Seven Ages of Paris (12 page)

Meanwhile, in Paris grim and chaotic times had descended once the firm hand of Philippe le Bel had been removed. In 1315, there had been a disastrous harvest, and famine settled on an unprepared city, her plight exacerbated by an improvident government. A comet passed over the city and was visible for three nights—an ill omen in the minds of Parisians. Two years later a fresh bout of irrational upheaval in the provinces sent a new wave of half-crazed pastoureaux flooding into Paris. Comprised of an assortment of unemployed youths seeking adventure, brigands, thieves, unfrocked priests, beggars and whores, they seized the Châtelet, assaulted the prévôt and pillaged the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They swept through the country, provoking new outrages against Jewish ghettos that had survived Philippe IV’s expulsion orders. At Chinon all the Jews were rounded up and thrown into one huge fiery pit; in Paris they were burned on the island that tragically bore their name at the tip of the Ile de la Cité, on the site where Jacques de Molay had been immolated. Louis le Hutin, apparently seeking forgiveness of his sins (notably the murder of hapless Queen Marguerite) and to curry favour with the populace, decided to empty the prisons. As a result, crime took off; it became dangerous to venture out at night, and there were more robberies and murders than had been known for forty years. From the areas where Saint Louis had strictly confined them, prostitutes now moved into the public baths, to the point where honest men could no longer go for an innocent soak without being exposed to more insidious temptations of the flesh.

To bring order to the chaos left by Le Hutin, his successors had the gallows and scaffolds working overtime; to satisfy demand, in 1325 the famous wooden gibbet at Monfaucon was replaced by one of sixteen stone pillars over ten metres high, and joined together by heavy beams. The corpses hung there until they disintegrated. That same year a gentle spring and a brief period of commercial prosperity under Charles IV lulled Parisians into expecting happy times ahead. Then came the bitterest of harsh winters; the Seine was covered with ice and even wells froze, trees cracked in the gardens, starving birds flocked into the city, and the cold fissured the stone walls. Food prices rocketed, as did the death toll.

Yet all through this period the population of Paris was forging ahead. Spaces between houses on the Left Bank where there had once been only fields and watermeadows were now being built on. The Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was no longer an isolated entity. Already the city was beginning to press up against the protective walls of Philippe Auguste. Paris was getting overcrowded again—dangerously so, if she were to be hit by a fresh epidemic. Nevertheless, except under Charles V during a brief truce in the Hundred Years War, virtually nothing of lasting value or permanence would be built in Paris until François Premier 200 years later. Under the early Valois, Paris stagnated. Though there was little or no physical development in the city, at least some evolution was to be seen in the apparel worn by the modish. At court, men took to adorning themselves with more jewellery than their women, wearing narrow-waisted tunics so saucily short that they revealed the buttocks and shoes so pointed that they made walking difficult.

In 1340, Edward III of tiny England assumed the title of King of France, and effectively destroyed the French fleet at Sluys, off the coast of Flanders. His troops landed virtually unopposed on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, just where Eisenhower’s Americans would land almost exactly 600 years later. In 1346, the English longbowmen—employing the most advanced weapon in all Europe—won one of history’s decisive battles against the ponderous French cavalry at Crécy on the Somme. All that Philippe Auguste had won for France at Bouvines now seemed lost. In a historic scene, recorded not least by Rodin, the burghers of Calais surrendered to Edward with halters round their necks. England was to hold this vital foothold, this arrow pointed at Paris, until the days of Elizabeth I more than two centuries later.

Edward’s small armies were highly efficient and full of national spirit. Year after year his marauding bands plundered and laid waste to northern France. Ten years after the massacre at Crécy another shattering defeat was inflicted at Poitiers by Edward’s son the Black Prince on an army that had not troubled to learn the lessons of the earlier débâcle. As if this were not enough, now the Black Death descended. Perhaps half the population of France was wiped out by the deadly combination of war and plague.

Preceded—so legend had it—by a portentous ball of fire in the skies over the city, the Black Death reached Paris in the summer of 1348, then moved slowly on towards Flanders and Germany. Paris herself, always vulnerable to any epidemic as a result of her overcrowding and poor sanitation, suffered far worse than the countryside or the smaller towns. Believing cats to be the source of plague, the Parisians killed off their most effective instruments for dealing with the plague-bearing rat population. The death rate reached 800 a day. The cemeteries and charnel houses were overflowing; soon there were not enough living to bury the dead, who lay rotting in their houses or even on the streets. Priests abandoned the sick and dying to shrive themselves. Those rich enough to do so, nobles and churchmen, left the city: “Those who were left drank, fornicated or skulked in the cellars according to their inclinations.” It seemed as if life, at best, could only drag on for a few painful weeks. Paris was described as having come close to “a complete collapse of public and private morality.” By the time the plague receded, in the winter of 1349, her population had been decimated.

During the Hundred Years War, France’s struggle for national survival left little time, cash or spirit for grand building designs in the capital. By way of a reminder of the grim fourteenth century, only a handful of half-timber houses remain, in the Rue François Miron—one of which today serves as a maison de rencontre. The fortunes of Paris rose and fell with those of the Valois kings. The sobriquets of these pre-Renaissance rulers did not always accurately reflect their characters, or their achievements. There was Jean le Bon, who was both bad and disastrous, losing for France the Battle of Poitiers, while Charles le Fou was certainly no worse; Charles VII, “Le Victorieux,” seems not to have been, losing his capital (for a while) as a result. A praiseworthy exception to the rule was Charles V, “Le Sage” (1364–80).

The auguries for Charles V, a small and deceptively frail man, were not encouraging. In 1356, while he was still dauphin, his father, the ill-starred Jean le Bon, and his brother Philippe were both imprisoned in London, having been captured, most humiliatingly, at Poitiers—from which battlefield Charles himself had managed to beat a rapid retreat. Taking advantage of the King’s defeat, in Paris the headstrong prévôt, Etienne Marcel, urged administrative reforms upon the monarchy that would today be regarded as distinctly democratic. Foreshadowing many things to come in Paris, including the events of 1789 and the Commune of 1871, Marcel held that a “Commune of Paris” should govern the kingdom, in consultation with the King. The monarchy experienced one of its most perilous moments when, at a cabinet meeting, two of the Dauphin’s principal counsellors, the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, were slaughtered before his eyes by supporters of Marcel.

But Marcel had overreached himself. Like Adolphe Thiers and the Versailles government in 1871 (or like Louis XIV and his mother, the Regent, during the Fronde), Charles decided to pull out of Paris and regroup with a view to seizing the capital by force. Around Paris the peasants, pushed over the brink by the deprivations of war, rose and made common cause with Marcel. But this jacquerie revolt was put down, and some 20,000 were slaughtered. Etienne Marcel then committed the unthinkable, and allied himself with the occupying English. This was altogether too much for the Parisians; “hooted at and censured,” Marcel was assassinated by his own followers in July 1358. From Compiègne Charles then re-entered Paris with ease and, at once demonstrating clemency and pushing aside Marcel’s constitutional reforms, ruled as an absolute but restrained monarch.

Charles now sought to secure Paris by upgrading the protective wall of Philippe Auguste, pushing it outwards to embrace the recently expanded city faubourgs (or suburbs) and fortifying the precincts of the Abbey of Saint-Germain. He abandoned Philippe’s old palace in the smelly and claustrophobic Ile de la Cité, first for the Hôtel Saint-Pol in the Marais and then, in 1368, for the fresh air and security of the Louvre. A cultured man and patron of the arts, Charles demolished Philippe’s grim old bastion, replacing it with a palace that, while it remained a stronghold, was embellished with fantastical turrets, pointed spires, conical roofs with lacy ridges, crested battlements and tall gilt weathervanes as handed down to posterity in the exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, compiled by the brothers Limbourg. Less militarily functional windows began to supplant the narrow arrow-slits of a city at risk. Its elegant, light-hearted fancies would have done credit to Bavaria’s Schloss Neuschwannstein, and no doubt it was the Louvre of Charles V that partly inspired Mad Ludwig. Moving into it four years after he came to the throne, Charles was the first and almost the last French king to make the Louvre his principal residence. Within its safe walls he collected his ancestor’s manuscripts to found the first Bibliothèque Nationale. Outside, a great rampart, running just five metres east of today’s Arc du Carrousel, now marked the western limits of Paris.

Like many of his successors, Charles ran into trouble with the rowdies of the Sorbonne; he met it by closing off the Rue de la Fouarre with chains at each end. In the next reign, that of his son, the unfortunate Charles le Fou (Charles VI), the University once more earned opprobrium by supporting a collaborationist party that favoured making Henry V of England the rightful king of France, thus earning for itself the epithet “an annexe of Oxford.”

What Charles V did for Paris, however, was not matched by either his financial or his diplomatic acumen. The Hundred Years War continued in all its horror, bringing France—and Paris—one of the most tragic periods in history. At Agincourt in 1415, as many as 10,000 French warriors fell to Henry’s longbowmen, at negligible cost to the English. It was a time of bitter cold, when the wolves came into the city to keep warm. The combination of the war and the Black Death had rendered much of the rural population of France homeless and starving. Fleeing the ruined countryside, these uprooted peasants sought shelter inside Charles V’s girdle of walls, where they set up a perilous no-go area in a tangle of reeking streets, establishing their own laws and terrorizing the populace. In daytime they spilled out into the rest of Paris, transmogrifying themselves into blind or limbless beggars; by night they miraculously recovered their faculties, attracting to the unsavoury area the name Cour des Miracles. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo described it as an “immense changing-room of all the actors of this comedy that robbery, prostitution and murder play on the cobbled streets of Paris.”

Paris was now under the occupation of les goddams (as the English soldiery were known). From Les Tournelles, his palace in the Marais, on the present site of the resplendent Hôtel de Soubise, the Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V and self-proclaimed Regent of France (1420–35), governed Paris—and not badly, though few Frenchmen would admit it. King without a capital, Charles VII ruled from Bourges over a divided rump of France—comparable to the area of non-occupied Vichy France from 1940. Then came Jeanne d’Arc, and by 1453 les goddams, now riven by a combination of weak kings and their own civil disputes— the Wars of the Roses—departed. With them also went the wolves. But, though the Hundred Years War was at last at an end, more wars followed, and internecine civil disputes too, with Louis XI taken prisoner in his own country, at Péronne in 1468.

RENAISSANCE STIRRINGS

By now, however, the first glimmer of a new light was beginning to illuminate Paris from the south-east, from Italy. Already during the reign of Charles VI contemporary paintings depict the mad King lying on his bed richly caparisoned in garments, the fabrics of which had made the wealth of Renaissance Florence. Liberated from the scourge north of the Channel, the Valois began to turn eager, and greedy, eyes towards Italy. Through marriages and deaths (notably of King René of Anjou and of Provence) and almost by default Louis XI made huge territorial gains, which set him among the great builders of the nation. During his reign, France acquired much of the geographical shape of the hexagon she inhabits today. Maine, Anjou and Provence, even powerful Burgundy, so long a thorn in the side of France, fell into Louis’s hands virtually without a battle. He also obtained a foothold in Naples. With Naples there opened a window that would bring enormous cultural wealth to Paris, but would also lead to the undoing of many a subsequent French ruler—down to Napoleon III—seduced by the allure of Italian sun and riches. Louis XI, sometimes described as the “strangest of all the Valois,” was certainly the most restless, spending half of his twenty-two-year reign wandering, away from Paris, and dying in his château at Plessis-les-Tours.

Nevertheless, within a few years of the departure of the last English troops, France under Louis XI recovered (as she was often to do) with astonishing rapidity. Recovery was partly a result of the fertility of her soil, coupled with the industry of her peasants; but it was also spurred by what de Gaulle later mystically identified as “une certaine idée de la France,” or, as André Maurois puts it, “a deep-rooted certainty that a Frenchman can only be a Frenchman.” Hand in hand with this went a fundamental, unshakeable belief in France’s universal mission civilisatrice.

In 1461, Louis XI made his joyeuse entrée into Paris. As André Maurois relates:

Upon his entry, the herald, Loyal Coeur, presented him with five noble ladies who represented the five letters of the name Paris, and each of them made a speech of welcome. The horses were caparisoned with cloth of gold lined with sable, with velvet lined with ermine, and with cloth of Damascus mounted with goldsmiths’ work. At the fountain of Ponceau, three handsome girls took the part of the Sirens, all naked, and you could see “their lovely breasts, round and firm, which was a very pleasant thing,” and they warbled little motets.