Seven Ages of Paris (19 page)

From then on, Gaston was seen as a broken reed (at least until the troubled days of the Fronde under Louis XIV), the throne at last made secure when, seemingly almost in a fit of absent-mindedness while sheltering from a storm overnight in her apartment, Louis caused Anne to conceive an heir, who was born on 5 September 1638, almost twenty-three years after their marriage. Two years later a similar miracle produced a second son, Philippe. Gaston, Richelieu’s bitter enemy, seemed to have lost all hope of succeeding to the throne.

In his third aim of humbling the Habsburgs, now grown so powerful through the aggrandizements of Charles V, Richelieu was largely successful in keeping out of the grisly Thirty Years War, that ravaged Germany and the countries east of the Rhine. Even so, in 1636, Spanish armies invading from Holland almost reached the gates of Paris. Though subsequently this could be seen as a last effort of waning Spanish power, at the time there was serious alarm in the city, and Parisians were grateful yet again for the protective walls that Philippe Auguste and Charles V had given them, though anxious about their state of repair. “Not a turret but would have come tumbling down at the sound of a roll of drums,” it was reported.

GOVERNANCE OF PARIS

Building astutely, and ruthlessly, on the absolutist foundations laid by Henri and Sully, Louis XIII and Richelieu steadily tightened the monarchy’s grip on Paris. It was a tendency that would continue into the ill-fated Second Empire of Louis Napoleon. In the mother country of liberty, the instinct for authoritarianism is never far below the surface. Almost never before had the charge of lèse-majesté been made so frequently outside Paris; although there were many uprisings in the provinces, Paris remained curiously tranquil throughout the time of Richelieu. It was Richelieu’s plain preference to govern via councils, rather than through favourites, but from the beginning of his ascendancy to the end, he ruled the city councils with a heavy hand—and the more powerful he grew the heavier that hand became. Louis himself could treat the Paris Parlement with downright brutality. On one chilling occasion he warned its First President, Guy Le Jay, of the limit of his powers: “If you continue your schemes, I will clip your nails so close that your flesh will suffer from it.”

In the Paris of Henri IV, duelling had become all the rage among galants, often taking place in the Place Royale. Each year several hundred members of the gentry perished in duels. Now Richelieu showed himself ruthlessly determined to stamp out what, to him, was a particularly heinous sin. Pour encourager les autres, in June 1627 a well-known noble, the Comte de Montmorency-Bouteville, arrested for duelling, was refused a pardon and beheaded. This caused a major sensation.

Unlike his father, Louis was not dedicated to Paris; like his Valois antecedents, when not at the wars or involved in acts of repression in the provinces he was addicted to la chasse. Richelieu, on the other hand, spent as much time in Paris as he could, because that was where lay the fount of power, as well as the potential sources of revolt. During the two Richelieu decades, the geographical centre of gravity of Paris gradually but systematically moved westwards, away from the smells and congestion of the Marais. To the great coral-like entity of the Louvre, Louis added only a tiny accretion, the Pavillon de l’Horloge, and a stretch of the west wing of the Cour Carrée.

But Richelieu, always shrewd in matters of real estate, agglomerated a vast property that stretched from the back door of the Louvre in the south to the city wall in the north. Through the centre he built a long, straight street (now, appropriately, the Rue Richelieu in the banking district of the 2nd arrondissement), and divided the expanses on either side into building lots. To the west of it, between 1633 and 1639, he had built for himself a sumptuous palace with eight elegant and classically regular courtyards, which Richelieu bequeathed to the King. Known initially as the Palais Cardinal, when the royal family moved in after Richelieu’s death it gained the name it has held ever since, the Palais Royal. “An entire city, built with pomp, seems to have arisen miraculously from an old ditch,” exclaimed Corneille, his praise possibly conditioned by the fact that he found there both a patron and a stage for his plays. The Palais Cardinal set a new standard, now in stone, of classical uniformity in Paris, though sadly little remains of the original design.

The shift in the religious balance following the death of Henri had resulted in a powerful Catholic renaissance. The clergy had regained respect and influence, and so had the Jesuits, who expanded everywhere in their role of educators. In the three decades after the assassination of 1610, on the Right Bank no fewer than eighteen new religious foundations (including the important seminary of Saint-Sulpice) had made their appearance, with a similar number on the Left Bank. Many major churches were also begun at this time. On the Left Bank, to mark the birth of the Dauphin in 1638, Anne transformed the simple little monastery of Val-de-Grâce in the Rue Saint-Jacques into an imposing abbey, with a cupola in the new style, emulating those of Florence and Rome—though technical problems delayed completion of the great dome till 1665. Louis was much given to church building as a form of thanksgiving (he erected Notre-Dame des Victoires to celebrate the fall of La Rochelle), but his most outstanding and most enduring contribution to the architecture of Paris lay in the middle of the Seine, on the Ile Saint-Louis.

Just upstream from the age-old Ile de la Cité lay two small muddy islets, their use over the centuries indicated by the name Ile aux Vaches. Henri IV had it in mind to join them together, build a dyke round them to keep the Seine out, and then develop the resulting island. His assassination brought the project to a halt, but Louis carried it forward under Henri’s builder Christopher Marie, together with two financiers—Poulletier and Le Regrattier—all of whose names survive to this day on the Ile. In return for its development, they were guaranteed rents from the houses over sixty years, a highly remunerative undertaking. For the first time an area of Paris was laid out on a grid system, thereby guaranteeing its survival from the subsequent attentions of Baron Haussmann. In 1618 the island was connected to the Right Bank by the Pont Marie (named after the architect, not—as might be thought given the piety of Louis and Anne—the Holy Virgin) and two years later to the Left Bank by the Pont de la Tournelle. The bridges were finished by 1645, the handsome quais by Louis’s death in 1643. Within thirty years, the two mudbanks had been transformed into a beautiful city in miniature, a seventeenth-century jewel encapsulating in its streets of pot-bellied houses both uniformity and individualism. Many of the houses were designed by Le Vau, who understandably kept one of the best for himself. His masterpiece, at the east end of the island, unquestionably is the Hôtel Lambert, marking a new development in style as a private town house for the affluent individual rather than as a showpiece to impress the public. Here Voltaire, Chopin and—more recently—the actress Michèle Morgan later lived, and it is now a treasure trove belonging to Baron Guy de Rothschild—alas, now somewhat marred by the ugly modern block of the Institut du Monde Arabe that fills the horizon just across the river. From its inception, prostitutes from the Marais were banned from the Ile, lending it (compared with the Place des Vosges) a somewhat sombre, almost puritan tranquillity. Somehow the Ile remained aloof from most of the revolts that rocked Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and today the clamour of the city still passes it by.

Among the major projects envisaged by Henri IV, the grandiose scheme for the Place de France was abandoned by Richelieu as simply too ambitious. But the thirty-three-year reign of Louis XIII might have left more of a mark on Paris had he not been taken for a ride by unscrupulous speculators. Notable among these was a Louis Le Barbier, driven on by an admirable ambition to secure good matches for his daughters. Le Barbier undertook for Louis the colossal venture of demolishing Charles V’s wall, bringing several new faubourgs into the city (five on the Left Bank alone), and then building a new protective wall. Richelieu was in a hurry to build the new wall on the Right Bank, not merely out of strategic considerations, but because the old one obscured the view from his Palais Cardinal. A contract was signed in October 1631, but the contractors, Pierre Pidou and Charles Froger, were as unreliable as Le Barbier—whose front-men they turned out to be. Virtually nothing was ever completed; Le Barbier died in 1641, a ruined man. Given the treatment meted out to the likes of Concini, he and his accomplices were lucky to escape with their lives.

ARTS AND LETTERS

Few Frenchmen today would deny that Richelieu’s greatest cultural legacy to France lay not in bricks and mortar, but in the creation of the Académie Française to defend and enhance the purity of the French language. Founded in 1635 and consisting initially of nine men of letters with an average age of thirty-six, it was then followed in 1648 by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and in 1671 by the all-powerful Académie Royale d’Architecture, designed similarly to establish and maintain standards in building. Originally organizations without a home, the Académies had to wait for Cardinal Mazarin to commission for them the superb Institut de France complex (opened in 1688) with its glittering cupola and its two arms that seem to reach out to embrace the very heart of Paris from its eminence on the Left Bank of the Seine.

The civil war in France had brought art to a new low. In Paris the League attacked Renaissance art as heretical, so few young artists of talent were attracted to the capital. Henri IV was no connoisseur, and had no time to become one; Marie de Médicis lacked the necessary taste, and commissioning Rubens did little to make of Paris a city attractive to artists. Fortunately Richelieu had both taste and the power to indulge it. He bought paintings and sculpture from Italy, and invited the portrait painter Philippe de Champaigne from Brussels. In 1635 he commissioned Nicolas Poussin to paint more of the light-hearted bacchanals and landscapes which had made his early reputation; Poussin, of Norman peasant stock, found money and fame in the capital, but not the technical encouragement he needed. In 1642, snubbing his rich but pretentious Paris patrons, he left France for the Rome that was always the source of his inspiration.

His fellow Norman Pierre Corneille, the great dramatist adept in both comedy and tragedy, was set to work by Richelieu as one of his cinq auteurs, writing plays under the Cardinal’s careful direction, some of which were performed before the King. In January 1637 he produced his heroic tragedy Le Cid, dealing with the conflict between sexual passion and honour—a milestone in the history of French drama. Corneille was notable for his belief in free will, in marked contrast to the theme of impotence conveyed in Greek classical tragedy, the tradition that was to be inherited by Racine.

Another figure of importance in French literature, a Norman like Poussin and Corneille, was the poet François de Malherbe. Henri IV brought him to Paris in 1605 as his official poet, and he remained in favour under Louis XIII and Richelieu. Renowned for his slowness in composition, he once spent three years writing stanzas on the death of a noble lady, so that when he came to present them the bereaved husband had already remarried—and died. Thus Malherbe left few verses to posterity, but what was important about him was the rigorous purity of his style and diction, and his clarity. He eschewed all Latinisms and foreign usage, in preference for common Parisian speech. This made him an important precursor of the Académie and what it was to stand for through the centuries. Though Henri had neither the instinct nor the time to be a patron of literature, no more than of painting, his own letters passionate and forthright as they were, broke new ground as classics of their kind. In many ways one sees his short, glorious reign as having laid the essential groundwork in Paris on which his widow, son and grandson—and Richelieu—were all to build with such success, accomplishing a kind of nationalization of the French arts.

Finally there was the great essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, so much admired down the years for the freshness, vigour and gaiety of his language. One of the last of the great provincial writers, it was Montaigne who called the Paris of Henri IV “la gloire de la France et l’un des plus nobles ornements du monde.” Justly, he was to have one of the grandest avenues in Paris named after him.

A NEW REGENT

The era of Louis XIII and Richelieu ended quite suddenly. At the last meeting of the two men, in Tarascon in 1642, both were so ill—the Cardinal’s body eaten away with ulcers—that the King ordered their beds to be placed next to each other. It was a tearful leave-taking. Richelieu died in December that year. Five months later, Louis was also carried away, in May 1643—apparently by tuberculosis, and amid no great mourning. Even so, it could reasonably be claimed that the Cardinal had made his master “le plus grand roi du monde.”

For a third time, the French found themselves ruled by a woman regent, the Queen Mother, Anne. Louis XIV was not yet five years old. Once more things looked perilous for France. Yet within a week of the child King’s accession a renewed Spanish advance upon Paris from the Low Countries was defeated, at Rocroi, by the twenty-two-year-old Duc d’Enghien, Prince de Condé (son of the troublesome but ineffectual would-be cuckold of Henri IV). One of the great military victories of French history, it was both an augury of what was to come and a hands-off warning to France’s enemies. Ahead lay the age of the Roi Soleil, whose effulgence would have been impossible without the achievements of his grandfather Henri IV.

Age Three

1643–1795

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LOUIS XIV

Paris at the end of Louis XIII’s reign (The Art Archive/Musée Carnavalet Paris/Dagli Orti)

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SEVEN

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The Move to Versailles

The civil wars started in Paris just as they did in London, over a little money.

VOLTAIRE

MAZARIN AND THE FRONDE