Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  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.

  In marked contrast to his sovereign, the Abbot of Saint-Denis was a monk of very modest stature, thin, sickly and in poor health, yet with immense energy, and he was to prove of considerably greater historical importance than either of the two kings he so faithfully served. Suger was both product and epitome of the twelfth-century Renaissance, as well as being a profound influence in the aesthetic development of France and of Paris. In that all-too-brief passage of enlight-enment between the Dark Ages and the purging of heresy in the later Middle Ages, the best and brightest arbiters of Church thought had little difficulty in squaring love of God with love of worldly beauty and of the sensuous world. Suger himself could be quite unashamed in his passion for exotic stained glass, and for the hoard of gold, jewellery and other objets d’art which he crammed into the treasury at his beloved Saint-Denis, but he was confident that there was a pragmatic excuse for church embellishment: if the common people (that is, the illiterate) could not grasp the Scriptures, th
en they could best be taught them through the medium of pictures, or stories carved in stone. Here was a substantial advance in medieval Christianity over the fundamental Muslim approach, which allowed of no representation of the human figure.

  “In the Middle Ages,” wrote Victor Hugo, “human genius had no important thought which it did not write down in stone.” In 1132, so it is recorded, the gothic style with its soaring spires, lofty rib vaults and pointed arches took root in France when Suger decided he had to rebuild, on a vastly expanded scale, the ancient romanesque abbey at Saint-Denis. Several times during his stewardship there had been distressing scenes on feast days, when the dense crowds had led to the faithful being trampled to death in the crush. There were even occasions when monks showing off the reliquaries had been forced to escape through windows to save them. Suger’s great new basilica was consecrated no more than a dozen years after it had been conceived—an extraordinary achievement. No expense was spared in the richness of its decoration. It must surely be seen as a true testimony to the spirit of the age that, with such crude tools, simple measuring devices and rudimentary mathematics handed down from Euclid and Pythagoras, the architects and masons of Suger could create these lasting miracles of construction. “Who was the sublime madman,” was the rhetorical question of Vauban, Louis XIV’s great military architect, “who dared launch such a monument into the air?” as he contemplated the massive central tower of Coutances Cathedral (1220–50) that seems to float in the sky. Soon after the consecration of Saint-Denis, Suger’s architect transported his know-how to Chartres, where, though it would be many years in completion, the finest of all the jewels of Latin Christendom was constructed. The great cathedrals of Sens, Laon, Bourges, Rheims and England’s Canterbury all owed something to the delicate little Abbot of Saint-Denis.

  SULLY AND NOTRE-DAME

  Finally, and most important, there was Paris’s own mighty Notre-Dame, begun in 1163 under the genius of Maurice de Sully, who started life as the simple son of a peasant from the Loire. Notre-Dame replaced on the Ile de la Cité the ancient sixth-century church, itself built upon the foundations of a Roman Temple of Jupiter, which—like Saint-Denis—had become too small for its congregation. Paris badly needed a great cathedral as a religious focus that would provide tone and gravitas previously lacking in the city. Only a few years before there had been an unseemly affray in Sainte-Geneviève as Pope Eugenius III, in Paris to bless the departure of the Second Crusade, celebrated Mass there. In honour of the occasion, the canons of the church had spread a resplendent silk carpet before the altar, but when the service was over the Vatican retinue folded it up to take it away with them. A lively altercation ensued between the Italian and the Parisian priests, ending disgracefully in an exchange of blows inside the church. During the rumpus, the sacred carpet was torn in two. Candelabra were seized and used as weapons; the King, Louis VII, trying to separate the combatants, was himself struck in the face.

  In the popular concept of the early Middle Ages, a church was likened to a ship steering for harbour, and what could be more appropriate than Notre-Dame’s extraordinarily dominant position on the Seine, athwart the stern of the Ile de la Cité, shaped so much like a ship? Indeed, such was to become the city’s coat of arms, with the singularly appropriate motto Fluctuat nec mergitur (She is tossed on the waves but is not overwhelmed). Construction work in the narrow streets of medieval Paris proved an immense undertaking. Masons had to haul the stone from quarries far from the city; while a new street, Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame, was pushed through to enable materials to be brought up to the building site from quarries upstream on the Seine. Pope Alexander III blessed the foundation stone, while Thomas à Becket was among those to watch its construction before returning to be murdered in his own Canterbury Cathedral. Even though he served thirty-six years as Bishop of Notre-Dame, Sully was not fortunate enough to see either the mighty portico or the two massive towers of his cathedral: it was two centuries before the work was entirely complete. But Sully did survive to baptize, in the chapel of the nearby Palais de la Cité, the grandson of Louis VI, Philippe Dieudonné Auguste, born two years after the start of building on Notre-Dame, and the king who in turn would give Paris a real start in the world.

  As in Roman days, under Sully the parvis de Notre-Dame became the true centre of Paris, the heart of France, with all distances of main roads measured from a bronze plaque set in the middle of it. From the cathedral’s seminaries, in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries alone, came no fewer than six popes. But the reputation of Sully’s monumental edifice has fluctuated hugely over the ages. Two centuries after its inception, streets neighbouring it were designated by the prévôt (provost) of Paris as an area for prostitutes, the warren of mean hovels becoming a bastion of vice, bawds, whores and ponces. Other great religious structures like Saint-Denis, Rheims and Louis IX’s magical Sainte-Chapelle took over many of its functions. The cathedral itself suffered centuries of neglect and dilapidation, and the revolutionaries of 1789 in their wild orgy of republicanism threatened to raze it to the ground. Napoleon Bonaparte restored it so that he could be crowned emperor amid its ancient symbolism, in December 1804, but its ravaged, dead walls had to be draped with hangings and baldachins to provide the required sumptuousness. Six years later he would marry Josephine’s successor, Marie Louise of Austria, there. Two decades later Victor Hugo lent Sully’s twelfth-century handiwork new romantic life in his creation of the figures of Quasimodo and the hapless Esmeralda in his great eponymous novel.

  Most of what one sees of Notre-Dame today, however, is the legacy of the nineteenth-century gothic medieval restorer—or vandal, depending on the point of view—Viollet-le-Duc, creator of the walled city of Carcassonne that is so romantically exciting when seen from a distance, so phoney close up. Even the twenty-eight Kings of Judah on the great western façade, destroyed by revolutionary zealots, are reproductions of Sully’s originals. Then, seven years after Viollet completed his work, Notre-Dame was threatened once again with destruction, this time by the Commune in 1871, when pews were actually piled up in the centre of the nave and soaked with petroleum. In 1944 it was Hitler’s turn to threaten it. Notre-Dame, however, was to outlive them all.

  At the same time that he was building Notre-Dame, Sully launched the construction of the neighbouring Hôtel Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris—and for centuries the only one—built on the foundations of an older hospital probably destroyed by the Norsemen. (Its name, still surviving, was given it by Philippe Auguste.) Sully left orders that every canon of Notre-Dame should bequeath a bed to the Hôtel Dieu on his death—a helpful contribution in an age when five patients often shared one bed. Under his administration, for the first time patients were segregated according to sex and illness. The Hôtel Dieu enjoyed royal patronage, and when Philippe Auguste set forth on the Crusades, he generously supplied extra bedding by offering it the straw of the stables his horses had vacated.

  ABÉLARD FOUNDS A UNIVERSITY

  To Paris, Suger and his king brought a new vitality, while in turn Louis VI came to mean more to her citizens than any of his Capetian predecessors. In terms of non-religious architecture, he replaced the wooden Grand Châtelet on the Right Bank with a robust stone tower, and under its protective shadow there grew up a whole district dedicated to commerce and provisions which later became Les Halles (see Chapter 2). Like Louis le Gros himself, Paris grew fat and prosperous, swallowing up villages so that only their steeples indicated where they had once been. On the Left Bank, sacked by the Norsemen, marshes were drained for new settlements, while monks canalized the stream of the Bièvre (where a future ruler of France, François Mitterrand, was to have his private residence) and wealthy merchants began to build their houses there.

  This same Left Bank during the reign of Louis le Gros saw the beginnings of a famous academic centre under the tutelage of one Pierre Abélard, later to become known as the Sorbonne. This redoubtable figure, a true Renaissance man, years if not centuri
es ahead of his time, was to enact with Héloïse one of the world’s great tragic love stories, as well as to introduce a new word into the French vocabulary, abélardiser (to castrate). But it is as a revolutionary teacher who was to found the great University that Abélard is central to the development of Paris.

  Born near Nantes in 1079, the son of a minor noble, Abélard chose to pursue the studious life, wandering from one school to another in the fashion of the age. When he was about twenty he was drawn to the Cathedral School of Paris by the fame of the much respected William of Champeaux, and here he shocked his fellows by presuming to question the principles of his teacher (there was always a certain unappealing arrogance in Abélard). After further stormy wanderings, in which he narrowly escaped being branded with heresy, he set up in Paris as a teacher in about 1114. A few years later he came to lodge in the house of one Canon Fulbert, as tutor to Fulbert’s niece Héloïse (who was already, precociously, a young woman of considerable learning)—she aged seventeen, he thirty-eight.

  There ensued the greatest story of romantic love perhaps ever to have come out of Paris, and a remarkably well-documented one. Abélard was not discreet, and—in his passion—neglected his students. Héloïse had a baby, given the egregious name of Astralabe (though we never hear of him again, in the archives or in any of the lovers’ letters) and sent off to Brittany to be brought up by Abélard’s sister. Abélard insisted on doing the decent thing and marrying his love—but shamefully tried to keep it secret. “In marrying, I was destroying myself; I was casting a slur upon my own honour,” he wrote in retrospect, and with a certain lack of grace. Héloïse, a thoroughly modern woman and ever the greater realist of the two, resisted—but in vain—on the ground that marriage would terminate Abélard’s brilliant career within the Church. Despite the marriage, the uncle Fulbert—outraged by this slight on the honour of his house—sought a hideous vengeance. In the dark of night, he treacherously had Abélard castrated. Héloïse, distraught, took the veil, eventually to become abbess of the Paraclete Convent at Nogent-sur-Seine given her by Abélard. Her eloquent and agonizing letters make it plain that, to the very end, she would have put her love for Abélard before love of God, a judgement verging on the heretical that surely would have brought her to the stake a hundred years later.