Seven Ages of Paris (29 page)

TO THE BRINK—AND OVER

By the time Louis XV died, he had—through his excesses, his extravagance and his incompetence in war—forfeited both at home and abroad virtually all the respect that his great-grandfather had so painstakingly built up for France a hundred years previously over the grand siècle. Yet the new young King was acclaimed in Paris with a fervour such as had greeted none of his Bourbon predecessors since Henri IV—despite his appearance, and despite the bad auguries. Rather pathetically he proclaimed, “I should like to be loved.” A thickset man with a puffy face not brimming over with intelligence, and bulging myopic eyes, Louis XVI was pious and chaste—unlike his predecessor—humanitarian by instinct, well meaning but lethargic. His wife, Marie Antoinette, justly or unjustly, will always be renowned for her bovine Habsburg extravagance; if she didn’t actually say “Let them eat cake,” she might as well have done. At their prodigiously lavish wedding in May 1770, there occurred an appalling disaster on the still incomplete Place Louis XV which superstitious Parisians viewed as the most sinister of omens. A stray rocket ignited a depot of fireworks intended for the celebrations, and, in the ensuing fire and panic among onlookers trapped in the narrow defile of Gabriel’s Rue Royale, 133 were counted dead.

While Marie Antoinette and her ladies cavorted at Versailles, playing at shepherdesses in her hameau, a phoney peasant hamlet, in the park real countrymen in the reign of Louis XVI were struggling against the threat of constant hunger and worsening poverty. Nevertheless, in Paris as the ancien régime ground to the end which with hindsight seems inevitable, there were great plans on the drawing board. Paris would be surrounded with a new grand boulevard: there was to be a new Place Royale that would fulfil Henri IV’s unrealized scheme: all the houses cluttering the Louvre and the Tuileries were to be removed; the sinister Grand Châtelet was also to be demolished, and there were even plans to demolish the Bastille and replace it with a large place, notionally to be named after Louis XVI; streets were to be straightened, the number of bridges and public fountains to be increased, the quays embellished. The insanitary Hôtel Dieu was to be “reformed,” and the cemeteries relocated from the centre of the city. Ironically, almost all these projects were later to be carried out after the Revolution by Napoleon and Haussmann.

Yet, if looks and auguries were against Louis XVI, so too were circumstances, for his accession coincided with a prolonged period of economic stagnation. On the other hand, as with Tsarist Russia in 1914, it seems that in 1789 there was a widespread belief that a time of prosperity was at hand, coupled to an era of universal felicity. But, looking at the way the cards were stacked against him, one wonders whether a Philippe Auguste, a Henri IV, a Roi Soleil or even a Bonaparte could have averted—or diverted—the deluge that was building up. Equally, one is amazed that it hadn’t burst on France a hundred years before. Inexorably the tide turned against the monarchy, which—though seemingly all-powerful still by the spring of 1789—hastened its own end. The echoes of the recent American Revolution—won at such enormous financial cost to France, which had sent arms and men to support the rebels—were to militate against Louis, as did the gentle reasoning of the philosophes and encyclopédistes by their discrediting of the ancien régime in all its aspects. The new King was having to pay the bill for the wars and extravagances of both his predecessors, Louis XIV and Louis XV.

The winter of 1788–9 was a particularly severe one, with cold, hunger and discontent all linking hands against the government. In January 1789, Louis’s hard-pressed director-general of finances, Jacques Necker, a Swiss banker, unable to cope with France’s national debt of one billion livres, an unprecedented amount, sought a panacea in convoking a meeting of the Estates-General, a body that had not met since the time of Louis XIII’s majority in 1614. There now took place the famous gathering in the Jeu de Paume, or indoor tennis court, so well depicted by David. The floodgates were now opening. The aristocracy had lost its influence; the bourgeoisie, already shaken to the core by the bursting of the Law bubble, now wanted something more than reform—though what that was it did not quite know until the Jacobins, a society of radicals, led the way. On 11 July, the King sacked Necker, and with him went the best hope of reform. Fearing national bankruptcy, the Bourse closed its doors. An empty exchequer and republican sentiment now combined.

Relentlessly, event followed on disastrous event. On 28 April, following a riot in a paper factory, the first shots had been fired in the wretched east-end Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where the final clashes of the Fronde had taken place against the young Louis XIV. What Carlyle categorized as the “bestial dawning of the age of reason” achieved its symbolic moment with the storming of the Bastille by insurgents from the same turbulent faubourg on 14 July. This grim fortress, regarded as a symbol of royal authority, held no more than seven prisoners, one of whom had spent twenty-three years there and—blinded by the sun—emerged into daylight wondering whether Louis XV was still on the throne. A hundred of the insurgents were killed by fire from the Bastille. The mob went mad. The ancient fortress was seized, and demolished stone by stone, the Governor killed and his head stuck on a pike.

A terrible wave of violence now surged through the city, where dark forces were thrown up as if from the depths of the earth by some volcanic eruption, forces that would not finally be quelled until the advent of Napoleon. All the impassioned hatreds that had been storing up in Paris since the Roi Soleil now exploded. The day before, there had been a sinister foretaste of this with the pointless sacking of the convent of Saint-Lazare. Formerly a hospital for lepers, by the seventeenth century the convent had become headquarters for charitable undertakings. Even the fruit trees in its orchard were now chopped down, and ferocious women—precursors of the tricoteuses—killed and made off with all the chickens in its poultry farm. When the police arrived the following morning, they were just in time to rescue two old priests about to be hanged from nearby lampposts. It was an unpleasant harbinger of what revolution would bring Paris.

Returning that afternoon from his favourite pastime, la chasse, Louis enquired, “Is this a rebellion?” “No, Sire,” came the reply, “it is a revolution.”

That October, rioters led by a troop of women marched on Versailles and hustled the royal family back to the Tuileries, where they remained virtual prisoners of the newly formed Paris Commune for the next three years. A revolutionary National Guard was created which would play a part in every uprising in Paris from 1789 to 1871, its arms forged in the sequestered precincts of Marie de Médicis’s princely Luxembourg Palace. On the night of 20 June the following year, disguised as a lackey, Louis XVI made his ill-organized and ill-fated flight eastwards from Paris, heading for Brussels, to seek refuge with the Allied forces that were menacing France. Turned back at Varennes, his doom was sealed. In June 1792, the Tuileries Palace was invaded and pillaged by the mob, who placed the symbol of revolution, a bonnet rouge, on the King’s head and forced him to drink with them. Three months later, in a climax of revolutionary violence, a surge of promiscuous killing was unleashed in the September Massacres: more than 1,200 priestly or aristocratic prisoners, women and children included, were hacked to death. Paris seemed seized by a mindless and uncontrollable lust for blood. That December Louis, who was now being held with his family in the Tower of the Temple, was put on trial, to be guillotined on the Concorde on 21 January 1793, a few metres from the empty pedestal where the statue of his grandfather had once stood. After a risible trial, Marie Antoinette followed him to the scaffold on 16 October; 30,000 troops had to be deployed to keep order that day. Under mysterious circumstances never resolved, the ten-year-old Dauphin, in effect Louis XVII, was murdered in the Temple two years later.

Paris now disappeared into a dark cloud of terror and anarchy—in which Dr. Guillotine’s modern-minded invention accounted for 2,800 deaths in Paris alone, and for 14,000 in the provinces.

Age Four

1795–1815

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NAPOLEON

Pre-revolutionary Paris of 1789

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TEN

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Empire and Reform

Ah! Now I hear the bell of Notre-Dame; I like it much better than the canon d’alarme!

A GLAZIER ON THE ILE SAINT-LOUIS, IN 1802

NEW DAWN, NEW MAN

In 1800, Paris greeted a new century, a new dawn, with optimism—and hope. The years of anarchy and bloodshed were receding ever further into the past. The Revolution was dead; but “Vive la Révolution!”

Those terrible years, the revanche of the downtrodden proletariat of Saint-Antoine against the Versailles of the Roi Soleil, had seen Paris ravaged by mobs in 1789, the takeover of government by the Convention in 1792, the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 and Marie Antoinette in October, the establishment of the so-called Committee of Public Safety, and the Terror of 1793–4. At the same time—miraculously—France’s revolutionary armies triumphed in the field against coalitions of her external enemies. In July 1794, the Terror ended with the guillotining of the dreadful “sea-green incorruptible,” Francois-Maximilien-Joseph de Robespierre. Gradually extremism gave way to moderation, as the Directory replaced the Convention. Under the Directory, feeble and corrupt as it was, reason and hope began to return to Paris. But the last decade had brought the city only dismay and destruction. Nothing had been built; on the contrary churches had been vandalized by the hundred, their ancient statues decapitated. With the new century, however, Paris had found a new master—a master who was brimming over with new ideas.

Outside the Tuileries Palace on 19 February 1800, the thirty-year-old General Napoleon Bonaparte jumped on to his horse to review the troops assembled on the terrace. He was watched and applauded by crowds gathered in the streets giving on to the Carrousel, at the windows of the houses and on the palace balconies. Paris was all agog, electric with an excitement mingled with curiosity and apprehension, to see the man of the moment who, until very recently, had been a relatively unknown young general, unimpressive in stature, who spoke imperfect French with a strong Corsican accent. Already an enormously successful commander in his twenties, Bonaparte on his return to Paris in 1797 had been acclaimed with full honours in the Luxembourg Palace by the Directory, its members clad in scarlet togas in emulation of ancient Rome. Every beautiful Parisienne had crowded into the courtyard, but, as a witness recorded, “in spite of the luxury, the elegance of the women’s clothes and the sumptuous costumes of the Directors, every eye was fixed on the spare, sallow, sickly-looking man in a simple coat, who appeared to fill all the space around him.” A few days later, Talleyrand, Napoleon’s future foreign minister, had thrown a splendid ball for him, unrevolutionary in its extravagance.

Two years later, in 1799, Napoleon had hastened home from one of his less successful campaigns, in Egypt, to find himself swept into power with the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799 in the revolutionary calendar), replacing the corrupt and inefficient Directory as one of three consuls. The idea of joint consuls was taken from Roman practice, and, as sometimes happened under that empire, soon le petit caporal was to manoeuvre himself into the post of first consul for life—making himself de facto ruler of twenty-seven million Frenchmen. Although on the eve of the Brumaire coup Parisians had viewed Bonaparte with scant enthusiasm “as a man whom nobody likes, and everybody prefers,” now two months later outside the Tuileries they were eager to set eyes on him. The face of their new First Consul was as yet hardly familiar to Parisians—hence the crush—for, over the previous four years, he had spent a total of 1,174 days away from Paris. More familiar to the Parisian beau monde was the face of his beautiful Creole consort, the six-years-older Josephine de Beauharnais. Well known in society as the widow of a guillotined general, and mistress in turn of three Directors—Tallien, Gohier and Barras—she had married General Bonaparte while he was on leave in 1796; and had come close to being divorced for infidelity while he was away in Egypt.

Within a few weeks of the parade outside the Tuileries, the new First Consul was off to fight a fresh campaign, in Italy. Yet again a French ruler would succumb to the urge to interfere in Italian affairs in the pursuit of la Gloire. Though longing for peace, Parisians were able to persuade themselves that this new campaign was all the fault of les perfides Anglais and their Austrian henchmen, who had given France no rest since the execution of Louis XVI, and had recently formed another hostile coalition against her. Potentially outnumbered and in a highly dangerous position, in May Bonaparte pulled off one of his greatest and most daring ventures—marching an army across the Great Saint Bernard Pass to take a greatly superior Austrian army in the rear. Nevertheless, on 14 June, outside the small village of Marengo, the First Consul came perilously close to decisive defeat. The day was saved only by the unplanned arrival of General Desaix, acting against orders, who turned defeat into victory—but at the cost of his own life. Desaix became a Napoleonic hero, and henceforth Marengo (after whom he named his favourite white charger) held a unique place for Bonaparte in the annals of his battles. Milan was occupied, the Austrians accepted defeat, the Second Coalition collapsed, and France’s new ruler returned to Paris in triumph, clad in all the laurels of la Gloire. For most of the next fifteen years his star would seem unassailable.

News of Marengo preceded him to Paris. The cannon thundering out proclaimed, “Italy is taken!” The city went wild with unaccustomed rejoicing. Here at last was a leader, able to assert French supremacy—and at a moderate cost in lives. Moreover, at home Napoleon promised to reverse the anarchy, destruction and decay left behind by a decade of revolutionaries. He wrote ahead to his brother Lucien that he was intending to arrive in Paris without warning. Still mistrustful of any kind of pomp and circumstance, he was averse to making a grand entry with a parade, instead creeping through the city gates almost stealthily at 2 a.m. on 2 July. But popular enthusiasm carried everything away, to his considerable surprise. On his arrival, a dense crowd converged on the Tuileries, and he had to show himself several times on the balcony “amid a temper of cries of joy.” The défilé lasted a whole day. At night almost every house in Paris was lit up. Over the two decades of Napoleon’s astonishing career, similar parades and celebrations would mark his victories and his triumphs, the path of his rise and his fall; equally they would provide markers to his achievements for the often bedazzled, often nervous capital.