$Unique_ID{how04470}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Third Estate Joins In The Government Of France}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Martin, Henri}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{king
pope
philip
france
kingdom
nobility
power
benefices
boniface
bull}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Third Estate Joins In The Government Of France
Author:      Martin, Henri
Translation: Leonard-Stuart, Charles

Third Estate Joins In The Government Of France

1302

     At the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the power of Philip
IV of France (surnamed the "Fair") was at its height, contentions arose
between him and Pope Boniface VIII over the taxation of the clergy, and the
right of nomination to vacant bishoprics and benefices within the dominions of
the French King.

     Affairs reached a crisis when Philip laid claim to the county of
Melgueil, which the Bishop of Maguelonne held in fief from the holy see.
Boniface provoked Philip by a chiding bull, and added to the provocation by
sending to the King, as negotiator in their differences, Bernard de Saisset,
whom the Pope, in spite of the King, had created Bishop of Pamiers.

     This tactless prelate made matters worse by an arrogant attitude, and
afterward spoke of the King, who received him in sombre silence, as "that
debaser of coinage, that proud and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare
at people without saying anything."

     Ignoring his ambassadorial privileges, Philip had him arrested and
imprisoned as a French subject, on a charge of treason, heresy, and blasphemy,
and sent his chancellor, Peter Flotte, and William de Nogaret, to the Pope, to
demand the prelate's degradation and deprivation of his see.

     The Pope, who meanwhile had launched his famous "Ausculta, fili," bull,
received Philip's ambassadors, but their interview was marked by a violent
scene: "My power!" exclaimed the Pope, "the spiritual power embraces and
includes the temporal power!"

     "So be it!" replied Flotte, "but your power is verbal; that of the King,
real."

     To deliberate on the remedies for the abuses of which he deemed the King
guilty, the Pope summoned all the superior clergy of France to an assembly at
Rome.

     Philip and his council resolved to fight the enemy with its own weapons,
to enlist public opinion on their side, and to shelter themselves behind a
great national manifestation; the three estates of France were convoked at
Notre Dame in Paris, the 10th of April, 1302, to take cognizance of the
differences between the King and the Pope.  For the first time since the
establishment of the kingdom of France, the town deputies were called to sit
in a body in a national assembly, alongside of prelates and barons; this great
event was the official acknowledgment of the middle class as the "Third
Estate," and attested that henceforth the villages, the towns, the communities
formed a collective entity, a political order.

     It is a singular thing that the first states-general was freely convoked
by the most despotic of the kings of the Middle Ages, and that he had the idea
to seek in them moral power and support.

     The attempt would seem foolhardy in a prince so little popular as Philip
the Fair; but Philip in reality risked nothing, and knew it; the feudality did
not possess sufficient union, the people did not have enough force to profit
on this occasion against the Crown.  Besides, the Pope was more unpopular than
the King, and had been so for a much longer time; the nobility, which, since
the reign of St. Louis, had coalesced to resist clerical jurisdiction, had not
changed in sentiment; as to the people, filled with the remembrance of St.
Louis, they loved the King still, better than the Pope, notwithstanding the
oppressions of Philip, and besides it was easy to foresee that the mayors,
consuls, aldermen, jurats or magistrates, who were to represent their cities
in the great assembly at Paris, dazzled with the unaccustomed role to which
they were called, and desirous to please the King in their personal interest
or in that of their towns, would be under the control of the adroit lawyers
who were prepared to work on their minds and to direct the debates.  The bull,
nevertheless, if its exact tenor had been known, might well have produced in
many respects a contrary effect to the wishes of of the King.  The reproaches
of Boniface touching the debasement of the coinage and the royal exactions,
reproaches which so irritated Philip, might have met with other sentiments
from the townsmen.  The chancellor, Peter Flotte, foresaw this; he distributed
among the public, instead of the original bull, a species of resume in which
he had assembled, in a few lines, in the crudest terms, the most exorbitant
pretensions of Boniface, at the same time suppressing everything which touched
on the troubles of the nation against the King.

     "Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip, King of the
French; fear God and observe his commandments.  We want you to know that you
are subject to us temporarily as well as spiritually; that the collation of
the benefices and the prebends - revenues attached to the canonical positions
- do not belong to you in any way; that if you have care of the vacant
benefices, it is to reserve their revenue for their successors; that if you
have misapplied any of these benefices, we declare that collation invalid and
revoke it, declaring as heretics all those who think otherwise.

     "Given in the Lateran in the month of December, etc."

     At the same time they caused to be circulated a pretended answer to the
pretended bull:

     "Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the French, to Boniface, who gives
out that he is sovereign pontiff, little or no salutations!  May your very
great Fatuity know that we are subject to no one as regards temporal power:
that the collation of vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by Royal
Right; that the incomes belong to us; that the collations made and to be made
by us are valid in the past and in the future, and that we will manfully
protect their possessors toward and against all.  Those who think otherwise we
take to be fools and insane."

     This brutal letter was not destined to be sent to its address, but to
abase the pontifical dignity, or at least the person of the Pope, in the eyes
of the French public.  The spirit of the people must have been greatly changed
if this end could be thus attained by a means which formerly would have drawn
universal indignation on the head of the sacrilegious monarch.

     The attack of Philip, on the contrary, was completely effectual.  The
prelates arrived at the states-general timid, irresolute, neutralized by the
difficulties of their position between the King and the Pope; the lords and
the townsmen hastened thither irritated against the bull, heated by the
violence of the royal answer.  The members of the assembly were influenced
each by the other according to their arrival; the pungent and wily eloquence
of Peter Flotte did the rest.  The chancellor, as the first of the great crown
officers and the king's chief justice, opened the states by a long harangue in
which, speaking in the name of Philip, he exposed with much force and
ingenuity the enterprises of the court of Rome and its wrongs toward the
kingdom and the Church.

     "The Pope confers the bishoprics and the rectories on strangers and
unknown individuals who never become residents.  The prelates no longer have
benefices to give to nobles whose ancestors founded the churches, and to other
lettered persons; from which results also that gifts are no longer given to
the churches.  The Pope imposes on the churches and benefices pensions,
subsidies, exactions of all kinds.  The bishops are kept from their ministry,
being obliged to go to the holy see to carry presents - always presents.  All
these abuses have done nothing but increase under the actual pontificate, and
increase every day - conditions that can no longer be tolerated.  That is why
I command you as your master and pray you as your friend to give me counsel
and help."

     The Chancellor added that the King had resolved, on his own initiative,
to remedy the encroachments that his officers had made on the rights of the
Church, and would have done so sooner had he not feared the appearance of
submitting to the menaces and orders of the Pope, who pretended to reduce to a
condition of vassalage the most noble kingdom of France, which had never been
raised but from God.  Peter Flotte dwelt especially on this latter argument,
and appealed in turn to the interests of the nobility and of the clergy, and
to national pride.  The fiery Count of Artois arose, and exclaimed that even
if the King submitted to the encroachments of the Pope, the nobility would not
suffer them, and that the gentry would never acknowledge any temporal superior
other than the King.  The nobility and the Third Estate confirmed these words
by their acclamations, and swore to sacrifice their properties and lives to
defend the temporal independence of the kingdom.  A Norman advocate, named
Dubosc, procurator of the commune of Coutances, accused the Pope, in writing,
of heresy for having wanted to despoil the King of the independence of the
crown which he held from God. The embarrassment of the clergy was extreme; the
members of the Church, fearing to be crushed in the crash between King and
Pope, asked time for deliberation; their declaration in the assembly then
being held, was insisted upon; already cries arose around them that whoever
did not subscribe to the oath would be held as an enemy of the State; they
acquiesced, satisfied apparently by an appearance of violence which would
serve them for an excuse at Rome.  They acknowledged themselves obliged, in
common with the other orders, to defend the rights of the King and of the
kingdom, whether they held estates from the King or not; then they prayed the
King to be allowed to go to the council convoked by the Pope; the King and the
barons declared themselves formally opposed.

     The three orders then separated, so as to write to the court at Rome each
its own side of the affair; the letters of the nobility and of the Third
Estate - which as may be imagined were all prepared in advance by the agents
of the King, and were only subscribed to and sealed by the assistants - were
addressed, not to the Pope, but to the college of cardinals.  The despatch of
the barons expresses rudely the tortuous and unreasonable enterprises of him
who, at present, is at the seat and government of the Church, and declares
that neither the nobility nor the universities nor the people require
correction or imposition of any trouble, whether by the authority of the Pope
or anyone else - unless it be from their sire, the King.  This letter is
signed, not only by the principal lords of the kingdom, but also by several
great barons of the empire.

     The epistle of the mayors, aldermen, jurats, consuls, universities,
communes, and communities of the towns of the kingdom of France has not been
preserved.  It is known only, by the answer that the cardinals made, that it
was conceived in the same spirit as the letter of the barons.  The letter of
the clergy is quite in another style: the clerks address their very holy
father and very holy sire, the Pope; expose to him the complaints of the King
and of the nobility; the necessity in which they find themselves engaged to
defend the King's rights, and the anger of the laity; the imminent rupture of
France with the Roman Church - and even of the people with the clergy in
general - and conjure the highest prudence of the Pope to conserve the ancient
union by revoking the convocation of the ecclesiastical council.

     The states-general were dissolved immediately after the unique seance
which had so well responded to the desires of the King.  The means employed to
attain this result were not entirely loyal, nor was public opinion altogether
free; it was but slightly enlightened on the grave debates that the
authorities affected to submit to it.  Nevertheless it was an important
matter, this call to the French nation, and it must be acknowledged that the
genius of France responded in proclaiming national independence, and in
repelling the intervention of the court of Rome in the internal politics of
the country.