The Duke of Orléans’ hand still held the bridle when an armed troop surrounded him in the Rue Barbette. The attack took place toward half-past seven in the evening. In that year of 1407, he had in his retinue only two squires mounted upon the same horse, a page, and a few valets walking ahead with torches. The murder did not extinguish the bitter rivalry between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy; rather, it invested it with a new character—that of a cycle of blood vengeance, concerning which the chronicles themselves fail to agree upon the ultimate culpability.
For several years, these two mighty houses had vied for dominion over the kingdom. The chronicle of Champagnac relates that John, Duke of Burgundy, known as John the Fearless, incited the populace to clamor against the royal taxes, thereby securing a formidable following within Paris. The Duke of Orléans, for his part, levied troops. Yet at the very moment when the two rivals appeared on the verge of open war, an apparent reconciliation was struck. The chronicler portrays this accord as purely feigned, attributing to each prince the secret intent to betray the other; yet nothing in the original text allows us to read their hidden thoughts. It is safer to hold to the outward actions he records: the two lords exchanged public marks of friendship, shared the same bed, took the sacrament together, drank from the same chalice, and swore an oath of brotherhood in arms.
Shortly thereafter, in the Rue Barbette, the Duke of Orléans was ambushed. Eighteen armed men fell upon him; Raoul d’Ocquetonville, a Norman gentleman placed at their head, is said to have struck the opening blows. He severed the hand holding the reins, then struck the Duke across the head. The young page, Jacob de Merre, threw himself across his master’s body to shield him, and was slain in turn. The torch-bearing valets could do nothing to arrest the assault. The assassins set fire to a nearby house behind them to cover their flight in the ensuing confusion.
The chronicler adds a detail which judicial prudence compels us to treat as mere rumor. A man is said to have emerged from an adjoining house, his features concealed beneath his hood, and delivered the final blow with a heavy mace. The whisper spread that this hooded assailant was none other than the Duke of Burgundy himself. The source provides no legal proof for this grave accusation, nor does it detail any formal inquest that might have substantiated it. It designates the assailants, however, as John’s retainers, and recounts that on the morrow John the Fearless attended the obsequies, feigning tears over the prince he had allegedly caused to be butchered.
When the widow and the son of the late Duke of Orléans demanded justice, and an official inquest appeared imminent, John the Fearless fled into Flanders. He soon returned at the head of nearly a thousand armed followers and, according to the narrative, boldly transformed his crime into a political trophy. The Chamber of Peers summoned him before the Great Marble Table. He appeared in full armor, surrounded by his men-at-arms, and openly claimed the assassination, portraying it as the lawful elimination of a tyrant who had brought the realm to ruin and enfeebled the crown.
His apologist, the Franciscan friar Jean Petit, undertook to justify the deed by invoking scriptural examples of tyrannicide. Champagnac roundly condemns this reasoning, reproaching the friar for elevating to a general rule acts that holy scripture merely records without enjoining. The Parisian populace, however, received the harangue with acclamation and carried John the Fearless through the streets in triumph. Thus the hearing did not reduce the deed to a question of law; instead, it laid bare the naked confrontation between two factions, each prepared to sanction political murder in the name of the public good.
The civil strife that ensued pitted the Burgundians against the Armagnacs—the name assumed by the party of the Count of Armagnac, father-in-law to the new Duke of Orléans. The chronicler notes that the conflict raged for seven years, the dominant faction systematically sending its adversaries to the gibbet, having them assassinated, or casting them into the flames. The butchers of Paris, armed and organized by John the Fearless, played a prominent role in these outrages. Yet the feud was not confined to armies in the field or state trials of great captains: it infected the parishes and neighborhoods, where the mere denunciation of a neighbor as a partisan was sufficient to cause their arrest and summary execution.
In 1418, John the Fearless made himself master of Paris, of the King’s person, and of the government. His followers, reinforced by mobs of butchers and flayers, laid siege to houses reputed to harbor Armagnacs, dragging the inhabitants off to prison or to the scaffold. According to the chronicle, royal partisans were hurled from the battlements onto waiting spears or drowned in the Seine. Common brigands mingled with the factions to pursue their own rapine under the guise of zeal. Champagnac further records mutilations and outrages committed against women; we retain here only the essential judicial reality: the capture of the city inaugurated an era of merciless retribution against individuals singled out solely by their political allegiance, without the pretense of a lawful trial.
The portrait of the court drawn by Champagnac is no less damning. He depicts Charles VI as bereft of reason, neglected to the point of wanting for clean linen and sustenance, while the realm groaned under warfare and famine. He fiercely accuses the Queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, of shifting her intrigues between the rival dukes; yet these charges, particularly those touching upon her private conduct, partake of the chronicler’s partisan polemic and cannot be accepted as proven facts. He relates that on one occasion, in a paroxysm of frenzy, the King caused a gentleman discovered in the Queen’s chambers to be seized, sewn into a leather sack, and cast into the river. This lurid episode, however, is supported by no documentary evidence in the text.
In a kingdom where the sovereign could no longer mediate between the factions, the ascendancy of John the Fearless appeared absolute. Yet during an earlier entry of the Burgundians into Paris, Tanneguy du Châtel, a loyal servant of the Dauphin, had saved the heir to the throne by wrapping him in his cloak and conveying him safely to Melun. Later, the Duke of Burgundy expressed a desire to meet the young Dauphin—the future Charles VII—to negotiate a pacification. The chronicle does not decide whether weariness, true repentance, or sheer dissimulation prompted this overture.
In 1419, the interview was appointed to take place upon the bridge of Montereau, where a wooden barrier and pavilion had been erected to receive the two princes. John the Fearless hesitated, but ultimately advanced with ten knights, in accordance with the terms agreed upon. There he was surrounded and struck down by armed men. The recorded testimonies diverge as to where the responsibility lay. Following Voltaire’s account, Tanneguy du Châtel delivered the fatal blow before the very eyes of the Dauphin. Other chroniclers directly accused Prince Charles of having commanded the slaughter. The archival record supplies no decisive proof that would elevate either tradition to absolute certainty.
Philip, the son and heir of John the Fearless, demanded vengeance for his father. The Parlement summoned the Dauphin before the Great Marble Table and condemned him to death in absentia, declaring all Frenchmen absolved from their oaths of fealty toward him. Champagnac recalls that Charles ultimately recovered his crown through the intervention of Joan of Arc and expelled the English from the realm. He also cites those historians who held the Dauphin entirely blameless, even regarding the deed itself, attributing the killing to the unquenched hatred of the late Duke of Orléans’ retainers and to the reckless imprudence of John the Fearless.
The first death had found its justification in the unbridled power of its instigator; the second, in an accusation that neither the trial in contumacy nor subsequent histories have managed to resolve. Between these two butcheries, street murder was transformed into an instrument of state policy, and subsequently into the pretext for a reciprocal condemnation. It is with this perpetual cycle of accusation, far more than with any definitive verdict upon the masterminds of Montereau, that the chronicle leaves the reader confronted.