Knowing One’s Place

Abstract

Between April and July 1413, a large group of Parisians led the violent Cabochien Uprising. This revolt has been positioned primarily as an extension of civil war politics between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. I argue that it was far more than that; it was a meaningful example of political resistance and an extraordinary event that nonetheless borrowed from everyday practices of civil autonomy and agency. In drawing from but moving beyond the civil war narrative, I examine the importance of urban spatial tactics, voice and violence in this rebellion. This approach enables us to discern what opportunities were available to early fifteenth-century Parisians to directly challenge their exclusion from politics, and to carve out a place of importance for their voices. Moreover, the same source material for the rebellion also illuminates the established systems, the spaces and the habits that empowered Parisians in the day-to-day. It was these conditions that provided the scaffolding for their rebellion, and they reveal strong tension between the king’s sovereign authority and his subjects’ autonomy. These complicated dynamics limited the king’s actual power in the streets, and suggest that Parisians could lay claim to more independence than we have previous considered.