Seven Ages of Paris Read online

  Perhaps fortunately for us sleepy Londoners, we have never known the violent changes of mood that have worked on Parisian adrenalin—for instance, Napoleon’s triumphal return from Tilsit, as Conqueror of Europe in 1807, followed only seven years later by Russian Cossacks camping in the Champs-Elysées; the dazzle of the Second Empire of 1867, followed by the horrors of the Commune of 1871; the Belle Epoque by the drama of the Marne of 1914; the catastrophe of 1940 by the rhapsody of the Liberation four years later.

  On top of Paris’s immortal beauty, her swift changes of mood never cease to fascinate me. Because of the chances of geography and history, she has always been a microcosm of the nation’s life, perhaps more so than any other capital in the world. In the course of work on nine books on French history, over three decades (sometimes a love-hate relationship), I found the scene repeatedly darting back to the capital, telling me things, little details, I didn’t know. So I kept a “discard box,” much as Churchill is said to have done in the Second World War—a kind of scrapbook, which is the origin of this book.

  Like a hauntingly alluring, and exacting, mistress, Paris has never quite left me. The choice of her seven ages is highly idiosyncratic; some of the leading actors, like Henri IV, I came to venerate; Louis XIV to dislike even more than I did already; about Napoleon I had written a certain amount already, yet his role in the development of Paris turned into a new voyage of discovery; de Gaulle I found myself reappraising and admiring more than I had in those contentious days of the 1960s when he was such a thorn in the side of les Anglo-Saxons. At times, in order to set each age in its right framework, I found myself almost composing a history of Paris from Julius Caesar onwards—even a history of France. The four and a half years of writing were wonderfully self-educative. My selection of the seven ages is, as I cautioned earlier, idiosyncratic, personal—and prejudiced. For instance, students of the Great Revolution may justly complain that I have foreshortened the terrible years from 1789 onwards. Yes, but so much has been written—especially since the bicentenaire of 1989—what is there that is new? And anyhow, as far as Paris was concerned, it was such a destructive, life-denying, wretched time. Again, I may be asked why I chose 1969 as my cut-off date. What about the Paris of François Mitterrand, that most adroit of modern French politicians, and as intriguing a subject for biography in his own right? In defence, I turn to Mao’s Prime Minister Chou En-lai, who, when asked for his view on the Great Revolution, gave the immortal response “It may be too early to tell.”

  Many people have helped and encouraged me during the years spent preparing and writing this book. In particular I wish to express my thanks to Sir Michael and Lady Jay, for help and hospitality at the British Embassy in Paris, and to Christine Warren, former Assistant Comptroller in the Embassy; to Ambassador and Mrs. Evan Galbraith, at the U.S. Embassy in Paris; to Mme. Bennett of the Mairie de Paris, M. Herrault of the Hôtel Matignon, M. Denoix de Saint Marc of the Conseil d’Etat; M. Maurice Druon, KBE, former Secrétaire Perpetuel (not least for his most generous Foreword), and M. Laurent Personne of the Académie Française; M. Guy de Rothschild and Mme. Kolesnikoff, Hôtel Lambert; Mme. Le Lieur, Hôtel de Sens; Mme. Garnier-Ahlberg, Hôtel Sully; M. Luc Forlivesi, Archives Nationales; M. Alfred Fierro of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris; and the helpful staff of the Musée Carnavalet. I owe appreciation to kind friends in Paris who have helped me with various points of research, notably Mrs. Jake Eberts and Mrs. Gaby Steers.

  I owe an almost career-long debt to my oldest French friends, S. E. Francis Huré and his late wife, Jacqueline, heroine of the Resistance, who, in the 1950s, first made me think—with affection—about France, and especially about Paris.

  In England I am indebted, as always, to the London Library; to the Cambridge University Library and the Seeley Library; and to my college, Jesus College Cambridge, for offering me a sanctuary from time to time. Mr. Tony Nuspl (now of the University of Saskatchewan) carried out invaluable research for me on the three earliest Ages, while taking his Ph.D. at Cambridge, and to him I am greatly beholden. My former colleague on the Franco-British Council, Professor Douglas Johnson, gave me helpful advice at various stages. I am indebted to Military History Quarterly for allowing me to draw on various articles I wrote for them; and also to Time Out for permission to use sections of my article “History in Marble,” from their excellent Paris Walks (London, 1999). Ms. Josine Meijer did the picture research, with skill and diligence; while, over several years, Mrs. Michael Robjohn worked stoically on research, filing and secretarial work, and keeping the author on the rails—I am most grateful to her. In a special category, I owe much gratitude to Mr. Peter James for his incomparable excellence as an editor: this book, our fifth together, longer and more complex than any of the others, came to require immense labour from him. Any surviving mistakes are, most emphatically, mine alone.

  On a personal and purely selfish note of gratitude, I would like to acknowledge my own extraordinary good fortune in having lived some of Age Seven in Paris, the good and the great times, and the bad times—over a period of some five decades.

  ALISTAIR HORNE

  Turville, May 2002

  A Note on Money

  Pre-revolutionary French currency is difficult to convert into modern values. At various times in French history different monnaie was used, the value of which could be arbitrarily changed. The écu, for example, might be worth three or six livres, depending on the date. Struck at the time of Louis XI and Charles VIII in the effigy of the king, it was worth five francs. Then there was the pistole, notionally worth ten livres. The livre itself, divided into sous and deniers and for long the standard measure of currency, originally equalled a certain weight of silver, but this was progressively reduced in value from the days of Charlemagne onwards. (In today’s terms the livre in the time of Louis XIV might be worth somewhere between eighty pence and £2, though some experts have recently put it as high as US$40. Such a discrepancy illustrates just how hard it is to establish a sensible relativity.)

  To complicate matters further, the livre tournois (meaning struck in Tours) was worth one-fifth less than the livre parisis (struck in Paris). Named after Louis XIII in 1640 (and struck by a Superintendant Bullion), there was the louis d’or, equalling the franc; later it became worth twenty-four francs and—later still—was replaced by twenty-franc pieces. In 1720 its official rate was fifty-four livres; after the John Law bubble burst, it fell to thirty-nine. The franc itself was introduced by King Jean le Bon in 1360, in the midst of the Hundred Years War (and a time of runaway inflation), as an update of the écu; it was superseded in turn, and disappeared for over 200 years. At last, under the Revolution the franc became the official currency, decimalized to contain 100 centimes. With the advent of Bonaparte, a napoléon was issued, worth thirty francs; it had a short life. Devalued many times, sometimes coined in light (and worthless) aluminium pieces, under de Gaulle the franc was restored as the nouveau or “heavy” franc, worth 100 old francs. It was to disappear, after six and a half centuries, swallowed up by the euro, in 2002.

  INTRODUCTION

  * * *

  From Caesar to Abélard

  Get down on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.

  SAINTE GENEVIÈVE, IN A.D. 451

  ORIGINS

  Mythomanes of Paris (of which there are many), seeking to imbue the city’s past with even more glamour than is already its due, claim that its progenitor was that Paris of legend, son of Priam, who so upset three competitive goddesses and whose passion for Helen launched one of the longest wars in history. Philippe Auguste, his poets and his historians were especially partial to the Trojan Connection: a “Catalogue” or family tree dating from the latter years of Philippe’s reign is captioned, “These are the names of the kings of the Franks who came from Troy.” (Hence, in a direct line, derived the Phrygian caps of ancient Troy, sported by those terrifying maenads of the Great Revolution, the tricoteuses.) Others dedicated to d
iscovering the earliest origins of Paris, marginally less romantic, reckon its true founder—in purely archaeological terms—to have been a tiny mollusc in some dark Jurassic Age called a nummulite. This provides a link to Venus, goddess of love, also born out of a shell—a myth celebrated on the Renaissance Fontaine des Innocents close to where Henri IV met his assassin. Other early Parisiens (in the Neolithic Age) were less feminine—giant, mammoth-like elephants who lumbered down from their habitat on the slopes of Belleville and what is now Père Lachaise Cemetery, to slurp from the (still pure) waters of the Seine.

  The less starry-eyed trace the true origins of Paris back to the Romans, who under the leadership of Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul in the first century B.C. In A.D. 358, the twenty-five-year-old Emperor Julian found Lutetia (as the Roman colony on the Ile de la Cité was called), with its vineyards, figs and gentle climate, so thoroughly agreeable that he refused a summons to lead legions to the Middle East. “My dear Lutetia,” he wrote. “It occupies an island in the middle of the river; wooden bridges link it to the two banks. The river rarely rises or falls; as it is in summer, so it is in winter; the water is pleasant to drink, for it is very pure and agreeable to the eye.” Julian sojourned there three years, thus in effect making Paris de facto capital of the Western Empire, counterpart of Constantinople in the East. Indeed he proclaimed himself emperor on the Ile de la Cité. (The next such ceremony was to be Napoleon Bonaparte’s in 1804.) The Roman tradition became dear to later rulers of “Lutèce.” In his godlike splendour, the Roi Soleil would tap into it, content to see himself portrayed as Hercules on the Porte Saint-Martin. The Great Revolution and its heirs reinvented such artefacts as consuls and senators, tribunes and togas. Napoleon I emulated Trajan’s Column to proclaim his victories over his Russian and Austrian foes at Austerlitz in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon III reverently clad the statue of his great-uncle atop it in a toga, and, when things were going badly for him in 1869, went to pay homage to the Roman ruins of Lutetia. A less pleasant legacy dating from Roman days was the entertainment of roasting stray cats alive, on the ill-omened Place de Grève, which continued until Louis XIV ended it in the seventeenth century.

  It was not only the gentle allure of muddy Lutetia, its vineyards and the “clear and limpid” waters of the Seine that attracted the Romans. From earliest days the navigable Seine and the north–south axis which intersected it at the Ile de la Cité formed one of Europe’s most important crossroads. The island itself constituted a natural fortress, all but unassailable—except when unprincipled barbarians like the Norsemen took it from the rear by floating down from upstream, whence the wine, wheat and timber from Burgundy normally came. In the ages before road or rail transport, the Seine—in marked contrast to the estuarial, shallow and narrow Thames—was an ideal river for major commerce. Its broad and deep currents were not too swift, and hard turf or stone lined most of its banks. Early descriptions of Paris comment on the extraordinary capacities of the waters of the Seine to support heavy loads. Together with its tributaries, the Oise and the Marne, the Seine linked up most of northern France and reached out southwards and eastwards, up to Montargis, Auxerre, Troyes and numerous lesser towns. It enabled Paris to dominate commerce in the north, making her a natural capital for trade early in the Middle Ages, never to lose this primacy. Meanwhile nearby stone quarries enabled her rulers to float down vast quantities of building material to construct her walls and fortifications.

  By the end of the first century A.D., Christianity had arrived in Paris, followed shortly thereafter by the first martyrs. Dionysius, or Denis, came from Rome and was probably Greek. Aged ninety, he was arrested for denying the divinity of the Emperor, imprisoned on what is now the Quai aux Fleurs, close to the modern Préfecture de Police, and then dragged up the Roman highway that still bears his name northwards from the Seine. On top of a hill overlooking the city where stood a temple to Mercury, he and two supporters were decapitated. According to legend, he picked up his head with its long white beard, washed it in a nearby stream, and continued walking for “six thousand paces.” The spot where he finally dropped and was buried became a holy place. Eventually the cathedral of Saint-Denis was built on its site, subsequently to become the burial place of French kings from Dagobert onwards. His place of execution became the “Mons Martyrum”—or Montmartre; and the city annals chalked up their first revolutionary martyr as well as their first bishop.

  With the death of the benevolent Julian and the collapse of Roman power after the best part of six centuries, various “barbarians,” pushed westwards by some unrecorded pressure in Central Asia, came trampling in from the east—Vandals, Franks, Avars and Huns. The Ile de France—one of the most ancient provinces of France, formed by the rivers Seine, Marne, Ourcq, Aisne and Oise—even then presented an enticing land of milk and honey, and Paris trembled. In 451, the worst of the lot, the Huns under their fearsome leader, Attila, crossed the Rhine heading westwards. At Cologne they were reported to have massacred 11,000 virgins. Parisians prepared for a mass exodus, piling their belongings on to wagons with solid wooden wheels. But a fifteen-year-old orphan girl called Geneviève, who had come close to fasting to death in her convent—like another French teenager nearly a thousand years later—had a vision. She exhorted the populace not to leave, telling them, “Get down on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.” She was proved right. Unlike Hitler, they stayed away, eventually to be driven back across the Rhine. Contemporary wits explained Geneviève’s “miracle” by suggesting that there were not 10,000 virgins in Paris to make it worth Attila’s while. A more likely explanation was that Attila had opted to head for Orléans to deal with his Visigoth foes there.

  Whatever the reasons behind Attila’s deviation, Geneviève’s intercession was rated a miracle. Less successfully she later led the Parisians against the barbarian and pagan Franks. Embodying the spirit of resistance, and living to the ripe old age of ninety, she helped convert the conquering Frankish king, Clovis, and became the patron saint of Paris. Her bones rested in the Panthéon, until scattered by the revolutionaries of 1789. Slender and austere in its elongation, her 1920s statue stands imposingly on the Left Bank’s Pont de la Tournelle, close to the area associated with her—christened Mont Sainte-Geneviève in her honour and eventually to embrace the Sorbonne. At various desperate moments in subsequent Paris history, when fresh barbarian hordes emerged from the east, mass supplications were made to Sainte Geneviève, calling for her renewed intercession to save the city—with varying degrees of success.

  MEROVINGIANS, CAROLINGIANS AND CAPETIANS

  A dynasty of Frankish rulers, most of them louts, their name appropriately derived from the Latin for “ferocious,” now entered the scene. Pushing in from the east and devastating the Gaul lands as they went, they came to be known as the Merovingians. Clovis, with his bride, Clotilde, father, Childeric and sons Clotaire and Childebert, moved into Paris from Clovis’s temporary capital at Rheims. As the Merovingians wrangled and split among themselves, there followed two and a half dark centuries of chaos and internecine savagery for Paris—its name now changed permanently from Lutetia. Clovis managed to kill off most of his family; after each killing he built a church. He was a great church-builder.

  They were not gentle or nice people, these Frankish forebears of the modern-day Parisian, but at least, under Clovis, the notion of Paris as a capital city first became accepted, because that was where he had his palace. His descendant Dagobert (629–39), on his interment (he died of dysentery, aged only thirty-six) at Saint-Denis, established the tradition of burial there for subsequent kings of France. But during these dark years the country found itself fragmented, and refragmented, among short-lived nations with strangely Orwellian names such as Neustria and Austrasia. Constant warring meant that rulers spent little time in Paris, which remained an unhygienic settlement of rude wooden huts, incendiarized at regular intervals.

  In the eighth century, a new threat distracted and mena
ced Paris, this time from the south, in the form of the Saracens. Their progress was halted at Poitiers (732) by Charles Martel, but to raise funds for his campaigns he had to sack the abbeys and churches of Paris (his chosen capital was Teutonic Metz). A special deal between Martel’s successor, Pépin (founder of the Carolingian dynasty), and a beleaguered Pope was to be of historic importance for both Paris and France. In exchange for being anointed and crowned in the basilica of Saint-Denis in July 754 by Pope Stephen, Pépin guaranteed to restore him to Rome. Henceforth Pépin saw himself entitled to wield the Sword of God, consequently inaugurating a special relationship whereby various French rulers through the ages, down to Napoleon and his imperial nephew, could claim prerogatives to intervene in Vatican affairs.

  The closing years of the century saw the arrival of Pépin’s son Charlemagne, a rather less attractive character than his portraits and subsequent canonization would suggest. Crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 by Pope Leo III, who anointed him as “his excellent son,” Charlemagne fought forty-seven campaigns in as many years; his great (though short-lived) empire extended from the Pyrenees to the Elbe, but he ran it all from Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), not from Paris. Once again Paris had an absentee ruler who did nothing for her, and she was not even mentioned in his last will and testament. Nevertheless, subsequent city elders (somewhat surprisingly) were to erect a statue to him in front of Notre-Dame. Charlemagne’s son, the first of eighteen kings named Louis, in fee to the papacy and under the thumb of his second wife, let it all go, allowing the empire to end up, by the turn of the century, dismembered into seven parts.