Today, the museum may seem rather old-school (there are no interactive displays or smell-the-medieval-odours attractions), but it offers an excellent opportunity to stroll through several millennia of Parisian life, featuring not only the big names of history but also the forgotten everyday people.
Lunchtime at the Neolithic restaurant
Logically, the most forgotten people of all are the very first known Parisians. Recent excavations near the river at Bercy (now the site of a multiplex cinema and trendy food court) have unearthed traces of settlements dating back some 6,000 years, including long wooden canoes, and some smaller artefacts that seem to confirm all the stereotypes about food-obsessed Parisians. The Musée Carnavalet’s collection of prehistoric tools consists largely of different-shaped blades for cutting and scraping meat. There are also several grinding stones, probably used for crushing herbs and spices, as well as a large variety of jugs and a selection of clay spoons, plates and even a ladle. Now I have seen a lot of prehistoric exhibits in my time, but never before spoons and a ladle. I was almost surprised that the archaeologists hadn’t found a reindeer-skin apron and a tray, proving that the region once boasted a tribe of Stone Age waiters—ancestors of today’s Parisian waiters, some of whom do have a certain prehistoric bluntness about them. And in case this idea seems too far-fetched, the museum also possesses a pair of wild-boar jaws with holes drilled through them, apparently so that they could be hung on a tree or palisade. Yes, in 4,000 BC the Parisians were already putting up restaurant signs.
Nothing, it seems, has survived to give us an idea of what happened in Paris between prehistory and the arrival of the Romans in 52 BC, probably because the Gauls torched their own village there to prevent the invaders capturing it. But we can guess what the site by the Seine must have looked like, because according to Caesar, it was then known as Lucotecia, a local word for bog. And the Romans kept the name, calling the place Lutetia.*
It is not certain exactly where in this tree-covered, silty bog the Gauls had their main settlement—on the Île de la Cité, some say, or near the western suburb of Nanterre.** But the Romans decided to build their city on higher ground, up on the Left Bank, centred around the hill now occupied by the Panthéon. And they brought the ultimate symbol of their civilization to the boggy riverside—the baths, les Thermes de Cluny, that still stand on a corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel. These weren’t filled with bucketfuls of muddy Seine water, either—the Romans constructed a 26-kilometre aqueduct to link them up with much purer springs.
The Musée Carnavalet testifies to this quantum leap in sophistication. Gallo-Roman artefacts on display include a set of slim copper probes and scalpels that look much like the kind of instruments that a surgeon would use to nip and tuck modern flesh; intricate pieces of moulded plasterwork—reminders that the gypsum deposits in Montmartre are the origin of the name plaster of Paris; an effete-looking miniature bronze of the messenger god Mercury, who is sporting a winged hat that would be very much at home on a Jean-Paul Gaultier catwalk; and a ring-shaped earthenware drinking flask with inscriptions that show how the Romans were expanding the area’s culinary horizons—on one side, the lettering reads ‘Landlady, fill my bottle with beer’ (the Gauls’ crude brew), and on the other, ‘Landlord, do you have spiced wine?’ An indication, perhaps, that incoming Roman wine merchants were marrying local barmaids and setting up a new style of Gallo-Roman café.
Gladiators, lions and pétanque players
While much of Paris’s history is thrust upon you—Notre-Dame, the Sacré Coeur and the Louvre, for instance—some of its finest historic sights are hidden away. One of the best examples of this is (or are) Les Arènes de Lutèce, in the 5th arrondissement.
At the end of the first century AD, the Gallo-Roman Lutetians built themselves a vast stone Coliseum outside their walls, about 500 metres south of the Île Saint-Louis. At its peak, the amphitheatre held 15,000 spectators, who came along to be amused either by theatrical shows or wholesale massacres of animals and gladiators. Even 2,000 years ago, Paris offered a wide variety of entertainment.
However, when Germanic invaders came visiting in the third century, entertainment suddenly became less of a priority, and stone from the amphitheatre was pillaged to shore up the city’s defences. After this, the stadium fell into disuse. It was used as a cemetery, and then swallowed up when King Philippe Auguste built his city wall in the thirteenth century. A convent was subsequently built across most of the site.
What was left of the amphitheatre lay hidden for six centuries or so, even though the neighbourhood was still popularly known as Les Arènes, and Roman masonry was only stumbled upon in the 1860s, when a new street, the rue Monge, was ploughed through the area. The existence of an amphitheatre was noted by the builders, but apartments were constructed along its western edge and Paris’s transport company bought the land to use as a tram depot.
The writer Victor Hugo and a protection committee, La Société des Amis des Arènes, were prompted to begin a vigorous ‘save the Arènes’ campaign. Hugo wrote to the Président de la République, Jules Grévy, in 1883, reminding him that: ‘It is impossible for Paris, the city of the future, to abandon the living proof that it was the city of the past.’***
The lobbying worked, and after the convent was demolished, the half-excavated area became a public garden. However, it wasn’t until 1917 that serious restoration was carried out, proof perhaps that by that time Paris was confident of winning the First World War and hanging on to its capital.
Today, this much-abused place has been absorbed into the city’s everyday life. It is a half-hidden, half-forgotten park, almost invisible except from the apartments that overlook it, and accessible through entrances that seem specially designed to keep it a secret.
Standing outside the rue Monge entrance, the only sign that you are near anything Roman is a blank area of wall in an apartment building, and an archway decorated with a gladiator’s helmet. A narrow passageway leads to what looks at first sight like a fairly typical Parisian park. An open area of gravel where local boys play football, a few green benches in fenced-off flower gardens, a terrace on which a dozen people are holding one leg in the air like dogs learning to pee against a lamppost—a Tai Chi class.
It is a million miles from the fully restored arènes in Arles, Nîmes or Orange. The amphitheatre is visible, though—the steps leading up to the top rows where the upper classes would have sat, out of reach of the blood and sweat of the gladiators, and the arcades from which big cats, armoured men and masked actors would have emerged, now put to modern sporting use as goals.
Apart from the shouts of the boys training to be temperamental modern footballers, the place is usually very peaceful these days, and remarkably empty. The small lawns up on the terraces are so little used that the park-keepers haven’t even bothered to put up the notorious Pelouse Interdite signs, which usually make me want to laugh and cry. Laugh, because it seems absurd to erect a sign saying ‘lawn forbidden on a lawn. (What’s it going to do, apologize and stop growing?) And cry because the sign means more than just ‘keep off the lawn’. It is saying ‘no fun or relaxation here’.
In the Arènes, however, lawn-based lazing is legal, and on a dry day it is a great place to lie down, stare up at the sky and wonder how this amphitheatre, one of the oldest vestiges of the ancient city, can be so rudely ignored.
Not that it’s always so peaceful. Modern Parisians have their own version of the blood and drama of the gladiatorial arena—pétanque tournaments. Almost inevitably, the amphitheatre’s gravel floor has been adopted by a pétanque club, the Amicale Bouliste des Arènes de Lutèce. The club has met there since the end of the Second World War, and regularly evicts the young footballers to take over the arena for its tournaments, at which point the stadium rings out once more to the clash of metal on metal and the groans of the vanquished.
No respect for history
In the third century, the Romans left their mark on Paris in another, eve
n more memorable way. It was after they beheaded Saint Denis, the man who introduced Christianity to the region, on high ground to the north of their city that the place of his execution was named ‘martyr’s hill’ or Montmartre.
From then on, things went rapidly downhill for Paris. In the fifth century the city was seized by the Franks, and then snubbed by the greatest Frankish King, Charlemagne, who set up his capital in Aachen. The Vikings regularly came pillaging, and soon all that remained on the Left Bank of the Seine was a clutch of convents, presumably with heathen-proof gates.
However, in the tenth century, Paris again became a capital, albeit of the tiny realm governed by the Kings of the Franks, and this elevation in status was the cue for some impressive refurbishment. The ancient cathedral on the Île de la Cité, which probably dated back to the fourth century, had survived the heathen onslaught and was one of the biggest in Europe, some 70 metres long, with five colonnaded naves decorated with mosaics. It must have risen above the hovels on the boggy island like a shiny new pair of Wellingtons in a muddy puddle.
So what did the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, do in 1163? Well, Maurice was the son of a humble woodcutter, so it was perhaps inevitable that he should decide to hack the old cathedral to the ground. This lack of respect for history was not unique to Paris, of course—practically every ancient cathedral stands on the ruins of an even more ancient church. Sully commissioned a new cathedral—Notre-Dame—in the gothic style that was all the rage at the time. And thus it was that for the next two centuries, the centre of Paris was a gigantic religious building site.
This huge project was just one sign of the way Paris was flourishing. Despite the murderous civil wars caused by les Anglais, which the Parisians helped to end by sending out some of their clergymen to prosecute the troublemaker Joan of Arc,**** Paris gradually established itself as the capital of a rich and stable nation, one of the power centres of Europe. It also began to assume its modern identity as a travel icon.
There is evidence of this double status in one of the most fascinating parts of the Musée Carnavalet, devoted to the Renaissance. Here, the democratic mix of exhibits works wonderfully: in the same room, you have the portrait of a glum-looking Mary Queen of Scots—who grew up in Paris and became an unhappy teenage Queen of France by marrying the short-lived King François II—and a party scene, with a drunken man groping a lady in front of a backdrop of Notre-Dame and the old city, a sort of Breughel on a dirty weekend in Paris. This latter picture looks as though it’s a pre-photography version of a ‘Your Face Here’ portrait—you no doubt paid the artist to have your portrait set against a stock background. In this case, the silhouette of Notre-Dame must already have been famous enough for people to want to boast about getting drunk in front of it. Stag and hen parties are nothing new, it seems.
The sixteenth-century rooms at Carnavalet also hint at the way Parisians turned their blossoming city into a bloodbath. There is a glowering portrait of Catherine de’ Medici, the mother of three Kings of France and the reputed instigator of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when 15,000 Protestants were killed in the space of twenty-four hours. In the portrait, Catherine’s eyes are as dark as her widow’s weeds, her expression as stony as if it was a marble sculpture instead of an oil painting—enough to turn anyone into a Catholic.
Which is exactly what happened to her son-in-law, King Henri IV, who was so terrified by the massacre that he renounced his Protestant faith. In the museum, he is commemorated in the most bizarre fashion of all—a narrow corridor is dominated by hunks of a massive statue of Henri that used to stand on the Pont Neuf. It was hacked to pieces by a revolutionary mob in 1792, and the Carnavalet somehow obtained a giant boot, an arm, a hand, and an amputated horse’s leg.
And it is the museum’s Revolution section that is the most fascinating, because these turbulent years are presented from the point of view of an ordinary Parisian citizen of the time. There are banners that were waved during meetings and demonstrations, obviously home-made, because one of them misspells the key word liberté as libeté. (But then, education for all was one of the revolutionaries’ key demands.)
There is also a collection of portraits of officials in revolutionary uniform. It was obviously a shrewd move at the time to have oneself painted this way, as proof of one’s patriotic zeal. And what is intriguing about the pictures is that most of them are very primitive, suggesting either that the sitters were too poor to pay a decent artist, or that all the good portrait painters had fled the country with their best clients, the aristos.
Political events also inspired a rash of revolutionary knick-knacks. The museum has an inkstand with the catchy slogan unité et indivisibilité de la République, a plate showing le patriote satisfait (the well-fed patriot) and—eerily—some intricate ivory working models of the guillotine. The weirdest exhibit, though, has to be a watch that tells ‘revolutionary’ time, with a day of 10 hours divided into 100 minutes of 100 seconds. It’s surprising that the idea didn’t catch on—with each revolutionary hour lasting the equivalent of 2.4 of our hours, the Parisian’s legendary two-hour lunchtime would have lasted the equivalent of 4.8 modern hours. Definitely worth revolting for.
The objects commemorating the end of the monarchy are just as down-to-earth. There is a re-creation of Louis XVI’s cell at the Temple prison, with furniture that was spirited away by sympathizers after his death and donated to the museum later. He had a decent enough bed, a bookcase, and even a miniature billiard table—probably for his son Louis-Charles, who died in prison aged ten, after three years of incarceration.
The museum even has Louis XVI’s prison laundry list. In two weeks, he sent out seventeen shirts, eight pairs of stockings, two caleçons (underpants or perhaps trousers), seven items of miscellaneous linen and three sheets to be washed. It doesn’t seem excessive, except when you remember that the only fresh linen many of the other prisoners got was a scarf to hold their hair out of the way when the guillotine blade came down on their neck.
Paris shoots itself in the foot (and elsewhere)
Immediately after the Revolution, Paris lapsed into a period of pleasure and violence, often with the two of them combined.
The most famous piece of architectural masochism was demolishing the Bastille, of course. Though this was a cleansing act, because the notorious prison was a symbol of aristocratic oppression—although, as mentioned earlier, it was almost empty on 14 July 1789—many of its previous inmates had been locked up for nothing more damning than inconveniencing an aristo.
More dubious, perhaps, was the wholesale destruction of ancient buildings just because of their religious connections. A whole series of paintings at the Carnavalet show triumphant post-revolutionaries pulling Paris’s churches to pieces stone by stone. Notre-Dame survived (albeit with decapitated statues) only by proving itself useful as a food depot and being adopted by the newly atheist Parisians as a church devoted to the god of Reason.
The only building of note to attract the attention of the city’s post-revolutionary painters figures in a twee little oil sketch of a mass in the Chapelle Expiatoire. Smartly dressed Parisians stand or kneel, facing a statue of a very sexy-looking Marie Antoinette in a negligée. The artist was obviously a fan of hers.
The Chapelle Expiatoire was built in 1815, and it seems strange to see the former royal anti-heroine being hero-worshipped on canvas so soon after both her head and her regime were toppled. But as early as 1815, after Napoleon Bonaparte’s spell as a self-elected Emperor, the royals had returned, and it was Louis XVIII who commissioned the Chapelle as a mausoleum for his brother Louis XVI and sister-in-law Marie Antoinette, on the site where their bodies were buried after execution.
Amazingly, the building came through the whole of the turbulent nineteenth century unscathed, and it can still be visited today. It is an eerily peaceful place despite its location a stone’s throw from boulevard Haussmann. The gardens leading to the Greek temple-like mausoleum are lined with twin rows
of graves, which have always been empty. They represent the King’s bodyguards, the Swiss Guards, about 600 of whom were massacred when Louis was arrested in the Tuileries Palace in August 1792 (yes, the Tuileries gardens used to contain a Renaissance palace, built by Catherine de’ Medici—it was another victim of the Revolution).
Inside the Chapelle, the tombs of Louis XVI and his wife are said to be situated exactly where the bodies were discovered, which must be why the marble statues do not reunite the couple. Marie Antoinette is with the Virgin Mary, while nearby an angel seems to be holding the resurrected Louis’ head in place. The chapel’s visitors’ book is also worth a peek—it’s full of drawings of fleur de lis (the royal flower) and vive le roi inscriptions. The 1789 Revolution and all the subsequent insurrections have never killed off French royalism completely.
Becoming the City of Light
The nineteenth-century rooms in the Musée Carnavalet bear testament to the climate of violence that reigned in Paris for decades after Louis XVI lost his head on the square named after him (now the place de la Concorde). Contrary to what the French like to believe, their Revolution wasn’t simply a bit of political debating, a few thuds of the guillotine and then liberté, égalité, fraternité for ever more. There were rebellions and/or coups d’état in 1799, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1851 and 1871, as well as various lesser outbreaks of violence that took their toll on the cityscape.
Whole walls at the Carnavalet feature nineteenth-century paintings of well-known buildings like the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville being bombarded, almost always by Parisians, as well as more intimate scenes of martyrdom on the barricades—one victim of the 1848 uprising is writing a slogan on a half-demolished wall in his own blood.
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