Who Was Charles VI of France?

Charles VI of France (1368–1422) reigned for forty-two years, from 1380 to 1422, and most of them were disasters of his own or someone else’s making. He is known to history as Charles the Mad (le Fou or le Bien-Aimé, the Well-Beloved, the epithet the chroniclers used while he was still popular). The first fit of madness struck on 5 August 1392 in the forest of Le Mans, when the king attacked his own escort and killed four men before being restrained. The illness recurred roughly forty times over the following thirty years, and the political consequences of those recurrences were, in the end, fatal to the French monarchy of the Valois. The Treaty of Troyes (1420), which disinherited his own son and recognised Henry V of England as heir to France, was negotiated while Charles was, by any reasonable standard, unfit to consent.

Childhood and the minority

Charles was born on 3 December 1368, the eldest son of Charles V and Joanna of Bourbon. He succeeded his father on 16 September 1380 at the age of eleven. The regency was exercised by his uncles — Louis of Anjou, John of Berry, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and Louis of Bourbon — who reversed Charles V’s fiscal and military reforms and provoked the Maillotins revolt of 1382 in Paris and the revolt of the Flemish cities later the same year. Charles assumed personal rule on 3 November 1388, dismissed his uncles’ favourites, and governed effectively with the help of Bureau de la Rivière and Jean de Montaigu for four years. The window closed on 5 August 1392.

The madness

The 1392 episode, in which the king killed several members of his own escort in a psychotic frenzy, was diagnosed at the time as a consequence of his exposure to heat, fatigue, and the toxic summer air. The diagnosis was wrong. The illness was a form of acute mania, almost certainly bipolar disorder by modern criteria, and it recurred with devastating regularity: in 1393, 1394, 1396, 1399, 1405, 1407, and intermittently thereafter. The Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis, the most important French narrative source of the reign, is unusually detailed on the symptoms. Charles recovered between attacks, but the relapses grew longer and the lucid intervals shorter.

The Armagnac-Burgundian civil war

The first effective political use of the king’s madness was the assassination of Louis of Orléans, the king’s brother, on 23 November 1407 by men of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. The act split the French ruling class into two armed camps, the Armagnacs (supporters of the widowed Valentina Visconti and her sons) and the Burgundians, and launched a civil war that lasted, with brief truces, until 1435. The dukes of Burgundy controlled Paris from 1411; the Armagnacs held the centre and south. Both factions spent the years 1407 to 1415 extorting the kingdom, and neither was able to mount a serious response to Henry V’s invasion of August 1415.

The Treaty of Troyes

The treaty signed at Troyes on 21 May 1420 was the most ambitious diplomatic instrument of the war. Charles VI, in one of his lucid intervals, recognised Henry V as regent and heir of France and contracted Henry to marry his daughter Catherine of Valois. The Dauphin Charles, the future Charles VII, was declared illegitimate — the fruit, the treaty alleged, of an adulterous liaison between Queen Isabeau and a certain Louis of Orléans (a calumny that has been convincingly demolished by modern scholarship). Henry V’s death at the Château de Vincennes on 31 August 1422, of dysentery, deprived the settlement of its principal architect. Charles VI died seven weeks later, on 21 October 1422, also at Vincennes.

Reputation

Charles was not the monster of English propaganda; the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc and the Vergier d’honneur are unreliable witnesses. He was a reasonably intelligent young man whose mind broke under the strain of a kingship he had not been trained for, and the political opportunism of his relatives turned his illness into the instrument of national disaster. The irony of the reign is that the most successful French king of the war, his grandson Charles VII, was the son of the worst. Enguerrand de Monstrelet and the Bourgeois de Paris are the principal narrative sources; the modern treatment in English is in Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War vols. III–IV.