Wealthy Calais Classes Sacrifice for the Less Powerful

This detail of Auguste Rodin’s masterpiece, _The Burghers of Calais_ (1884-89) evokes a moment of despondency and sacrifice that took place in the Hundred Year’s War between France and England in the Late Middle Ages. The story ultimately has a happy ending, but nowhere is this foreshadowed in Rodin’s work.

In 1346, the French town of Calais had been starved into submission during an eleven-month siege by English forces. According to the chronicler Jean Froissart, the king of England agreed to spare the inhabitants of the city only if six of the top leaders agreed to turn turn themselves in. He demanded these leaders put nooses around their necks as they left the confines of Calais, with the idea that they would be executed. Froissart records that six of the town’s wealthiest citizens from the burgher social class volunteered to go. Rodin’s sculpture envisions these leaders as they face their immanent death.

In fact, Froissart relates that the English Queen Philippa of Hainault stayed the execution of the burghers with a plea to her husband to have mercy.

Cast in the late nineteenth century in an era that had not yet borne witness to the horrific warfare that would shape the world in the decades to come, the sculpture nevertheless manages to convey a sense of suffering that large-scale violence has caused in human history. It says much that in both the Middle Ages and the late nineteenth-century there were people who wanted to showcase the role of the wealthiest members of society as ones who were willing to bear the burden of sacrifice for the less powerful masses.