2016, Vol., No.34

Korean Review of French History 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.67

pISSN : 1229-702X
https://journal.kci.go.kr/krfh

While change in the French nobility in the late Middle Ages has widely been discussed in the context of general crisis of the medieval society, closer inquiries need to be made regarding its correlation with the Hundred Years’ War that was an aspect as well as a factor of the crisis. Above all, as military mobilization of the nobles by way of arrière-ban were frequent and the royal taxation was established, a combination of tax exemption and military service constituted an essential prerequisite for the nobles as a legal class. Prolonged war accelerated its polarization and structural realignment as well. In the face of crisis most of the nobles came to find a breakthrough by contracting an alliance with the princes who sought to construct respective ‘princely states’ living off expanded royal finance, and finally by serving the royal authority that emerged as the eventual winner overwhelming its entire rivals.

The purpose of this article is to examine concretely the transition from the feudal society to the political society around the defeat of the Battle of Crecy in 1346 and the assembly of the states in 1347. At the beginning of the 14th century, the state system operating around the war and the tax is considered limited to exceptional and necessary cases. So, the unity and the perpetuity presupposed by the state system could not get no stable legitimacy of members of the political society. In this context, with the beginning of the Hundred Years War, calling for the preparation of long-term, the government of Philip VI faced the severe challenge of assembly of the states. As taxation was justified only by the outbreak of war, the preparation before the outbreak of war was seen as unjust policy. Yet the successive defeats of France, especially the inability of the king and nobles revealed in the defeat of the Battle of Crécy provides members of political society a good reason for their new political movement. From the assembly of the states in 1347, they began to try to actively intervene in state government beyond the royal initiative. Specifically, this assembly shows great historical significance: in relation to taxation, it no longer insisted the refusal but the control. This phenomenon means that the feudal society turns into political society for good in France and that the interests of political society were concentrated the central scene around the capital Paris, disengaging the regionalist character. In the situation of a series of economic disasters and social crises, the Black Death, chronic war and the failure of life of people, the deprived of political right began demanding the right to Policy based on a political affect for a respublica in common.

‘The Transformation of War’, which has been made during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), reaches its culmination in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). Napoleonic era was a period in which military purposes were infused into foreign policies, the politics being overwhelmed by war efforts. Human and material resources in the rear have been mobilized to the war efforts, and the culture of war in full bloom was fueling social base for war. Napoleonic Wars to annihilate the enemy’s main force has caused tremendous casualties. With Napoleon, ‘god of the war’, the warfare reached at the level of ‘absoluten Krieg’, to borrow an expression from Carl von Clausewitz. Total war is often defined as a war involving the complete mobilization of a society’s resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy, without any distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In this sense, Napoleonic Wars merit attention as a beginning of modern Total War rather than as a mere succession of the French Revolutionary Wars. ‘True’ total war would have to await a new military technology and logistics resulted from Industrial Revolution. In a broad political and cultural context, however, total war avant la lettre exists in the Napoleonic Empire.