Procès politiques au temps de Louis XI: Armagnac et Bourgogne, ed. Joel Blanchard

Abstract

This volume is a further instalment in Joel Blanchard’s project to present unpublished documents relating to the political trials launched against some twenty of Louis XI’s most highly placed opponents between 1465 and 1483. The previous volume, which appeared in 2012, dealt in great depth with the trial of Jacques d’Armagnac, Duke of Nemours in 1477, while that of Louis de Luxembourg, Constable of Saint-Pol appeared in 2008. With this volume we have two corpora of documents, the first relating to Nemours’ cousin Jean V Count of Armagnac, the second to the posthumous trial of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy in 1478. Neither case represents a ‘treason trial’ of a living person but serves to demonstrate the development of royal ideology and illustrate the impact of competing jurisdictions, understandings of the idea of sovereignty and obligation within the political class of late medieval France. As Blanchard points out in his introduction, such documents do not answer all the questions one would wish to ask and present formidable problems in disentangling the complexities of networks of allies and clients in a rapidly changing political environment. The overall context is, of course, the Guerre du Bien public of 1465 and the dangerous series of conspiracies in 1472–4. Both generated an intense discourse on bad government which was attractive and powerful, and which Louis XI in his turn was careful to counter by pointing out in his letters and declarations the contradiction between demands for good government and abuses of power on the part of those who made them. In turn, the king was careful to observe at least the forms of judicial procedure and to carry a consensus. He was concerned to ‘de-legitimise’ rebellion by demonstrating judicially the ‘lack of faith’ on the part of opponents who had received his letters of grace and forgiveness and yet continued to attack him. The Nemours trial documents are an unusual survival of a complete dossier, in effect to ‘declare’ the guilt of the accused before eliminating him. The documents in the cases under review here largely follow the aftermath of such elimination. Armagnac was notoriously murdered after his surrender of Lectoure to a royal army in March 1473, having been stripped of his lands twice before (in 1443 and 1455). Banished in 1460, rehabilitated in 1461, he dabbled in the Bien public and other conspiracies in the late 1460s. Mandrot and Samaran published some documents on his case, such as the arrêt de Parlement of May 1460 declaring him guilty of treason, as well as the arrêt of September 1470 and the depositions of witnesses to events at Lectoure. This publication concentrates on, firstly, the memorandum for Charles d’Armagnac, Jean V’s brother, for rehabilitation and the return of his property in 1490. This interestingly gives the Armagnac case for Louis XI’s arbitrary rule and the procedural errors in his trials; secondly, the response of the procureur-général du roi. Finally, we have the depositions of the Cadet d’Albret, kinsman and ally of Jean V, who was tried and executed after the siege of Lectoure. His evidence covers a broad range of matters related to the end of Jean V’s life, including accusations of witchcraft, the count’s notoriously colourful family life (he had sired three children by his sister) and the siege itself. As for the post-mortem ‘trial’ of Charles the Bold for lèse-majesté, much revolved around the question of the constraint applied to the king at Péronne in 1468. In fact, no original of Burgundy’s safe-conduct has survived and, indeed, the surviving copies differ from each other. Blanchard suggests that it was not beyond the king to manufacture such a document which was crucial to his case of ‘notorious’ treason before the Parlement. The first document published here is a copy of a legal opinion on whether the king was placed under constraint by Burgundy at Péronne. The argument is advanced that the treaty was nullified by the mortal fear applied by the Duke. In the second draft opinion published, that of Pierre d’Oriole, a broader argument is developed which sought to question all the major treaties with Burgundy: Arras (1435), Conflans (1465) and Péronne (1468). Of all these, Péronne was singled out as illegitimate. Other documents published concern essentially the king’s position in 1478 on the course of his relations with Burgundy. The case was not followed to a conclusion but the effect of declaring Burgundy guilty of notorious lèse-majesté was enough to serve the king’s purposes at the time. As Blanchard concludes, the purpose of all these cases was a pragmatic development of the doctrine of lèse-majesté from doctrines already in existence but powerfully applied by the Crown in new circumstances. All documents are scrupulously edited with full notes and helpful indexes which permit navigation through the text.