Jacquerie - Suppression

Suppression

The revolt was suppressed by French nobles led by Charles the Bad of Navarre, cousin, brother-in-law and mortal enemy of the Regent, whose throne he was attempting to usurp. His and the peasant army opposed each other near Mello on 10 June 1358 when Guillaume Cale, the leader of the rebellion, was invited to truce talks by Charles. Foolishly, he went to the enemy camp, where he was seized by the French nobles, who considered that as he was of low birth, the customs and standards of chivalry did not apply to him; he was tortured and decapitated. His now leaderless army, which only Froissart's account, heavily influenced by the conventions of Romance, claimed was 20,000 strong, was ridden down by divisions of knights' cavalry in the ensuing Battle of Mello, which was followed by a campaign of terror throughout the Beauvais region, where soldiers roamed door to door in the countryside lynching countless peasants. Maurice Dommaget notes that the few hundred aristocratic victims of the Jacquerie were known to the chroniclers, who detailed the outrages practiced upon them; some 20,000 anonymous peasants were killed in the fury that followed.

The final events transpired at Meaux, where the impregnable citadel was crowded with knights and their ladies. A large armed band of some 800 men-at-arms from Paris, not the 10,000 Jacques of Froissart's account, under the leadership of Etienne Marcel, departed from Paris 9 June; when they appeared before Meaux they were taken in hospitably by the disaffected townspeople and fed. The fortress, somewhat apart from the town, remained unassailable. Two captain adventurers returned from crusade against the pagans of Prussia, were at Châlons, Gaston Phebus, comte de Foix and his noble Gascon cousin the Captal de Buch; the approach of their well-armed lancers encouraged the besieged nobles in the fortress, and a general rout of the Parisian force ensued. The nobles then fired the suburb nearest the fortress, entrapping the burghers in the flames. The mayor of Meaux and other prominent men of the city were hanged. There was a pause, then the nobles plundered the city and churches and set fire to Meaux, which burned for two weeks, overrunning the countryside, burning cottages and barns and slaughtering all the peasants they could find.

The reprisals continued through July and August. There was a massacre at Reims, steadfast in the Royal cause though it had remained. Senlis defended itself. Knights of Hainault Flanders and Brabant joined in the carnage. Following the declaration of amnesty, issued by the Regent, 10 August 1358, such heavy fines were assessed the regions that had supported the Jacquerie that a general flight of peasantry ensued. Historian Barbara Tuchman says: "Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantages of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents".

The slanted but vivid and quotable account of Froissart can be balanced by the Regent's letters of amnesty, a document that comments more severely on the nobles' reaction than on the peasants' rising and omits the atrocities detailed by Froissant: "it represents the men of the open country assembling spontaneously in various localities, in order to deliberate on the means of resisting the English, and suddenly, as with a mutual agreement, turning fiercely on the nobles".

The Jacquerie traumatized the aristocracy. In 1872 Louis Raymond de Vericour remarked to the Royal Historical Society, "To this very day the word 'Jacquerie' does not generally give rise to any other idea than that of a bloodthirsty, iniquitous, groundless revolt of a mass of savages. Whenever, on the Continent, any agitation takes place, however slight and legitimate it may be, among the humbler classes, innumerable voices, in higher, privileged, wealthy classes, proclaim that society is threatened with a Jacquerie"