Charles V "the Wise" (1364–1380) rebuilt France after Poitiers and the Jacquerie, and — through Du Guesclin's Fabian war — recovered nearly everything the treaty of Brétigny had ceded to England.
Charles V learned kingship in catastrophe: regent at eighteen after Poitiers, with his father captive, Paris in revolt under Étienne Marcel, the Jacquerie burning the countryside, and Navarre and England dismembering the realm. He survived it all — and remembered every lesson.
As king he refused the war England wanted. Reopening hostilities in 1369 on a Gascon legal pretext, he let Bertrand du Guesclin's harrying columns, fortified towns, and fleet do the work while forbidding pitched battle with English field armies. By 1380 the great Brétigny cession was reduced to Calais and a sliver of Gascony — Crécy and Poitiers annulled without a Crécy or a Poitiers.
Born at Vincennes in 1338, Charles was the first heir of France to bear the title Dauphin, from the newly purchased Dauphiné. At Poitiers in 1356 the eighteen-year-old commanded a division and was led from the field before the end — a humiliation his enemies never let him forget and his later strategy answered better than bravado would have.
The regency of 1356–1360 was his forge. The Estates under Étienne Marcel tried to rule through him; Marcel's mob murdered the marshals of Champagne and Normandy in his own chamber, splashing him with their blood, and he escaped Paris to raise the loyal towns. Marcel's murder by the Parisians themselves in 1358, and the collapse of the Jacquerie, gave the Dauphin back his capital; the treaty of Brétigny in 1360 bought his father's liberty at a ruinous price in land and gold — a price Charles spent his reign clawing back.
Christine de Pizan's Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V — a commissioned but detailed portrait by a court insider's daughter — fixed the image contemporaries confirm: a thin, grave, sickly king with a swollen right hand who could not bear armour long, and who therefore made his study, council chamber, and library the theatre of his kingship. He kept fixed working hours, heard petitions in person, and read voraciously; his Louvre library of over nine hundred volumes became the seed of the Bibliothèque nationale.
The wisdom in the epithet was practical: he chose servants of low birth and high talent — Du Guesclin the Breton hedge-knight made Constable, the Bureau brothers' predecessors in the ordnance, Clisson — and held them against aristocratic complaint. Enemies then and critics since have called the method cold, legalistic, even devious: he fought by lawsuit, subsidy, and siege, and shed his own nobility's illusions about glory. He would have accepted the description.
The rebuilding came first: the standing taxes (fouage, aides, gabelle) regularised war finance; the ordinance of 1374 fixed royal majority at fourteen to spare France another long regency; walls — including the Bastille — rose around Paris; and a real navy grew at the Clos des Galées in Rouen. When the Gascon lords appealed to Paris against the Black Prince's hearth tax in 1368, Charles had his casus belli in proper legal form.
The war of 1369–1380 was fought his way. Du Guesclin, Constable from 1370, shadowed and starved the great English chevauchées — Knolles's in 1370 destroyed piecemeal at Pontvallain, Lancaster's of 1373 bled to a ruin across the winter Auvergne — while town after town in Aquitaine was bought, besieged, or persuaded back to French allegiance. The Castilian galleys won at La Rochelle in 1372, closing the sea. Poitou, the Limousin, Périgord, the Agenais, the Rouergue: by 1377 the principality of Aquitaine created at Brétigny had collapsed to Bordeaux, Bayonne, and their hinterland.
Du Guesclin died in July 1380; Charles followed on 16 September, after ordering on his deathbed the abolition of the fouage — the hearth tax underpinning his whole system — in a final scruple of conscience about taxation without consent. He was buried at Saint-Denis beside the constable he had raised from nothing.
The recovery proved personal rather than institutional: his son Charles VI's minority squandered the treasury, and the madness that followed delivered France to the feuds that Agincourt and Troyes exploited. But the model survived — when Charles VII finished the war seventy years later, he did it with his grandfather's tools: permanent taxes, a professional army, artillery, and the refusal of battle on English terms.