Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  It was the time of the early scramble for colonies in the New World, but Sully saw France’s map of the world lying entirely in Europe. “Things which remain separated from our body by foreign lands or seas will only be ours at great expense and to little purpose” was his view. Instead he performed wonders to repair the damages of war, reconstructing bridges, rebuilding roads (and lining them with trees), laying out a network of canals, draining marshes and improving afforestation, and spending more money on these areas than at any other time during the century. Modern France is greatly indebted to Sully for the ordered beauty of her countryside, as well as for the establishment of industries making carpets, tapestries and glass. In Paris he ordered new streets to be cut which would allow carriages and merchants’ carts to pass. Soon, residence in a broad, straight street was to become a mark of social status.

  Sully left to posterity a fine hôtel between the Place des Vosges and the Rue Saint-Antoine, but he was something of a puritan, opposed to the idle and pleasure-loving ways of life, and Henri’s wanton extravagances were a constant worry to him. Having to squeeze Parisians to meet the gigantic costs of the King’s improvements to the Louvre was bad enough, but on top of that were all the women—and his profligacy as a gambler. As age began to exact its toll, affecting at least his external aspects, and the Vert Galant remained galant but no longer green, Parisians—ever restless and impatient—found the image less enchanting, and now tended to see instead the cost of it all. Catholics chafed under the terms of Nantes, and the League began to raise its head again. By 1610, Henri’s popularity was distinctly waning.

  From 1601 to 1610, a delicate Pax Gallicana had been maintained on Henri’s borders, during which time France—and Paris especially—had prospered. The King, through the voice of Sully, began to talk ominously about the “Grand Design,” whereby the continent would be ruled by a council of sixty elected members. More specifically, the Design targeted Flanders and the Rhineland (an orientation that was to bring to ruin Henri’s grandson Louis XIV). There the death of the Duke of Jülich-Cleves had left this important principality in a power-vacuum, enticing to Spain. But, in the eyes of Parisians, there was far more to it than mere power politics. Henri had unbecomingly fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, Charlotte, daughter of the Constable of France, from the powerful house of Montmorency, who had captured his imagination dancing before him in a fête as one of the nymphs of the goddess Diana. Suspicious (rightly) of the King’s intentions, her fiancé, the Prince de Condé, fled with Charlotte across the border to Brussels in November 1609, escaping ahead of the King’s prévôts by only a few hours.

  Stricken, the lovelorn King wrote that, from misery, “I am now nothing more than skin and bone. Everything displeases me; I run away from company and if I permit myself to be brought into any gathering, instead of cheering me up, it succeeds in killing me.” Shocking though it was to the French body politic, it looked as if Henri was prepared to go to war to get her back. The atmosphere in Paris particularly was tense as the war on which Henri seemed to be embarking threatened completely to redraw the map of Europe, placing France squarely in the camp of the Protestant nations. By May 1610 a powerful (and expensive) French army 50,000 strong, backed by English and Dutch troops, was poised to invade Flanders; but on the 14th of that month, on the eve of Henri going off to join his soldiers, something unimaginable occurred.

  SIX

  * * *

  Regicide, Regent and Richelieu

  An entire city, built with pomp, seems to have arisen miraculously from an old ditch.

  CORNEILLE, LE MENTEUR, 1643

  ASSASSINATION OF HENRI IV

  At 4 p.m. on 14 May 1610, Henri was travelling from the Louvre to meet Sully at the Arsenal when his coach became stuck in congested traffic in the narrow Rue de la Ferronnerie, close to today’s Centre Pompidou. Since his formal accession in 1593 there had been twenty-four known plots to assassinate him, but Henri was careless of danger, perhaps believing that destiny would protect him. Nevertheless, in recent months he had apparently had several premonitions of his death. After going to Mass at the Church of Saint-Roch that morning, he had met with Marshal de Bassompierre, who had found him “strange in his manner”; his thoughts seemed fixed on his death. Bassompierre chided him for his uncharacteristic gloom, remarking that he was just in the prime of life: “Had he not the finest kingdom in the world, a beautiful wife, a beautiful maîtresse and two lovely children?” It was to no avail. “Mon ami,” said the King, “I’ve got to leave it all!” Because of the narrowness and congestion of the Paris streets, Henri was travelling in a small, light phaeton with open sides. Yet that same Bassompierre had just received from Italy a remarkable invention: a heavy coach enclosed by glass windows, the armoured limousine of its day. Had the King been in Bassompierre’s Italian vehicle, less accessible from the street, he might well have survived.

  A thirty-two-year-old with red hair, François Ravaillac, was awaiting his opportunity. Ravaillac was a rejected monk and failed schoolteacher from Angoulême who had done time in a debtors’ prison; he was also a fanatical Catholic, given to hallucinations and delusions about his role as deliverer of France and said to have declared that he would “prefer the honour of God to all else” and that he would like to see all heretics subjected to fire and brimstone. He had come to Paris in December 1609 seeking, in vain, an audience with the King in order to tell him to banish the Protestants, or else force conversion upon them. Returning to Paris the following April, Ravaillac was appalled to learn of the preparations for war, a war against the Pope, which, in his eyes, “meant war against God.” He stole a short kitchen knife from an inn, determined to kill the King, but changing his mind at least once.

  In the Rue de la Ferronnerie, Henri’s coach was blocked by a broken-down haycart in collision with a wagon laden with provisions, while another cart had collapsed under the weight of its load of barrels—a typical Parisian scene. The King’s attendants dispersed to help with the carts. Ravaillac, having stalked Henri all morning, now saw his chance, leaped on to the running-board of the coach and stabbed the King three times, just as he was reading a letter. After the first blow Henri heroically murmured, “Ce n’est rien,” but Ravaillac’s second blow severed his aorta, killing him instantly. The assassin made no attempt to flee, and was seized by Henri’s travelling companion, the Duc d’Epernon. The King was rushed to a neighbouring apothecary, but there was no hope. His body was taken back to the Louvre, where he had been living, while overnight Paris was assured that he had only been wounded.

  When the truth finally got out the next day, a horrified Paris began to look for vengeance. The tax burden and the sex scandals were forgotten; the ill-conceived expedition to Jülich swiftly put on hold. But who, apart from the madman Ravaillac, was to blame? Ravaillac, subjected to the most appalling tortures, was insistent that he had acted alone. Most of Paris refused to believe this; there was evidence that there had been several plots in hand, Henri having earned the hatred of extremists on both sides for his efforts towards religious reconciliation. Heavily under suspicion was his former mistress the Marquise de Verneuil, known to have been hoping that, upon Henri’s death, her son, the bastard child of the King, would succeed. And there was always the sinister hand of Spain. A paralysing fear spread through the city that, after two decades of peace, civil war would grip the land once more. The Jesuits, for one, fearful that they would be blamed, hastened to praise the King and acquired his heart to bury in their chapel at La Flèche, on the Ile de la Cité; while Huguenot leaders rushed forward to acclaim him the best king Providence had granted them.

  On 27 May, still protesting that he had acted as a free agent on a divinely inspired mission, Ravaillac was put to death. Before being drawn and quartered, the fate of a regicide, on the scaffold erected at the Place de Grève, he was scalded with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh then being torn by pincers. After this hors d’oeuvre of inhumanity, his arms and legs
were attached to horses which then pulled in opposite directions. One of the horses “foundered,” so a zealous chevalier offered his mount; “the animal was full of vigour and pulled away a thigh.” After an hour and a half of this cruelty, Ravaillac died, as the mob tried to prevent him from receiving the last rites and urged the horses to pull harder. When what remained of the regicide finally expired, “the entire populace, no matter what their rank, hurled themselves on the body with their swords, knives, sticks or anything else to hand and began beating, hacking and tearing at it. They snatched the limbs from the executioner, savagely chopping them up and dragging the pieces through the streets.” Children made a bonfire and flung remnants of Ravaillac’s body on to it. According to a witness, one woman actually ate some of the flesh. The executioner, who was supposed to have the body of the regicide reduced to ashes in order to complete the ritual as demanded by the law, could find nothing to bring his task to completion but the assassin’s shirt. Seldom, even at the height of the Terror, can the Paris mob have acted with greater ferocity, a ferocity born as much of fear as of grief and vengeance. But their frenzy also attested to the powerful sentiments of loyalty to the Crown which Henri had done so much to rekindle.

  The King’s embalmed corpse was placed on display in the Louvre until 29 June, then conducted solemnly to Saint-Denis, where he had first made his vows as a Catholic monarch seventeen years before, and where a solemn funeral service was held on 1 July. The cortège then processed across Henri’s own recently completed Pont Neuf.

  THE REGENCY

  Of Henri’s all-too-brief reign, it would be hard to improve on André Maurois’s assessment. The results may have been “less astonishing than legend would have them,” he wrote,

  but at least Henri IV and Sully gave France ten years’ truce, and the country remembered it as a golden age … “You cannot be a Frenchman,” said Henri de Rohan, “without regretting the loss to its well-being France has suffered.” Ten generations have confirmed this judgement, and Henri IV remains, together with Charlemagne, Joan of Arc and Saint Louis, one of France’s heroes. He typifies not France’s mystical aspect, but its aspects of courage, good sense and gaiety.

  Much loved by so many of his countrymen, Henri of Navarre was the second consecutive French king to die by the knife of a religious zealot. What would have happened in Paris if Ravaillac had proved to be Huguenot or the tool of a Protestant conspiracy instead of a lone Catholic fanatic is awful to contemplate. As it was, the city trembled for days if not weeks; throughout the country a renewal of civil war was widely predicted. Waiting in the wings, in Milan, fêted by Spanish envoys there, was the self-exiled Prince de Condé, the last would-be cuckold of the murdered King and a close prince of the blood—though he was held back by a lack of both charm and resolve. But Henri at least had planned his succession as well as he could. For all the rival claims of the mistresses, he had left a legitimate heir by Marie de Médicis, Louis XIII.

  The new King, however, was a child not quite nine years old; over the next hundred years, there would be three child kings in a row on the throne of France, ruling through three regents. This was a uniquely dangerous situation for a mighty country confronted by watchful enemies, both inside and outside. In the case of both Louis XIII and his son Louis XIV, aged four when he came to the throne, the regent would be a woman, the Queen Mother. But Henri had foresight. Six months before his death he had declared to Marshal de Lesdiguières that he “well knew that the foundation of everything in France is the prince’s authority.” For that reason, he intended to establish the Dauphin “as absolute king and to give him all the true, essential marks of royalty, to the end that there might be no one in the realm who would not have to obey him.” Here, de facto, was enunciated the principle of absolutism by which, for better or worse, France would be governed until the Great Revolution 180 years later—and which would be revived under Napoleon.

  On the eve of setting off for the wars, Henri had taken the wise precaution of designating his queen, Marie, to act as regent in his absence, supported by a Regent’s Council fifteen strong. Though she had not the authoritarian will of her predecessor Catherine, Marie—fat, blonde and comely enough when Rubens glorified her—sensibly retained all of Henri’s ministers. Only the ageing Sully resigned; but he left France’s coffers full. Acting judiciously to calm Protestant fears of another Saint Bartholomew’s, one of her first moves was to confirm the Edict of Nantes. But the stability achieved by Henri, which was not rooted in any fundamental reforms, had been no more than a temporary truce, and as such it remained constantly at risk.

  When Marie was declared regent shortly after the announcement of Henri’s death, Parisians were so shocked and frightened “that in a moment the expression of all Paris changed … The boutiques closed; everyone began to wail and cry, with women and girls tearing their hair out.” In fact, Parisians did not rise up in revolt. Instead of running to arms, they prayed for the health and prosperity of the new King, the whole of their fury directed against the regicide. So Marie was able to lay a foundation sufficiently sound for the young Louis XIII to survive campaigns against the princes in 1619–20 and against the Huguenots in 1627–8—and to resist the external pressures of the Thirty Years War, which ravaged central Europe.

  Outside Paris but within the Ile de France, increasingly affluent nobles built a multitude of elegant châteaux, harbingers of Versailles—constructed like Courances in the brick-and-stone manner of Henri IV, one of the most felicitous styles of any. But within the capital few great new building projects were undertaken under the Regency. The Queen Mother contented herself with purchasing and completing her sumptuous Luxembourg Palace, summoning Rubens from Antwerp in 1621 to decorate its galleries with twenty-five vast canvases that celebrated, with magnificent flattery, the main events of her marriage and the benefits to her adopted country of the Regency. Here in the Luxembourg’s wild park, the young Louis played, his dogs coursing after hare and boar where today children play tennis and watch Punch and Judy shows. Above all, the final touches were applied to Henri’s masterpiece, the Place Royale.

  In 1612 the engagement was announced of the ten-year-old Dauphin to Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain, a thoroughly dynastic arrangement. At the same time, Louis’s sister Elisabeth was betrothed to Anne’s brother, the future Philip IV of Spain. That April saw one of the most extravagant celebrations ever mounted in Paris, dignifying the double engagement and inaugurating the newly opened Place Royale. A mock carrousel, called the Château de Félicité, complete with turrets and battlements, was erected in the city centre, but this time—in response to the tragic death of Henri IV and all that had followed it—there would be no jousting. Instead the Regent and her court watched from specially constructed stands as an elaborate cavalcade passed before them, thrilling some 200,000 Parisians who had gathered in the streets. As night fell, accompanied by a tremendous blast of trumpets, drums and clairons, and the firing of 4,000 rockets from the towers of the nearby Bastille,* the whole Château de Félicité was set alight. Two more days of celebration followed.

  The great festival in the Place Royale, which so fittingly marked Henri’s lasting bequest to Paris, also assured the popularity of La Reine Marie—but only temporarily. Already suspect because of her Italian background, Marie rashly handed considerable powers to her Italian favourite, a woman widely regarded as “a swarthy and greedy sorceress” called Leonora Galigai, whom she had imported from her native Florence. Leonora was married to an affected fop, Carlo Concini, whom the Queen made Marquis d’Ancre, and a marshal of France—though he never fought a battle. The Concinis seemed to exert a curious influence over the Queen Regent, enriching themselves and picking up titles, and generally making themselves hugely unpopular. They soon became scapegoats for all the real or imagined shortcomings of the regime. Meanwhile, in October 1614 Louis had reached his majority, aged twelve, and—frail, elegant and dressed in white—had appeared before the Estates-General, where the yo
ung Bishop of Luçon, by the name of Richelieu, first made his mark with a speech of forceful eloquence. The boy King thanked his mother profusely for “all the trouble” she had taken on his behalf, and declared that he wished her to continue to govern and to be obeyed.

  The young King was a glum shadow of his father, substantially lacking his charm and panache, and so fearful of women that he was certainly no Vert Galant. He was a strange man. A lonely child, sulky, morose and shy, he grew up to be secretive, cold, hard—and capable of great cruelty. He was unsociable and a dreamer, who seemed always to be bored. When asked to pardon a condemned peer (and personal friend), he is said to have remarked, “A king should not have the same feelings as a private man.” Like his mother he made a poor choice of favourites: Charles d’Albert de Luynes, Grand Falconer at the court. Luynes, who was twenty-three years older than Louis, was a fairly humble petit gentilhomme from near Aix-en-Provence, born—according to Richelieu’s acid comment—of a canon from Marseilles and a chambermaid. He was good looking and well built, and his early hold on young Louis—from 1614 onwards—derived from his expertise in riding and hunting.

  In November 1615, aged thirteen, Louis was finally married to the Spanish princess Anne of Austria, now a beautiful young woman. He made a show, unusual for him, of being joyeux et galant during the festivities, but he is said not to have entered his wife’s bed until five years after their marriage, and then only when he was led to it by Luynes. There was to be no issue of the marriage for twenty-two years. But for the advent of one of history’s greatest politicians, Cardinal Richelieu, his reign would probably have been little short of a calamity for France.