A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [121]
As the savage repression swept north, its new leader emerged in Enguerrand de Coucy, whose domain had been at the center of the storm. The Jacques were never able to reassemble, says Froissart, because “the young sire de Coucy gathered a great number of gentlemen who put an end to them wherever they found them without pity or mercy.” That so young a man should have taken the leadership bespeaks a strong personality, but nothing more about him can be learned from the episode. The Chronique Normande and other accounts also mention his hunting down peasants through hamlets and villages and hanging them from trees while his neighbor the Comte de Roussi hung them from the doors of their cottages. The totality of what is known is fixed by the 19th century authority Père Denifle: “It was chiefly Enguerrand VII, the young seigneur de Coucy, who, at the head of the gentry of his barony, completed the extermination of the Jacques.”
Reinvigorated by the blood of Meaux, the nobles of that region finished off the Jacquerie between Seine and Marne. “They flung themselves upon hamlets and villages, putting them to the flame and pursuing poor peasants in houses, fields, vineyards and forest to be miserably slaughtered.” By June 24, 1358, “20,000” Jacques had been killed and the countryside converted to a wasteland.
The futile rising was over, having lasted, despite its long shadow, less than a month, of which two weeks were taken up by the repression. Nothing had been gained, nothing changed, only more death. Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantage of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents. Reckless of consequence, the landowners, who were already suffering from the shortage of labor after the plague, let revenge take precedence over self-interest.
Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and an end. Since the day after Poitiers, Marcel had kept men at work extending the walls, strengthening the gates, building moats and barriers. Now fully enclosed and fortified, the capital was the key to power. From Vincennes on the outskirts, the Regent with assembled nobles was probing for an entry; Marcel, who had lost sight of every purpose but overpowering the Regent, was planning to deliver the capital to Charles of Navarre; the eel-like Navarre was negotiating with both sides and was in contact with Navarrese and English forces outside the walls.
At a mass meeting staged for him by Marcel in the Place de Grève, he told the crowd that “he would have been King of France if his mother had been a man.” Planted demonstrators responded with shouts of “Navarre! Navarre!” While the majority, shocked by the disloyalty, remained silent, he was elected by acclamation Captain of Paris. His acceptance of the office on the side of the people alienated many of his noble supporters, for they did not wish to be “against the gentry.” Probably at this time Enguerrand de Coucy fell away from the Navarrese party, for he soon afterward appeared in opposition to it.
Under Marcel too the ground was breaking away like ice in a river. His connivance with the Jacques frightened many of the “good towns” and, more seriously,