Sometimes a specific historical event makes its name endure by applying it generically to other similar ones.
This is what happened, for example, with the Spanish guerrillas in the War of Independence, a word that today universally designates this type of combat, and what also happens in France, where the term jacquerie was used to designate the frequent peasant revolts that devastated the country during the Middle Ages and even in later centuries, and which had its origin in a violent episode that occurred in 1358:la Grande Jacquerie .
As can be deduced from the date, the context was the Hundred Years' War , that terrible conflict that devastated French soil due to the respective territorial claims of the Gallic king and that of England, and which often meant suffering a war within another. When something like this is combined with other elements such as a series of bad harvests and the scourge of the Black Death, the people who suffer the most, that is, the common people, usually exceed their limit of endurance and take up arms .
Given that, in the prevailing feudal system, this social stratum was made up mainly of peasants (who were given the derogatory name of Jacques Bonhomme , possibly because of their typical clothing, a check or jackets , from which the words jacket and cutaway are derived) and taking into account an exceptional combination of factors, that jacquerie had some particularly serious characteristics. A chronicler of the time, Jean Froissart , left a description of the events -albeit somewhat biased as it was related to the lords- and called the episode "the Great Tribulation" .
Everything developed in rural areas where the price of grain had plummeted:Ile-de-France, Picardy, Champagne, Artois and Normandy. Just two years before, the French army had suffered a catastrophic defeat in Poitiers and those places were plunged into misery and famine, also looted by the so-called routiers or free companies, which were bands of mercenaries, very fickle in their fidelity, who, when they did not have a contract, devastated all territory they passed through.
Due to the capture of King John II by the English, the government was unstable as the dauphin Carlos had to share power with the Estates General, led by the bourgeois merchant Etienne Marcel . John paid his ransom by promising four million scudi and the cession of the southwestern territories, traditionally linked to the English Plantagenet dynasty, but the Estates General refused to accept those conditions, so the threat of a new invasion by Edward III led Marcel to appoint Carlos de Navarra puppet regent.
Marcel had the support of the bourgeoisie of Paris and he managed to get the whole city on his side, so that the Dauphin was forced to besiege it and, allied with the nobility, move the court to Compiègne. In this way, to the conflict with England and Marcel's coup, a civil war was added. . The only thing missing was a revolution of the peasantry and this was produced by the Dauphin's decision to impose a heavy tax with which to pay for war operations.
The spark sprouted in the region of Beauvais , when four gentlemen members of a free company were killed by the peasants; The example spread like wildfire and a rosary of incidents was unleashed similar in more places. They were spontaneous , because they did not obey a predetermined plan nor was there any organization, but rather they responded to the action-reaction effect in the face of injustice and abuse, although there are those who believe the opposite, emphasizing the simultaneous emergence in several foci at the same time on May 28.
However, as expected, the tendency of those rebels was to unite to have more strength and thus they were forming larger and larger bands, going from a few dozen initial troops to hundreds and then thousands. Five thousand of them came together under the leadership of a charismatic boss, the rancher Guillaume Caillet , who made contact with Etienne Marcel and decided to ally with him.
Thus, that mass of indignant jacques , apparently supported by the artisan guilds and well-to-do peasants, advanced on Paris to break the siege, destroying all the properties of the nobility that they found in their path but respecting those of the Church, which made it clear who they considered enemies.
The Grand Jacquerie It was a brutal and violent movement, a sudden outburst of great intensity that, however, lacking organization, turned out to be short-lived, barely a couple of weeks. It crashed on June 9, 1358, when a thousand of its members tried to storm the Chateau de Meaux , Dauphin's residence, and his cavalry massacred those who deep down, no matter how aggressive they were, were nothing but poorly armed serfs lacking training for war.
The defeat invited to parley and, indeed, the next day Charles II offered Caillet to meet with him to try to reach an agreement. But it was a trap:the leader of the jacques he was detained, tortured and brutally executed, as befitted his low social status, while his men were massacred by English mercenaries hired ad hoc for the nobility.
The subsequent repression , hanging from town to town anyone suspected of having been part of the uprising, lasted two months and left a period of funeral peace for twenty years; at least in France, because the example jumped to other places Central Europe, the Italian peninsula and even England itself.