And to Hell with Burgundy

By Charles Elliott

LOUIS XI, THE UNIVERSAL SPIDER by Paul Murray Kendall. 464 pages. Norton. $10.

In 1429, when Louis was five years old, the fortunes of his father King Charles VII fell so low that a cordwainer refused to sell him a pair of shoes on credit. The English were besieging Orleans. French nobles in Brittany, Armagnac and Foix had made a separate peace with the invader. The proud Duke of Burgundy, in league with England, gazed hungrily from his own secure domains toward the wreckage of his brother's holdings. The Valois kingdom of France seemed on the point of dissolution.

It was of course Joan of Arc, that provocative manifestation of God's will (or pure fortune), who appeared at the last moment to rally Charles' forces and save the country. But it was from the Dauphin, Louis, that leadership came to knit up the raveled threads of French life after St. Joan's battlefield miracle. Hung with epithets ("The universal spider," which referred to the scope and stickiness of his machinations, was one of the mildest), he eventually took his place in history as Louis XI, a giant and an ogre, a bloodstained, gloomy tyrant who forged a unitary state out of warring fragments.

According to Historian Paul Murray Kendall, Louis XI was a far more complicated character than legend implies. Possibly the most effective ruler France ever had, Louis was tough-minded and subtle, and so much of a political pragmatist and innovator that nobody knew quite what to make of him. Especially his feckless father. Lapped in beautiful women and dreams of martial acclaim, Charles snubbed and ignored the boy until, at the age of 16. Louis responded with a plot to seize the throne. It failed, but Louis had found his metier.

For the next 20 years he studied war at the head of a ragtag army of freebooters in the Alpine foothills and civil administration as lord of his duchy of Dauphine. Skill at foreign affairs and espionage he seemed to acquire by osmosis. Stumping around in rough clothes, sneering at courtly chivalry, conferring with his agents (most of whom were disgracefully lowborn), he made the rest of the French nobility decidedly edgy. Even the old Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, in whose court Louis occasionally sought refuge, was disconcerted. Duke Philip's idea of style was three dozen mistresses, regular tourneys and a room in his palace mechanically equipped to produce facsimile thunder, lightning and rain on demand. What Louis liked was plain food and a first-rate intelligence service.

In 1461, Charles VII died, and Louis proceeded to show the nobles how right they had been to worry. "It was necessary for him to make a new world," an Italian envoy reported, meaning a world in which Louis, not the dukes, was boss. To make it he sometimes used force, if possible someone else's (the obdurate Swiss won several crucial battles for him). Nearly always he preferred to bargain or bribe. Overconfidence in his talking powers sometimes got him into trouble. But because he knew his opponents better than they knew themselves, he generally came out ahead. He dealt with Edward IV's invasion by conning him into withdrawing his troops. "My father drove them out by force of arms," Louis later bragged, "whereas I've driven them out by force of venison pies and good wines."

Kendall's account of Louis' incomparably complex dealings is a model of grace and clarity. At times the fog of Gallic intrigue grows almost too thick for any but the most attentive reader. But it is a tribute to the author's skill that despite the staggering ruck of events and the gulf of years that separates us from his protagonist. Louis comes through not as a monster but a comprehensible human being, fleetingly attractive and always impressive. If he sometimes resembles a Mafia Don organizing Newark, fair enough. Louis XI didn't want love, he wanted power, and he got it.

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