Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Finally there was the great essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, so much admired down the years for the freshness, vigour and gaiety of his language. One of the last of the great provincial writers, it was Montaigne who called the Paris of Henri IV “la gloire de la France et l’un des plus nobles ornements du monde.” Justly, he was to have one of the grandest avenues in Paris named after him.

  A NEW REGENT

  The era of Louis XIII and Richelieu ended quite suddenly. At the last meeting of the two men, in Tarascon in 1642, both were so ill—the Cardinal’s body eaten away with ulcers—that the King ordered their beds to be placed next to each other. It was a tearful leave-taking. Richelieu died in December that year. Five months later, Louis was also carried away, in May 1643—apparently by tuberculosis, and amid no great mourning. Even so, it could reasonably be claimed that the Cardinal had made his master “le plus grand roi du monde.”

  For a third time, the French found themselves ruled by a woman regent, the Queen Mother, Anne. Louis XIV was not yet five years old. Once more things looked perilous for France. Yet within a week of the child King’s accession a renewed Spanish advance upon Paris from the Low Countries was defeated, at Rocroi, by the twenty-two-year-old Duc d’Enghien, Prince de Condé (son of the troublesome but ineffectual would-be cuckold of Henri IV). One of the great military victories of French history, it was both an augury of what was to come and a hands-off warning to France’s enemies. Ahead lay the age of the Roi Soleil, whose effulgence would have been impossible without the achievements of his grandfather Henri IV.

  Age Three

  1643–1795

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  LOUIS XIV

  Paris at the end of Louis XIII’s reign (The Art Archive/Musée Carnavalet Paris/Dagli Orti)

  Click here to see a larger image.

  SEVEN

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  The Move to Versailles

  The civil wars started in Paris just as they did in London, over a little money.

  VOLTAIRE

  MAZARIN AND THE FRONDE

  On his accession, the four-year-old Louis went to live in the Louvre with his mother, Anne, and his younger brother Philippe, before moving into the Palais Royal. From the earliest days Louis loved playing there with soldiers, a silver set having been made for him specially by a goldsmith from Nancy. He even had his own miniature collection of gold cannon drawn by fleas. As he grew older he would march through the Palais Royal deafening bystanders with his drum, and later still take to target practice on sparrows in the gardens with a small arquebus.

  With Richelieu dead, Anne called on his far less austere, Italian-born secretary Jules Mazarin to be first minister. Rumours, unsubstantiated, held that he also became the Queen Mother’s lover. Aged forty, Cardinal Mazarin was a highly cultivated man (though, according to Voltaire, he never learned to pronounce French properly), a lover of opera and drama, and he seemed unassuming and always smiling, flexible where Richelieu had been ruthless. But he was to follow in much the same pattern; and it was ironic that the two senior churchmen should both be so unhesitant in resorting to the sword. Mazarin’s reputation for avarice made him few friends, while his lifestyle also rendered him heavy-handed with taxation. In 1648 the little-loved paulette tax, first levied by Sully, came up for renewal. The Paris Parlement protested vigorously.

  Acting against the advice of Mazarin, Anne ordered the arrest of three of the leading trouble-makers in Parlement. One was an elder called Pierre Broussel, who was immensely popular with Parisians. On learning of his arrest, Paris closed up shop and took to the streets. That night angry demonstrators forced Anne and Louis to take refuge in the Palais Royal, which was not nearly so formidable a bastion as the Louvre. The next morning some 1,200 barricades of chains, barrels and paving stones were thrown up across the capital. Mazarin prevailed upon Anne to give way, and Broussel was released. But the situation remained tense, with the Palais Royal highly vulnerable. On 13 September the royal family fled Paris for the Château de Rueil. It was an intolerable humiliation that must have made the most powerful impression on an impressionable young king. Meanwhile, his head swollen by his triumph at Rocroi, the Prince de Condé was making for Paris; and, in England, where Charles I was about to lose his head, a dangerous example in rebellion had been set.

  In the words of Voltaire: “The civil wars started in Paris just as they did in London, over a little money.” And what was beginning was indeed a civil war, the first since the early days of Henri of Navarre, and largely concentrated in and around Paris. The rebels now called themselves frondeurs—a fronde was a sling, which had been used to hurl pebbles through Mazarin’s windows—and the Fronde indeed came more to resemble ill-disciplined small boys with catapults. The first of the successive uprisings, lasting from 1648 until 1649, was known as the “Fronde de Parlement”; it contended for principles. The second, the “Fronde des Princes,” which lasted until 1653, was concerned chiefly with the rivalry of competing princes.

  The Peace of Westphalia in October 1648, although it left Spain still at war with France, brought an end to the Thirty Years War. At the end of that month Anne deemed it safe to return to Paris, to await the arrival of the twenty-seven-year-old hero, the “Grand Condé.” Now a duke six times over, Condé would surround Paris and cut off food supplies. But, with only 15,000 men, he realized (like Henri IV before him) that he was not strong enough to besiege the city. The Fronde won a first success with the capture of the Bastille, and once again the Queen Mother and the child King left Paris—this time for Saint-Germain-en-Laye, reduced to a state of penury by the exigencies of civil war. In March 1649, shocked by how matters had got out of hand in London with the execution of the King of England two months previously, the moderates of Parlement recoiled from further revolt and signed an agreement by which Parisians agreed to lay down their arms and give up the Bastille in return for an amnesty.

  It was only a truce. Now France’s other great—and ambitious—soldier entered the lists against the King. The Marshal Vicomte de Turenne, egged on by his mistress, a troublesome beauty called Geneviève de Longueville (once heard to admit, “I don’t enjoy innocent pleasures!”), into collusion with the Spaniards, marched in 1650 to within fifty kilometres of Paris. Meanwhile, Condé had shown himself to be so arrogant, to the point of endangering the monarchy, that Mazarin had had him arrested, together with two other princes. Condé snorted, “So this is what I get for my services!” Elements of a Feydeau farce now took over, with rival princes popping in and out of closets and switching loyalties with abandon.

  Paris was soon in a ferment again. In February 1651, Anne decided to leave Paris once more. But Louis’s laying out of his boots and travelling suit sparked off murmurs in the city. The mob burst through the gates of the Palais Royal, demanding to see the infant King. It was a potentially ugly and certainly humiliating situation. Anne, however, played a remarkably cool hand, telling Louis of what was afoot and instructing him to feign sleep. An emissary of the mob, who had insisted on an audience with the King, was taken into the royal bedchamber—where he was greatly discountenanced to find a sleeping child.

  Momentarily safe, Anne and the King remained precariously in Paris, more or less under house arrest at the Palais Royal by the frondeurs. Mazarin, however, decided it prudent to go into temporary exile near Cologne, having released Condé on the way. But he continued to direct Anne by letter from the Rhineland. Condé immediately joined the rebel forces in Paris and incited civil war throughout France. Skilfully Anne regained the loyalty of Turenne, the only general who could match Condé, and who—thoroughly disenchanted by Condé’s self-serving pretensions—changed sides to lead the royal forces to a series of victories in the provinces. Facing defeat there, Condé decided to stake all on one last throw: he would seize Paris. In the wings Mazarin played a waiting game, assured that the Grand Condé could always be relied upon to thwart his own stratagems.

  In September 1651, at thirteen, Louis came of age. He rode to Parle
ment, which was sitting at the Palais de Justice, and there declared in resolute tones, “Messieurs, I have come to my Parlement to tell you that, following the law of the land, I intend to take over the government myself; and I hope by the goodness of God that it will be with piety and justice.” Writing to Mazarin, a courtier praised the young King as having displayed “the bearing and intelligence of a man of twenty-five.” The following October Louis made his formal state entry into Paris, and appointed Anne as his chief counsellor. But he made it plain that henceforth he in person would rule France and exact loyalty. In August he suspended Parlement and transferred it to Pontoise, whence it might operate in greater tranquillity than within the turbulent capital. Only fourteen counsellors of the Conseil d’Etat obeyed him; given all the circumstances and dangers, it was a courageous act for a young boy. Louis was learning rapidly the art of governing.

  By this time, Paris had been reduced to a state of anarchy and misery—and hunger. Intermittently besieged by Condé and his squabbling fellow princes, cut off from outside supplies, starvation was constantly in attendance, with fears of a repetition of the horrors of 1590. The environs of the city were devastated by the warring factions. Murder, destruction of crops and pillage were the order of the day.

  Four troublesome and chaotic years had passed by, in which Anne and Louis had been forced to leave Paris four times. Mazarin came back from Germany at the head of a small army of 7,000 men, wearing green ribbons to distinguish them from the yellowy-grey of Condé’s men. Condé remained just outside Paris, in control but “his power diminishing day by day and his army growing ever weaker,” with his own arrogance undiminished and the war-weariness of the Parisian populace mounting. Unhelpful allies for him, too, were the hated Spanish troops who supported him—only recently bitter enemies whom the Parisians thought Henri IV had got rid of once and for all back in 1594. Heading the royal armies, the redoubtable Turenne now in June 1652, with 12,000 men to Condé’s 6,000, led the King (currently resident in Saint-Denis) and his court towards his own capital.

  On 4 July representatives of bourgeois and clergy gathered in the Hôtel de Ville to discuss the restoration of order. But their meeting ended in massacre, with at least a hundred killed and the building set on fire by Condé’s rag-tag supporters. The smoke could be seen all over Paris. His cause thoroughly discredited, Condé crept out of the city. A week later Louis re-entered it, taking up residence not in the vulnerable Palais Royal, but in the ancient and much more easily defended bastion of the Louvre. Parlement renounced its claims to have a voice in political and financial affairs; in return Louis undertook to ensure that office-holders would get paid off. The rebellious grandees were guaranteed pensions and lands—provided they never tried to force their way into the Conseil d’Etat.

  The Paris Fronde, both components of it, was finished (though it dragged on for another year in the provinces, and for several more in Normandy). Wisely, Louis promised a general amnesty; there was no unconditional surrender, and no savage reprisals. Condé was sentenced to death in absentia, but was pardoned in 1660; though, if ever a warlord deserved to lose his head or be locked up for ever in the Bastille, it was he—certainly this would have been his fate under earlier French monarchs. Later, back in favour, Condé was to win important battles against Louis’s foreign enemies. To nobody’s astonishment more than his own, in February 1653 Cardinal Mazarin was invited back, received by Louis “as a father and by the people as a master,” and entertained at what remained of the Hôtel de Ville “amid the acclamations of the citizens.” The appreciative Italian flung money to the populace, but was said to have commented on “the fickleness or rather the folly of the Parisians.”

  Thus ended the last great revolutionary struggle in France before 1789. All authority would now reside in Louis alone. Witnessing his triumphal entry into Paris in 1652, the diarist John Evelyn, over from Commonwealth England, remarked with a touch of envy, “The French are the only nation in Europe to idolize their sovereign.” Louis had won a notable victory, and would waste no time in capitalizing upon it. As Voltaire put it, the King “found himself absolute master of a kingdom still shaken from the blows it had received, every branch of administration in disorder, but full of resources.” The country at large had never been more impoverished. Fields were covered in weeds and brambles, livestock was slaughtered by marauding bands. There was nowhere enough to eat, and food had to be imported into the countryside from the royal granaries. Paris was a shambles, with murder and theft rampant. Yet the country, blessed as ever with Sully’s deux mamelles, its combination of benign climate and fertile land, managed to survive.

  Although on the first anniversary of July 1652 the now subservient Hôtel de Ville launched a grand festival celebrating the re-establishment of royal authority, henceforth Louis watched it like a hawk. In June 1654, he was belatedly crowned at Rheims. While out hunting in April 1655, he had word that Parlement was meeting without his knowledge. Galloping six kilometres, he entered the Palais de Justice in his riding boots to forbid the meeting to continue. Legend has it that, cracking his whip, he uttered the famous words “L’état, c’est moi.”

  For the ensuing twenty-five years, he would be assiduous in avoiding both Parlement and the Hôtel de Ville—which he would always regard as the contentious focus of the Paris Fronde.

  MARRIAGE AND INDEPENDENCE

  Four years later, in 1659, Louis signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, at last bringing to an end the wars with Spain, which had been France’s principal enemy ever since the days of François I and Charles V more than a century and a half before. He sealed it with marriage to his cousin, the Infanta Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain. In exchange for an extravagant dowry of half a million gold écus, his bride renounced her right to the Spanish throne. From now on, Spain was militarily out of the picture. At the same time, the menace of France’s other hereditary enemy, England, was nullified by domestic turmoil: Cromwell dead, the Commonwealth about to pack its bags, and Charles II—who had spent his mature life as a humble refugee enjoying the hospitality of France—about to be restored as monarch without real power and without animosity to France. Thus Paris could look forward to the best part of a century of stability and prosperity, almost unrivalled in her long history. There would be wars, but they would be far off, incapable of disturbing Parisian life. There was nonetheless plenty of excitement in store for the capital.

  The marriage of Louis and the Infanta was celebrated on the Franco-Spanish frontier at Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Louis then made his triumphal entry into Paris in August 1660. As pure spectacle Parisians had never seen anything quite like it. At the end of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, near where only a few years previously the Fronde had fought its last battle, a vast throne was set up on a site henceforth known as the Place du Trône. Here Louis received all the official bodies of Paris filing past in homage. Then an immense procession escorted the young couple through numerous triumphal arches to the Louvre, past the Hôtel de Ville of unhappy memory. Looking down on them from glittering balconies were the Queen Mother Anne, the ageing Mazarin, the victorious Marshal Turenne—and a Mme. Scarron, who, as Marquise de Maintenon, would eventually become Louis’s last wife.

  The cavalcade was accompanied by massed trumpet and drum fanfares, the trumpeters dressed in blue and silver, while twenty-four violins serenaded the King. Two young poets present that day—La Fontaine and Racine (aged only twenty-one)—wrote odes to commemorate the occasion. An estimated 100,000 Parisians saw their king that day; they would never be so close to him again, or indeed to any other French monarch.

  Two years later, to celebrate the birth of his firstborn, Louis would mount another great spectacle. This time, evoking the days of Henri II and Louis XIII in the Place Royale, it was a carrousel, a great equestrian show with sumptuously attired horsemen vying with each other in a cross between a medieval tournament and a ballet. To mount it, a large space was cleared in front of the Tuileries Palace (the site of the Arc du Ca
rrousel erected by Napoleon) and a vast amphitheatre built to house 15,000 spectators. Five teams of princes of the blood were fantastically dressed to represent Romans, Persians, Turks, Indians and Americans. The King himself took part, dressed as a Roman emperor (this was to become his favourite role) and wearing a sun on his shield with the inscription Ut vidi vici (“As I saw, I conquered”). The resplendent cavalcade traversed Paris twice, to the resounding acclaim of spectators on every rooftop. Here lay the beginnings of the myth of the Age of the Roi Soleil.

  In February 1661, there was a serious fire at the Louvre, and Mazarin moved from his apartments in that palace to Vincennes. There, playing with his warblers and his monkey, he died the following March, aged only fifty-nine but prematurely exhausted. A grief-stricken Louis burst into tears; “he loved me and I loved him,” he later said of this discreet and sagacious “stepfather”—an admission he would make of no one else. For two hours after learning of the death of his loyal friend and guide he shut himself up alone; then he called in his first council. It is possible that he was also relieved. As he wrote in his memoirs, “I felt my mind and courage soar … I felt quite another man. I discovered in myself qualities I had never suspected.” Later he was heard to remark, “La face du théâtre change”—or, as he put it to his entourage, “In future I shall be my own prime minister.” Louis was now alone, and the sole ruler of France. With a population of eighteen million in 1660, compared with England’s five million, Spain’s six, Austria’s six and Russia’s fourteen million, his was substantially the largest country in Europe. And Paris, the largest capital, now had been getting on for half a million inhabitants.