Metro Stop Paris

by Gregor Dallas

  * Is it Lili, Lily or Lilly? The sources, including Debussy's own correspondence, are inconsistent. Most of the time Debussy refers to his wife as "Lilly," and so we shall call her. She was baptized "Rosalie."

  10

  PALAIS-ROYAL

  FROM THE OPÉRA you can take Line No. 7 down to the Palais-Royal, which arrives in the heart of the most frequently visited part of Paris. From the west exit the Avenue de l'Opéra runs straight up to Garnier's monument; to the left is the Palais du Louvre; the Rue de Rivoli stretches in a straight line up to the Place de la Concorde. In the opposite direction lies the Arcades du Louvre, with paintings, ancient manuscripts and precious art objects for sale for those who can afford them; further down the Rue de Rivoli lies the Hôtel de Ville and, to its south, the Îie de la Cité and Notre Dame Cathedral. In this small area there is practically every picture postcard scene of what the world imagines Paris to be like, with the exception of the Eiffel Tower. This is the centre of Paris's tourist trade.

  But what of historical Paris? It would be difficult to imagine a more important event in the history of Paris than the French Révolution : it started right here, at the Palais-Royal.

  There is not much left of revolutionary Paris. When Jules Michelet set out to write his great history of the Révolution in 1847 he walked down to the Champ de Mars for a little inspiration. The Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower now stands, had been the location of the Fête de la Fédération, a tremendous show of national unity, on 14 July 1790. "The Champs de Mars!" exclaimed Michelet. "This is the only monument that the Révolution has left. The Empire has its Column . . . Royalty has its Louvre . . . And the Révolution has for her monument—empty space." It is true that Napoleon wiped out as many traces of the Révolution as he could. But there is not much of the Empire left either; when Michelet refers to the column in the Place Vendôme, he could have added that that was about all that remained of Napoleon's regime, apart from the market of Saint-Germain and a fantastic neo-Egyptian structure which serves as a market by the Place du Caire in the Deuxième. As for royalty and its Louvre, no king nor emperor in France would recognize the Louvre as it stands today The Tuileries palace, where these sovereigns lived, was destroyed during the last days of the Commune in May 1871. On the site where the glass Pyramid now stands was a mass of hovels and stinking alleys which blocked Louis XVI's view of the Louvre. There was no Rue de Rivoli. There was no Avenue de l'Opera. There was no thrust westward. In place of the great avenues was a maze of crooked streets, passages and urban pathways that delighted Balzac in his wanderings about town in the 1830s: "through these alleys circulate bizarre beings who belong to no world, semi-naked forms, animated shadows." Thomas Carlyle's History of the French Révolution, published in 1837, also took a certain pleasure in painting their obscurity: "Down in those dark dens, in those dark heads and hungry hearts, who knows in what strange figure the new Political Evangel may have shaped itself."

  But out of those medieval warrens there arose, in the years that immediately preceded the Révolution, a huge complex that shone at night like a single great lantern, the new Palais-Royal, that building on your right. This is the monument of the French Révolution, the monument Michelet forgot.

  Its most ancient wing had been a gift from Louis XIII to Cardinal Richelieu; the cardinal's inheritors had returned it to the King, Louis XIV, who then passed it on to the younger branch of the Bourbon family, the Dues d' Orléans —the crucial act because there was always contention between the royal cousins. It was Louis Philippe Joseph, Due d' Orléans, at the outbreak of the Révolution, who had decided in the early 1780s to turn his palace and its gardens into a pleasure park. He employed the architect, Victor Louis, to create the large neoclassical quadrilateral that one finds today; by 1785, when Louis Philippe Joseph's father died, the Palais-Royal had become the veritable core of Paris, or as Louis Sebastien Mercier described it at the time, "a small city of luxury enclosed in a large one."

  Play and corruption were organized vertically in the Palais-Royal; the higher you ascended, the more grotesque the vice. On the ground floor, through the arcades, were the shops, which were more expensive than anywhere else in town but so colourful and bright that they "sucked dry the other quartiers of town, which began to take on the look of sad and uninhabited provinces." There were also the cafés, the most famous being the café de Foy in the Galerie Montpensier. Sieur Dubuisson kept its biggest rival, the café du Caveau, in an elegant underground gallery where some of Paris's most famous men of letters, and agitators, used to gather. On the first floors there were huge gambling houses; throughout the Révolution betting—on heads and high political stakes—was a favourite pastime. Still higher up were the nests of the debauched, male and female, of every description. No class, no rank was recognized in the Palais-Royal; courtesans looked like countesses, while countesses passed as commoners. The Palais-Royal was open to everyone—which is why the Révolution started here.

  So many of the most radical debating societies met beneath its arcades. The Club des Enragés held session in the Restaurant Masse; the Abbé Sieyès's Club de 1789 was founded here in 1790 attended by the flower of the French revolutionary aristocracy—La Fayette, Talleyrand, the brothers Lameth, de Broglie, Clermont-Tonnerre. Marat used to scribble away in the cafés; Camille Desmoulins screamed out to the mob standing on one of the terrace tables.

  Who was this royal duke, whose renovated palace provided the springboard for the French Révolution ? Historians today have a tendency to view the Révolution as something inexorable—like Tolstoy's great locomotive of history—driving itself onwards to ever more violent, destructive phases. But that was certainly not the view at the time. Louis Philippe Joseph, the Due d' Orléans, was the man who provided the alternative route, the hope for people at the time who sought a nonviolent solution to the political crisis, the proof for people who look back on the events that something else could have happened. The Duke could have become King, replacing his more absolutist cousin, Louis XVI, with a constitutional monarchy that would have led the movement of 1789 not towards the Terror of the Year II but to England's Glorious Révolution of 1688. It is conceivable. It was what many in the early 1790s intended. But it did not happen.

  From the very outset a little grain of folly had inserted itself in the story. Perhaps it was his personality. In his youth the Due d' Orléans assumed the figure of a light-hearted Valmont, the perverse rake of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). He was stupendously rich—by the 1780s his properties covered one twentieth of France from which he culled an annual rent of over seven million livres—and he was perpetually in debt, which explained the presence of the popular new bazaars in the Palais-Royal. "To what can I aspire?" he wrote to his dear old father-in-law, the Due de Penthievre, in 1774 during a moment of eighteenth-century spleen. "I am twenty-seven years old and I still haven't done anything." Like Valmont, the Duke had until then devoted most of his energies to the fine strategy of seducing women, though in the Duke's case most of the women came out on top.

  Two of them in particular were going to exert a lifelong influence on him, Madame de Genlis and Mrs. Elliot. The husband of Felicite Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, the Comtesse de Genlis, had become captain of the Duke's private guard in 1771. Madame had read all the classical authors; she acted in a private theatrical troupe, danced, composed proverbs and even wrote her own plays; she also played the harpsichord with an exquisite touch. And at the age of twenty-six she was incredibly beautiful. A passionate, adulterous affair immediately ensued with the Duke. Madame de Genlis, who may well have been the prototype of Laclos' Madame de Merteuil, took charge of the Duke's children, including the future King of the French, Louis Philippe. She surrounded the Duke with her own business managers and a circle of literary friends who made the Académie Française, on the opposite bank of the Seine, look small. At the head of all the business managers she imposed her own brother, the Marquis Ducrest, whose family arms portrayed a ship under fu
ll sail with the disconcerting motto: 'A little wind and I will go far." It was through Ducrest that many of the writers in the Duke's circle were recruited, writers of a most radical kind. Among them figured Jean-Paul Marat of L'Ami du Peuple and Jacques-Pierre Brissot, future leader of the Girondins. But the writer who would play the greatest role in the Duke's developing political career was a frustrated army officer who had made a name for himself through a scandalous novel on French aristocratic maurs—none other than Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In today's jargon, we would say that Laclos was destined to become the Duke's speechwriter. More than that, it was the wily Laclos who provided the Duke's political career with its plot. But something in the plot went terribly wrong.

  The second important lady in the Duke's complicated life was the resplendent blonde English divorcee, Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliot. Her lovers included many of the great aristocrats of her day— George Selwyn, Charles William Windham and Lord Cholmondeley. The father of her illegitimate daughter, Georgiana Augusta Frederica Seymour, may well have been George, Prince of Wales—"Prinny" "Florizel," the "Pig of Pall-mall," the "Prince of Whales" as he was variously known. Prinny and the Duke were two of a kind and they became close friends during a visit the Duke made to England in July 1782: they went careering off together across Hyde Park, riding "like madmen"; they shared the same passion for horse racing at Epsom, for the progressive politics of Mr. Charles James Fox (in opposition to the King) and for the very same woman, Mrs. Elliot. Mrs. Elliot kept a diary, a record of the plot as it went wrong.

  The Duke's love of things English counted against him, both in Louis XVI's court and among the public at large. In 1784 libellous pamphlets began to appear in the streets of Paris describing his "orgies" and this "Anglomania," which was the cause of his madness for horses and racing. As for Louis XVI, he hated the English. The recent Gordon Riots in London proved to him that they were still slaughterers of Catholics; besides, they had beheaded their King. Since childhood Louis had developed an obsession with the destiny of Charles I. The advisers around the Duke, on the other hand, were enthusiastically pro-English. They saw in the Duke a new William of Orange, who would establish a constitutional peace as in England in 1688.

  THEIR CHANCE CAME with the developing crisis of the French national debt. The King's ministers had made numerous attempts, each one as desperate as it was ineffective. Finally they decided to summon, in February 1787, an Assembly of Notables which had not met since 1626. The Assembly was divided into seven bureaux, each presided over by a Prince of the Blood: thus, it was thought, assuring the King's control. But the third bureau was presided over by the King's cousin, the First Prince of the Blood, the Due d' Orléans, and it was here that the renovators of the Palais-Royal saw their opportunity to introduce a good dose of constitutional reform.

  But the Duke was not a great president of the third bureau; he preferred galloping horses. One scandal that April nearly stopped his political life altogether. A deer had wandered into the Faubourg Montmartre and the Duke gave chase; he pursued it through the barrières and across Place Vendome, knocking over several pedestrians in the process, until he finally cut it down on the Place Louis XVI —today's Place de la Concorde. Perhaps the sacrifice of that poor beast on the square where the guillotine would soon stand was a premonition of things to come; it did not help the Duke's political reputation.

  An early opportunity for a French constitutional monarchy was thus lost. The quickening pace of events soon offered another. The Notables concluded that the thoroughgoing reforms demanded by the King's ministers required the consent of the people. France had no parliament so the Notables demanded the convening of the Estates General, an ancient assembly divided into three "estates"—the Church, the Nobles and the Commoners—which had not met since 1614. A second Assembly of Notables was called in September 1788 to discuss how to put it together. In the meantime the skies of Heaven collapsed on France: in July a hailstorm stretching from Rouen in Normandy to Toulouse by the Pyrenees pelted the land with stones of ice so large that they killed hares and partridge, tore branches from trees, wiped out vineyards and destroyed the wheat harvest. The kingdom was faced with the worst famine since 1709. But the peasants of the fields and the artisan workers of the towns did not lay the blame at the feet of God, they accused men—the "hoarders," the rich robber merchants, the organizers of the grain trade. Popular word spread of a "famine plot."

  When it became clear that elections to the Estates General were to be held in the early spring of 1789 the radical authors of the Palais-Royal got busy penning propaganda pamphlets for their Constitutional Party. Choderlos de Laclos and the dour little Abbé Sieyés composed real little bestsellers. By the winter of 1788-89 the Due d' Orléans was regarded as leader of the " Révolution," as people were now calling the fast flow of events. It was one of the coldest winters on record. From November 1788 to January 1789 the Seine froze over. The Duke distributed food around Paris at his own expense. He became one of the most popular men in the city The tumult developing in his Palais-Royal was indescribable. The gardens had been converted into a circus arena, with the floor of the gardens lowered three feet—as they appear today. The crowd took on the wild appearance of spectators at a Roman holiday in the Colosseum. In the cafés inflammatory proclamations were read aloud, there was a torrent of news, false and true, and improvised speeches were made from every corner. Whether he liked it or not, the Duke was in the radical camp. Through the court at Versailles rumour rapidly spread of an "Orléanist plot."

  The atmosphere in which the elections to the Estates General took place in late March and early April 1789 did not augur well for the Duke's political followers, who still sought a peaceful transition to a constitutional monarchy. The poor harvest and harsh winter had created widespread suspicion and fear which, in early spring, spilled over into violence. Throughout the country bands of peasants, many of them women, attacked grain barges, wagons or flour stores; there were cases of attacks on seigniorial property, but rarely on persons. In Paris it was worse, far worse. Up to a quarter of the adult male population had been excluded from the vote. The food crisis had ravaged the 40,000 or so artisans and workers of the eastern faubourgs of Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel (roughly today's Vingtième and Treizième). The frozen Seine and its stinking southern tributary, the Bièvre, had thrown a host of small traders into the pit of starvation, the most notable of the new poor being the brewers of Saint-Marcel.

  At one of the electoral assembles in Paris in early April 1789, a wealthy wallpaper manufacturer, Réveillon (who had been a poor artisan himself), demanded the deregulation of the price of bread and of wages—an idea that would have won plaudits in today's Economist. It was not something to advocate before the hungry inhabitants of the Faubourgs. On the night of the 26-27 April, armed with a variety of home-made weapons and holding torches in their hands, a mob from Saint-Marcel crossed to Saint-Antoine, collecting supporters as they moved. "Death to the rich! Death to the aristocrats! Death to the hoarders!" shouted the crowd of three thousand rebels. On the Place de Greve, before the Hôtel de Ville, they burnt effigies of Réveillon and one of his accomplices, Henriot, a saltpetre manufacturer. They sacked Henriot's home in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; a line of municipal Gardes Françaises managed to halt them before they reached Réveillon's home and manufactory, on a prominent corner of Rue Montreuil.

  Somehow, France would always manage to have its revolutions in the spring. Spring was also the season of sporting events. Horse racing was all the rage in 1789, thanks largely to the Duke of the Palais-Royal. On 28 April, with a mob of protestors still demonstrating in Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the racing season began in the park of Vincennes. To get there, its wealthy fans had to cross the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in their carriages.

  Most of the carriages got through, though not without being exposed to the menacing taunts of "Death to aristocrats!" Carriages carrying the Orléans coat of arms were applauded, with the accompanying cry of "Long live the Third Esta
te!" When the Duke himself appeared, the crowd started clamouring, "Long live our Father d' Orléans ! Long live the only true Friend of the People!" The Duke opened his liberal purse and threw its contents to the people. The return from the races proved a sadder tale. Several of the carriages were blocked by increasingly nervous Gardes Françaises, who were holding the crowds back from Sieur Réveillon's home. The Duchesse d' Orléans insisted, with the support of the crowd, that the Gardes let her through; they obliged, thus opening a breach for the attack on Rue Montreuil. Soldiers of the Royal Cravate cavalry regiment took fright and opened fire. In the resulting mayhem several hundred were killed. Among the bodies of the protesters were found ècu coins that could be traced to the Duke. Vicious talk in Versailles about the "Orléanist plot" grew. Increasingly heated debate was heard on the streets of the "famine plot."

  Prospects for a quiet "Glorious Révolution " à la mode anglaise were looking increasingly dim. Less than a week after the slaughter on Rue Montreuil the Estates General were opened in Versailles. For a month all business was dominated by procedural matters and for a month the First Prince of the Blood remained silent; the Duke's political position was unknown, save at a vote on credentials when he joined a minority of forty-seven liberal nobles in the call for the uniting of the three estates in a single assembly. It was finally the showdown between the Third Estate and the two privileged orders in June which forced the Duke to speak. On 10 June Sieyés, who had early gone over to the Third, declared the Third to be the "Commons" and summoned the other two orders to join them. During the next week almost half the clergy had moved over to the Third Estate, which on 17 June declared itself to be the "National Assembly."