Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Darkness had descended on Versailles. After Marie-Adélaïde, there were no more balls or entertainments. Then, on 13 August 1715, the King felt a stabbing pain in his left leg; ten days later, despite prescriptions of massive doses of asses’ milk, it turned black. Gangrene had set in. Louis sent for his heir, his five-year-old great-grandson, yet another Louis, and told him, “Mignon, you are going to be a great king.” Then he passed him this lapidary last testament: “Try to remain at peace with your neighbours. I have loved war too much.” On 1 September the Roi Soleil was extinct, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday, and having occupied the throne for seventy-two years and a quarter. “His name cannot be uttered without respect, without linking it to an eternally memorable century,” wrote Voltaire in an excess of homage for so sceptical a critic. Yet later in his life Voltaire could remember seeing, as the great King was laid to rest, little tents set up along the road to Saint-Denis, along which the funeral cortège would pass, where “people were drinking, singing and laughing.” The old monarch had begun to seem immortal, doggedly ruling over a nation that had become increasingly weary with the burdens he had imposed on it. The grand siècle was well and truly over; the bills would shortly be presented for payment.

  ANOTHER REGENCY

  Discreetly, Mme. de Maintenon withdrew from Versailles, declaring that the King had died “like a hero and a saint.” She lived out the remaining four years of her life in seclusion at nearby Saint-Cyr. The act of dying, she declared on her deathbed, was “the least important event of my life.” At Versailles the atmosphere of gloom-bound piety she had done so much to create lingered on for a while, at least until the new child King, Louis XV, was old enough to take over. It was a melancholic place, haunted by phantoms and memories. On the accession of the Regent, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the court—and life itself—moved back to Paris, after an exile of thirty-three years. Once again, it became the true centre and soul of France, for the first time in almost a century.

  The Regent took up his official residence in Richelieu’s Palais Royal (where he had in fact been living for many a year), and with him came the seat of government. Philippe was aged forty-one at the time of his uncle’s death, but he looked older. Debauchery and too many drunken evenings had taken their toll. His left arm had been smashed by a cannonball in the wars, and his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he had to peer so closely at documents that his quill pen became entangled in his wig. He was less careful about his dress than he had once been, provoking Saint-Simon to quip that no one had less work to do than his Royal Highness’s master of the wardrobe, except his confessor. Yet he remained a man of great charm and wit. He was voraciously well read, in literature as in philosophy, and was gifted with a remarkable memory. He was more compassionate and tolerant than most of his contemporaries, yet his reputation down the ages was that of a debauchee, philanderer and rake; he was rumoured to have seduced his own daughter and even to have poisoned the Dauphin—and perhaps the King too. He spent as much time as he could in the Palais Royal, wenching and debauching. Even his pious best friend, Saint-Simon, so disapproved of the raffish hangers-on at the Palais Royal that when the Roi Soleil was alive he agreed to meet Philippe only at court in Versailles, never in Paris. Politically, his principal handicap was that the Roi Soleil had not allowed him to play any part in public life, with the result that he was totally lacking in the knowledge that experience brings.

  Yet the man with the daunting task of running the country in the wake of the Roi Soleil proved himself to be far more than just an ambitious, Rabelaisian profligate. He was as accomplished in the arts as he had been as a soldier in Louis XIV’s battles; he encouraged Watteau and the melancholy gaiety of the fête galante, and he saw the point of Voltaire. A skilled diplomatist, he helped bring to an end to Louis’s wars, which were ruining France; he opened the prisons of Paris and liberated the galley slaves—one of the most dreadful abuses of human rights left over from the Middle Ages, encouraged and even augmented by Louis. In his efforts to educate the silent and reserved child King, Louis XV, he did his best, employing a light touch and encouraging him with the words “But are you not the master? I am here only to explain, propose, receive your orders and execute them.” The French economy was in terrible shape, and Philippe could also claim advanced and—to say the least—venturesome ideas on how to put it right. But here he came unstuck, with disastrous consequences for Paris that were to bring the Revolution a notch or two closer.

  To the city he brought in John Law, an Edinburgh financier (and one of the few Anglo-Saxons to rate a major entry in Le Petit Larousse). Law introduced paper money, setting up in 1716 a “General Bank” to discount commercial paper, which, in 1718, became the Royal Bank with the state as its principal shareholder. This was followed by an adventurous scheme to settle the wastes of Louisiana (named after Louis XIV; New Orleans, it should be noted, was named after the Regent, Philippe). Paris was hit by a febrile wave of speculation and optimism. Tourists and provincials, bent on getting rich quickly, crowded into the city. All went reasonably well, until greed—or prescience—persuaded the Prince de Conti to arrive, on 2 March, with three covered wagons, demanding gold from the bank in exchange for fourteen million shares. The following day, another eminent aristocrat, the Duc de Condé-Bourbon, a prince of the blood no less, rolled up insisting that he sell a further twenty-five million shares. The Regent was appalled: “It appears, Monsieur, that you take pleasure in destroying in a moment that which we have had so much trouble in establishing … What are you each going to do with such a great amount of money?”

  Now, following after the grandees, nervous bourgeois speculators swamped the bank with their paper money, calling for gold and silver in payment. There was simply not enough to cover demand; the full vulnerability of “Law’s System” was exposed. The bubble burst, with terrible and far-reaching consequences. By May, an edict slashed the value of paper shares and notes by 50 per cent. The city was horror-struck. Commented Saint-Simon: “every rich man thought himself ruined without resource, and every poor man saw himself a beggar.” Paris seethed; social discontent multiplied, developing into civil disorder, with murders and robberies rampant In July, Law—recognized by the mob—narrowly escaped being lynched. On 9 December, excoriated by Parisians as “that miserable Englishman” (though he was of course a Scot), Law resigned, retiring to die quietly in Venice nine years later, himself totally impoverished—not a swindler, but an honest and misguided optimist.

  Typically, Paris seemed to shrug off the disaster with her habitual insouciance. Life returned to the gaiety expressed in the works of Watteau in his last years (he died in 1721), and then moved on to the frothy and equally unreal world of Fragonard. Nevertheless, Law and his “System” had caused the monarchy to totter. The bourgeoisie, created and enriched by the Roi Soleil, had been ruined; worse, they had become dangerously disillusioned with a regime that had proved itself to be so flawed. It would take almost a hundred years, plus the genius of a Bonaparte, before a new and trustworthy Banque de France could be established.

  Worn out by his debaucheries, and doubtless by the Law catastrophe, Philippe died in 1723—in the arms of a mistress. A grisly story circulated that, at his post-mortem, one of his Great Danes jumped up and ate his heart.

  LOUIS XV

  On the death of the Regent, Philippe d’Orléans, Louis XV was still an immature child of thirteen. Whereas his illustrious great-grandfather had been hardened by the Fronde, the young King was brought up to know only cringeing, flattery and licentiousness. Shortly after the Regent’s death, he came across as “a handsome young man, frail and gloomy, with the pretty face of a girl, unfeeling and cold.” He succeeded in being both timid and violent, an unfortunate combination—and secretive. Moving back to Versailles after the death of the Regent, he was to find himself more cut off from his people than any of his predecessors. He had no particular interest in literature or music or the arts—until Mme. de Pompadour came along.
At first, following Philippe, young Louis turned over the governance of France to Cardinal Fleury, described by one historian as “an agreeable nobody.” Certainly the Cardinal was neither a Sully nor a Colbert, and—in the opinion of Saint-Simon—had “not the slightest notion of anything when he took the helm.”

  When Fleury died, aged eighty-eight, in 1742, the King allowed himself—and France—to be ruled by his mistresses, first Mme. de Pompadour for two decades, then, after her demise, by the much hated vulgarian Mme. du Barry. He had begun by affronting Spain with his change of marital intent, marrying in 1725 the daughter of the Polish claimant, Maria Leszczynska. Seldom addressing a word to her, Louis gave her ten children in ten years (“Always going to bed, always being brought to bed,” sighed the unhappy Queen). Wearing no cosmetics, and supposedly spending her time embroidering altar cloths, she bored Louis, and then closed her bedroom door to him when he was only thirty. He had affairs with four (de Nesle) sisters in a row. When the last, the Duchesse de Châteauroux, died—poison was rumoured—Louis, out hunting, picked up a woman of modest bourgeois birth but of considerable character unpromisingly called Mlle. Poisson. Promoted to Marquise de Pompadour, she too appears to have been frigid, keeping a hold on the King by supplying him with quantities of young girls—including, allegedly, her own daughter. The Parc-aux-Cerfs at Versailles—visited nightly by Louis for assignations arranged by Pompadour—gained an infamous reputation.

  Here lies one twenty years a maid,

  Fifteen a whore, and seven a procuress

  was the epitaph the pamphleteers gave her when she died, aged forty-three and of natural causes, in 1764. Thanks to her interference in high policy, her extravagance and her wanton influence on the King, Pompadour died unmourned, despised by the court as a bourgeois but hated by the bourgeois of Paris as being in league with the tax collectors. Nevertheless, through her encouragement of the arts and architecture, France’s cultural heritage owes more to her than it likes to admit. At Versailles the Petit Trianon, and in Paris the Ecole Militaire and the Place de la Concorde, all owe something to Mlle. Poisson, as does Sèvres porcelain. Her place was taken by another of low birth, a pretty prostitute called Jeanne Bécu, later Comtesse du Barry. She was, so Louis confided to that great expert on the art of philandering, the Duc de Richelieu, “The only woman in France who can make me forget that I am in my sixties.”

  There was never to be a Mme. de Maintenon who could bring Louis XV in his maturer years to a sense of gravitas. Although, with the highly developed sexual urges of the Bourbon clan, his amorous exploits were no more excessive than those of Henri IV or Louis XIV, his ineffectiveness as a ruler ensured that they were considered scandalous even by the century of de Sade and Choderlos de Laclos. With tragedy, post-Racine, dying as an art, the essential frivolity of the life and times of Louis XV is reflected in the dramas of Marivaux, perhaps especially when compared with those of Molière; while such serious talents as Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and the encyclopédistes—illustrious as they were—hardly lent support to a threatened dynasty. Painted by Pompadour’s protégé Boucher (“His lovers are shepherds, but incapable of watching a flock,” complained the critics), life at Versailles grew ever more feckless, pointless and removed from the real world. Unfortunately, the court there was composed largely of absentee landlords seeking refuge from the mounting disfavour of their peasants, and allowing their estates to fall into rack and ruin. Unlike their English counterparts, they never travelled or made the “grand tour,” so their horizons became ever more narrow. More than a diversion, at Versailles sex became the principal occupation; it was acceptable, when princes of the blood like the Chartres dined out, for them to ask for the use of their hostess’s bed during the meal. In contrast to Empress Maria Theresa’s respected and austere court in Vienna, Louis’s earned its reputation as the most corrupt in Europe, Mme. du Barry symbolizing the completeness of its corruption.

  In Paris the tenor of life at court was mirrored and embodied in the person of the wicked but brave and brilliant Armand, Duc de Richelieu, Marshal of France and grand-nephew of the great Cardinal. Adept at climbing into and out of bedroom windows, he won fame by audaciously scaling the supposedly impregnable heights of Fort Saint-Philip at Mahon, on the isle of Minorca, thereby achieving the surrender of the British garrison. It was one of the few French successes in the Seven Years War (1756–63), and a victory famed both for the execution of the unfortunate British commander, Admiral Byng (“pour encourager les autres”) and for the invention, by Richelieu’s enterprising cook, of Mahonaise sauce. Described at the time as being “husband to all wives except his own,” Richelieu married three times under three reigns and sired a child (illegitimate) in his eighties. Strolling round the Place Royale, the Duc was given to reminiscing happily that he had slept with the lady of every single household. Through all his escapades, however, he was generally able to count on the support of the King, who described him as “an old family acquaintance; they found him once under my mother’s bed!” Aged ninety-two, still en pleine vigueur, he chose wisely to die one year before the Revolution.

  For France, victories on the battlefield exonerate scandals; but Louis XV was a loser. Paying little heed to the last words of his predecessor, he likewise impoverished the country by his wars (though he hated battles), wars even more foolish and unsuccessful than those of Louis XIV. At first, blundering far into the eastern marches of Europe, Louis supported that new upstart, Frederick II of Prussia, then turned against him. In the first war (of the Austrian Succession), the French army found itself having to fight a terrible mid-winter retreat from Prague; in the second, it was roundly defeated by an embattled Frederick at Rossbach. In both conflicts Prussia emerged with net gains, pointers to the crushing defeats that German arms would inflict on France in the next two centuries. Worse still, in the course of the bitter Seven Years War, which was almost a first world war, France lost her empire in Canada (though, at the time, Voltaire scathingly wrote off this vast domain as “quelques arpents de neige”—a few acres of snow), the Mississippi territory and India, while Britain gained hers. As French historians accept, the Peace of Paris signed in 1763 was one of the saddest in French history. About the only territorial acquisition of the reign was Corsica, where an important actor in the history of France was waiting to be born.

  From being “le bien-aimé” Louis progressively became France’s most unpopular monarch. By the 1750s he had been forced to construct a “Route de la Révolte” whereby he could travel from his Palais de Fontainebleau to Versailles without traversing turbulent Paris. In 1757, a half-mad servingman, Robert François Damiens, tried to assassinate him with a penknife. Only the King appeared to be astonished. “Why try to kill me?” he asked. “I have done no one any harm.” Few historians would agree. Damiens was put to death no less cruelly than Ravaillac, the successful assassin of the admirable Henri IV a century and a half previously. Tried by sixty judges and tortured judicially for several hours before his execution (despite the King’s request that he should not be harmed), Damiens—like Ravaillac—was pulled limb from limb by four horses; but first his flesh was torn open by giant, red-hot pincers and molten lead poured into the wounds.

  In May 1774, regretted by no one and horribly disfigured, Louis was carried off by smallpox. His burial was carried out in secrecy at Saint-Denis, for fear of the cortège being attacked by angry Parisians. With remarkable similarity to the end of Louis XIV, both the Dauphin and his wife had predeceased the King. So it was Louis’s grandson who inherited, as the twenty-year-old Louis XVI—as popular as his predecessor had been unpopular. At least superficially, once again the barometer looked set fair.

  NEW BOUNDARIES

  The Paris of Louis XV and XVI was still a noisy, smelly city, the largest in Europe, and with her narrow streets still medieval in plan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, habitually prejudiced towards the rustic, found it a city of “small, dirty and stinking streets, ugly black houses, an air of filth, poverty, begg
ars, carters, sewing women, women hawking tisanes and old hats.” The writer Restif de la Bretonne agreed, providing a glimpse of what Paris was like on a wet night: water gushing from the housetops in torrents, the Rue Montmartre a river of filth.

  Little or nothing was added to Parisian architecture during the Regency, or during the early years of Louis XV, when continuing wars left little to spend. The Palais Bourbon, however, was erected in 1722–8 for a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and Mme. de Montespan, and there was intense building activity during the years 1758–88. Ten thousand new houses were erected and a great deal of demolition carried out—as witness the superb records painted by Hubert Robert, the chronicler supreme of ruins. The old wooden houses encumbering bridges like the Pont Notre-Dame were pulled down. In 1786, a royal decree ordered that all the houses on the endangered Seine bridges should be removed— but the Revolution intervened before it could be complied with. A minimum width for new streets was fixed at 9.75 metres. A new wall, known as the “Farmers-General,” twenty-five kilometres in length, enlarged the boundaries of the city to coincide with today’s outer line of boulevards. It was completed just in time for the Revolution—for which its construction was in part responsible.

  During the first half of the century Parisian architects and interior decorators flirted with the light-hearted frivolity of Italian and German rococo, of which Fontaine’s and d’Ivry’s ornate north and eastern frontages of the Palais Royal, and the resplendently ornate Salon de la Princesse by Germain Boffrand in the Marais’s Hôtel de Soubise are superb examples. But on the whole Parisian architecture settled down into an elegant classicism, developed under Louis XIV and admired and copied throughout Europe. Behind this French classicism lay a body of architectural theory, fostered by the Académie Royale d’Architecture. Here Jacques-François Blondel (no relation, apparently, of his great namesake of Louis XIV’s time) produced his prolific drawings. These show the typical town house which was to become the prototype of chic, bourgeois Paris when the Regent brought life back to the city on the death of Louis XIV. Private houses, often already divided into apartments, would rise from five floors to six, seven or even nine by the time of the Revolution.