Jacquerie

Overview

The Jacquerie is the peasant uprising that spreads north of Paris during France’s post-Poitiers collapse and turns military defeat into a wider crisis of social and noble authority.

Current Profile

The episode places the revolt alongside Parisian revolution, royal captivity, civil war, and free-company violence. It spreads through pockets including Amiens and Normandy rather than appearing as a single conventional front.

Charles the Bad suppresses it and temporarily wins noble support. Its role in the narrative is therefore double: it demonstrates how far order has broken down, and it becomes an opportunity for an elite rival to present himself as defender of the nobility.

Key Characteristics

• Peasant uprising north of Paris after Poitiers.
• Revolt spreading through multiple local pockets.
• Symptom of collapsing military and social authority.
• Threat that temporarily unifies nobles behind Charles the Bad.
• Crisis nested inside civil and international war.

Evidence

• Geography and spread: 321: Hundred Years’ War: A Storm of Swords (Part 4) locates the revolt north of Paris and in pockets including Amiens and Normandy.
• Political effect: 321: Hundred Years’ War: A Storm of Swords (Part 4) says Charles the Bad gains noble support by suppressing it.
• Systemic context: 321: Hundred Years’ War: A Storm of Swords (Part 4) places it beside Parisian disorder and free-company violence.

Qualifications

The source gives only a compressed narrative of the uprising. Causes, participants, chronology, violence, repression, and local variation require dedicated evidence before broader conclusions.

What Changed

• Created the Jacquerie as a social-order component of France’s post-Poitiers crisis.

Relationships

• Charles the Bad - suppressor who converts the revolt into temporary noble support.
• Charles V of France - Dauphin governing amid the uprising and wider disorder.
• Free Companies in the Hundred Years’ War - parallel coercive force worsening rural insecurity.
• Hundred Years’ War - conflict whose effects expand beyond armies and diplomacy.
• Battlefield Victory and Political Control - state-capacity problem revealed by uprising after royal defeat.