CHRISTINE AND THE ARMAGNAC-BURGUNDIAN FEUD
The sun had not yet risen on May 29, 1418, when Perrinet Leclerc unlocked the Porte Saint Germain with keys pilfered from his father’s bedside.1 Waiting outside was the Burgundian Jean de Villiers Seigneur de L’Isle-Adam, accompanied by a group of several hundred mounted men armed for battle. They burst through the gate, heading toward Châtelet. When the last had entered, Leclerc relocked the gate and tossed the keys over the wall to prevent the escape of the Armagnacs, who would soon be trying to flee. On reaching Châtelet, the Burgundians were greeted by crowds eager to avenge four years of Armagnac oppression. Hastily convoking, they decided to seize Armagnac leaders in their hotels. The group then continued through the streets shouting, “La paix, la paix, Bourgogne!” and “Vive Bourgogne!” as yet more supporters poured from their houses to join the fray.2 One contingent rode to the Hotel Saint Pol, just inside the city wall on the north bank of the Seine, to lay hold of the mad king, who cheerfully agreed to everything they demanded. Another made for the hotel of Bernard Count of Armagnac, near the Louvre, but Bernard, having been tipped off, was hiding in a nearby home, disguised as a mendicant. Still another galloped toward the Palais des Tournelles, north of the Hotel Saint Pol, in search of the fifteen-year-old dauphin Charles. However, the Armagnac prévôt of Paris, Tanguy du Chastel, alerted by the commotion in the streets, had hurried to rouse the sleeping dauphin. Tanguy used his own robe to clothe the young man and spirited him first to the Bastille and then to Melun.3
Juvénal des Ursins writes of the massacre, “to describe the murders, pillaging, stealing and tyranny carried out in Paris would be a thing too long and pitiful to recite.”4 The Burgundians knew that their opponents would seek revenge. On June 1, Tanguy du Chastel led a small force of Armagnacs back into the city by way of the Porte Saint Antoine. The Burgundians repelled them and then rampaged, hacking Armagnacs to pieces wherever they found them. Burgundians unable to join in the butchery—children, the unarmed—cursed their prostrate enemies. On June 12, crowds broke into prisons, seizing, among others, the Count of Armagnac, denounced by the man in whose house he had been hiding.5 The crowds murdered the count and his friends along with other prisoners, stripping the bodies and exposing them for public display.
The frenzy continued into the following months. The arrival in Paris on July 14 of Jean sans Peur and Queen Isabeau, whom Jean had released from Armagnac imprisonment the preceding November, did not halt the violence. A group led by Capeluche, the executioner of Paris, massacred another set of prisoners on August 21. Jean regained control of the situation only after persuading several thousand rebels to leave the city to fight the Armagnacs in Montlhéry. He then had the city gates barred while he rounded up and executed the instigators of the second prison massacre. Before order was restored, the slaughtered would include, in addition to the Armagnac leaders, the humanists Jean de Montreuil, Gontier Col, and possibly Laurent de Premierfait. The theologian Jean Gerson was fortunate enough to be in Germany at the time, having stayed on after the Council of Constance. Although the Armagnac-Burgundian feud had been under way for nearly two decades at the time of the Paris massacre, according to contemporary chroniclers, this episode surpassed all others in violence.6
I open with this description of violence because the Orleanist-Burgundian feud is the context for Christine de Pizan’s political writing. Recognizing this context has important implications for how we read her corpus. In her study of Joan of Arc, Colette Beaune notes the reluctance of modern historians to recognize the maid as an Armagnac, although she surely was.7 A similar hesitation marks Christine scholarship. The first step in the case that I make through an accumulation of evidence in the course of this study—that Christine, like Joan of Arc, must be seen as an Orleanist or Armagnac sympathizer—is the observation that members of feuding societies tend to be partisan rather than impartial. This point itself, however, requires justification: was the conflict that so preoccupied Christine a feud?8 The phenomenon described by scholars of feuding is compatible with descriptions of the Orleanist-Burgundian conflict in its early days: provocation, response, provocation. Bloodshed follows a long escalation of hostilities (as we see in the assassination of Louis of Orleans and, later, Jean sans Peur). Scholars commonly distinguish feuding, “armed combat within political communities,” from warfare, “armed combat between political communities.”9 A feud displays “clear rules (about who retaliates, when, how, and against whom), governed by norms that limit the class of possible expiators (women and children are usually excluded) and the appropriateness of responses.”10 True, the massacre of 1418 was thought to exceed these limits. However, even it was not spontaneous but tactical, a response to a particularly grievous long-term set of injuries. Michael Sizer has shown that the Burgundians targeted institutions and persons under whom they had suffered massively during Armagnac rule, denuding the bodies of their victims to protest social distinctions, lining up behind Capeluche to reclaim the right to mete out justice, and massacring prisoners because the prisons were insecure, which meant that the Armagnacs held in them posed a genuine threat.11 Moreover, the rampages responded to a specific event: the Count of Armagnac’s rejection of a treaty negotiated between the king’s ambassadors and the Duke of Burgundy in mid-May in La Tombe, north of Paris.12 When ambassadors arrived in Paris with news of peace, the Parisians had danced in the streets, anticipating a life free from the threat of war and Armagnac oppression. But when the Count of Armagnac rejected the treaty, the Burgundian Parisians began to plan their revolt. Although the shouts of “La paix, la paix, Bourgogne” from people in the midst of committing horrific acts may seem “grimly ironic,” Sizer explains, the Burgundian Parisians were indeed seeking peace. It was just that they believed “that the only end to the war was through extermination of the enemy infecting the body politic.”13
To return to historians’ reluctance to see Christine as partisan, feuds polarize populations, although the process can be slowed to some extent by intimate interactions among the members.14 This was true for the Orleanists and the Burgundians, who lived in close proximity. Still, Emily Hutchison has shown in her study of Orleanist and Burgundian emblems that by 1411 everyone had been forced to choose a side: “The symbols used, the violence faced and the implications of being called an ‘Armagnac’ or a ‘Burgundian’ forced ordinary people of the realm to join one faction or the other.”15 As to why nonpartisanship would have been difficult even earlier than 1411, the bone of contention was regency—that is, who would govern for the mad king—and the Orleanists and Burgundians represented the only choices available. Some historians have hypothesized the existence of a neutral “royalist” party. But there was no third claimant for regency apart from a period of a few years, when, as R. C. Famiglietti has shown, the dauphin Louis of Guyenne worked to create his own faction.16 Indeed, Christine threw her weight behind the dauphin when he began to move in this direction. But without a third regency candidate, a neutral royalist party would have been meaningless.17 Timur R. Pollack-Lagushenko has shown that the Orleanist and Burgundian factions were nothing like modern parties with stable membership based on a common ideology.18 Rather, they were groups associated with a leader from whom they expected reciprocation. At different times, a given baron, occupied with his own business, might not be actively engaged in the conflict. Also, even important leaders—the king himself, the queen, the Duke of Berry, the dauphin, the Duke of Anjou, and even Jean of Burgundy’s brothers—switched sides, joining up with a faction when they needed the support of one of the leaders and remaining involved until they had achieved what they wanted.19