Table Of ContentWalled Towns and the Shaping
of France
From the Medieval to the Early
Modern Era
Michael Wolfe
WALLED TOWNS AND THE SHAPING OF FRANCE
Copyright © Michael Wolfe, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-60812-2
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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ISBN 978-1-349-37484-7 ISBN 978-0-230-10112-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230101128
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolfe, Michael.
Walled towns and the shaping of France : from the medieval to the
early modern era / Michael Wolfe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. City and town life—France—History. 2. City walls—Social
aspects—France—History. 3. Cities and towns—France—History.
4. Fortification—France—History. 5. Authority—Social aspects—
France—History. 6. France—Social life and customs. 7. France—
History—Medieval period, 987–1515. 8. France—History—16th century.
9. France—History—Bourbons, 1589–1789. I. Title.
DC33.2.W65 2009
944(cid:2).02—dc22 2009002650
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations iv
Preface v
Part I The Walls Go Up (900–1325)
1 Urban Legacies and Medieval Trends up to 1100 3
2 Lords and Towns (1100–1225) 19
3 Capetian Expansion and New Urbanism, 1225–1325 39
Part II The Walls Move Outward (1325–1600)
4 Bonnes Villes and the Hundred Years’ War 57
5 Royal Rulers and Bastioned Towns 75
6 Walled Towns during the Wars of Religion 97
Part III The Walls Come Down (1600–1750)
7 State Building and Urban Fortifications 123
8 Opening Towns, Closing Frontiers 147
Conclusion Palimpsests and Modern Trajectories 171
Notes 175
Select Bibliography 223
Index 251
Maps and Illustrations
Cover Henri IV before Amiens, 1597. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. G151474).
Maps
1.1 Walled towns in Roman Gaul. 4
2.1 France, 1150–1250. 26
3.1 Bonnes Villes and Bastides, 1300. 43
4.1 Hundred Years’ War. 59
6.1 Wars of Religion, 1561–1629. 101
8.1 France, 1650–1710. 152
Figures
1.1 Vestiges of the Gallo-Roman theater in Poitiers.
By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. M74188). 5
5.1 Villefranche. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. M73577). 83
6.1 Fortifications of La Rochelle, 1573. By permission of
the Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. 87C 131083). 106
7.1 V iews of Calais, Guigne, and Ardres by Joachim
Du Wiert, 1611. By permission of the Bibliothèque
Nationale (B.N. Vx23 2989). 124
7.2 Surrender of La Rochelle, 1628. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. 152878). 135
8.1 Tours in the late seventeenth century. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. M74008 B15). 160
Preface
T
he history of France can be read on the walls of its towns, even though most of
these walls no longer exist. Towns have played a decisive, yet changing set of roles
in the country’s history. This book focuses on these urban experiences, assess-
ing the ways in which social and political practices, military technologies, physical
geography, and shifting regional networks shaped the emergence of new forms of
public authority and civic life. Towns and territorial rulers, chief among them the
monarchy, together constituted the “state” understood as a set of mutual relation-
ships based on agreed upon rules and shared interests. These relationships became
embodied above all in the “wall,” an image at once both intensely physical and
deeply symbolic. This study presents a synthetic analysis based on an exhaustive
study of the vast secondary literature on French urbanism in general and hun-
dreds of individual towns. It begins with a review of medieval towns and traces
their ensuing evolution to the eighteenth century when they began to be released
from the confines of their walls. A dynamic new kind of modern urban commu-
nity began to take shape in advance of the revolutionary upheavals in politics and
industry after 1789. This long-term perspective offers a new interpretive framework
centered on urban fortifications, for how they were built, the contests to control
them, and how they shaped the lives of people both inside and outside them, all tell
us a great deal about the making of France.
The book has three parts. Part one, “The Walls Go Up (900–1325),” examines
the Gallo-Roman urban legacy and the rise of walled towns from the tenth cen-
tury to the onset of the Hundred Years’ War. Part two, “The Walls Move Outward
(1325–1600),” explores how that conflict, together with new forms of monarchical
state authority, gunpowder weapons, and new fortification design theories from
Italy, all shaped towns up through the Wars of Religion. Finally, part three, “The
Walls Come Down (1600–1750),” charts the impact that a now dominant royal
state had on urban forms and communities, the emergence of a royal fortification
service, new ways of envisioning urban communities, and attempts to spur town
economic life, all of which required an expanded perimeter of fortified places in
Vauban’s ceinture de fer while towns in the “interior” began to be opened up for
new modern forms and practices of civic life to emerge.
This study contends that the historical genesis of modern France was over the
last millennium a largely ongoing urban phenomenon. Networks of urban com-
munities, in relation first with feudatory powers and then the monarchy, gradually
defined from an ever widening regional ambit much of the country’s economic,
political, and cultural life. The distinction between “urban” and “royal” begins to
collapse as towns and the crown instead stood along a continuum of nascent public
forms and statist forces that—through conflict and accommodation—created so
much of the France we see today.
vi Preface
I wish to thank all the people and institutions whose generous support helped
me write this book. Both St. John’s University and Pennsylvania State University
provided me the generous time and resources necessary for research and writing.
The National Endowment for the Humanities gave me a summer grant years ago
that initiated this project. Another happy summer of research at the Newberry
Library, and repeated trips to the Bibliothèque Nationale and regional archives in
Amiens, Bourges, La Rochelle, Montauban, and Nîmes, as well as the Library of
Congress, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the Harlan Hatcher Graduate
Library at the University of Michigan, and the Huntingdon Library in San Marino,
California, all afforded me opportunities to delve into the rich documentary his-
tory of urban fortifications. Inter-loan librarians, especially the late Cathy Wagner
at Penn State, were tireless in tracking down all kinds of obscure French titles for
me on this town and that. And over the years, many colleagues and friends—you
know who you all are!—have read portions of this work or patiently listened to me
go on and on about my walls. My deep gratitude goes to you all. Finally, to my
family, who endured my long absences and the even longer time I spent sequestered
within the walls of my office, along with gratitude comes my love. I dedicate this
book to my lovely wife and best friend, Amy, with the promise that which Fate has
joined no walls will ever rend asunder.
Part I
The Walls Go Up (900–1325)
Chapter 1
Urban Legacies and Medieval
Trends up to 1100
Gallo-Roman and Early Medieval
Urban Legacies
The contradictory impulse to be apart from yet also connected to the outside
world shaped the first Neolithic fortified settlements in what became France five
thousand years ago. This ambivalence became more pronounced in the timbered
stockades around later Celtic villages, described first by Julius Caesar. Roman
military encampments laid out by priests with the intersecting lines of the cardo
and decumanus defined a central enclosed space yet pointed to the world at large.
These fortified sites evolved after the second century CE into walled towns known
as oppida.1 Situated on rivers for trade and defense, Gallo-Roman oppida began
as simple quadrilateral enclosures pierced by gated ways. The massive brick walls
and towers that later ringed them arose as Roman power weakened in the third
century CE.2
Over one hundred oppida existed across greater Gaul, along with smaller walled
places known as castrums (castra; see map 1.1). Later Germanic invaders often
maintained and even bolstered these fortified places.3 In the fifth century, Visigoths
transformed the Roman amphitheater in Nîmes into a little town by closing off the
entrances and using the stadium’s upper tiers as ramparts. Shops, churches, and
residences for some two thousand people eventually went up inside the arena. The
amphitheaters in Poitiers and Arles underwent similar alterations that lasted into
the nineteenth century (see figure 1.1). Roman temples sometimes became con-
verted into fortified redoubts known as castellums.4 Gallo-Roman fortifications
often disappeared because they served as stone quarries for later medieval building
projects.5 Traces of oppida abound in French towns today or in street names while
their distinctive roseate walls still stand in Le Mans and Valence.6
Late Antique walls fell into disrepair as towns shrank under Frankish rule
in the early Middle Ages. As a result, the Frankish nobility gradually assumed
more direct control of walled towns and fortified places. The Catholic Church
also played a pivotal role in shaping early urban enceintes to shield God’s peo-
ple. Thick-walled Romanesque churches, often built by monasteries, offered ref-
uge in towns as well as the countryside. Episcopal sees also established protective
zones in cathedral precincts. Church buildings provided a place to store food and
munitions as churchmen assumed local military authority. In 898, for example,
King Charles the Simple granted permission to the bishop of Noyon to rebuild the
4 Walled Towns and the Shaping of France
Map 1.1 Walled towns in Roman Gaul.
old fortifications of Tournai. Concessions of authority to local nobility and clergy
surged as Carolingian power waned in the ninth and tenth centuries.7
While Gallo-Roman brick enceintes persisted in many places, new proto-urban
defensive works after the ninth century were mainly wooden stockades similar to
the rudimentary moat and bailey structures found in the countryside. Historians
must rely on archaeology to understand these sites, which usually consisted of a
circular enceinte composed of deep ditches fronting earthen walls topped with
a wooden palisade. Vestiges of these defenses still subsist in some street plans.8
After 900, rising commercial activity along rivers and coastlines renewed interest in
building fortifications in burgs from the Seine basin north to the Scheldt estuary.
Viking raids also stimulated fortification construction in places that then evolved
into trading centers. While Gallo-Roman continuities held sway in some areas,
the seeds of a new, expanded urbanism took root after 900.9 Gallo-Roman walled
towns had developed primarily as political and military centers, whereas medieval
