Seven Ages of Paris (7 page)

The imperial attack was matched by a French counterattack that equally imperilled Emperor Otto’s life. In the end, four imperial knights succeeded in conveying the Emperor to safety, although they themselves were captured. Otto now galloped off the battlefield, hardly stopping until he had reached his base camp at Valenciennes, thirty kilometres away. The battered imperial insignia, with Otto’s fear-inducing great eagle mounted above a dragon and borne on a four-wheeled chariot, were however triumphantly presented to King Philippe, and then transported to Paris along with captives and booty.

Guérin, whose victories on the right wing had enabled him to pass to the left, helped achieve success there too. By five o’clock, the fighting was all but over, having lasted no more than a few hours. Philippe’s triumph was complete. The military leadership of the coalition were incarcerated, some at Philippe’s newly built tower of the Louvre outside his city-walls, thus effectively dissolving John’s coalition against his French rival.

The victory at Bouvines prompted waves of spontaneous rejoicing throughout the realm: the populace danced, the clergy chanted, and bells were rung. Flowers and branches festooned churches and houses and carpeted the streets of towns and villages. Peasants and harvesters shouldered their scythes and rakes, leaving ripened crops, and rushed instead to see the captives led to Paris in chains, and to join the townsmen and grandees in greeting the King. Bishop Guérin headed the procession into Paris, singing canticles and hymns, as the King walked behind.

At various crises in French history, propagandists would dust off the victory of Bouvines and recycle it as a touchstone of national faith. At the time of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois monarchy in 1840, Bouvines would be trotted out as the first true victory of king and “people.” In the run-up to the First World War, it would be evoked as a glorious feat of French over German arms. Since 1945, if it is referred to at all, it is chiefly as a victory over les Anglo-Saxons. Though it hardly rates in English history books as a decisive battle, Bouvines was an outstanding victory. In purely military terms, it represented a triumph of mobility and superior morale.

Philippe was now forty-nine, with another nine years left to reign. For him, in Paris, victory at Bouvines meant a remarkable reconciliation between the three orders of King, Church and nobles. Never before had a French monarch been so secure on his throne, or France so secure in Europe. Philippe Auguste found himself master of France, and France in the first rank among European states. He had fought, and won, the first truly national war in French history. Bouvines was a kind of Valmy of the Middle Ages, a victory not only of the King and his knights, but of the King and the common people. With it the French first became conscious of being a nation—and Paris of being a capital, increasingly the administrative heart of that nation.

TWO

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Capital City

The two nations set off in different directions. England headed towards liberty, France towards absolutism.

ERNEST LAVISSE, HISTOIRE DE FRANCE, III, P. 202

THE GREAT WALL

Unforeseen—and unforeseeable—at the time, the consequences of le dimanche de Bouvines in July 1214 were immense: for both France and England, for the future shape of Europe and, not least, for the city of Paris. Enraged by the lost battle and exasperated by all the past wickedness of their own king, now truly Jean-Sans-Terre, the English barons rose up and forced him to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in April the following year. And in a treaty once more imposed by the Pope, John agreed at Chinon to pay reparations and implicitly to accept the French conquests in Anjou, Brittany and Poitou. In marked contrast, for the last nine years of his life Philippe himself was to fight no more battles. Instead he concentrated his prodigious energies on reasserting the power of his personal rule, reforming his government and reconstructing his capital. The conduct of war, now on the peripheries of his hugely expanded domain, he left to his son and heir, Louis, who was able to act with a remarkable degree of independence.

In May 1216 the future Louis VIII, invited to be king of England by a faction of disaffected English nobles, actually landed with an army some 15,000 strong on the Isle of Thanet. For a moment it looked as if the English crown would indeed pass to Capetian France. Then, in one more of those unexpected reversals of history, in October John suddenly died of the famous surfeit of lampreys. His death, which took place at the same time as that of the all-powerful Innocent III, provoked a sudden wave of patriotic loyalty to his heir, the innocent nine-year-old Henry. Louis was forced to leave the country through the hostility of the bishops and populace, and on his way back home in August of 1217 his fleet was almost totally destroyed off Calais in one of the first decisive victories of English naval power.

Now, for at least as long as Philippe lived, there would be no further threat from an impoverished and enfeebled Plantagenet England. Once vast, its mainland empire was reduced to Gascony and the port of Bordeaux. Severed for ever was the old, intimate connection with nearby Normandy. At the same time as Philippe had been countering the external menaces that faced him from his accession, he had with similar vigour, adroitness and sense of purpose been subordinating the recalcitrant barons of France. Four and a half centuries before his successor Louis XIV actually said it, the principle of L’état, c’est moi was foreordained by Philippe Auguste. Historians are generally agreed that Bouvines was a turning point for both countries, fundamentally shaping the destinies of each. Says Ernest Lavisse, “The two nations set off in different directions. England headed towards liberty, France towards absolutism.”

When the terrible Algerian War, which tore France apart for eight years, ended in 1962, President de Gaulle remarked, with massive relief, “France was now free to look at France.” After Bouvines, it could equally well be said that Paris was free to look at Paris. What she saw was the beginnings of a most imposing capital, where Philippe had built well on the foundations laid by his father and grandfather. He had also most impressively—and literally—built his own foundations.

Before Philippe, travellers approaching Paris would have seen from the vineyarded hill of Montmartre a turreted city surrounded by a wooden palisade which protected the Right Bank, much as it had done since the days of the Norse invasions. Philippe Auguste changed all that. Appreciating the vulnerability of his capital, key to his whole small realm, he set about making it impregnable with a “continuous wall, well provided with towers and fortified gates, other royal cities to be protected similarly.” Initially this medieval Maginot Line protected only the Right Bank, enclosing many meadows and marshes hitherto lying outside the city confines, but as Otto’s hostile coalition of Germans and Flemings began to threaten Paris from the east and south, from 1210 onwards the Left Bank—then largely an area of orchards and vineyards—also came to be embraced within Philippe’s great system of ramparts.

Whereas the old wooden stockade, dating back in places to Roman times and which had withstood the Norsemen, enclosed a meagre ten hectares comprising mainly the ancient settlement and seat of government on the Ile de la Cité, under Philippe this was expanded to 250. It began on the Right Bank near the present-day Pont des Arts, then passed through the future rectangle occupied by the Louvre, cut across the Rue Saint-Honoré, then swung eastwards by the Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, the ancient entrances to the city. It then curved south-eastwards, embracing much of the marshland of the Marais, to intersect with the Rue des Francs Bourgeois just west of where Henri IV would four centuries later lay out what was to become known as the Place des Vosges, ending at a riparian tower on the Quai des Célestins. Crossing the Seine via the eastern tip of the sandbar that was to become the Ile Saint-Louis, it began again on the Left Bank at the Quai de la Tournelle, ran inside the old moat of the Rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, then turned west to enclose the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève. It traversed the present-day Boulevard Saint-Germain (but leaving the prosperous abbey and Saint-Sulpice just outside to the west), then terminated once more on the river at the Tour de Nesle, which once stood on the site of the present Institut de France and which was to achieve infamy under the reign of Philippe le Bel a hundred years later.

Completed just before Bouvines (by which time the immediate threat of attack had passed, not to be revived until the Hundred Years War), the Great Wall of Philippe Auguste took the best part of twenty years to construct. Despite his preoccupation with external warfare, Philippe was very closely involved in the planning of it. He personally supervised construction details, specifying that the wall should be no less than three metres thick at ground level, and two and a half metres thick at a height of six metres; it was to have thirty-three towers north of the Seine and thirty-four to the south, each carefully rounded so as to deflect cannonballs, and two dozen fortified gates. Overall it would have been some ten metres high. Philippe’s engineers built extremely well, and to this day you can still find sections of immensely rugged masonry in various parts of the old city. An imposing stretch lies off the Rue Clovis, now set within the grim edifice of the new Sorbonne; the best part of a tower stands encompassed within a building close to the Procope, Paris’s oldest restaurant, in the Cour du Commerce Saint-André. On the Right Bank, you can find a section in a lycée near the Hôtel de Sens, another close to the Musée Carnavalet on Rue des Francs Bourgeois.

THE LOUVRE AND LES HALLES

To guard the approaches to Paris from where the Norsemen had come in the ninth century, Philippe stretched a thick chain across the Seine, supported on boats, and another at the eastern approaches to the city. Just outside his new wall, he built a powerful, squat and square donjon, flanked with turrets, just across the river from the Tour de Nesle. In the centre of it was a great tower, forty-five metres in circumference and thirty metres high—though, because of the thickness of its walls, it probably afforded an internal diameter of no more than eight metres across. It acquired the name of the Louvre, possibly derived from louve, or female wolf, because it was used as a hunting box, but more probably from the archaic word louver or blockhouse, or even, quite simply, from l’oeuvre, the work. The first stone of the Louvre was laid in 1202, and it was originally designed as a major stronghold (though it never came to be used as such) and a treasury. Not a palace to be lived in, it was only in the reign of Charles V (1364–80) that the Louvre, with windows struck through Philippe’s grimly functional arrow-slits and with fancifully decorative pointed roofs superimposed, became a palace fit for a king. Philippe Auguste, like his ancestors, continued to reside on the Ile de la Cité.

In addition to the Louvre there were, now inside the enceinte, the two defensive towers of the Grand and Petit Châtelet guarding the bridges that linked the Ile de la Cité with both banks of the Seine. The Grand Châtelet, founded on a wooden guard tower built in 870 to ward off the Norsemen, was converted by Louis VI, Philippe’s grandfather, into a considerable fortress. Now Philippe’s wall rendered its original role obsolete, so instead it became the office of the prévôt (the acting governor of Paris, the representative of royal authority), and later the most sinister of all its prisons, its thick walls muffling the cries of the tortured. In his epic in praise of the King, Philippidos, Guillaume le Breton, poet laureate of the time, draws various parallels with the walls of Troy. But such fortifications were only the tip of the iceberg of Philippe’s construction work in Paris.

When he was just twenty years old (as the story goes), Philippe went to the window of his palace on the Ile de la Cité to admire the Seine, but the stench that greeted him as a heavy wagon stirred up the mud on the street ouside made him reel back. Pigs had been banned from Paris ever since the Crown Prince, Philippe’s uncle, had been killed by one frightening his horse—but the law had proved all but unenforceable. In a medieval Europe accustomed to evil-smelling streets, Paris had prize-winning qualities that were to endure through the ages. The streets were simply open sewers, hence the names given to some of them: Rues Merderelle, Tire-pet, Fosse-aux-Chieurs and so on. Each rainfall turned them to a mud enriched by the droppings of horses and domestic animals, the waste from the tanneries and butcheries, and of the residents themselves in their houses innocent of any plumbing; and there were the forbidden swine to root through it and churn it all up. Thus, as a consequence of his shock on opening the window on the Quai de l’Horloge, young Philippe ordered all streets to be paved. A start, a slow start, was made during his reign—beginning, understandably, with the streets adjacent to the Palais de la Cité. Gradually main thoroughfares like the Rues Saint-Martin and Saint-Jacques, Saint-Antoine and Saint-Honoré, became the first to be cobbled, or rather paved with flagstones.

Within the protective walls Philippe had erected, Paris for the first time was now able to build in peace for the centuries to come. His achievements were remarkable. The rebuilding of the great cathedral of Notre-Dame begun by Bishop Sully under Philippe’s father in 1163 was completed. Sainte-Geneviève was rebuilt too, while the districts of Saint-Honoré, Saint-Pierre (which became Saints-Pères) and Les Mathurins—all named after the churches or monasteries founded in them—came into being. Three new hospitals were constructed, including the Sainte-Catherine on the Rue Saint-Denis founded for women in 1184. To replace the waters of the Seine, already partially polluted, a catchment for fresh water was created from springs up on the heights of Belleville outside the city, and new aqueducts, the first since the Roman era, and numerous fountains, were built (one, on the corner of Rue Saint-Martin, was to provide the citizens of Paris with drinking water for seven centuries).

One of Philippe’s most lasting contributions to Paris was the creation of Les Halles, which Emile Zola was to dub “the belly of Paris.” All through the history of the city, down to the present era, the distribution of food has presented a fundamental headache, with cheap foodstuffs arriving in the city from underpaid producers, to reach the consumers at vastly inflated prices—due to the demands of the middlemen, in turn caused by the anarchy of the city’s narrow medieval street system. Adjacent to the unsavoury Grand Châtelet on the Right Bank was the Grève, a gravelly sandbar on which there were no buildings, except for water-mills for grain, and where there piled up shipments of all kinds of goods—hay, grain, wood, wine, fish, coal, salt and hides—conveyed up and down the Seine. It was to become a sombre place of public executions, but by the time of Philippe Auguste there had accumulated around it through the ages a malodorous anarchy of miscellaneous trades. Probably the most polluting were the tanners, who gave the Quai de la Mégisserie that runs past the site of the Grand Châtelet its present name. Other streets long since disappeared revealed the business conducted there: Rues de la Grande Boucherie, la Tuerie (slaughterhouse), Pied de Boeuf, Pierre à Poisson and de l’Ecorcherie (knacker’s yard), as well as the Val d’Amour and Pute-y-Muce (whore in hiding). The noise and smells around this area in medieval Paris must have been unspeakable. Adding to the concentration of commerce and merchandising was the fact that the great north–south axes of Rues Saint-Denis, Saint-Martin and—across on the Left Bank—Saint-Jacques, and that to the east and west of Rue Saint-Antoine, all funnelled into the narrow streets around the Grève.