Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Up to almost the very last moment, even after the Allies had crossed the Rhine into France, Parisians continued to treat the war as a distant happening that could never immediately affect the capital. After all, Paris had not been entered by a foreign army since the unhappy days of Jeanne d’Arc in the fifteenth century; she had not been invested since Henri IV’s siege in 1590; she had not experienced any warfare since the final flutter of the Fronde in 1652. On 1 February 1814, in the last of its Pièces de circonstances, special heroic performances put on to celebrate contemporary events, the Théâtre National staged a patriotic show to evoke the fight of Charles Martell against the Saracens, and the “Siege of Calais”; it was followed two weeks later by Philippe Auguste à Bouvines, just as 170,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians were massing on the outskirts of Paris, and the city walls were about to fall. Then came brief moments of panic as reality set in. Out at the barrières there were screams of “The Cossacks are coming! Shut all the shops!” Trees in the Bois de Boulogne were hastily cut down (as they would be again in 1870) to provide barricades against the Allied armies. Hospitals suddenly became overcrowded as wounded from the front straggled in, often finding doors barred against them. Shops emptied as speculators became hoarders, while hungry soldiers begged for bread in the streets. Talleyrand, looking forward to the arrival of his new masters, the restored Bourbons, recorded “grande incertitude.”

  In the third week of March, Russian troops entered the east of Paris, on their third assault carrying the fortified redoubt which brave students of the Polytechnique had run up among the tombs of Père Lachaise, the new cemetery the Emperor had established only ten years previously. Abandoning Napoleon, Empress Marie Louise left for Blois, and then for Vienna. On 30 March Paris was subjected to cannonfire. Incredulous that things could come to this, the capital was not prepared for defence. As the Russians captured Montmartre, it was reported that the miller of the Moulin de la Galette had been shot, his body bound to one of the sails of the famous moulin. After he and Mortier had fought hard at Romainville, Marmont, Duc de Ragusa, finally deserted his master and signed an armistice at two o’clock on the morning of the 31st.

  The reaction of the Parisians on the street surprised observers, among them Napoleon’s architect Fontaine: “Who could have imagined that the actual event would resemble a festival that did not disturb public peace and order?” Cossacks clattered down the Champs-Elysées, and then encamped there. Their behaviour was far from immaculate—but, after what Moscow had suffered, it was surprising that it was not much worse.

  On 6 April Napoleon signed his abdication, and departed for Elba, an exile that would last for less than a year. On a beautiful spring day, 31 March, the victorious Allies had marched into Paris led by the Red Cossacks of the Imperial Guard. It was a picturesque affair, almost on a par with the other triumphant entrées made by the deposed Emperor: heading it was Tsar Alexander, followed by the King of Prussia and then Prince Schwarzenberg, representing the Emperor of Austria. Their respective armies followed, green leaves in their shakos. Military grandees, bearing the white cockades of the Bourbons on their hats, pranced down on horseback to meet them, while various royalist gentry (including a returning Chateaubriand) appeared from nowhere to circulate among the crowds. By now thoroughly disenchanted with Paris and its inhabitants, a censorious Stendhal recorded the “fickle delight” with which the Parisian crowd greeted its conquerors. The almost universal enthusiasm struck some as positively indecent. White handkerchiefs fluttered everywhere. “The blue and red were trampled underfoot and the most rabid were those who had been the most Bonapartist …” recorded Mme. Chateaubriand. “We women would cry ‘off with our heads!’ were we to hear our neighbours do so.”

  Then, on 4 May, came the restored Bourbon, Louis XVIII, returning to reclaim the nation lost by his decapitated brother and claiming that, “by the grace of God,” he had never ceased to be king. He entered Paris in an open carriage drawn by eight white horses; a Te Deum was sung at Notre-Dame; and the King was solemnly saluted by choirs, a concert and the release of a balloon decorated with white flags. At the other end of the Ile, the statue of the first Bourbon, Henri IV, destroyed in the Revolution, was hastily resurrected in plaster on the Pont Neuf. It was all “so like a party,” remarked Mme. de Coigny, “that it is a pity it is a conquest,” a sentiment that sums up the whole incongruous gala. Blücher lost a king’s ransom of 1.5 million francs in one evening gaming in the ever receptive Palais Royal, and it was said that the Allied troops were spending more on pleasure than the reparations France had to pay to their governments. During those May days, Josephine, the former Empress, went riding with the gallant Tsar, caught a cold which turned into pneumonia and died—“going,” in the elegant words of her son Eugène, “as gently and as sweetly to meet death as she had met life.”

  By the Treaty of 30 May 1814, the Allied armies left Paris. After over twenty years of war, peace now seemed restored. But it was dreadful old Fouché who saw the truth, predicting for 1815 that “Spring will bring Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets.”

  THE ROAD TO SAINT HELENA

  It proved to be a remarkably precise prophecy. All through the year that followed the withdrawal of the victorious Allies, Paris seethed with discontent. The streets swarmed with discharged and penniless veterans, while some 12,000 ex-officers on half-pay took to meeting in the cafés to lament “the good old days” of the Empire. One after the other promises made by the new regime were seen to be broken, while in his tiny kingdom of Elba Napoleon—his own pension unpaid—paced up and down in anger and vengeful frustration and bided his time. Suddenly, it came one day in March 1815 when the Governor, his captor, took leave to visit his mistress on the Italian mainland. Napoleon landed back in the South of France, marching towards Paris, collecting new armies as he went, in the miracle known as the Hundred Days.

  When he reached the capital, there took place yet another of those volte-face that occur through French history, which amazed even Napoleon himself. “They let me come back just as easily as they let the others go!” he exclaimed. Paris remained extraordinarily placid. About the worst upheaval took place in the Sorbonne, where no exams were set that winter and spring. At the Tuileries Palace, where seamstresses had been busy unpicking the Napoleonic bees from the carpets, replacing them reverently with hastily stuck-on fleurs-de-lys, the returned Chateaubriand gave the newly enthroned King a brave historian’s advice—to remain and await the arrival of the usurper. Louis was more realistic. “You would have me,” he said, “sit upon the curule chair [as the Roman senators did, awaiting the barbarians]. I don’t feel like it.” The portly old King then clambered heavily into his coach and sped off to Ghent.

  Paris, however, was not a cheerful place as Napoleon resumed control. Loud jubilation and songs from the immediate vicinity of the Tuileries contrasted sharply with the total darkness and silence prevailing in the outer districts. A new war threatened immediately as the Allies reassembled their forces. Spring never seemed to come, and it was an ominously grey and cold day as Napoleon reviewed his new armies on the Champ-de-Mars. It must have seemed, to Parisians, like a long hundred days as the Emperor set off with his reconstituted army to meet his fate at Waterloo.

  Just as the first tidings of battle reaching Wellington in Brussels were bad, so false rumours arriving in Paris resulted—briefly—in “extravagant rejoicing.” Government stocks rocketed, and “a brilliant society” displayed itself once again in the Tuileries Gardens. Abruptly, however, the mood changed as the truth became apparent in the form of the last of Napoleon’s great armies limping back to Paris, defeated. Instead of chic and busy shoppers, the Place Vendôme was filled with wounded men, groaning on straw at the foot of the soaring monument that depicted the zenith of all Bonaparte’s past victories. Abandoning his army a third and final time, Napoleon hastened back to Paris. There, on 21 June, he called for Marie Walewska and their son, Alexandre, to say his last farewell, before goi
ng off into definitive exile. “The mood was lugubrious,” recalled an aide. “It was raining, the Emperor was burning state papers, and I was packing his personal effects.” Young Alexandre (who would become a minister under his father’s nephew, Napoleon III) recorded that the Emperor took him in his arms, and “a tear ran down his face.” The next day, the third anniversary of the launching of the march on Moscow, Napoleon abdicated a second time.

  This year there was a sixteen-day siege as the Allies fought their way once more through the graves of Père Lachaise, as the Prussians stormed Issy, and as the National Guard put up a spirited resistance at the Barrière de Clichy in the north of the city. But as they reoccupied Paris, the Allies—after suffering further casualties—were in a far more sombre and less forgiving mood. Blücher’s Prussians left a path of desolation on their route from Waterloo to Paris, a foretaste of what lay ahead in three subsequent German invasions; in Paris only Wellington’s forceful personal intervention prevented Blücher from blowing up the Pont d’Iéna by way of erasing a permanent slight on Prussian arms. This time it was the turn of the triumphant British troops to bivouac in the Place de la Concorde. In the Bois they noted with disgust the wanton damage effected by Prussians in neighbouring encampments. “Our camp was not remarkable for its courtesy towards them,” recorded Captain Gronow of the Grenadiers, with the best insular disdain. On the other hand, Parisiennes expressed shock on discovering that the Highlanders wore no culottes under their kilts.

  The Allied sovereigns held swaggering parades on the Champ-de-Mars. French pride was shattered. Over the rest of the country a Royalist “White Terror,” comparable to the épuration which was to follow the Liberation of 1944, held sway. One Parisian eyewitness, Dr. de la Sibouti, recalled that “the Bois de Boulogne was laid bare, the statues of Luxembourg mutilated with sabre cuts; our hearths and homes were overrun by soldiers who spoke to us as masters. Such are the rites of war.” But, with generous objectivity, he went on to admit, “Our own soldiers have probably abused them on more than one occasion.”

  Nevertheless, for all the bitterness in the air, once again in her turbulent history Paris displayed her remarkable capacity to recover and live again as if little had happened. Captain Mercer of the Royal Horse Guards thought “how strange it was that the French were so happy in their defeat … !” The wounded were cleared out of the Place Vendôme, which soon filled with beautiful women showing off their finest silks. On 8 July, the King returned; Chateaubriand witnessed those adept time-servers, Talleyrand and Fouché, welcoming him at Saint-Denis, while Wellington—amazed by the wild cheering—wondered whether it could possibly be the same Parisians cheering each time. In the Tuileries Palace, work at once recommenced on replacing the bees with fleurs-de-lys. At the Comédie Française, life began again as Mlle. Mars (who had begun her career under the Revolution and would continue until 1841, after the last King had once more disappeared) resumed its traditions. In the Luxembourg Gardens the first bicycles (invented by a German) took part in a race; and there was a first session of the new Chamber of Deputies, imposed on the King by the Allied peace terms. The fearless Marshal Ney was shot, pour décourager les autres, it might have been said. But the French army, for all he had inflicted upon it, and no matter how often he had betrayed it, would never cease to revere the small man in the grey frock coat.

  REPARATIONS AND RESTORATION

  Considerably harsher than the terms offered by the Allies in 1814, the Treaty signed in November 1815 demanded 700 million francs in gold, eventually whittled down to 265 million. Compared with the fierce reparations that would be exacted on the defeated by the victors after the succeeding wars of 1870 and 1914–18, Paris escaped lightly. With a sense of honour which did England lasting credit, as well as setting the tone, the Duke of Wellington insisted on paying the market price for Pauline Borghese’s sumptuous house on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, for the site of the new British Embassy. His defeated foe would hardly have done the same in any of the conquered capitals he had occupied. What caused the most distress in Paris, and was regarded (quite unfairly) as excessive vengefulness on the part of the occupiers, however, was the repatriation of the looted works of art in the Louvre, agreed as part of the terms of the peace settlement.

  To undo the assiduity of Vivant Denon and gather up the masterpieces removed from Italy, from Rome Pope Pius VII sent Canova, the greatest sculptor of his day. It was a daunting, and in no way felicitous, commission. Andrew Robertson, the Scottish miniaturist whose visit to Paris coincided with Canova’s, at first sight was agreeably “surprised by the vivacity of Parisian night life, the cafés, the music, the dancing and the well-dressed people.” Rushing to the gallery of the Louvre after Waterloo, he saw “the first and greatest productions of human genius,” but was then shocked by “the bare walls and frames where a number of the pictures had been taken away by the Allies and the original proprietors.” Blücher had been there before him. Sir Walter Scott, writing to his sister from Paris that autumn, was describing the Louvre as “truly doleful to look at now, all the best statues are gone, and half the rest, the place full of dust, ropes, triangles, and pulleys, with boards, rollers etc.”

  Faced with the dismantling of all he had achieved in the name of Napoleon, his life’s work, Vivant Denon resigned, to die heartbroken in 1825, four years after his master, gazing out from his Left Bank house on the Quai Voltaire at his precious, ransacked Louvre across the Seine. Meanwhile Canova found himself virtually ostracized by the Paris art world as fellow artists such as Gros and Houdon cut him dead. But, worse than that, he found himself living in sheer timore, “often afraid to go to his lodging there for fear of being murdered.” The job completed, he was delighted to leave occupied Paris for friendly London, which, following Waterloo, had taken over from Paris as the leading world capital of power and patronage. Even so, despite all the “enforced redistributions” of 1815, the Louvre never lost its status as the world’s greatest museum of art. As Denon predicted in a letter to Talleyrand of September 1815, “We have already had some big losses, Monseigneur, but, with time, one could hope to recoup them. The gaps that exist will be filled in the long term.”

  So, with the Congress of Vienna engineered by those astute statesmen Metternich and Talleyrand, after twenty years of war peace came finally to Europe. England withdrew to her island and her empire to prosper during a hundred years of Pax Britannica. Bonaparte, the disturber of Europe’s equilibrium, was penned in at dank, wind-blown and termite-ridden Longwood on Saint Helena, where he would die—possibly of arsenic poisoning, some continue to think—in 1821. Not till December 1840, on the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz, would his remains be brought back for interment under the great dome of the Invalides, which Louis XIV had bequeathed to Paris. But for France, and Paris in particular, there would be little real tranquillity over the ensuing years. The country was financially, morally and physically in ruins. Estimates of her military dead alone range from 430,000 to 2,600,000. More insidiously still, the issues of the Great Revolution had never been properly resolved.

  Age Five

  1815–1871

  * * *

  THE COMMUNE

  Paris in 1851 at the accession of Napoleon III

  Click here to see a larger image.

  THIRTEEN

  * * *

  Constitutional Monarchy and Revolt

  Parisians are like children; one constantly has to fill their imagination, and if one cannot give them a victory in battle every month, or a new constitution every year, then one has to offer them daily some new building sites to visit, projects that serve to beautify the city.

  COMTE DE RAMBUTEAU, MEÈMOIRES, P. 269

  THE LAST BOURBONS

  After the fervour and violent upheavals of the Napoleonic era, the years 1815 to 1870 offered a period of rest, readjustment and retrenchment under the leadership successively of Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis-Philippe and Louis Napoleon. Or so it was on the surface, but underneath there were de
ep currents of discontent and disunity, waiting to shake France and destroy more of Paris than either 1789 or any foreign enemy had done. Returning to Paris during the Restoration, Stendhal found a society “profoundly ill at ease with itself.” Typical of the confusion of legitimacy and loyalties inherited by the new regime was the varied fortune of the figure atop the mighty Vendôme Column. First, in 1818, the statue of Napoleon was removed, melted down and replaced by a giant fleur-de-lys. Then, in 1833, Louis-Philippe—always keen to oblige the prevailing mood—had the Emperor restored complete with bicorne hat; but the statue displeased his nephew, Napoleon III, who removed it to Les Invalides and replaced it with a copy of the original figure. In 1871, the Commune revolutionaries—under the guidance of the painter Gustave Courbet—brought the whole column tumbling down. Finally, in 1875, Republican President McMahon had it restored with the present-day figure crowned in Caesarean laurels.

  To have presided over, and healed, all the disarray left behind in 1815 France would have required an Henri IV. But Louis XVIII was certainly no Henri of Navarre; he was, so the people said, “partly an old woman, partly a capon, partly a son of France, and partly a peasant.” He was homosexual, without a son, so obese and dropsy-ridden that eventually he had to be lifted in and out of his carriage. Aged beyond his sixty years, he would die after only nine years on the throne. But his instincts were not all bad. The politician-historian Guizot saw him as “a moderate of the Old Regime and an eighteenth-century freethinker.”

  Unfortunately, in his baggage train Louis brought with him a coterie of reactionary émigrés thirsting for vengeance after twenty-five years of exile and hardship, determined to put the clock back to the ancien régime, to Louis XIV if possible, and who gave rise to the famous epithet about the Bourbons having “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Louis wanted to abide by the liberal “Charter” modelled on English constitutional practice, which he had admired during his exile and been forced to accept on his return. But the émigré extremists, the “Ultras,” trampled it under foot, launching in the provinces a White Terror of threat and murder, with Royalist bands plundering, looting and settling old private scores. It was well said at the time, “If you have not lived through 1815, you do not know what hatred is.”