Jacquerie - The Uprising

The Uprising

This combination of problems set the stage for a brief series of bloody rebellions in northern France in 1358. The uprisings began in a village of St. Leu near the Oise river, where a group of peasants met in a cemetery to discuss their perception that the nobles had abandoned the King at Poitiers. "They shamed and despoiled the realm, and it would be a good thing to destroy them all."

The account of the rising by the contemporary chronicler Jean le Bel includes a description of horrifying violence. According to him, peasants

"killed a knight, put him on a spit, and roasted him with his wife and children looking on. After ten or twelve of them raped the lady, they wished to force feed them the roasted flesh of their father and husband and made them then die by a miserable death."

Examples of violence on this scale by the hands of French peasants are offered throughout all of the medieval sources, including Jean de Venette, in general sympathetic to the peasants' plight, and the particularly unsympathetic aristocrat Jean Froissart. Among the chroniclers, the one sympathetic to the plight of the peasants is the anonymous monk who continued the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis.

The peasants involved in the rebellion seem to have lacked any real organization, instead rising up locally as an unstructured mass. It is speculated by Jean le Bel that evil governors and tax collectors spread the word of rebellion from village to village to inspire the peasants to rebel against the nobility. When asked as to the cause of their discontent they apparently replied that they were just doing what they had witnessed others doing. Additionally it seems that the rebellion contained some idea that it was possible to rid the world of nobles. Froissart's account portrays the rebels as mindless thugs bent on destruction, which they wreaked on over 150 noble houses and castles, murdering the families in horrendous ways. Outbreaks occurred in Rouen and Rheims, while Senlis and Montdidier were sacked by the peasant army. The bourgeoisie of Beauvais, Senlis, Paris, Amiens and Meaux, sorely pressed by the court party, accepted the Jacquerie, and the urban underclass were sympathetic.

The Jacquerie must be seen in the context of this period of internal instability. At a time of personal government, the absence of a charismatic king was detrimental to the still-feudal state. The Dauphin had to contend with roaming free companies of out-of-work mercenaries, the plotting of Charles the Bad, and the possibility of another English invasion. The Dauphin gained effective control of the realm only after the supposed surrender of the city of Paris under the high bourgeois Étienne Marcel, prevôt des marchands in July 1358. Marcel had joined Cale's rebellion somewhat inadvisedly, and, when his wealthy supporters deserted his cause it cost him the city and his life, in September. It is notable that churches were not the targets of peasant fury.