The war, after having greatly weakened the noblesse, and having caused infinite sufferings to France, now drew towards a close; the Duke of Burgundy at last agreed to abandon his English allies, and at a great congress at Arras, in 1435, signed a treaty with Charles VII. by which he solemnly came over to the French side.  On condition that he should get Auxerre and Macon, as well as the towns on and near the river Somme, he was willing to recognise Charles as King of France.  His price was high, yet it was worth all that was given; for, after all, he was of the French blood royal, and not a foreigner.  The death of Bedford, which took place about the same time, was almost a more terrible blow to the fortunes of the English.  Paris opened her gates to her King in April, 1436; the long war kept on with slight movements now and then for several years.

The next year was marked by the meeting of the States General, and the establishment, in principle at least, of a standing army.  The Estates petitioned the willing King that the system of finance in the realm should be remodelled, and a permanent tax established for the support of an army.  Thus, it was thought, solidity would be given to the royal power, and the long-standing curse of the freebooters and brigands cleared away.  No sooner was this done than the nobles began to chafe under it; they scented in the air the coming troubles; they, took as their head, poor innocents, the young Dauphin Louis, who was willing enough to resist the concentration of power in royal hands.  Their champion of 1439, the leader of the “Praguerie,” as this new league was called, in imitation, it is said, of the Hussite movement at Prague, the enthusiastic defender of noble privilege against the royal power, was the man who afterwards, as Louis XI., was the destroyer of the noblesse on behalf of royalty.  Some of the nobles stood firmly by the King, and, aided by them and by an army of paid soldiers serving under the new conditions, Charles VII., no contemptible antagonist when once aroused, attacked and overthrew the Praguerie; the cities and the country people would have none of it; they preferred peace under a king’s strong hand.  Louis was sent down to the east to govern Dauphiny; the lessons of the civil war were not lost on Charles; he crushed the freebooters of Champagne, drove the English out of Pontois in 1441, moved actively up and down France, reducing anarchy, restoring order, resisting English attacks.  In the last he was loyally supported by the Dauphin, who was glad to find a field for his restless temper.  He repulsed the English at Dieppe, and put down the Comte d’Armagnac in the south.  During the two years’ truce with England which now followed, Charles VII. and Louis drew off their free-lances eastward, and the Dauphin came into rude collision with the Swiss not far from Basel, in 1444.  Some sixteen hundred mountaineers long and heroically withstood at St. Jacob the attack of several thousand Frenchmen, fighting stubbornly till they all perished.