Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  DEPARTURE FOR VERSAILLES

  On 6 May 1682, Louis XIV abandoned Paris for Versailles. It was slightly less than a century after his grandfather had fought so hard to gain mastery of his capital. That was the day Louis made the official announcement that, henceforth, the seat of the French government would be out at his former hunting-lodge, Versailles, twenty kilometres removed from the Louvre. In Nancy Mitford’s words:

  [Louis] arrived there with some pomp, accompanied by his family, his ministers and the whole Court. The Court of France for ever in the country! The fashionable world was filled with dismay now that the long-expected blow had fallen. Not all the criticism was frivolous, however. For years Colbert had begged his master to abandon the project, for the obvious administrative reasons …

  The house was still far from ready, but the King—like any sensible house-owner—thought he would never get the workmen out unless he moved in himself. Jules Hardouin-Mansart was still at work finishing the Galerie des Glaces.

  The rest of the accommodation, to provide lodgings for between 2,000 and 5,000 people, was austere to say the least. In many cases rooms had been chopped up into tiny units with no regard for the imposing façade, giving on to dismal little interior wells. But at least the King himself and his descendants could feel safe there. Although they were virtually unguarded, over the coming century there would be only one half-hearted attempt at assassination.

  Aged forty-four in 1682, Louis was at the peak of his powers. In 1661 his queen, Maria Theresa, had presented him with a son and heir, the Grand Dauphin, who showed promise of becoming a sound ruler and who in turn, later in that year of the move to Versailles, produced an heir, the Duc de Bourgogne. As we have seen, the King’s mistresses, the Duchesse de La Vallière and the Marquise de Montespan, had provided a clutch of further children, several of whom had been legitimized. Thus the succession to the throne of France, only recently so shaky, now seemed assured. The King’s own health was excellent; the territory of France seemed at last secure from external foes; and the nation seemed, rarely and miraculously, at peace with herself. Much of the work of Henri IV appeared to have reached fruition. His grandson could now, with some justification, call himself Louis le Grand (the title which the municipality of Paris had unctuously bestowed on him in 1678) and the Roi Soleil. He could afford a little personal extravagance in building a new country seat, but what had decided him to pull out of the capital for which Henri of Navarre had fought so ardently?

  Like many of his Valois forebears, including François I, Louis preferred country to town. Already by 1665 he had taken to spending one day a week out at his father’s modest hunting-lodge in the woodlands of Versailles. Yet it was not so much la chasse that drew him as peace and tranquillity; he needed space. And this was something rooted in the experiences of his early years, in his love of order in all things, as well as in the nature of Paris. Frankly, he disliked Paris; from 1670 until the end of his reign, he would grace the city with his presence only twenty-five times. But his hostility, and his move to Versailles, did Paris only limited harm. In the course of his long reign, the capital still managed to flourish.

  EIGHT

  * * *

  A Building Boom

  Let no one speak to me of anything small!

  BERNINI TO LOUIS XIV, 1665

  COLBERT

  The Fronde, the trial of Fouquet and the various “Affaires des Poisons” had all been significant milestones on Louis XIV’s road to Versailles, as he made his escape from his reasoned fear of plots against his person, as well as from the gossip that seethed in his turbulent capital. But what of his very considerable accomplishments in the city he was about to abandon? What was built, what was changed and what was destroyed during the first half of Louis’s reign, which ended with his decampment for Versailles in 1682?

  By the end of his first ten years of personal rule, Louis XIV had launched what had been a virtually bankrupt country on a course of remarkable prosperity. Both in Paris and at Versailles his ambitious building programme from the 1660s onwards was predicated on three factors: the continuation of peace (or, at least, involvement in wars for the pursuit of la Gloire that could be won with little effort or expense); the brilliant policies of the man who succeeded the disgraced Fouquet, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; and the extraordinary inherited and inherent wealth of the country at large. Colbert was already forty-one when appointed assistant to Fouquet in 1661. His capacity for ruthlessness was displayed in the destruction of his boss; he was a teetotaller, icily cold and humourless, earning the nickname of the “Man of Marble” or “le Nord” (Mme. de Sévigné’s sobriquet). Of him the venerable Mazarin, in whose employ Colbert’s career had started, was alleged to have said to the King shortly before his death, “Sire, I owe you everything, but I believe I can repay some of my debt by giving you Colbert.” In fact it was a debt that he thereby discharged fully, and with interest.

  A worthy successor to Sully, and in contrast to Fouquet, Colbert was immaculately honest. Into the administration of French finances he introduced a new precision and order, and was almost unique among Louis’s sycophantic entourage in being able to confront the King over his extravagances and the use, or abuse, of royal power. After Mazarin and Fouquet, Louis would permit no one near him with the power of a prime minister; yet Colbert’s influence over his two decades in office came to reach areas far beyond that of a superintendent of finance, not least in the centralization of the nation, France, upon the capital, Paris. Thanks to his early financial reforms, he rapidly achieved a surplus of receipts over expenditure. Nevertheless, and until the mid–eighteenth century, a large share of state revenue still came via such archaic practices, widely open to graft and sleaze, as the sale of offices and allowing “tax farmers” to take their substantial cut of the revenue gleaned.

  Under Colbert’s regime, a kind of industrial revolution swept the country. Shipbuilding developed; the army was modernized and expanded; mines, foundries, mills and refineries thrived, as did the wool trade on the back of such prestige industries as Savonnerie carpets and France’s superlative Gobelin tapestries. France, emulating the serious side of her pleasure-loving king, went earnestly to work; as Louis advised the heir who was never to succeed, “Never forget that it is by work that a king rules.” The building boom in Paris was but one aspect of Colbert’s far-reaching influence. When his restraining hand was removed from the treasury by death in 1683, it reinforced the impact on Paris of Louis’s departure for Versailles.

  While Paris expanded dramatically, becoming a city of 400,000, the rural population if anything declined. The seventeenth century was mostly a time of hardship and recession for the French peasantry; the weather was capricious, producing frequent years of terrible harvests, and agriculture had not matched the advances being achieved in England. In a bad year a village could easily lose between 10 and 20 per cent of its population. The price of land was such that the purchase of a holding large enough to support one family might cost a labourer the equivalent of a century’s wages. Moreover, the peasantry found itself exploited, parasitically, by the state, the Church, landlords and bureaucrats alike. There were occasional popular revolts against taxation, and regular bread riots in provincial towns, yet because of the centralized power of Paris under the absolute monarchy they were never permitted to amount to anything—at least not for another hundred years. Paris and the provinces would continue to look at each other with mutual dislike, disdain and distrust.

  One of the first projects in Paris to receive the attention of Colbert (in 1664 he had also become superintendent of buildings) was the construction of the Collège des Quatre Nations. For this purpose Mazarin had left in his will two million livres, earmarked to provide a Parisian education for sixty boys from the provinces. To find room for the Collège, the old Tour de Nesle from the time of Philippe le Bel, dominating as it did the Left Bank of the Seine, was demolished in 1663. In its place rose a superb piece of baroque designed by Le Vau, with the most magni
ficent library in Paris—later to become the home of the Académie Française (see this page). Appropriate to the origins of its benefactor, its curved façade—embracing an elliptical church within—was surmounted by a typically Italianate dome, which made it something rare in a city of square squares.

  A far more daunting project, however, was the completion of the Louvre—that hardy perennial which claimed the resources of many rulers both before and after Louis. In 1661 fire had ravaged part of it, and Le Vau had been brought in to undertake restoration, with Le Brun painting his extravagant frescoes depicting the triumph of the chariot of Apollo, in a pointed and grandiose compliment to the Roi Soleil. The main priority was the construction of a grand façade to crown the courtyard to the east, the Cour Carrée of François I, more or less completed by 1659. Louis had his own very clear ideas on architecture, and placed a strong emphasis on the classical. So he invited from Rome Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, whose Piazza of Saint Peter’s had established him as the most famous architect of his day.

  Aged sixty-six, Bernini brought with him all the arrogance of an Italian of the High Renaissance. Employing what was his idea of flattery, he told the most powerful king in Europe, “inasmuch as you have not seen the buildings of Italy you have remarkably good taste.” At their first meeting in Saint-Germain, he said to Louis, “I have seen, Sire, palaces of emperors and popes … from Rome to Paris. But for a king of France … we must construct something more magnificent … Let no one speak to me of anything small!” This last was the kind of talk that appealed to Louis, and initially Bernini got on surprisingly well with him. Louis sat for him no fewer than thirteen times to produce the outstanding bust, probably the best likeness of the Roi Soleil ever achieved, which now graces Versailles.

  But Bernini the architect was a different story. He contemptuously swept aside the sketches of his leading French contemporaries, terminating any argument by repeatedly quoting Michelangelo as the ultimate arbiter of good taste. His initial plans had to be modified, because the terraces and meridional flat roofs would not withstand the rain and snow of a Paris winter; the high pitches of the roofing genius François Mansart (great-uncle of the Louvre architect Hardouin-Mansart) were more suitable. Already, under construction just across the river, there was an example of glorious baroque in the shape of Le Vau’s Collège des Quatre Nations. Not all the Paris establishment was enamoured of it, but Bernini was encouraged. For the Louvre he came up with an even grander baroque façade of imposing convex arcs. But it involved demolishing houses to the east, and crowding in upon the antique Church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, much beloved by Parisians. And the ever practical Colbert wondered where the servants would sleep, and how food was to be brought from the kitchens.

  After a six-month sojourn, during which he modified his “projects” for the Louvre several times and managed to offend almost everybody, Bernini was sent home laden with money, and his plans were discreetly dropped. Louis thought them just too florid for France’s sober northern clime. In any case, his brief attention span was already beginning to switch to schemes for Versailles. Instead of the Italian, Claude Perrault was brought in to design a classical storeyed building with the façade of a great Roman temple imposed on it. Perrault, brother of the artist Charles, was by profession a doctor (described as spending his spare time in the dissection of camels), an amateur rather than a professional architect who had never designed a building in his life before. Nevertheless, his plans were at least as ambitious as Bernini’s had been. For the façade’s massive central pediment, topping a majestic colonnade of fifty-two tall Corinthian pillars, Perrault selected two immense monolithic blocks from the quarries in nearby Meudon. Each of these, around twenty metres long and nearly three metres in height, weighed so much that to hoist them into position a special machine on rollers had to be constructed—not unlike the methods used by the ancient Eygptians to build the pyramids.

  Begun in 1667 and completed three years later, the massive façade introduced on to the Paris landscape the “colossal” style of classical purism which was to be emulated by Napoleon with his construction of the Madeleine and its counterpart, the Chamber of Deputies, one and a half centuries later. It represented a complete break with the traditions of French architecture since Henri IV. But, as Louis’s interest shifted, so the interior of the Louvre remained unfinished, embraced by scaffolding until 1755—just in time for the Revolution. By then Perrault’s grand façade had lost its point, as the whole centre of gravity of the city had moved westwards, to the Tuileries Palace and, beyond, to what was to become the Concorde. The edifice which had been so grandly conceived as an imposing front was to be left high and dry as little more than a glorified tradesmen’s entrance, huddled about by insignificant houses. Between 1667 and 1680 Perrault went on to work at the long southern façade of the Louvre that bordered the Seine.

  With Louis’s departure for Versailles and his accompanying switch of interests, the Louvre fell on hard times. Between 1670 and 1672 the sum earmarked for expenditure on the palace fell by 80 per cent. The great building came to house a miscellany of temporary occupants. First there were artists setting up their studios in the deserted galleries, together with their hangers-on. Then came a diversity of dealers, prostitutes included, building shacks within the precincts, and stabling their horses in the Cour Carrée. Some of the squatters made off with panelling and pictures, and progressively the palace was allowed to fall into disrepair. Over the years of neglect the Louvre was also used as a granary and a printing works. By 1750, its state had become so bad that demolition was considered; there were suggestions of installing an opera or a royal library there, but all such projects ran aground on the rocks of finance. It was a sorry plight for so historic a building, on which such grandiose efforts had been lavished over the ages; and the Roi Soleil has much to answer for here. Finally the Convention, in 1793, with one of its few sensible decrees, saved the Louvre by opening the Grande Galerie to exhibit choice artefacts from the royal collections of the fallen monarch—including the Mona Lisa. But the Louvre had to wait for Napoleon before its salvation was assured.

  THE BOULEVARDS AND THE DEVELOPING ARCHITECTURE

  With the defeat of the Fronde, continuing peace and security at large had seemed to remove all direct military threat to Paris, and this now led Louis to undertake a still more sweeping alteration to the face of the city. With its population now bursting out of the confines of the old crumbling walls of Philippe Auguste and Charles V (which had become the dumping ground for all sorts of city rubbish and ordure), Louis decreed the levelling of the existing ramparts. In their place, he laid out long and straight promenades which came to be known as “boulevards”—a corruption of the German word Bollwerk, meaning a bulwark or rampart. Agreeably lined with shady trees, the grands boulevards from their earliest days became favourite places of promenade, while wealthy Parisians built stately houses looking out on to them. The greatest of all the boulevards, of course, was the new Champs-Elysées, laid out by Le Nôtre—who had been “liberated” from Vaux-de-Vicomte following the demise of Fouquet—from 1667 onwards. While it presented a magnificent vista leading to the Tuileries Palace, Le Nôtre’s inspired work further shifted the centre of gravity of the Louvre westwards, and away from Perrault’s grand façade.

  Next, begun in 1671 (though not completed till the last years of Louis’s reign, when military triumphs were wearing a bit thin), came the monumental edifice of the Hôtel des Invalides on the Left Bank, eventually topped by Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s great dome.* At more than 100 metres high, it dwarfed Le Vau’s dome for Mazarin’s Collège upstream, and was the very apotheosis of baroque in Paris. Designed, generously, to house the old soldiers who would survive the wars that Louis was planning, construction of the Invalides was, uniquely, funded out of the army budget (indicating how much Louis was prepared to make available for military ventures). With its long avenues radiating out in all directions, which would find echoes in Versailles, the Invalides prese
nted Parisians with the most exciting perspective yet seen in the city. Decorated only with helmets, prancing horses and other military paraphernalia, its rather austere frontage, 210 metres long, was a masterpiece of classical grandeur. The complex centres on Mansart’s magnificent church, which in 1840 became the final resting place of France’s greatest soldier, Napoleon.

  Louis’s anciens combattants were not entirely happy with the Invalides; they chafed at the harsh military discipline maintained there—not least the regulation that, if caught in flagrante with a woman of the town, the veteran and his lover were to be exposed together, much to the delight of the Parisians. When complaints about the soup escalated into a full-scale riot, Colbert’s brutal successor, the Marquis de Louvois, did not hesitate to call in a firing squad.

  Though the Invalides was built to house up to 7,000 pensioners, the last was admitted before the First World War, and since then it has housed various army offices and museums. In the aftermath of the First World War, captured Krupp cannon stood proudly in front of the façade; after the Second World War, these were replaced by two German Panzer tanks—until the new entente cordiale with the eastern neighbour prescribed their discreet withdrawal into the appropriate museum.

  Among the other grand churches worked on in Louis’s first flurry of construction in Paris was the displeasingly hideous Saint-Sulpice (just north of the Luxembourg Palace), with its seemingly incomplete and asymmetrical eggcup towers (for Victor Hugo, they evoked two enormous clarinets). As with other major churches, including Saint-Roch (a little north of the Louvre), work was suspended after the move to Versailles and not recommenced until the next century.