Towns and Princely Rebellion in Fifteenth-Century France: The War of the Public Weal, 1465

Abstract The historiography of fifteenth-century France overwhelmingly finds that towns worked with the monarchy against rebellious princes in pursuit of a centralised royal state. Focusing on the War of the Public Weal of 1465, this article demonstrates instead that urban communities played a central role in the rebellion and that there was considerable urban support for the league. This evidence suggests both that we need to re-evaluate the view that the princes lacked popular support in their rebellions against the Crown in fifteenth-century France and that we need to reconsider the current model of town–Crown relations. The article begins by highlighting regional patterns of support for the king and the princes during the war, before moving on to examine ideology and the reasons why towns favoured one side over the other. It then goes on to consider what townspeople hoped to gain from their actions during the War of the Public Weal, taking particular account of the presence of urban factions and the competition for urban privileges. A study of urban participation in the War of the Public Weal thus contributes to debates on the wider narratives of European state formation in the later Middle Ages, when increasingly powerful monarchs sought to break the power of their overmighty subjects by co-opting urban populations to join their cause, and highlights the ongoing limitations of French royal power at the end of the Middle Ages.