Seven Ages of Paris (73 page)

Public gaze once more shifted to the Vietnam peace talks, still under way in Paris—and to the more heartening revolt of the students in Prague. There they were rebelling to win freedoms long enjoyed by their Parisian counterparts. Then eyes were once more focused on America, where in June an art-loving actress shot and wounded Andy Warhol. Two days later in Los Angeles a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, shot dead Robert Kennedy, hours after he had won California’s Democratic primary for the presidential election. In August Brezhnev’s tanks crossed into Czechoslovakia, and Prague returned to the grip of a Moscow winter with censorship of the press reimposed.

Soon the bill for Paris’s month of madness came in: 150 million francs, with more to follow, resulting—according to banker Georges Pompidou—in a “slow haemorrhage” in the nation’s finances. Devaluation of the franc became unavoidable. The opening item was for the re-laying in the streets around the Boul’ Mich’ of some one million stone paving blocks, prized up by the students to construct barricades. After a century and a half of insurrections and barricades, the city fathers finally took the wise decision to tar over the pavé, making it virtually inaccessible to future insurgents. The workers were placated by a huge wage boost of 10 to 14 per cent. But the invisible, long-term cost to Paris of 1968 was greater still: it was also the year when, influenced by les événements, the art market began to leave its traditional home for London and New York.

For the Sorbonne, a new law was hurriedly prepared by former premier Edgar Faure and adopted in November. The old University of 130,000 students, proven impossible to administer, was broken up into thirteen successors each of a maximum of 20,000, and efforts were made to avoid creating another Nanterre—an isolated university surrounded by bidonvilles. The reform was based on two principles dear to General de Gaulle—participation and autonomy. These meant, in practice, that the dictatorial role of certain professors was abolished and the control of the Ministry of Education in Paris removed. Faculty members henceforth had to live in the vicinity of the University, so as to provide a teacher-student relationship that had probably been lacking at the Sorbonne ever since the time of Abélard; and the mandarins were prevented from holding their University chairs virtually for life. The Napoleonic decree dating back to 1811 whereby the University was assured of being an “asylum of safety” from the outside world was revoked. And students did not get the participation in University governance for which they had clamoured.

DE GAULLE GOES

The new year of 1969 opened as if nothing had happened in Paris the previous May. There was a token one-day national strike; then, in the theatre, the press galvanized itself to attack a blasphemous short play, The Council of Love, written by a Bavarian doctor, Oscar Panizza, who ended his life in a lunatic asylum. “Stupid, boring, incongruous, obscene, repugnant, abject, ignoble, revolting, outrageous, offensive, filthy, vile, scandalous and deplorable” were the adjectives used by Le Figaro. Not even Nijinsky had attracted such damnation. Spring brought yet another referendum, the fifth of the Fifth Republic, as promised by de Gaulle the previous year. This time it related to a much discussed scheme to modernize and streamline the paralysing centralization of the country on Paris, which dated back to Louis XIV and beyond. It was not a major issue, but a thoroughly sensible measure, part of de Gaulle’s programme for France “marrying her age,” and—as with past referendums—demanded simply a yes or a no at the polls. As usual it was put as a choice “between progress and upheaval.” But France was bored with going to the polls, and—Paris in particular since the previous May—bored with de Gaulle.

On 10 April the General gave a television interview in which he abruptly declared that, if the referendum failed, he ought not to continue as head of state. The challenge was there. Three weeks later, on a poor turnout, the noes won by a narrow margin. Immediately de Gaulle packed up and departed from the Elysée, pausing only to shake hands with Colonel Laurent, commander of his palace military guard, and to issue the tersest of communiqués to an ungrateful people: “I am ceasing to exercise my functions as President of the Republic. This decision takes effect from midnight tonight.” There was no constitutional reason whatsoever for him to resign, but over the past months he had been expressing pessimism and disillusion to his inmates: “What’s the point of all that I am doing? … nothing has any importance.” After more than ten years in residence, one small camionette sufficed to remove all the baggage of the General and his lady to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. De Gaulle’s departure was in no way followed by the chaos he had so often predicted—though doubtless it would have been had he left the previous May. This in itself seemed almost like one more sign of disrespect from an ungrateful populace, who had turned on this ageing President just as they had turned on Pétain and Louis Napoleon before him. Seamlessly the apolitical Pompidou took over, moving into the Elysée. De Gaulle removed himself to storm-battered western Ireland. The following year he died. “France is a widow,” declared the new President.

It was indeed the end of an epoch—an epoch which, through the person of de Gaulle, stretched back to the wars in Algeria and Indo-China, and to the Second World War, the Occupation, Liberation and épuration, and beyond to the turbulent, depressing 1930s and even to the First World War in which he himself had fallen wounded on the hideous battlefield of Verdun and been made a German prisoner-of-war. It marked the end of the most personal experiment in modern government that France had known since Napoleon Bonaparte grasped the imperial crown to place it on his head in Notre-Dame. On de Gaulle’s departure the inevitable parallels were also drawn with Saint Louis and Philippe Auguste, but he had given his country a strong regime without ever falling for the institutional allure of fascism—whatever his foes on the left might say. He had, it could be claimed, saved the country of which he cherished that romantic, mystical “certaine idée” once, twice, three times and more. He had changed the intangible map of Europe, and France’s position in it; and—not least—he had helped bring Paris proudly into the modern world.

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Death in Paris—The Père Lachaise Cemetery

Most of the cemeteries have long suffered from a condition of overcrowding. They can neither hold more corpses nor decompose those that are there. All decomposition takes place practically in the open. The ground has become a pitted black mire from the constant process of decay.

PREFECT FROCHOT TO NAPOLEON, 1801

As the city of light and life, Paris is also a city of the dead—her illustrious dead. Napoleon, Europe’s most fearsome warlord since Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, left hecatombs of graves from Portugal to Moscow. Though brimming over with ideas for his embellissement of Paris for the living, as its civil administrator he had abruptly found himself faced with the urgent problem of creating space for the grateful dead of Paris. By the end of the eighteenth century the problem of burial inside the old city had become acute: within its cramped limits over-population of the dead presented an ever more difficult problem, more serious even than that of housing the living. In the pre-revolutionary capital, pretty well every parish had its own small cemetery, of which the largest, the Innocents, covered only 130 metres by 65. As these filled up, the corpses of the poorer classes were heaped into common graves, most of them many layers deep. Before long, terrible smells began to spread through the surrounding streets. When these common graves themselves reached bursting point, room for fresh bodies was created by disinterring the old bones and piling them up in hideous charnel houses near by.

One night in 1776, a shoemaker crossing the Innocents pitched into one of its open graves and was found dead there the next day. Four years later, the common grave at the Innocents subsided into the cellars of next-door houses, almost provoking the suffocation of their occupants. This was too much for Parisians gradually discovering the importance of hygiene. The Innocents was shut down, its mortal remains conveyed to the catacombs under Denfert-Rochereau on the Left Bank from which the stone for old Paris had been cut. This was, however, still not enough. It needed a revolutionary government to solve the problem, and under the new National Assembly all graveyards within the city walls were closed down in 1791. But, beyond that, not much was done.

Then, in 1801, Prefect Frochot brought the problem to the attention of the new First Consul. He reported:

Most of the cemeteries have long suffered from a condition of overcrowding. They can neither hold more corpses nor decompose those that are there. All decomposition takes place practically in the open. The ground has become a pitted black mire from the constant process of decay.

Three years later Napoleon decreed the interment of all the Paris dead in three gigantic cemeteries to be laid out beyond the walls (a development that was not followed by London until 1842). The biggest was set up on property newly sold by a dispossessed landowner called Jacques Baron. The unfortunate Baron himself was among the first to be buried there. It came to be known, down through the ages and across the world, as Père Lachaise Cemetery. There it stands far from the bustle of the grands boulevards, in the centre of the unfashionable east end of Paris. Not many of the millions of tourists who descend upon the city each year seem to visit it; yet, one of the world’s largest cemeteries, it contains probably more of France’s past than any other forty-four hectares of her soil. Even for those uninterested in the stories of the army of eminent Frenchmen and women whose relics lie beneath its eccentric and extravagant slabs, in a city that grows more frenetic by the day Père Lachaise still provides an oasis of tranquillity from which some arresting and unusual views can be obtained. Yet it was also where the most brutal bloodletting in Parisian history took place. In it resides a whole history of Paris, indeed of France herself, in marble and stone.

Back in Philippe Auguste’s twelfth century, the hill over which Père Lachaise now spreads was an agricultural smallholding owned by the Bishop of Paris. There he cultivated wheat, vegetables and grapes for his own wine press (handily close to Notre-Dame). In 1430 a rich spice-merchant, called Regnault de Wandonne, bought it and built himself a country house there, known as the Folie Regnault. Some 200 years later, the land was taken over by the Jesuits, who built a retreat there. Then, in 1675, one of their order, Père La Chaise, was appointed confessor to Louis XIV, and as a result of the Roi Soleil’s generosity Père La Chaise’s estate expanded and prospered. Soon the Mont Louis—as it was known for many years in honour of its benefactor—became a haunt of Paris’s elegant courtesans, attracted as much by the prospect of encountering the King’s influential confessor as by the excitement of the fêtes galantes held there. The Jesuits’ domain evidently earned a powerfully hedonistic reputation, which persisted until long after Père La Chaise’s death, at the age of eighty-five, in 1709. In 1762, with the downfall of the Jesuits, the estate was disposed of, and after passing through several hands it was bought by Jacques Baron. When the Revolution ruined him financially, Baron had to sell to the city of Paris.

From the heights of the Mont Louis, Père Lachaise Cemetery enjoys spectacular views over Paris—once the leaves have fallen from the trees. The visitor who stands by the chapel erected alongside the original manor of Louis XIV’s confessor will be able to see the Panthéon, the Sacré-Coeur at Montmartre, the Eiffel Tower and the countryside beyond Meudon to the south-west. It was this eminence that led to Père Lachaise, three times in its history, becoming a battlefield—in 1814, 1815 and, its worst ordeal, during the bitter civil war of 1871, when the Paris Commune expired at the end of that blood-soaked May. On Whitsunday, 147 Communards were stood against a wall in the eastern corner of Père Lachaise and vengefully shot down. That wall, its bullet-scarred expanse graced by a simple commemorative plaque to the Communard martyrs, became a rallying-point for France’s left wing. For more than a hundred years, every Whitsun marches would solemnly proceed to the Mur des Fédérés, as it is called—occasions that would often turn into political demonstrations on the controversies of the day.

Here, around the Mur des Fédérés, have congregated the tombs of some of France’s proletarian heroes—Henri Barbusse, the leading anti-war novelist of the post-1918 generation; Picasso’s friend Paul Eluard, the poet; Marcel Willard, the defender of Georgi Dimitrov, who was tried and acquitted of complicity in the Reichstag fire of 1933, later to become Prime Minister of Bulgaria. Near by a gleaming slab of black granite conceals the final resting place of Maurice Thorez, the influential and long-standing boss of France’s Communist Party. Also in this section of Père Lachaise, which has become known as the Coin des Martyrs, are to be found various memorials to more recent examples of man’s inhumanity to man. Plaques honouring young men of the Resistance murdered by the Gestapo are intermixed with grim monuments to the victims of the Nazi concentration camps. The courageous Frenchwomen who died at Ravensbrück are commemorated by a pair of manacled stone hands; Belsen by a group of emaciated figures in blackened bronze, looking with bitterness up at the heavens; and Mauthausen by a plain stone shaft inscribed with the chilling statistics of mass murder.

Between the opening of Père Lachaise on 21 May 1804 and the end of 1815, some 530 graves were sold; twenty years later 11,289 plots had been bought and embellished. Meanwhile, with consummate artistry, in 1810–11 Prefect Frochot had the existing skulls and bones from the old Paris cemeteries reinterred in elegant arrangements in the catacombs. Laid out like a modern grid-form metropolis, Père Lachaise has the feel of a town—truly, a city of the dead—with tidy paved and cobbled “streets,” complete with cast-iron signposts. By the 1820s it had become an international tourist attraction, featuring prominently in all guidebooks to Paris. As it expanded over the years, Père Lachaise came to embrace, in closest proximity, all the violent contrasts of Paris life. Not far from the Mur des Fédérés, on the very spot where the last Communard cannon fired its final round, there now stands a small chapel, built by the Municipality of Paris in memory of the man principally responsible for the defeat of the Commune—Adolphe Thiers. Also up by the Mur lie the bodies of Karl Marx’s daughter Laura and her husband, Paul Lafargue—who committed joint suicide in 1911; while near them is the painter Amedeo Modigliani, buried together with his lover, Jeanne Hebuterne, who killed herself a few days after his painful death from meningitis.