The Concinis, arrogant parvenus, came increasingly to annoy Louis by cheekily parading outside his windows in the Louvre, with an escort two or three hundred strong. The situation grew intolerable. In April 1617, Louis, almost certainly egged on by his favourite, ordered the elimination of Concini. On the morning of the 24th, accompanied by a retinue of fifty, the puffed-up Marshal d’Ancre entered the Louvre through the great door facing on to Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Immediately a courtier, Vitry, a former counsellor of Henri IV, supported by a few men, sprang out and, putting his hand on the right arm of Concini, announced, “The King has commanded me to seize your person.” Concini cried out for help, but was immediately felled by a volley of pistol shots. His retinue did nothing. Meanwhile Louis and Luynes were waiting anxiously inside, ready to flee if the plot failed.
Within the very courtyard of the Louvre, Paris could chalk up another ruthless murder. The city rejoiced ferociously at the end of the hated Concini, who was suspected of complicity in the death of Henri IV and even blamed for the failure to place his statue on the Pont Neuf. Buried after the killing at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Concini’s body was later dug up, torn apart and cannibalized: “Having torn out the heart, one mob roasted it on a charcoal brazier, and ate it with relish.” With the murder of Concini, at sixteen the unpleasant Louis had truly come of age. “Yes, now I am king!” he declared. At court it was as if lightning had struck. Abject by definition, the courtiers rallied instantly to their new star, raising him up in the window of the palace to show him to the guard assembled in the courtyard. Marie de Médicis, realizing that her innings was over, said resignedly, “I’ve reigned for years, and now I expect nothing more than a crown in heaven!” She was exiled (briefly) to Blois. Her Italian best friend, Leonora Galigai, Concini’s widow, was seized while trying to conceal her jewellery in a mattress, and then burned on the Place de Grève as a witch. “What a lot of people to see a poor woman die!” she is said to have exclaimed. Richelieu, compromised by his association with Concini, went back to his diocese. Luynes was made a duke and appointed master of the royal household—in effect, master of the state. He was to prove an increasingly pernicious influence on Louis.
* The Bastille had been built by Charles V in 1370 as the Castle of Saint-Antoine.
LOUIS XIII GROWS UP
With the double marriage, the Spanish threat to France which had so exercised Henri IV was now approaching its end. Indeed Spain, about to begin her long descent into torpor following the death of Philip II in 1598, was no longer her principal enemy. Once again the dangers were internal. Luynes, a Catholic zealot, soon found himself entangled in a campaign against the Protestants in the south-west of France. An incompetent general, in 1621 he so mishandled the siege of Montauban that it had to be abandoned after three months. Among the many casualties was Luynes himself, dead of the fièvre pourpre, or camp fever.
Unmistakably, the death of Luynes was a stroke of good fortune for France, though it left a serious power-vacuum in Paris. Into it, and out of his temporary disgrace, moved Richelieu—at the behest of a king disoriented by the loss of his favourite. With Luynes now dead, Louis became reconciled to his mother; and in 1622 her new favourite, the Bishop of Luçon, was made Cardinal Richelieu. Two years later, swallowing his pride, Louis called in the man he had previously viewed as a dangerous prelate “ready to set fire to the four corners of the realm” and invited him to take over his government. This decision was to transform an unattractive and accident-prone princeling into a monarch with a claim to greatness—if only a greatness that lay in his remarkable willingness to entrust the running of the country almost entirely to his brilliant premier ministre. Richelieu was to declare that “My first goal was the majesty of the King; the second was the greatness of the realm.” Historians such as Montesquieu, however, saw it differently: Richelieu had assigned the King the role of playing “second fiddle in the realm and first in Europe.”
Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu was born in Paris in 1585 of noble family from Poitou. With his arched nose and thin lips, his goatee and military moustache, his pale complexion and slender build, he cut a distinguished figure that was to dominate the portraits of the epoch. Beneath the cool, reasoned exterior was a man of passion, occasionally capable of violent rage. France, as Richelieu saw it, was in a mess, but, ever the pragmatist, he eschewed grand designs in favour of a method. “In politics,” he would say, “one is impelled far more by the necessity of things than by a pre-established will.”
Richelieu’s early programme operated on three fronts: to crush Huguenot power, to humble the “Great Lords” among the French nobles, grown too rich and too powerful under the Regency, and to thwart the designs of Habsburg Austria. In the first of these, he was greatly aided by the folly of James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham precipitated an Anglo-French war, into which the key Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay was unwillingly drawn. After suffering terrible privations, La Rochelle was starved out following a fourteen-month siege in 1627–8. Buckingham simply pulled out, abandoning his Huguenot allies to their fate. Acting with great moderation in the wake of this disaster for the Protestant cause, Richelieu directed Louis towards humanity, reconfirming the Edict of Nantes, depriving the Huguenots of their fortresses and their armies, but guaranteeing them liberty of conscience. As a result of this “Peace of Grace,” the Huguenots caused no real trouble for the government during the next few decades.
By way of humbling the nobles, the second prong of his strategy, Richelieu began by purging from the Conseil d’Etat, the chief governing council, all the ministers who opposed him. For many years without an heir, Louis was a natural object for conspiracy. At one time or another, his half-brothers, the Vendômes, the illegitimate sons of Henri IV, and his own brother, Gaston d’Orléans, six years younger, were all plotting against him and Richelieu. Gaston, until 1638 the presumptive heir to the throne, was an attractive but feckless libertine of no great intelligence, and in 1626 he became seriously embroiled in a plot to assassinate Richelieu. After a period of exile abroad, Gaston was back in France in 1632, now involved with the Duc de Montmorency in open rebellion in the Languedoc. Montmorency was wounded and captured, then executed. Given that he was the greatest nobleman of France outside the royal family itself, and had an outstanding record of service to the Crown, the sentence came as a profound shock, provoking many appeals for clemency. But, whereas Richelieu might have yielded, Louis showed himself remorselessly harsh in having the sentence carried out. “One should not pity a man who is about to suffer his punishment,” he said, “one should only pity him for having deserved it.”
From then on, Gaston was seen as a broken reed (at least until the troubled days of the Fronde under Louis XIV), the throne at last made secure when, seemingly almost in a fit of absent-mindedness while sheltering from a storm overnight in her apartment, Louis caused Anne to conceive an heir, who was born on 5 September 1638, almost twenty-three years after their marriage. Two years later a similar miracle produced a second son, Philippe. Gaston, Richelieu’s bitter enemy, seemed to have lost all hope of succeeding to the throne.
In his third aim of humbling the Habsburgs, now grown so powerful through the aggrandizements of Charles V, Richelieu was largely successful in keeping out of the grisly Thirty Years War, that ravaged Germany and the countries east of the Rhine. Even so, in 1636, Spanish armies invading from Holland almost reached the gates of Paris. Though subsequently this could be seen as a last effort of waning Spanish power, at the time there was serious alarm in the city, and Parisians were grateful yet again for the protective walls that Philippe Auguste and Charles V had given them, though anxious about their state of repair. “Not a turret but would have come tumbling down at the sound of a roll of drums,” it was reported.
GOVERNANCE OF PARIS
Building astutely, and ruthlessly, on the absolutist foundations laid by Henri and Sully, Louis XIII and Richelieu steadily tightened the monar
chy’s grip on Paris. It was a tendency that would continue into the ill-fated Second Empire of Louis Napoleon. In the mother country of liberty, the instinct for authoritarianism is never far below the surface. Almost never before had the charge of lèse-majesté been made so frequently outside Paris; although there were many uprisings in the provinces, Paris remained curiously tranquil throughout the time of Richelieu. It was Richelieu’s plain preference to govern via councils, rather than through favourites, but from the beginning of his ascendancy to the end, he ruled the city councils with a heavy hand—and the more powerful he grew the heavier that hand became. Louis himself could treat the Paris Parlement with downright brutality. On one chilling occasion he warned its First President, Guy Le Jay, of the limit of his powers: “If you continue your schemes, I will clip your nails so close that your flesh will suffer from it.”
In the Paris of Henri IV, duelling had become all the rage among galants, often taking place in the Place Royale. Each year several hundred members of the gentry perished in duels. Now Richelieu showed himself ruthlessly determined to stamp out what, to him, was a particularly heinous sin. Pour encourager les autres, in June 1627 a well-known noble, the Comte de Montmorency-Bouteville, arrested for duelling, was refused a pardon and beheaded. This caused a major sensation.
Unlike his father, Louis was not dedicated to Paris; like his Valois antecedents, when not at the wars or involved in acts of repression in the provinces he was addicted to la chasse. Richelieu, on the other hand, spent as much time in Paris as he could, because that was where lay the fount of power, as well as the potential sources of revolt. During the two Richelieu decades, the geographical centre of gravity of Paris gradually but systematically moved westwards, away from the smells and congestion of the Marais. To the great coral-like entity of the Louvre, Louis added only a tiny accretion, the Pavillon de l’Horloge, and a stretch of the west wing of the Cour Carrée.
But Richelieu, always shrewd in matters of real estate, agglomerated a vast property that stretched from the back door of the Louvre in the south to the city wall in the north. Through the centre he built a long, straight street (now, appropriately, the Rue Richelieu in the banking district of the 2nd arrondissement), and divided the expanses on either side into building lots. To the west of it, between 1633 and 1639, he had built for himself a sumptuous palace with eight elegant and classically regular courtyards, which Richelieu bequeathed to the King. Known initially as the Palais Cardinal, when the royal family moved in after Richelieu’s death it gained the name it has held ever since, the Palais Royal. “An entire city, built with pomp, seems to have arisen miraculously from an old ditch,” exclaimed Corneille, his praise possibly conditioned by the fact that he found there both a patron and a stage for his plays. The Palais Cardinal set a new standard, now in stone, of classical uniformity in Paris, though sadly little remains of the original design.
The shift in the religious balance following the death of Henri had resulted in a powerful Catholic renaissance. The clergy had regained respect and influence, and so had the Jesuits, who expanded everywhere in their role of educators. In the three decades after the assassination of 1610, on the Right Bank no fewer than eighteen new religious foundations (including the important seminary of Saint-Sulpice) had made their appearance, with a similar number on the Left Bank. Many major churches were also begun at this time. On the Left Bank, to mark the birth of the Dauphin in 1638, Anne transformed the simple little monastery of Val-de-Grâce in the Rue Saint-Jacques into an imposing abbey, with a cupola in the new style, emulating those of Florence and Rome—though technical problems delayed completion of the great dome till 1665. Louis was much given to church building as a form of thanksgiving (he erected Notre-Dame des Victoires to celebrate the fall of La Rochelle), but his most outstanding and most enduring contribution to the architecture of Paris lay in the middle of the Seine, on the Ile Saint-Louis.
Just upstream from the age-old Ile de la Cité lay two small muddy islets, their use over the centuries indicated by the name Ile aux Vaches. Henri IV had it in mind to join them together, build a dyke round them to keep the Seine out, and then develop the resulting island. His assassination brought the project to a halt, but Louis carried it forward under Henri’s builder Christopher Marie, together with two financiers—Poulletier and Le Regrattier—all of whose names survive to this day on the Ile. In return for its development, they were guaranteed rents from the houses over sixty years, a highly remunerative undertaking. For the first time an area of Paris was laid out on a grid system, thereby guaranteeing its survival from the subsequent attentions of Baron Haussmann. In 1618 the island was connected to the Right Bank by the Pont Marie (named after the architect, not—as might be thought given the piety of Louis and Anne—the Holy Virgin) and two years later to the Left Bank by the Pont de la Tournelle. The bridges were finished by 1645, the handsome quais by Louis’s death in 1643. Within thirty years, the two mudbanks had been transformed into a beautiful city in miniature, a seventeenth-century jewel encapsulating in its streets of pot-bellied houses both uniformity and individualism. Many of the houses were designed by Le Vau, who understandably kept one of the best for himself. His masterpiece, at the east end of the island, unquestionably is the Hôtel Lambert, marking a new development in style as a private town house for the affluent individual rather than as a showpiece to impress the public. Here Voltaire, Chopin and—more recently—the actress Michèle Morgan later lived, and it is now a treasure trove belonging to Baron Guy de Rothschild—alas, now somewhat marred by the ugly modern block of the Institut du Monde Arabe that fills the horizon just across the river. From its inception, prostitutes from the Marais were banned from the Ile, lending it (compared with the Place des Vosges) a somewhat sombre, almost puritan tranquillity. Somehow the Ile remained aloof from most of the revolts that rocked Paris in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and today the clamour of the city still passes it by.
Among the major projects envisaged by Henri IV, the grandiose scheme for the Place de France was abandoned by Richelieu as simply too ambitious. But the thirty-three-year reign of Louis XIII might have left more of a mark on Paris had he not been taken for a ride by unscrupulous speculators. Notable among these was a Louis Le Barbier, driven on by an admirable ambition to secure good matches for his daughters. Le Barbier undertook for Louis the colossal venture of demolishing Charles V’s wall, bringing several new faubourgs into the city (five on the Left Bank alone), and then building a new protective wall. Richelieu was in a hurry to build the new wall on the Right Bank, not merely out of strategic considerations, but because the old one obscured the view from his Palais Cardinal. A contract was signed in October 1631, but the contractors, Pierre Pidou and Charles Froger, were as unreliable as Le Barbier—whose front-men they turned out to be. Virtually nothing was ever completed; Le Barbier died in 1641, a ruined man. Given the treatment meted out to the likes of Concini, he and his accomplices were lucky to escape with their lives.
ARTS AND LETTERS
Few Frenchmen today would deny that Richelieu’s greatest cultural legacy to France lay not in bricks and mortar, but in the creation of the Académie Française to defend and enhance the purity of the French language. Founded in 1635 and consisting initially of nine men of letters with an average age of thirty-six, it was then followed in 1648 by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and in 1671 by the all-powerful Académie Royale d’Architecture, designed similarly to establish and maintain standards in building. Originally organizations without a home, the Académies had to wait for Cardinal Mazarin to commission for them the superb Institut de France complex (opened in 1688) with its glittering cupola and its two arms that seem to reach out to embrace the very heart of Paris from its eminence on the Left Bank of the Seine.
The civil war in France had brought art to a new low. In Paris the League attacked Renaissance art as heretical, so few young artists of talent were attracted to the capital. Henri IV was no connoisseur, and had no time
to become one; Marie de Médicis lacked the necessary taste, and commissioning Rubens did little to make of Paris a city attractive to artists. Fortunately Richelieu had both taste and the power to indulge it. He bought paintings and sculpture from Italy, and invited the portrait painter Philippe de Champaigne from Brussels. In 1635 he commissioned Nicolas Poussin to paint more of the light-hearted bacchanals and landscapes which had made his early reputation; Poussin, of Norman peasant stock, found money and fame in the capital, but not the technical encouragement he needed. In 1642, snubbing his rich but pretentious Paris patrons, he left France for the Rome that was always the source of his inspiration.
His fellow Norman Pierre Corneille, the great dramatist adept in both comedy and tragedy, was set to work by Richelieu as one of his cinq auteurs, writing plays under the Cardinal’s careful direction, some of which were performed before the King. In January 1637 he produced his heroic tragedy Le Cid, dealing with the conflict between sexual passion and honour—a milestone in the history of French drama. Corneille was notable for his belief in free will, in marked contrast to the theme of impotence conveyed in Greek classical tragedy, the tradition that was to be inherited by Racine.
Another figure of importance in French literature, a Norman like Poussin and Corneille, was the poet François de Malherbe. Henri IV brought him to Paris in 1605 as his official poet, and he remained in favour under Louis XIII and Richelieu. Renowned for his slowness in composition, he once spent three years writing stanzas on the death of a noble lady, so that when he came to present them the bereaved husband had already remarried—and died. Thus Malherbe left few verses to posterity, but what was important about him was the rigorous purity of his style and diction, and his clarity. He eschewed all Latinisms and foreign usage, in preference for common Parisian speech. This made him an important precursor of the Académie and what it was to stand for through the centuries. Though Henri had neither the instinct nor the time to be a patron of literature, no more than of painting, his own letters passionate and forthright as they were, broke new ground as classics of their kind. In many ways one sees his short, glorious reign as having laid the essential groundwork in Paris on which his widow, son and grandson—and Richelieu—were all to build with such success, accomplishing a kind of nationalization of the French arts.
Seven Ages of Paris Page 15
