Justine Firnhaber-Baker

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt

(Oxford University Press, 2021), 319 pp. $102.00

For all its lingering notoriety in France, the Jacquerie of 1358 has received surprisingly scant attention. Prior to Firnhaber-Baker’s The Jacquerie of 1358, there existed only one scholarly monograph (and that from 1859) and relatively few articles, recently added to by Firnhaber-Baker herself. This alone makes the book under review a publication of note; but its academic achievement also renders this the indispensable work on the uprising. The Jacquerie remains a perplexing phenomenon, an explosion of violence and seeming anarchy that ignited and died out within a few weeks in early summer. The causes of it were once thought to lay in economic wretchedness and social animosities, and perhaps also millenarian hysteria; but more recent research, not least from Firnhaber-Baker, has brought political aspects to the fore. Of course, many elements played their part in an era of intensive marauding by soldiers and the aftermath of the first outbreak of the Black Death, so it is not altogether shocking that the lighting of the political fuse was the last phase leading to this combustive episode. As Firnhaber-Baker argues convincingly, though, it is a mistake to view the uprising through just one lens, when many perspectives are needed: this was not one uniform movement with a single goal. The eruption of violence supports this, as it manifested itself in different ways, but all born of an understandable deep frustration and exasperation. The social and economic factors are clear in the price rises caused by the impact of the Hundred Years War, the exhaustion of war taxation and soldiers ravaging the countryside exploiting, rather than protecting, French subjects, while the capture of King John II at Poitiers nearly two years earlier created a political vacuum in Paris leading to factional fighting and setting the scene for a rebellion in the capital.

The crisis points of the Jacquerie as seen through contemporary accounts lasted just a fortnight from 28 May: the first centred on rural uprisings in Beauvais, Picardy and the northern Île de France; the second on its even more brutal suppression by King Charles the Bad of Navarre, cynically exploiting political motives. Castles and manors, symbols of oppression, were destroyed by the score; nobility accounted for 85 per cent of fatalities: “It was their social status, with its odour of military failure, material excess unearned privilege, and moral treachery, that made them targets” (p. 123). This was not a frenzied rampage, however; ecclesiastical lordships were largely unharmed. The leader of the rustic Jacques, a rich peasant called Guillaume Calle, made contact with the provost of Paris, Étienne Marcel, who headed the capital’s revolt against the Dauphin, leading to some coordination of the violence: Paris was encircled by the forces of the Dauphin; Marcel hoped to break this with the help of the rural uprising. For the Jacques, there was much in a Norman chronicler’s view that they revolted because the Dauphin’s men were pillaging the countryside to stock up the supplies in his castles blockading Paris. But even here there is disagreement whether the forces of the capital and the countryside were one or two separate movements. Firnhaber-Baker convincingly emphasises the former for part of the revolt, while noting that “the Jacquerie remained a movement whose impetus came as much from grassroots anger at the nobility as from its leaders’ strategic partnership with the urban reformers” in Paris (p. 168).

Developing the work on rebellion by Cohn, Firnhaber-Baker shows how the impulsive uprising perception of the Jacquerie is no longer tenable: there was clear, military-style preparation and organisation for the revolt. Indeed, it was as much a military operation as anything else; the various other causal factors already mentioned further helped recruitment to the movement. Moreover, “common-born militias”(p. 46) were becoming frequently utilised, prefiguring the Jacquerie with its “use of rural people as troops and the destruction of fortresses” (p. 48). The targeting of nobles was not merely social, but a direct attack on supporters of the Dauphin’s party and war-machine. The murder of Raoul de Clermont-Nesle and his party on 28 May at Saint-Leu d’Esserent, the initial spark to the conflagration was, as Firnhaber-Baker shows, understood by many as a military act, “a planned attack […] not a spontaneous uprising” (p. 83). This focusing of the book on the context of war and politics is one of its many strengths; it is explained with admirable lucidity.

Another key strength is the attention afforded to the role of violence, one of Firnhaber-Baker’s key areas of research. While the febrile and complex factional politics was indeed a blood-thirsty affair, she uses letters of remission to reveal the rather limited extent of the Jacques’ own, over-hyped violence given the circumstances: fewer than a score of noblemen and one noblewoman were killed along with some unnamed victims; sexual violence was not a feature of the Jacquerie. This was not the apocalyptic massacre of the chronicles, as cheer-led by Froissart; it was certainly nothing like the merciless suppression of the insurrection, by which time what had begun as a social revolt had developed into “a social war” (p. 213) Nor, indeed, was the violence as necessarily as bad as the cumulative actions of the free companies rampaging around Paris.

Firnhaber-Baker convincingly counters aspects of the influential work of Cazelles and Luce, while acknowledging that there is still room for debate on whether the Jacquerie was a politically inspired revolt, a military operation, an act of class hatred or one of town versus country, reminding the reader that the motivations behind any large-scale revolt are multiple and mutable; she is also right to emphasise the first three, while allowing for plenty of accidental input as well. Messy history is often accurate history. As she emphasises: “the Jacquerie involved a large and diverse group”; it was not a discrete ‘thing’ to which we can attribute a single meaning, but rather a constellation of overlapping events and processes undertaken and understood differently by different people at different times” (p. 96). This makes the Jacquerie all the more fascinating. Firnhaber-Baker’s fine account neatly underlines all these issues in an important and absorbing study which gives as clear and perceptive understanding of the uprising as we are likely to have. This is an accomplished and authoritative study, convincing in its arguments, and a tremendous book.

Sean McGlynn
University of Plymouth at Strode College