Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  In the space gained by his demolitions round the Place du Carrousel, Napoleon planted his triumphal arch to commemorate Austerlitz. The pièce de résistance of the Carrousel comprised the famous horses looted from Venice by Napoleon during the first Italian campaign—originally made for a temple in ancient Corinth. Remarkably, the Carrousel had its first stone laid only eight months after the Battle of Austerlitz; it then remained clad in scaffolding for the next two years. Furious about the delay, Napoleon demanded of the Intendant-Général when the scaffolding was finally to be removed. The answer came, “We are only waiting for the statue of your Majesty.” Napoleon flew into a terrifying rage: “What statue are you talking about?—I never asked for one; nor did I order that my statue should be the principal subject of a monument raised by me, and at my expense, for the glory of the army which I had the honour to command.” He insisted that the chariot drawn by the four Venetian horses should remain empty. And so it did until Waterloo, when the horses were returned to Venice, and an allegorical figure representing the Restoration filled the empty chariot, as it does today. But Napoleon could not hide his disappointment. Compared with Louis XIV’s triumphal arch at the Porte Saint-Denis, he thought the Carrousel was altogether too “mesquin” (mean, or mediocre); he felt humiliated at not being able to rival the monument consecrated to the martial triumphs of his great predecessor and rival in la Gloire.

  Hence the much more imposing monument, designed by Jean Chalgrin, on top of the hill at the Etoile (so called because it was already the hub of eight different roads), for all time to remain the most enduring and dominating symbol of Paris. The history of the Arc de Triomphe was to be a turbulent one, and its completion was beyond even the all-powerful Emperor’s capacity. Although the first stone of the Arc was laid in August 1806, just before Napoleon set off for the Jena campaign, such was the immensity of its weight predicted by the engineers that foundations eight metres deep had to be dug. That year he admitted that the Arc “would be a futile work which would have no kind of significance if it wasn’t a means of encouraging architecture.” Typically, by now preoccupied with building a Louvre-sized palace for his infant son, the King of Rome (born in March 1811), Napoleon lost interest. Louis XVIII, inheriting the incomplete structure, contemplated razing it, but was persuaded to recommence work in 1823; it was finally unveiled by the last King of France, Louis-Philippe, in 1836. Even so it remains incomplete, as the discussion about what to place atop it, whether another chariot or an effigy of Napoleon standing on a pile of enemy arms or on a terrestrial globe, or a huge eagle, a statue of liberty or a gigantic star, was never resolved.

  Rising up from the Champs-Elysées among open fields and vineyards, the Arc de Triomphe in Napoleon’s imagination would be set off by two enormous lakes on either side of the Champs-Elysées, complete with boats. Among other unrealized fantasies for Paris was the Emperor’s notion of a memorial at the Etoile in the shape of a monster elephant. What it represented—whether a symbol of power or Napoleon’s covetous feelings for India—no one quite seems to know. Later the plan was to transfer it instead to the Place de la Bastille, and it was to be cast there, in 1811, in bronze from cannon captured from the Spanish insurgents. But the disastrous Iberian adventure failed to supply enough captured weapons to build an elephant on that scale, so instead it was fashioned out of wood and painted plaster. Under the Parisian weather the elephant gradually disintegrated, evolving into the home of thousands of rats and somehow symbolic of the decay of Empire. Coming upon it thirty years later, Victor Hugo, who hated all Bonapartes, latched on to the decrepit mammoth for a passage in Les Misérables:

  in this deserted and exposed corner of the Place, the large head of the colossus, its trunk, its tusks, its tower, its enormous rump, its four feet resembling columns, under a starlit night formed a frightening and terrible silhouette … It was sombre, enigmatic and immense. It was some kind of potent phantom, visible and upright alongside the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

  WATER

  Strolling with his Minister of the Interior at Malmaison, Napoleon was said to have declared (when he was still First Consul), “I want to do something really great and useful for Paris,” to which Chaptal replied instantly, “Give it water!” For a city on the brink of the industrial age, post-revolutionary Paris remained a disgrace, insofar as—even by 1807—its 600,000 inhabitants had to make do with less than nine litres per head a day. By a decree of May 1806, Napoleon ordered the digging of nineteen new wells, and prescribed that by the following year fresh water was to flow through all the fountains of Paris, night and day. This was inspired by the powerful impression the fountains of Rome had made on him; Paris was to emulate Rome. But fountains were only part of the solution; where was the water to come from? Certainly not from the filthy Seine, where as late as 1811, after a ham fair in the city, some 450 kilos of rotting meat would be chucked into the river—by no means an isolated event. So Napoleon would bring fresh water to the city all the way from the River Ourcq, by a canal one hundred kilometres long. Digging started in 1802 and was supposed to be completed by the autumn of 1805, but there were repeated delays, partly thanks to the shortage of manpower caused by the insatiable demands of the Grande Armée. Finally, on 2 December 1808—the anniversary of Austerlitz, of course—a momentous opening ceremony announced the arrival of the sweet waters of the Ourcq in the Bassin de la Villette. It would be some years, though, before any but the courtesans of the beau monde would be able to give up sharing a bath. Nevertheless, the opening of the Ourcq Canal was indeed a historic moment for Paris; Napoleon had succeeded where all previous rulers had failed. He also began constructing a modern sewer system, but here work lagged deplorably once his energetic hand was removed.

  The most tangible part of Paris’s water problem continued to be presented by the polluted and disease-ridden river running through its centre. The Pont Saint-Michel, originally built in 1387, had been destroyed several times, then rebuilt with thirty-two houses on it. Partly for aesthetic reasons, the Bourbon kings had hesitated to remove them; then their removal had been decreed in 1786, only for the Revolution to intervene. Finally demolition was ordered from Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon believing that the old houses spoiled the panorama down the river, but chiefly because of the pollution they caused to the waters below. Paris had long suffered from a serious shortage of bridges across the Seine, with ferries plying back and forth even from the Louvre; then, under the Consulate and Empire, four new bridges were laid down. All were to be toll bridges: five centimes for people on foot, ten for those on horseback and fifteen for a coach with one horse, twenty for a coach with two horses, two for a donkey.

  Meanwhile, the Seine rolled on, encumbered with floating mills and boat wash-houses, and as filthy as ever. Undeterred, the nude bathers continued to plunge into it. One Parisienne recalled how a naked male had retrieved her hat which had blown into the river, apologizing chivalrously, “Excuse me, Madame, for wearing no gloves!”

  Another perennial problem posed by the sacred river was its inconvenient habit of overflowing its banks at unpredictable intervals. The inondation of 1801–2 had been the worst since 1740, and boats had to be used to circulate in a number of streets. As a result, Napoleon as First Consul instantly decided to construct the Quai d’Orsay, running without a break between the Pont Royal and Concorde—a scheme which had been on the drawing board ever since the reign of Louis XIV. It was where the famous barges were built for the invasion of England, and for a while there was little but an appalling mess, but the Quai was completed by 1806. In March 1808, Napoleon issued a decree to continue the quays from the Concorde all the way to the Ecole Militaire on the Left Bank. Three years later he built the short Quai Montebello opposite the Hôtel Dieu, in honour of his favourite marshal, killed at Aspern-Essling in 1809. By 1812, the length of the quays constructed over ten years reached 3,000 metres. Of the Emperor’s many proud embellissements, the quays were the ones which evoked possibly the most praise for both effica
cy and beauty.

  DREAMS AND THEIR REALIZATION

  Inevitably, many of Napoleon’s grandiose projects—like those of Louis XIV before him—reflected that illusive commodity so precious to French hearts: la Gloire. The most imposing of all was the great imperial palace at Chaillot intended for the infant King of Rome. The site selected stood on what was later known as the Trocadéro heights, where the present hideous 1930s Chaillot complex stands, facing the Eiffel Tower. In Napoleon’s time it was an idyllic corner of cottages and vineyards, where Catherine de Médicis once had a country house. It was to be an “imperial city,” “a Kremlin a hundred times more beautiful than Moscow’s,” and larger even than decaying Versailles. With his usual despatch Napoleon had work begin in May 1811 on what the architects, Fontaine and Percier, regarded as “the vastest and most extraordinary work of our century”—a palace and park covering the whole area of today’s Trocadéro, La Muette and Porte Maillot, or about half the present 16th arrondissement. Triple terraces would rise to it from the Seine, culminating in an immense colonnade with a frontage 400 metres long, and freely imitating Mansart at Versailles. In terms of what it could have meant for Paris as a whole, this display of true folie de grandeur was distinctly alarming. But just as “Aiglon,” King of Rome, would never rule, so Chaillot would never be built.

  For the duration of the Empire Paris was described as resembling one vast building site. When the King of Württemberg was asked, on a visit in 1810, what he thought of Paris, he replied tersely, “Fine, for a town that the architects have taken by assault!” Despite the endless bullying, the barrage of orders and decrees from the far-flung corners of Empire, works repeatedly fell behind. “It required all my character, to write six, ten letters a day and go red with rage,” Napoleon admitted on Saint Helena. Sometimes he almost despaired and, as a man of the south, several times contemplated escaping altogether from the negative attitude of the Parisians to found an entirely new capital in Lyons, “a habitation worthy of my rank and fortune”; he thought of calling it, modestly, “Napoléonville.”

  In all Napoleon’s vast building schemes, the estimates would always be set too low; he would initiate projects on a staggering scale, but by the time of Waterloo few would have been completed. The civilian bureaucracy of Paris was to defeat even an emperor at the full height of his formidable powers. As a consequence, Napoleon, always so decisive in battle, showed himself often disastrously hesitant and pusillanimous in his embellissement campaign for Paris, repeatedly changing his mind and unable to concentrate his thoughts. At times he seemed all but overwhelmed by the architectural heritage of the Bourbons. An example was the muddle over the memorial to General Desaix, the fallen hero of Marengo. After ten years of indecision, a statue of Desaix was erected in the Place des Victoires, on the site where the Convention had removed the huge monument to Louis XIV. But when it was finally unveiled on 15 August 1810, Napoleon’s birthday, Parisians were shocked to see the general, not clad as a warrior of Rome or Greece, but totally naked. Reacting to the city’s sudden display of prudishness, the press announced that there were “faults in the casting.” It was not just a sudden excess of pudibonderie, but generals, clad or nude, were also getting to be out of vogue in the city. Desaix was melted down; come the Restoration his bronze was recycled for the statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf.

  The problem of Louis XIV’s Versailles, too, showed Napoleon at his most indecisive. Left empty and dilapidated by the Revolution, the palace was considered by Napoleon as a home for the wounded; but then he changed his mind. The palace stayed empty. Exasperated, Napoleon demanded to know “why the Revolution, which destroyed so much, hadn’t demolished the château of Versailles? I wouldn’t then have a misjudgement of Louis XIV, and an old, badly built château on my hands.” In 1813, when things were turning out badly for him, he was still grumbling: “If I ever do anything to the façade of Versailles facing Paris I want it to be my architecture so it won’t accord with the rest.” Fortunately, by that time he no longer had the option.

  Although the boulevards remained piled up with building materials in imperial Paris, there continued to be an almost complete absence of pavements. The English in 1802 had been shocked by the narrowness and dirtiness of the streets, and the terrible noise of iron- and wooden-wheeled vehicles rolling over uneven pavé. But there was little improvement over the next dozen years. Malodorous gutters still ran down the centre, except in the new streets like Rivoli where they were finally channelled down each side. One night Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Master of the Horse, fell—carriage and all—into a huge pothole in the Place Vendôme.

  Equally little advance was made in illumination of the city. Philippe Lebon, inventor of gas illumination, died mysteriously, stabbed in the Champs-Elysées, on the eve of the Emperor’s Coronation. As a result, gas-lighting was never introduced in Napoleon’s time. The 4,200 lights throughout Paris added up to rather fewer than at the time of Louis XIV a century and half previously. One writer described imperial Paris as “not the City of Light but the city of candle ends.” Napoleon once wrote angrily to Fouché declaring that the non-lighting of Paris “amounts to an embezzlement.” Hampered by the narrow streets, Paris’s firefighting service was not much better. In 1808, the cornmarket was allowed to burn down through incompetence, but the worst disaster was to occur in 1810—the conflagration in the ballroom at the Austrian Embassy, which horribly, and ominously, marred Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise.

  THE UNDERCLASS

  Despite the efforts of Fouché, supported by all the trappings of a police state, lawlessness persisted in Paris. As the effects of the British blockade bit deeper, so smuggling became a major Parisian industry, and, with the involvement of army deserters and even senior officers, tended to be run like a military operation. Fake carriages with dummy passengers filled with 300 litres of cognac were employed to dupe the Customs and Excise, and a tunnel half a kilometre long was dug under the city barrières, to emerge beneath a convent. By 1808 the situation had become so bad that a ban was imposed on any construction work within a hundred metres of the city perimeter. In the Chaussée d’Antin, the smartest corner of Paris, the beautiful and virtuous Mme. Récamier held her legendary salon. But within yards of the Chaussée thieves and pickpockets proliferated, making it at night virtually a no-go area. Among the victims in 1807 was David the painter, when a well-dressed individual pretending to be his servant extracted 18,000 francs from a bank, accompanied the bank clerk to David’s nearby studio, then hit him over the head and made off with the money. Equally rapacious were the gambling dens around the Palais Royal, just as they had been under the most louche days of the Regent, the Duc d’Orléans. Marvellously described in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, men who had lost their fortune on the tables in a matter of hours would be conducted into a “recovery” room, also known as the salle des blessés. Nearby was a gunsmith’s selling pistols, also inhabited by a former priest. Thus, it was said, in a space of a few hours victims could “be ruined, commit suicide, and pass to a better world with the help of religion.” When by imperial decree gambling houses were banned in 1806 throughout the country, Paris was left exempt—the tax collected from the Palais Royal was altogether too profitable to the government.

  During the Consulate one of the plagues of Paris had been the multitude of beggars. One German visitor was profoundly “moved by the horrible, endless begging in the streets … in bad, dirty weather, when one cannot step too far away from the houses without ending up in a sea of sludge, or when one is in danger of falling under a wheel, one has to make one’s way through long rows of beggars who cannot be avoided.” There were reported to be over 100,000 of these vagrants in 1802, and the figure did not decrease by the end of the Empire. Many were discharged old soldiers, reproaching civilians with their silent salutes. In 1809, the Paris police declared its intention of creating a large home for beggars outside Paris at Villers-Cotterets. But nothing was ever done. Similarly, as of 1806 the English press rec
koned the number of prostitutes in Paris to be as high as 75,000. Allowing for the exaggeration of an impressionable and perfide enemy this was a considerable number.

  Meanwhile much of the incidental robbery and violence on the streets of Paris was caused by licentious soldiery on leave, deserters or draft-dodgers. There were numerous ways of avoiding the call to arms, such as chopping off a finger or knocking out front teeth (without which a soldier could not tear open a musket cartridge), and it seems significant that, in 1806, the year of Jena, there were only 14,300 Parisians in military service out of a population of nearly 600,000. By 1810 the rate of desertions from the Grande Armée had become alarming, and many deserters had taken refuge among the criminal underclass in Paris. Parisiennes had been delighted by dashing cavalry officers bowing to them with their enormous plumes, and the handsome veterans would be applauded when they paraded on the Carrousel—but for the rest of the time the soldiery were the terror of Paris, recognized for their brutality towards inoffensive citizens. One soldier relieved himself over customers in an underground café, and when a waiter reproached him he was beaten up; at the door of the Senate, a young man was cut to pieces by an infantry sergeant for bumping against him; at Montrouge three soldiers disembowelled a stranger, on the ground that he had “looked at them in an insulting manner.” Six soldiers raped a respectable woman at the Port-au-Blé, then threw her into the Seine. And so it went on.

  Swollen by the deserters, the underclass of the Paris poor lived as miserably as ever under the ancien régime. There were areas of pronounced sordidness around the Hôtel Dieu, in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau and the 12th arrondissement where, in 1813, one-fifth of the population were listed as indigent. Conditions in these poorer quartiers were appalling. One contemporary observer wrote: