As a statesman Louis IX. has left no distinct monument. The famous “Établissements of St Louis” has been shown in our own day to have been private compilation. It was a coutumier drawn up before 1273, including, as well as some royal decrees, the civil and feudal law of Anjou, Maine and the Orléanais. Recent researches have also denied Louis the credit of having aided the communes. He exploited them to the full. His standpoint in this respect was distinctly feudal. He treated his clergy as he did his barons, enforcing the supremacy of royal justice, and strongly opposing the exactions of the pope until the latter part of his reign, when he joined forces with him to extort as much as possible from the clergy. At the end of the reign most of the sees and monasteries of France were in debt to the Lombard bankers. Finally, the reign of Saint Louis saw the introduction of the pontifical inquisition into France.
There are numerous portraits of St Louis, but they are unauthentic and contradictory. In 1903 M. Salomon Reinach claimed to have found in the heads sculptured in the angles of the arches of the chapel at St Germain portraits of St Louis, his brothers and sisters, and Queen Marguerite, or Blanche, made between 1235 and 1240. This conjectured portrait somewhat resembles the modern type, which is based upon a statue of Charles V. once in the church of the Celestins in Paris, and which Lenoir mistakenly identified as that of Louis IX. The king had eleven children, six sons and five daughters, among them being his successor, Philip III., and Robert, count of Clermont, the ancestor of Henry IV.
The best contemporary accounts of Louis IX. are the famous Memoirs of the Sire Jean de Joinville (q.v.), published by N. de Wailly for the Soc. de l’Hist. de France, under the title Histoire de Saint Louis (Paris, 1868), and again with translation (1874); English translation by J. Hutton (1868). See also William of Nangis, Gesta Ludovici IX., edited by M. Bouquet in vol. xx. of the Recueil des 'historiens des Gaules et de la France. Of modern works may be mentioned C. V. Langlois in E. Lavisse’s Histoire de France, tome iii., with references to literature; Frederick Perry, Saint Louis, the Most Christian King (New York, 1901); E. J. Davis, The Invasion of Egypt by Louis IX. of France (1898); H. A. Wallon, Saint Louis et son temps (1875); A. Lecoy de la Marche, Saint Louis (Tours, 1891); and E. Berger, Saint Louis et Innocent IV (Paris, 1893), and Histoire de Blanche de Castille (1895). See also The Court of a Saint, by Winifred F. Knox (1909). (J. T. S.*)
LOUIS X. (1289–1316), king of France and Navarre, called le Hutin or “the Quarreller,” was the son of Philip IV. and of Jeanne of Navarre. He was born at Paris on the 4th of October 1289, took the title king of Navarre on the death of his mother, on the 2nd of April 1305, and succeeded Philip IV. in France on the 29th of November 1314, being crowned at Reims in August 1315. The origin of his surname is uncertain. Louis X. is a somewhat indistinct figure among the kings of France, the preponderating influence at court during his short reign being that of his uncle, Charles of Valois. The reign began with reaction against the policy of Philip IV. Private
vengeance was wreaked on Enguerrand de Marigny, who was hanged, Pierre de Latilli, bishop of Châlons and chancellor, and Raoul de Presle, advocate of the parlement, who were imprisoned. The leagues of the lesser country gentry, formed in 1314 before the accession of Louis, continued to demand
the ancient privileges of the nobility,—tourneys, private wars and judgment of nobles not by king’s officers but by their peers—and to protest against the direct call by the king of their vassals to the royal army. Louis X. granted them charters in which
he made apparent concessions, but used evasive formulas which in reality ceded nothing. There was a charter to the Normans, one to the Burgundians, one to the Languedocians (1315). Robert de Béthune, count of Flanders, refused to do homage, and his French fiefs were declared confiscate by a court of his peers. In August 1315 Louis X. led an army toward Lille,
but the flooded Lys barred his passage, the ground was so soaked with rains that the army could not advance, and it was thrown back, without a battle, on Tournai. Need of money inspired one famous ordinance of this reign; in 1315 the serfs of the royal domains were invited to buy their civil liberty,—an invitation
which did not meet with great enthusiasm, as the
freedman was merely freed for further exploitation, and Philip V.
was obliged to renew it in 1318. Louis X. died suddenly on
the 5th of June 1316. His first wife was Margaret, daughter
of Robert II., duke of Burgundy; she was accused of adultery
and died a prisoner in the château Gaillard. By her he had one
daughter, Jeanne, wife of Philip, count of Evreux and king
of Navarre. By his second wife Clémence, daughter of Charles
Martel, titular king of Hungary, he left a posthumous son,
King John I.
See Ch. Dufayard, “La réaction feodale sous les fils de Philippe le Bel,” in Revue historique (1894); Paul Lehugeur, Histoire de Philippe le Long, roi de France (Paris, 1897); and Joseph Petit, Charles de Valois (Paris, 1900). (J. T. S.*)
LOUIS XI. (1423–1483), king of France, the son of Charles
VII. and his queen, Marie of Anjou, was born on the 3rd of July
1423, at Bourges, where his father, then nicknamed the “King
of Bourges,” had taken refuge from the English. At the birth
of Louis XI. part of France was in English hands; when he
was five years old, Joan of Arc appeared; he was just six when
his father was crowned at Reims. But his boyhood was spent
apart from these stirring events, in the castle of Loches, where
his father visited him rarely. John Gerson, the foremost theologian
of France, wrote a manual of instructions (still extant)
for the first of his tutors, Jean Majoris, a canon of Reims. His
second tutor, Bernard of Armagnac, was noted for his piety
and humility. If, as has been claimed, Louis owed to them
any of his tendency to prefer the society of the poor, or rather
of the bourgeois, to that of the nobility, their example was his
best lesson in the craft of kingship. In June 1436, when scarcely
thirteen, he was married to Margaret (c. 1425–1445), daughter
of James I. of Scotland, a princess of about his own age, but
sickly and romantic, and in every way his opposite. Three
years after this unhappy marriage Louis entered upon his stormy
political career. Sent by his father in 1439 to direct the defence
of Languedoc against the English, and to put down the brigandage
in Poitou, he was induced by the rebellious nobles to betray
his trust and place himself at the head of the Praguerie (q.v.).
Charles VII. pardoned him this rebellion, due to his ambition
and the seductive proposal of the nobles to make him regent.
The following year he was fighting the English, and in 1443
aided his father to suppress the revolt of the count of Armagnac.
His first important command, however, was in the next year,
when he led an army of from 15,000 to 20,000 mercenaries and
brigands,—the product of the Hundred Years’ War,—against
the Swiss of the canton of Basel. The heroism of some two
hundred Swiss, who
for a while held thousands of the French
army at bay, made
a great impression
on the young prince.
After an ineffective
siege of Basel, he
made peace with the
Swiss confederation,
and led his robber
soldiers into Alsace to
ravage the country
of the Habsburgs,
who refused him the
promised winter quarters. Meanwhile
his father, making a
parallel campaign in Lorraine, had assembled his first brilliant court at Nancy, and when Louis returned it was to find the king completely under the spell of Agnes Sorel. He at first made overtures to members of her party, and upon their rejection through fear of his ambition, his deadly hatred of her and of them involved the king. The death in 1445 of his wife Margaret, who was a great favourite of Charles VII., made the rupture complete. From that year until the death of the king father and son were enemies. Louis began his rebellious career by a futile attempt to seduce the cities of Agenais into treason, and then he prepared a plot to seize the king and his minister Pierre de Brézé. Antoine de Chabannes, who was to be the instrument of the plot, revealed it to Charles, and Louis was mildly punished by being sent off to Dauphiné (1447). He never saw his father again.
Louis set out to govern his principality as though it were an independent state. He dismissed the governor; he determined advantageously to himself the boundaries between his state and the territories of the duke of Savoy and of the papacy; and he enforced his authority over perhaps the most unruly nobility in western Europe, both lay and ecclesiastical. The right of private warfare was abolished; the bishops were obliged to give up most of their temporal jurisdiction, the scope of their courts was limited, and appeals to Rome were curtailed. On
