28. The Jacquerie: When Oppressed French Peasants Snapped
French aristocrats used to contemptuously refer to all peasants as “Jacques” or “Jacques Bonhomme”, after a padded overgarment worn by them called a “jacque”. So when those peasants erupted in a revolt in 1358, it came to be known as “The Jacquerie“. The uprising was led by a well-off peasant named Guillaume Cale, from Beauvais, about 50 miles from Paris. France at the time was undergoing a rough patch following the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. The peasantry, upon whose toil all rested and through whose fields the armies marched and pillaged, endured the roughest patch of all. Their overlords, the French nobility, were not doing well, either, and their prestige had sunk to a low ebb after a series of humiliating defeats.
Early in the century, France’s aristocrats had turned tail and fled at the Battle of the Spurs, leaving the infantry commoners to be slaughtered. More recently, they had suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of the English in the Battles of Crecy and Poitiers. The latter battle was particularly humiliating because the nobility allowed the French king’s capture. The defeat’s aftermath was also particularly onerous upon the peasantry, because the English demanded a huge ransom for the king’s release, which ransom was ultimately squeezed from the peasants. Finally, the French nobility failed in their basic function and the raison d’etre that justified their high status, of protecting the populace from enemy depredations. Unchecked by the peasants’ aristocratic overlords and supposed protectors, bands of English and Gascon mercenaries roamed the countryside, pillaging and raping, at will.
