CHARLES VII
(1403–1461). One of the best known but least understood of the medieval kings of
France, Charles VII was the eleventh child of Charles VI and Isabeau of Bavaria. That he
would become king or be immortalized by his association with Jeanne d’Arc and the
reconquest of France was unimagined during his youth. Becoming dauphin in 1417 after
the unexpected deaths of older brothers, he entered the political scene in one of the
darkest periods of French history. In 1418, upon escaping a Burgundian coup in Paris, he
became head of a government in exile dominated by the Armagnac faction. His ill-
advised role in the assassination of the duke of Burgundy in 1419 united the English and
Burgundians, and they sought to disinherit him in the 1420 Treaty of Troyes. When
Charles did become king in October 1422, he controlled only the third of the realm south
of the Loire. He indiscriminantly accepted a wide range of supporters and advisers,
whom he only slowly learned to control. Denied access to Paris and derisively called
“king of Bourges,” Charles courted provincial estates and the bonnes villes. His actions
foreshadowed the administrative decentralization of his later reign.
After years of catastrophic defeats, the appearance of Jeanne d’Arc marked a turning
point in Charles’s fortunes. Her victories at Orléans and Patay brought Charles to Reims
for a coronation in July 1429. By 1435, he brought Burgundy to a separate peace in the
Treaty of Arras, which allowed the Valois reentry into Paris in 1436. A contentious
decade of reform passed before Charles could complete the reconquest of France. The
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438 affirmed royal control of the French episcopacy
and ecclesiastical revenues, and, at the Estates of 1439, Charles increased taxation and
attempted to outlaw unauthorized armed forces. The military anarchy of the brigandage
(écorcherie) and the revolt of his son, the future Louis XI, and many peers in the
Praguerie posed a new crisis that took all of Charles’s tactical and diplomatic skills to
overcome. Influenced by his mistress Agnès Sorel, he settled on his two reliable advisers:
Pierre de Brézé and the constable Richemont, and by 1445 he was able to implement his
program. In 1449, the revitalized Valois army renewed the war, and by 1453 the English
had been driven from Normandy and Guyenne.
Consolidating his authority for the rest of his years, Charles easily disciplined such
restive princes as the count of Armagnac and the duke of Alençon, used the courts to
reconcile a nation embittered by civil war, and perfected the administrative structures that
had brought him victory. Only his son, the future Louis XI, impatiently waiting in
Burgundian exile, celebrated his death. Sometimes called “the Victorious,” Charles was a
man who preferred negotiations to war and judiciously waited to exploit his enemies’
divisions. He is better remembered as “The Well-Served” king, skilled in the selection
and management of advisers who helped him construct a new monarchy out of the cruel
necessities of a lifelong struggle to reunite France.
Paul D.Solon
[See also: ARISTOCRATIC REVOLT; ARMAGNACS; COMPAGNIES
D’ORDONNANCE; JEANNE D’ARC; JOHN THE FEARLESS; MONTEREAU;
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 380