The Dinner at Étampes — Meeting of the League of the Public Good against Louis XI (1465)

This engraving, from the work La Bretagne by Jules Janin, published in Paris by Ernest Bourdin in 1844, depicts the Dinner at Étampes, the gathering of allied princes that preceded the official formation of the League of the Public Good against Louis XI in 1465. The scene illustrates the diplomatic phase of this noble coalition, during which the great lords of the kingdom — Charles the Bold, Francis II of Brittany, John II of Bourbon, and their allies — assembled to coordinate their action against a monarchy they deemed too authoritarian. The League of the Public Good represents the first and most serious domestic crisis of Louis XI's reign: the ligueurs challenged the centralisation of royal power, control over finances, and the distribution of offices, claiming in the name of the « public good » a restoration of princely influence. For Louis XI, the episode ultimately forced painful diplomatic concessions — he was compelled to return the towns of the Somme and grant Normandy to his brother — yet he drew from it a lasting lesson on the necessity of dividing his adversaries rather than confronting them as a united bloc. Janin's illustration, produced in the nineteenth century, contributes to the Romantic and historicising visual representation of the great political episodes of the French Middle Ages.