The Caesar of Paris

by Susan Jaques

In 461, Paris was besieged by the Salian Franks led by Merovingian King Childeric I. Saint Geneviève rescued the city from starvation by bringing wheat from Brie and Champagne by barge. Two decades later, Childeric’s teenage son Clovis became King of the Franks. In 486, Clovis defeated the last Roman army, taking control of Gaul. With Geneviève’s consent, Clovis entered Paris. He was converted to Christianity by his wife Clotilde, and baptized at Reims in 496. Because of Paris’s strategic location between the Loire and Rhine, Clovis chose it as his capital in 508.

  The city’s prestige waned when Carolingian king Charlemagne moved the Frankish capital and Holy Roman Empire to Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen. At the end of the tenth century, the Capetians came to power, restoring the royal palace on the Île de la Cité and building a church where the Sainte-Chapelle now stands. The big change came in the twelfth century, when the Capetians turned Paris into France’s political, economic, religious, and cultural capital.

  At Saint-Denis, the Merovingian church built in 775 by Charlemagne’s father Pepin the Short was replaced by an abbey church in a dramatic new Gothic style; the Cathedral of Notre Dame soon followed. On the left bank of the Seine, the new University of Paris was founded to train scholars in theology, mathematics, and law. Meanwhile, trade and finance were centered on the right bank (north of the Seine), with a port, central market, and workshops. Boasting a population of roughly one hundred thousand, medieval Paris was western and central Europe’s largest city.

  To protect against an English attack from Normandy, Philip II erected the massive fortress of the Louvre. Surrounded by a moat, the rectangular fortress sported four towers and a central circular tower nearly one hundred feet tall. Philip rebuilt the wooden Petit-Pont and Grand-Pont in stone, and began construction of a covered market, Les Halles. He also used stone to pave the city’s foul-smelling mud streets. Before leaving for the Third Crusade, Philip strengthened Paris’s defenses with stone walls on both banks of the Seine.

  Charles V built a new wall of fortifications around the city. He also built the Bastille fortress at the eastern end of Paris, and an imposing fortress at Vincennes, east of the city. In 1534, François I became the first French king to live at the Louvre, demolishing the central tower to create an open courtyard. Near the end of his reign, François replaced one of Philip II’s wings with a new wing sporting a Renaissance façade. François also reinforced Paris’s position as a center of learning.

  François’s son Henri II continued to decorate Paris in the French Renaissance style. The finest Renaissance fountain in the city, the Fontaine des Innocents, was built to celebrate his official entrance into Paris in 1549. Like his father, Henri added a new wing to the Louvre, the Pavillon du Roi, to the south along the Seine, which included his first floor bedroom. He also built a magnificent ceremonial hall, the Salle des Cariatides, in his father’s Lescot Wing.

  After Henri’s death from jousting wounds, his widow Catherine de’ Medici constructed the Tuileries Palace perpendicular to the Seine, just outside the city’s Charles V wall. To the west of the palace, she created a large Italian-style garden. Louis XIV, who transferred his court from Paris to Versailles, commissioned Les Invalides as a hospital and church for war-wounded and retired soldiers.

  By 1800, Paris’s Roman roots lay buried under fourteen centuries of construction. The Roman aqueduct d’Arcueil that supplied fresh water to the city was long gone. Some six hundred thousand Parisians lived without a sewer system. The neglected capital looked and smelled like the city of Louis XVI. Unlike London, the streets of Paris had no sidewalks. Seagulls fed on heaps of garbage. Not much had improved in the half century since Voltaire described the city as a model of squalor, shapelessness, and disorder.1

  Fifty-five fountains had potable water—one per every ten thousand Parisians. An estimated twenty thousand Parisian houses and buildings lacked any water supply. Running on a limited schedule, turned off at night, the crowded fountains were supplied by two large seventeenth-century water pumps next to the Seine, the Samaritaine, and Notre-Dame, and by two large steam pumps at Chaillot and Gros Caillou installed in 1781.2 After filling their buckets at the public fountains or Seine, water carriers traveled from house to house with two buckets hanging from a yoke of wood across their shoulders.

  Shortly after taking power, Napoleon asked his interior minister, chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, what would be the most useful thing he could do for Paris. Without hesitating, Chaptal replied, “Give it water.” That evening, Napoleon ordered studies for an aqueduct from the Ourcq River. On May 19, 1802, Napoleon green lighted construction of the Ourcq canal, diverting the Seine from below the Bassin d’Arsenal to the Bassin de la Villette.

  Leading the project was Pierre-Simon Girard, Napoleon’s energetic Chief Engineer of Bridges and Highways and head of his service of water and sewers. Born in Caen, Girard was a math and engineering prodigy who served with Napoleon in Egypt. With his team of engineers, Girard had drawn up plans for Alexandria, the port, and surrounding coast. He took part in the study of ancient monuments, including on the island of Elephantine.

  Funding for the canal was secured via a grant and wine taxes; the first stone was laid on September 23. Private financiers were awarded the contract to construct and manage the canals. The city of Paris agreed to purchase land and surrender tolls for ninety-nine years to the firms building the canals. Work began in 1805. In addition to the Canal d’Ourcq, Girard supervised the Canal Saint-Denis and Canal Saint-Martin to improve the city’s waterways for trade.

  Just before the Bassin de la Villette was filled with water on December 2, 1808, Napoleon wrote his new interior minister Emmanuel Crétet about the canal projects: “I made the glory of my reign consist in changing the face of the territory of my empire. The execution of these great works is as necessary to the interest of my people as to my own satisfaction.”3

  Napoleon also ordered the creation of Paris’s sanitation system, with sewers built on the model of the ancient Roman sewer system. Thanks to a constant supply of running water, Roman hygiene was the most advanced in the ancient world. Construction of aqueducts was often driven by demand from Rome’s popular bath complexes; bathing became a nearly universal practice among Romans of all social levels. Latrines with stone seats and small pipes underneath with running water were added to bath complexes, near forums, and the city’s busiest streets. In private homes, people used chamber pots, which were emptied into the streets.

  In the sixth century B.C.E., Rome began developing its sewer system. An underground network of conduits carried away the city’s waste from public and private latrines, and removed water from the baths and runoff from roads.4 Starting below the Forum of Augustus, the principal sewer, or Cloaca Maxima, passed between the basilica Julia and temple of Vesta, under the Arch of Constantine, before discharging into the Tiber below the Ponte Rotto through an arch sixteen feet in diameter.5 Rome’s sanitation system became “one of marvels of the world’s civil engineering,” writes Robert Hughes.6

  Rome’s aqueducts earned it the moniker regina aquarum, “the queen of waters.”7 Rome’s first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, was built in 312 B.C.E., and named for Appius Claudius Caecus, one of two powerful magistrates or censors. In 35 B.C.E., Augustus launched a major overhaul of the city’s aging water supply. Old aqueducts were repaired and four new aqueducts were built to meet the needs of the growing population, estimated at one million people. Augustus also established a permanent office, the cura aquarum, dedicated to maintaining and improving Rome’s water supply.8

  By Trajan’s reign in 109 C.E., eight aqueducts including the new Aqua Trajana brought water from the surrounding hills to the right bank of the Tiber. At the height of the Empire, eleven aqueducts supplied water from springs, a river, and a lake. Gravity brought the fresh water across great distances into elevated castellum or cisterns, then through both open conduits and underground lead pipes, supplying the city’s baths, fountains, and houses. Most aqueducts were built at ground level or in a
tunnel below. When the water had to cross the Roman Campagna, it arrived via long arches and bridges.

  Distinctively Roman, a symbol of the Empire, the aqueduct was in Pliny’s words, “the greatest wonder the world has ever seen.”9 About the system Pliny wrote: “But if anyone will note the abundance of water skillfully brought into the city, for public uses, for baths, for public basins, for houses, runnels, suburban gardens, and villas; if he will note the high aqueducts required for maintaining the proper elevation; the mountains which had to be pierced for the same reasons; and the valleys it was necessary to fill up; he will consider that the whole terrestrial orb offers nothing more marvelous.”10

  With over forty tributaries, flooding was a persistent problem with the 210-plus-mile long Tiber. In an effort to minimize the damage, Julius Caesar proposed changing the river’s course by building a canal from the Milvian Bridge that would sweep water to the west, and flow along the slopes of the Vatican and Janiculum hills. Seeking a less drastic solution, Augustus created an office of curator of the Tiber, overseeing programs to clean and widen the riverbed. Augustus’s lifelong friend Marcus Agrippa restored Rome’s waterworks during his post as Augustus’s aedile (the magistrate responsible for public buildings). Agrippa replaced the contractors in charge of the water supply with a new government department, the Statio Aquarium, which cleaned the clogged sewers, repaired the leaking aqueducts, and built the Aqua Julia aqueduct.11

  The Romans also built aqueducts across the Empire. One of the most spectacular provincial aqueducts was the first century Pont du Gard. Considered a masterpiece of civil engineering, the bridge carried water over thirty miles from the Eure springs near Uzès to Nîmes across the Gard River. With its thirty-five arches, the magnificent aqueduct attracted eighteenth-century tourists, including philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  “I was expecting to discover a monument worthy of the men who had built it,” wrote Rousseau, “but what in fact I saw went, for the only time in my life, well beyond my expectations. Only the Romans were capable of creating such an effect. The silence and solitude of its setting made this austere, noble monument all the more impressive. . . . The immense vaults sent back the echo of my footsteps, and I seemed to hear the voices of those who had built them. Now no more than a tiny insect lost in the vast structure, I felt more and more insignificant, when suddenly something lifted up my spirits and I cried out, ‘Why am I not a Roman?’”12

  Near the end of the Roman Empire, Rutilius sang the praises of its water system: “. . . and what of the streams suspended on aerial arches, higher than the rainbow’s reach? One might call them mountains raised to the stars, Giants’ work as Greece would say. Rivers are diverted into your precincts and concealed underground; the great Baths swallow up whole lakes. Your walled gardens are irrigated by streams of your own: they echo with the babble of local springs. Thus a cool breath refreshes the summer air; a healthy thirst is relieved by clear waters. . . . What of the groves enclosed by vaulted cloisters, where Rome-bred birds frolic with varied song?”13

  The Romans were also famous for their bridge building. With the innovation of keystone for arches, they began constructing stone bridges. Among the famous examples was Julius Caesar’s bridge over the Rhine. Finished in just ten days, the three-hundred-foot-long bridge sent a powerful message to the Germanic tribes—not even the Rhine could stop Rome. Two centuries later, Trajan’s engineer Apollodorus of Damascus designed a legendary bridge across the Danube. Reaching sixty-two feet above the water, with a width of passage of 49 feet and length of 3,723 feet, it remained one of the world’s longest arched bridges for over a millennium.14

  Between 1801 and 1804, Napoleon ordered construction of three new bridges financed by a private company in exchange for toll revenues. To the traditional bridge building materials of granite, marble, and wood, Napoleon’s engineers added iron, which had been used for two bridges in England. Architects Percier and Fontaine objected to iron on aesthetic grounds. “The city will gain little from the building of an iron bridge,” Fontaine wrote Napoleon’s secretary Bourrienne. “Such a bridge will of necessity be very narrow and it will diminish this beautiful stretch of water, often used for fêtes. Nor will it, with its light structure, match the magnificence of the two monuments between which it will be built.”15

  Undeterred, Napoleon approved the Pont des Arts on March 15, 1801, connecting the Louvre and the Collège des Quatre-Nations (today’s Institut de France). Designed by engineers Jacques Dillon and Delon de Cessart, inspector general of roads and bridges, Paris’s first iron bridge featured wooden planking resting on nine cast iron arches (each with an 18.5-meter span) supported by masonry piles. When the footbridge debuted in November 1803, it became an instant hit, with a reported 64,000 crossings on opening day.16 Furnished with benches and lanterns, decorated with potted orange trees and rare shrubs along the iron balustrades, the bridge offered splendid views of the Louvre and Île de la Cité for a one-sou toll.

  Despite its popularity, the charming Pont des Arts was not a hit with Napoleon. He came to agree with Percier and Fontaine that the iron did not complement the nearby stone bridges. But his biggest issue seemed to be its lack of monumentality. After visiting the Louvre, Napoleon stopped at an intersection leading to the Pont des Arts and turned to Bourrienne: “It [the bridge] has no feeling of solidity about it; it has no grandeur. I can understand that in England where stone is rare they use iron for arches of enormous dimensions; but in France where everything abounds . . .”

  Napoleon’s concept of monumentality was an ancient one. As a young general in Egypt, he had admired the millennia-old pyramids, sphinxes, and obelisks built by the pharoahs. Rome’s emperors were also masters of the monumental. As Edmund Thomas explains, a monumentum in second-century Rome was a lasting structure that perpetuated the name of its builder and advertised the wealth and promise of the Antonine society.17

  With the Pont des Arts underway, work began on a second iron bridge connecting the Jardin des Plantes with Faubourg Saint-Antoine. After several attempts to link the two banks, engineer Becquey de Beaupré proposed a design featuring five cast-iron arches over masonry piles. After the Grande Armée’s victory over Austria in December 1805, the bridge would be renamed the Pont d’Austerlitz. The names of the principal officers who died in the battle were inscribed on the bridge. The third bridge built during the Consulate, Cité, featured two arches in a masonry framework and connected the Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis (demolished in 1811).

  Napoleon’s most ambitious iron project was inspired by ancient Rome. In 1802, fire destroyed the dome roof of the Halle aux Blés, Paris’s circular grain exchange. Jean-Baptiste Rondelet came upon a glowing description by Caracalla’s biographer Spartianus of a “miracle of engineering”—a metal vault in the Baths of Caracalla. Architects, wrote Spartianus, had theorized that “the whole roof was supported by girders of metal dexterity concealed in the thickness of the masonry.”18 French engineers were familiar with Vitruvius’s descriptions of structural vaults made with iron bars. Napoleon approved the project and personally dedicated the cast-iron dome, the largest iron structure of its day.

  A small bridge across the Crou, a tributary of the Seine near Saint-Denis, was also made of wrought iron. Pierre Fontaine succeeded in stopping construction of two more iron bridges in Paris on aesthetic grounds. Iron was also more expensive than any other building materials, and Napoleon abandoned other projects. Ironically in 1829, Fontaine would design a glazed iron roof for the Galerie d’Orléans in the Palais Royal.19 Ultimately, Napoleon would complete three bridges, the Pont des Arts footbridge (1804), the Pont d’Austerlitz (1807), and the Pont d’Iéna (1808–1814).

  Napoleon wasn’t sentimental about “the old Paris.” “To beautify Paris,” he wrote, “we need to demolish more than build.”20 Determined to modernize and adorn the capital with monumental buildings, Napoleon continued to demolish church property confiscated during the Revolution.

  The area
around the Tuileries had developed gradually after construction of the palace in 1564 between the Louvre, the rue Saint-Honoré, and the Seine. Napoleon’s move here in 1800 and the development of the Louvre into Napoleon’s museum inspired his interest in unifying the two former royal palaces into an unmatched imperial palace. Driving this ambition was an element of one-upmanship with the Bourbon kings. “As heir to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, Napoleon . . . wanted to complete a project that a century of royal rule had been unable to bring to fruition,” writes Jean-Philippe Garric.21

  The Grand Gallery along the Seine enclosed the ensemble on the south, but its central area was still occupied by private hotels and the convents of the Assumption, the Capuchins, and the Feuillants. This problem was solved after the Revolution when these private and religious buildings became national property. By decree in October 1801, Napoleon ordered a series of openings cut between the Tuileries Gardens, the Place Vendôme, rue Saint-Honoré and rue Saint-Florentin, the gardens of the convents of the Assumption, the Capucines, and the Feuillants. In January 1802, Napoleon acquired land to be used for the rue de Rivoli, named for his victory against Austria on January 14 and 15, 1797. In addition to this main street, the plan called for the creation of the perpendicular rue Castiglione and rue and place des Pyramides. Demolition and clearing began in 1802.

  Napoleon assigned Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine to design buildings for the new avenue to complement both the Louvre and Tuileries palaces and gardens. After rejecting their first proposal that included a winter walk, pavilion, and amphitheater, Napoleon accepted a plan featuring an elegant neoclassical arcade. All buildings were required to be three stories, built over a ground floor and mezzanines with arcades. The first floor was to feature a light modillioned entablature with balconies bordered in wrought iron. The second, shorter story was to have an attic and balustrade above. But Napoleon’s ambition to connect the palaces went unrealized; only the arcades and a few buildings were finished during his watch.22 The famous rue de Rivoli would be completed by later regimes.