The first failures in the One hundred Year old war tarnish the prestige of French monarchy deeply, at the same time as that of the knighthood. The defeats prepare certainly a questioning of the strategy and armies, but also of a whole social organization based on the military aristocracy.

In a humiliated kingdom, disorientated, deprived of sovereign (Jean II the Good is prisoner in England), subjected to the ambitions of Charles de Navarre and in the grip of popular revolts, the Étienne Marcel clothier, become provost of the merchants in 1355, is made the spokesperson convinced of reforming ideas. The movement of the provost failed well to succeed when the general states, at this meeting in Paris in 1357, sought to establish a parliamentary monarchy. But the middle-class loyal supporter made assassinate Étienne Marcel on on July 31st, 1358.

Curiously could one say, in the European campaigns, the country condition improves rather at the beginning of the XIV ^E century. Admittedly, serfdom still prevails, more strongly in England and Central Europe. But much the rural ones benefit from the rise of the cereal products of 1317-1318. Those which survived the plague benefit from the low price of the deserted ground; many peasants widen their soils and expensive rent their labor force to an often ruined nobility. Indeed, the devaluations worsen the fall of the income drawn from the feudal revenues, and, for lack of labor, the reserves hardly produce. The war, which represents heavy loads, constrained with the prolonged abandonment of the field.

Everywhere in Europe, campaigns and cities are gained by outbursts of violence. Expression of an angry lassitude, these movements are deprived of social program and policy, although they are, in fact, antifiscaux and antiseigneuriaux.

In the campaigns, the military defeats, the carelessness of the lords absent, plunderings and the destruction, the increase in the royal and seigniorial taxation cause abrupt protests, not so much poorer, but especially of new enriched, which fear to see melting their asset. The best agricultural soils are touched (Beauvaisis, Île-de-France, basin of London). These revolts generally take the aspect of “fears” spontaneous, violent ones, and cruelly repressed.

With this kind of revolt corresponds, undoubtedly, that of the maritime Flanders carried out by Zannequin (1323-1327). Partially helped by the tisserands, it is crushed by Philippe VI of France.

The “revolt of the workers” in England (1381) is the expression of the rural masses shouting their misery as much as their refusal of the poll tax imposed by the government in 1380. Revolted, directed by Wat Tyler, manage to enter London at the summer 1381. But the assassination of Tyler gives the signal of repression, and the concessions granted a little before by Richard II are immediately forgotten.

The Scandinavian aristocracies face similar revolutionary spasms, so much in Sweden (1434) that in Norway (1438) and that in Denmark (1441). The country furies agitate also Aragon as from 1409 and Catalonia in 1462.

Downtown, the Parisian jacquerie of 1358 is primarily antinobiliaire. To try to seize the power, Étienne Marcel would not have, it seems, not scorned the support of the insurrectionists.

The degradation of the foremen reports is at the origin of revolts called “emotions”. They are not new: the XII ^E and XIII ^E century had already known the many ones, revolt of the tisserands of Troyes into 1175 with the riots of Pontoise (1267) and Layered branches (1279), before those of Douai and Ypres (1294-1305).

The employers' elite wants to ensure its monopoly and its supremacy on the apprentices as on more specialized servants and companions. It subjects the access to the control to more demanding conditions: the import duty is increased and the increased difficulty of the masterpiece. These measurements block the trades, because a good amount of employees are consequently maintained under precarious conditions, without much hope of promotion.

The paroxysm of the protest movement is at the end of the XIV ^E century; it takes the aspect of strikes, sometimes accompanied by breaking of machines as in Rouen in 1381-1382. The tumult of Ciompi with Florence in 1378 is the expression of a discomfort as much political than social, just like the Parisian movement of the maillotins, which openly blames the party of the king and his regents (1382). One needs the royal army to crush in Rozebeke, in 1382, the tisserands Flemish pro-English revolted against France.

As a whole, the workmen hardly benefitted from these revolts. But much more still than in the peasants, they supported a solidarity whose consequences will fall under a remote future, vis-a-vis the traders and with the owners who preserve the economic and political power cities.