Louis XI

King of France (r. 1461-1483)

• Born: July 3, 1423
• Birthplace: Bourges, France
• Died: August 30, 1483
• Place of death: Plessis-les-Tours, France

Louis XI rebuilt France from the Hundred Years’ War, prevented renewed English invasion, demolished Burgundy as a great power within France, ended the era of feudal dominance, restored the extent and influence of the royal domain, and reorganized medieval France as a modern nation-state, with himself as the prototype of Renaissance despotism.

Early Life

When Louis (loo-ee) was born to Charles VII and Mary of Anjou, the misfortunes of the Hundred Years’ War saw most of France controlled by the English or their Burgundian allies following the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. Louis was reared with middle-class companions at Castle Loches in Touraine and was educated on broad lines, while his father, disinherited by the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, dawdled at Bourges, essentially waiting on events. Joan of Arc’s victories in 1429 and 1430 revived confidence in the Valois cause, and following the Franco-Burgundian alliance of 1435 and the 1436 recapture of Paris, Charles VII felt secure enough to bring the dauphin, Louis, into public affairs.

In 1436, Louis entered an arranged political marriage to eleven-year-old Princess Margaret of Scotland, an unhappy union without children. His soldiering also began in 1436, and by 1439, he held independent commands. As a general, Louis was energetic, courageous, and moderately successful. As king, he would prefer diplomacy to war from his personal experience that “battles are unpredictable.”

From 1436 to 1445, Louis and his father agreed on broad royal policy, but not on specific men and measures, and in 1440, the dauphin was persuaded by powerful magnates to head a rebellion dubbed the Praguerie. The revolt failed, and reconciliation followed. After his wife’s death in 1445, the dauphin resumed his demand for new royal advisers, and in 1447, Charles sent his heir to semibanishment as governor of Dauphiné.

Louis reorganized the government in Dauphiné and took his own line in foreign policy, including his 1451 marriage to Charlotte of Savoy, which Charles refused to accept. The crucial father-and-son quarrel centered on the efforts of each to control or bribe the advisers of the other. In 1456, Charles sent his troops to Dauphiné to enforce his authority, and Louis fled to the court of Burgundy.

Louis spent five years in the Burgundian Netherlands as a guest of Duke Philip the Good and his son, the future Duke Charles the Bold . Louis could see that their wealth, army, and ambition were all organized toward making Burgundy an independent power in France and Europe. Charles VII died on July 22, 1461, and Louis at last came to the throne of France. He was thirty-eight years old.

Life’s Work

As king, Louis initially replaced most of his father’s advisers but continued basic royal policy. External defense and internal coordination were still the great national problems. Territorial feudalism still defied control by wreaking local havoc, but the feudal levy of lance-wielding knights could not defend France in wars of gunpowder and missiles. Yet the king’s expensive, new standing army of middle-class professionals threatened the whole structure of feudal government, and the great magnates resisted in four separate rebellions against Louis.

In the first of these feudal revolts, audaciously advertised as The League of the Public Weal, Charles led a concerted advance on Paris in 1465. The indecisive Battle of Montlhéry on July 16 left Paris saved by Louis but besieged by Charles and the magnates. To keep Paris, the king was forced to give the rebels territories later expensively regained. The Burgundian settlement was challenged by Charles after his 1467 accession, and Louis was then forced to make humiliating concessions at the Peronne Conference of 1468.

The 1468 marriage alliance of Charles and Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV of England, posed an open threat to Louis of invasion. His bold support of the Lancastrian restoration of 1470 seemed ill-judged when Edward resumed power in 1471. By the time Edward invaded France in June of 1475, however, Charles was preoccupied with a Rhineland siege. Louis came to terms with Edward in the August 29 Peace of Picquigny, offering him money and a pension; the two monarchs exchanged sardonic compliments through an iron grill.

Charles, meanwhile, pursued his claims in other quarters. In 1476, the duke and his army advanced to Lake Neuchâtel and began a campaign in which he was three times soundly beaten in unexpected attacks by Swiss infantry at Grandson, Murten, and Nancy, where Charles died fighting in 1477. His heir was his nineteen-year-old daughter, Mary of Burgundy .

Louis gave the Swiss money only until they began to win and then moved decisively, bringing Nevers, ducal Burgundy, Charolais, Picardy, Artois, Boulogne, and Rethel under the control of France. Mary, to protect Franche-Comté, Luxembourg, and the remaining Burgundian Netherlands, married Maximilian I of Habsburg. Louis broke the power of Burgundy in France by being ready and able to invade in the hour of Burgundian defeat.

By inheritance and pressure, Louis acquired Provence, Anjou, Maine, and Bar. The emerging geographic outline of modern France was accompanied by a strategic linkage of royal lands in the Loire and Seine river valleys. With the duke of Alençon under control, the estates of Armagnac partitioned, the heir of Bourbon married to Louis’s daughter Anne, and the elderly duke of Brittany now harmlessly isolated, Louis was now the feudal master of France, which he had to be in order to change the feudal system.

Externally, Louis managed to gain Roussillon from the aged and wily John II of Aragon, but John’s revenge was masterful. His son Ferdinand II married Isabella I of Castile in 1469, commencing an age of increasing Spanish unity, nationalism, and anti-French sentiment. In Burgundy, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere, the fear of French strength prepared the way for the future Habsburg-Valois wars.

Domestically, Louis replaced military, police, administrative, tax, and judicial institutions of the territorial lords with agencies of the Crown. The nobles who had ruled fiefs became a privileged class of patriotic military and civilian servants sworn in loyalty to the king. The 1472 concordat with the pope gave Louis somewhat comparable powers in the appointment of new bishops. Significantly, the king’s taxes, such as taille, aides, and gabelle, were now collected without representative consent, and the remaining parlements merely registered the king’s laws.

Additionally, Louis invested in and promoted new industries such as silk production and modernized mining as well as many commercial enterprises. A royal messenger system became a sort of postal service, conveying not only government business and privileged letters but also the publications of the new printing industry Louis helped to develop.

This rebuilding and modernization of French life depended on the safety of commerce and the tranquillity of a country no longer beset by ravaging armies. In the revised order of the new French state, the greatest economic benefit went to the bourgeoisie and the wealthiest peasants, but political power in France was concentrated in the hands of the king. On the whole, Louis governed wisely and well, but he institutionalized despotism.

Great in his accomplishments for France, Louis was not impressive in appearance. His dress and manners were informally bourgeois rather than royal. Louis was witty, garrulous, and even charming in conversation or letters, but he lacked the touch of dignity, heroism, generosity, or even understandable vice that would cause men to overlook the cruelties of which, like his contemporaries, he was sometimes capable.

Apoplexy crippled Louis as early as February, 1481, and eventually killed him. He died at Plessis-les-Tours on August 30, 1483, hopeful that his religious observances, his generosity to the Church, and his sincere faith would gain for him a fair judgment from God. His only son succeeded as Charles VIII with his sister Anne as regent. A younger daughter, Jeanne, became duchess of Orléans.

Significance

When Louis XI ascended the throne in 1461, the postwar lives of Frenchmen were still dominated by territorial feudal lords whom the king could not control. When Louis died in 1483, a centralized nation-statemonarchy was the new great fact for the future of France. The scattered royal domain lands of 1461 were increased in extent, geographic cohesiveness, and economic leadership. Most conspicuously, Louis’s policy helped to shatter the Burgundian power, that, in alliance with the external foes and internal rivals of the French crown, had long constituted a threat to the survival of France itself as a nation of consequence.

The nation-state that Louis created gave the country more security, peace, and order, as well as better laws and justice; new industry, production, commerce; and a better life, especially in the towns, than feudal Europe had ever sustained. High taxes were the naturally unpopular price for the benefits. Louis’s political system endured basically unchanged for three centuries, until the old regime was swept away in 1789.

Despite the greatness and importance of Louis’s achievements, legend, fiction, and even some historians have distorted and diminished his reputation. Most scholars agree that he deserves a better place in public estimation. Apart from the problem of misrepresentation, however, the evidence at hand suggests that, while Louis XI was in his own time respected and feared, he did not, for whatever reason, capture great sympathy and affection.

Bibliography

Bakos, Adrianna E. Images of Kingship in Early Modern France: Louis XI in Political Thought, 1560-1789. New York: Routledge, 1997. Explores the legacy of Louis XI and the representation of his kingship during the two hundred years leading up to the French Revolution, as a means of understanding the ideological evolution of France during this period. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Champion, Pierre. Louis XI. Translated by Winifred Stephens Whale. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929. Once the standard biography on Louis XI, this work is weakened by its reliance on Philippe de Commynes, a sparsity of detail, and lack of footnotes, but it is still a clear and enjoyable account.

Commynes, Philippe de. The Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes. Edited by Samuel Kinser. Translated by Isabelle Cazeaux. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969. These memoirs are the contemporary source most used by later biographers. The author, an adviser and confidant to Louis for eleven years, combines an intimate and generally favorable account of the king with his own reflections on politics.

Kendall, Paul Murray. Louis XI. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. The most useful single volume on Louis XI. Kendall’s research is comprehensive. This book is scholarly, informative, and accurate, with an extensive bibliography and footnotes that give the reader the sources for everything consequential. Although it is well written, the complex story is not as easy to follow as in Champion.

Lewis, D. B. Wyndham. King Spider. New York: Coward, McCann, 1929. A popular work, now dated, but useful for the section translating a short selection of Louis’s letters from the eleven-volume French edition. The book’s title comes from Charles the Bold’s description of Louis as “the universal spider,” a label that has lasted.

Mosher, Orville W., Jr. Louis XI, King of France. Toulouse, France: Édouard Privat, 1925. Many biographers complain of the distortion and legend surrounding Louis without adequate explanation. Mosher supplies this, although the work should be read with later works.

Potter, David. A History of France, 1460-1560: The Emergence of a Nation State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Charts French history from the reign of Louis XI to the Wars of Religion, arguing that a fundamental continuity exists throughout this time, which should belie attempts to demarcate a clear division between late medieval and early modern France. Includes illustrations, genealogic tables, maps, appendices, bibliography, and index.

Spencer, Mark. Thomas Basin (1412-1490): The History of Charles VII and Louis XI. Nieuwkoop, the Netherlands: De Graaf, 1997. Study of the life of Louis XI written by Thomas Basin, a prelate who was forced to flee from Louis, then write his biography while wandering from town to town seeking refuge.