The council that opened at Basel in 1431 was the last serious attempt to make general councils the governing organ of the western church. The idea had force behind it: a council at Constance had just ended a schism in which three men claimed the papacy, and had decreed that councils should meet at regular intervals and that their authority came directly from Christ. Basel set out to act on that.
It legislated on clerical discipline and on the reform of papal finance, and it negotiated with the Hussites of Bohemia, granting them the cup in the agreement known as the Compacta, which is a real achievement in a century not much given to compromise with heretics. But it also fought the pope continuously, and when Eugene IV transferred the council to Ferrara in order to negotiate with the Greeks, the fathers who remained at Basel declared him deposed and elected a replacement, a widowed duke of Savoy who took the name Felix V.
He was the last antipope. Support drained away, the rump moved to Lausanne, and Felix resigned in 1449. The effect of the whole episode was the reverse of what its participants intended: by making conciliar government look like schism, Basel discredited the movement and left the papal monarchy stronger than it had been, which is one of the conditions of everything that happened in the following century.