Seven Ages of Paris (3 page)

It was not only the gentle allure of muddy Lutetia, its vineyards and the “clear and limpid” waters of the Seine that attracted the Romans. From earliest days the navigable Seine and the north–south axis which intersected it at the Ile de la Cité formed one of Europe’s most important crossroads. The island itself constituted a natural fortress, all but unassailable—except when unprincipled barbarians like the Norsemen took it from the rear by floating down from upstream, whence the wine, wheat and timber from Burgundy normally came. In the ages before road or rail transport, the Seine—in marked contrast to the estuarial, shallow and narrow Thames—was an ideal river for major commerce. Its broad and deep currents were not too swift, and hard turf or stone lined most of its banks. Early descriptions of Paris comment on the extraordinary capacities of the waters of the Seine to support heavy loads. Together with its tributaries, the Oise and the Marne, the Seine linked up most of northern France and reached out southwards and eastwards, up to Montargis, Auxerre, Troyes and numerous lesser towns. It enabled Paris to dominate commerce in the north, making her a natural capital for trade early in the Middle Ages, never to lose this primacy. Meanwhile nearby stone quarries enabled her rulers to float down vast quantities of building material to construct her walls and fortifications.

By the end of the first century A.D., Christianity had arrived in Paris, followed shortly thereafter by the first martyrs. Dionysius, or Denis, came from Rome and was probably Greek. Aged ninety, he was arrested for denying the divinity of the Emperor, imprisoned on what is now the Quai aux Fleurs, close to the modern Préfecture de Police, and then dragged up the Roman highway that still bears his name northwards from the Seine. On top of a hill overlooking the city where stood a temple to Mercury, he and two supporters were decapitated. According to legend, he picked up his head with its long white beard, washed it in a nearby stream, and continued walking for “six thousand paces.” The spot where he finally dropped and was buried became a holy place. Eventually the cathedral of Saint-Denis was built on its site, subsequently to become the burial place of French kings from Dagobert onwards. His place of execution became the “Mons Martyrum”—or Montmartre; and the city annals chalked up their first revolutionary martyr as well as their first bishop.

With the death of the benevolent Julian and the collapse of Roman power after the best part of six centuries, various “barbarians,” pushed westwards by some unrecorded pressure in Central Asia, came trampling in from the east—Vandals, Franks, Avars and Huns. The Ile de France—one of the most ancient provinces of France, formed by the rivers Seine, Marne, Ourcq, Aisne and Oise—even then presented an enticing land of milk and honey, and Paris trembled. In 451, the worst of the lot, the Huns under their fearsome leader, Attila, crossed the Rhine heading westwards. At Cologne they were reported to have massacred 11,000 virgins. Parisians prepared for a mass exodus, piling their belongings on to wagons with solid wooden wheels. But a fifteen-year-old orphan girl called Geneviève, who had come close to fasting to death in her convent—like another French teenager nearly a thousand years later—had a vision. She exhorted the populace not to leave, telling them, “Get down on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.” She was proved right. Unlike Hitler, they stayed away, eventually to be driven back across the Rhine. Contemporary wits explained Geneviève’s “miracle” by suggesting that there were not 10,000 virgins in Paris to make it worth Attila’s while. A more likely explanation was that Attila had opted to head for Orléans to deal with his Visigoth foes there.

Whatever the reasons behind Attila’s deviation, Geneviève’s intercession was rated a miracle. Less successfully she later led the Parisians against the barbarian and pagan Franks. Embodying the spirit of resistance, and living to the ripe old age of ninety, she helped convert the conquering Frankish king, Clovis, and became the patron saint of Paris. Her bones rested in the Panthéon, until scattered by the revolutionaries of 1789. Slender and austere in its elongation, her 1920s statue stands imposingly on the Left Bank’s Pont de la Tournelle, close to the area associated with her—christened Mont Sainte-Geneviève in her honour and eventually to embrace the Sorbonne. At various desperate moments in subsequent Paris history, when fresh barbarian hordes emerged from the east, mass supplications were made to Sainte Geneviève, calling for her renewed intercession to save the city—with varying degrees of success.

MEROVINGIANS, CAROLINGIANS AND CAPETIANS

A dynasty of Frankish rulers, most of them louts, their name appropriately derived from the Latin for “ferocious,” now entered the scene. Pushing in from the east and devastating the Gaul lands as they went, they came to be known as the Merovingians. Clovis, with his bride, Clotilde, father, Childeric and sons Clotaire and Childebert, moved into Paris from Clovis’s temporary capital at Rheims. As the Merovingians wrangled and split among themselves, there followed two and a half dark centuries of chaos and internecine savagery for Paris—its name now changed permanently from Lutetia. Clovis managed to kill off most of his family; after each killing he built a church. He was a great church-builder.

They were not gentle or nice people, these Frankish forebears of the modern-day Parisian, but at least, under Clovis, the notion of Paris as a capital city first became accepted, because that was where he had his palace. His descendant Dagobert (629–39), on his interment (he died of dysentery, aged only thirty-six) at Saint-Denis, established the tradition of burial there for subsequent kings of France. But during these dark years the country found itself fragmented, and refragmented, among short-lived nations with strangely Orwellian names such as Neustria and Austrasia. Constant warring meant that rulers spent little time in Paris, which remained an unhygienic settlement of rude wooden huts, incendiarized at regular intervals.

In the eighth century, a new threat distracted and menaced Paris, this time from the south, in the form of the Saracens. Their progress was halted at Poitiers (732) by Charles Martel, but to raise funds for his campaigns he had to sack the abbeys and churches of Paris (his chosen capital was Teutonic Metz). A special deal between Martel’s successor, Pépin (founder of the Carolingian dynasty), and a beleaguered Pope was to be of historic importance for both Paris and France. In exchange for being anointed and crowned in the basilica of Saint-Denis in July 754 by Pope Stephen, Pépin guaranteed to restore him to Rome. Henceforth Pépin saw himself entitled to wield the Sword of God, consequently inaugurating a special relationship whereby various French rulers through the ages, down to Napoleon and his imperial nephew, could claim prerogatives to intervene in Vatican affairs.

The closing years of the century saw the arrival of Pépin’s son Charlemagne, a rather less attractive character than his portraits and subsequent canonization would suggest. Crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 by Pope Leo III, who anointed him as “his excellent son,” Charlemagne fought forty-seven campaigns in as many years; his great (though short-lived) empire extended from the Pyrenees to the Elbe, but he ran it all from Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), not from Paris. Once again Paris had an absentee ruler who did nothing for her, and she was not even mentioned in his last will and testament. Nevertheless, subsequent city elders (somewhat surprisingly) were to erect a statue to him in front of Notre-Dame. Charlemagne’s son, the first of eighteen kings named Louis, in fee to the papacy and under the thumb of his second wife, let it all go, allowing the empire to end up, by the turn of the century, dismembered into seven parts.

Meanwhile, as the Carolingians wrangled, and all Europe sank into a kind of lethargy, in the ninth century a new warrior race emerged from the north. The Norsemen, and their kinsmen the Danes, surged out of bleak Scandinavia to invade the British Isles and Russia as far as Kiev, and even reached Constantinople. In 845, it was the turn of Paris, when 120 longboats, decorated like terrifying black sea-dragons and bearing thirty pairs of oars, attacked the city (unexpectedly) from upstream. Once again the population fled, and the Norsemen carried off tons of booty, including the magnificent bronze roof of Saint-Germain-le-Doré. Defenceless Paris was attacked again in 852 and 856, when more churches lost their roofs, and yet again in 858, in 861 and in 865. As in the time of Attila, Paris shrank back into the original ten hectares of the Ile de la Cité. The wooden walls of Roman days were hastily reconstructed, while to defend its two bridges—the Grand Pont connecting it to the Right Bank and the Petit Pont to the Left—two wooden towers were erected, called châtelets, or “little castles.”

In 885, when Charlemagne’s imperial structure had all but disintegrated and the throne of France was to all intents vacant, there came the city’s worst tribulation. Setting forth from England, a force of Norsemen under the command of Siegfried captured Rouen and headed on up the Seine. Fourteen hundred boats reached Paris, conveying a formidable force of some 30,000 hirsute warriors. Led by a heroic Comte de Paris, Eudes, who was to prove himself France’s homme fort, Paris refused to surrender—the first time that any city had resisted the terrible Norsemen. Paris was besieged for ten grim months, but at last, after some highly dubious negotiations, Siegfried was bribed with 700 livres of silver and allowed a free passage, both ways, to carry the war upstream to Burgundy, and leave Paris in peace. Siegfried then repeated the procedure, “subjecting unhappy Burgundy to the worst winter it had ever known.” Not surprisingly, the episode was to lead to centuries of instinctive mistrust and hatred of Paris by the Burgundians, culminating during the Hundred Years War in their alliance with the English.

In 911, the Norsemen were bought off definitively by giving them the duchy of Normandy, which they had in fact already been occupying for a number of years. Thereby the dread pirates acquired a territorial base, a certain respectability and a religion. For the next century the superabundant energies of these new Normans, under Duke Rollo, were directed notably against the British Isles, culminating in the overthrow of King Harold at Hastings in 1066. In France, there followed more years of anarchy, chaos and exhaustion, until the turbulent tenth century approached its end with Louis V dying devoid of heirs, thus bringing down the curtain on the Carolingian dynasty. Now a great-nephew of Eudes, Hugues Capet—a true Frenchman, or at least a man with a French-sounding name—opens the new millennium for France. In 987 he was duly elected king by assembled French barons. A month later he was crowned in Rheims Cathedral, thereby establishing a fresh precedent, like Dagobert’s interment at Saint-Denis. As the energetic Normans swarmed across the English Channel and then began to reorganize the sleepy and backward Saxon England they had conquered, so a new threat to France was about to take shape—a threat that, from time to time, was to appear more immediate, and would certainly endure for longer, than any since the Romans of Julius Caesar. When the millennium dawned, the vulnerable new France ruled over by the Capetians consisted of no more than the diminutive domain called the Ile de France, with Paris at its centre, surrounded by the hostile states of Burgundy, Flanders, Normandy, Aquitaine and Lorraine. She was poor, her vassals powerful and her rulers inhibited by linguistic anarchy wherein few spoke a common language; and she was heavily dependent on the support of the Church. But by 1328, when the Capetian dynasty had run its course, the Kingdom of France had become the most united and potent in Western Europe.

Little is known of Hugues Capet (the surname came as a sobriquet because of the abbeys whose cappa he wore). He seems to have been a timid and anomalous character who achieved little of distinction before dying of smallpox after a reign that lasted only nine years. His heir, accorded the nickname of Robert le Pieux, became the first ruler almost since the Romans to bother seriously about the reconstruction of Paris. His most memorable act was to restore the Palais de la Cité, which had stood on Roman foundations for a thousand years and was now showing signs of dilapidation, but he also set about rebuilding the Paris abbeys of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, which had lain in ruins ever since the Norse raids and the First Siege of Paris.

Yet Paris remained the unimpressive capital of an unimportant state. The queen of Henri I (1031–60), Anne of Kiev, coming from a supposedly backward country, was not taken by her husband’s domain; nose in air, she wrote to her father, Yaroslav the Great, complaining that it was “a barbarous country where the houses were gloomy, the churches ugly and the customs revolting.”

Then, after several more dim Capetian kings, there arrived the first of the significant rulers of the dynasty, Louis VI, Le Gros.

SUGER AND THE TWELFTH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE

The three decades spanned by Louis VI’s reign (1108–37) represent an important turning point, not just in the artistic development of Paris, but in the cultural history of the West as a whole. Until one considers the dates, it is hard to grasp that what is known—with considerable justification—as the twelfth-century Renaissance, a true window of bright light in the Middle Ages, took place over a century before Giotto and Dante were even thought of, its landmarks and symbols the soaring gothic glories of numerous cathedrals. Originating supposedly in the East, it was in France (and especially in the nuclear Ile de France) that the innovation of gothic religious architecture found its most fertile ground and its inspiration. Close to the heart of it was a most remarkable Parisian—Abbé Suger.

Abbot of Saint-Denis for thirty years until his death in 1151, Suger was the first in a long line of able and enlightened ministers to the kings of France—a diplomat, a statesman and a businessman, outstanding for his architectural good taste, as well as being a churchman who built (or rather rebuilt) the magnificent basilica of Saint-Denis. But Suger was also an author, who took it upon himself to write a chronicle of his sovereign. His Life is full of wars and rumours of wars, including the first of the long-running contests against the new foe, the Norman English. In 1124 the French and their allies under Louis defeated a coalition of Henry I of England and the Holy Roman Emperor, at Rheims. More important, however, from the point of view of France—and Paris—was Louis’s successful struggle against the feudal lords of France, which lasted through most of his reign. Rather late in life, Louis le Gros married an admirable and extremely plain woman who provided stability and bore him nine children, thus assuring the future of the dynasty. Skilfully he arranged—just before his death—the marriage of his infant son Louis to Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was not to be a happy alliance, bringing with it much future trouble; but it achieved without a blow reunification with the great Duchy to the south-west—and a period of relative tranquillity for the Ile de France, and Paris.