How Did the War Create French National Identity?
The Hundred Years’ War did not invent France. The Capetian kings had been working since the twelfth century to extend royal authority over the great territorial princes of the realm — the dukes of Aquitaine, Brittany, Burgundy, and Normandy, the counts of Toulouse, Flanders, and Champagne. What the war did, and what no medieval monarch could have achieved by the slow accumulation of dynastic right, was to make the slow process of territorial integration into a lived experience of national selfhood. By 1429 a Frenchman could plausibly feel that he belonged to a France that was something more than the personal union of the Valois. The 116-year conflict with England, the disasters of the 1340s, the recovery of the 1370s, the trauma of the Armagnac–Burgundian civil war, and the Joan of Arc–era coronation at Reims made that identity possible. The argument is set out in the national identity cluster article and developed, on the French side, by Colette Beaune’s Le Miracle de la France and by the contributors to the Dictionnaire de la France médiévale.
The France of 1328
The kingdom that Philip VI inherited at his coronation at Reims on 29 May 1328 was a feudal monarchy, not a nation-state. The royal domain, in the strict sense, was the Île-de-France, the Orléanais, and a scatter of appanages. The dukes of Brittany, Burgundy, Aquitaine, and the counts of Flanders, Armagnac, and Toulouse were, in practice, sovereign within their territories. The southern half of the realm spoke Occitan; the northern half spoke varieties of French that were mutually intelligible only with difficulty. Customary law, weights and measures, and coinage varied from province to province. The French of 1328 were subjects of the king of France; they were not, in any modern sense, French.
The disaster and the Estates General
The disasters of the Edwardian phase — Crécy on 26 August 1346, the Black Death of 1348–1350, and the capture of John II at Poitiers on 19 September 1356 — exposed the weakness of the Valois monarchy in a way that no amount of normal peacetime politics could have done. The provincial Estates of 1355 and the great Estates General of 1356–1358, called to address the fiscal crisis after Poitiers, brought representatives of the three orders from across the kingdom into a single political conversation. The Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis, the principal French contemporary source, records the new tone of public discourse. The vulgus — the people, the kingdom as distinct from the king — had begun to speak.
The Paris revolt of 1357–1358, led by Étienne Marcel, was the first political event in French history that could plausibly be called national: a movement of the urban bourgeoisie of the capital, with allied provincial elements, against the royal government. The Jacquerie of 1358, the great peasant uprising of the Beauvaisis, was its rural counterpart. Both were crushed with extreme violence, but the fact that they had happened at all, and the fact that chroniclers thought it worth describing them, is evidence of a new political vocabulary.
The Caroline recovery
The recovery of the Caroline phase, conducted by Charles V and Bertrand du Guesclin from 1369 to 1389, was a French project in a way the Edwardian defence had not been. Charles cultivated a court and a royal image that was distinctively French: the king as the head of a chivalric nation, the du Guesclin as the model French knight. The Grandes Chroniques de France, compiled at Saint-Denis in the 1370s and 1380s, presented the Capetian and Valois kings as the legitimate heirs of Charlemagne, and France as a Christian kingdom with a continuous history reaching back to the conversion of Clovis. The du Guesclin himself, a Breton who served a French king, became in death the hero of a national cult.
The political cost of the Caroline recovery was the renewed civil war. Charles V died in 1380; his son Charles VI began to suffer the first attacks of the madness that would cripple the monarchy from 1392; the dukes of Orléans and Burgundy fought for the regency; the assassination of Louis of Orléans in 1407 and the Armagnac–Burgundian civil war that followed turned the kingdom into a French-on-French battlefield. France, in the years Henry V invaded in 1415, was in no position to defend itself.
Joan of Arc and the coronation at Reims
Joan of Arc, born c. 1412 in Domrémy on the border of Champagne and the duchy of Bar, was a child of this civil war. She presented herself to the Dauphin in early 1429 with a programme that was at once political, religious, and national: the Dauphin must be crowned at Reims, the English must be expelled, France must be one kingdom under one king. The relief of Orléans on 8 May 1429, the Loire campaign, and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429 transformed the war’s political character. Reims was not only the site of the coronation: it was the site at which the Capetian monarchy had defined itself, and the act of crowning Charles VII there, with Joan standing beside him, was a piece of theatre of the highest political importance. The French, as the chroniclers of the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc later recorded, had a king anointed with the holy oil of Saint Remigius.
The Joan of Arc who emerged from the rehabilitation proceedings of 1450–1456 was a saint of France. The Church’s careful narrowing of her cult, and the political uses to which it was put in the 15th and 16th centuries, made her a symbol of French national identity in a way she had not been in 1429. The Voice that had spoken to her in 1425, the rehabilitation verdicts argued, had spoken for France.
The institutional consolidation
The work of national consolidation was done, after 1429, by the agents of Charles VII. The permanent taille, granted by the Estates General at Orléans in 1439, gave the French crown a fiscal independence from the regional estates that the English parliament had never quite achieved. The compagnies d’ordonnance of 1445 created a professional standing army, paid out of royal revenue. The standing train of artillery under the Bureau brothers gave France the most powerful military instrument in Europe. By 1453 the Valois monarchy, the most ramshackle of the great European kingdoms in 1328, was the most centralised. The change was made possible by the war, but the consolidation itself was the work of the post-Joan decades.
The political vocabulary
By 1453, the political vocabulary of the French was recognisably national. The word France — the kingdom as a single entity, distinct from the king’s personal domain — was increasingly used in chancery documents and in chronicle. The chancery registers of Charles VII carry the formula pour le bien de nous et de nostre royaume in a way the registers of Philip VI do not. The chronicler Thomas Basin, writing in the 1470s, took it for granted that his readers would understand a “France” that was a territorial and political whole.
The long-term consequences, in the standard reading of Jean Favier’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1980), are the foundations of the centralised French state that Louis XIV would inherit. The path from 1453 to 1789 is long, but the Hundred Years’ War was, in Favier’s phrase, the moment at which the foundations were laid.
Legacy
The war’s deepest legacy in France was the making of France. The 14th and 15th centuries saw the slow transition from a feudal aggregate, held together by the personal authority of the king, to a kingdom with a sense of itself. Joan of Arc, the Estates General of the 1350s, the great chroniclers of the Saint-Denis school, the rhetoric of Charles V’s chancery, and the institutions of Charles VII’s reign are the milestones. The English kings, by the end, had become the foreign enemy against whom French identity was defined.