Jacquerie
The chronicle of Jean de Venette articulates the perceived problems between the nobility and the peasants, yet some historians, such as Samuel K. Cohn, see the Jacquerie revolts as a reaction to a combination of short- and long-term effects dating from as early as the grain crisis and famine of 1315.
In addition, as a result of the temporary lull in hostilities of the Hundred Years' War due to the French defeat at Poitiers, thousands of soldiers and mercenaries on both sides of the conflict found themselves "without commanders or wages".
Many of them responded by forming free companies, attacking both military and civilian targets such as castles and villages (often to ransom for a profit) and engaging in frequent acts of rape, looting and murder.
The uprisings began in a village of St. Leu near the Oise river, where a group of peasants met to discuss their perception that the nobles had abandoned the King at Poitiers.
Froissart's account portrays the rebels as mindless savages bent on destruction, which they wrought on over 150 noble houses and castles, murdering the families in horrific ways.
The bourgeoisie of Beauvais, Senlis, Paris, Amiens, and Meaux, sorely pressed by the court party, accepted the Jacquerie, and the urban underclass were sympathetic.
The Dauphin gained effective control of the realm only after the supposed surrender of the city of Paris after the murder of the leader of the Estates General Étienne Marcel, prevôt des marchands on 31 July 1358.
The revolt was suppressed by French nobles and gentry led by the Dauphin and Charles of Navarre, cousin, brother-in-law, and mortal enemy of the Regent, whose throne he was attempting to usurp.
[11] Historian Barbara Tuchman says: "Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantages of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents".
[3] The slanted but vivid account of Froissart can be balanced by the Regent's letter of general amnesty, a document that comments as severely on the nobles' reaction as on the peasants' rising and omits the atrocities detailed by Froissart: "it represents the men of the open country assembling spontaneously in various localities, in order to deliberate on the means of resisting the English, and suddenly, as with a mutual agreement, turning fiercely on the nobles".
In 1872 Louis Raymond de Vericour remarked to the Royal Historical Society: To this very day the word "Jacquerie" does not generally give rise to any other idea than that of a bloodthirsty, iniquitous, groundless revolt of a mass of savages.
