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By Root 1315 0

caused the disaffection of the upper bourgeois in his own city. In the chaos and scarcities and disruption of trade, they veered toward the Regent as the only focus in the desperate need for authority. Paris was coming apart in furious factions, some for fighting to the end behind Marcel, some for deposing Navarre, some for admitting the Regent, all fired by hatred of the English, who were ravaging the outskirts with daily atrocity. With his support waning, Marcel was reduced to the naked need of armed force. On July 22, in the act that turned sentiment against him, he allowed Charles of Navarre to bring a band of English men-at-arms into the city. Aroused and armed Parisians fell upon them with such effect that they had to be locked up in the fortress of the Louvre for protection.

Meanwhile the prosperous bourgeois feared that if the Regent succeeded in taking the city by force instead of surrender, all citizens alike would be subjected to punishment and plunder. Unable to force Marcel to yield the city, they determined to dispose of him on the theory that “it was better to kill than be killed.” Amid cabals and enemies and inexplicable events, the citizens were easy prey to whispers of treachery on the part of the Provost.

On July 31 the end came when Marcel appeared at the Porte St. Denis and ordered the guards to deliver the keys of the gate to officers of the King of Navarre. The guards refused, shouting betrayal of the city. Weapons flashed, and a draper named Jean Maillart, evidently pre-equipped, unfurled the royal banner, mounted his horse, and raised the royal battle cry “Montjoie–St. Denis!” Crowds took up the cry, clashes and confused alarms erupted. Marcel next appeared across the city at the Porte St. Antoine, where he again demanded the keys and met the same response, which was led by a certain Pierre des Essars, a knighted bourgeois and cousin by marriage of both Maillart and Marcel. In a rush upon the Provost, the guards of St. Antoine struck him down, and when the bloodstained weapons had lifted and the melee had cleared, the body of Etienne Marcel lay trampled and dead in the street.

Two of his companions were also killed, and others of his party were stripped, beaten, and left naked under the walls. “Then the people rushed off to find others to treat the same way.” More of the Provost’s partisans were murdered and dumped naked in the streets. While Charles of Navarre escaped to St. Denis, the royalist faction took control and two days later, on August 2, 1358, opened the city to the Regent.

He at once proclaimed a pardon for the citizens of Paris except for close associates of Marcel and Navarre, who were executed or banished, and their confiscated property turned over to the Regent’s party. But the spirit of the blue-and-red hoods remained strong enough to cause angry demonstrations when more of Marcel’s adherents were arrested. The situation was sullen and dangerous. On August 10 the Regent issued a general amnesty and ordered nobles and peasantry to pardon each other so that the fields might be cultivated and the harvest brought in. The extermination of the Jacques was making itself felt.

With Marcel’s death the reform movement was aborted; the glimpse of “Good Government” was to remain only a glimpse. After Artevelde and Rienzi, Marcel was the third leader of a bourgeois rising within a dozen years to be killed by his own followers. The people of France on the whole were not ready for an effort to limit the monarchy. They blamed all their troubles—heavy taxes, dishonest government, debased coinage, military defeats, banditry of the companies, the fallen condition of the realm—on the crown’s evil councillors and the caitiff nobles, not on the King, who had fought bravely at Poitiers, or even on the Dauphin. No political movement sprang from Marcel’s bones. The right of the Estates General to convene at will was lost, the provisions of the Grand Ordinance largely, though not entirely, discarded. The crown was left free for the period of royal absolutism that history held in waiting.

Though the