Charles VI of France

Charles was born in Paris on December 3, 1368, the eldest surviving son of King Charles V of France and Jeanne de Bourbon ^[1]. His father, remembered as Charles the Wise, had spent his reign rebuilding royal finances and clawing back territory lost to England in the early phases of the Hundred Years' War. The boy grew up in a court that valued books and administration: Charles V assembled a celebrated library in the Louvre and surrounded himself with capable ministers, an environment that shaped expectations for the heir ^[2].

His mother died in 1378, when Charles was nine. Two years later, on September 16, 1380, Charles V died at Beauté-sur-Marne, and the eleven-year-old prince became king of France ^[1]. He was crowned at Reims on November 4, 1380. Because he was a minor, real power passed to his four uncles: Louis, Duke of Anjou; John, Duke of Berry; Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; and Louis, Duke of Bourbon, his maternal uncle ^[3]. The arrangement proved costly. The uncles diverted royal revenue to their own ambitions, and the reimposition of taxes that Charles V had cancelled on his deathbed provoked urban revolts, including the Maillotins rising in Paris in 1382, when crowds armed with lead mallets attacked tax collectors ^[3].

The young king's first taste of war came early. In November 1382 he accompanied the royal army that crushed the rebellious Flemish militias at the battle of Roosebeke, a victory that strengthened the crown and the Burgundian interests of his uncle Philip ^[3]. Three years later, on July 17, 1385, Charles married Isabeau of Bavaria at Amiens, a match arranged with Wittelsbach connections in mind and one that would place Isabeau at the center of French politics for decades ^[4].

In 1388, aged nineteen, Charles dismissed his uncles from the royal council and recalled his father's old administrators, men the princes mocked as the Marmousets. For roughly four years these experienced officials pursued reform of taxation, justice, and the royal household, and the period is generally judged one of competent government ^[2]. Contemporaries called the affable young ruler Charles the Beloved, and the kingdom seemed set on a steadier course than the regency years had allowed ^[1].

That promise collapsed in a single afternoon. In August 1392, while leading an armed expedition through the forest near Le Mans against Pierre de Craon, who had attempted to murder the constable Olivier de Clisson, the king suddenly turned on his own escort. He killed several of his knights before being restrained, then fell into a stupor ^[1]. It was the first of dozens of psychotic episodes that would recur, with intervals of lucidity, for the remaining thirty years of his life. During later attacks he failed to recognize his wife and children, insisted he was not the king, and at times believed he was made of glass and would shatter if touched, a delusion recorded by chroniclers and much discussed by later historians of medicine ^[5].

The king's illness transformed French politics. Because medieval monarchy concentrated authority in the person of the ruler, and because Charles could neither govern consistently nor be deposed, power drained toward whoever controlled his council during his absences ^[2]. His uncles, above all Philip the Bold of Burgundy, promptly reversed the Marmouset reforms and resumed direction of the state. After Philip's death in 1404, the contest sharpened into a feud between his son John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, and the king's own brother Louis, Duke of Orléans, who was close to Queen Isabeau ^[3].

The rivalry turned murderous. On November 23, 1407, assassins hired by John the Fearless cut down Louis of Orléans in a Paris street ^[3]. The duke's partisans, led after 1410 by Count Bernard VII of Armagnac, father-in-law of the young Charles of Orléans, organized against Burgundy, and France slid into open civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians. Paris changed hands amid purges and massacres, including the Cabochien revolt of 1413, when Burgundian-aligned butchers and skinners briefly terrorized the capital ^[6].

Through all of this the king remained the formal source of legitimacy. Ordinances went out in his name whichever faction held him, and both sides claimed to be rescuing Charles from the other. Court life produced strange episodes of its own. At a masquerade in January 1393, later known as the Bal des Ardents, the king and several companions danced in costumes of linen and pitch that caught fire from a torch; four men burned to death, and Charles survived only because the young Duchess of Berry smothered the flames with her skirts ^[5].

England watched the French collapse with interest. In 1415 the young Henry V revived the Plantagenet claim to the French crown and landed in Normandy. After taking Harfleur he marched for Calais, and on October 25, 1415, at Agincourt, his outnumbered army destroyed a French force top-heavy with Armagnac nobility ^[7]. Charles VI was too ill to command; the defeat killed or captured much of the kingdom's military leadership, including the poet-duke Charles of Orléans, who spent the next quarter century in English custody ^[7].

Worse followed. Henry returned in 1417 and methodically conquered Normandy, taking Rouen in January 1419 after a starvation siege. Meanwhile the dauphin's Armagnac government and the Burgundians edged toward reconciliation, until a meeting on the bridge at Montereau on September 10, 1419, ended with Armagnac retainers hacking John the Fearless to death in the dauphin's presence ^[3]. The murder drove the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, into open alliance with England.

The result was the Treaty of Troyes, sealed on May 21, 1420. Under its terms Charles VI kept his crown for life, but Henry V married the king's daughter Catherine of Valois, became regent of France, and was recognized as heir to the French throne, while the dauphin Charles was repudiated as guilty of the Montereau murder and effectively disinherited ^[8]. The treaty split France in two: the north and Paris accepted the Anglo-Burgundian settlement, while the dauphin held the lands south of the Loire and refused to surrender his birthright ^[2].

Charles and Isabeau of Bavaria had twelve children, though several died young. The survivors shaped European politics for a generation: Isabella married King Richard II of England as a child; Michelle and Catherine married into the Burgundian and English ruling houses; and the youngest son, the future Charles VII, carried the Valois cause through its darkest years ^[4]. Three elder sons who held the title of dauphin, Louis of Guyenne and John of Touraine among them, died in adolescence, repeatedly reshuffling the succession during the civil war ^[4].

The king's relationship with Isabeau deteriorated under the strain of his illness. During his episodes he sometimes refused to see her, and from the mid 1390s a young woman named Odette de Champdivers attended him as a companion; she bore him a daughter, Marguerite, whom his successor later legitimized ^[5]. Isabeau, left to navigate factional politics, became a target of hostile propaganda in her own time and after, blamed unfairly by later writers for the Treaty of Troyes and for the kingdom's misfortunes, a portrait modern scholarship has done much to correct ^[4].

In his lucid intervals Charles could be gracious and was genuinely popular with ordinary Parisians, who continued to call him the Beloved even as chancery documents from enemies of the crown might have preferred otherwise. The affection was real: crowds mourned him openly at his death in a way they notably did not for the English regent who followed ^[6].

After Troyes the old king was a spectator in his own kingdom. Henry V and Philip the Good governed the occupied north in his name while the dauphin's administration at Bourges kept a rival France alive ^[2]. Then chance intervened. Henry V died of dysentery at Vincennes on August 31, 1422, aged about thirty-five, leaving an infant son, Henry VI, as heir to both crowns under the treaty ^[8].

Charles VI outlived his supplanter by less than two months. He died in Paris at the Hôtel Saint-Pol on October 21, 1422, at the age of fifty-three, and was buried at the abbey of Saint-Denis beside his ancestors ^[1]. At the funeral the English regent, John, Duke of Bedford, proclaimed the baby Henry VI king of France and England, while south of the Loire the nineteen-year-old dauphin took the title Charles VII ^[8].

The succession the treaty had tried to settle thus reopened immediately. Seven years later Joan of Arc led Charles VII to coronation at Reims, and by 1453 the Valois had expelled the English from all of France except Calais. The double monarchy created at Troyes barely outlasted the man whose signature, extracted during his illness, had made it possible ^[7].

Anyone asking who was Charles VI of France confronts a paradox: a king remembered less for what he did than for what his incapacity allowed to happen. His forty-two year reign, the longest of any medieval French king, bracketed the near destruction of the Valois monarchy, yet the institution survived him, partly because officials, courts, and towns had learned to function around an absent center ^[2]. Historians studying Charles VI of France facts have often treated the reign as a test case for how personal monarchy coped with a ruler who could neither rule nor be replaced.

His illness has attracted sustained medical speculation. Retrospective diagnoses have ranged from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to porphyria, though most careful scholars, including his modern biographer Françoise Autrand and the historian R. C. Famiglietti, stress that the surviving descriptions do not permit certainty ^[5]. The glass delusion attributed to him became a recognized phenomenon in early modern medical writing and still surfaces in histories of psychiatry ^[5].

Among Charles VI of France achievements, modest as the list is, contemporaries counted the reforming government of 1388 to 1392, patronage of artists and of the celebrated illuminated manuscripts produced for his court, and the founding tournament culture of the Court of Love of 1400. But any Charles VI of France biography ultimately turns on the larger inheritance: a civil war that scarred France for decades, a treaty that nearly ended the dynasty, and, through his daughter Catherine, an unexpected afterlife, since her second marriage to Owen Tudor made the mad king of France an ancestor of the Tudor monarchs of England ^[8].