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For the moment, left to defend a crown amid the wreckage, Charles on the advice of his father’s councillors rejected the Estates’ demands and ordered them to dismiss. At the same time he removed himself from Paris as a precaution. Refusing to disperse, the standing committee assembled the day after he left, in November 1356, and listened to an inflammatory address by Robert le Coq denouncing royal misrule and specifying enlarged demands for reform. “Shame to him who speaks not forth,” he cried, “for never was the time so good as now!”

The bid to limit the monarchy was now in the open. It might have been the French Runnymede if the challengers had been as cohesive as the English barons of 1215, but they were soon to split into factions.

The upper level of the Third Estate, made up of merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, office-holders, and purveyors to the crown, had nothing left in common with its working-class base except the fact of being non-noble. To overcome that barrier was every bourgeois magnate’s aim. While climbing toward ennoblement and a country estate, he emulated the clothes, customs, and values of the nobles and on arriving shared their tax exemption—no small benefit. Etienne Marcel had an uncle who had paid the highest tax in Paris in 1313 and whose son bought a patent of nobility for 500 livres. Marcel’s father- and brother-in-law, Pierre and Martin des Essars, starting from bourgeois origins in Rouen, had become enriched and ennobled in the service of Philip the Fair and Philip VI. As the crown’s agents, they and their kind provisioned the royal households, commissioned their tapestries and books, purchased their jewels, fabrics, and works of art, served as their confidants and moneylenders, and held lucrative office as treasurers and tax-collectors. Pierre was able to give his daughter Marguerite, when she married Marcel, a princely dowry of 3,000 écus.

Nobles and clergy resented the royal favor shown and the opulence allowed to officials chosen from outside their ranks. Especially they hated the finance officers, “who travel in pomp and make fortunes greater than the dukes and marry their daughters to nobles and buy up the lands of poor knights whom they have cheated and impoverished … and appoint their own kind to offices whose numbers grow from day to day and whose salaries keep pace.”

Between the official class and the mercantile bourgeois like Marcel, no love was lost, though they shared the enterprises of capitalism. When capitalism became feasible through the techniques of banking and credit, it became respectable. The theory of a non-acquisitive society faded, and accumulation of surplus wealth lost its odium—indeed, became enviable. In Renart le Contrefait, a satire of the time, the wealthy bourgeois enjoy the best estate of all: “They live in a noble manner, wear lordly garments, have falcons and sparrow hawks, fine palfreys and fine chargers. When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”

Chosen by the leading citizens, the Provost of Merchants and his fellow magistrates administered all the usual municipal functions and assigned daily duty to the police force, which was manned by the obligatory service of citizens in units of ten, forty, and fifty. Assisted by four deputies and a council of 24 clerics and laymen, the Provost was supposed to be on duty from seven A.M. every day except holy days. His seat was the Châtelet, which was also the city prison and was located on the right bank at the entrance to the Grand Pont, the only bridge leading over to the Ile de la Cité. Nearby the Châtelet was the City Hall on a large open square called the Place de Grève, where the unemployed came to be hired.

The city Marcel governed covered an area, by present landmarks, from approximately the Grands Boulevards on the right bank to the Luxembourg Gardens on the left, and east to west from the Bastille to the Tuileries. Everything beyond