Seven Ages of Paris (9 page)

Evidence about the kinds of punishment imposed by the authorities seems to be scanty for the reign of Philippe Auguste itself, but they were a great deal less draconian and ingenious in their cruelty than a century later, under Philippe le Bel, when horrible refinements of torture became current. But if one relies on sources dating from around 1400, it is possible to infer that in early-thirteenth-century Paris the crimes of treason, homicide and rape were punished by dragging the culprit through the streets and then hanging him. Arson and theft of property also merited hanging; heresy and sodomy earned the stake; currency forgers were thrown into boiling water. The lesser offences, principally the infliction of blows and injuries where blood was shed, recorded in the registers under the heading “little blood” (sang menu), were for a long time covered by the law of retaliation, although eventually they became liable only to fines, imprisonment and penalties corresponding to the harm caused. Frankish customary tradition applied a whole range of penalties against theft, not just the death penalty. Under the jurisprudence of Charlemagne, theft was liable to penalties ranging from the loss of an eye to the gallows, and this custom lasted at least until the reign of Saint Louis. Corporal punishment, such as hanging, whipping, branding and loss of a limb, were designed to be deterrents.

Ecclesiastical judges could condemn to death too. One Jean Hardi died at the stake for having sexual relations with a Jewess, which was held to be contrary to nature. Men were usually killed by hanging, women by whipping. Suicide was also considered a crime, so the suicide’s cadaver would be hanged. Non-capital corporal punishment pronounced in the name of the bishop—for example, the mutilation of an ear or branding by hot iron—were carried out at the Croix-du-Tirouer, in the Rue Saint-Honoré at the top of the Rue l’Arbre-Sec.

In addition to the royal and episcopal justice, there were judicial organs of seigneurial jurisdictions in Paris; their sergeants kept an eye on petty, daily offences like insults, altercations, brawls and games of chance. Justices in Paris exercised their rights using pillories, with petty criminals subjected to ridicule by the crowd in the square before the church. At Saint-Germain-des-Prés there was a pillory at the crossroads of the present-day Rue de Buci and the Boulevard Saint-Germain. At night, since fear of evil spirits and wrongdoers alike was greater under cover of darkness, the magistrates paid particular attention to security. The hour of curfew having been fixed by decree, the town clock would impose silence, the taverns would shut and house doors would close as the night watch began its round. The night guard (le guet) was the responsibility of the guilds, whose members were expected to volunteer by turns so that a full complement of sixty burgesses each night was available to make the rounds or stand at assigned posts. (Later, by 1364, the town watch was supported by the royal guard, consisting of a company of twenty mounted sergeants and several dozen armed footsoldiers.) Patrolling the city was never a professional job in medieval Paris: it relied instead on the ties of family, work and neighbourhood, and on the authority of heads of families, guilds and volunteers in the militia.

There were haunts of poverty and shame on Philippe Auguste’s map of Paris. The basic principle of medieval regulation in this regard was to designate certain areas for prostitution and limit vice strictly to them. Thus in London prostitutes were assigned two sites; in Venice they were confined to the Castellato, at the centre of the Rialto; in Amiens they were obliged to spend both night and day in the Rue des Filles, but this street proved to be too small and the district was enlarged. The aim of this sort of social hygiene was to locate these places well away from seigneurial residences, in poor districts, often along the river. The sites where vice could be practised in Paris (notably in close proximity to Notre-Dame) were in fact not fixed by Philippe Auguste, but by his grandson, the saintly Louis IX. Tradition attributes to this pious monarch the designation of eight streets where the “common ribalds” could ply their trade, though ordinances of 1254 and 1256 laid down that prostitutes should be driven out of town.

DRESS, SONG AND LOVE

In a world where comforts shared by all classes were few, degree showed itself to a large extent in apparel. In bed at night, all wore nothing—men and women, rich and poor. By day, a baron could be spotted in cold weather by his furlined pellice. Men of all ranks wore braies, the full, pleated breeches favoured by the Gauls, while the affluent also wore long stockings, or chauces, often in brilliant colours and of rich materials such as silk or cotton (imported from Africa, therefore of even greater rarity). Above would be worn a pleated doublet with full but short sleeves revealing the tight-fitting chainse shirt (handsomely embroidered in the case of the wealthy). Instead of a braie women who could afford it wore a long linen chainse trailing to the ground. Elegant women wore clothes of brilliant hue—for example, a purple mantle fastened by a gold pin at the breast, and a high wimple. Hair was parted in the middle, with two long plaits dropping down as far as possible. For men, shaving was no easy matter—performed with an instrument like a carving knife, painful on a virile stubble.

To palliate the hardship of medieval life, entertainment was of the highest priority. Parisians of all ranks loved a party, especially a good wedding feast, where minstrels would perform. The principal instrument of the visiting jongleur would be a viele, a flat-bottomed fiddle, vaguely triangular, with three strings worked by a concave bow that was a little awkward to handle. The music of the times was, it seems, seldom in unison. The jongleur would first of all strike a note on his viele, and then chant; the much loved, heroic Chanson de Roland could take as long as five hours to perform. With his wide knowledge of Jerusalem, the Siege of Antioch, of Arabs and Babylonians, drawn from the Crusades, and his tales of heroes who would give up all in the cause of the Faith, the well-travelled jongleur was a much sought-after figure. Though the chansons de geste such as Roland, with their attachment to a chivalry that was heroic to the point of suicide and absurdity, were arguably to help France lose the Battle of Crécy in the next century, they now kindled in Parisians for the first time a patriotic feeling of intense love for la douce France—principally identified with the immediately surrounding Ile de France.

Out of these chansons grew another form of literature of great importance, centred around women and dealing with courtly love. In this early development of feminism in France, the Crusades played a significant role: because of the lengthy absence of the lord, the lady gained more power. Here Eleanor of Aquitaine was perhaps a role model, as well as importing to rude Paris the “courtly” manners of the south. Beginning a long tradition, great ladies took to having lovers, in addition to their lawful spouses. Whereas in the more northerly clime of England the courtly lover of Malory and the Round Table tended to platonic adoration from afar, the Parisian woman already expected—and received—more earthly devotion. Nevertheless, as André Maurois points out, such chansons contributed to a “discipline of customs and manners which was a great step forward to civilization.” With it came the ascendant influence of the Parisian woman, and also the importance attached to love—and with it humour and satire.

THE KING DIES

The last years of Philippe Auguste’s reign were marred by a campaign in south-west France of appalling savagery against fellow Christians: the Albigensian Crusade. Whatever the actual heresy adopted by the unfortunate Albigensians, or Cathars (it was called Manichaeism), they were charged with enormous outrages such as institutionialized sodomy. The tolerance that had characterized Abélard’s twelfth century was fast evaporating, and charges of heresy, and the Inquisition, lay just around the corner, with the most baleful influences on France—and Paris. There were also thinly disguised territorial motives in the Albigensian Crusade, and, as with all religious civil wars, it was prosecuted with ruthless ferocity. Whole areas of Languedoc were laid waste by the awful Simon de Montfort. Whipped on by the Papal Legate, Arnaud Amalric, with the alleged exhortation “Kill them all. God will recognize his own,” the brutal massacre of the inhabitants of Béziers, where 7,000 men, women and children were herded into the Church of the Madeleine and slaughtered, is remembered to this day. The war in Languedoc was to drag on wretchedly for decades. Urged on by the Pope, Philippe pursued it with reluctance, but it remained a blot on the closing years of his reign and distracted him from his plans for Paris.

In September 1222, when the Albigensian affair had taken a turn for the worse, Philippe was laid low with a fever which plagued him for the next nine months. Recognizing that death was near, he bequeathed his jewellery to Saint-Denis, and the substantial sum of 50,000 livres as compensation for citizens whom he had wrongfully condemned or who had been victims of his “extortions.” In July 1223, he was in the Eure, heading for a conference in Paris to the latest papal agenda for a crusade, when his condition deteriorated. On the 11th he was duly bled, and the following day he insisted that he had to die in Paris, but he had only reached Mantes on the 14th when death claimed him. He was buried the next day in his beloved Saint-Denis, having passed on a request to his successor to “offer justice to his people, and above all to protect the poor and humble from the insolence of the proud.”

With his death, Paris in particular mourned a great ruler. The virtual founder of France, who had established a powerful country, Philippe Auguste left a capital for the first time secure enough within the mighty walls he had built around it to develop, thrive and expand. Paris had at last become the definitive administrative centre of France, as well as Europe’s capital of learning. With a population in Abélard’s time of 100,000 (the largest in Western Europe, but still tiny compared with the one million of contemporary Constantinople), it was now approaching the 200,000 mark. And the great gothic cathedrals that Philippe and his father left behind them were only the first instalments of a historic grandeur.

THREE

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The Templars’ Curse

Pope Clement, iniquitous judge and cruel executioner, I adjure you to appear in forty days’ time before God’s tribunal. And you, King of France, will not live to see the end of this year, and Heaven’s retribution will strike down your accomplices and destroy your posterity.

JACQUES DE MOLAY, IN 1314

SAINT LOUIS

Louis VIII, nicknamed “Le Lion,” was the first Capetian monarch not to be designated king in advance during the lifetime of his father—a symbol of how strong Philippe Auguste had left the dynasty. He was thirty-six, but died of dysentery three years later (though the circumstances excited suspicion) while at the incessant wars in the south-west, at Montpensier. Keeping on his father’s ministers, such as Bishop Guérin the hero of Bouvines, and maintaining all his policies, Louis VIII’s short reign was but a continuation of Philippe’s. At his death, his son Louis IX was only twelve years old. So authority remained vested in his mother, Blanche of Castile, the Regent, who also took over the same ministers and policies. There were troubles with Philippe Hurepel, the legitimized son of Philippe Auguste and Agnes of Merano, abetted by Henry III of England; but Hurepel died in 1234, and Louis IX enjoyed a relatively tranquil and successful forty-four years on the throne.

Coming to the throne in 1226, Louis IX—“Saint Louis” (he was canonized in 1297 by Pope Boniface VIII, notably for his crusading zeal, but also perhaps partly to propitiate the French, who were then closing in on Rome under Philippe le Bel)—was to consolidate much of the work of Philippe Auguste both in France and in Paris. When he took over the reins from his mother he is reputed immediately to have impressed his less pious contemporaries by the purity of his soul. He seems to have been a strange, complex man, terrified by his dominant mother and her threats of the devil into wearing a hair shirt by day and, at night, performing fifty genuflections and reciting as many Ave Marias before going to bed. In Maurice Druon’s summation, “He was one of the great neurotics of history. Had he not inclined to saintliness he might have been a monster. Neros are made of the same fibre.”

Certainly, with his passion for crusading he would seem in the eyes of today’s historians rather less than deserving of sainthood. But he brought to the Capetian dynasty a morality which would die with him. In geopolitical terms, he routed Henry III’s English at Saintes in 1242, then concluded a (brief) peace with England. During his reign the unfortunate Albigensians were finished off (1229), and Languedoc became assimilated into France, and, through his marriage in 1234 to Margaret of Provence (another powerful woman), he acquired for France a claim to one of the richest and largest of her neighbours to the south. By the Treaty of Paris of 1259 Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou were attached to the French Crown, bestowing on Louis considerable prestige in Europe.

Louis was very tall and thin, his figure described as being “bowed by fasting and mortification.” Some of his earthier contemporaries were not impressed by his excessive piety, which extended to washing the feet of his nobles, and on occasion they jeered at him for being a “king of priests” rather than of France. Inflexible in his beliefs, he installed the Inquisition in France, with all the misery which that was to bring, and turned his back on the liberalism of the twelfth century.

In 1248, channelling his piety into crusading zeal, Louis embarked on the Seventh Crusade, against the wishes of the Pope and against the judgement of his counsellors. In a remarkable display of the French monarchy’s new solidity, he also took with him Queen Margaret and two of his brothers, leaving his mother, Blanche of Castile, once more in charge in Paris. The aim of the Crusade was to liberate the Holy Land from the Sultan of Egypt, but—as usual—things went wrong and by 1250 Louis, stricken with typhus, was a prisoner of the Sultan at El Mansura after a catastrophic massacre of his forces. With great difficulty the King raised his own heavy ransom with recourse to the affluent Knights Templar, though at first they had refused. He then opened negotiations with the Muslims for the delivery of Jerusalem—which might well have succeeded but for the arrival of news of the death of the Regent, his mother Blanche.