The Capetian kingdom, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc
A small royal domain around Paris grows into a kingdom, survives a century of war with England, and finds a heroine in a teenage girl from Lorraine.
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
- Joan of Arc: A History — Helen Castor, Faber and Faber (2014)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
When Hugh Capet was elected king of West Francia in 987, he directly ruled little more than the area around Paris and Orléans; great dukes and counts, some richer than he was, held the rest. Over three centuries his descendants, the Capetians, patiently enlarged the royal domain through marriage, inheritance and war. Philip II Augustus seized Normandy from the English king John in 1204 and won at Bouvines in 1214, and Louis IX, Saint Louis, gave the monarchy a reputation for justice and piety.
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
A war of succession
In 1328 the direct Capetian line died out. The French nobility chose Philip VI of Valois rather than Edward III of England, whose claim came through his mother. From 1337 the dispute, tangled with English lands in Gascony and trade with Flanders, became a long series of wars and truces later called the Hundred Years’ War. The English won crushing victories at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415). Plague, peasant revolt and civil war between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions devastated the country, and in 1420 the Treaty of Troyes made the English king heir to the French throne.
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
Joan
In 1429 Joan, a peasant girl of about seventeen from Domrémy in the east, reached the disinherited dauphin Charles at Chinon, saying that the voices of saints had sent her. She rode with the army that lifted the English siege of Orléans in May and brought Charles to be crowned at Reims in July. Captured by the Burgundians in 1430 and sold to the English, she was tried by a church court for heresy and burned at Rouen on 30 May 1431. A later trial annulled the verdict in 1456, and the Catholic Church canonised her in 1920.
- Joan of Arc: A History — Helen Castor, Faber and Faber (2014)
The French went on to recover Normandy and, after the battle of Castillon in 1453, Gascony; only Calais stayed English, until 1558. The war left a stronger monarchy, the first permanent royal army and royal taxes, and a far sharper sense of being French rather than English.
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
In English memory the war is a story of underdog victories, the "happy few" of Agincourt, and of English becoming the language of the nation again, used in Parliament and the law courts and by Chaucer.
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
Why it matters today
This is where the French state and the idea of France as a nation took shape: a strong king in Paris, a sense of "us" defined against the English, and Joan of Arc, the patriot saint whom Catholics, republicans, the Resistance and the far right have all claimed. The habit of looking to Paris and to the state to hold the country together runs back to the Capetians.
The Hundred Years' War gave England Crécy and Agincourt, the longbowmen and Shakespeare's Henry V, and it helped turn the French-speaking Plantagenet elite into English people. Losing France by 1453 made England an island kingdom, and the habit of seeing the French as the friendly old enemy dates from these centuries.