Seven Ages of Paris (8 page)

To relieve the pressure, in the early part of the twelfth century Louis le Gros had set up a primitive market on some marshy fields, Les Champeaux, which became known in perpetuity as Les Halles (apparently originating from the expression pour ce que chacun y allait). In 1183 Philippe Auguste had them replaced with two permanent stone buildings designed to protect both goods and vendors from bad weather and from robbery. Although the topography of Paris in the twelfth century is not clear, Les Champeaux were known to have been located on a little mound. As such, the site was protected from the inundations which periodically occurred in the marshy area situated to the north-west. It seems likely that the site also provided a link with Montmartre to the north.

Under Philippe Auguste, the market entered an era of growth. In 1181, the King incorporated into Les Champeaux the Saint-Ladre or Saint-Lazare fair which was held outside the city limits, probably between the Saint-Laurent church and the Saint-Lazare leper house (that is, at the present-day intersection of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and the Boulevard Magenta). The following year, according to some sources, the market was further enlarged by the confiscation and demolition of houses owned by Jews. Philippe, in contrast to his father, was to earn a bad reputation in his dealings with the Jews and their property.

Economic conditions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were favourable to the growth of trade, not only in France but in Europe generally. By the creation of new roads, by the development of new needs, by the maintenance of relative peace, commercial relations by land and by water could extend internationally. But there were still problems, since a lone merchant couldn’t hope to succeed by throwing himself into some far-off trade adventure. Thus an individual’s first care was to place himself under the protection of someone stronger. Everywhere merchants encountered depredation, protectionist land magnates, fiscal barriers and tolls. To begin negotiations allowing the purchase of distant goods, to guarantee the transport in security of the goods and their sale on the market, merchants had to form themselves into companies and assemble together in approved places and at certain times of the year. Hence, it was only to be expected that Paris, capital of a kingdom and a European city by virtue of her university, should have become a large commercial centre, especially with a well-placed site on the Right Bank available for such use. In establishing Les Halles, Philippe struck a blow for Paris as a major trading centre of Europe. Down through the ages, through repeated rebuilding and expansion, the market continued on Philippe’s original site, with the surrounding area retaining much of its original flavour—until Presidents de Gaulle and Pompidou evacuated the whole congested complex out to Rungis, on the way to Orly Airport, in the 1960s.

THE UNIVERSITY

Over the years from Abélard to Philippe Auguste, the University of Paris had grown up to become a significant force in the land, along with the monarchy, the nobility and the Church. From earliest days, its students had keenly and liberally involved themselves in city life, outside the walls of Academe—so much so that in the south transept of Notre-Dame a series of reliefs shows scenes from student life, as well as depicting a medieval seminar in progress (though they are listening closely, the participants appear to be taking no notes). In 1200 the new century began with a brawl between town and gown in Paris, grave enough for the King, Philippe Auguste, himself to get involved. An account given by the English chronicler Roger of Howden describes how a band of German students wrecked a tavern and severely beat the owner. In a punitive raid, Thomas, the royal prévôt of Paris, attacked the Germans’ hostel with urban militia; as a result some Parisian students from the University were killed.

Outraged by this incident, the University’s professors joined their students in demanding redress and suspended teaching, threatening to leave Paris in a body. Here, as in later centuries, the most potent weapon in the armoury of both students and masters was to strike—or, in medieval terms, to order “a cessation of lectures.” It caused Philippe to fear that the students might boycott his city and even migrate to Plantagenet England. At the same time he had another, more personal motive for appeasing the University. His dispute with the Pope was still running, and his lands were still under interdict, so he was keen to win over Paris churchmen (under whose aegis the University existed) for their support in the royal cause. Accordingly, in July 1200, under powerful pressure, Philippe issued a charter (the University’s first) that was highly beneficial to the students. To punish the prévôt, the King proposed that Thomas be imprisoned for life unless he chose to submit to trial by ordeal. If he failed it, he was to be executed; if he passed it, he was nonetheless forever prohibited from holding the office of prévôt or bailli (bailiff—see below) and from returning to Paris. He survived the ordeal and went into exile. Similar measures were taken against his henchmen.

Constituting a substantial segment of the city’s population by this time, these scholars enjoyed clerical privileges that exempted them from normal jurisdiction. Ecclesiastical courts had formulated two sets of privileges to protect the clergy. The first was the privilegium canonis, under which the clergy were considered sacred personages. Any physical violence against them was therefore sacrilege, and punishable by immediate excommunication, for which absolution could be obtained only by arduous penance. Under the second, the privilegium fori, the clergy were exempt from the secular courts and subject exclusively to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In Paris, because of the concentration of scholars, the problem of repressing clerical crime was more acute than anywhere else.

Yet, having avenged the students’ honour by punishing Thomas, the King promised to reinforce the privilegium canonis by commissioning the agents of royal justice to protect clerics from all such assaults by laymen. If the townsmen saw any layman assaulting a student in Paris, except in self-defence, they were required to arrest the offender, hand him over to royal justice and give evidence against him. Finally, Philippe commanded his officers:

neither to arrest clerics accused of crimes nor to seize their chattels without serious cause. If arrest was deemed necessary, the cleric was to be delivered immediately to an ecclesiastical court, which would attempt to satisfy the king and the injured party.

Particular care was to be exercised to avoid physical injury to the students unless they resisted arrest. All complaints of violence were to be investigated by inquest. Both the prévôt and the people of Paris were required to observe these measures under oath. Philippe’s statute thus went to exceptional lengths in giving the University vital concessions and privileges which it would strive to safeguard over the ages.

The students and their masters thereby received virtual immunity from royal justice, which was greatly to exacerbate the headaches the prévôt had in maintaining order in the city. Their protected status encouraged aggressive behaviour among the scholars, who became renowned for their brawling and rioting, as well as for committing more violent crimes. By 1221, the Bishop of Paris, under whose edicts they came, excommunicated all students carrying arms. Two years later (the year of Philippe’s death) the hatred of town for gown reached a peak when the Paris citizenry fought a pitched battle against the students during which 320 were killed and their bodies thrown into the Seine.

DESPOILING THE JEWS

How did Philippe Auguste manage to raise money for all his vast urban projects in Paris, defensive and peaceful? As well as being a highly talented fund-raiser, Philippe seems to have been a most astute financial manager. While his father Louis VII had—according to the chroniclers—only 19,000 livres spending money per month, by Philippe’s death in 1223 his son Louis VIII could reckon on a sum of 1,200 daily, or nearly twice as much. When it came to financing his ambitious fortifications, not only of Paris but of most of his important cities like Orléans, Laon and Péronne, Philippe was greatly aided by a most efficient and modern-minded system of standardization. Whereas in 1197–8, Coeur de Lion had spent 34,000 livres on the construction of his vast fortress of Château Gaillard alone, Philippe’s total programme (before his conquest of Normandy) cost no more than 40,000, while the whole of the Left Bank stretch of enceinte wall came to no more than 7,020 livres. He kept his economy under tight control, was meticulous in exacting taxes from his vassals, as from the wealthy clergy, while as his banker he employed the Templars, expert in augmenting their fortunes—which was to be their downfall a century later, under another Philippe. He turned a blind eye to Simon de Montfort’s brutal crusade against the Albigensians of south-west France, of which he disapproved, but readily accepted the spoils into his exchequer. One of his main sources of income, however, derived from the Jewish community of Paris.

From Philippe Auguste to Philippe Pétain, and beyond, treatment of the Jews in Paris, indeed in northern France as a whole, was never conspicuous for its generosity. But this was true of most of medieval Europe. There were the relatively good periods, and the very bad. To his shame, the reign of Philippe Auguste belonged categorically to the latter. In French Jewish lore, he came to be known as “that wicked King.” Under Louis VII, the Jews had been relatively well treated, their synagogues protected, and they had prospered. By the end of Louis’s long reign their small community had come to own nearly half of all private property in the city, with large numbers of the citizenry in their debt. But before his father was even cold in the grave Philippe, still barely fifteen and probably acting under pressure from the establishment, in 1180 issued orders for the Jews under royal protection in Paris to be arrested in their synagogues, imprisoned and condemned to purchase their freedom through surrender of all their gold and silver and precious vestments. Though not in fact initiated as religious persecution, it was a cynically skilful ploy for getting on his side both the Church and the great mass of wealthy Parisian debtors. Above all, it granted Philippe the immense sum of 31,500 livres, which he needed both for building the walls of Paris and Les Halles, and for equipping his army to defeat the Plantagenets. Two years later, he followed up with a decree expelling the Jews from France and confiscating the totality of their wealth. Debts were wiped out—except for a fifth which the royal coffers appropriated.

Altogether the value of Philippe’s first depredations against Paris Jewry was equivalent to roughly one and a half times what his government might expect to raise in normal predictable revenue for an entire year. This was not, however a formula found acceptable to all of his neighbouring vassals, and in 1198 he relented partially—and then kept changing his mind at varying intervals, with the cruellest of consequences. Perhaps only a couple of thousand Jews, out of a total population of some 60,000 to 100,000, were involved, but the expulsions brought to an end the ancient Juiverie on the Ile de la Cité, and their synagogue was converted by Bishop Sully, creator of Notre-Dame, into the Church of the Madeleine. When the Jews returned, they settled predominantly in the Marais area of what was to become the 4th arrondissement (which still retains most of the traditional Jewish shops and restaurants of Paris). But, once again, the Jews were expelled from the whole of France, their property confiscated, under Philippe le Bel a century later. In many ways, the policy of Philippe Auguste, with its frequent vacillations, was harsher than that of his successor, insofar as it provoked crude anti-Semitism with the native Parisians attacking the Jews as blameworthy for any disadvantageous change in the tax laws.

LAW AND ORDER

Ruthless an absolute monarch as he was, there is no question but that Philippe Auguste had the interests of Paris very high among his priorities—if not top, after Bouvines. Though his father had first established the city as France’s permanent seat of government, it was Philippe who truly loved her, and he was the first ruler to make her—secure within her new walls—a caput, his administrative capital. Records (remarkably complete, considering the distance of the times and the fact that the national archives had been lost at the Battle of Fréteval) show that, despite his many absences in battle, 31 per cent of all Philippe’s royal actes from the Curia Regis had a dateline of Paris, thereby indicating his residence there. In the remaining decade of his life after Bouvines, consequent to the peace and stability that the victory over John and his allies had given, he spent most of his days in the city, planning, reorganizing it—and building.

In terms of administration, though he had ruthlessly crushed and brought to heel his rural nobles, and absolute ruler though he was, in Paris he introduced an astonishing degree of devolution—or what, in those days, would have passed for the beginnings of democratic rights. Under Louis VII, the Paris merchants had thrived, but it was Philippe who first gave the bourgeois classes, the Latin burgenses nostri, their official standing. It was he who, in his extraordinary Testament of 1190, had handed over the affairs of Paris to six eminent bourgeois while he went off to the Crusades; and it was under him that the Paris water merchants, also members of the bourgeoisie, were granted virtual control of river traffic on the Seine (in itself a measure of the prime importance of the river in the life of the city). In the Hôtel de Ville on the Right Bank, east of the Louvre, it was Philippe too who instituted the parloir aux bourgeois, the first seat of a Parisian municipal administration.

Parisian law and order, too, received its impetus from Philippe. Just before embarking on the Third Crusade, in an ordinance of 1190 he had created the system of baillis (or bailiffs), placed directly under the royal government. Drawn from the bourgeoisie, a useful counterweight to the landed seigneury, they were responsible for the dispensation of justice—and also for checking up on any excesses committed by the prévôts. Fearful of assassination by an agent of Coeur de Lion, in the course of his struggles against the Plantagenets Philippe formed the habit of going around the city with an escort of guards armed with truncheons, rude predecessors of the modern gendarmerie and riot police. In marked contrast to the authoritarian Henry Plantagenet, bitterly struggling with the Church to wrest judicial rights from it (and perhaps in reaction against the martyrdom of Becket), Philippe was generally meticulous in allowing the clergy to preserve these prerogatives. Unusual was a case, in 1210, concerning a group of heretics condemned at the councils of Sens and Paris. These members of the clergy were degraded, handed over to the King’s court and burned in the field of Les Champeaux.