Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [18]
But France could produce no Dante, which was probably decisive in the battle of tongues. Moreover, southern France was ravaged by endemic outbreaks of militant heresy and increasingly violent efforts to suppress them. From the 1330s it was the victim of periodic and devastating English invasions, in which Burgundy often joined, and from the 1420s onward the French crown was engaged in a long and costly effort to recover its lost provinces from English occupation. In the second half of the fifteenth century, France was acquiring the basis of its modern territorial composition, absorbing Gas-cony in 1453, Armagnac in 1473, Burgundy in 1477, Provence in 1481, Anjou in 1489 and Brittany in 1491. In the long run, this huge consolidation (followed by the annexation of Bourbon territory in 1527) was to make France the richest state in Europe by far. But at the time, the impact was absorbed by the consequences of Charles VIII’s decision, in 1494, to pursue his claim to the Kingdom of Naples by invading Italy. This incursion, catastrophic for Italy, became a source of weakness for France too, for it was repeated by Charles’s successors Louis XII and François I at great cost and to little effect, culminating in François’s catastrophic defeat and capture at the Battle of Pavia (1525).
During the long decades of political and military preoccupations France was not, naturally, immune to the new Renaissance spirit. On the contrary: it was used to put a classical gloss on French expansionism. The French court was crowded with clever Italians, exiles from Florence and the papal court and from the factional fighting in Genoa and Milan, egging the Valois kings on in the hope that a French conquest of Italy would reverse their own fallen fortunes. The heroic shades of antiquity were invoked by French propagandists. Charles and Louis were compared to Hannibal, crossing the Alps. François was presented as conducting a dialogue with Julius Caesar (an Italian who had reversed the conquest by invading Gaul). This work was accompanied by Caesar’s Commentaries, in a version exquisitely illuminated by Albert Pigghe and Godefroy le Batave, which must rank as one of the finest of all Renaissance manuscripts and is among the great treasures of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The invasions were also celebrated in medallions, enamels, statues, triumphal arches and prints, all in classical mode and often made with the help of Italian craftsmen. But the great French Renaissance writer was slow to appear. François Villon (1431–65?), the only outstanding fifteenth-century French poet, was curiously untouched by the Renaissance, and in the mere three thousand lines of his verses that have survived it is hard to find traces of the new spirit—he is the Middle Ages in all their brutal magnificence.
However, in the long run the Renaissance struck France with shattering force. Charles VIII returned from Italy with a score of expert workmen, but it was François I who embraced the new culture enthusiastically on behalf of his country. He was employing Leonardo da Vinci in France as early as 1516, and he likewise brought over artists of the stature of Primaticcio and Rosso Fiorentino. These men worked alongside French artists like Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin to form the École de Fontainebleau, the first major Renaissance artistic center outside Italy. François carried through, with Italian assistance and inspiration, what is probably the largest program of châteaux or palace building in history, mainly in the Loire Valley.
Equally important was the French passion for Renaissance