Charles VI’s first fit of madness in 1392

Charles VI’s first fit of madness in 1392 transformed a royal military expedition into a crisis of command: the king, convinced that those around him were enemies, attacked members of his own party, and had to be subdued by his attendants. The episode near Le Mans was the first public manifestation of an illness that would repeatedly interrupt his reign, and its immediate consequence was the abandonment of the campaign.

Campaign and Setting

The episode occurred during a royal expedition to Brittany, undertaken after Pierre de Craon attempted to assassinate Olivier de Clisson, the constable of France. Craon had been banished from court and blamed Clisson for his exile. When the Duke of Brittany refused to surrender him, Charles raised an army to subdue the duke and bring Craon to justice. The expedition thus began as an assertion of royal authority against a powerful noble who had refused the king’s demand.

Jean de Carrouges rode in the king’s retinue. Newly raised to the rank of chevalier d’honneur, he travelled with ten squires of his own. He was an experienced campaigner who had fought in numerous battles, including the recent campaign in Scotland. His presence placed the episode within a world organized around military service and royal command; yet the central danger came not from an opposing army but from the king’s sudden inability to recognize his own companions.

On August 8, the army passed through a large forest near Le Mans. Before the incident on the open plain, a bare-headed man in a smock ran into the road, seized the king’s horse by the bridle, and warned him not to continue because he was betrayed. The attendants treated the man as mad and beat him until he released the reins. The royal party then rode on. The warning did not stop the expedition, but it became an unsettling prelude to what followed: a few hours later Charles himself would act under the conviction that enemies surrounded him.

The King’s Sudden Delusion

Around noon, the army emerged from the forest and crossed a broad sandy plain in separate groups. Charles rode apart from the dust raised by the army, while his uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, travelled roughly a hundred yards to his left. The king wore a black velvet jerkin and a scarlet hat. Pages rode behind him, one wearing a polished steel helmet and another carrying a lance with a broad steel head.

The crisis began accidentally. The second page dropped the lance, which struck the helmet of the page in front. The sound startled Charles, who was still thinking about the warning in the forest. The account describes his mind as reeling: he imagined that enemies were about to attack. He spurred his horse forward, drew his sword, and turned on the pages, no longer recognizing them. Convinced that he was in battle, he shouted commands to attack supposed traitors.

The pages reined aside to escape him. In the confusion, Charles struck and killed several men in his entourage. He then saw his brother, Louis of Valois, and rode after him with his sword raised. Louis fled, while the dukes of Berry and Burgundy recognized the danger and called for the king to be caught. Their alarm turned the royal party into a pursuit: knights and squires rode after Charles as he chased his brother across the plain.

Containment and Abandoned Expedition

Louis eventually outran the king, and the men-at-arms caught up with Charles. Rather than injure him, they surrounded him and parried his blows, allowing him to exhaust himself. When he finally collapsed in the saddle, a knight approached quietly from behind and restrained him. The others took away his sword, lifted him from his horse, and laid him on the ground.

Charles did not recover his bearings immediately. His eyes moved strangely, and he could not speak or recognize even his brother and uncles. His attendants carried him back to Le Mans in a litter. The expedition was called off at once. A campaign begun to enforce the king’s authority had instead exposed the limits of his ability to exercise it: the army’s immediate task became protecting and transporting its own ruler.

The contrast with the expedition’s original purpose is sharp. Charles had raised an army to answer a challenge to royal authority, but the sudden crisis made him dependent on the restraint of those around him. The men who surrounded him did not treat him as an enemy to be defeated; they took care not to hurt him and waited until they could safely remove his weapon. Their measured response contained the immediate danger, but it could not restore the king’s capacity to lead the campaign.

Significance and Aftermath

The episode was the first public display of the madness that would affect Charles for the remainder of his life. Over the next thirty years, until his death in 1422, he alternated between periods when he seemed quite normal and bouts of debilitating insanity. The account also describes his later sensitivity to bright light and loud noises, and his belief at times that he was so brittle he might break like glass. These recurring episodes made the events near Le Mans more than a single interruption to a campaign: they introduced a lasting instability at the center of government.

The political consequence followed quickly. Charles had recently shaken off the control of his uncles and declared himself sole ruler, but after the fit he could no longer govern himself, much less the kingdom. Authority passed back to his uncles and his brother, Louis, the man who had nearly been caught by the king’s sword. The near reversal is central to the event’s significance: a king setting out to punish disobedience became dependent on the very family and attendants whose authority he had sought to escape.

The account presents a precise sequence of warning, accident, misrecognition, violence, pursuit, and containment. The initial warning is left unexplained; the narrative does not establish whether the man in the forest knew of any real betrayal. Instead, it emphasizes that Charles’s thoughts remained fixed on the warning when the dropped lance startled him. The episode’s force comes from that collision between ordinary accident and royal power: the lance falls by chance, but the king’s delusion turns the sound into the imagined beginning of an attack, with consequences for his entourage and for the campaign.