Seven Ages of Paris (18 page)

THE REGENCY

Of Henri’s all-too-brief reign, it would be hard to improve on André Maurois’s assessment. The results may have been “less astonishing than legend would have them,” he wrote,

but at least Henri IV and Sully gave France ten years’ truce, and the country remembered it as a golden age … “You cannot be a Frenchman,” said Henri de Rohan, “without regretting the loss to its well-being France has suffered.” Ten generations have confirmed this judgement, and Henri IV remains, together with Charlemagne, Joan of Arc and Saint Louis, one of France’s heroes. He typifies not France’s mystical aspect, but its aspects of courage, good sense and gaiety.

Much loved by so many of his countrymen, Henri of Navarre was the second consecutive French king to die by the knife of a religious zealot. What would have happened in Paris if Ravaillac had proved to be Huguenot or the tool of a Protestant conspiracy instead of a lone Catholic fanatic is awful to contemplate. As it was, the city trembled for days if not weeks; throughout the country a renewal of civil war was widely predicted. Waiting in the wings, in Milan, fêted by Spanish envoys there, was the self-exiled Prince de Condé, the last would-be cuckold of the murdered King and a close prince of the blood—though he was held back by a lack of both charm and resolve. But Henri at least had planned his succession as well as he could. For all the rival claims of the mistresses, he had left a legitimate heir by Marie de Médicis, Louis XIII.

The new King, however, was a child not quite nine years old; over the next hundred years, there would be three child kings in a row on the throne of France, ruling through three regents. This was a uniquely dangerous situation for a mighty country confronted by watchful enemies, both inside and outside. In the case of both Louis XIII and his son Louis XIV, aged four when he came to the throne, the regent would be a woman, the Queen Mother. But Henri had foresight. Six months before his death he had declared to Marshal de Lesdiguières that he “well knew that the foundation of everything in France is the prince’s authority.” For that reason, he intended to establish the Dauphin “as absolute king and to give him all the true, essential marks of royalty, to the end that there might be no one in the realm who would not have to obey him.” Here, de facto, was enunciated the principle of absolutism by which, for better or worse, France would be governed until the Great Revolution 180 years later—and which would be revived under Napoleon.

On the eve of setting off for the wars, Henri had taken the wise precaution of designating his queen, Marie, to act as regent in his absence, supported by a Regent’s Council fifteen strong. Though she had not the authoritarian will of her predecessor Catherine, Marie—fat, blonde and comely enough when Rubens glorified her—sensibly retained all of Henri’s ministers. Only the ageing Sully resigned; but he left France’s coffers full. Acting judiciously to calm Protestant fears of another Saint Bartholomew’s, one of her first moves was to confirm the Edict of Nantes. But the stability achieved by Henri, which was not rooted in any fundamental reforms, had been no more than a temporary truce, and as such it remained constantly at risk.

When Marie was declared regent shortly after the announcement of Henri’s death, Parisians were so shocked and frightened “that in a moment the expression of all Paris changed … The boutiques closed; everyone began to wail and cry, with women and girls tearing their hair out.” In fact, Parisians did not rise up in revolt. Instead of running to arms, they prayed for the health and prosperity of the new King, the whole of their fury directed against the regicide. So Marie was able to lay a foundation sufficiently sound for the young Louis XIII to survive campaigns against the princes in 1619–20 and against the Huguenots in 1627–8—and to resist the external pressures of the Thirty Years War, which ravaged central Europe.

Outside Paris but within the Ile de France, increasingly affluent nobles built a multitude of elegant châteaux, harbingers of Versailles—constructed like Courances in the brick-and-stone manner of Henri IV, one of the most felicitous styles of any. But within the capital few great new building projects were undertaken under the Regency. The Queen Mother contented herself with purchasing and completing her sumptuous Luxembourg Palace, summoning Rubens from Antwerp in 1621 to decorate its galleries with twenty-five vast canvases that celebrated, with magnificent flattery, the main events of her marriage and the benefits to her adopted country of the Regency. Here in the Luxembourg’s wild park, the young Louis played, his dogs coursing after hare and boar where today children play tennis and watch Punch and Judy shows. Above all, the final touches were applied to Henri’s masterpiece, the Place Royale.

In 1612 the engagement was announced of the ten-year-old Dauphin to Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, a thoroughly dynastic arrangement. At the same time, Louis’s sister Elisabeth was betrothed to Anne’s brother, the future Philip IV of Spain. That April saw one of the most extravagant celebrations ever mounted in Paris, dignifying the double engagement and inaugurating the newly opened Place Royale. A mock carrousel, called the Château de Félicité, complete with turrets and battlements, was erected in the city centre, but this time—in response to the tragic death of Henri IV and all that had followed it—there would be no jousting. Instead the Regent and her court watched from specially constructed stands as an elaborate cavalcade passed before them, thrilling some 200,000 Parisians who had gathered in the streets. As night fell, accompanied by a tremendous blast of trumpets, drums and clairons, and the firing of 4,000 rockets from the towers of the nearby Bastille,* the whole Château de Félicité was set alight. Two more days of celebration followed.

The great festival in the Place Royale, which so fittingly marked Henri’s lasting bequest to Paris, also assured the popularity of La Reine Marie—but only temporarily. Already suspect because of her Italian background, Marie rashly handed considerable powers to her Italian favourite, a woman widely regarded as “a swarthy and greedy sorceress” called Leonora Galigai, whom she had imported from her native Florence. Leonora was married to an affected fop, Carlo Concini, whom the Queen made Marquis d’Ancre, and a marshal of France—though he never fought a battle. The Concinis seemed to exert a curious influence over the Queen Regent, enriching themselves and picking up titles, and generally making themselves hugely unpopular. They soon became scapegoats for all the real or imagined shortcomings of the regime. Meanwhile, in October 1614 Louis had reached his majority, aged twelve, and—frail, elegant and dressed in white—had appeared before the Estates-General, where the young Bishop of Luçon, by the name of Richelieu, first made his mark with a speech of forceful eloquence. The boy King thanked his mother profusely for “all the trouble” she had taken on his behalf, and declared that he wished her to continue to govern and to be obeyed.

The young King was a glum shadow of his father, substantially lacking his charm and panache, and so fearful of women that he was certainly no Vert Galant. He was a strange man. A lonely child, sulky, morose and shy, he grew up to be secretive, cold, hard—and capable of great cruelty. He was unsociable and a dreamer, who seemed always to be bored. When asked to pardon a condemned peer (and personal friend), he is said to have remarked, “A king should not have the same feelings as a private man.” Like his mother he made a poor choice of favourites: Charles d’Albert de Luynes, Grand Falconer at the court. Luynes, who was twenty-three years older than Louis, was a fairly humble petit gentilhomme from near Aix-en-Provence, born—according to Richelieu’s acid comment—of a canon from Marseilles and a chambermaid. He was good looking and well built, and his early hold on young Louis—from 1614 onwards—derived from his expertise in riding and hunting.

In November 1615, aged thirteen, Louis was finally married to the Spanish princess Anne of Austria, now a beautiful young woman. He made a show, unusual for him, of being joyeux et galant during the festivities, but he is said not to have entered his wife’s bed until five years after their marriage, and then only when he was led to it by Luynes. There was to be no issue of the marriage for twenty-two years. But for the advent of one of history’s greatest politicians, Cardinal Richelieu, his reign would probably have been little short of a calamity for France.

The Concinis, arrogant parvenus, came increasingly to annoy Louis by cheekily parading outside his windows in the Louvre, with an escort two or three hundred strong. The situation grew intolerable. In April 1617, Louis, almost certainly egged on by his favourite, ordered the elimination of Concini. On the morning of the 24th, accompanied by a retinue of fifty, the puffed-up Marshal d’Ancre entered the Louvre through the great door facing on to Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Immediately a courtier, Vitry, a former counsellor of Henri IV, supported by a few men, sprang out and, putting his hand on the right arm of Concini, announced, “The King has commanded me to seize your person.” Concini cried out for help, but was immediately felled by a volley of pistol shots. His retinue did nothing. Meanwhile Louis and Luynes were waiting anxiously inside, ready to flee if the plot failed.

Within the very courtyard of the Louvre, Paris could chalk up another ruthless murder. The city rejoiced ferociously at the end of the hated Concini, who was suspected of complicity in the death of Henri IV and even blamed for the failure to place his statue on the Pont Neuf. Buried after the killing at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Concini’s body was later dug up, torn apart and cannibalized: “Having torn out the heart, one mob roasted it on a charcoal brazier, and ate it with relish.” With the murder of Concini, at sixteen the unpleasant Louis had truly come of age. “Yes, now I am king!” he declared. At court it was as if lightning had struck. Abject by definition, the courtiers rallied instantly to their new star, raising him up in the window of the palace to show him to the guard assembled in the courtyard. Marie de Médicis, realizing that her innings was over, said resignedly, “I’ve reigned for years, and now I expect nothing more than a crown in heaven!” She was exiled (briefly) to Blois. Her Italian best friend, Leonora Galigai, Concini’s widow, was seized while trying to conceal her jewellery in a mattress, and then burned on the Place de Grève as a witch. “What a lot of people to see a poor woman die!” she is said to have exclaimed. Richelieu, compromised by his association with Concini, went back to his diocese. Luynes was made a duke and appointed master of the royal household—in effect, master of the state. He was to prove an increasingly pernicious influence on Louis.

* The Bastille had been built by Charles V in 1370 as the Castle of Saint-Antoine.

LOUIS XIII GROWS UP

With the double marriage, the Spanish threat to France which had so exercised Henri IV was now approaching its end. Indeed Spain, about to begin her long descent into torpor following the death of Philip II in 1598, was no longer her principal enemy. Once again the dangers were internal. Luynes, a Catholic zealot, soon found himself entangled in a campaign against the Protestants in the south-west of France. An incompetent general, in 1621 he so mishandled the siege of Montauban that it had to be abandoned after three months. Among the many casualties was Luynes himself, dead of the fièvre pourpre, or camp fever.

Unmistakably, the death of Luynes was a stroke of good fortune for France, though it left a serious power-vacuum in Paris. Into it, and out of his temporary disgrace, moved Richelieu—at the behest of a king disoriented by the loss of his favourite. With Luynes now dead, Louis became reconciled to his mother; and in 1622 her new favourite, the Bishop of Luçon, was made Cardinal Richelieu. Two years later, swallowing his pride, Louis called in the man he had previously viewed as a dangerous prelate “ready to set fire to the four corners of the realm” and invited him to take over his government. This decision was to transform an unattractive and accident-prone princeling into a monarch with a claim to greatness—if only a greatness that lay in his remarkable willingness to entrust the running of the country almost entirely to his brilliant premier ministre. Richelieu was to declare that “My first goal was the majesty of the King; the second was the greatness of the realm.” Historians such as Montesquieu, however, saw it differently: Richelieu had assigned the King the role of playing “second fiddle in the realm and first in Europe.”

Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu was born in Paris in 1585 of noble family from Poitou. With his arched nose and thin lips, his goatee and military moustache, his pale complexion and slender build, he cut a distinguished figure that was to dominate the portraits of the epoch. Beneath the cool, reasoned exterior was a man of passion, occasionally capable of violent rage. France, as Richelieu saw it, was in a mess, but, ever the pragmatist, he eschewed grand designs in favour of a method. “In politics,” he would say, “one is impelled far more by the necessity of things than by a pre-established will.”

Richelieu’s early programme operated on three fronts: to crush Huguenot power, to humble the “Great Lords” among the French nobles, grown too rich and too powerful under the Regency, and to thwart the designs of Habsburg Austria. In the first of these, he was greatly aided by the folly of James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham precipitated an Anglo-French war, into which the key Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay was unwillingly drawn. After suffering terrible privations, La Rochelle was starved out following a fourteen-month siege in 1627–8. Buckingham simply pulled out, abandoning his Huguenot allies to their fate. Acting with great moderation in the wake of this disaster for the Protestant cause, Richelieu directed Louis towards humanity, reconfirming the Edict of Nantes, depriving the Huguenots of their fortresses and their armies, but guaranteeing them liberty of conscience. As a result of this “Peace of Grace,” the Huguenots caused no real trouble for the government during the next few decades.

By way of humbling the nobles, the second prong of his strategy, Richelieu began by purging from the Conseil d’Etat, the chief governing council, all the ministers who opposed him. For many years without an heir, Louis was a natural object for conspiracy. At one time or another, his half-brothers, the Vendômes, the illegitimate sons of Henri IV, and his own brother, Gaston d’Orléans, six years younger, were all plotting against him and Richelieu. Gaston, until 1638 the presumptive heir to the throne, was an attractive but feckless libertine of no great intelligence, and in 1626 he became seriously embroiled in a plot to assassinate Richelieu. After a period of exile abroad, Gaston was back in France in 1632, now involved with the Duc de Montmorency in open rebellion in the Languedoc. Montmorency was wounded and captured, then executed. Given that he was the greatest nobleman of France outside the royal family itself, and had an outstanding record of service to the Crown, the sentence came as a profound shock, provoking many appeals for clemency. But, whereas Richelieu might have yielded, Louis showed himself remorselessly harsh in having the sentence carried out. “One should not pity a man who is about to suffer his punishment,” he said, “one should only pity him for having deserved it.”