public's enthusiasm for amusement parks like Disneyland proves that kings, queens, poor peasant women seduced by charming princes always make people dream. This is why Jacques Bainville and his epigones adore Joan of Arc. The little peasant girl from Lorraine loved her king so much that she did not hesitate to sacrifice her life to save him. And since it was the voice of God that urged her to kick the English out of France, she was also the heroine of those who wanted to exalt her Christian roots and defend the nation against all foreign invaders. Every year, since the National Front has existed (1972), on the second Sunday of May, the founding father of the party goes to the Place des Pyramides, where the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc is located, in Paris, to celebrate the birthday of his favorite heroine.

However, the efforts of the far right to monopolize Joan of Arc came up against competing companies as early as the ¹⁹th century . Political movements of all persuasions tried to rally the Maid of Orleans to their own cause. Jules Michelet made her a republican saint, the mother of the French nation. Charles Péguy a socialist heroine. Louis Aragon presented her as the great figure of a national past returned to the people thanks to the Communist Party. More recently, Marxist philosophers (I am thinking of Daniel Bensaïd) have compared his fate to the tragic solitude of Che in Bolivia. And feminists like Michèle Sarde celebrated the one who had dared to defy the sexist ban under which no woman will wear the dress of a man. I do not forget, of course, that on May 8, 2016, the man who was still only François Hollande's Minister of the Economy went to Orléans for the 587th edition of the Johannine celebrations. He declared that day: "The French need Joan of Arc [because she has] brought France together above parties. »

If I finally decided to start this popular story with the epic of good Lorraine, it is neither to denounce a myth nor to support it, but quite simply because France has definitively imposed itself on the scene of history at its time. As I indicated in the foreword, the word France is used here in its legal sense. It designates a State whose sovereign exercises his power of command over a territory and the population that inhabits it. This French State, all recent historical studies confirm, was definitively consolidated between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century ; the epic of Joan of Arc representing only one episode in a process which will end with the end of the Hundred Years' War, a few decades after her death. Historical upheavals are always collective phenomena and great figures make history only insofar as they seize the opportunities offered to them. This was the case of Joan of Arc.

We can therefore use his name as a memorial marker to designate the beginning of the history of France. However, I insist on the fact that a beginning is not an origin. It was the beginning of a new era which also marked the end of another. The France which imposed itself at the beginning of the 15th century was in fact built on the ruins of a world in the process of disappearing, even if traces of this distant past have been transmitted to us. I will therefore begin this popular history by recalling the materials from which the French nation was made.

Our Ancestors Were Migrants

Followers of the national novel have cultivated the legend that our ancestors were Gauls. It is obviously not forbidden to wonder about the genealogy of a people. Moreover, we now have a scientific instrument which can be useful for this purpose, provided that it is handled with care. This is population genetics. It makes it possible to reconstruct the main stages of the multiple migratory exchanges which, over the centuries, have enriched and diversified human groups. These studies confirm what serious historians have established for a long time. The Gauls were not the first to settle in this territory which is now called France. They were preceded by nameless men, who left practically no traces, whose existence is sometimes discovered by chance during archaeological excavations. Without going into the debates between specialists, it is likely that the first human beings appeared on earth two or three million years ago, first in Africa. In other words, our ancestors were all migrants. We know practically nothing of the different stages that led them to populate the different continents of our planet. The oldest traces of the genus Homo that have been found in the territory corresponding to present-day France date back 1.6 million years for Homo erectus and 40,000 years for Homo sapiens (modern man , sometimes said of Cro-Magnon) and they too were already migrants!

These founding migrations also affected the regions of France that are now called the overseas departments and territories: Antilles, Guyana, Réunion, Polynesia, etc. The first traces left by the Amerindian peoples in Guyana date from the 6th millennium BC. The presence of the Arawaks, the first Amerindians who occupied the Caribbean islands, is attested from the first two centuries of our era (between 160 and 220). From the ninth century, the Caribs , coming from Guyana, settled in turn in the Lesser Antilles. As Jean-Pierre Sainton notes: "Very early on, Amerindian migrations made the maritime space not a barrier but an interface, an intense zone of communication and an essential factor of regional integration. »

Fernand Braudel had made the same observation about metropolitan France. Due to its geographical position, located at the crossroads of Europe, between the Atlantic area and the Mediterranean area, the future Hexagon was among the first regions of the West to come into direct contact with the great civilizations of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean.

Migrants speaking Celtic languages settled there in the middle of the first millennium BC. Among them were those who, in their own language, are called Celts, and, in ours, Gauls, to use a formula of Julius Caesar in The Gallic Wars , the story where he recounts the exploits of his conquest. This sentence is a good illustration of one of the great traps constantly set for the historian by the long history of human migrations: the trap of colonial domination fixed in language. The Celts did not know writing. Before recent advances in archeology, the only sources we had to know about this past resided in the writings of those who, like Julius Caesar, colonized them by imposing their language on them. One of the essential forms of domination in history has opposed those who held the power to describe and interpret the world by means of writing and those who only had an oral language. Speech is indeed a limited means of communication, adapted to societies based on direct links of mutual knowledge, while writing allows communication at a distance, in space but also in time.

Not only did the Gauls themselves not use this word to name themselves, but the terms that Caesar uses to describe the different parts of Gaul: Aquitaine, Belgium, Celtic were also ignored by conquered tribes. The trap of writing closed on the historians who invented a genealogical continuity from our ancestors the Gauls because they did not understand that the permanence they postulated actually resided in the printed texts which served as their source.

Roman colonization took the form of the establishment of administrative entities, roads and towns that left an indelible mark on space. However, very often, the Romans contented themselves with Latinizing the pre-existing entities. The divisions of the old countries called Gallic were thus perpetuated to the point that we find traces of them in the current administrative boundaries. The name of the inhabitants has very often been used to name, in fact, the capitals of our departments: Vénètes (Vannes), Cadurques (Cahors), Nemnètes (Nîmes), Parisii (Paris), Tarbèles (Tarbes), etc. The mastery of writing allowed the Romans to impose Latin as the official language, but gradually the Gallic elites appropriated this new means of communication and internalized the vocabulary of the colonizers.

Along with migrations and written communication, the third factor that imposed itself in the initial construction of the French nation was the Christian religion. The reign of Emperor Constantine (306-337) was a decisive step towards the homogenization of Gallo-Roman Gaul in Christian monotheism. From then on, spiritual power and temporal power were closely associated in the domination of the popular classes. Thanks to the support of the state power, the Christian Church was able to develop its administrative structures, install its bishops in the big cities of the Empire. After the sack of Rome by the Visigoths (410), a decisive step towards the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Church became the only force organized on a large scale. Capable of exercising its power over an area far exceeding the territories of the princes, it nevertheless needed their support to maintain itself.

From the 3 rd century onwards , new migrations once again influenced the course of history. In the 19th century , historians imposed the myth of the great invasions when in reality the penetration of Germanic tribes into Gallo-Roman space took place over a long period. The Romans made many compromises with these peoples who often became Latinized in contact with their neighbor. The Visigoths, settled in the Aquitaine region and used first as auxiliaries of the Roman army, made Toulouse the capital of their kingdom. In the North, the Romans entrusted the chiefs of Frankish and Burgundian tribes with command posts. The head of the Salian Franks (from which the Merovingian dynasty originated) was even proconsul of the Gauls, that is to say a senior Roman official.

After the fall of Rome, the Frankish aristocracy seized the large estates cultivated by slaves and small settlers subject to royalties. We know very little about the living conditions of these popular classes because, as Karl Ferdinand Werner pointed out, only the rich and powerful, the saints and their servants, appear in our texts. The secular or religious elites who monopolized writing were completely unaware of the existence of those thanks to whom they could live in opulence.

Clovis's conversion to Christianity allowed the Merovingian kings to control the appointment of bishops and abbots, who were most often from the same social class as the warlords. In return for the protection granted to the clerics, the latter legitimized the power of the Frankish princes by giving it a sacred character. For a long time, historians followed to the letter the hagiographical accounts written by these intellectuals of the time, in the forefront of which must be mentioned Bishop Grégoire de Tours.

A more critical reading of period documents, taking into account other sources, particularly iconographic and archaeological ones, has enabled recent historical work to shed light on the specific forms of domination exercised by the powerful in medieval times. Nevertheless, this scholarly history remains strongly marked by identity presuppositions which often make real individuals disappear in favor of fictitious characters designated by proper names. Take the example of the word people, which comes from the Latin " populus . This term did not have, in the Middle Ages, the meaning that we give it today when we speak of the French people. It designated ethnic groups, in a sense very close to the word tribe that the colonial powers would use in contemporary times to discredit Africans. Using the term people without precaution to name the Frankish tribes of the High Middle Ages finally confirms the view of the clerics from the Frankish aristocracy who monopolized written culture. The people of which they speak is not a community of citizens but a group of subjects placed under the thumb of a warlord. When she explains that the triumph of the Merovingians results from the emergence of a common consciousness which is based on the origins, is built in the kingdom and is projected into the future", Régine Le Jan reinforces a vision of story that overgeneralizes observations that only concerned a very small aristocratic circle.

Agnès Graceffa is therefore right to point out that, in the historical chronicles written by the clerics of the High Middle Ages, the identity of social groups is confused with that of their leaders. The concepts of people, nation and race are thought out from and according to these. In the pre-modern context, the feeling of belonging concerns only the elite precisely because it alone possesses a political existence. Rather than feeding the metaphysics of the sense of belonging, all the more celebrated for being undemonstrable, it is better to recognize, more modestly, that we know nothing of the feelings that those below because the popular masses of that time were plunged into a night from which they would never emerge.

Slavery Was For Almost A Thousand Years

The Dominant Form Of Exploitation

Of The Working Classes In Europe.

The monarchist reading of the history of France has the other defect of plunging those who read it into a formidable anachronism. She persuades them that these kings who reigned over their people occupied the conquered territories like Hitler's armies in 1940-1944. In reality, these warlords did not have the means of their policy. They triumphed with arms in hand, installed their subordinates on the conquered territories, but the written culture was not sufficiently developed for them to be able to set up a real bureaucracy, the only means of perpetuating a domination from a distance.

When Clovis died, the kingdom was divided between his four sons, who spent their time warring against each other. Over the generations, three autonomous entities were formed: Neustria (between Seine and Loire), Austrasia (in the eastern part of present-day France) and Burgundy. In the middle of the 8th century, Pepin the Short, from an aristocratic family in Austrasia, seized power to found the Carolingian dynasty. Crowned Emperor of the Romans in the year 800, his son, Charles the Great (Magnes), in doing so, gave substance to the idea of a universal empire which lasted throughout the Middle Ages. Much later, French and Germans disputed its symbolic heritage by presenting Charles the Great either as one of the founders of the French monarchy or as that of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was within the framework of the large domains conceded by the royal power to the dignitaries of the Carolingian Empire that the seigniory emerged as a fundamental level of the medieval economic system. This estate economy had to fulfill two major requirements: to fulfill the obligation of the gift that fell to the aristocracy to honor its rank, and to ensure the domestic consumption of the extended families grouped together on these properties.

As Georges Duby noted, the primary function of these large estates was to enable a few men to live in idleness, abundance and power. They supported the magnificence of a very restricted elite of greats. [...] Around the chiefs, lay and religious, lived hundreds of companions, their relatives, their friends, those who had placed themselves under their patronage, guests received with generosity and who spread the glory of the house far and wide, finally crowds of servants and among them those artists of metal, carpentry and weaving who built the luxurious setting befitting the rank of the master, who fashioned his weapons, his jewels, his ornaments.

These large estates were nevertheless capable of producing enough food for a part to be marketed and ensure a real profit for the exploitation. The lord who owned the land exercised a multifaceted power over those who worked there because he held the military force to make them obey, but also to ensure their protection. This system of domination was legitimized by the vision first formulated at the end of the ninth century of a society composed of three orders: those who pray, those who fight and those who work . The free peasants, who owned land called alleux, did not completely escape this seigniorial power, but they benefited, in principle, from the protection of public institutions (whether imperial, royal or county).

This was not the case for slaves, who represented the largest part of the labor force exploited by the owners of large estates, as in Roman times. The incessant conflicts between the warlords turned the vanquished into slave labor and their status was transmitted from generation to generation. In the inventories of the time, slaves were placed in a separate category, alongside movable property.

During the Carolingian period, the decline of internal conflicts modified the areas where slaves were recruited. The traffic was still fueled by poverty because a man without resources had the right to sell his children. However, the bulk of new slaves came from wars waged by Carolingian kings outside the empire. When the Saxons were defeated by Charlemagne, many of them were deprived of their freedom. These practices persisted above all on the eastern fringes of Europe and in the Mediterranean area. Raids were regularly carried out in areas not yet Christianized, especially in the part of Europe where Slavic populations lived (term which gave the word slave in French). In the eighth century , the conquest of North Africa by the Muslims fueled the trans-Saharan slave trade. Captives from southern Niger were taken in caravans that crossed the desert to Sudan where they were exchanged for gold or ivory. These African slaves were used for centuries in the Mediterranean regions as labor in mines, ports, plantations and also as servants.

The Carolingian Empire suffered the same fate as the Merovingian kingdom, despite the development of monetary exchanges and written culture. In 843, during the division of Verdun, the grandsons of Charlemagne shared the inheritance. Charles the Bald received western France, Lothair the middle part of the empire (the Lotharingia), from the North of the Netherlands to present-day Italy, and Louis the German inherited eastern France. The migratory pressures illustrated by the incursions of the Vikings in the north and the Saracens in the south forced the Carolingian kings to entrust increasing powers of command to the counts, who then had the military means enabling them to break their allegiance with regard to the central power. The great public offices thanks to which Charlemagne had managed to govern the territory of the empire, mainly those of count and bishop, ended up being part of the heritage of the great aristocratic families, which accelerated the process of formation of the independent territorial principalities.

Feudalism Imposed Itself From The 11th Century

onwards As A New Mode Of Domination

Of Man By Man.

The collapse of central power favored the emergence of a new system of domination: feudalism (which Marxists prefer to call feudalism), much better suited to the technical possibilities of that time. Marked, most often without knowing it, by the Hegelian vision of history, historians have long interpreted the virtual disappearance of the state as a regression in Europe's triumphal march towards progress. Today, the diagnosis of medievalists is much more nuanced.

Marc Bloch had already underlined it: feudalism is the direct domination of man over man. The term that has imposed itself to designate this process within the dominant class is, moreover, explicit. Dependence is based on the homage of vassals to their lord. It is a direct link, reinforced by a ritual comprising gestures, words, then an oath on the Gospels - I am your man, said the vassal to his lord - which allowed the most powerful to be at the head of an entire chain of command, through intermediaries. The princes, the dukes, the counts arrogated to themselves all the regal instruments, levying taxes and all sorts of levies, dispensing justice, sometimes beating money. The vassals swore loyalty to the lord in exchange for a fief, most often land over which they reigned supreme.

Historical research has shown that the period during which the decomposition of the Carolingian Empire accelerated (from the middle of the ninth century ) was also marked by a profound transformation of economic structures. The collapse of the state caused the generalization of the process that historians call the encellulation of the old aristocratic estates. To strengthen their control over their territory and to intensify its economic exploitation, the secular and ecclesiastical lords gathered around a fortified center the peasant populations who had been dispersed until then. Far from being limited to the principalities resulting from the former Carolingian counties, the celling gradually spread to all levels of aristocratic society.

and taxation over those who live there, appeared from the Carolingian period, imposed itself from the 11th century onwards as the structure fundamental to economic and social life in the countryside of the West.

The dissolution of the domanial system contributed to the abandonment of slavery replaced by new forms of subjugation. The end of the Roman Empire was accompanied by a crisis in the modes of land government and domination of the peasants assigned to the development of the estates. From the sixth century, indeed, a multitude of statutes referring to as many particular situations of the peasants governs the ownership of the ground and the organization of work . For this reason, medievalists now speak of servitude (rather than serfdom), which involved different modalities and intensity according to places and according to times. Its function was to reinforce the social power of the lord and to consolidate his domination, while justifying significant levies on the labor force and on the harvests. Whatever the name given to these positions, they affected fundamental human rights: the right to marry, the right to inherit and transmit, the right to sell one's property. The seigniorial control which was exercised over all these aspects defined a humiliated condition which justified the putting to work of the men and the puncture operated on their production. These situations were observable, in greater or lesser harshness, until the end of the Middle Ages and sometimes even beyond.

The militarization of space, illustrated by the proliferation of fortified castles, also had the effect of fixing the spatial organization of the seigniory shared between the domain, space exploited directly by the lord thanks to a workforce of servants and serfs living in the castle, and tenures, on which worked peasants caught in various forms of subjugation. For the latter, the positive side of this evolution was due to the fact that they were grouped together in the same space, the village, which became the basic framework of rural society for a millennium. From then on, the peasant community was able to live on a stable territory (the finage) around a central place: the church. The parishes adapted to this village logic, which ensured the priests a major role in the animation of a collective life punctuated by the rituals of the Christian religion, in particular all those which marked the great stages of peasant life (baptism , wedding, funeral).

Historians today wonder whether the mode of feudal domination, based on direct ties of dependence, was not one of the essential factors in the spectacular development of the economy experienced by the western part of the Europe between the tenth and twelfth centuries . Works converge to show that it was progress in agriculture that was the engine of this growth. And even if they were served by an improvement in agrarian techniques and a better use of available techniques (the plow, the three-year rotation, the shoulder collar, the camshaft for the mills), it is undoubtedly the overexploitation of peasant labour, a consequence of the rationalization of the economic exploitation of the seigneuries, which played a decisive role.

This boom led to a decline in famines and therefore a drop in mortality. The resulting increase in population caused an intensification of land clearing in a Europe where much land was still unexploited. On the social level, the enrichment of the countryside had the effect of accentuating a progressive differentiation of conditions within the working classes. Robert Fossier concluded from his research on Picardy that in the twelfth century the village elite (lords, wealthy peasants) represented 3% of the population; 16% were labourers, owners of holdings greater than or equal to three hectares; 33% cultivated plots while supplementing their resources by working at the seigneurial manor; 36% were labourers plunged into chronic poverty. Slightly more than one in ten people lived on the margins of society, having no other means of surviving than to hire out their arms to the owners of the land during the harvest.

To take full advantage of the clearings and to increase their resources, the lords multiplied franchise charters. They recognized the autonomy of the village communities, but in exchange they agreed to manage the distribution and collection of royalties due to the lord themselves. This process accelerated the empowerment of urban powers, giving rise to municipal institutions called aldermen in the north and consulates in the south of the kingdom. The inhabitants of these towns concretized their emancipation by building surrounding walls around their cities. Between the 11th and 14th centuries , the development of crafts and trade led to the proliferation of trade associations, which were organized to ensure the monopoly of work in a specific field and to limit internal competition, but also to control the quality of products, monitor the training of workers and regulate the dissemination of inventions and technical improvements. This was the starting point of the corporatist system, associating (and opposing) the masters and the companions.

From the 11th century , the incursions of armed bands from Northern or Eastern Europe ceased completely. Taking advantage of prosperity, the Vikings had settled in Normandy in the 10th century ( Norman means man of the North) and no longer hit the headlines. Followers of monarchist history concluded that the era of migration was over, for human displacements only interested them if they were savage hordes terrorizing clerics who wrote histories of France. However, it has been a long time since Georges Duby drew our attention to the fact that the rural population at this time proved to be much more mobile than is usually believed. Demographic growth in fact pushed people living in overpopulated areas to move in order to clear the spaces hitherto unexploited, while a large number of poor peasants emigrated to the cities. The development of trade multiplied the number of traders. In northern Europe, from Bruges to Novgorod, the guilds of the port cities of the Hansa took on considerable importance. In the South, trade between the shores of the Mediterranean attracted merchants from the Levant (often Syrians or Jews), who sometimes settled in ports such as Marseille.

The Lords Of Île-De-France

Gradually Imposed Their Domination

Over A Vast Territory

Which Became The Capetian Kingdom

The triumph of feudalism did not completely eliminate the royal function, but it became a stake in the struggles between the most powerful lords. Finally, it was Hugues Capet, the great-grandson of Robert le Fort, Duke of Neustria, who won in 987. Weak enough not to appear as a threat in the eyes of his neighbors, the Duke of Île -de-France succeeded in founding a new dynasty which reigned almost uninterruptedly for almost a thousand years. As they no longer had sufficient military forces to impose their supremacy on the other great lords, Hugues Capet and his successors also relied on the feudal system. They had to conquer new territories in order to enlarge the circle of their vassals. Their luck was that Île-de-France was located at the heart of the area which benefited the most from the economic development of the 11th and 12th centuries . In the region between the Loire and the Seine, the memory of the glorious hours of the Frankish monarchy was maintained thanks to the large number of clerics who piously cultivated this memory, from monasteries and abbeys built sometimes from the Merovingian period, such as that of Saint -Denis, which had become the necropolis of the Robertians and the Capetians.

The reign of Philippe Auguste, at the beginning of the 13th century , was a decisive moment for the rebirth of the royal state. By multiplying the wars of conquest and matrimonial alliances, he succeeded in greatly extending the territories annexed to the kingdom of Île-de-France. At his death, the Capetian domain was four times larger than when he acceded to the throne. His successors consolidated this domination. At the end of the 13th century, there remained only three principalities which escaped royal power: Flanders, Gascony (Guyenne) and Brittany . In two centuries, the Capetian family had therefore succeeded in restoring the domination of the King of West Francia over a good part of the territory which Charles the Bald had inherited.

The conquest of these new lands was completed by a long work aimed at subduing all the forces that refused royal authority. The most important point was undoubtedly the alliance woven by the Capetians with the representatives of the Church to eliminate religious dissidence. In exchange for the legitimacy granted to them by the Church, the monarchs pledged to protect Christians everywhere. This was the main motive which provoked the multiplication of crusades against heretics from the eleventh century onwards . After the expeditions carried out against the Muslim Saracens to recover the holy places, the crusaders attacked the Cathars of the South of France, in what was long called the Albigensian crusade. In 1209, the Frankish barons besieged the city of Béziers and, as worthy successors of their ancestors who had massacred the Muslims in Jerusalem, they exterminated the inhabitants of the city, then seized Carcassonne. A few years later, Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, was defeated by royal troops. The county was annexed to the Capetian kingdom which became, in fact, a bilingual kingdom divided between its northern part where the langue d'oïl was spoken and its southern part where the langue d'oc was spoken. The Inquisition continued its work by hunting down the Cathars, many of whom perished at the stake.

In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council, organized by Pope Innocent III, decided to attack the Jews as well, asking the lords to treat them as perpetual serfs. Died in 1270 on the eve of a new crusade against the Muslims, the King of France Louis IX, considered a saint during his lifetime and canonized barely thirty years after his death, became famous for the fierce repression he led. against the Jewish communities of the kingdom. In his monumental biography of Saint Louis, Jacques Le Goff did not hesitate to affirm that this monarch was a milestone on the road to Christian, Western and French anti-Semitism.

The common interests which bound the royal power and the Church did not prevent the development of a growing antagonism between the Capetian State and the papacy. The conflict with the Holy See in Rome resulted in the election of a French pope, Clement V, who settled in Avignon. Between 1378 and 1417, two popes fought to take control of the Christian Church.

The Capetian kings also multiplied initiatives to subjugate the nobility. They took advantage of the development of monetary exchanges to replace more and more often the fief previously granted in the form of land by a rent paid in money. This was one of the most effective solutions to counter the tendency of vassals to see themselves as owners of their fiefs. The royal power used in the same direction the progress of the written culture, with a multiplication of the procedures of investigations for purposes of information or repair of the suffered wrongs. Since the twelfth century, Paris had become the largest university center in Europe . The Sorbonne, built on the Sainte-Geneviève mountain, mainly trained theologians, but the Capetians favored the development of a small community of lawyers who undertook to unify royal law by drawing strong inspiration from ancient Roman law. They played a key role in redefining the vassalic bond. The old feudal principle according to which the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal, justified by the need to maintain a direct link between the lord and his man, was gradually abandoned, which allowed the king to place at the top of a whole pyramid of dependents, vassals, sub-vassals, etc., that he could mobilize for war. At the time of Philippe Auguste, which is considered the height of the chivalric model, the royal army was made up of several thousand knights who performed a military service fixed at forty days and forty nights. It is thanks to all these vassals that Philippe Auguste was able to extend his kingdom.

The formation of this small milieu of lawyers in the service of the king enabled Louis IX to create a royal court of justice, the Parliament of Paris, which functioned as a court of appeal and as an administrative tribunal. The thesis that Françoise Autran devoted to this institution between the middle of the fourteenth century and the middle of the fifteenth century is particularly instructive for those who want to understand how this state nobility was born, the excessive power of which many still today deplore. .

The Parliament of Paris gradually imposed itself on the ecclesiastical and seigniorial justices. About a hundred members (presidents, advisers, king's lawyers, clerks, bailiffs, etc.) served the cause of the king with their pens and received regular wages in exchange. Initially, more than half of them were churchmen because this state body had been created on the model of religious institutions. The other members came from the nobility or the bourgeoisie. However, stronger than the vassalic or bourgeois groups, and even than the princely clienteles, the esprit de corps of these lawyers allowed them to quickly overcome their initial particularisms. The councilors placed their sons there and married their daughters there. And this heredity of charges, combined with matrimonial alliances, reinforced the collective identity of the group, contributing to its secularization. From the beginning of the fifteenth century , they had become professional administrators of royal justice. Exempted from the payment of tax, they were all considered as belonging to the nobility.

This first great institution was completed a few decades later by the Chamber of Accounts, which took the habit of separating ordinary receipts (from the royal domain) and extraordinary receipts (from taxes and levies of the kingdom) . The members of these royal institutions formed the summit of a small administration whose basic levels were occupied by bailiffs and seneschals distributed throughout the territory.

The Capetians also took advantage of the rivalries that were beginning to oppose the nobles and the bourgeois. Since the twelfth century, franchise charters had enabled the multiplication of medieval communes . Bound by oath and sworn faith, they were integrated into the feudal system and agreed to pay royalties to the lord in exchange for their freedom. The royal power interfered more and more in these power relations by providing support to urban communities that sought to emancipate themselves from lordly tutelage, thus encouraging the growth of crafts and trade. These cities, which royalty referred to as good towns or sworn towns, became autonomous entities within the kingdom's body politic. They had the right to administer themselves like small republics, but under the supervision of justice and the royal police.

These advantages were also granted to certain professional communities, called sworn trades as opposed to regulated trades which were less autonomous. Within the sworn trades, those who had the status of masters could administer their corporation as they pleased, controlling recruitment to limit competition. Thanks to the taxes and royalties paid in exchange for royal protection, this bourgeoisie contributed more and more heavily to the state budget, but it also played a role in the military field. Contingents from the good towns took part in the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, which allowed Philippe Auguste to confirm the annexation of Normandy, Anjou and Touraine, as well as to add that of France. Artois.

The Hundred Years War Jeopardized

The Construction Of The Capetian State

At the end of the twelfth century for the first time, and more and more often during the thirteenth century, the king of the Franks was called " Rex Francie ", king of France. However, the Capetians were not the only royal dynasty that managed to dominate the world of lords. As early as the 11th century, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, had crossed the sea and had himself crowned King of England . One of his descendants, Henri Plantagenêt, Count of Anjou and Maine, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, was crowned King of England in his turn. At the head of a veritable empire, anchored on both sides of the Channel, the Plantagenets were seen as a major threat to the Capetians. The conflicts between the two dynasties focused on Guyenne (in the Bordeaux region), acquired by Henri II Plantagenet at the end of the twelfth century , but which the kings of France exhausted themselves in reconquering for several centuries. This was one of the causes of the Hundred Years' War, which therefore lasted, in reality, three hundred years (interrupted, it is true, by numerous periods of calm).

The Capetians were also threatened on their eastern border by the Duke of Burgundy. This feudal principality had been considerably reinforced thanks to the marriage of Philippe le Hardi with Marguerite de Flandre in 1363. It now extended from the Netherlands to Provence. The dream of reconstituting the former Lotharingia and making it an independent state took shape again. Finally, in the northeast of their kingdom, the Capetians were in constant rivalry with the sovereigns of the Holy Germanic Empire.

The royal states of this period were very sensitive to the test of succession. For more than three centuries, for example, the existence of an indisputable male heir at the death of his father was one of the decisive conditions for the construction by the Capetians of a solid French monarchy. In the aristocracy of that time, women also had certain means to resist male domination. As wives, they were at the center of alliance games that allowed kings to expand their possessions. As mothers, they played a major role in the sustainability of the kingdom, on the condition, however, that they gave birth to sons and that they were deemed faithful to their husbands, to avoid the discredit that weighed on the bastards.

The formidable power accumulated by Henri Plantagenet was the product of these internal contradictions in the family sphere. Louis VII, the father of Philippe Auguste, had married Eleanor of Aquitaine but had repudiated her because of her supposed infidelities while he was at the crusades, and especially because she had not given him a male heir. She remarried shortly after with Henri Plantagenêt, bringing her the powerful duchy of Aquitaine as a dowry. The queen of the Franks thus became queen of England.

In 1328, things got complicated for the Capetians because Charles IV, the last son of Philippe le Bel, died without a male heir. Edward III, King of England, claimed the crown but the peers of France who formed the Council of Regency opted for Philip VI of Valois, the king's cousin. This dynastic quarrel was one of the main causes of the Hundred Years War.

Followers of monarchical history are most often content to tell the story of this war by evoking only the rivalries between reigning families. In reality, this long period of collective violence also resulted from the serious economic crisis which shook Europe from the beginning of the fourteenth century . Historians have explained this depression by several factors. According to Édouard Perroy, the subsistence crisis of 1314-1316 acted as a detonator. It caused a demographic collapse, a shrinking of cultivated space and a decline in industrial activity. More recent work has shown that the prosperity of the previous period had the effect of integrating the peasants into monetary circuits. Many of them supplemented the resources drawn from their land with a salary obtained by working on another farm or by exercising a craft activity, such as spinning and weaving, which were already widespread in the countryside of the North and Flanders. This development of trade placed them in a greater dependence with regard to the markets and therefore to the fluctuation of prices. This phenomenon could explain the rapid spread of the economic crisis in much of Western Europe and the fact that it affected both the peasants and the urban proletariat.

The recession having also reduced the resources of the lords, they reacted by increasing the tax burden, aggravating at the same time the peasant misery. These economic factors played a determining role in the explosions of violence which multiplied throughout the continent, and of which the Hundred Years War was the most visible expression.

The recession reached its climax with the terrible outbreak of the Black Death. In five years (1347-1352), the plague caused more than twenty-five million deaths. It is estimated that in total a third of the European population disappeared at this time. The kingdom of France, which had sixteen million inhabitants at the beginning of the thirteenth century , only had twelve million a century later. The crisis affected above all the rural economy. Seigniorial revenues fell sharply; which affected the standard of living of the gentry. In an attempt to rectify their situation, the owners exploited even more, as we have seen, the labor force of the peasants. The 13th and 14th centuries were therefore marked by a resumption of seigniorial management. Even if the situations could vary greatly from one region to another, in many places there was then a strengthening of serfdom. This was particularly the case on the lands of the Abbey of Saint-Claude – a large ecclesiastical lordship located in the Haut Jura – which formally depended on the Holy Germanic Empire. In the thesis he devoted to it, Vincent Corriol noted that serfdom only appeared in the fourteenth century in this region. The small peasant communities that had formed to clear the forests that had been unexploited until then lost their autonomy and the local society was reconstituted around two statuses: the bourgeois and the serf.

However, if the question of serfdom appears more and more often in the seigniorial archives of the late Middle Ages, it is also because the resumption in hand of the management of their lands by the owners led to a strong diffusion of written culture in countrisides. To rationalize the exploitation of their domain, the great seigniories entrusted its administration to officers who knew Roman law well. During disputes with the peasants, they increasingly used texts as evidence. The penetration of written culture within the seigniorial class also had the effect of unifying extremely diverse practices by grouping them under identical names. One of the major consequences of this process was that the rural communities became privileged interlocutors for the lords and their managers.

The Crisis Transformed

The Dominant Representations Of Poverty

The crisis massively affected the countryside, but the cities were not spared. Not only were their inhabitants directly affected by the scourges of the time, but they also had to deal with the influx of an enormous mass of migrants whom war, epidemics and hunger had driven out of the countryside.

One of the major consequences of this invasion of cities was that poverty suddenly became much more visible. Until the 11th century , the weakness of economic development made massive poverty endemic, but which did not worry the elites. In the last two centuries of the Middle Ages, representations of poverty changed profoundly. Poverty ceased to be perceived as an individual affliction. It became a social scourge and a crime. As Michel Mollat notes: 30 to 40% of the 'poor' in a city of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth were heavier than 80% in the countryside of the tenth century . As often, the upheaval of representations was translated into language. The word beneficence (which gave rise to beneficence" in the eighteenth century) then imposed itself to describe the desacralization of mercy.

In this urban society organized in corps where each group protected itself by creating its own borders, the irruption of all these vagabonds caused a deep crisis of the previous system of assistance to the poor. The religious institutions created in previous centuries to care for the destitute were quickly overwhelmed. Their role declined from the middle of the fourteenth century to the benefit of urban institutions. These adapted to the new requirements by operating a selection based on the criterion of domiciliation. By imposing distinctive marks on the indigent (tokens, lead plates, crosses sewn on the sleeve and chest, etc.), the agents of this new assistance policy invented embryonic forms of identification of entitled persons. At the same time, this rationalization leads to a more precise definition of the notion of indigence by making a distinction based on the criterion of aptitude for work.

In the middle of the fourteenth century , a new profile of the destitute appeared. The increasingly rigorous separation between the good and the bad poor leads to rejecting the able-bodied vagrant in the category of criminals. The multiplication of the number of able-bodied beggars everywhere aroused reactions aimed at bringing them into line. The refusal to work was presented as an offense against God that a good Christian must absolutely repress. Throughout Europe, measures were multiplied to stem this scourge. The authorities urged the Church to stop giving alms to people healthy in body and limbs. Thus was born the police of the poor.

In 1351, Jean II, known as the Good, issued the first ordinance of the kingdom of France targeting those who stand by the city of Paris. He forbade the workers to frequent the taverns on working days and to leave their workshops to seek better wages. In 1367, a new royal ordinance obliged the unemployed to repair the ditches, under penalty of being whipped. The text quoted by José Cubero is very clear, although it is written in old French: "And after the said three days are found oyseux or playing dice or beggars, they will be taken and put in prison and put on bread and water; and so held for the space of four days, and when they shall have been delivered from the said prison, if they are found sick or if they have no property from which they may have their lives, or if they have not , without fraud to whom they face jobs or whom they serve, they will be put in the pillory and the third time they will be signed on the forehead with a hot iron and banished from the said places. »

This text clearly shows the major role of constraint in settling the social question. As Bronislaw Geremek pointed out in his study of the repression of vagrancy in Paris at the end of the Middle Ages: "The judicial system and the police apparatus are, above all, directed against the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. It should however be specified that the forces of order were at that time still embryonic and did not form a