Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Of all Louis’s harsher policies, not even the wars affected Paris and Parisians quite so radically, and disastrously, as this. With enthusiasm Louvois added an extra note of horror to Louis’s Revocation with his brutal dragonnades, armed raids accompanied by torture, pillage and scorched earth against Protestant dissenters in the provinces—Languedoc in particular. Within a matter of months of the Revocation, France’s Protestants had been reduced by three-quarters; most had become Catholics; some had emigrated; others, alleged infringers of the law, had been sent to the galleys—the punishment for any Calvinist skilled worker trying to flee. The goods and property of Protestant families were confiscated, to further inhibit them from leaving the country. Wealth bequeathed to Protestant foundations was also to be confiscated and applied instead to the royal hospitals. The ensuing violence took place largely in the countryside, where Protestants were obliged to go to Mass and to take communion; those spitting out the host were condemned to be burned alive; others who refused the last rites on their deathbed had their corpses dragged about the street after their death.

  If Languedoc bled cruelly, however, it was nothing compared to the catastrophic and lasting damage inflicted on the capital, Paris—even though she was never exposed to the worst atrocities committed in the provinces. There the ghosts of Saint Bartholomew’s Night and the bitter siege of 1590 were still capable of casting their sombre shadows. Protestant numbers had already become reduced to perhaps 15,000, but these were the elite. Some of the most prestigious among the Huguenot nobility in Paris were now expedited to the Bastille, subject to a strict regime and freed only once they converted. Many of them died there. Among the Parisian Protestants were leading painters, sculptors, architects and court musicians, including Claude Le Jeune; there were médailleurs and maîtres tapissiers, such as the masters of the Gobelin factory; and there were leaders in finance, industry and science.

  Many of these people fled the country after 1685. They included men like Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock and the first to derive the theory that the stars were in fact other suns, who returned to his native Holland. Silk-makers emigrated to England, glass-makers to Denmark, and 600 army officers departed to reinforce the ranks of France’s enemies. At the Battle of the Boyne hundreds of French Huguenots fought in the ranks of William of Orange against the Irish Catholics. Many, later encouraged by Frederick the Great, ended up in Prussia, their descendants leading the cohorts that would invade France in three successive wars from 1870 onwards. By 1700 between a third and a half of the population of Berlin was reckoned to be refugees from Louis’s misguided religious strategy. This strategy also hardened Protestant opinion against him abroad: the League of Augsburg, uniting as it did France’s enemies against her, was but one of the laden consequences.

  The Huguenots were not the only religious body to feel the scourge of royal bigotry. The Jansenists were a gloomy sect founded by a Dutchman called Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who, becoming bishop of Ypres, had sought a return to the simplicity and discipline of the early Christians. With ideas reminiscent of Calvin’s, and believing in free will and predestination, the sect had their Paris headquarters in the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs. In their austerity they often seemed holier than the Jesuits, which was to be a constant source of friction. Among the eminent supporters of Jansenism were Pascal and Racine, and it was at Port-Royal that La Rochefoucauld wrote his famous maxims. Blaise Pascal, who died in 1662 when he was only thirty-nine, was one of the stars in the firmament of the Roi Soleil. Son of a tax fonctionnaire, a frail genius racked by headaches and insomnia who never knew a day without pain, he wrote an essay on conic sections when he was sixteen and developed the first calculating machine while in his twenties. He was also credited with postulating a key philosophical question: “Is Christianity primarily a religion of reason or a religion of love?” In 1655, after undergoing a mystical experience, he moved into the Port-Royal, where his niece worked. From here he published his masterpiece, the Lettres provinciales, a blistering Jansenist satire on the Jesuits.

  Racine, who wrote a history of the Port-Royal, was deeply influenced by Jansenism as well, his conscience torn by its teachings. Perhaps rather feebly, and to show his bonne volonté in the court, as well as ingratiating himself with Mme. de Maintenon, in his later years he wrote a play at her request for the girls’ school she had founded for the under-educated daughters of French country squires. Called Esther and drawn from the Bible, the play was produced numerous times at Versailles in the winter of 1689. But this did nothing for the Jansenists. In 1709, Louis finally seized an opportunity to raze the Port-Royal convent to the ground, and—after a brief period of persecution—to disperse the nuns. Yet the controversy was to flare up again after his death, afflicting French religious life into the nineteenth century.

  Much of religious thought and teaching in Louis’s Paris continued to centre on the Sorbonne. Since its foundation it had expanded steadily: the Collège d’Harcourt (later Lycée Saint-Louis) in 1280; the Collège Cardinal Lemoine in 1302; the Collège de Navarre (later Ecole Polytechnique) in 1304; the Collège de Lombards (for Italian students) in 1333. By the end of the fifteenth century there were fifty-two separate colleges. In 1470, German technicians set up Paris’s first printing press there. Through the years of the later Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance it had continued its reputation for rowdiness; the great poet François Villon, who was constantly in trouble, found refuge there. During the Hundred Years War it had fallen on hard times. But under the great Richelieu (who studied there, later became its Chancellor, and asked to be buried there) the Sorbonne experienced a new flowering and considerable expansion. Richelieu’s architect Jacques Lemercier added its classical chapel. Louis XIV continued the work of Richelieu and sustained the Sorbonne, but did little to alter its curriculum, which up to the Revolution remained largely clerical in content.

  PARIS NEGLECTED

  As Louis fought his wars, progressively ever more disastrous, and threw his energies and the state’s resources into developing Versailles, so Paris withered on the vine—not least, as we have observed, the abandoned Louvre.

  Most of the new public works in Paris were now indivisibly associated with the personal glorification of the Roi Soleil, superb pieces of architecture though they undoubtedly were. There was the magnificent Place Vendôme, designed to be centred on a statue six metres high of a conquering monarch on horseback, in Roman costume but with a seventeenth-century wig. Unthinkable in the times of Philippe Auguste or Henri IV, the horse would supposedly be big enough to hold in its stomach twenty people around a table. (Fortunately, it was never built; in its place was erected the Vendôme Column, a shifting cast of latter-day Caesars atop it.) Then there were the triumphal arches, Portes Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, and the Place des Victoires, before 1686 one of the most dangerous areas of Paris—now home to twenty-first-century couturiers such as Kenzo. Here the centrepiece, a four-metre-high statue of the King standing in his coronation robes, depicted four chained women at its base, representing his subjected enemies. “Gilded all over,” it drew Martin Lister’s intense disapproval:

  Close behind is the statue of Victoire, that is a female of vast size, with wings, holding a laurel crown over the head of the King and resting one foot upon a globe. Great exceptions are taken by artists to the gilding … but what I chiefly dislike in this performance is the great woman perpetually at the king’s back; which, instead of expressing victory, seems to act as an encumbrance, and to fatigue him with her company … this woman is enough to give a man a surfeit …

  It was said that each king had his statue among those he most loved; Henri IV in the midst of the people on the Pont Neuf; Louis XIII among the tumultuous favourites of the Place Royale; while Louis XIV resided with the tax collectors in the Place des Victoires.

  As already noted, Louis’s excursions to Paris in his later years were few and far between. These were usually to dedicate one or other of these attrib
utes of self-glorification. During this fallow period the most handsome addition to Paris architecture was the new Pont Royal, linking the Tuileries to the Left Bank. In her diary Mme. de Sévigné recorded one day in February 1684 how its predecessor, the old Pont Rouge, “had left for Saint-Cloud this morning”—yet another of the old wooden bridges washed away by the Seine in one of its moments of ferocity. Opened in 1689, its replacement, the elegant Pont Royal, remains one of the city’s principal glories.

  In the years 1689–97 war again exacerbated the plight of the poor. Then, in 1693, another disaster struck in the shape of a poor harvest, compounded by inefficient (and probably corrupt) means of storing grain. Paris hungered, grumbled and longed for peace. A new prayer, at once seditious and blasphemous, went the rounds: “Our Father who art in Versailles, thy name is no longer hallowed; thy kingdom is diminished; thy will is no longer done on earth or on the waves. Give us our bread, which is lacking to us …” But the prosperous city bourgeois maintained their girths, their riches out of sight of the poor, just as the coquetry which was symbolized by Ninon’s Paris went unseen by Scarron’s newly pious Versailles.

  BOREDOM AT VERSAILLES

  Meanwhile, radiating outwards from the person of the King, life went on at Versailles—where, even as late as May 1682, some 36,000 men and 6,000 horses were still toiling away in the great enterprise of construction. At the centre of everything was the King, l’état personified, surely the most courteous monarch there ever was, but demanding total obeisance and all-embracing loyalty. Surrounded by 10,000 courtiers, he lived virtually without a guard—there would only ever be one half-hearted attempt on his person. After a while, once the numbing grandeur of Versailles had begun to wear thin, the boredom must have been excruciating—ennui, that most pernicious and dreaded of all French diseases. Like Dante’s Inferno, this ennui had its concentric circles. The worst, the outer circle, was to be out of favour with the King and sentenced to exile on one’s own estates in the provinces; the unfortunate Chevalier de Bouillon, for one, was exiled in perpetuity for having been overheard daring to call the Roi Soleil “an old country squire, living in the provinces with his aged mistress.” Then there was exile in Paris, still away from court; finally, the innermost circle of all, there was Versailles itself.

  For a courtier with no taste for cards (which so often spelt financial ruin), for hunting or for gossip, it was a leaden existence—futile, wearisome and often demeaning. Life in ce pays-ci, as it was called, became bound by petty codes and customs, and meaningless rules: for instance, in chapel only princes of the blood were permitted to place their hassocks straight; the rest had to put theirs down at an irregular angle. Even the faithful Governess Scarron herself, so closely linked with that ennui, was once heard to complain, “Before being at court, I had never known boredom, but I have since acquainted myself with it well.”

  It was all part of Louis’s essential apparatus of state. As Stendhal who, as a good Frenchman, also knew about ennui, wrote a century and a half later, “The masterpiece of Louis XIV was to create such boredom out of exile.” Within its opiate embrace, Louis’s nobles could no longer plot against him, and from it they could escape only to an outer circle of boredom. “When one is wretched enough to be far from your Majesty one is not only unhappy but ridiculous,” wrote one such exile craving to come back into the cage. The French aristocracy, the ruling class, was reduced to impotence. But in the long term the concentration of so many courtiers at Versailles and the absentee-landlordism it engendered also proved the ruin of every element of local government in France.

  After Louis’s profane loves had been cleared out by the Governess Scarron, Versailles became even more boring. In 1686, a middle-aged Louis was operated on (amazingly, with success) for a painful anal fistula—his first real illness. Seven years later, he decided that—much as he loved doing so—he would ride to war no more. Following the marriage of Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy to his grandson, in 1697, the great ball of the reign took place in the Galerie des Glaces. Then, with the turn of the century and accumulating disasters, the dancing dwindled and finally ceased. Even Louis seemed to weary of the splendour and the tedium; to get away from the teeming crowds of the obsequious that he had himself created, he decided to build at Marly a small retreat where he could sometimes be alone. Shivering, Mme. de Maintenon complained, “Symmetry, symmetry, if I stay much longer here I shall become paralytic. Not a door or window will shut.”

  Versailles rapidly became an old folks’ home, as the young and fashionable steadily trickled off back to Paris. Humming with pleasure, life began to centre once more on the Palais Royal and Monsieur’s libertine young son Philippe II d’Orléans, the future Regent. Nevertheless, in all things—except perhaps morals—Paris continued sedulously to ape Versailles.

  THE END OF THE GRAND SIÈCLE

  At the turn of the century, the Roi Soleil’s family life had never seemed sunnier. He was the most favoured, as well as the most powerful, monarch on earth. In manners, style and the arts—in almost all things French—other nations tried to model themselves on France, and especially on the Paris which Louis had created, and then abandoned. French furniture and French porcelain were to be seen everywhere in the houses of the rich all over Europe. There was virtually a common European civilization, which was French and aristocratic. French was, and remained, the international language of polite society. For Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia, French became his language of choice.

  Then, for Louis, the terrible sequence of reversals began. The bad omens were there the very year of the move to Versailles, with the death in labour of the Dauphine, as she gave birth to Louis’s first grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne. Charmingly the quacks prescribed that a sheep be flayed alive in her room and the ailing Princess wrapped in its skin; the ladies-in-waiting were horrified; the Dauphine died in agony anyway. Then, in 1701, queer old Monsieur died of a stroke, supposedly brought on by a row with his elder brother. “And so ended this year, 1701,” wrote Saint-Simon, “and all the happiness of the King with it.” But worse was to come. The following year brought the disastrous War of the Spanish Succession—which Louis never wanted, but into which he was propelled by the diplomatic follies of his previous wars. Europe, refusing to accept a Bourbon prince on the throne of Spain (left heirless by the death of Louis’s brother-in-law), which would have given France an impossible agglomeration of power, united against Louis. Marlborough marched to Blenheim and back, destroying French armies right, left and centre as he went. In 1706, a total eclipse of the sun seemed like a portent of the new chain of catastrophes that were about to engulf the Roi Soleil. The following year, Dutch scouts—eager to revenge past injuries—pushed almost to Versailles. Living from hour to hour, the court expected at any moment to have to evacuate to Chambord. Then came Marshal de Villars’s miraculous, eleventh-hour counterstroke, liberating—by the end of 1712—all of France.

  In the meantime, however, fresh disasters befell France, and Louis personally. We have seen that the winter of 1709 brought perhaps the worst cold ever recorded; in Paris on 13 January the thermometer fell to minus 21.5 degrees Centigrade, and even sunny Provence registered temperatures of minus 16 degrees. Altogether France lost half of her livestock that winter; vines everywhere were killed. In Burgundy, children were reported living off boiled grass and roots; “Some even crop the fields like sheep.” The Seine froze solid, and ice snapped the moorings of barges. The cold even killed Louis’s confessor, Père La Chaise, and a former royal mistress, the Princesse de Soubise, frozen to death in her palace. Impoverished by war, Louis was unable to pay for the “King’s bread” of past years that had sustained the poor of Paris—except by raising fresh taxes. On his way out wolf-hunting, the Dauphin found his way barred by ravenous women clamouring for food. Wolves once again roamed the provinces. Twenty-four thousand Parisians are recorded as having died that winter; and there were riots, with mobs setting off ominously for Versailles. Ugly rumours ran round that Mme. de Ma
intenon was buying up wheat for her own use. Struggling against calamity, La Reynie’s able successor, d’Argenson, declared prophetically, “I foresee that the fires will soon burn in this capital and I fear they will be difficult to extinguish.” In the context, it seems miraculous that it would take another eighty years before the flames raged out of control.

  Louis was plunged into depression, which even Mme. de Maintenon was unable to dispel. “Sometimes,” she recorded, “he has a fit of crying that he cannot control, sometimes he is not well. He has no conversation.” But Louis’s personal afflictions had hardly begun. In 1711, Monseigneur, the Dauphin, kept in semi-seclusion at Marly, where—infuriatingly—he “stood in the corner whistling and tapping his snuffbox,” caught smallpox and died. All Louis’s hopes, and affections, now centred on his grandson, the new Dauphin, a serious young man of thirty who reflected the King’s own capacity for hard work, and his twenty-five-year-old wife, Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, whom Louis adored and whose charm and gaiety had brought new life to an ageing court. But in January 1712, while Louis was still in mourning for his son, Marie-Adélaïde caught measles; on 9 February she died. Ten days later, her husband succumbed to the same disease. In March—as the Allies were beginning to threaten Versailles—their five-year-old son Louis died too. Three dauphins within the year! Suspicions of poisoning once again raised their ugly head, with fingers pointed at Philippe, the new Duc d’Orléans, a libertine known to read Rabelais during Mass, and brought by the deaths closer to the throne. Panic swept the court, though Louis kept his head, murmuring piously to Villars, “God punishes me, and I have deserved it. I shall suffer less in the next world.”