The Treaty of Conflans between Louis XI and Charles the Bold (1465)

This coloured engraving by Lacoste jeune, after a composition by Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, forming plate no. 41 of Paul Lehugeur's work Histoire de France en cent tableaux (Paris, A. Lahude, c. 1883), depicts the meeting between Louis XI and Charles the Bold at the conclusion of the Treaty of Conflans on 5 October 1465, which ended the War of the League of the Public Good. The king and the Count of Charolais face each other in a solemn scene of official reconciliation, surrounded by their respective counsellors and courtiers, underscoring the gravity of the diplomatic moment. For Louis XI, the treaty was a painful setback: he was forced to restore to Charles the Bold the towns of the Somme, bought back in 1463, and to grant Normandy to his brother Charles of France, erasing two of the clearest successes of the early years of his reign. These concessions were not, however, final in the king's eyes: the rivalry between the two men was far from over, and Louis XI would spend the following years regaining the advantage by other means. Philippoteaux's engraving, produced in the context of the revival of French history painting in the nineteenth century, stages this episode as a symbolic confrontation between two of the most complex personalities of fifteenth-century Europe.