The Capetian cadet branch that ruled France through the Hundred Years’ War, from the crisis of 1328 to the recovery under Charles VII.
When Charles IV, last of the direct Capetians, died in 1328, the French magnates passed over the claim of Edward III of England — descended through his mother — and gave the crown to Philip of Valois, nephew of Philip IV, as Philip VI. The rejection of Edward’s claim became a legal pretext for the Hundred Years’ War.
Philip VI’s reign opened badly: English longbowmen destroyed his mounted chivalry at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and the Black Death struck France in 1348.
His son John II the Good was himself captured by the Black Prince at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, a catastrophe that left France leaderless. The huge ransom, the peasant revolt called the Jacquerie, and the Parisian rising under Étienne Marcel brought the monarchy near collapse.
John died a captive in London in 1364, having returned voluntarily when a hostage broke parole — an act contemporaries praised as chivalrous and modern historians find ruinous.
Charles V the Wise rebuilt the kingdom. Avoiding pitched battles, he used his constable Bertrand du Guesclin to wear the English down through skirmishing and sieges, and by 1380 had recovered nearly all the territory lost at Brétigny. He reformed the coinage and taxation and built royal libraries and the Bastille.
His death in 1380 left the recovery in the hands of a child king and quarrelling royal uncles.
Charles VI suffered recurring bouts of insanity from 1392, and the vacuum of power split the court between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions in open civil war. Henry V of England exploited the division, annihilating the French nobility at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and forcing the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which disinherited the dauphin.
For a time it seemed the French and English crowns would be united under the Lancastrians.
The disinherited dauphin, crowned Charles VII at Reims in 1429 after Joan of Arc broke the siege of Orléans, gradually turned the war. Reconciliation with Burgundy in 1435, a standing army, and reformed artillery under the Bureau brothers let him reconquer Normandy and Guyenne, ending the Hundred Years’ War in 1453.
Under Charles VII the Valois monarchy emerged victorious and far stronger, its authority and finances rebuilt for the centralised state of the later kings.