Few kings have reigned as young as Charles V and, in a relatively short and especially cruelly turbulent reign, accomplished such great things, not through arms, but through diplomacy.
Ascending the throne at the age of twenty-seven, for seventeen years Charles V repaired the innumerable ills of France and displayed a patient and powerful activity, which confounded his many enemies, while earning him from his contemporaries the noble surname of 'the Wise,' which posterity has confirmed.
Such, in a few words, is the character of this reign and this king, so poorly appreciated by our modern historians, prey to a system of preconceived ideas which has distorted their vision, if one may put it thus, and has meant that even when the evidence forced them to recognize, almost against their will, the merit and real services of Charles V, it ultimately inspired in them only a sort of terror towards this monarch, whose character, along with the order of the times, places him immediately after Louis IX and makes him the precursor of Louis XI, whose great-grandfather he was.
It is true that Louis IX and Louis XI are not very sympathetic to most of our modern historians, liberals and often even revolutionaries, depending on how completely they lack religious sense. The thought of a study on the character of Charles V came to us, and naturally had to come, following our research on the episode of Étienne Marcel, where we have already begun to vindicate the memory, so shamefully outraged, of this same king during his difficult beginnings as Lieutenant General, then Regent of the kingdom during his father's captivity.
In reproducing some remarkable pages by Mr. L. Binaut on the deplorable way in which Mr. Perrens became the extreme apologist for the 14th-century demagoguery against the Dauphin Charles, we reserved new and important citations from this article, so vigorous and strong in logic, which we wish to use as the introduction and theme of the study you are about to read.
Here, then, is what Mr. Binaut says, with great reason:
“This so sharply divided distribution of merit and demerit, which puts all the good on one side and all the evil on the other, is suspect in itself and at first glance. Even if it were otherwise, even if at a certain period all the extravagances and all the deceptions had gathered in the palaces of kings, it would not follow, for all that, any general condemnation against the secular policy of the monarchy.
One could abandon to the reprobation of history King John and his son and their ministers and their generals, and it would nonetheless remain true that the monarchy, in its time, was necessary, that it was for France in particular the most powerful agent of unity, of justice, of the leveling—perhaps excessive—that distinguishes us, and that it has the right to be judged according to this great function so long fulfilled and not according to the vices and failings of a few individuals.”
However, as this sort of partiality in history becomes rather common, some more general considerations on this subject will doubtless not be useless. It is a matter of justice, and as such the question is not without a very direct interest for us. Justice towards men of the past is not at all indifferent to our destinies today. The justice of the historian is one of the great public interests, for history is the fatherland, and the iniquitous defamation of the past is the discord and weakness of the present.
Justice possesses a conciliatory force which, leaving to each individual, to each class its share of honor, and granting no one the monopoly of merits, extinguishes by explaining the quarrels of the past for the benefit of the future. The historian has no right to listen to his sympathies, to plead for his race, his profession, his party. And yet, since Boulainvilliers, that is to say since people began to recognize in our history and to follow from century to century a class struggle originating in the conquest, and perpetuated until our time, a secret partiality has always cast its hue on the exposition of the facts of this great drama. The best minds are not entirely exempt from it.
In others, the indictment or panegyric is the very foundation of what they call history, and all too often contemporary polemics, more or less disguised, ascend with its passions into past times, altering if not the material of the facts, at least their proportion, their measure, their character, suppressing those that hinder it, giving great place and prominence to those from which it wishes to draw arguments for its cause, so that, while saying true things, one thus arrives at the falsest representation of the whole, and the reader emerges from it filled with retroactive hatreds, ill-founded admirations, and troubled impressions which corrupt judgment both on things of the past and those of today.
Mr. Sismondi, on the eve of 1830, one of the extreme liberals of 1828—a forever disastrous epoch in our history—Mr. Sismondi shows himself particularly hostile to Charles V in his voluminous work. A sort of irresistible and inexplicable attraction at first glance characterizes the feverish, anxious, and almost irritated way in which the author of the *History of the French* approaches the reign of this king:
“Since his father had remained captive at the Battle of Poitiers, nearly eight years before, he had been almost always the depositary of royal authority in France. He was therefore well known to the people over whom he was called to reign; but this knowledge had inspired for him neither affection, nor esteem, nor confidence. The soldiers and the nobility reproached him for his cowardly conduct at Poitiers, which had caused the loss of the battle, the captivity of his father, and the danger, almost the ruin of the kingdom.
The bourgeois had been deceived and sacrificed by him; they had been punished by torture for having trusted his oaths. The peasants not only had experienced, through his fault, the pillage of the men-at-arms and all kinds of calamity; they could believe, at the time of the Jacquerie, that they were an object of hatred for him and that this prince desired their extermination.
The Dauphin, feared and despised by the people, was not viewed more favorably by his relatives, and one seeks in vain which prince, which order of the State placed confidence in the new king.
However, Charles V is known to posterity by the surname of Charles the Wise, and his reign, placed between two of the most calamitous epochs in French history, presents, if not a period of prosperity, at least a marked return internally towards the strengthening of order, externally towards the re-establishment of power.
The disasters that his father and grandfather had brought upon France were almost repaired during his reign of sixteen years, and he has been credited not only with all the good he had done, all that which, in his time, had been done of itself, but also with all the harm that his adversaries had done to themselves.
Charles was surnamed by his contemporaries, rather the learned, *sapiens*, than the wise, because he had received a more literary education than the princes to whom he was compared. A pedantic daughter of his astrologer, Christine de Pisan, left us his panegyric: it is a writing where it is as difficult to find a characteristic trait of the prince who is its object as a true sentiment, a thought worthy of praise in the author. Christine de Pisan, however, deserves to be believed when she speaks of the erudition of the king she celebrates…
It is not because of the confidence that King Charles V granted to astrologers, or the progress he himself made in astrology, that posterity has confirmed the name of wise borne by this king. It has been struck by the contrast between his immobility and his conquests: he was weak, sickly, of a fearful character; he no longer appeared in the armies after the Battle of Poitiers: in his own palace he lived hidden, so to speak; he attracted attention by no brilliant action of any kind; he was rarely mentioned by contemporary historians; he left in neither the laws nor the diplomatic acts any notable trace, and yet he regained almost all the provinces that the English had taken from his father…”
What a mixture of admiration and contempt, at once, in this picture of the reign and acts of Charles V! Mr. Sismondi gnashes his teeth while admitting, despite himself, the real and consequently incontestable merits of Charles V. But, to relax somewhat from such fatigue, such torture, or at least the obsession which his memories inflict upon him, he hastens to testify to his sympathy for the English and tries to place justice and right on the side of the King of Navarre and the enemies of Charles V and France.
As a skillful tactician, instead of attacking the English, Charles V had them attacked by their neighbors and detached their allies from them; he wore them out especially by boring them and temporizing, as Fabius had done in antiquity, and as was to be done with so much success, at the beginning of our century, by Wellington towards our armies, in Spain and elsewhere: it is good warfare…
Shortly before Christmas (1373),—continues Mr. Sismondi,—the English arrived at Bordeaux, after a march of more than two hundred leagues across France; but the army so brilliant with which they had left Calais was weakened, exhausted, discouraged. It had not kept forty horses out of the several thousand with which it had set out; it was in no state to undertake anything, and yet its equipment had so ruined Edward III that he could no longer, for the rest of his life, make a vigorous effort to recover his French possessions, while Charles V congratulated himself for having said to his generals:
“Let them go; through smoke can they come to our inheritance? It will weary them, and they will all come to nothing. Although a storm and a tempest appear at once in a country, if it departs since and wastes away by itself; so will it happen with these English people.”
The reign of which we have just seen the picture is not an ordinary epoch, nor is Charles V a common king; one sees how Mr. Sismondi treats both, by this deplorable system of preconceived ideas of which Mr. Binaut has rendered such complete justice, regarding the Étienne Marcel of Mr. Perrens.
However, the summary of this reign by the irascible liberal is in a relatively softened tone, though still unsympathetic; an admission formulated under such conditions seems, for that very reason, to have more value, because one cannot suspect it of partiality—quite the contrary.
“We have sought to make known Charles V as he had shown himself to his subjects, as foreigners had judged him, when he ascended the throne; tainted by a notable trait of cowardice at the Battle of Poitiers, and having given since, in his two regencies, incontestable marks of incapacity, pusillanimity, negligence, and bad faith, he had then inspired in his subjects, who had had all the time to know him, neither affection nor esteem.
He had attained royalty under the most unfavorable circumstances: his treasury was empty and yet burdened with an enormous debt to pay to foreigners; his army was humiliated and disorganized; his subjects, diminished by half by plague, war, and famine, were oppressed at the same time by his own officers and by brigands more masters than he in the kingdom.”
In sum and despite his little sympathy for Charles V, Mr. Sismondi nonetheless devoted to this king nearly three hundred pages of volume X of his *History of the French*. Let this be noted. To speak so lengthily of a man one does not like, there must yet be some merit in this man; without that, one would not linger over him to such an extent.
Let us here give the floor to a learned pupil of the École des Chartes, Mr. Saint-Luce, whose testimony we have already invoked in our study on the revolutionary provost of Paris:
“It has been said for a long time, based on the authority of Froissart, that Charles had shamefully taken flight at the Battle of Poitiers. Mr. Lacabane has the honor of having been the first to refute this calumny in the most peremptory manner, by publishing a letter from the Count of Armagnac which establishes that the young princes left the battlefield only by the express order of the king.
The most authoritative historians of this time, notably Messrs. Michelet and H. Martin, have sided with the opinion of the learned diplomat. Unfortunately, while Mr. Perrens nourishes a veritable tenderness for Charles the Bad…, this writer lets shine through everywhere the most passionate and unjust hatred against the Dauphin Charles.