Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  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 im-posing 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 turn
ed 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.

  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.