Until the Revolution, the great Abbaye de St Germain was the largest and richest of all the Left Bank religious communities, and also the oldest. It had been founded in the mid-sixth century under the Merovingian dynasty and became the burial place for their kings. It was rebuilt about the year 1000. The church we see today, floodlit after dark above the noisy Boulevard St Germain, is essentially this thousand-year-old construction, though its accompanying grounds and buildings have all gone under streets. Over the next two and a half centuries a brilliantly decorated Chapel of the Virgin was built and also monastery buildings: cloister, refectory, dormitories, parlour, chapterhouse, library, scriptorium, infirmary, kitchens, vegetable and physic gardens, and a palace for the Abbot with its own garden. Later came a stable yard, and the Abbey’s own prison was added on the south side as the secular power of the institution increased, for the Abbey owned all the land running westwards along the Left Bank of the river for many miles.
It was called St Germain des Prés – ‘in the fields’ – to distinguish it from another St Germain church on the Ile de la Cité, but the name was apt, for on the medieval map of Paris the packed streets stop short at the walls and at the Porte de Buci. The Abbey, barely two hundred metres distant, is indeed out in the green fields, surrounded like a storybook castle by its own fortified walls and by a moat fed from the Seine. (Today the narrow Rue de l’Echaudé runs down the line of the one-time Abbey moat on its eastern side, while on the west the citadel extended as far as the present Rue St Benoît, to the north as far as the present Rue Jacob and to the south almost to the Place St Sulpice: the Rue du Four there remembers the Abbey’s four – its bakehouse.)
By the seventeenth century the moat had gone. A hospital for the poor, La Charité, founded by Marie de Médicis, was constructed alongside. Queen Marguerite de Valois had built herself a palace and gardens between the Abbey and the river, and a new suburb, mainly of rather grand private houses, had spread beyond La Charité to the west. The Abbey itself, under Benedictine rule, had become something of an intellectual centre, and the Faubourg St Germain adjacent to it was the chosen quarter of cosmopolitan aristocratic families. The English Resident (King’s representative) had a house there in the Rue Taranne,1 and during the Civil War and the Commonwealth, when Royalist sympathisers took refuge in Paris, an English colony was established in the Faubourg.
The young John Evelyn discreetly left England for some time and lived in the Rue de Seine, just on the frontier of the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg: he ended up marrying the Resident’s daughter. Shortly after Charles II made a triumphal return to England to claim his throne, Evelyn’s friend and Royal Society colleague John Aubrey also visited the Left Bank. Aubrey’s finances went through periodic crises, so it is perhaps indicative of one of these that he did not stay in the select Faubourg but in the heart of the old Latin Quarter, lodging in the time-honoured way of visiting scholars ‘dans le cloistre de St Julien le Pauvre’. A letter addressed to him there is in the neat hand of Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, who was another long-term Parisian Englishman.
Throughout the eighteenth century the Faubourg St Germain, keeping aloof from the Latin Quarter on its doorstep, continued to flourish socially and architecturally. Streets of handsome houses entre cour et jardin were built, and a roll of the distinguished family names associated with the Faubourg reads like a history of both the Ancien Régime and the Enlightenment. This state of affairs was too good to last, and it did not. By one of the many violent reverses of fortune that the French Revolution threw up, the Place Maubert, so long associated with popular uprisings and judicial brutality, did not feature much, whereas the hitherto tranquil area between the new medical schools and St Germain des Prés became steeped in Revolutionary associations and in actual blood.
The old name for the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine was the Rue des Cordeliers, from the large monastery of the Cordeliers on its western side, one of the many institutions that settled in the Quarter under Louis IX. Humble barber-surgeons had long had a presence in the street, and towards the end of the seventeenth century a handsome amphitheatre was built there for what was by then the socially grander Royal College of Surgeons. Then, in the late eighteenth century, the fine new medical schools were planned on the opposite side of the street on the site of an ancient collège. By the Revolution, they had been partially built. When the monks were dispossessed in 1790, their chapel was requisitioned by the more extreme wing of the Revolutionary movement headed by Georges-Jacques Danton, Jean-Paul Marat and Camille Desmoulins. All lived nearby, and thus the lethally influential Club des Cordeliers was born.
Marat was a medical doctor and had had some success in this capacity in Britain, but by 1790 he had abandoned the study of gonorrhoea (for which he had been awarded an MD from the University of St Andrews) in favour of journalism. He had his own printing press in the Cour de Commerce St André, with which he published a Revolutionary journal, and it was at his lodging in what was to become the Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine that he was famously stabbed by Charlotte Corday while he was taking a medicinal bath.2 Not that the street was unused to blood before then. There had long been a slaughterhouse there, serving the old Marché St Germain, and it is characteristic of the visceral invective that drove the Revolution forward that a local butcher, Legendre, was a prominent member of the Club des Cordeliers and made much of his slaughtering trade. The cobbler Simon, in whose brutal custody the ten-year-old son of the King and Queen was later to vanish, was also a local man and Club member.
Just up the road, the small Abbey prison became a Revolutionary one, into which were packed more than three hundred prisoners whose crime consisted of showing a lack of Revolutionary enthusiasm. These included some aristocrats from the Faubourg and eighteen priests, but also a number of quite ordinary citizens of the Quarter and some unfortunate actors from the theatre. When the September massacres of 1792 launched the Terror the Abbey prison became the site of one of the most violent: the long association of the Abbey with the burial of kings gave an extra edge of profanation to these mass killings. The victims were cut to bits one by one with sabres as they tried to escape back into the building, collapsing on a huge pile of clothes in the centre of the prison courtyard which soon became saturated with blood. Although the massacre had been begun by a street mob, it turned into an organised ritual of execution. Benches were placed for spectators – men and women separated, as if to respect prim convention even in this scene of carnage. After some initial nervousness, the audience settled down to talk and hoot, commenting on how ‘well’ some victims died and booing the ‘cowardly’ ones – a neat illustration of the fact that there is always a section of society that will accept any regime, however grotesque, provided it appears to have official sanction. The bodies were left there for days as a festering spectacle.
It may have been the September massacres, or it may have been the execution of the King the following January, that decided Charlotte Corday to act. A girl from an impoverished family of minor aristocrats, with intellectual tastes and the moderate Revolutionary sympathies of the pre-Terror period, Corday left her native Normandy in July 1793 and travelled to Paris by diligence. She took a room off the Rue St André des Arts, made a trip to the Right Bank to buy a knife in the shopping galleries of the Palais Royal, and managed on her second try to gain entry to Marat’s lodging. Having stabbed him, she made no attempt to flee, and was quickly arrested by a police sergeant who came upon the excited crowd gathered in the street. This was in what was officially Year Two of the new republican universe, when even time was supposed to run differently. It is rather disconcerting to find the regular forces of law and order still taking charge of a murder inquiry and ‘confronting the accused with the body’ in the traditional French way, when so much blood had already flowed on other pretexts. She was taken to the Abbey prison. ‘I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand!’ she told the judges at her summary trial. She was sent to the guillotine four days later. Her high-prin
cipled act did not save anyone nor halt the relentless progression of the Terror. It was Marat who became a popular hero: little effigies of him were sold to replace the discarded crucifixes. By the autumn of the same year Queen Marie Antoinette had followed the King to the guillotine.
The following spring it was the turn of Danton and Desmoulins themselves to be arrested at dawn by Section-leaders beating rifle butts on the doors of their houses. Danton’s home was near where his statue stands today, at the Odéon crossroads, by what was then the entry to the Cour de Commerce. Three months later, with even the semblance of a trial abandoned, the intellectual leader Robespierre and his disciple Saint-Just met the same inevitable fate. With their beheading, the Terror had essentially consumed itself and was extinguished. In any case, France was already at War with Austria and her allies, and Napoleon Bonaparte was in the ascendant.
At the start of the Revolution, when the monks had been dispossessed of the Abbey, a huge quantity of saltpetre for making gunpowder had been stored in the refectory. In August 1794, just as the cycle was reaching its end, an explosion took place. This, and the fire that followed, destroyed many of the buildings on the north side, including the library and the Chapel of the Virgin. After this, time, neglect, the long-term effects of saltpetre and the spread of urban Paris did for much of the rest. The Rue de l’Abbaye was laid out over the northern ruins as early as 1800. A few battered pieces of masonry and statues are preserved in a little railed garden which is all that remains of the monks’ cloister. Other, more substantial stones underpin, like folk memories, the foundations of several of the houses in the street.
The whole Revolutionary experience had been so traumatic, so far-reaching in its effects both geographically and in time to come, and yet so brief, that within a few years it came to seem almost incredible even to those who had lived through it. In Paris, there had been no oppressed, landless peasantry for the Revolution to emancipate. The great upheaval was seen by most Parisians as a disaster, which directly brought about the death of nearly three thousand mainly harmless fellow Parisians.3 The monetary inflation and the economic and social disorganisation that followed in its wake temporarily ruined great swathes of the bourgeoisie, including all those shopkeepers whose trade depended on prosperous upper classes, and brought no material gain at all to the mass of the Parisian poor. It also, as part of the ideological assault on closed societies and cartels, dismantled the collegiate and teaching structures of the Latin Quarter. Doctors of Letters at the Sorbonne were butchered, faculties and academies were swept away, as were exams and professional qualifications. In the medical field it was declared that, in the name of equality, anyone could be a doctor or surgeon who claimed to be one. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who for thirty years had been advancing the study of chemistry and laying the foundations of much that we regard as essential to the subject today, was guillotined because of his upper-class association with the former government. He had discovered oxygen, invented the first periodic table and indeed the metric system that the Revolution itself adopted. He asked for a few weeks’ stay of execution to give him time to complete his memoirs, but this was denied him by Robespierre with the notorious remark that ‘the Revolution has no need of learned men’.
This state of wilful chaos could not last. With the coming of the Directoire, a little order began to be restored. Under Napoleon, the whole structure of formal medical education was reinvented, this time on a national scale, helped on by the need for competent surgeons to attend to battlefield injuries. Napoleon himself took a closely focused interest in these matters: it was during his campaigns that the first field hospitals were set up, and several Parisian hospitals were improved. There was now much greater emphasis on clinical training and hands-on practice, and here the more positive, longer-term effects of social upheaval begin to become apparent. The intellectual vision that had fuelled the Revolution had been overtaken by fanaticism, yet enough of it had survived to release a rush of energy and creativity. Old methods and hierarchies were questioned; a new spirit of enquiry and imaginative conceptualisation was abroad.
Some of the leading medical figures that Arthur Jacob was to encounter twenty years later passed their teens in the maelstrom of the Terror and the abolition of the institutions where they were supposed to be studying, yet that decade saw the emergence of an outstanding group of young men who became known as ‘the School of Paris’ and were to change medical and surgical practice for good. Among them were Guillaume Dupuytren, who was to preside over the Hôtel Dieu for twenty years from the Restoration, and René Laennec who invented the stethoscope. New disciplines in anatomy, pathology, physiology and statistical evaluation, all based on close observation, had begun to develop. Surgeons, who had by long tradition been classed as inferior to physicians, were now their equals and worked alongside them. In any case, the status of both had never been higher. No wonder, by 1814, Paris had become the place to study, for foreigners just as much as for the French themselves.
So, when Arthur Jacob arrived in the Latin Quarter, although it was the downfall of Napoleon that made his visit possible, the Napoleonic organisational structures were securely in place and throughout subsequent dynastic upheavals were not essentially to change. The Rue des Cordeliers, after being briefly named Rue Marat and then Rue de la Santé, had become the Rue des Ecoles de Médecine; the building of the Ecoles had been resumed and extended.4 There was now a fine amphitheatre there for anatomical demonstration, top-lit, holding twelve hundred, though within a generation the number of aspirant medics wanting to attend lectures there would make its space inadequate. The inscription, stating that the Emperor in his kindness had encouraged the students in their zeal and progress, had just been modified to read not ‘Emperor’ but ‘Sovereign’. The surgeons were now established in part of the one-time monastery of the Cordeliers, though they were not to take over the entire premises till 1825. For the moment, a manufacturer of decorative tiles had his workshop there in the monks’ refectory. The slaughterhouse had been got rid of, as had the old and dirty Marché St Germain. A new market building had been built, arcaded like the one of the Carmes on the other side of the Quarter. Except for the smell from the live poultry being sold there, the Ecoles de Médecine area was now regarded as a salubrious district: the blood, animal and human, had been washed away.
In other ways, too, the Quarter had retained its old equilibrium. Most of the monastic institutions were gone and some of the churches were in ruins, but the others had reopened their doors again for business years ago as if the massacres of priests and parishioners had never been. The Panthéon, which had been built on top of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève just before the Revolution as an elegant replacement for the ancient church there, then re-named at the Revolution as a secular mausoleum for national heroes, now, for twenty years, became the church of Sainte Geneviève once again.
It was as if a collective amnesia had overtaken Parisians, along with the sense of accelerated time induced by the meteoric rise of Napoleon, his Empire and now his spectacular fall. It was the epic battles of Napoleon’s wars that were lodged in the forefront of memory now, not that other blood shed less than a generation before which now seemed remote as if many more years had passed. If some still mourned their fractured families and lost inheritance, they did so in private. New titles, bestowed by the Emperor, were everywhere now, though the bearers of older ones too were, like the Bourbon king, regaining their old place in society. The grievances now were the grievances of hundreds of army officers, suddenly finding themselves on half-pay and without occupation, and of rank-and-file ex-conscripts who were reduced to begging for bread on the streets. Popular resilience was already strained by the abrupt collapse of all that Imperial might and the need now to wave enthusiastic flags at the returning Bourbons. If the Revolution was still present at all in memory it was for the time being unmentionable, inexplicable, thrust away out of sight like some embarrassing and toxic object. Like Richelieu’s head –
Ca
rdinal Richelieu, the towering political figure of the early seventeenth century, had been responsible for rebuilding the Sorbonne. He died in 1642 and was entombed in the new chapel attached to the university. At the height of the Revolution in 1793, the chapel was sacked, the marble tomb broken open and the body dragged out and trampled underfoot. In a grotesque mummery of what was being done throughout France to living representatives of former power, Richelieu’s head – in a remarkable state of preservation and apparently recognisable from his portrait – was hacked off. Then it disappeared.
Twenty-two years later, when the supposed remains of Louis XVI and his Queen were given a ceremonial reburial, there were many in Paris who felt that this gesture disinterred a shameful past that would have been better left hidden. So no one was eager to bring to notice any of the Revolution’s other detritus. When Arthur Jacob arrived in Paris to study the new, sophisticated medicine, Richelieu’s head was actually sitting in the centre of the Latin Quarter, in a cupboard in a grocer’s shop in the Rue de la Harpe. Its presence there was unknown to anyone but the grocer and his wife. He had picked the head up and made off with it on the day of the tomb-breaking. She objected to having ‘that nasty thing’ in the house, but her husband would not agree to dispose of it. Eventually, after his death, she confided in a neighbour and, with his help, sold the object. It then vanished again from the record and from men’s minds for forty years and another two re volutions. Such was the history of nineteenth-century Paris.
Ordinary bodies were, however, a commonplace feature of the Latin Quarter. Some of them, unlike Richelieu’s remnant, became embarrassingly public. The young medics of the time, spurred on by the new view that anatomical observation and understanding were fundamental to all branches of medicine, seem to have had a passion for bodies. In that era before refrigeration, dissection officially only took place in the winter months. But it was complained that, between April and October, students would secretly take bits from patients who had died in hospital and carry them home in their pockets to dissect at leisure in their lodgings. In 1818 human bones were found in the latrine of a baker who had been letting rooms to medical students for years, and later some more were discovered in a drain near the Ecoles de Médecine. Nor were the young medics above playing jokes by leaving body parts around the streets. The year before the discovery in the latrine, a dissected head turned up one morning, placed on top of a marker stone in the Rue Serpente, which wound its way between the Rue de la Harpe and the Rue Hautefeuille.
Footprints in Paris Page 7