Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The students and their masters thereby received virtual immunity from royal justice, which was greatly to exacerbate the headaches the prévôt had in maintaining order in the city. Their protected status encouraged aggressive behaviour among the scholars, who became renowned for their brawling and rioting, as well as for committing more violent crimes. By 1221, the Bishop of Paris, under whose edicts they came, excommunicated all students carrying arms. Two years later (the year of Philippe’s death) the hatred of town for gown reached a peak when the Paris citizenry fought a pitched battle against the students during which 320 were killed and their bodies thrown into the Seine.

  DESPOILING THE JEWS

  How did Philippe Auguste manage to raise money for all his vast urban projects in Paris, defensive and peaceful? As well as being a highly talented fund-raiser, Philippe seems to have been a most astute financial manager. While his father Louis VII had—according to the chroniclers—only 19,000 livres spending money per month, by Philippe’s death in 1223 his son Louis VIII could reckon on a sum of 1,200 daily, or nearly twice as much. When it came to financing his ambitious fortifications, not only of Paris but of most of his important cities like Orléans, Laon and Péronne, Philippe was greatly aided by a most efficient and modern-minded system of standardization. Whereas in 1197–8, Coeur de Lion had spent 34,000 livres on the construction of his vast fortress of Château Gaillard alone, Philippe’s total programme (before his conquest of Normandy) cost no more than 40,000, while the whole of the Left Bank stretch of enceinte wall came to no more than 7,020 livres. He kept his economy under tight control, was meticulous in exacting taxes from his vassals, as from the wealthy clergy, while as his banker he employed the Templars, expert in augmenting their fortunes—which was to be their downfall a century later, under another Philippe. He turned a blind eye to Simon de Montfort’s brutal crusade against the Albigensians of south-west France, of which he disapproved, but readily accepted the spoils into his exchequer. One of his main sources of income, however, derived from the Jewish community of Paris.

  From Philippe Auguste to Philippe Pétain, and beyond, treatment of the Jews in Paris, indeed in northern France as a whole, was never conspicuous for its generosity. But this was true of most of medieval Europe. There were the relatively good periods, and the very bad. To his shame, the reign of Philippe Auguste belonged categorically to the latter. In French Jewish lore, he came to be known as “that wicked King.” Under Louis VII, the Jews had been relatively well treated, their synagogues protected, and they had prospered. By the end of Louis’s long reign their small community had come to own nearly half of all private property in the city, with large numbers of the citizenry in their debt. But before his father was even cold in the grave Philippe, still barely fifteen and probably acting under pressure from the establishment, in 1180 issued orders for the Jews under royal protection in Paris to be arrested in their synagogues, imprisoned and condemned to purchase their freedom through surrender of all their gold and silver and precious vestments. Though not in fact initiated as religious persecution, it was a cynically skilful ploy for getting on his side both the Church and the great mass of wealthy Parisian debtors. Above all, it granted Philippe the immense sum of 31,500 livres, which he needed both for building the walls of Paris and Les Halles, and for equipping his army to defeat the Plantagenets. Two years later, he followed up with a decree expelling the Jews from France and confiscating the totality of their wealth. Debts were wiped out—except for a fifth which the royal coffers appropriated.

  Altogether the value of Philippe’s first depredations against Paris Jewry was equivalent to roughly one and a half times what his government might expect to raise in normal predictable revenue for an entire year. This was not, however a formula found acceptable to all of his neighbouring vassals, and in 1198 he relented partially—and then kept changing his mind at varying intervals, with the cruellest of consequences. Perhaps only a couple of thousand Jews, out of a total population of some 60,000 to 100,000, were involved, but the expulsions brought to an end the ancient Juiverie on the Ile de la Cité, and their synagogue was converted by Bishop Sully, creator of Notre-Dame, into the Church of the Madeleine. When the Jews returned, they settled predominantly in the Marais area of what was to become the 4th arrondissement (which still retains most of the traditional Jewish shops and restaurants of Paris). But, once again, the Jews were expelled from the whole of France, their property confiscated, under Philippe le Bel a century later. In many ways, the policy of Philippe Auguste, with its frequent vacillations, was harsher than that of his successor, insofar as it provoked crude anti-Semitism with the native Parisians attacking the Jews as blameworthy for any disadvantageous change in the tax laws.

  LAW AND ORDER

  Ruthless an absolute monarch as he was, there is no question but that Philippe Auguste had the interests of Paris very high among his priorities—if not top, after Bouvines. Though his father had first established the city as France’s permanent seat of government, it was Philippe who truly loved her, and he was the first ruler to make her—secure within her new walls—a caput, his administrative capital. Records (remarkably complete, considering the distance of the times and the fact that the national archives had been lost at the Battle of Fréteval) show that, despite his many absences in battle, 31 per cent of all Philippe’s royal actes from the Curia Regis had a dateline of Paris, thereby indicating his residence there. In the remaining decade of his life after Bouvines, consequent to the peace and stability that the victory over John and his allies had given, he spent most of his days in the city, planning, reorganizing it—and building.

  In terms of administration, though he had ruthlessly crushed and brought to heel his rural nobles, and absolute ruler though he was, in Paris he introduced an astonishing degree of devolution—or what, in those days, would have passed for the beginnings of democratic rights. Under Louis VII, the Paris merchants had thrived, but it was Philippe who first gave the bourgeois classes, the Latin burgenses nostri, their official standing. It was he who, in his extraordinary Testament of 1190, had handed over the affairs of Paris to six eminent bourgeois while he went off to the Crusades; and it was under him that the Paris water merchants, also members of the bourgeoisie, were granted virtual control of river traffic on the Seine (in itself a measure of the prime importance of the river in the life of the city). In the Hôtel de Ville on the Right Bank, east of the Louvre, it was Philippe too who instituted the parloir aux bourgeois, the first seat of a Parisian municipal administration.

  Parisian law and order, too, received its impetus from Philippe. Just before embarking on the Third Crusade, in an ordinance of 1190 he had created the system of baillis (or bailiffs), placed directly under the royal government. Drawn from the bourgeoisie, a useful counterweight to the landed seigneury, they were responsible for the dispensation of justice—and also for checking up on any excesses committed by the prévôts. Fearful of assassination by an agent of Coeur de Lion, in the course of his struggles against the Plantagenets Philippe formed the habit of going around the city with an escort of guards armed with truncheons, rude predecessors of the modern gendarmerie and riot police. In marked contrast to the authoritarian Henry Plantagenet, bitterly struggling with the Church to wrest judicial rights from it (and perhaps in reaction against the martyrdom of Becket), Philippe was generally meticulous in allowing the clergy to preserve these prerogatives. Unusual was a case, in 1210, concerning a group of heretics condemned at the councils of Sens and Paris. These members of the clergy were degraded, handed over to the King’s court and burned in the field of Les Champeaux.

  Evidence about the kinds of punishment imposed by the authorities seems to be scanty for the reign of Philippe Auguste itself, but they were a great deal less draconian and ingenious in their cruelty than a century later, under Philippe le Bel, when horrible refinements of torture became current. But if one relies on sources dating from around 1400, it is possible to infer that in early-thirteenth-century Paris t
he crimes of treason, homicide and rape were punished by dragging the culprit through the streets and then hanging him. Arson and theft of property also merited hanging; heresy and sodomy earned the stake; currency forgers were thrown into boiling water. The lesser offences, principally the infliction of blows and injuries where blood was shed, recorded in the registers under the heading “little blood” (sang menu), were for a long time covered by the law of retaliation, although eventually they became liable only to fines, imprisonment and penalties corresponding to the harm caused. Frankish customary tradition applied a whole range of penalties against theft, not just the death penalty. Under the jurisprudence of Charlemagne, theft was liable to penalties ranging from the loss of an eye to the gallows, and this custom lasted at least until the reign of Saint Louis. Corporal punishment, such as hanging, whipping, branding and loss of a limb, were designed to be deterrents.

  Ecclesiastical judges could condemn to death too. One Jean Hardi died at the stake for having sexual relations with a Jewess, which was held to be contrary to nature. Men were usually killed by hanging, women by whipping. Suicide was also considered a crime, so the suicide’s cadaver would be hanged. Non-capital corporal punishment pronounced in the name of the bishop—for example, the mutilation of an ear or branding by hot iron—were carried out at the Croix-du-Tirouer, in the Rue Saint-Honoré at the top of the Rue l’Arbre-Sec.

  In addition to the royal and episcopal justice, there were judicial organs of seigneurial jurisdictions in Paris; their sergeants kept an eye on petty, daily offences like insults, altercations, brawls and games of chance. Justices in Paris exercised their rights using pillories, with petty criminals subjected to ridicule by the crowd in the square before the church. At Saint-Germain-des-Prés there was a pillory at the crossroads of the present-day Rue de Buci and the Boulevard Saint-Germain. At night, since fear of evil spirits and wrongdoers alike was greater under cover of darkness, the magistrates paid particular attention to security. The hour of curfew having been fixed by decree, the town clock would impose silence, the taverns would shut and house doors would close as the night watch began its round. The night guard (le guet) was the responsibility of the guilds, whose members were expected to volunteer by turns so that a full complement of sixty burgesses each night was available to make the rounds or stand at assigned posts. (Later, by 1364, the town watch was supported by the royal guard, consisting of a company of twenty mounted sergeants and several dozen armed footsoldiers.) Patrolling the city was never a professional job in medieval Paris: it relied instead on the ties of family, work and neighbourhood, and on the authority of heads of families, guilds and volunteers in the militia.

  There were haunts of poverty and shame on Philippe Auguste’s map of Paris. The basic principle of medieval regulation in this regard was to designate certain areas for prostitution and limit vice strictly to them. Thus in London prostitutes were assigned two sites; in Venice they were confined to the Castellato, at the centre of the Rialto; in Amiens they were obliged to spend both night and day in the Rue des Filles, but this street proved to be too small and the district was enlarged. The aim of this sort of social hygiene was to locate these places well away from seigneurial residences, in poor districts, often along the river. The sites where vice could be practised in Paris (notably in close proximity to Notre-Dame) were in fact not fixed by Philippe Auguste, but by his grandson, the saintly Louis IX. Tradition attributes to this pious monarch the designation of eight streets where the “common ribalds” could ply their trade, though ordinances of 1254 and 1256 laid down that prostitutes should be driven out of town.

  DRESS, SONG AND LOVE

  In a world where comforts shared by all classes were few, degree showed itself to a large extent in apparel. In bed at night, all wore nothing—men and women, rich and poor. By day, a baron could be spotted in cold weather by his fur-lined pellice. Men of all ranks wore braies, the full, pleated breeches favoured by the Gauls, while the affluent also wore long stockings, or chauces, often in brilliant colours and of rich materials such as silk or cotton (imported from Africa, therefore of even greater rarity). Above would be worn a pleated doublet with full but short sleeves revealing the tight-fitting chainse shirt (handsomely embroidered in the case of the wealthy). Instead of a braie women who could afford it wore a long linen chainse trailing to the ground. Elegant women wore clothes of brilliant hue—for example, a purple mantle fastened by a gold pin at the breast, and a high wimple. Hair was parted in the middle, with two long plaits dropping down as far as possible. For men, shaving was no easy matter—performed with an instrument like a carving knife, painful on a virile stubble.

  To palliate the hardship of medieval life, entertainment was of the highest priority. Parisians of all ranks loved a party, especially a good wedding feast, where minstrels would perform. The principal instrument of the visiting jongleur would be a viele, a flat-bottomed fiddle, vaguely triangular, with three strings worked by a concave bow that was a little awkward to handle. The music of the times was, it seems, seldom in unison. The jongleur would first of all strike a note on his viele, and then chant; the much loved, heroic Chanson de Roland could take as long as five hours to perform. With his wide knowledge of Jerusalem, the Siege of Antioch, of Arabs and Babylonians, drawn from the Crusades, and his tales of heroes who would give up all in the cause of the Faith, the well-travelled jongleur was a much sought-after figure. Though the chansons de geste such as Roland, with their attachment to a chivalry that was heroic to the point of suicide and absurdity, were arguably to help France lose the Battle of Crécy in the next century, they now kindled in Parisians for the first time a patriotic feeling of intense love for la douce France—principally identified with the immediately surrounding Ile de France.

  Out of these chansons grew another form of literature of great importance, centred around women and dealing with courtly love. In this early development of feminism in France, the Crusades played a significant role: because of the lengthy absence of the lord, the lady gained more power. Here Eleanor of Aquitaine was perhaps a role model, as well as importing to rude Paris the “courtly” manners of the south. Beginning a long tradition, great ladies took to having lovers, in addition to their lawful spouses. Whereas in the more northerly clime of England the courtly lover of Malory and the Round Table tended to platonic adoration from afar, the Parisian woman already expected—and received—more earthly devotion. Nevertheless, as André Maurois points out, such chansons contributed to a “discipline of customs and manners which was a great step forward to civilization.” With it came the ascendant influence of the Parisian woman, and also the importance attached to love—and with it humour and satire.

  THE KING DIES

  The last years of Philippe Auguste’s reign were marred by a campaign in south-west France of appalling savagery against fellow Christians: the Albigensian Crusade. Whatever the actual heresy adopted by the unfortunate Albigensians, or Cathars (it was called Manichaeism), they were charged with enormous outrages such as institutionialized sodomy. The tolerance that had characterized Abélard’s twelfth century was fast evaporating, and charges of heresy, and the Inquisition, lay just around the corner, with the most baleful influences on France—and Paris. There were also thinly disguised territorial motives in the Albigensian Crusade, and, as with all religious civil wars, it was prosecuted with ruthless ferocity. Whole areas of Languedoc were laid waste by the awful Simon de Montfort. Whipped on by the Papal Legate, Arnaud Amalric, with the alleged exhortation “Kill them all. God will recognize his own,” the brutal massacre of the inhabitants of Béziers, where 7,000 men, women and children were herded into the Church of the Madeleine and slaughtered, is remembered to this day. The war in Languedoc was to drag on wretchedly for decades. Urged on by the Pope, Philippe pursued it with reluctance, but it remained a blot on the closing years of his reign and distracted him from his plans for Paris.

  In September 1222, when the Albigensian affair had taken a turn for the worse, Philipp
e was laid low with a fever which plagued him for the next nine months. Recognizing that death was near, he bequeathed his jewellery to Saint-Denis, and the substantial sum of 50,000 livres as compensation for citizens whom he had wrongfully condemned or who had been victims of his “extortions.” In July 1223, he was in the Eure, heading for a conference in Paris to the latest papal agenda for a crusade, when his condition deteriorated. On the 11th he was duly bled, and the following day he insisted that he had to die in Paris, but he had only reached Mantes on the 14th when death claimed him. He was buried the next day in his beloved Saint-Denis, having passed on a request to his successor to “offer justice to his people, and above all to protect the poor and humble from the insolence of the proud.”

  With his death, Paris in particular mourned a great ruler. The virtual founder of France, who had established a powerful country, Philippe Auguste left a capital for the first time secure enough within the mighty walls he had built around it to develop, thrive and expand. Paris had at last become the definitive administrative centre of France, as well as Europe’s capital of learning. With a population in Abélard’s time of 100,000 (the largest in Western Europe, but still tiny compared with the one million of contemporary Constantinople), it was now approaching the 200,000 mark. And the great gothic cathedrals that Philippe and his father left behind them were only the first instalments of a historic grandeur.