Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/588

 552 FRANCE [HISTORY. 1163-64. Contrast of Charles VII. and LouisXI. Between father and son what contrast could be greater 1 ? Charles VII., &quot; the Well-served,&quot; so easy-going, so open and free from guile; Louis XL, so shy of counsellors, so cner g e tic and untiring, so close and guileful. History does but a PlSi ze f r Charles, and even when she fears and dislikes Louis, she cannot forbear to wonder and admire. And yet Louis enslaved his country, while Charles had seen it rescued from foreign rule ; Charles restored something of its prosperity, while Louis spent his life in crushing its institutions and in destroying its elements of independence. A great and terrible prince, Louis XI. failed in having little or no constructive power ; he was strong to throw down the older society, he built little in its room. It is the fatal evil of absolute monarchy that it is not bound to replace what it crushes ; so that the old order passes away, and no new society springs up in its place. It is to this that France owes the barrenness of her constitutional history. The reign of Louis XL is well divided into three periods. rpj ie rg j. g - x vearg jj. represent his strife with his great lords (1461-1467) ; the next period, of nine years, is occu pied by his rivalry with Charles the Bold (1469-1476); the third, a time of seven years, gives us the king &quot; trium phant and miserable&quot; (1476-1483). We are so wont to associate the name of Louis XI. with all that is cold, measured, and crafty that we can scarcely believe we are reading his history when we hear the narrative of his first acts on coming to the throne. He appears as a young impulsive prince, whose frank imprud ence calculated no cost. He offended the duke of Bur gundy s followers who escorted him to his consecration at llheims, and thence into Paris, by sending them away empty; he deprived the duke of Bourbon of the govern ment of Guienne, which he held; he dismissed all his father s ministers and friends ; he set free the noble cap tives whom his father had been obliged to restrain ; he alienated the nobles and clergy by negotiating with the pope and threatening to abolish the Pragmatic Sanction. In all this he seemed inclined to depend on the support of the good towns. Most serious of all was his action with respect to the district of the river Somme, at that time the northern frontier of France. The towns there had been handed over to Philip of Burgundy by the treaty of Arras, with a stipulation that the crown might ransom them at any time, and this Louis succeeded in doing in 1463. The act was quite blameless and patriotic in itself, yet it was exceedingly unwise, for it thoroughly alienated Charles the Bold, and led to the wars of the earlier period of the reign. Lastly, as if he had not done enough to offend the nobles, Louis in 1464 attacked their hunting rights, touching them in their tenderest part. No wonder that this year saw the formation of a great league against him, and the outbreak of a dangerous civil war. The &quot; League of the Public Weal &quot; was nominally headed by his own brother Charles, heir to the throne ; it was joined by Charles of Charolais, v.-ho had completely taken the command of affairs in the Burgundian territories, his father the old duke being too feeble to withstand him ; the dukes of Brittany, Nemours, Bourbon, John of Aujou, duke of Calabria, the count of Armagnac, the aged Dunois, and a host of other princes and nobles nocked in ; and the king had scarcely any forces at his back with which to withstand them. His plans for the campaign against the league were admirable, though they were frustrated by the bad faith of his captains, who mostly sympathized with this outbreak of the feudal nobility. Louis himself marched southward to quell the duke of Bourbon and his friends, and returning from that tusk, only half done for lack of time, ho found that Charles of Charolais had passed by Paris, which was faith ful to the king, and was coming down southwards intending to join the dukes of Berri and Brittany, who were on their way towards the capital. The hostile armies met at 146, Montleheri on the Orleans road ; and after a strange battle minutely described by Commines a battle in which both sides ran away, and neither ventured at first to claim a victory the king withdrew to Corbeil, and then marched into Paris (1465). There the armies of the league closed in on him ; and after a siege of several weeks, Louis, feeling disaffection all around him, and doubtful how long Paris herself would bear for him the burdens of blockade, signed the peace of Conflans, which, to all appearances, secured the complete victory to the noblesse, &quot; each man carrying off his piece.&quot; Instantly the contented princes broke up their half-starved armies and. went home, leaving Louis behind to plot and contrive against them, a far wiser man, thanks to the lesson they had taught him. They did not let him wait long for a chance. The treaty of Conflans had given the duchy of Normandy to the king s brother Charles ; he speedily quarrelled with his neighbour the duke of Brittany, and Louis came down at once into Normandy, which threw itself into his arms, and the whole work of the league was broken up. The count of Charolais, occupied with revolts at Dinan and Li6ge, could not inter fere, and presently his father the old Duke Philip died (1467), leaving to him the vast lordships of the house of Burgundy. And now the &quot; imperial dreamer,&quot; Charles the Bold, Cha was brought into immediate rivalry with that royal tlie trickster, the &quot; universal spider,&quot; Louis XI. Charles was Bolt by far the. nobler spirit of the two : his vigour and intelli gence, his industry and wish to raise all around him to a higher cultivation, his wise reforms at home, and attempts to render his father s dissolute and careless rule into a well- ordered lordship, all these things marked him out as the leading spirit of the time. He was completely free from those mean faults which marked his antagonist: he could not lie nor cheat ; he was not cold and heartless ; he despised the immoral life, the loose tales, the disorderly company of the dauphin s sojourn at Geneppe. Unfortu nately, in this noble and otherwise harmonious instrument there was that &quot;one little rift,&quot; which gradually ruined all: his pride, which was high, would not have been fatal to him; it was his anger, combined with a certain strength of obstinacy, which brought him to ruin. His territories were partly held under France, partly under the empire : the Artois district, which also may be taken to include the Somme towns, the county of Pthetel, the duchy of Bar, the duchy of Burgundy, with Auxerre and Nevers, were feudally in France; the rest of his lands under the empire. He had therefore interests and means of interference on either hand ; and, in fact, it is clear that Charles set before himself two quite different lines of policy, according as he looked one way or the other. He looked towards Paris, and seeing the king there growing stronger, desired to curb him by a league of princes ; he looked towards the east, and saw there a splendid field for his ambition, in the scattered territories which lay on the edge of the Holy Roman Empire. At first he followed the former line, seek ing to weaken his neighbours, and by coalition against the strongest of them to become undoubted master of the rest; this was in the times of his active hostility towards Louis XL; afterwards he made truce with the king, and turned his arms against the east, attacking first Lorraine, and then Switzerland. At the time of Duke Philip s death a new league had been formed against Louis, embracing the king of England, Edward IV., the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, and the kings of Aragon and Castile. Louis strained every nerve, he conciliated Paris, struck hard at disaffected partisans, and in 1468 convoked the States-General at Tours. The three Estates were asked to give an opinion as to the power