Armagnacs vs Burgundians: France’s Other Civil War

On a cold November night in 1407, the king’s brother rode home through the dark streets of Paris. Louis, Duke of Orléans, had left Queen Isabeau’s apartments and was heading back to his own lodgings when armed men rushed his escort. They hacked him from his horse, cut off his hand as he tried to shield himself, and left him bleeding in the gutter.

Within days, everyone in France knew who had ordered it. John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, did not even bother to deny it. He claimed he had killed a tyrant to save the kingdom.

That murder lit the fuse on a civil war inside France that lasted from 1407 to 1435. The Armagnac–Burgundian conflict was a fight over the regency of a kingdom whose king had gone mad. It split cities, families, and the royal court, and it gave England its best chance in a century to conquer France.

The Armagnac–Burgundian civil war was a power struggle between two factions of the French nobility during the reign of Charles VI. It turned a long, grinding conflict with England into a three‑sided war and helped produce the disaster at Agincourt and the Treaty of Troyes. To understand why France nearly collapsed in the early 1400s, you have to start with this fratricidal feud.

Why did France split into Armagnac and Burgundian factions?

The root problem was simple and terrifying: the king of France could not rule.

Charles VI, who had come to the throne in 1380 as a child, suffered his first major psychotic episode in 1392. He attacked his own companions in a fit of madness during a campaign, killing several men. After that, his mental health never really recovered. He had long stretches when he could not recognize his wife or children, forgot he was king, or fell into catatonic states.

Medieval France had no clear legal script for a long-term, intermittently incapacitated king. So power pooled where it always did in such moments: among his closest male relatives and the queen.

Two men mattered most. Louis, Duke of Orléans, the king’s younger brother, and Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, the king’s uncle. Philip had been a leading figure in government since Charles’s minority. He was rich, cautious, and politically experienced. Louis was younger, ambitious, and resented being kept in the shade.

When Philip died in 1404, his son John the Fearless inherited both the Burgundian lands and his father’s place at court. John was not cautious. He was bold, aggressive, and deeply conscious that his family had long carried much of the burden of French politics and war.

By then, Louis of Orléans had become the lightning rod for discontent. He was accused of corruption, of squeezing taxes out of the kingdom, of having an affair with Queen Isabeau. Some of that was propaganda, some of it was probably true. In any case, he was the man people blamed when the royal government demanded more money.

So when John of Burgundy had Louis murdered in 1407, he was not just removing a rival. He was making a bid to control the regency during Charles VI’s bouts of madness. The question “who rules when the king cannot?” had been answered with an axe in a Paris alley.

That assassination forced every noble, city, and royal officer in France to choose a side. The feud over regency turned into a civil war. That is how a medical crisis in the royal household fractured the entire kingdom.

Who were the Armagnacs and Burgundians really fighting for?

After Louis’s murder, his widow and children needed protection and a political patron. They found one in Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, a powerful southern noble whose daughter married Louis’s son, Charles of Orléans.

From around 1410, “Armagnac” became shorthand for the anti‑Burgundian faction. It was less a coherent party and more a loose coalition: the Orléans family, the Armagnac clan, many southern nobles, and a cluster of royal officers and lawyers who feared Burgundian dominance.

On the other side were the Burgundians, centered on John the Fearless and his vast territories in eastern France and the Low Countries. Burgundy controlled rich cities like Dijon, Ghent, and Bruges. Its dukes had their own armies, their own diplomats, and their own fiscal base. In many ways, they were quasi‑sovereign princes inside the kingdom of France.

Both sides claimed to be loyal to Charles VI. Both claimed to act in the king’s name. The real fight was over who would “guide” the monarch and control royal policy, finances, and offices during his episodes of insanity.

There was also a social and urban edge to the split. In Paris, the powerful guild of butchers and parts of the urban population leaned Burgundian, attracted by John’s populist rhetoric against corrupt royal favorites. The Armagnacs were often seen as the party of court insiders and southern aristocrats.

The names can mislead modern readers. “Armagnac” did not mean only men from Gascony, and “Burgundian” did not mean every subject of the duke. These were political brands, not ethnic blocs. But they mattered deeply. Men killed, looted, and risked their lives under those labels.

By turning a family feud into named factions, the murder of 1407 hardened temporary alliances into something like parties. That made compromise harder and prolonged the war.

How did the civil war turn Paris into a battlefield?

The first open fighting between Armagnacs and Burgundians flared around 1410–1412. Each side raised armies, hired mercenaries, and tried to seize strategic towns. France, already strained by the long conflict with England, now had French troops burning French villages.

Paris was the prize. Whoever held the capital could claim to speak for the king. The city’s politics were volatile. Guilds, university masters, and urban notables all had their own agendas. John the Fearless played to that audience, presenting himself as the defender of the “good people of Paris” against rapacious courtiers.

In 1413, a violent urban movement known as the Cabochien revolt, named after a radical butcher, broke out in Paris with Burgundian backing. Reformers pushed for sweeping changes: purges of officials, new ordinances to control corruption, and a larger role for the Estates General.

The reforms were real, but so was the bloodshed. Enemies were dragged from their homes, imprisoned, sometimes killed without trial. The chaos frightened moderate Parisians and alienated parts of the nobility. John the Fearless lost control of the movement he had helped unleash.

By 1414, the Armagnacs had regained influence in Paris. The queen and the royal council swung away from Burgundy. John was forced out of the city. The “Armagnac party” now controlled the capital and much of the royal administration.

Armagnac dominance in Paris meant that when the English king Henry V looked across the Channel, he saw a divided enemy with one faction in power and another nursing grievances. The struggle for Paris had not just wrecked the city’s politics. It had advertised France’s weakness to its oldest enemy.

How did English intervention turn a feud into a catastrophe?

Henry V came to the English throne in 1413 with a clear goal: revive English fortunes in the Hundred Years’ War. He knew France was split. He intended to use that.

In 1415 he invaded Normandy. The Armagnac‑dominated royal government tried to respond, but its forces were scattered and its commanders divided. The result was the battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415.

At Agincourt, a smaller English army, anchored by longbowmen, smashed a much larger French force. Thousands of French knights and nobles died or were captured. Among the captives was Charles of Orléans, the young head of the Orléans family and a key Armagnac figure. He would spend decades in English captivity.

Agincourt was not just a military defeat. It decapitated parts of the French aristocracy and deepened factional suspicion. Each side accused the other of treachery or incompetence. Instead of uniting against the invader, Armagnacs and Burgundians doubled down on their feud.

Things got worse in 1417 when Henry V launched a second, more systematic invasion aimed at conquering Normandy. While English forces besieged French towns, the civil war flared again.

In 1418, Burgundian supporters in Paris opened the gates to John the Fearless’s men. The city exploded in violence. Armagnac leaders were hunted down and killed. The Count of Armagnac himself, Bernard VII, was seized and murdered by a Parisian mob. His head was paraded on a pike.

Queen Isabeau now aligned herself with the Burgundians. The Armagnac faction, shattered in Paris, rallied around the Dauphin Charles, the king’s son, who fled south. France now had two power centers: a Burgundian‑English‑leaning regime in Paris and an Armagnac court in the Loire valley.

English intervention did not just exploit French divisions. It deepened them. Every English victory shifted the balance between Armagnac and Burgundian, and every factional massacre made a negotiated peace harder just when France needed unity most.

Why did Burgundy ally with England in 1420?

The most shocking twist came in 1419. With English armies tightening their grip on Normandy, some French nobles tried to end the feud between Armagnac and Burgundian. The Dauphin Charles and John the Fearless agreed to meet on a bridge at Montereau in September.

The meeting was supposed to be a step toward reconciliation. Instead, it turned into another murder. During the encounter, men in the Dauphin’s entourage attacked John the Fearless and killed him on the bridge.

Whether Charles directly ordered the killing is still debated by historians. What matters is how it looked. To the Burgundian camp, the Dauphin had lured their duke into a trap under a safe‑conduct and butchered him. The new duke, Philip the Good, was young, enraged, and determined to avenge his father.

That rage opened the door for Henry V. In 1420, Burgundy and England signed the Treaty of Troyes with Queen Isabeau and the mentally ill Charles VI. The treaty did three extraordinary things:

First, it disinherited the Dauphin Charles. Second, it recognized Henry V of England as heir to the French throne. Third, it arranged for Henry to marry Charles VI’s daughter, Catherine of Valois.

In theory, when Charles VI died, Henry V would inherit France. In practice, Henry died in 1422, a few months before Charles VI, leaving an infant son, Henry VI. But the political map was set. The English king, backed by Burgundy, claimed to be the legitimate king of France. The Dauphin Charles, backed by Armagnac loyalists, claimed the same.

The Burgundian alliance with England internationalized the French civil war. What had begun as a fight over regency now determined who would wear the crown itself. That raised the stakes so high that compromise looked like treason to both sides.

How did the civil war finally end with the Treaty of Arras?

Through the 1420s, the war ground on. English and Burgundian forces controlled Paris and much of northern France. The Dauphin’s court held the south and center. Many French towns tried to survive by switching sides when necessary or by cutting local deals.

In 1429, a new figure appeared: Joan of Arc. Claiming divine guidance, she convinced the Dauphin to let her accompany a relief force to Orléans, a key Armagnac stronghold under English siege. The lifting of the siege and a string of victories along the Loire boosted French morale.

That summer, Joan escorted the Dauphin to Reims, where he was crowned King Charles VII. The coronation mattered. It gave the Armagnac claimant the traditional sacramental legitimacy that the Treaty of Troyes had tried to deny him.

Even so, the English and Burgundians still held Paris and much of the north. Joan was captured in 1430 and executed in 1431, with Burgundian involvement in her handover to the English. The war did not end with her death, but her story shifted perceptions. The idea of a divinely favored French king fighting foreign occupiers began to cut across old factional lines.

By the early 1430s, Philip the Good of Burgundy had reasons to rethink his alliance with England. The English crown was weak, ruled by regents for the child Henry VI. Burgundy’s own interests in the Low Countries and eastern France did not always align with English aims. Trade with French cities mattered to Burgundian merchants. Endless war was bad for business.

Charles VII, for his part, had matured. He had purged some of the more violent Armagnac hardliners and surrounded himself with more pragmatic advisors. Both sides had been fighting, raiding, and taxing for decades. War weariness was real.

Negotiations led to the Treaty of Arras in 1435. Under its terms, Charles VII and Philip the Good made peace. Charles formally apologized for the murder of John the Fearless at Montereau and agreed to various concessions, including territorial and financial advantages for Burgundy.

In return, Burgundy recognized Charles VII as the legitimate king of France and broke with England. Within months, Paris returned to royal control. The Armagnac–Burgundian civil war, in the strict sense, was over.

The Treaty of Arras mattered because it reunited most of France under one king and isolated the English. Without Burgundian support, England could not hold its conquests indefinitely. The end of the civil war made the eventual French reconquest of Normandy and Gascony possible.

What did this civil war change in France and the Hundred Years’ War?

By 1435, France was scarred. Whole regions had been ravaged repeatedly. The civil war years of 1410–1412, 1413–1414, and 1417–1420 had seen tens of thousands of deaths, mass plunder, and the breakdown of basic order.

One long‑term effect was the rise of more centralized royal power. Charles VII, learning from the chaos, began to build a more permanent royal army and more regular taxation in the 1440s. The memory of unpaid mercenaries turning into roaming bands of brigands during the civil war made many elites accept stronger royal control in exchange for security.

The feud also reshaped the map of power inside France. The Burgundian state continued as a semi‑independent power for decades, but its decision to break with England and reconcile with the Valois crown tied its fate more closely to French politics. When the Valois dukes of Burgundy died out later in the century, their lands were contested between France and the Habsburgs, a struggle that would define early modern European politics.

In terms of the Hundred Years’ War, the Armagnac–Burgundian conflict explains why England came so close to winning. Without French civil war, Henry V’s victories would have been harder to achieve and far harder to exploit. The Treaty of Troyes, which nearly erased the Dauphin’s claim, was only possible because one French faction hated another more than it feared foreign conquest.

The war also left deep cultural memories. The word “Armagnac” would later be used as a slur in Burgundian territories, and vice versa. Chronicles from the time are full of laments about “brother against brother” and “Frenchman against Frenchman.” For later French writers, the period became a cautionary tale about the dangers of factionalism.

Most of all, the civil war shows that the Hundred Years’ War was not simply France versus England. It was also French versus French, with foreign powers exploiting internal fractures. That mix of dynastic crisis, mental illness at the top, factional hatred, and outside intervention nearly destroyed the French monarchy. The fact that it did not owes a lot to the moment in 1435 when two old enemies, Armagnac and Burgundian, finally decided that fighting each other was worse than facing the English together.