Seven Ages of Paris
Page 1
Acclaim for Alistair Horne’s
Seven Ages of Paris
“How much happier life would be if one could read books as riveting as Alistair Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris every week of the year. Horne has a masterful way of infusing grand historical themes with rich narrative detail. His chronicle of the cultural and political forces that have shaped Paris over the past millennia is a dazzling, engrossing work.”
—Francine du Plessix Gray
“Excellent.… Horne, one of the most graceful and satisfying of historians, seems to know every place and curbside in Paris.… He has, you feel, walked every inch of Paris, and his book is a veritable tour of the city from the ground up.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A rich, seething history lesson that gives more life to the arrondissements and sites of a great city.”
—Associated Press
“Paris is what you bring to it, and Mr. Horne brings his broad erudition and intense feel for French history. He not only understands the political passions that made the city the inescapable center of France’s life … but, more subtly, the poetry and music of the city’s air.”
—The Washington Times
“Outstanding. Mr. Horne’s book … is ideal for reading just before or after a trip to Paris, with its expansiveness and store of detail, its richness of personal and historical knowledge of the City of Light.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“An authoritative thousand-year history; twenty-five years in the making.”
—New York magazine
“Exciting.… Horne’s history of Paris is … tantamount to a history of France.… Readers will agree with Maurice Druon, who writes in the foreword, ‘Horne is everywhere and knows everything.’ ”
—Providence Journal
“Weaves fascinating anecdotes and trivia, ancient rumors about naughty royals and well-researched military, political and cultural history into an engrossing paean to the City of Light.”
—Town and Country
“[Horne] is a master storyteller who regularly shows that lively, interesting writing and good history are completely compatible. This is a terrific book, a must for anyone who loves history or Paris, much less both.”
—Greenwich Time
“Horne is at once readable, insightful and most helpful with appropriate asides and well-chosen quotations and anecdotes that illustrate a viewpoint. His is a work worth keeping and sharing with future generations.”
—The Decatur Daily
“Full of entertaining—and enlightening—anecdotes, this engrossing book traces the City of Light from its beginnings as a muddy Roman outpost to the heady days of May ’68.”
—France Magazine
“What is charming about this book is that it can serve both as a rough guide to historical Paris (what remains of it), as well as provide an architectural summary of what the rest of the world knows.”
—The Denver Post
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2004
Copyright © 2002 by Alistair Horne
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd., London, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Horne, Alistair.
Seven ages of Paris / Alistair Horne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-679-45481-0 (alk. paper)
1. Paris (France)—History. I. Title: 7 ages of Paris. II. Title.
DC707 .H74 2002
944′.361—dc21
2002029653
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5169-6
Trade Paperback: 978-1-400-03446-8
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
For Nicky
Good friend, and ally, of many years;
best of publishers for nearly forty
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Maurice Druon
Preface
A Note on Money
INTRODUCTION: FROM CAESAR TO ABÉLARD
Age One 1180–1314: PHILIPPE AUGUSTE
1. Sunday at Bouvines
2. Capital City
3. The Templars’ Curse
Age Two 1314–1643: HENRI IV
4. Besieged
5. “Worth a Mass”
6. Regicide, Regent and Richelieu
Age Three 1643–1795: LOUIS XIV
7. The Move to Versailles
8. A Building Boom
9. Death of the Ancien Régime
Age Four 1795–1815: NAPOLEON
10. Empire and Reform
11. “The Most Beautiful City That Could Ever Exist”
12. Downfall of an Empire
Age Five 1815–1871: THE COMMUNE
13. Constitutional Monarchy and Revolt
14. The Second Empire
15. L’Année Terrible
Age Six 1871–1940: THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
16. Belle Epoque
17. The Great War
18. The Phoney Peace
Age Seven 1940–1969: DE GAULLE
19. The Occupation
20. “I Was France”
21. Les Jours de Mai
EPILOGUE: DEATH IN PARIS–THE PÈRE LACHAISE CEMETERY
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
Foreword
by Maurice Druon
Over and above their rivalries and their ententes, for nearly a thousand years France and England have exercised upon each other a reciprocal attraction, almost a fascination. The evolution of their history, institutions and literature has been, for leading intellectuals of the two countries, a constant object of contemplation, of study and—if one may say so—of delight. For our generation Alistair Horne stands in the first rank of this elite.
Among the twenty-odd books which (apart from the official biography of Harold Macmillan) have established his fame, a large part, such as How Far from Austerlitz? Napoleon 1805–1815; The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune 1871; The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916; and A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, have had as their subjects episodes of French history. Alistair Horne has no need to be introduced to the public. His renown precedes him.
In doing me the honour of asking me to write a foreword to Seven Ages of Paris, he wanted (I felt) only to offer me the opportunity to express once more the gratitude that I cherish, since the commitments of my youth, towards Great Britain and the heroic city of London, which were, during the worst ordeals of the last century, the ultimate refuge of our honour and the citadel of our liberty. It requires, however, no effort at all from me to express my admiration for the substantial book of which I have had the advantage of being one of the first readers. It will remain, I believe, Horne’s most outstanding work.
Devoting many years to its preparation, he has poured into it all the knowledge acquired through his earlier works. He has consulted every possible source, not only French and English, but European and even American. He has brought to light accounts that have generally been ignored, and that are often out of the ordinary. His researches demanded innumerable visits t
o Paris, where—a tireless walker—he has endeavoured to tread upon the very soil that bears the footprints of the personalities he describes, and where there occurred the events which he narrates. Not a single century holds any secrets from him.
In retracing the history of Paris, from its most distant origins, Roman as well as Gallic, he offers us, in effect, a new history of France herself—a personalized history, and one that is very captivating to read. For Alistair Horne is a storyteller as well as a historian. When he writes history, he tells us a story—superbly and dramatically. He has perfectly grasped the wavelike continuum in France’s destiny, which travels incessantly from the heights to the depths, because—though the French have always jibbed at reform—they have repeatedly been ready to throw themselves into adventures and revolutions. It required supermen to make France’s destiny go forward, or to be masters of it.
With every sound intuition, Horne dates the first great epoch of Paris from the reign of Philippe Auguste. Precocious genius in the art of power and a formidable medieval strategist, Philippe Auguste was obsessed by the unity of the territory. In order to govern his kingdom firmly, he needed a vast, active and powerful capital which was solidly fortified. The same necessity imposed itself on his grandson, Saint Louis, himself obsessed by the unity of law, and upon Saint Louis’s own grandson, Philippe le Bel, who devoted his efforts towards the unity of the state. Those three rulers invented the nation, with its irreversible characteristics, and that centralization—based on Paris—which still marks France.
Allying his dedication to truth with a sense of the epic, it is at the pace of a cavalcade that Alistair Horne makes us journey through the centuries leading from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. From then on he wanders at a more leisurely speed. He is an apostle of factual history. He leaves it to others to embark on a priori theories or on the drawing of abstract sociological conclusions. He just tells it as it was.
I am glad that he has his likes, and expresses them, as he expresses his antipathies. Without a little passion, history is cold, history is dead. Of all the French monarchs, it is Henri IV, visibly, who wins his favour. This courageous warrior, this skilful diplomat, this peacemaker, this dedicated philanderer, who lacked neither cunning nor generosity, appeals to him. In contrast, Louis XIV, thinking constantly of la Gloire, this quintessence of an autocrat, irritates him. Horne reproaches him, not without reason, for having prepared the collapse of his dynasty through his abandoning Paris for Versailles. He has difficulty in disguising a certain contempt for Louis XV and for the unfortunate, inadequate Louis XVI.
When Bonaparte appears, it is by means of a long flashback that the author relates the events of the Revolution, and paints for us the state of squalor and dilapidation in which the Terror had left Paris—with its stinking and muddy streets, façades demolished, a city in terrible misery. He observes, amused, the removal of moral constraints during the Directory, before Napoleon arrived to reconstruct the state—and then the capital. But when this conqueror who was both a lawgiver and a builder, having overthrown Europe, falls victim to the immoderation of his dreams, he leaves behind him a Paris that is one immense construction site.
Horne alternates the art of synthesis with that of detail. If he pauses near the bed of Mme. Récamier, it is not only to contemplate Chateaubriand sporting poses which he liked to strike, but to remind us that there was also an old M. Récamier, the great banker who was responsible for a resounding bankruptcy, and who yet managed to recoup his fortunes. When he crosses the Pont d’Iéna, it is to remind us how the English soldiers Wellington posted there, in 1815, prevented Blücher from destroying the structure the name of which he regarded as an insult to Prussia.
Horne is everywhere and knows everything. When he stops at a crossing, he sees there the coup which was carried out under Louis-Philippe. Or he sees the old streets and the patrician houses destroyed by Haussmann in order to open up the grands boulevards which changed the face of Paris during the prosperous reign of Napoleon III—who built so much yet ended so tragically.
He knows the numbers of cholera victims, during each epidemic, and the numbers of prostitutes, and the numbers of thieves, just as he knows the price of rats, and of the cat meat sold in the butchers’ shops during the terrible siege of 1870. (Yet he also notes how cellars remained full—for, although the population lacked everything else, Paris never went short of wine!)
The descriptions of Paris before and after the two great wars of the twentieth century, separated by a “Phoney Peace,” are given fully and judiciously. Among the fragments of courage which illuminate the work, not the least is that recalled by the great victory parade of 1919—a cortège not only of heroism, but also of illusions.
Nothing escapes his paintbrush, which depicts men and things in their proper chiaroscuro, and which brings alive once more fashions and those who created them, ideas and those who launched them, the arts and those who gained fame therein, political battles and those who failed or triumphed.
It was an English writer, Charles Morgan, greatly admired in my youth but now perhaps unfairly forgotten, who wrote, “France is an idea necessary for civilization.” Alistair Horne evokes this idea when he makes us relive the Occupation, with an accuracy to which my own recollections can testify—but also with manifest emotion. A cruel shadow descended on Paris when Nazi troops marched down a deserted Champs-Elysées. Terrible food shortages, heating non-existent, empty shops but full theatres, shoes with wooden soles that clattered on the pavements in the haste of getting home before the curfew, brutal round-ups, black market and clandestine operations—here were four years of humiliation, of privation, fear and denunciations, but also of heroism. If Horne underlines the exploits of the Resistance, he also hesitates before condemning the cowardice of the collaboration. “How can we judge?” he says. “It never happened to us. What would we have done in their place?”
That “certaine idée de la France” found refuge in London, with de Gaulle. The light returned to Paris in the exalted but also troubled hours of the Liberation. Intellectually as much of a Gaullist as an Englishman can be, Alistair Horne cannot quite resist the strange seduction which the Man-of-18-June exercises upon all those who study him: this arrogant visionary, this uncompromising prophet, this acclaimed solitary, this authoritarian tactician, the last of the great French monarchs, who, like the first, united in his person nation, law and state. Once again it was Paris, through a new bout of fever in 1968, the least bloody but also the most disturbing of her history, which darkened and abbreviated the end of de Gaulle’s reign.
Yes, I have taken enormous pleasure in rereading the history of my country, rejuvenated by the eye of a Briton. Having admired the elegant and fluid style of Alistair Horne, I wager that this book will go into many translations. For all those lovers of Paris so numerous throughout the world, it will provide a generous source of reference, an exciting travelling companion—and, in the evening of life, a lullaby of nostalgia. Seven Ages of Paris is, in itself, a monument.
MAURICE DRUON,
Académie Française, KBE
Preface
Whereas London, through the ages, has always betrayed clearly male orientations, and New York has a certain ambivalence, has any sensible person ever doubted that Paris is fundamentally a woman? It was thus that I first conceived this book—not as any arrogant attempt to write an all-embracing history of Paris, but rather as a series of linked biographical essays, depicting seven ages (capriciously selected at the whim of the author) in the long, exciting life of a sexy and beautiful, but also turbulent, troublesome and sometimes excessively violent woman.
Not only is she herself all woman, but in every age Paris seems to throw up from within an extraordinary range of fascinating, powerful and often dangerous women who leave their mark on the city. They may be seen to begin with tragic Héloïse; Henry James properly dubbed her “a Frenchwoman to the last millimetre of her shadow … worth at least a dozen Abelards,” and though she spent most of
a long, sad life banished far from Paris, she always seemed to me equally a Parisienne to “the last millimetre.” Then there are Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Henri IV’s passionate and violent Reine Margot. The reign of Louis XIV educes the bossily pious Mme. de Maintenon, counterparted by her outrageous and rather more attractive—and unlikely—friend, the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos. The age of Napoleon has, of course, Josephine—and many others with walk-on (generally boudoir) parts; similarly with Louis Napoleon, beginning with the frigid Empress Eugénie and ending with the fiery “Red Virgin,” Louise Michel, whose pétroleuses did their best to burn down Paris in the last days of the Commune. A happier age, briefly, of the Belle Epoque brings Sarah Bernhardt across the boards and culminates with Colette traversing—and surviving—two appalling world wars. The few bright moments of the “Phoney Peace” of 1919–39 are illuminated by great vedettes like Josephine Baker, who became as much a Parisienne as any of them. And finally we have the post-1945 age of Piaf and Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir and Coco Chanel—all of them women who to some degree dominated the Paris that nurtured them.
The great Richard Cobb, late of Oxford, England’s foremost connoisseur of Paris, in moments of exasperation was given to exclaim, “Wonderful country, France … pity about the French!” Of course he didn’t really mean it, and it was far too all-embracing an insult. Occasionally, on a soaking-wet day when there is no parking and the concierge turns his back on me, I have felt, more specifically, “Pity about the Parisians.” Then they will do something utterly disarming, generous to a fault. At least, neither Paris nor the Parisiens can ever be boring. I hesitate to appear to misprize my native city, but how can the history of dear, sedate old London town possibly compare to Paris for sheer excitement? (Of course, one can sometimes have perhaps too much excitement.) Against several revolutions, including one rather big one, several sieges, several occupations, what has mild-mannered London to offer but one regicide, a plague and a fire? A city without walls, protected by the Channel instead of only the gentle Seine, never threatened with starvation or besieged by an enemy—at least until Hitler came knocking at our door? And, against the great builders and city-planners from Philippe Auguste to Haussmann, of whom can London boast? A Wren or two. Then, where were our Impressionists during the Belle Epoque?