Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The Paris defenders were placed under command of the twenty-two-year-old half-brother of Mayenne, the Duc de Nemours, said to be energetic and zealous, but short of experience. Then, upon a scene hardly encouraging for the Catholics, there suddenly appeared a secret weapon—in the shape of the Papal Legate, Enrico Caetani, sent by Pope Sixtus V, perhaps the most resolute of all the Counter-Reformation pontiffs. Caetani’s mission was to purchase the release from Henri of Cardinal de Bourbon and to stiffen the resistance of the Parisians. Furnished with a credit note for 100,000 écus to devote to the Cardinal’s freedom, he promptly spent the money on providing the besieged with arms and foodstuffs. (The Cardinal died anyway during the siege.) Caetani established his moral ascendancy by declaring in a sermon before the Sorbonne that, “whether Catholic or not,” Henri was to be excluded for ever from the throne of France.

  Henri positioned two batteries of cannon on the heights of Montmartre, bombarding Paris indiscriminately, but with little effect on civilian morale. The Parisians, according to contemporary accounts, “just laughed.” But hunger began to take hold. Donkeys began to disappear, then—as would also happen in 1870—cats and dogs, and even rats. Rations were reduced, and one man was reported eating candle tallow; there were said to be experiments in milling bones out of the graveyards for flour, and there was more than one account of cannibalism—“little children disguised as meat.” A mother was found to have eaten her two dead children—both supposedly interred in accordance with Catholic rites, but a thigh was discovered in an armoire. The maid confessed everything, after the mother’s own death. As always, it was the poor who suffered most grievously, while (so it was claimed) religious establishments had stored provisions to last a year. According to Captain Pigaffetta, in the wealthy districts there were shops selling game and a wide range of foods—at extortionate prices. By August, Henri had captured all the suburbs and brought his guns “to within a stone’s throw” of the ramparts. It looked as if the fall of Paris was now but a matter of time. Pacifist feelings gathered strength. The Catholics, especially the extremist leaders of the League, steeled themselves for a dreadful orgy of revenge for St. Bartholomew’s Eve. But Henri, with his customary shrewdness, saw that clemency would serve him best. The League, however, rejected Henri’s terms, and the siege continued. Then two events of great significance took place—both of them outside Paris. First, on 27 August, the intransigent Pope Sixtus died, to be followed by more liberal pontiffs, three in just over a year; then came Clement VIII, who was radically to alter Vatican policy towards France and come to terms with Henri of Navarre. On the other side of the balance, however, and with far more immediate consequence for the starving Parisians was the news, which reached the city on 30 August, of the approach of a formidable liberating army led by the Italian Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, commander of Philip II’s forces in the Spanish Netherlands. One of Europe’s most outstanding generals, Parma had been ordered by Madrid to give up his current campaign against the Dutch and to hasten south to save Paris. At Meaux, some forty kilometres east of Paris, close to where the Kaiser was to be halted on the Marne in 1914, Parma linked up with Mayenne.

  Henri made one last assault on the southern ramparts, but was repulsed by four Jesuits, a librarian and a lawyer who defended the threatened sector with pickaxes. He was now obliged to abandon the siege and defend himself against Parma and Mayenne. To a new mistress, he wrote gloomily:

  Mistress, I am writing this to you the day before a battle. The issue is in the hand of God, who has already decided what will come of it and what he deems to be expedient for his glory and for the salvation of my people. If I lose the battle, you will never see me, because I am not the kind of man to flee or to retreat. I can assure you, however, that if I die, my penultimate thought will be of you and that my last will be of God.

  But, manoeuvring with more skill than Henri, Parma denied him both battle and a glorious death, and instead focused his attention on taking and securing the approaches to Paris. On 1 September a first convoy of foodstuffs reached the wretched city. By the 7th, Parma held both banks of the Marne at Lagny and was able to rush provisions down the river—that age-long lifeline of Paris.

  Proud Paris was liberated, amid frenzied rejoicings. But at what a cost! Out of its pre-siege population of 220,000, as many as 40,000 to 50,000 are estimated to have died of starvation or disease. The economic life of France’s capital had been seriously damaged by the most crippling siege in the history of any major European city since that of Constantinople by the Turks in the previous century. After all their suffering, the Parisians became increasingly disenchanted with the conduct of the League, and—with their habitual impatience—dismissive of its leaders.

  After four months of privation, the Papal Legate Enrico Caetani could not wait to get back to Rome. One of his entourage, the Bishop of Asti, Monsignor Panigarole, was to recall the torments of 1590: “there was no meat, no fish, no milk, no fruit, no vegetable. I would almost say there was no sun, no sky, no air … One thinks of the Siege of Jerusalem, one thinks of Titus and Sennacherib! It was a miracle …”

  * As a result of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War, the population had fallen from the 300,000 of 1314.

  FIVE

  * * *

  “Worth a Mass”

  As soon as he was master of Paris, one saw nothing but stonemasons at work.

  LE MERCURE GALANT ON HENRI IV, IN 1610

  PARIS REGAINED

  Once the siege was raised in the autumn of 1590, outside Paris the war continued fitfully, with Henri striving to isolate the capital from other French cities. In January 1591 he made another attempt on Paris, a Trojan-horse ruse directed at the Porte Saint-Honoré with soldiers disguised as peasants carrying sacks of flour, but they were driven off. The League took its revenge by executing four Parisian dignitaries for collusion, but was itself punished in turn by Mayenne, keen to maintain discipline, with the summary hanging of six of its leaders. France had arrived at a kind of stand-off. It was clear that neither Counter-Reformation Catholicism nor Protestantism would be acceptable to Paris. Added to all the killings during the thirty-year series of religious wars, the exhaustion inflicted by the siege left Parisians, anxious to free themselves from the reactionary inflexibility of the Leaguers, in a mood for compromise. Unable to win a clear-cut military victory, sensing the atmosphere in the capital and taking advantage of the new, temperate mood in the Vatican, as well as exploiting splits within the Paris League itself, Henri decided to play his supreme card.

  By the summer of 1592, he had come to understand that he would have to abjure Calvinism if he wished to consolidate his hold on the crown. His personal salvation concerned him hardly at all, but he realized that he could not move too quickly or his Catholic subjects would distrust him all the more. The following January the Estates-General of the League met in Paris, but it was not until May that Henri made the bombshell announcement that he had resolved to convert, “having recognized and judged that it was good to do so.” Negotiations took place between the League and Henri at La Villette, with Henri still pressing for a military advantage round the capital.

  Then, on Sunday, 25 July 1593, at Saint-Denis, the resting place of kings of France including Dagobert, Philippe Auguste and Saint Louis, Henri of Navarre, now a vigorous forty-year-old, solemnly abjured his Protestant faith to embrace Catholicism. The previous evening, leaders of the League, apprehensive about the coup that Henri was about to achieve, ordered parish priests in the city to declare the immediate excommunication of anyone daring to take part in this “comedy of the conversion.” Mayenne ordered the guards along the walls to shoot at anyone leaving the city during the next twenty-four hours. But these measures proved ineffective. Several hundred Parisians stole out of the city under cover of darkness to witness the ceremony at Saint-Denis. That day crowds, estimated variously at between 10,000 and 70,000, lined the streets and the square. The royal procession progressed along a thick carpet of flowers
thrown by well-wishers crying “Vive le roi!” at every step taken by the King. Henri was dressed in symbolic white: a simple white doublet and white stockings contrasted by a black cape, black shoes and a black plumed hat. This costume was designed to represent purity and innocence, and was carefully chosen by the King to reflect his whole-hearted penitence. He bore none of the usual insignia of office, such as fleurs-de-lys or crowns. The only emblem of royal authority was his sword, a sign of the power which reinforced the significance of his conversion. As he approached the steps of the church, he relinquished even this symbol.

  After he had received absolution from the Archbishop, a flock of white doves was released from the abbey’s belfry, to indicate the occurrence of a “miracle.” Then Henri IV left Saint-Denis and rode on horseback with an escort to Montmartre, where, at the martyred saint’s tomb, he gave thanks to God for his conversion. There was more wild cheering as he rode through the hilly streets. From Montmartre he surveyed the rebellious capital which still defied him, as cannonades and fireworks lit up the sky in his honour. Paris, Henri is famously said to have observed that day, was “well worth a Mass.” For all his earthly cynicism, however, Henri IV, founder of the Bourbon dynasty, was to prove one of France’s greatest monarchs. With Paris longing for peace and stability, the League was at last crumbling to pieces. There now began a steady stream of desertions to Henri’s camp, and in August 1593 a general truce was concluded with Mayenne. The stage was set for Henri’s triumph in Paris.

  On 22 March 1594, having already been formally crowned in Chartres, he entered his turbulent capital as Henri IV. There had, in effect, been a coup, negotiated during the previous night in deepest secrecy between the Duc de Cossé Brissac, the newly appointed Governor of Paris—eager for a marshal’s baton from a grateful ruler—and two representatives of the Paris bourgeois échevins, or aldermen. Together with the prévôt and a small posse of troops, Brissac seized the Porte Saint-Denis and headed for the Louvre. There they were halted by a guard of some twenty German Landsknechte, but these were dispersed, killed or thrown into the Seine.

  That was the sum of resistance. The Grand Châtelet was taken without a shot, and at 6 a.m. Brissac was opening the gates of Paris to Henri. It was cold and raining, but the King nonetheless removed his ornate headdress as he began his descent along the Rue Saint-Honoré. Promptly, and diplomatically, he went to Notre-Dame to sing a Te Deum. The pealing of the cathedral bells was the first warning the sleepy Leaguers received that the enemy they had so resolutely held at bay for three years was now in their midst. Swiftly Henri’s champions ran through the city, proclaiming a general amnesty and instructing all to wear a white scarf as a sign of loyalty.

  Now properly awake, crowds poured into the street to see the King as he left Notre-Dame to make his way to the Louvre. Previous joyeuses entrées into Paris of kings newly anointed or on marriage had been lavish affairs. At the triumphal entry of Henri II in 1549, for instance, leading poets and artists had been hired to decorate the route of the procession, terminating at the Palais de Justice with symbolic statuary and triumphal arches inscribed with verses in praise of the King. The parade had included representatives of all the city’s corporations, including fifty pastry chefs, forty barrel-makers, 250 printers and 200 tailors. A second, similar procession had been held two days later for the entry of the Queen.

  All that was in marked contrast to the simple spontaneity that now greeted this far more historic entry of Henri of Navarre. Bravely the King walked through the streets, jostled and greeted by the curious. Many were surprised to find him quite human, physically normal and friendly; the League preachers had never portrayed him that way. That afternoon Philip II’s Spanish garrison left the city in good order. They filed past, saluting the King. To their leaders he responded, “Recommend me to your master, but never come back.” The party attached to the Papal Legate had already decamped in the morning, taking with it a few Parisian parish priests who were implicated in the activities of the League. Later, the standing corporations of the city and individuals who had compromised themselves by collaboration with the League requested an audience to seek forgiveness. Henri was willing to show himself a gracious victor; no more than 140 individuals were banished from the city, and even these were allowed to rejoin Mayenne in Meaux, should they so desire. No obstacles were put in their way. There were no executions, no confiscations of property. On the other hand, as an instrument of discipline, Henri had erected a gallows near the Porte Saint-Antoine, “to hang any person who should be found so bold as to attempt anything against the public peace.”

  THE CITY IN 1594

  After all the years of bitter internecine fighting, followed by the terrible deprivations of the 1590 siege, the Paris that Henri IV inherited was indeed a sad city. Nothing had been repaired, let alone built. Living conditions had become unbearable. The siege, mob violence and the continual guard duty imposed on many citizens had caused shopkeepers to shut their doors and workers to stop producing even the necessities of life. Commerce had ceased when the siege made land and river traffic impossible. One of Henri’s first acts had been to order that shops be opened and work resumed.

  The streets were covered with a thick slime of decayed garbage, ashes, urine and faeces (animal and human). Uncobbled, they became impassable during rains, and even where paved the holes were so deep and full of mud that horses risked breaking their legs. It was reported that only “the most refined courtiers” were able to avoid the mud by resorting to a horse or a mule, often with their wives en croupe. There were only eight functional carrosses in the whole city. If the paving originated by Philippe Auguste was in a dreadful state, so were the bridges. Lack of funds blocked even the most essential projects.

  Grandiose schemes initiated by Hugues Aubriot to provide a system of sewers had been brought to a standstill. Sanitation in this overcrowded city was worse than it had ever been, and its very survival had become endangered by the neglect of public fountains and streets during the years of violence. With each year of the war, contamination of water supplies had increased and the peril of epidemic had grown greater. Plague was constantly in attendance, and even though the municipal government knew the water to be contaminated it did little to restore the fountains. Many had ceased to flow at all; conduits leaked, flooding cellars and privies in nearby houses. For lack of water the Parisians turned back to well and river water, both of which were contaminated. Over the course of a decade and a half there were no fewer than three plague epidemics; 30,000 had died in 1580, and two years after his entrée, in 1596, Henri was forced to retire to Rouen after 600 had died of la peste in the Hôtel Dieu in one month. To the multiplicity of street cries was added that of a much sought-after vendor of patent rat-traps:

  La mort aux ratz aux souriz

  C’est une invention nouvelle!

  The plight of the poor had become more grievous than ever. To keep the hordes of militant beggars at bay, householders were instructed by ordinance not to have more than one street door, and never to leave their homes uninhabited. Many of the beggars joined murderous bands with names such as “Tire-Laine” and “Mauvais Garçons.” Punishments were correspondingly draconian; the Italian Ambassador recorded, in 1577, hangings every day in Paris, “at every point.” Since the days of Philippe Auguste the forms of execution had also become increasingly ingenious and refined, suitable to every infraction. A letter to Rabelais listed some of those meted out to religious malefactors: “brûlez, tenaillez, cisaillez, noyez, pendez, empalez, espaultrez, démebrez, executrez, crucifiez, bouillez, escarbrouillez, découpez, fricassez, grillez, tronçonnez, écartelez, déhinquaindez, carbonadez, ces méchants hérétiques.” Abandoned for a century, the brutal wheel had been brought back as an instrument of capital torture; decapitation was reserved for the gentry.

  In physical terms, the Paris Henri inherited in 1594 was encircled by a grey stone wall two and a half kilometres in diameter, and about sixteen kilometres in circumference. Towers built by
Charles V rose up every seventy metres. At the four points where the walls came down to the Seine stood tall, though neglected, bastions, from which heavy iron chains could be suspended across the river to prevent enemy ships from sailing into Paris during a siege.

  Paris was still very much a medieval city, with the Ile de la Cité at its heart. At the western end of the island stood the Palais, a chaotic maze of chiefly gothic buildings. Since the King and court had departed, it now housed the Parlement, the Chambre des Comptes, the Cour des Aides and the Cour des Monnaies, together constituting the highest functions of government. Louis IX’s Sainte-Chapelle, built in the thirteenth century, stood in the centre, its delicate spire rising sublimely over all the surrounding buildings. Around the Palais, much as now, there scurried a population of some 4,000–5,000 magistrates, clerks, copyists and minor officials. In addition, merchants, booksellers, paper- and ink-sellers, prostitutes, singers, letter-writers and beggars, among others, daily set up shop or frequented the dozens of stalls tacked on to the buildings. The focus of all this bustle was the Grande Salle, with its marble floor, heavy columns lined with statues of French kings, and gold ceiling—a favourite meeting place for tout Paris.

  Still connecting the Ile with the Left and Right Banks were bridges crowded with overhanging wooden buildings, veritable deathtraps. In December 1596, the Pont au Meunier collapsed, depositing its 160 or more inhabitants in the Seine. The bridge had been swept away by currents many times, and earlier that year inspectors had warned house-owners that it might fall. Probably absentee landlords, they did nothing. When the bridge finally disintegrated, François Miron, the prévôt, installed six months previously, took charge of the rescue operations. He ordered guards placed over the wreckage to stop pillaging, and then began the task of prosecuting the guilty parties, the owners of the bridge, in an operation that might easily have set off a general riot.