Edward’s small armies were highly efficient and full of national spirit. Year after year his marauding bands plundered and laid waste to northern France. Ten years after the massacre at Crécy another shattering defeat was inflicted at Poitiers by Edward’s son the Black Prince on an army that had not troubled to learn the lessons of the earlier débâcle. As if this were not enough, now the Black Death descended. Perhaps half the population of France was wiped out by the deadly combination of war and plague.
Preceded—so legend had it—by a portentous ball of fire in the skies over the city, the Black Death reached Paris in the summer of 1348, then moved slowly on towards Flanders and Germany. Paris herself, always vulnerable to any epidemic as a result of her overcrowding and poor sanitation, suffered far worse than the countryside or the smaller towns. Believing cats to be the source of plague, the Parisians killed off their most effective instruments for dealing with the plague-bearing rat population. The death rate reached 800 a day. The cemeteries and charnel houses were overflowing; soon there were not enough living to bury the dead, who lay rotting in their houses or even on the streets. Priests abandoned the sick and dying to shrive themselves. Those rich enough to do so, nobles and churchmen, left the city: “Those who were left drank, fornicated or skulked in the cellars according to their inclinations.” It seemed as if life, at best, could only drag on for a few painful weeks. Paris was described as having come close to “a complete collapse of public and private morality.” By the time the plague receded, in the winter of 1349, her population had been decimated.
During the Hundred Years War, France’s struggle for national survival left little time, cash or spirit for grand building designs in the capital. By way of a reminder of the grim fourteenth century, only a handful of half-timber houses remain, in the Rue François Miron—one of which today serves as a maison de rencontre. The fortunes of Paris rose and fell with those of the Valois kings. The sobriquets of these pre-Renaissance rulers did not always accurately reflect their characters, or their achievements. There was Jean le Bon, who was both bad and disastrous, losing for France the Battle of Poitiers, while Charles le Fou was certainly no worse; Charles VII, “Le Victorieux,” seems not to have been, losing his capital (for a while) as a result. A praiseworthy exception to the rule was Charles V, “Le Sage” (1364–80).
The auguries for Charles V, a small and deceptively frail man, were not encouraging. In 1356, while he was still dauphin, his father, the ill-starred Jean le Bon, and his brother Philippe were both imprisoned in London, having been captured, most humiliatingly, at Poitiers—from which battlefield Charles himself had managed to beat a rapid retreat. Taking advantage of the King’s defeat, in Paris the headstrong prévôt, Etienne Marcel, urged administrative reforms upon the monarchy that would today be regarded as distinctly democratic. Foreshadowing many things to come in Paris, including the events of 1789 and the Commune of 1871, Marcel held that a “Commune of Paris” should govern the kingdom, in consultation with the King. The monarchy experienced one of its most perilous moments when, at a cabinet meeting, two of the Dauphin’s principal counsellors, the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, were slaughtered before his eyes by supporters of Marcel.
But Marcel had overreached himself. Like Adolphe Thiers and the Versailles government in 1871 (or like Louis XIV and his mother, the Regent, during the Fronde), Charles decided to pull out of Paris and regroup with a view to seizing the capital by force. Around Paris the peasants, pushed over the brink by the deprivations of war, rose and made common cause with Marcel. But this jacquerie revolt was put down, and some 20,000 were slaughtered. Etienne Marcel then committed the unthinkable, and allied himself with the occupying English. This was altogether too much for the Parisians; “hooted at and censured,” Marcel was assassinated by his own followers in July 1358. From Compiègne Charles then re-entered Paris with ease and, at once demonstrating clemency and pushing aside Marcel’s constitutional reforms, ruled as an absolute but restrained monarch.
Charles now sought to secure Paris by upgrading the protective wall of Philippe Auguste, pushing it outwards to embrace the recently expanded city faubourgs (or suburbs) and fortifying the precincts of the Abbey of Saint-Germain. He abandoned Philippe’s old palace in the smelly and claustrophobic Ile de la Cité, first for the Hôtel Saint-Pol in the Marais and then, in 1368, for the fresh air and security of the Louvre. A cultured man and patron of the arts, Charles demolished Philippe’s grim old bastion, replacing it with a palace that, while it remained a stronghold, was embellished with fantastical turrets, pointed spires, conical roofs with lacy ridges, crested battlements and tall gilt weathervanes as handed down to posterity in the exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, compiled by the brothers Limbourg. Less militarily functional windows began to supplant the narrow arrow-slits of a city at risk. Its elegant, light-hearted fancies would have done credit to Bavaria’s Schloss Neuschwannstein, and no doubt it was the Louvre of Charles V that partly inspired Mad Ludwig. Moving into it four years after he came to the throne, Charles was the first and almost the last French king to make the Louvre his principal residence. Within its safe walls he collected his ancestor’s manuscripts to found the first Bibliothèque Nationale. Outside, a great rampart, running just five metres east of today’s Arc du Carrousel, now marked the western limits of Paris.
Like many of his successors, Charles ran into trouble with the rowdies of the Sorbonne; he met it by closing off the Rue de la Fouarre with chains at each end. In the next reign, that of his son, the unfortunate Charles le Fou (Charles VI), the University once more earned opprobrium by supporting a collaborationist party that favoured making Henry V of England the rightful king of France, thus earning for itself the epithet “an annexe of Oxford.”
What Charles V did for Paris, however, was not matched by either his financial or his diplomatic acumen. The Hundred Years War continued in all its horror, bringing France—and Paris—one of the most tragic periods in history. At Agincourt in 1415, as many as 10,000 French warriors fell to Henry’s longbowmen, at negligible cost to the English. It was a time of bitter cold, when the wolves came into the city to keep warm. The combination of the war and the Black Death had rendered much of the rural population of France homeless and starving. Fleeing the ruined countryside, these uprooted peasants sought shelter inside Charles V’s girdle of walls, where they set up a perilous no-go area in a tangle of reeking streets, establishing their own laws and terrorizing the populace. In daytime they spilled out into the rest of Paris, transmogrifying themselves into blind or limbless beggars; by night they miraculously recovered their faculties, attracting to the unsavoury area the name Cour des Miracles. In Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo described it as an “immense changing-room of all the actors of this comedy that robbery, prostitution and murder play on the cobbled streets of Paris.”
Paris was now under the occupation of les goddams (as the English soldiery were known). From Les Tournelles, his palace in the Marais, on the present site of the resplendent Hôtel de Soubise, the Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V and self-proclaimed Regent of France (1420–35), governed Paris—and not badly, though few Frenchmen would admit it. King without a capital, Charles VII ruled from Bourges over a divided rump of France—comparable to the area of non-occupied Vichy France from 1940. Then came Jeanne d’Arc, and by 1453 les goddams, now riven by a combination of weak kings and their own civil disputes— the Wars of the Roses—departed. With them also went the wolves. But, though the Hundred Years War was at last at an end, more wars followed, and internecine civil disputes too, with Louis XI taken prisoner in his own country, at Péronne in 1468.
RENAISSANCE STIRRINGS
By now, however, the first glimmer of a new light was beginning to illuminate Paris from the south-east, from Italy. Already during the reign of Charles VI contemporary paintings depict the mad King lying on his bed richly caparisoned in garments, the fabrics of which had made the wealth of Renai
ssance Florence. Liberated from the scourge north of the Channel, the Valois began to turn eager, and greedy, eyes towards Italy. Through marriages and deaths (notably of King René of Anjou and of Provence) and almost by default Louis XI made huge territorial gains, which set him among the great builders of the nation. During his reign, France acquired much of the geographical shape of the hexagon she inhabits today. Maine, Anjou and Provence, even powerful Burgundy, so long a thorn in the side of France, fell into Louis’s hands virtually without a battle. He also obtained a foothold in Naples. With Naples there opened a window that would bring enormous cultural wealth to Paris, but would also lead to the undoing of many a subsequent French ruler—down to Napoleon III—seduced by the allure of Italian sun and riches. Louis XI, sometimes described as the “strangest of all the Valois,” was certainly the most restless, spending half of his twenty-two-year reign wandering, away from Paris, and dying in his château at Plessis-les-Tours.
Nevertheless, within a few years of the departure of the last English troops, France under Louis XI recovered (as she was often to do) with astonishing rapidity. Recovery was partly a result of the fertility of her soil, coupled with the industry of her peasants; but it was also spurred by what de Gaulle later mystically identified as “une certaine idée de la France,” or, as André Maurois puts it, “a deep-rooted certainty that a Frenchman can only be a Frenchman.” Hand in hand with this went a fundamental, unshakeable belief in France’s universal mission civilisatrice.
In 1461, Louis XI made his joyeuse entrée into Paris. As André Maurois relates:
Upon his entry, the herald, Loyal Coeur, presented him with five noble ladies who represented the five letters of the name Paris, and each of them made a speech of welcome. The horses were caparisoned with cloth of gold lined with sable, with velvet lined with ermine, and with cloth of Damascus mounted with goldsmiths’ work. At the fountain of Ponceau, three handsome girls took the part of the Sirens, all naked, and you could see “their lovely breasts, round and firm, which was a very pleasant thing,” and they warbled little motets.
On the Pont au Change, the bird-sellers, who had a monopoly on the Place du Châtelet (they still have it), released 200 of their wares, brilliant of plumage. But Paris benefited little during Louis’s reign. Indeed he seems to have been something of a skinflint, once declaring, “I have decided to marry my small daughter Joan to the small Duc d’Orléans, because it seems to me that the children they might have would not cost much to feed.”
Louis’s son Charles VIII soon became seduced “by the phantoms and glories of Italy,” and involved himself in a lightning campaign that was so effective that it almost resembled a promenade, bringing him to the very gates of Rome. Initially, the Italians seemed to welcome the French; Charles in turn came home enthralled by Italian art, thus opening France’s doors to the Renaissance. Alas, in 1498, aged only twenty-eight, the poor gangly fellow died after bashing his head on the low lintel of a door at Amboise on the Loire, the château to which he was so passionately attached. On his death, the succession went sideways, to the Orléans branch of the House of Valois. The new King, Louis XII, great-grandson of Charles V, was yet another who did not share his forebear’s passion for Paris. He too was to be enticed into the maze of Italian politics and intrigue, by Pope Julius II, the builder of St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. This warrior Pope, aroused by Machiavelli, wanted the weight of French arms as a counterbalance to his enemy, the Venetians. But as soon as Louis became too successful and occupied Milan, Julius II switched sides and sought to get rid of the French. In 1513 Louis’s army was crushed at Novara, Milan was lost, and the French had to beat an indecently hasty retreat back over the Alps. Though Italy was lost, she was never forgotten. Aged fifty-three and without an heir, Louis was married a third time, to Mary, the sixteen-year-old sister of England’s Henry VIII. In an apparent effort to please his lusty young bride, the sickly Louis was said to have greatly exceeded his strength and died suddenly in the middle of the night on New Year’s Day, 1515.
In France as a whole, which enjoyed a period of rare prosperity and peace at home, the reign of Louis XII was generally rated a success—though, like his predecessors, he had had little time—or money—to devote to his capital. Thus, over five reigns during the previous century and a quarter, Paris virtually stagnated. When they were not away at the wars, the later Valois concentrated their wealth and energies on the joys of la chasse, and on translating the marvels of the Italian Renaissance to their glorious châteaux on the Loire—Amboise, Blois, Chenonceaux, Chaumont and Azay, culminating in the modest hunting lodge of François I at Chambord, with an entire village constructed on its roof and its great spiral staircases designed to take a horse and coach.
Anything to be away from smelly, pestilential, unruly Paris!
TWO STRONG KINGS
It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between the sickly and delicate Louis XII and his successor, the robust, rumbustious François Premier. Just twenty-one when he succeeded (sideways, like the heirless Louis), François was a giant of over two metres tall, with long legs and arms and massive hands and feet. In his energies, appetites and tastes, he was every inch the Renaissance king; in the magnificence of his clothes he closely resembled his contemporary, England’s Henry VIII—the close-fitting doublets with the slashed sleeves, the extravagant Italian shoes and the feathered hats. He brought Benvenuto Cellini to France, and Leonardo da Vinci died in his arms. Like his two predecessors, as Bismarck might have said in a different context, François’s “map of Europe” lay in Italy—and so did his fate. Inheriting a country threatened on three sides—by Henry VIII across the Channel, by Emperor Maximilian beyond the Rhine, and by Ferdinand of Aragon over the Pyrenees—François decided to seize the initiative by recapturing Milan—almost on a whim. At first things went well. At the resplendent Field of the Cloth of Gold, a forerunner of lavish state visits, François managed to entice Henry VIII into watchful, and only temporary, neutrality. But the death of Maximilian I brought a far more redoubtable foe to the east—the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, ruler of Habsburg Austria and King of Spain.
Thus, hardly had France recovered from the Hundred Years War against England than a new challenge appeared. Spain, released from Moorish bondage and now, under Charles V, allied by marriage to the Austrian Habsburgs, confronted France on both sides, east and west. Here were the beginnings of France’s ensuing four centuries of conflict with the Germanic world; by the time of François’s death in 1547, it should have been clear that the enduring problem for France was no longer Italy.
Ten years into his reign, disaster struck the perhaps excessively hubristic François. His cousin Charles de Bourbon, Constable of the Kingdom of France and thus its most powerful military leader, defected to the enemy. Suddenly it looked as if the dreadful days of the Hundred Years War might be returning, with enemy troops advancing to within fifty kilometres of Paris—as close as Kaiser Wilhelm was ever to come. Rashly crossing the Alps once again, François led his army to total defeat at Pavia in 1525, crushed by Spanish infantry, the most formidable soldiery in Europe at that time. He himself was wounded and taken prisoner—the last French ruler to be imprisoned by a foreign power until Napoleon on Elba. Paris was left all but undefended. To his mother François wrote the famous words: “Madame, of everything there remain to me only honour and life, which are unscathed.” To many Frenchmen, however, it must have seemed as if the melancholy prediction of Louis XII was coming true: “We busy ourselves in vain … that big young fellow will spoil everything.”
It looked as though a resurgent, fiercely reactionary Catholic Spain, bursting with wealth plundered from the New World, was becoming master of Christendom. Meanwhile, across the Rhine an event that was soon to shake Christendom, especially France, went by almost unnoticed. In 1517, a little-known German monk called Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the local church at Wittenberg, in protest against the sale of indulgences to
finance the building of Saint Peter’s, and against the harshness of Madrid-oriented Catholicism in general. There followed his excommunication and his courageous appearance before the dread Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Though beset by enemies, at home and abroad, François had at least succeeded in preserving the national integrity of France; but, as his foreign wars ended, so the sixteenth century’s wars of religion began, leading to an epoch of terrible civil conflicts in France.
While in captivity François studied his captors’ success in the New World and dreamed up his “grand design” for France. On his release (after submitting to a draconian peace treaty) he was to found the port of Le Havre as a base for exploration and to despatch Jacques Cartier on the first of his voyages to discover Canada. Much of his energy went into hunting, and the building of vast hunting-boxes such as Chambord, precursor of Versailles. As a result of all this, on top of his unrelenting military expenditure, François’s finances were constantly in a tangle, and the country was heavily in debt. To offset some of this burden, François introduced bonds on the Hôtel de Ville as a principle of public debt, while money moved into the hands of a bourgeoisie seeking to merge with the nobility.
Despite his many other distractions, François I was, however, the first king since his great-great-grandfather Charles V, nearly two centuries before, to undertake serious works in Paris. Allowing the Renaissance to establish its ineffaceable imprint there, he razed Charles’s fortress Louvre as well as the last structures of Philippe Auguste. Evincing Paris’s new sense of security at the heart of the nation, the Louvre was no longer a bastion (after his incarceration in Madrid, François had a horror of fortresses), but an elegant and majestic palace. Designed by the architect Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon—“the French Phidias”—it was to prove a masterpiece of Renaissance grace, its style borrowed from Greece and Rome but with an unmistakable Frenchness. François had had time to complete only the two south-west sections on the Cour Carrée (the palace as a whole was not finished until 1663). His son Henri II and later Henri III were to add the two lateral wings. But François had set the classical design for the future, as well as initiating the art collection that would make the Louvre the greatest gallery of paintings in the world. Legend has it that he brought its most famous canvas, the Mona Lisa, to Paris after the death of Leonardo in 1519.
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