That [day in May 1588] taught Parisians the authentic method of fortifying themselves, each in his own quarter, far more sturdily and securely with barricades of this kind than by simply extending and stretching the chains. And you can well believe that even with the gates wide open, a hundred thousand men would have been unable to take the city by force.
ANONYMOUS
The search for origins comes naturally to historians, presumably because they attach special significance to the logic of temporality. Believing that the course of human affairs is influenced by all that went before, they are inclined to trace events back to the circumstances of their beginning in an effort to understand their import.
Unfortunately, unraveling the fabric of history runs the risk of disrupting the semblance of coherence it presents to the world. A seemingly straightforward innovation may prove, on inquiry, to have assumed many guises. Each variation has, in turn, multiple points of origin, each with plausible but competing claims to precedence. Their paths of development, once reconstructed, turn out to be, not linear and continuous, but rather full of starts and stops, and these converge and combine in ways that further confound efforts to sort them out. Whether the historian’s subject is the stirrup and moldboard plow or the photographic image, the attempt to settle the question of origins in a definitive way often proves futile.1
Still, even when it proves impossible to settle the question once and for all, the search for origins can be an instructive exercise, if only for what it tells us about how history is written. In the case of the barricade, historians of France had arrived, by the late 1700s, at a consensual account of its invention. Over the next half century, popular histories even added romanticized engravings depicting the crucial moment of creation. The simplicity and drama of this story may have lent itself to retelling, but on close inspection, the consecrated version more nearly resembles an origin myth than well-documented historical fact. In the interest of restoring some of the complexity lost in the process of mythification, I will present alternative accounts of the barricade’s beginnings in reverse chronological order, begging the reader’s indulgence for the fact that as we recede in time, the question of origins inevitably becomes more nebulous.
There is a certain comfort in being able to assign a precise date and location to an event of historical moment. The standard history of the barricade allows us to do still better, by specifying the individual widely credited with the invention of this novel technique of urban insurrection. Though Guillaume Girard could already claim in the middle of the seventeenth century that “all the world has heard of the barricades of Paris,” even today few will be familiar with the exploits of Charles II de Cossé, comte de Brissac, or with his role in the religious conflicts that beset France in the sixteenth century.2
From its beginnings in the German and Swiss states, the Protestant Reformation’s progress across western Europe was uneven. Its early successes came mainly in the north, notably in the Netherlands and England, whose rulers’ attitude toward religious nonconformism was relatively tolerant. Spain and Italy became, on the contrary, strongholds of orthodox Catholicism, doing their utmost to suppress heresy in whatever form it appeared. France was intermediate in doctrinal as well as geographic terms. Even before the spread of Martin Luther’s example, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples developed an indigenous strain of Reformed thought and had already printed a vernacular version of the New Testament by 1523.
A vigorous reaction, emanating from Paris, wiped out that first wave of French Protestantism; but it was followed in the 1540s and 1550s by a second, based on the teachings of John Calvin. This too was the object of intense persecution, initially carried out by the Paris parlement, which condemned scores of Huguenots to death. This culminated in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, which claimed the lives of more than 2,000.3 Among those present in the French capital was Henri de Bourbon, ruler of Navarre, a kingdom that spanned the slopes of the Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France, who was spared only because he agreed to convert on the spot to what the Church faithful called the “Catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion.”
For the remainder of the sixteenth century, wars of religion dominated European politics. One obvious manifestation was the bitter rivalry between Spain and England, countries separated not only by religious differences but also by their desire for naval, colonial, and commercial supremacy. But Spain, which was struggling to maintain its foothold in the Netherlands, was increasingly at odds with France as well. In 1574, as these two great Catholic powers were teetering on the brink of war, the French king died and was succeeded by his younger brother, Henri de Valois, who assumed the throne as Henri III.
Though the new king married in the year following his accession, he would remain without an heir.4 As a result, France became polarized around the question of who would succeed Henri III. The heir apparent was his brother François d’Alençon, who headed the faction known as the Politiques, which favored an accommodation with the Protestants. Worse yet, from the point of view of Catholics, the king’s cousin and brother-in-law was next in line—the very same Henri de Bourbon, who had relapsed into heresy since his conversion at the time of the Saint-Bartholomew massacre. Even the king himself was suspect, having settled the civil war that broke out soon after he ascended the throne on terms deemed favorable to Protestants, who were granted territorial concessions and freedom of worship (except in the region surrounding Paris). Many Catholics wondered whether Henri III might be a misguided Protestant sympathizer, if not an undeclared heretic in his own right.5
In reaction, defenders of the Church formed the Holy League (or Holy Union) in 1576. It began as an association of cities, dedicated to reestablishing Catholicism as the exclusive religion of France. Though Henri III insisted on becoming titular head of this coalition in a futile effort to control its activities, its animating spirit was Henri de Lorraine, duc de Guise. The League’s immediate objectives were to undo the recent peace accord, aggressively pursue the war against the Huguenots, and exclude Henri de Navarre from the succession. With time, it also hoped to get the government to submit to the control of the Estates General, which it expected to be dominated by proponents of the Catholic cause. This effort to limit the power of the central state gave the alliance something of an anti-absolutist tenor.
Though Henri III managed to ignore certain League demands—for example, that he set up an inquisition that would help fund military expenses by confiscating the property of Protestants—he was forced to appease this powerful coalition by resuming the war against Navarre and convoking the Estates General toward the end of 1576. When, however, a new peace was signed in September 1577, Henri seized this opportunity to disband the Holy Union.
Though compromise and temporization served him well in moderating opposition over the next few years, the death in 1584 of François d’Alençon meant that Navarre had become the presumptive heir. The prospect of a Protestant king fanned the flames of Catholic fanaticism and led to the reconstitution of the Holy Union. This second League boldly made an agreement with Philip II of Spain and the pope that would have resulted in the crown of France eventually passing to the duc de Guise. This attempt to exclude Navarre’s claim to the throne, along with Henri III’s rejection of the offer of direct Spanish assistance in the campaign to extirpate French Protestantism, produced the War of the Three Henris, or Henriade. The differences among the protagonists (and the constituencies they represented) tell us a great deal about the age in which they lived.
In 1585, Henri de Lorraine, both a brilliant general and standard-bearer of the ultra-Catholic cause, enjoyed more enthusiastic popular support in most French cities than the king himself. This was notably the case in Paris, where his advocacy on behalf of the Estates General was interpreted, however naively, as support for the principle of popular sovereignty. Though there can be no doubt that Guise was committed to the triumph of the Catholic faith and the annihilation of French Protestants, these objectives also served his personal ambitions, which almost certainly included the desire to succeed the king and perhaps to supplant him outright. His two great victories over Protestant forces at Vimory and Auneau in the fall of 1587, though not militarily decisive, so enhanced Guise’s standing in the eyes of the Catholic majority that the king was helpless to prevent him from recruiting a vast army, headquartered in Soissons, a hundred miles northeast of Paris. Ostensibly intended to pursue the war against Navarre, this force represented a direct threat to the king’s authority.
The position of Henri de Bourbon was nearly the polar opposite. Reviled by most French subjects as a heretic, he was obliged to wage a largely defensive struggle against the combined royal and Leaguer armies on one flank, and their Spanish allies on the other.6 In October 1587, a series of adroit diversionary tactics enabled him to defeat a force commanded by the duc de Joyeuse, at Coutras, near Bordeaux. To Navarre’s disappointment, he was unable to capitalize on this victory by convincing Henri III that he and Guise should be left to work out their differences without the intervention of the king’s own army.7 Even more dispiriting, his success actually had the effect of resuscitating the campaign against the Huguenots. Yet, however dim his prospects might have appeared, Navarre’s victory also rekindled the rivalry between the French king and the duc de Guise, which would ultimately assure their mutual destruction.
For his part, Henri de Valois, though he ruled the most populous nation in Europe, could not escape constant reminders of the limits of his power. For the past decade, his efforts to promote policies of religious toleration had proved largely ineffectual. Though he had arguably done more even than Guise, the great military hero, to prevent German and Swiss intervention on behalf of French Protestants,8 he earned only scorn from League supporters and was unable to prevent Guise from recruiting a powerful private army. He had also failed to moderate the high price of bread or to contain periodic riots, some in the capital itself, provoked by supply crises. In all his activities, he was hampered by a chronic shortage of revenues, despite a level of taxation that was already so high that any further increase was sure to cause widespread protest. His reliance on favorites like Jean-Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, whom he made duc d’Epernon, Baron René de Villequier, and Marquis François d’O intensified the hatred of League sympathizers, who despised them for their tolerance of Protestantism, corrupt practices, or debauched personal conduct. Henri III had little room for maneuver, trapped as he was between French Huguenots and their allies the Politiques on the one hand, and Catholic extremists, most of whom were concentrated in the major cities, on the other. Because he was not strong enough, personally or militarily, to force either side into submission, his inclination during the crisis of 1588 was to offer compromises to his enemies in the hope that time would allow him to gain the upper hand.
In March 1587, residents of the French capital had received an unwelcome reminder of what it could mean to live under a Protestant monarch. The bells of Notre-Dame summoned them to a mass for the repose of the soul of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. After eighteen years of captivity, this former queen of France had been beheaded by order of Queen Elizabeth of England, from whom she had once sought asylum. Mary was the niece of the duc de Guise, and her execution drove his ultra-Catholic supporters into paroxysms of rage.9
As a hotbed of anti-Protestant sentiment and the hub of the Holy Union’s network of rebellious cities, it was perhaps natural for Paris to have spawned a local association, the Sixteen, that operated at times in parallel to, and at times independently of the League itself.10 Its leaders, a mix of local magistrates and sharply partisan clerics, conducted a relentless propaganda campaign against the royal administration and the king’s chief favorite, d’Epernon. Indeed, representatives of the Sixteen gradually usurped the authority of both royal and municipal officials by levying taxes, raising armies, and setting policy for the Paris region with little effective oversight. Though strictly local in scope, the Sixteen’s political influence in the capital of the realm meant that its actions had national repercussions. In 1587, it addressed a series of appeals to sister cities within the Holy Union. Its manifesto called for a collective response to the threat of invasion by a German Protestant army and an independent resolution to the problem of royal succession.11
The leaders of the Sixteen also hatched several plots against the person of Henri III himself. Of these conspiracies to kidnap or do away with the king, few ever got beyond the planning stage and none succeeded. Indeed, we know of their existence thanks only to the presence, in the innermost circles of the Sixteen, of a spy named Nicolas Poulain, who was reporting their every move directly to the king.12 Poulain testified that, as each successive plot came to grief, the Paris Sixteen became ever more desperate to contrive a new course of action that would forestall discovery of their earlier treason. It was this dynamic that propelled them toward a plan for the general insurrection of May 1588.13
FIGURE 6. A panoramic view of Paris in the sixteenth century: an engraving by Arthur Hauger, “6e Tableau du Diorama—Vue d’ensemble de Paris au XVIe siècle—Journée des Barricades, 12 mai 1588,” Hist PC 001C: 86 CAR 1046, Cabinet des arts graphiques, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. To the best of my knowledge, no contemporaneous image of the First Day of the Barricades, May 12, 1588, has survived. The oldest representations of the 1588 events that we do possess date from the nineteenth century, an era in which barricade consciousness had reached its height. This artist’s rendering shows what Paris may have looked like on that morning. In the middle ground, stretching across the river in front of the Ile de la Cité, are the foundations of the Pont-Neuf, then in the process of construction. Barely discernable in the left foreground, residents have built a barricade on the ramparts of the quays. Unfortunately, the image presents us with a mix of aesthetic and historical compromises. For example, from this peripheral vantage point (facing east, or upstream) it was possible to present a sweeping panorama of the city; but, in order to make the barricades visible (just barely, I am afraid, in the much reduced format that book reproduction imposes), they had to be situated in an outlying location on the right bank of the Seine rather than in the crowded districts of the left bank, where the initial confrontations occurred.
The king, fully informed of these machinations, tried to prevent simmering passions in the capital from reaching the boiling point by forbidding Guise from entering the city.14 The Sixteen, meanwhile, were insistently urging the duke to come without delay, convinced that his mere presence would assure the success of a Parisian uprising. When he in fact arrived, around midday on May 9, the news spread like wildfire, and a crowd estimated at 30,000 gathered along his route to shower the leader of the Holy League with expressions of affection and acclaim.15 Guise proceeded directly to the residence of the queen mother, and it was through her intercession that he was able to obtain an immediate audience with the king.16 En route to the Louvre, the people again turned out in throngs, shouting, “Long live Guise! Long live the pillar of the Church!” and treating him as their savior.17
LEGEND
Events of 1588
Notre Dame (1)
Ile de la Cité (2)
Pont-Neuf (3)
Louvre (4)
Hôtel de Guise (5)
Faubourg Saint-Denis (6)
Place Maubert (7)
Petit Châtelet (8)
Cemetery of Saints-Innocents (9)
Tuileries (10)
Bastille (11)
Hôtel de Ville (12)
Palais de Justice (13)
Events of 1648
(including path of royal procession
from Palais-Royal to Notre Dame)
Notre Dame (1)
Palais-Royal (14)
Palais de Justice (13)
Ile de la Cité (2)
Porte Saint-Honoré (15)
Rue Saint-Honoré (16)
Pont-Neuf (3)
Pont Saint-Michel (17)
Quai des Grands Augustins (18)
Grand Châtelet (19)
Rue de l’Arbre-sec (20)
Porte Saint-Denis (21)
Faubourg Saint-Antoine (22)
Bastille (11)
Porte Saint-Antoine (23)
Events of 1789-95
Hôtel de Ville (12)
Faubourg Saint-Denis (6)
Bastille (11)
National Convention (24)
Faubourg Saint-Antoine (22)
Panthéon (25)
The “Whiff of Grapeshot” in Vendémiaire (26)
MAP 3. Parisian landmarks, listed in the order they are mentioned in chapters 2–4, denoting key locations in the barricade events of 1588, 1648, and 1789–1795. The underlying map is used with the kind permission of Historic Urban Plans, Inc., Ithaca, New York, USA.
The reception Guise received from Henri III was an entirely different matter. The king was livid with anger. He immediately demanded that Guise explain his disobedience. Guise claimed both that he felt obliged to come to defend himself against the scurrilous attacks of his enemies who appeared to have convinced the king of his treasonous intent; and that he had never understood the king to have formally barred him from the capital.18 Perhaps realizing what a powerful irritant his sole presence was proving to the king, he then hastened back to the Hôtel de Guise, his Paris residence, for a meeting with representatives of the Sixteen and a few of his trusted lieutenants.19
Having defied the will of the king with impunity and having now gathered his forces, Guise arrived for a second audience on Tuesday, May 10, with an escort of 400 well-armed men. Such a show of strength was not calculated to place the king at ease nor to encourage a reconciliation.20 Indeed, at a third meeting, held on the following day at the queen mother’s residence, strained relations degenerated into recriminations and reproaches. Unable to get the king to agree to a convocation of the Estates General, which he expected to be able to dominate, Guise was forced to reconsider alternatives to peaceful persuasion.
The king had also made his preparations. In normal times he relied solely on a personal bodyguard, the “Forty-five,” and a few hundred royal guardsmen to maintain order in Paris, a city of a quarter million residents. As a precaution, he had, as early as May 5, reinforced the guard around the Louvre and summoned 2,000 French and 4,000 Swiss guardsmen, all seasoned troops, to the faubourg Saint-Denis, just outside what were then the boundaries of the city proper.21 On May 9, the day that Guise arrived in the capital, the Paris militia was placed on alert, and inhabitants were forbidden to leave their homes with arms other than a sword or a dagger on their persons.22 Reports that Guise’s men were continuing to drift into the city caused the king to order militia colonels to mount a strict guard on the city gates and conduct searches at all inns and rooming houses for “vagabonds and strangers.” By May 11, as prospects for an amicable accommodation with Guise appeared to vanish, Henri III attempted to reclaim the initiative in this test of wills by ordering an “extremely meticulous search” of all private dwellings early the next morning.23 Those unable to establish that they were habitual residents would have their arms and horses confiscated. Because members of the bourgeois militia refused to serve outside the quarter where they lived, responsibility for carrying out these searches fell to the Swiss and Royal guards who had recently been stationed in the suburbs of the city. It was their entry into the capital at 5 A.M. on May 12 that provoked the rebellion known as the Day of the Barricades.
The king’s action represented a violation of customary practice and local privilege. The capital had long been protected by a ban on the billeting of troops within the city limits, and its residents took enormous pride in the fact that its home-bred militia retained the exclusive right to police their neighborhoods. When residents awoke on May 12 to find that the king’s guards had taken up positions throughout the capital, it simply confirmed the disturbing rumors that had been circulating, with the connivance of the Sixteen, since the beginning of the month. The king, it was said, intended to establish a permanent garrison in the capital and use it to arrest prominent Parisians and have them hanged as examples of what was in store for rebellious subjects. One of the king’s lieutenants had supposedly been overheard making scarcely veiled threats about what his men would do to the wives and daughters of those found concealing prohibited weapons.24
Parisians considered the “new and unaccustomed spectacle” of 6,000 elite soldiers occupying the bridges, squares, and marketplaces of their city a provocation.25 Merchants and workshop owners closed their doors, as knots of apprehensive residents gathered in the streets to discuss recent developments and consider their options. René de Villequier, the governor of Paris, made the rounds of the city insisting that shops reopen, but compliance was grudging and lasted only as long as the king’s guards remained in sight.
Faced with this intrusion, Parisians reverted to a pattern more than two centuries old. In anticipation of civil unrest, residents assembled in their neighborhoods and proceeded to “stretch the chains.” This involved lifting and extending a length of heavy iron links, one end of which was solidly anchored in the masonry of a corner building, and the other end of which could be fastened to a hook similarly embedded in a wall or a pillar on the opposite side of the street. By strategically locating a few such roadblocks at the main entry points to their neighborhood, inhabitants could bar access to interlopers by taking up positions behind the chains (see fig. 10 on p. 61). In many quarters, the chains were stretched each night, but at the first sign of a public disturbance, they might also be deployed in daylight hours.26
What happened next was, however, no part of the customary pattern. According to contemporary chroniclers, Charles II de Cossé, comte de Brissac, one of Guise’s most trusted advisors, directed supporters in the place Maubert to reinforce the line of demarcation represented by the chains by filling barrels with earth and paving stones. “The bourgeois from around the Saint-Séverin crossing had been stirred up and assisted by the comte de Brissac, who had arrived in the university quarter early that morning, armed the students, and caused them to build the first barricades near the rue Saint-Jacques and the quarter around the place Maubert,” a contemporary historian noted.27 They thus created a formidable obstacle, capable of withstanding an assault by the king’s soldiers (fig. 7). By 9 A.M., the entire Latin quarter was studded with these structures, and Brissac had been immortalized as the inventor of the barricade.28
The tactic proved decisive. A contingent of the Swiss Guard led by Louis de Crillon, one of the king’s most zealous men-at-arms, had been ordered to occupy the place Maubert. Their advance was halted by the fortifications the people had built at the Saint-Séverin crossing.29 Under fire from the barricades themselves and from the windows of adjoining buildings, the troops were forced to withdraw after four of their number had been killed and many others disarmed.30 Word of this success quickly spread, and by noon, the rest of the city had followed the example set by Brissac. By nightfall, the issue had been decided: for the first time, the people of Paris had used barricades to carry out an armed insurrection.
FIGURE 7. Charles II de Cossé, comte de Brissac, presiding over barricade building in 1588. This somewhat allegorical nineteenth-century woodcut evokes Brissac’s legendary role in the First Day of the Barricades. The barricade consists primarily of loose paving stones, along with a piece of furniture and a wheeled vehicle—elements more characteristic of the barricades of later centuries. The artist has, however, included a barrel and even an iron chain (although connected only to a broken post). Genouillac [c. 1880?] n.d., 2: opposite p. 92.
The story I have told thus far may seem straightforward. It recounts an initiative taken on a specific date in 1588, at a specific location in Paris, by an individual whose life is relatively well documented. But sorting out the confusing flow of historical events is rarely so simple. And so it proves in the case of the first barricades.
Brissac’s claim to precedence as originator of this tactic can only be sustained if we ignore other, discordant accounts of how the first barricades were conceived. The chronicler Pierre Palma Cayet (1525–1610) makes no more than offhand mention of Brissac, focusing instead on preparations begun long in advance of the actual outbreak:
In accordance with a decision agreed to more than a year earlier, [the followers of the Sixteen] made barricades everywhere in the vicinity of the university and as far afield as the Petit Châtelet. And as the king’s guards had posted sentinels along one side of the street, Crucé positioned musketeers along the other. As soon as certain members of the Sixteen who lived in the rue Neuve saw that the Swiss guards were taking up positions in the Marché Neuf, they had the chain stretched across the rue Neuve Notre-Dame and lined it with barrels. The members of their faction—and there were many in those quarters—all immediately manned this barricade with muskets and showed the Swiss, just by their bearing, that the guardsmen would do better to withdraw.31
This version does single out a specific individual, Oudin de Crucé, a prosecutor at the Châtelet, as having exercised some personal responsibility for the uprising, but not specifically in connection with building barricades.32 Instead, that construction process was overseen by unnamed local members of the Sixteen, who had the presence of mind to issue orders to reinforce the chains, thus resulting in the first barricade.
While Cayet alludes vaguely to these ringleaders, he also points in a completely different direction by referencing a decision made early in 1587 that provided the framework for insurgent activities on the Day of the Barricades. Unfortunately, he offers few details on the nature of that arrangement. For that we must turn to the only witness who has provided an insider’s perspective on the earlier conspiracies of the Paris League.
We have already made the acquaintance of Nicolas Poulain, who was recruited into the highest echelons of the organization plotting against the king, only to betray its secret workings to the intended victim. Because the deposition which he recorded in the summer of 1588 was a justification of his personal conduct as well as a recounting of events, it deserves to be viewed with a skeptical eye. Poulain was, however, uniquely placed. No one else who had intimate knowledge of what transpired in the inner circles of the Sixteen was inclined, then or later, to discuss the experience. His account contains a great deal of circumstantial detail, some of which can be verified in the narratives of other authors, making it an invaluable source on the clandestine activities of the ultra-Catholic faction.33
Most of Poulain’s narrative recounts the half-dozen preliminary plots against the king that partisans of the Holy League in Paris tried to carry out. He notes that, in the final months of 1586, the Sixteen, again fearful that their treasonous projects of the past two years were about to be discovered and punished, began pressing the Holy League to take immediate action. When the leaders of the national organization proved reluctant to precipitate a direct confrontation with the king, the Paris Sixteen considered whether a bold stroke in the capital might not succeed in forcing the rest of France to follow its lead. Local militants initially proposed an abduction. This plan was rejected by their aristocratic allies in the League on grounds “that a king is not taken in this way, that it could not be done with causing a stir, and that if it could be done, it would require a prince of mark to carry it off.”34 The objection was sufficient to cause the plan to be set aside pending the long-hoped-for visit of the duc de Guise.
In the event, it was Guise’s brother, the duc de Mayenne, who came to Paris in February 1587, fresh from new military triumphs against the Huguenots in Guyenne. Within hours of his arrival, the leaders of the Paris Sixteen had gathered at Mayenne’s temporary residence. They shared with him their concerns, and he promised them the full support of the House of Lorraine. In the days that followed, this group laid plans for the capture of the city’s major strong points in case of a general insurrection. The plotters’ single-minded focus on prisons, forts, and arsenals aroused concern in some quarters over how the general population might react. It was pointed out that as many as 6,000 to 7,000 thieves and common laborers were to be found in the city at any given time.35 Since the conspirators could hardly take advance precautions without betraying their intention of fomenting an insurrection, they needed a plan that would prevent disorderly elements from taking advantage of the suspension of normal police and military control by pillaging the city. The concept of the barricade was intended as a response to this prospect of popular anarchy. Poulain describes the scenario the conspirators conjured up in these terms:
FIGURE 8. Building a Holy League barricade in 1588. Like figure 7, this latter-day image is allegorical. It simultaneously shows how barricades were built and conveys their association with the Catholic cause. Anquetil [1805] 1851, 393.
This gang [of lawless individuals] would be like a snowball, growing ever larger [as it rolled along], and would finally bring ruin and total confusion both to the enterprise and to those who had initiated it. Following this advice, which seemed weighty and very pertinent, the invention of barricades was proposed, discussed, and approved. As finally agreed upon, the chains would be stretched, barrels full of earth would be placed so as to prevent passage and, once the password had been given out, no one would be allowed to pass through the streets unless he knew the word and the sign. Everyone would construct barricades in their own quarter according to the instructions that would be sent to them.36
Poulain goes on to say that barricades were also expected to prevent members of the nobility housed in different parts of the capital from coming to the aid of the monarchy. Though he did not assign responsibility to any particular individual for having conceived the idea, the obvious candidate was Mayenne, a professional soldier with years of experience in combat at close quarters and the individual who presided over this secret meeting. It could, however, just as easily have come from one or more members of the Sixteen, who were arguably more familiar with the constricted layout of the early-modern capital and more attuned to the demands of leading the insurgent population of Paris in a civil conflict.
We are unlikely ever to know who came up with the original idea for the simple reason that, since the proposed 1587 uprising never took place, none of the other participants ever had occasion to record the details of the plot. Poulain seemed to suggest that the principal reason for its postponement was the tightening of security that followed his own betrayal of the League’s early plans to the king.37 Indeed, through the spring of 1588, each new intrigue—however carefully nurtured—had to be abandoned when it became apparent that the king remained one step ahead of the conspirators. Eventually, the Sixteen concluded that they harbored a traitor within their ranks, and attempts were made to smoke him out.38 In the final analysis, what led to Parisians’ building the first barricades was not a deliberate plan but an impulse on the part of the duc de Guise.
Despite all the high-grade intelligence provided by his personal spy, Henri III was thus, in the end, unable to prevent the insurrection that would drive him from his capital. The insurrection united all segments of the population against him, and, according to one eyewitness, “In no time at all, everyone had stretched the chains and made barricades at the corners of the streets. The artisan put aside his tools, the merchant his business, the university its books, the prosecutors their briefcases, the lawyers their cornettes, and even the presidents and councilors [of the Paris parlement] took up halberds.”39 The crowd that built and defended the barricades was mixed in age and gender as well as class origins. Youth predominated, and accounts single out students for the conspicuous role they played, but sources also note the presence of old men carrying weapons and reproaching their younger colleagues for having waited so long to “dispatch these foreigners.”40 Some observers called attention to the presence of women and children, who appeared at windows to rain down tiles they had dislodged from the roof or paving stones they had carried up from the street.41
The king had placed the Swiss Guard at a fatal disadvantage by forbidding “all his men from drawing their swords more than halfway, on pain of death, hoping that temporizing, along with soft and pretty words, would tame the fury of the rebels and little by little disarm this foolish people.”42 Insurgents raised their barricades, sometimes no more than thirty feet away from royal guardsmen, who looked on, “though they could easily have prevented it.”43 Troops stationed in the Cemetery of Saints-Innocents had to stand by and watch as insurgents manning a nearby barricade intercepted a shipment of bread and wine intended for the soldiers and proceeded to eat and drink these spoils right before their eyes. Asked whether he was comfortable with his men’s position, a captain in the king’s service complained that he was not, “because the prévôt de marchands [i.e., the mayor], who had assured the king of [the support of] thirty thousand residents, was doing a poor job of keeping his word, for he [the captain] was beginning to realize that the thirty were on his side and the thousand on Guise’s.”44
By midday on May 12, resistance to the initial deployment of soldiers had grown so spirited that all the king’s forces had to be recalled to the Louvre. However, even retreat proved difficult, because any troop movement necessarily involved highly charged confrontations with insurgents. The deadliest collision of the day took place not far from the banks of the Seine on the Ile de la Cité.45
That scene bears comparison to the 1832 insurrection recounted in the previous chapter. With Swiss guardsmen and crowd members drawn up face to face, a shot again rang out from an unknown quarter. What makes the sixteenth-century episode stand out, however, is that the troops were the ones to suffer the reversal of fortune. Isolated and vastly outnumbered, their ranks were decimated by the civilian population. Forbidden to defend themselves, many Swiss threw down their weapons, some even pulling scapulars from beneath their tunics and crying out in broken French, “Good Christians!” in the hope of obtaining mercy from the crowd.46 Estimates of casualties ranged from twenty to sixty dead, and from twenty-five to as many as eighty wounded, almost entirely among the king’s soldiers.47
With this disastrous turn of events, the king was forced to swallow his pride and send repeated messages to Guise pleading that he intervene to pacify the crowd and spare the royal guardsmen. Guise initially demurred, claiming that it was beyond his power to control the “rampaging bulls” who had taken over the streets.48 But he soon consented to make a tour of the city to help secure the release of the Swiss guardsmen who had been taken captive. As he made his way through the central districts, he was greeted by shouts of “Long live Guise!” on all sides. Perhaps because he was still in the presence of the king’s emissary, he felt obliged to respond by saying, “My friends, you’ll be the ruin of me. Shout instead, ‘Long live the king!’ ”49
On the morning of May 13, Henri III acceded to the main demand of the Parisians by promising to withdraw all but his normal complement of soldiers to a distance of seven leagues from the capital. He made this concession contingent upon Parisians dismantling their barricades and relinquishing their weapons, but the level of distrust among residents was so high that they refused to comply until the troops had already departed.50 The king was thus compelled to accept yet another humiliation and to run the added risk of falling into the hands of his enemies by ordering his forces to leave the city at midday.
In the judgment of Pasquier, “the morning, until 10 A.M., was the king’s; the rest of the day belonged to the duc de Guise.”51 It was the construction of barricades that had enabled Parisian insurgents to effect this dramatic shift in the balance of power in the span of a few hours. But the fortunes of the principal actors had not yet ceased to vacillate. By the afternoon of May 13, the king received reports that new barricades were being constructed in the immediate proximity of the Louvre, and that some insurgents were preparing to storm this stronghold and effectively take him prisoner. Whether as a ruse or in a final effort to strike a compromise, Henri sent his mother, Catherine de Médicis, to speak with Guise.52 She initially set out to cross Paris in her coach, but soon had to abandon it in favor of a sedan chair when the insurgents proved unwilling to remove more than “one barrel per barricade” to allow her to pass.53 When she at last arrived, Guise’s intransigent attitude quickly convinced her that no accommodation was possible. She then dispatched her companion, Secretary of State Claude Pinart, to warn the king that he was in danger and recommend that he flee the capital.54
As if he were taking his customary evening promenade, Henri III strolled from the Louvre to the Tuileries gardens. His true objective was the royal stable, where, accompanied by a handful of his closest advisors and a contingent of the Swiss Guard, he set out on horseback for the Porte-Neuve on the road to Saint-Cloud. But he did not make his escape without suffering the final indignity of having forty rebel harquebusiers fire on the royal party from the guard post at the porte de Nesle. Henri’s parting gesture was to turn back upon Paris and curse it for its ingratitude, swearing to himself that he would never enter the city again except as commander of a full-scale military assault.55
Guise gave this spur-of-the-moment assessment to the queen mother, still present when he learned of Henri III’s departure: “This means my death, Madame. While Your Majesty entertains me, the king runs off and seals my fate.” Guise’s analysis would prove accurate. In one bold stroke, Henri III’s timely withdrawal accomplished a dramatic reversal. The League was denied the critical advantage it had hoped to gain from the Day of the Barricades: the king’s capture, or at least a degree of control over his movements and actions. But though Henri had managed to retain his independence, it would be months before he was in a position to act assertively. While the League rapidly consolidated its control over the capital, the king continued to give ground to his rival, whom he ironically called the “king of Paris.”
Though the queen mother remained behind in the city as the king’s representative, and though Guise made a consistent show of respecting royal prerogatives and maintaining the outward forms of monarchical authority, it was clear to all parties that in the aftermath of the barricades, “nothing took place except by order of the duke.”56 This de facto seizure of power operated at several levels. To begin with, a word from the leader of the Holy League was sufficient to accomplish what all the king’s pleas had been powerless to effect: the removal of the barricades and the resumption of circulation through the streets of Paris.57 Guise next moved to secure complete military control over the capital. On May 14, with the accord of the Sixteen, he placed one of his lieutenants in command of the Bastille.58 In the days that followed, Guise’s authority was extended first to the Arsenal, then to the fortified castle at Vincennes, and finally to the peripheral forts that guarded access to Paris. The Holy League now held sway over every important military facility in the vicinity, effectively shielding the city from attack.
Guise soon turned to the task of purging the municipal administration. The Paris prévôt de marchands, Nicolas-Hector de Perreuse, was arrested on May 15 and imprisoned in the Bastille, where he would remain until July.59 Guise also sought to replace the sheriffs who had served under Perreuse as well as other municipal officers who “smelled royalist” (sentoyent le Royal).60 This was accomplished through a hastily called “election” over which Guise personally presided.61
In a scene that anticipated one of the oft-repeated rituals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a throng gathered on the square before the Paris Hôtel de Ville to approve by acclamation a slate of new city leaders.62 Unsurprisingly, three of the four newly elected sheriffs owed allegiance to the Sixteen.63 The new municipal authorities handpicked the colonels, captains, and quartiniers who took charge of the Paris militia. Without even the pretense of respecting the king’s authority, the League then named a new lieutenant general of Paris and placed its own representatives in key positions within the University of Paris.64
The Holy Union even made a bid to extend its gains beyond the limits of the capital. Guise’s brother, the duc de Mayenne—one of our candidates for the distinction of having invented the barricade—had attempted to seize Lyon, the second largest city in the realm, on May 12. His attack was repulsed by the inhabitants.65 On May 17, Guise himself addressed a letter to municipal authorities in the other cities of the League, justifying his activities in Paris and asking for their support.66 Soon thereafter, the new municipal officials in the capital wrote to their counterparts in Rouen, Troyes, Sens, and other cities to make a similar appeal. Neither effort produced immediate results. This did not prevent Guise from making a backhanded bid for a kind of international recognition by dispatching Brissac to the English ambassador to offer a guarantee of safety.67
In brief, the rebellion staged by Guise and his allies succeeded in gaining complete ascendancy over Paris, though the rest of France and the world at large maintained their distance and—most ominously—the king remained at large. Since neither camp was strong enough to dominate its rival, French politics slipped into a state of temporary paralysis. A public façade of compromise and conciliation concealed a renewal of behind-the-scenes conspiracies.
The position of Henri III, living in effective exile from his own capital, was uncomfortable but not untenable. To gain time and to curry favor with the Catholic majority, he offered major concessions to Guise and the League. D’Epernon and la Villette, his most trusted advisors, were dismissed and obliged to publish apologies.68 Others, like d’O, de Biron, and de Crillon, were effectively banished from court and excluded from the councils where governmental policy was deliberated. At the same time, prominent Guisards were showered with rewards. Brissac was placed in charge of the defenses of the capital, while relatives and allies of the duc de Guise received choice provincial posts. Though enraged at Guise’s temerity in asking for such favors, the king was as yet in no position to refuse.
Guise himself was named lieutenant general of the entire realm. In this way, the king’s army, effectively merged with the forces of the League (now commanded by Mayenne) was mobilized for a resumption of the war against Navarre. This time the campaign would be financed through the confiscation of Protestant property, a move that became a practical necessity once the king was obliged to repeal the recently imposed taxes on salt, cloth, and leather.69 Resources were also committed for the fortification of ten new Leaguer strongholds throughout the kingdom.70
For the most part, the wishes of the people of Paris were also granted. The king belatedly confirmed the newly elected municipal officers and even agreed to pardon any offenses arising from the Day of the Barricades. He also consented to the League’s two major political demands. First, he declared all members of the House of Bourbon excluded from the royal succession. Second, he agreed to call a meeting of the Estates General early that fall, but in Blois, not Paris. Since League supporters were certain to dominate the delegations from all three estates, and Brissac, Guise’s ally, was designated to serve as spokesperson for the nobility, it appeared that Guise had emerged victorious on every salient point.
The one request the king pointedly ignored was that he move back to the capital. Since he had already given in to residents’ desire that he withdraw the Royal Guard from their city, his return could only have made him the prisoner of the Sixteen. He chose instead to retain his freedom of movement and the opportunity it offered to indulge his thirst for revenge. On the morning of December 22, 1588, while the Estates General were still in session, the king sent word to the duc de Guise and his brother, Louis de Lorraine, Cardinal de Guise, that he wished to consult them at his headquarters in Blois on a matter of great importance. After a brief wait, as the duke proceeded from the vestibule to the royal chambers, he was ambushed by a dozen members of the king’s personal bodyguard and stabbed to death. The cardinal was imprisoned and executed the next day.71
On Christmas Eve, as news of the killings reached Paris, the people again took up arms. The Sixteen cried out for vengeance and mounted a tight guard, day and night, over the city. Immediate retaliatory measures were limited to searches of the houses of known royalists (including that of L’Estoile) and the removal of symbols of royal authority like the king’s coat of arms from the walls of public buildings. Soon, however, Paris took the lead in organizing a concerted revolt of French cities.72 It was the stubborn resistance of this urban coalition that eventually persuaded Henri III to seek a reconciliation with the king of Navarre, leading to plans for a joint siege of Paris. Under the terms of their alliance, Henri III, still without an heir, revoked his earlier declaration of exclusion and now proclaimed Navarre his legitimate successor.
The throne actually became vacant more quickly than either of the two cousins had imagined. On August 1, 1589, Jacques Clément, a Dominican monk and fanatical Guisard, obtained a private audience with Henri III and brought the Valois dynasty to a sudden end by driving a dagger into the king’s chest. Ironically, he thus delivered France into the hands of a Protestant king, though it was far from obvious that the newly designated heir would be able to bring the country into submission. Four years of civil war, fought among constantly shifting coalitions, helped decide the issue in Navarre’s favor. More than his skill in battle, however, it was his wisdom and insight that earned him the French crown and a revered place in that country’s history. In July 1593, Navarre underwent his second conversion to the Catholic faith, opening the way for a reconciliation of the warring parties. In February 1594, he ascended his new throne as Henri IV, the first Bourbon king of France. One month later, he entered Paris, receiving the keys to the city from none other than Guise’s erstwhile retainer, Brissac.73 The French state’s policy of accommodation was reaffirmed when, four years later, the new ruler issued the Edict of Nantes, establishing the principle of religious toleration under a regime of civic equality and bringing to an end the era of the great wars of religion.
The richly documented history of the Paris League offers a satisfying solution to the mystery of how the barricade originated. Indeed, period sources furnish a wealth of circumstantial detail, to the point where no fewer than three distinct interpretations have been handed down. Each specifies the person or group responsible for this innovation as well as the precise moment when it was conceived and the exact location where it was supposedly realized. Although historians have differed on the relative merits of the competing explanations, they have been all but unanimous in associating the first beginnings of the barricade with the insurrection of 1588.
There is, however, one insuperable difficulty that stands in the way of anointing any account that situates the invention of the barricade in 1588. All three of the versions previously presented are demonstrably wrong, for the simple reason that we possess clear evidence that barricades already existed some twenty years earlier. Why hasn’t this evidence been integrated into the story of the barricade’s origin? One reason is that the revelation derives not from chroniclers or historians but is based on a different type of evidence altogether.
Authoritative sources on the first usage of French words have dated the entry of the term “barricade” into the written language no later than 1570 or 1571. It was over a seven-month period spanning those years that Blaise de Monluc dictated the text of his Commentaires. Although the memoirs of this future maréchal de France were not actually published until 1595, the work was placed in circulation as a manuscript text in 1571, the year of its dedication, or possibly in 1572, when it is believed it was read by King Charles IX of France. The date of drafting is significant, for it establishes Monluc’s claim to having been the first to make a reference to barricades part of the historical record.74
Monluc devoted a portion of his memoir to describing the sieges he conducted against the rebellious Protestant strongholds of Mont-de-Marsan in 1569 and Rabastens-de-Bigorre in 1570. He recounted the efforts made by the defenders of those embattled towns to repel his army’s attacks by building structures that would not only impede the advance of his soldiers but help plug the gaps his siege guns had made in their fortifications.75 Monluc had good reason to call attention to the efficacy of this tactic. During the assault on Rabastens, he received a hideous wound when a musket shot, fired from behind a barricade, struck him full in the face. It was during his convalescence from this life-threatening and disfiguring injury that the Commentaires were drafted. His description of the techniques used by residents in their attempt to stave off his assault—in particular, their use of barrels (tonneaux) filled with earth—made it obvious that Monluc’s usage of the term barricade was consistent with the meaning it has had ever since.76
Why, then, have these events been systematically overlooked by those who have tried to retrace the origins of the barricade? After all, they took place in two towns—one, the principal grain storehouse for the Landes region; and the other, among the most heavily fortified citadels in the kingdom of Navarre—that were of great strategic importance in the war of religion then raging in the southwest. But as crucial as they were to Monluc’s mission, they nonetheless remained, from the vantage point of Paris, provincial centers of moderate size and limited political significance. Moreover, Monluc’s text remained the sole source that made any mention of these incidents, and it was never as widely disseminated as any of the epic accounts of the 1588 uprising in the capital. Instead of singling out a recognizable individual on whom the distinction of having invented the barricade could be conferred, Monluc’s description only made vague mention of an indeterminate number of anonymous barricade-builders. Perhaps most damaging of all, the Commentaires never actually pretended that the tactic was in any way novel. In short, Monluc failed to furnish the elements essential to the sort of narrative that would possess widespread appeal—much less the high drama from which an enduring origin myth could be fashioned. Far more promising material was available in the many celebrated chronicles of what soon came to be known as the “Day of the Barricades,” one of the landmark events of the sixteenth century, which brought the most important city on the Continent to a standstill, opposed the most noteworthy personages of the day in a conflict that would prove to be a fight to the death, and set in motion a series of violent confrontations ending with a momentous change of dynasty. On the principle that every good story deserves a memorable tagline, historians of the period were soon advancing the spurious claim that 1588 marked the earliest known use of barricades.
Yet there is reason to doubt whether in Mont-de-Marsan we have at last isolated the authentic origin of the barricade, some twenty years prior to the date that is commonly cited. After all, if Monluc wrote the word in 1571, it was doubtless employed in everyday speech still earlier, and even the verbal expression must logically have been preceded by a material reality that people saw as widespread and consistent enough to warrant a name.
By its nature, a “routine” cannot originate in a discrete act of personal creativity that marks a complete departure from past practice. It represents instead an accretion, extension, or synthesis of preexisting techniques, undertaken by many actors in a variety of situations. We have seen, for example, that barricades were an outgrowth of the use of heavy iron chains for the purpose of neighborhood defense. But for the hundreds of years before the French began reinforcing them, chains had been in common use in European cities, apparently without ever resulting in the creation of the barricade. To understand the unique and culturally specific character of that process of innovation requires that we delve a little deeper into the prehistory of the barricade.
In the first half of the fourteenth century, France, with its sixteen million inhabitants, could boast of being the most populous realm in Christendom. But because it remained deeply fragmented by dynastic disputes, foreign invasion, and civil unrest, its rank among the great European powers was equivocal. In 1328, the Capetian dynasty ended when King Charles IV died without a male heir. It was replaced by the lineage of the Valois kings after an assembly of notables chose Philippe VI over two powerful rivals: Philippe d’Evreux, king of Navarre; and Edward III, king of England. The parallels with the late sixteenth century—especially the drawn-out three-way contest for the crown—are obvious enough, although this earlier crisis unleashed a period of violent political conflict that lasted a century rather than a generation.77
Philippe VI’s reign began auspiciously enough with a 1328 victory against the Flemish at Cassel, but that remained the only significant military triumph he would achieve. The early phase of the Hundred Years’ War was marked by an almost unbroken string of French reversals. In 1340, Philippe’s navy was destroyed at the battle of Sluys, giving the English fleet complete mastery over the channel. A direct confrontation in August 1346 produced a second and even more ignominious French defeat at Crécy. Outnumbered more than two to one, the English army was able to score a decisive victory thanks to the use of foot soldiers armed with longbows and battle tactics developed in the war with Scotland. Edward III followed up his advantage by laying an eleven-month siege to Calais. With the capture of that port city, the English controlled a crucial point of debarkation for future campaigns on the Continent.78
These military disasters were soon overshadowed by an even greater calamity. A midcentury epidemic of black plague, the most virulent ever experienced in the European world, forced a temporary suspension of hostilities. In just over two years, beginning in 1347, France lost between one-third and one-half of its population. When Philippe VI died in 1350 and was succeeded by his son, Jean II, the country was in a seriously weakened state. The new king had to confront not only the continued depredations of the English in the north and southwest but also the threat posed by the new king of Navarre, who had also renewed his claim to be the rightful king of France. Jean II’s fortunes in war would prove to be even more disastrous than Philippe’s, for in 1356 he would suffer the greatest military defeat ever sustained by a French king. At Poitiers, a numerically inferior English army commanded by the Black Prince (Edward III’s eldest son) inflicted extremely heavy casualties on French forces. Not only were the ranks of the aristocracy decimated, but the king himself was taken captive. By the late spring of 1357, Jean II had been transported to London and was being held for ransom.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, France’s largest city may already have counted as many as 250,000 residents.79 To sheer size was added its status as the seat of French government, the primary residence of the king, the home of the most celebrated university on the Continent, and a center of commerce and skilled trades. The capital city’s preeminence fully justified, in the minds of most Parisians, the exceptional degree of autonomy it enjoyed. Command over the municipal government of such a metropolis had the potential—then as now—to serve as a springboard to national political prominence. With the country still reeling from stunning military defeats, the capture of its king, and the demographic and social dislocation attendant on the plague, the moment was ripe for an ambitious and opportunistic leader to emerge.
This was the unsettled context for Etienne Marcel’s meteoric rise to power. Born no later than 1310 to one of the wealthiest non-noble families of the capital, he would prove to be a leader of remarkable energy and insight. For four generations, his forebears had been highly successful cloth merchants (drapiers) whose names regularly appeared on the list of those who paid the highest taxes in France’s richest city. By 1352, Marcel had inherited the mantle of family patriarch. His position within the oligarchy that dominated the commercial affairs of Paris explains why, late in 1354 or early in 1355, we find him being elected prévôt de marchands and assuming administrative control over the city.80 His duties in that office were extensive and varied. Public order and well-being depended on his ability to ensure a steady supply and regulate the prices of essential foodstuffs and to adjudicate disputes among corporate bodies and private individuals. In addition, this individual was responsible for assessing and collecting taxes; overseeing the disbursement of city revenues; maintaining the ramparts, gates, streets, quays, bridges, and fountains of Paris; and commanding the city’s militia.
Increasingly, however, protecting the interests and even the security of the capital required action at the national level. Marcel’s willingness to seize the initiative had already been demonstrated at the December 1355 assembly of the Estates General, where he served as spokesperson for the Third Estate. In this role, he attempted to broker a historic compromise between that body, which had only been created in 1302, and the French king.81 This agreement sought to allow Jean II to replenish the royal treasury and quickly raise an army to defend his throne by introducing a new sales tax and gabelle (salt tax). In return, the king would have abandoned his right to appropriate goods at will (droit de prise) and renounced plans to impose forced loans and further debase the currency. Often singled out for its “democratic” spirit, the 1355 assembly was noteworthy for its insistence that all exemptions from the new levies be eliminated and that it retain oversight of tax collections in order to prevent corruption. Above all, the accord would have established the principle that the Estates shared responsibility for the conduct of fiscal affairs with the king.
Unfortunately, the arrangements painstakingly negotiated by Marcel and so favorable to the interests of the merchant class unraveled within a year. Despite the Estates’ endorsement of the new taxes, revenue collection ran far behind the estimates on which the king had based his plans to raise an army of 30,000. Reconvened in March and again in May of 1356, delegates tinkered further with the tax structure without ever achieving a satisfactory outcome. Unable to pay his existing army, much less engage new soldiers, and confronted with the imminent bankruptcy of the state, Jean II was forced to revoke the commitments he had made and fall back upon that perennial stratagem of cash-strapped governments everywhere, the dilution of the currency.82
This expedient required neither consultation with nor the approval of the Estates General, but it was not without political cost, particularly for the Valois, whose legitimacy had been diminished by their disastrous military record. Even the poor, who might expect to benefit from the opportunity to repay their debts with less valuable coins, regarded the devaluation of the currency as an unwelcome sign of economic instability. The commercial classes recognized this manipulation as a surreptitious form of taxation aimed squarely at them. As far as they were concerned, the king’s abrogation of his commitments released them from their pledge to support Jean II’s military operations by outfitting 500 men-at-arms (Parisians and mercenaries) at the city’s expense. The resulting collapse of the king’s agreement with the urban middle class that Marcel represented meant that the French army that confronted the Black Prince near Poitiers on September 19, 1356, consisted almost exclusively of members of the aristocracy.
That crucial defeat proved especially costly to the French nobility. In addition to the staggering loss of life, the second estate’s failure to fulfill its primary responsibility of protecting France against foreign invasion dealt a crippling blow to its prestige. The king’s capture had equally dramatic repercussions, for it deprived the country of its lawful ruler while rendering a swift and uncontested succession impossible. The king’s eighteen-year-old son, the dauphin Charles, assumed the title of royal lieutenant (and later regent), but his youth and inexperience prevented him from providing strong leadership. The prévôt de marchands was quick to capitalize upon this unparalleled opportunity to advance the interests of his principal constituency.
Marcel, now under intense pressure to take sides in the bitter struggle for the French throne, realized that whatever choice he made had the potential to expose Paris to grave threats, whether from the presence of Edward III’s soldiers on French soil, assaults by armed bands loyal to Charles of Navarre, or depredations by the undisciplined armies of Charles of Valois. Forced to rely on his own resources, he had, within one month of the debacle at Poitiers, accelerated projects begun earlier that year aimed at fortifying the capital city against attack. He proposed to finance the planned improvements through an increase in the octroi.83 His program called for enlarging the existing system of ramparts on the right bank of the Seine, clearing the area immediately outside the city walls of buildings and other obstructions that had been illegally constructed over the years, mounting wooden sentinel boxes on the battlements, and digging enormous entrenchments fifteen feet deep and thirty feet wide at their base.84 In addition, and, for the first time, “chains were forged to close off the Seine and barricade the streets during the night.”85 According to Dulaure, “[Etienne Marcel] imagined barricading each street by stretching across it a heavy chain that was solidly attached to the walls of the houses that formed the entrance of each street. This was the first time that such a means of defense had been employed in Paris.”86
It was natural enough for nineteenth-century historians, steeped in the lore of the barricade, to equate the stretching of chains with the building of barricades. That did not make it any less anachronistic, since neither the word nor the concept yet existed in the fourteenth century. Strictly speaking, the object itself was also lacking, since Parisians’ early use of chains, involving neither barriques (barrels) nor any other form of reinforcement, hardly fulfilled the meaning of the term as it later developed.
So, while the connection between chains and barricades is real, it is by no means straightforward. The clearest proof is that of all the European cities where the custom of stretching chains was established (often long before it migrated to France), none independently developed the barricade routine.87 In the Flemish city of Ghent, for example, chains were in use by the end of the thirteenth century. The Chronicle of Bury St. Edmunds recounts how an English army of occupation was attacked and many of its soldiers killed because residents of the city employed huge chains to close off individual quarters and prevent isolated units from coming to each others’ aid.88 Chains were also crucial to the initial success of the 1338 Flemish revolt led by Jacob van Artevelde, captain general of Ghent, the architect of Flanders’ “alliance of three cities,” a rebellion that managed for a time to make good their claim to regional autonomy.89
There can be little doubt that Etienne Marcel was aware of these precedents. He was, after all, a member of one of the elite merchant families of Paris and a successful cloth wholesaler in his own right. We know, moreover, that he specialized in the importation of camelin fin and écarlate, varieties of high-quality striped fabric whose manufacture was peculiar to Ghent, the acknowledged center of the vital textile industry of Flanders and Brabant.90 Marcel’s business affairs therefore necessitated frequent visits to that region and inevitably acquainted him with the history and local customs of a city that was a major trading partner of Paris and the source of his own livelihood. Castelnau has also suggested that Marcel was as much impressed by the freedoms and independence that Flemish towns enjoyed as by their prosperity.91 His reorganization of the bourgeois militia and his introduction of chains to the French capital thus amounted to a borrowing of known techniques that had already proved their worth in local struggles for self-determination.
Marcel continued his efforts to effect a reconciliation between the dauphin and Charles of Navarre and devise a tax structure that would adequately fund the French army.92 When these negotiations reached an impasse, he managed to block the dauphin’s attempt to further debase the currency.93 A struggle now ensued in which Marcel sought to build a coalition of French cities while Charles of Valois forged a new alliance with the clergy and aristocracy and tried to isolate Marcel within his Parisian base of support, calling on him to restrict his activities to the administration of the capital.94
In the final months of 1357, as the country slid back toward the abyss of civil war, Paris was one of the few areas largely spared the ravages of warring armies, thanks to the foresight of its prévôt de marchands. Anxious to secure his local political standing, Marcel resumed work on the capital’s defenses. This time, as many as 3,000 workers were employed, sometimes day and night, widening and deepening the moats that surrounded the city, extending walled fortifications into the faubourgs, building new battlements at the city gates, and adding more chains.95 Froissart, a contemporary observer who never hesitated to criticize Marcel on other grounds, offered this positive assessment of the new projects: “Given the enormous circumference of Paris, managing to close off such a city and surround it with secure defenses in the space of a year was a great feat. In my view, this was the greatest benefit that the prévôt de marchands realized in his life, for otherwise the city would since have been overrun, despoiled, and looted all too many times.”96
Of course, these labors on behalf of the residents of Paris in no way dispelled Charles de Valois’ conviction that Marcel was a dangerous rival. A further standoff at the meeting of the Estates General held in January 1358 set the stage for a direct confrontation. The occasion was provided when the dauphin’s right-hand man, Robert de Clermont, maréchal de Normandie, hunted down a murderer in the Eglise Saint-Merri, thus violating both the right of sanctuary and the city’s prized autonomy. As a result, Paris was thrown into a state of turmoil, which not even the stretching of chains could contain, and Marcel calculated that the alignment of political forces had shifted once again in his favor.
On February 22, a crowd led by Marcel and his close associates swept into the private apartments of the dauphin in what today is the Palais de Justice. After a brief exchange in which Marcel was unable to extract a promise that Paris would be protected from attack, Marcel gave a sign to the armed men who accompanied him. They proceeded to slaughter Jean de Conflans, maréchal de Champagne, before the eyes of the incredulous dauphin. They next pursued Robert de Clermont, maréchal de Normandie, défiler of the sanctuary of Saint-Merri, to an adjoining room, where he too was killed. In a gesture intended to extend his protection to the terrified dauphin, the prévôt de marchands removed his ruler’s hat and exchanged it for the blue-and-red cap that he, like all his followers, was wearing.97 Convinced that his life would be the next to be taken, the dauphin agreed on the spot to the crowd’s demands.98
In the end, Marcel’s rash actions proved fatal. Charles soon found a pretext for leaving Paris, immediately broke with the rebels, and took steps aimed at bringing them to heel. By early April, his army had seized the cities of Montereau and Meaux, which controlled access to the capital via the waterways of the Seine, the Marne, and the Yonne, thus cutting off the routes by which the city was provisioned. A sharp reaction against the barbarity of the attacks on the dauphin’s lieutenants had already undermined provincial support for the Paris prévôt de marchands; now the precarious state of the capital’s economy compromised his standing among his local supporters.99 This shift in public sentiment intensified when the dauphin laid siege to Paris. Though the fortifications Marcel had set in place prevented the city from being overrun, he was able to remain in power only by instituting severe repressive measures, including the execution of partisans of the dauphin.100 In a final desperate act, on July 31, 1358, when Marcel attempted to open a city gate—whether to the soldiers of Navarre or to bands of English mercenaries has never been made clear—he was surprised and struck down by a crowd that had rapidly assembled. Among its members were a number of former supporters and even some members of his own extended family.
No other champion capable of wielding the authority that Marcel had briefly exercised materialized, and the events of the decade following his death sadly fulfilled his direst premonitions.101 But that does not mean that he failed to leave an important legacy with regard to the role of Paris and of the Third Estate in French political affairs. Indeed, the events of 1355 to 1358 have been viewed by some observers as a prefigurement of the great French Revolution of the late eighteenth century.102 In both periods, France’s richest and most populous city staged a challenge to a monarchy jealous of its prerogatives but incapable of discharging its most basic responsibilities. Military fiascoes, the mismanagement of the currency, and fiscal imbalances resulting from an inefficient and corrupt system of taxation created political opportunities for the leaders of the urban middle classes to claim a larger role in the conduct of government. As if to remind participants of the strong parallels between the two set of events, the tricolor flag that France adopted in 1789 married the white of the Bourbon dynasty to the same blue and red banner that Marcel and his adherents had defiantly displayed in 1358.
The fourteenth century did not produce a single barricade. It did, however, set in place some of the crucial preconditions, political and practical, that made possible the eventual emergence of this technique. From the time of Etienne Marcel’s stewardship over the city, a spirit of revolt lingered. Like the coals of a banked fire, this propensity for urban insurrection never lay very far beneath the surface of French politics and threatened to reignite the capital whenever fanned by the winds of change.
Chains were, in a sense, the material precondition of the rebelliousness of Paris. Because they tended to appear each time residents sought to control movements within the city, chains naturally became a point of friction with royal authorities, anxious to stifle the capital’s propensity to revolt. With Charles V’s death in 1380, the crown passed to his twelve-year-old son, Charles VI, whose three uncles collaborated in a joint regency. Their frequent raids on the royal treasury and insatiable thirst for new sources of revenue eventually produced a tax rebellion, known as the revolt of the Maillotins (because of the maillets [mallets] wielded by the rebels), that spread from Paris to the provinces in 1381–82. As part of the brutal repression that followed that uprising, the king’s uncles took steps to deprive Parisians of their most effective instrument of insurrection by removing all chains from the capital and having them locked away in the castle at Vincennes.103
Even after Charles VI came of age, he was unable to provide the strong leadership that France desperately needed. The nation’s political fortunes underwent a further and precipitous decline during his recurrent bouts of mental illness, and the Orléans and Burgundy branches of the royal family fought a series of civil wars to decide who should govern in the mad king’s name. Worse yet, the war with England revived, and in 1415 French armies suffered another crushing defeat at Agincourt. With the monarchy in a state of disarray, John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, succeeded in capturing Paris. In a bid to win popular favor, he restored the previously confiscated chains to city residents, who proceeded to deploy them several times in the course of the fifteenth century in much the same way they had in the 1350s. The custom was therefore very much alive in the sixteenth century, when Parisians turned it to account in the construction of their first barricades.104
Without ever arriving at its nominal objective, our inquiry into the origins of the barricade has nonetheless yielded a wealth of possibilities. Even limiting ourselves to structures explicitly labeled barricades, the choices initially appear to be many, though in the end, those dating from 1588, a year long accepted as the moment of inception, must ultimately be rejected. Monluc’s report may not document the very first use of the tactic, but the Commentaires at least demonstrate that the concept was in existence no later than 1571. They also establish to a near certainty that the identity of the “inventors” of the technique will forever remain unknown to history, since if they were not Monluc’s anonymous adversaries of Mont-de-Marsan in 1569, they were protagonists in some still earlier and more obscure conflict.
We are also in a position to stipulate that the barricade was a collective innovation, not just because its construction is by its nature a collaborative act, but also because, in its quality as a novel routine, it could only have arisen over time, out of small, simple variations on long-established practices. We have traced the associated custom of stretching the chains back to the fourteenth century, at which time it already had a close connection to a tradition of urban insurrection, allowing chains to function as proto-barricades, serving to isolate neighborhoods and impede the circulation of outsiders.
By the second half of the sixteenth century, these elements had come together to form a recognizable pattern of sufficient distinctiveness and stability to merit a name of its own. This new routine of collective action caught on so quickly that it was soon being used to define the climactic event of the late Valois monarchy as the “Day of the Barricades.” The great insurrection of 1588 was not, however, the last event to be so honored. In the next chapter, we turn to the mid-seventeenth century and the Parisian rebellion that definitively established the recurrent character of barricade construction.
