. Potential for the resort to force of arms characterized 15th-century French politics. Great magnates and princes of the blood regularly assembled coalitions of lesser men anxiously seeking patronage and protection. Those who openly challenged royal authority in 1439, 1465, and 1488 typically cloaked their rebellion in a demand for “reform” but were motivated less by ideology than self-interest. Wishing to dominate rather than resist the monarchy, such rebels demanded a role in crown governance and access to crown resources.
The Praguerie, named in memory of the Hussite revolt, occurred when peers acted to restrain Charles VII, who had been emboldened by the Treaty of Arras and his recent recapture of Paris. At the Estates General of 1439, Charles had threatened princely autonomy by outlawing private armed forces. The duke of Bourbon and others seduced the youthful dauphin, Louis, into joining them in open revolt. Skirmishes in Poitou, Auvergne, and the Bourbonnais restored crown authority by June 1440, but the price of peace was the delay of military reform as well as the provision of pensions and seats in the royal council for many of the rebels.
In 1465, peers again united in an inaptly named Ligue du Bien Publique to restrain a monarch whose reach exceeded his grasp. Nominally led by Louis XI’s brother, Charles of France, the League was dominated by the dukes of Bourbon and of Brittany and by Charles the Bold, then count of Charolais. Louis’s army restored his authority in the Bourbonnais and succeeded in holding Paris after the indecisive Battle of Montlhéry (July 16, 1465). Compelled to compromise nonetheless, Louis, in the treaties of Conflans and Saint-Maur, promised to restore the pensions and positions of many he had injudiciously ruined upon his accession to the throne as well as to grant his brother the apanage of Normandy and to reconcile himself to the dukes of Brittany and Burgundy.
As late as 1488, a similar revolt occurred, in the so-called Guerre Folle, when the dukes of Brittany and of Orléans challenged the regency of Anne of Beaujeu. The subsequent attachment of Brittany to the royal domain, however, ended the era of armed defiance of royal authority by eliminating the last great independent principality. Henceforth, rebels, such as the duke of Bourbon in 1525, would be viewed not as disobedient vassals but as traitors deserving exile or execution rather than reconciliation.
