A valiant and loyal knight, but a frivolous, hare-brained, thoughtless, prodigal, and obstinate as well as impetuous prince, and even more incapable than Philip of Valois in the practice of government, John, after having summoned at his accession, in 1351, a states-assembly concerning which we have no explicit information left to us, tried for a space of four years to suffice in himself for all the perils, difficulties, and requirements of the situation he had found bequeathed to him by his father.  For a space of four years, in order to get money, he debased the coinage, confiscated the goods and securities of foreign merchants, and stopped payment of his debts; and he went through several provinces, treating with local councils or magistrates in order to obtain from them certain subsidies which he purchased by granting them new privileges.  He hoped by his institution of the order of the Star to resuscitate the chivalrous zeal of his nobility.  All these means were vain or insufficient.  The defeat of Crecy and the loss of Calais had caused discouragement in the kingdom and aroused many doubts as to the issue of the war with England.  Defection and even treason brought trouble into the court, the councils, and even the family of John.  To get the better of them he at one time heaped favors upon the men he feared, at another he had them arrested, imprisoned, and even beheaded in his presence.  He gave his daughter Joan in marriage to Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, and, some few months afterwards, Charles himself, the real or presumed head of all the traitors, was seized, thrown into prison, and treated with extreme rigor, in spite of the supplications of his wife, who vigorously took the part of her husband against her father.  After four years thus consumed in fruitless endeavors, by turns violently and feebly enforced, to reorganize an army and a treasury, and to purchase fidelity at any price or arbitrarily strike down treason, John was obliged to recognize his powerlessness and to call to his aid the French nation, still so imperfectly formed, by convoking at Paris, for the 30th of November, 1355, the states-general of Langue d’oil. that is, Northern France, separated by the Dordogne and the Garonne from Langue d’oc, which had its own assembly distinct.  Auvergne belonged to Langue d’oil.

It is certain that neither this assembly nor the king who convoked it had any clear and fixed idea of what they were meeting together to do.  The kingship was no longer competent for its own government and its own perils; but it insisted none the less, in principle, on its own all but unregulated and unlimited power.  The assembly did not claim for the country the right of self-government, but it had a strong leaven of patriotic sentiment, and at the same time was very much discontented with the king’s government:  it had equally at heart the defence of France against England and against the abuses of the kingly power.  There was no notion of a social struggle and no systematic idea of political revolution; a dangerous crisis and intolerable sufferings constrained king and nation to come together in order to make an attempt at an understanding and at a mutual exchange of the supports and the reliefs of which they were in need.