A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [247]
The upper bourgeois were anxious both to contain the rising and to use it to force concessions from the crown. They quickly mobilized a militia to resist both the rebels and armed intervention by the King. Squads were stationed at street crossings and scouts sent up into church towers to watch for the approach of men-at-arms. “They soon showed themselves so strong,” wrote Buonaccorso Pitti, a Florentine banker in Paris, that the Maillotins in time obeyed them, with the result that the bourgeois were able to use the armed rebels in their own struggle against the crown.
Following so closely on events in Rouen, the uprising in Paris deepened fears of a conspiracy of revolt. The court decided to parley. Coucy, known for his tact and persuasiveness, was sent with the Duke of Burgundy and the Chancellor to the Porte St. Antoine to hear the insurgents’ demands. Jean de Marès acted as mediator. The Parisians insisted on an abolition of all levies since the coronation, plus amnesty for all acts of riot, and the release of four bourgeois arrested earlier for having advised against Anjou’s tax. The royal negotiators, until they could return with an answer, granted release of the four prisoners as a gesture of appeasement—with contradictory results. Without waiting to hear more, the mob stormed the Châtelet and other prisons, opening every cell and dungeon, releasing inmates so broken or emaciated that they had to be carried to the hospital wards of the Hôtel Dieu. All records of trials and convictions were destroyed in bonfires.
The most celebrated prisoner of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, was among the liberated. Mounted on a “little horse,” the former Provost was escorted to his home by the Maillotins, who begged him to become their leader. In every rising, the same need was felt and the same effort made to persuade or force someone of the governing class to take charge and give orders. Aubriot wanted no part of it. During the night, while the insurgents caroused “in eating, drinking and debauches,” he managed to leave Paris, and when in the morning they found him gone, a great cry was raised that the city was betrayed.
The bourgeois pressed for a solution, anxious that “the hot imprudence of the lowest people should not be turned to the detriment of men of substance.” Ready to subdue Paris by whatever means, the crown agreed to everything except pardon for those guilty of breaking into the Châtelet—but its intent was no more honest than Richard II’s. On receiving the royal letters confirming the agreement, the bourgeois leaders alertly noted that the language of the remittance was ambiguous and the document, instead of being sealed in green wax on silk, was sealed in red wax on parchment, denying it the quality of perpetuity.
Despite popular rage at this duplicity, the court was stiffening. Other towns where protest had erupted were found to have been acting not in concert but independently, thus subject to local suppression. Armed force was gathering at Vincennes and fear of punishment spreading in Paris. The court was able to force the city’s leaders to yield forty fomenters of the revolt, of whom fourteen were publicly executed to the great indignation of the populace. According to the Monk of St. Denis, others were secretly drowned in the river by royal order. Gaining security, the Dukes sent the King back to Rouen on March 29 to impose reprisals held in abeyance. In a miserable exhibition of ritual joy at the royal approach, the people, in festival clothes of blue and green, were lined up in organized plea for clemency, crying “Noël, Noël, Vive le Roi!” which did not suit the Duke of Burgundy. To induce the proper mood for heavy fines, he ordered his men-at-arms