Episode 8: The Crisis - Famine, Plague, and War (1314-1360)
Spring 1315. The rains come and don’t stop. Week after week, cold rain pours down. The fields flood. The grain rots. And in Paris, people begin to starve.
This is the Great Famine. Just the first of three catastrophes that will devastate 14th-century Paris. After the famine comes the Black Death—bubonic plague arriving in 1348, killing half the city’s population in months. Bodies pile up faster than they can be buried. Mass graves overflow. The streets fall silent except for the carts collecting corpses and the constant tolling of funeral bells.
And then comes war. The Hundred Years War begins in 1337, and by 1356, the French king is captured at the Battle of Poitiers. Paris erupts in revolution. Étienne Marcel leads an uprising demanding reform. The Jacquerie peasant revolt explodes in the countryside with horrific violence on both sides. And through it all, the city bleeds.
This episode is hard. It’s about suffering on a scale that’s difficult to comprehend. But it’s also about survival. About a city that endured the worst century in its history and somehow kept going. Because Paris had learned something fundamental: it could survive anything.
The golden age of Saint Louis is gone forever. What replaces it is a city that knows trauma, that understands fragility, but that refuses to give up.
The crisis of the 14th century. Paris survives. Barely. But it survives.
