‘Roi de justice’ and ‘père des armes’: Military justice and royal pardon in fifteenth and sixteenth-Century France

Verreycken, Quentin
(2023) International Military Justice Forum 2023 — Location: Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (8.November.2023)

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Between the end of the Hundred Years’ War and that of the Italian Wars, the king of France undertook an in-depth reform of his military institutions, which included the establishment of standing armies, but also the strengthening of military justice, in order to reinforce military discipline and put an end to the abuses committed by soldiers on the population. Yet, despite the rise of judicial coercion against combatants, the Crown continued to grant dozens of letters of pardon to its soldiers each year, thus allowing them to escape the rigor of military justice. To understand this paradox, this contribution will examine how the royal powers to exercise justice and wage war articulated with each other through the use of pardon in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France. The study of the letters granted to soldiers reveals that the power to pardon reflected the Crown’s pragmatic approach of political and military imperatives, in order to compensate the logistical deficiencies of a burgeoning absolutist State. The content of these letters also shows the special relationship between the king and his armies, as military service took on the value of a contract offering the soldiers a royal pardon as a reward for their loyalty. In the end, the Crown’s extensive use of royal pardon towards its armies illustrates the fragile balance between the military and peacemaking functions of the monarchical ministry or, in other words, between a rigorous exercise of justice to maintain public order and a circumstantial application of forgiveness to respond to the vagaries of war and the military apparatus. This contribution will ultimately adopt an historical approach from below by observing, through the case of pardon letters granted to military offenders, the tensions in the construction and the exercise of an effective military justice system in France at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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Verreycken, Q. (2023). ‘Roi de justice’ and ‘père des armes’: Military justice and royal pardon in fifteenth and sixteenth-Century France. International Military Justice Forum 2023, Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/26680