Seven Ages of Paris (13 page)

On the Pont au Change, the bird-sellers, who had a monopoly on the Place du Châtelet (they still have it), released 200 of their wares, brilliant of plumage. But Paris benefited little during Louis’s reign. Indeed he seems to have been something of a skinflint, once declaring, “I have decided to marry my small daughter Joan to the small Duc d’Orléans, because it seems to me that the children they might have would not cost much to feed.”

Louis’s son Charles VIII soon became seduced “by the phantoms and glories of Italy,” and involved himself in a lightning campaign that was so effective that it almost resembled a promenade, bringing him to the very gates of Rome. Initially, the Italians seemed to welcome the French; Charles in turn came home enthralled by Italian art, thus opening France’s doors to the Renaissance. Alas, in 1498, aged only twenty-eight, the poor gangly fellow died after bashing his head on the low lintel of a door at Amboise on the Loire, the château to which he was so passionately attached. On his death, the succession went sideways, to the Orléans branch of the House of Valois. The new King, Louis XII, great-grandson of Charles V, was yet another who did not share his forebear’s passion for Paris. He too was to be enticed into the maze of Italian politics and intrigue, by Pope Julius II, the builder of St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. This warrior Pope, aroused by Machiavelli, wanted the weight of French arms as a counterbalance to his enemy, the Venetians. But as soon as Louis became too successful and occupied Milan, Julius II switched sides and sought to get rid of the French. In 1513 Louis’s army was crushed at Novara, Milan was lost, and the French had to beat an indecently hasty retreat back over the Alps. Though Italy was lost, she was never forgotten. Aged fifty-three and without an heir, Louis was married a third time, to Mary, the sixteen-year-old sister of England’s Henry VIII. In an apparent effort to please his lusty young bride, the sickly Louis was said to have greatly exceeded his strength and died suddenly in the middle of the night on New Year’s Day, 1515.

In France as a whole, which enjoyed a period of rare prosperity and peace at home, the reign of Louis XII was generally rated a success—though, like his predecessors, he had had little time—or money—to devote to his capital. Thus, over five reigns during the previous century and a quarter, Paris virtually stagnated. When they were not away at the wars, the later Valois concentrated their wealth and energies on the joys of la chasse, and on translating the marvels of the Italian Renaissance to their glorious châteaux on the Loire—Amboise, Blois, Chenonceaux, Chaumont and Azay, culminating in the modest hunting lodge of François I at Chambord, with an entire village constructed on its roof and its great spiral staircases designed to take a horse and coach.

Anything to be away from smelly, pestilential, unruly Paris!

TWO STRONG KINGS

It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between the sickly and delicate Louis XII and his successor, the robust, rumbustious François Premier. Just twenty-one when he succeeded (sideways, like the heirless Louis), François was a giant of over two metres tall, with long legs and arms and massive hands and feet. In his energies, appetites and tastes, he was every inch the Renaissance king; in the magnificence of his clothes he closely resembled his contemporary, England’s Henry VIII—the close-fitting doublets with the slashed sleeves, the extravagant Italian shoes and the feathered hats. He brought Benvenuto Cellini to France, and Leonardo da Vinci died in his arms. Like his two predecessors, as Bismarck might have said in a different context, François’s “map of Europe” lay in Italy—and so did his fate. Inheriting a country threatened on three sides—by Henry VIII across the Channel, by Emperor Maximilian beyond the Rhine, and by Ferdinand of Aragon over the Pyrenees—François decided to seize the initiative by recapturing Milan—almost on a whim. At first things went well. At the resplendent Field of the Cloth of Gold, a forerunner of lavish state visits, François managed to entice Henry VIII into watchful, and only temporary, neutrality. But the death of Maximilian I brought a far more redoubtable foe to the east—the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, ruler of Habsburg Austria and King of Spain.

Thus, hardly had France recovered from the Hundred Years War against England than a new challenge appeared. Spain, released from Moorish bondage and now, under Charles V, allied by marriage to the Austrian Habsburgs, confronted France on both sides, east and west. Here were the beginnings of France’s ensuing four centuries of conflict with the Germanic world; by the time of François’s death in 1547, it should have been clear that the enduring problem for France was no longer Italy.

Ten years into his reign, disaster struck the perhaps excessively hubristic François. His cousin Charles de Bourbon, Constable of the Kingdom of France and thus its most powerful military leader, defected to the enemy. Suddenly it looked as if the dreadful days of the Hundred Years War might be returning, with enemy troops advancing to within fifty kilometres of Paris—as close as Kaiser Wilhelm was ever to come. Rashly crossing the Alps once again, François led his army to total defeat at Pavia in 1525, crushed by Spanish infantry, the most formidable soldiery in Europe at that time. He himself was wounded and taken prisoner—the last French ruler to be imprisoned by a foreign power until Napoleon on Elba. Paris was left all but undefended. To his mother François wrote the famous words: “Madame, of everything there remain to me only honour and life, which are unscathed.” To many Frenchmen, however, it must have seemed as if the melancholy prediction of Louis XII was coming true: “We busy ourselves in vain … that big young fellow will spoil everything.”

It looked as though a resurgent, fiercely reactionary Catholic Spain, bursting with wealth plundered from the New World, was becoming master of Christendom. Meanwhile, across the Rhine an event that was soon to shake Christendom, especially France, went by almost unnoticed. In 1517, a little-known German monk called Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the local church at Wittenberg, in protest against the sale of indulgences to finance the building of Saint Peter’s, and against the harshness of Madrid-oriented Catholicism in general. There followed his excommunication and his courageous appearance before the dread Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Though beset by enemies, at home and abroad, François had at least succeeded in preserving the national integrity of France; but, as his foreign wars ended, so the sixteenth century’s wars of religion began, leading to an epoch of terrible civil conflicts in France.

While in captivity François studied his captors’ success in the New World and dreamed up his “grand design” for France. On his release (after submitting to a draconian peace treaty) he was to found the port of Le Havre as a base for exploration and to despatch Jacques Cartier on the first of his voyages to discover Canada. Much of his energy went into hunting, and the building of vast hunting-boxes such as Chambord, precursor of Versailles. As a result of all this, on top of his unrelenting military expenditure, François’s finances were constantly in a tangle, and the country was heavily in debt. To offset some of this burden, François introduced bonds on the Hôtel de Ville as a principle of public debt, while money moved into the hands of a bourgeoisie seeking to merge with the nobility.

Despite his many other distractions, François I was, however, the first king since his great-great-grandfather Charles V, nearly two centuries before, to undertake serious works in Paris. Allowing the Renaissance to establish its ineffaceable imprint there, he razed Charles’s fortress Louvre as well as the last structures of Philippe Auguste. Evincing Paris’s new sense of security at the heart of the nation, the Louvre was no longer a bastion (after his incarceration in Madrid, François had a horror of fortresses), but an elegant and majestic palace. Designed by the architect Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon—“the French Phidias”—it was to prove a masterpiece of Renaissance grace, its style borrowed from Greece and Rome but with an unmistakable Frenchness. François had had time to complete only the two south-west sections on the Cour Carrée (the palace as a whole was not finished until 1663). His son Henri II and later Henri III were to add the two lateral wings. But François had set the classical design for the future, as well as initiating the art collection that would make the Louvre the greatest gallery of paintings in the world. Legend has it that he brought its most famous canvas, the Mona Lisa, to Paris after the death of Leonardo in 1519.

Always forward-looking (except perhaps in warfare), François abandoned the royal palaces in the Marais to open up that quarter to development by wealthy entrepreneurs, buying up land previously belonging to the religious orders. In 1535 he founded the Collège de France, as a competitor of and a corrective to the unruly Sorbonne next door. One of its specific aims was to propagate the humanistic ideals of the Italian Renaissance, and for the first time lectures were given in an enriched French language.

Among François’s most portentous introductions from Italy was the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker, Catherine de Médicis, as a bride for his heir, the future Henri II. With her came Italian culture of the High Renaissance, intrigue—and the art of poison. In 1547 François died, worn out by war, hunting and sex. Notwithstanding all his absences and distractions, it was he—lending a brilliance to the French Crown unknown since Saint Louis—who truly and ineradicably established the Renaissance in Paris. The fashion and style of the times in François’s France sprang from the top, from the court which followed the King wherever he went, a train of 12,000 horses, tents, baggage, tapestries, gold and silver plate, and wives, sisters and mistresses. “A court without ladies is a springtime without roses,” he proclaimed, and later French monarchs were to follow his lead. Poetry, music, games, gallantry and revels were the order of the day in this new France, suddenly prosperous in his last years through trade with Florence and a gold-laden Spain. Whereas Louis XI (perhaps like later sovereigns of Britain) thought that “knowledge makes for melancholy,” François was genuinely a “lover of good literature and learned men.” He was as adept in conversation about painting as about war, and it was said that “Whoever chanced to come was received, but he must needs not be a fool or a stumbler.” It was the era of Rabelais, intoxicated with knowledge and earthiness, moving on from the courtly love songs of the troubadours, the jongleurs and the pious mystery plays of the Middle Ages; a time when—abandoning their prescriptions of modesty—painters could depict the King’s mistress aux seins nus.

If the ideal of Frenchmen of the Middle Ages had been Philippe Auguste’s grandson Saint Louis, among the Valois of the sixteenth century it was Machiavelli. From the Borgias’ Italy, François’s outrageous friend Benvenuto Cellini brought not only art but a new morality; in his world la vie sexuelle was free, and even murder was forgiven—if the offender was an artist. “Virtuous young people,” he boasted, “are those who give the most thrust with the knife.” In the world of Philippe Auguste, Cellini would have rated the gallows and hell, but in the sixteenth century he was befriended by princes amused by his antics. Those men and women of the Renaissance, in France as in Italy, “had so much animal violence that the scruples of their minds never put a check on the motions of their bodies. They were good Catholics, but they did not go abroad without a dagger in their belts.”

With the death of François, one strong king followed another. Lacking his father’s charisma, Henri II was a sombre man, not over-endowed with brains, and chiefly interested in physical exercise. Wedded to a Médicis, Henri II more than continued the Italianate traditions of François I, further advancing François’s work on the Louvre, and with Catherine, his widow, commissioning Philibert Delorme to build a great new Renaissance Palace of the Tuileries, further west and perpendicular to the Seine. But under Catherine there also intensified an altogether more sombre aspect of the Renaissance in France—the Wars of Religion.

In 1559, under Henri II, a treaty was signed, that of Cateau-Cambrésis, one of those which laid the basis for modern France. Under it Queen Elizabeth was forced to relinquish England’s last foothold on the French mainland—Calais—which, though it had surrendered the previous year, had remained a permanent threat. At the same time, France secured three fortresses that would play a key role in wars against a new enemy, Germany, in both 1870 and 1914. By this treaty France also firmly turned her back on Italy—at least until Napoleon. It was a good accommodation for France, and extensive festivities were organized in Paris to mark it and to celebrate the weddings of two royal princesses. The athletic Henri joined in by entering a jousting tournament at Les Tournelles palace, where once the Duke of Bedford had held sway and on what is now the Place des Vosges in the Marais area. But the lance of his adversary splintered and put out his eye. After ten days of agony Henri died, aged forty-one, having reigned barely twelve years. Though he had been wearing the colours of his mistress, the sixty-year-old Diane de Poitiers, his widow, Catherine, ordered the palace to be razed to the ground.

Henri’s sufferings, however, were as nothing compared to what now overtook France in the course of the half-century that followed his death, and to which the country all but succumbed. The violent death of the second of two authoritarian and strong rulers marked an equally violent turning point in the history of both the Valois dynasty and France itself. From then on began the grim period of European struggles between Catholics and Protestants known as the Wars of Religion. Under the unrelentingly harsh Catholic fundamentalism of first Charles V, then Philip II of Spain, which throughout the sixteenth century wielded the most powerful military force in all Europe, the Inquisition was given full rein. Europe, and France, seemed destined to be torn apart by the rival factions. What now overtook France, and Paris, in the three decades from 1559 to 1590, was like an infinitely more savage Gallic version of William Shakespeare’s History Plays—the disorder and savagery which follows when strong rulers give way to weak ones.