Seven Ages of Paris (2 page)

That “certaine idée de la France” found refuge in London, with de Gaulle. The light returned to Paris in the exalted but also troubled hours of the Liberation. Intellectually as much of a Gaullist as an Englishman can be, Alistair Horne cannot quite resist the strange seduction which the Man-of-18-June exercises upon all those who study him: this arrogant visionary, this uncompromising prophet, this acclaimed solitary, this authoritarian tactician, the last of the great French monarchs, who, like the first, united in his person nation, law and state. Once again it was Paris, through a new bout of fever in 1968, the least bloody but also the most disturbing of her history, which darkened and abbreviated the end of de Gaulle’s reign.

Yes, I have taken enormous pleasure in rereading the history of my country, rejuvenated by the eye of a Briton. Having admired the elegant and fluid style of Alistair Horne, I wager that this book will go into many translations. For all those lovers of Paris so numerous throughout the world, it will provide a generous source of reference, an exciting travelling companion—and, in the evening of life, a lullaby of nostalgia. Seven Ages of Paris is, in itself, a monument.

MAURICE DRUON,

Académie Française, KBE

Whereas London, through the ages, has always betrayed clearly male orientations, and New York has a certain ambivalence, has any sensible person ever doubted that Paris is fundamentally a woman? It was thus that I first conceived this book—not as any arrogant attempt to write an all-embracing history of Paris, but rather as a series of linked biographical essays, depicting seven ages (capriciously selected at the whim of the author) in the long, exciting life of a sexy and beautiful, but also turbulent, troublesome and sometimes excessively violent woman.

Not only is she herself all woman, but in every age Paris seems to throw up from within an extraordinary range of fascinating, powerful and often dangerous women who leave their mark on the city. They may be seen to begin with tragic Héloïse; Henry James properly dubbed her “a Frenchwoman to the last millimetre of her shadow … worth at least a dozen Abelards,” and though she spent most of a long, sad life banished far from Paris, she always seemed to me equally a Parisienne to “the last millimetre.” Then there are Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Henri IV’s passionate and violent Reine Margot. The reign of Louis XIV educes the bossily pious
Mme.
de Maintenon, counterparted by her outrageous and rather more attractive—and unlikely—friend, the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. The age of Napoleon has, of course, Josephine—and many others with walk-on (generally boudoir) parts; similarly with Louis Napoleon, beginning with the frigid Empress Eugénie and ending with the fiery “Red Virgin,” Louise Michel, whose pétroleuses did their best to burn down Paris in the last days of the Commune. A happier age, briefly, of the Belle Epoque brings Sarah Bernhardt across the boards and culminates with Colette traversing—and surviving—two appalling world wars. The few bright moments of the “Phoney Peace” of 1919–39 are illuminated by great vedettes like Josephine Baker, who became as much a Parisienne as any of them. And finally we have the post-1945 age of Piaf and Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir and Coco Chanel—all of them women who to some degree dominated the Paris that nurtured them.

The great Richard Cobb, late of Oxford, England’s foremost connoisseur of Paris, in moments of exasperation was given to exclaim, “Wonderful country, France … pity about the French!” Of course he didn’t really mean it, and it was far too all-embracing an insult. Occasionally, on a soaking-wet day when there is no parking and the concierge turns his back on me, I have felt, more specifically, “Pity about the Parisians.” Then they will do something utterly disarming, generous to a fault. At least, neither Paris nor the Parisiens can ever be boring. I hesitate to appear to misprize my native city, but how can the history of dear, sedate old London town possibly compare to Paris for sheer excitement? (Of course, one can sometimes have perhaps too much excitement.) Against several revolutions, including one rather big one, several sieges, several occupations, what has mild-mannered London to offer but one regicide, a plague and a fire? A city without walls, protected by the Channel instead of only the gentle Seine, never threatened with starvation or besieged by an enemy—at least until Hitler came knocking at our door? And, against the great builders and city-planners from Philippe Auguste to Haussmann, of whom can London boast? A Wren or two. Then, where were our Impressionists during the Belle Epoque?

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.

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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 discovering 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.