Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Of the Ultras who surrounded him Louis remarked glumly, “If these gentlemen had full freedom, they would end by purging me as well!” In Paris, the Pavillon de Marsan became the headquarters of reaction, and there the sons of the future Charles X, their wives, courtesans and bodyguards, all talked treason twenty-four hours a day. Plotting away against the regime too was the Charbonnerie, a secret society based on an Italian prototype; while the childless Louis’s brother, and heir, the future Charles X—“an émigré to his fingertips and a submissive bigot,” in Guizot’s eyes—also conspired against him. Then, in June 1820, and accompanied by revealingly little public emotion, the young Duc de Berry, nephew of Louis and third in succession to the throne, was assassinated by “a little weasel-faced mongrel,” a fanatic called Louvel, motivated simply by “hatred of the Bourbons.” The deed was seized upon by the Ultras as a welcome excuse to press for more power and a less liberal regime. Many of the harsher new laws passed reflected the pressures imposed on the regime; for instance, one “on sacrilege” made theft of church vessels subject to the same penalty as parricide—the hand to be severed, and the head sliced off.

  THE PROFILE OF RESTORATION PARIS

  Compared with what preceded it under Napoleon and what was to follow under Baron Haussmann, during the years of the Restoration and of Louis-Philippe the profile of Paris changed but little. Its population had risen to over 700,000 (by 1844 it would reach one million, as more and more hopefuls flooded in from the provinces, enticed by the questionable blandishments of city life). These hordes were still crammed into a web of narrow, ill-paved and filthy streets. Among the few novelties was the Chapelle Expiatoire, built—first things first—for Parisians to atone for the murder of Louis XVI and his queen, on the exact place where they had originally been buried; and, with fine irony, the Rue Napoléon was renamed the Rue de la Paix. Uncompleted Napoleonic projects such as the Bourse—fundamental to the enrichissez-vous era on which Paris was about to embark—were completed. But lack of financial resources and of the absolutist power to project bold new commissions left its mark on the city. Stylistically, it was revived Louis XVI. New apartment buildings were lower and smaller, more spartan and utilitarian in style, with less spacious rooms. Most were swept aside by later and less ephemeral buildings. Many were erected, speculatively, at such high cost that they could be neither rented nor sold and the result left many houses empty. In the 1820s there were schemes launched to develop peripheral areas like the Batignolles on the Right Bank and Grenelle on the Left, which encouraged the speculators as wealth increased. Outside the old Octroi (customs) wall the delayed industrial revolution began implanting major manufacturing industries, years after London had done the same.

  With more money came splendid galleries and covered passages constructed—by private speculators—around the Rue Vivienne and other Right Bank areas, for bourgeois shoppers to spend what was being accreted in the new counting houses constructed by financiers around Mme. Récamier’s Chaussée d’Antin. The aim of these opulent new arcades was not merely to “protect the passer-by from the dangers of the streets; they had to hold him, enslave him, body and soul … he was supposed to feel so enchanted that he forgot everything: his wife, his children, the office, and dinner.” Heinrich Heine particularly enjoyed strolling through the Passage des Panoramas, though a contemporary German biographer observed that it was “a place one avoids walking through in the evening if accompanied by a lady”—for here the elegant and affluent jostled shoulders, as they always had, with the underworld, pickpockets and tricksters, prostitutes and beggars.

  Otherwise, little changed. The residential areas around the Louvre and Marais had fallen into decrepitude, and the revolutionary poor continued to exist, and seethe, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. By 1830, the western limit of the city was still the Place de la Concorde, while the Champs-Elysées continued to be bordered by ditches and hovels, with strange subterranean cabarets. An incomplete Arc de Triomphe stood in a forest glade, while the equally incomplete Madeleine rose out of a piece of terrain vague—though its unfinished beauty was to arouse the romantic sensibilities of Mrs. Trollope, who on a moonlit night in 1835 thought this “pale spectre of a Grecian temple … was the most beautiful object of art I ever looked at.” In place of Napoleon’s decaying elephant monstrosity at the Bastille, Louis-Philippe erected the July Column, crowned by a statue with broken chains and a torch, as a symbol (unsuccessful) of reconciliation after the 1830 Revolution that brought him to power;* while that earlier symbol, the Concorde, was reorganized around the vast obelisk filched from Egypt (a suitably neutral device, politically).

  As a consequence of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the industrial revolution came late to Paris. By 1844, France still had only one-third as much railway line as Britain, and just over half as much as backward Prussia; the fastest mail-coach, carrying only four passengers in some discomfort, reached Bordeaux from Paris in forty-five hours, Lyons in forty-seven. Instead of appreciating its economic significance, many Parisians regarded the railway as an object of frivolity, with even the enlightened Adolphe Thiers remarking that a line from Paris to Saint-Germain would have amusement value only. When it was finally opened it reached no more than halfway. But in 1837 a momentous decision, unique in Europe, was taken to link Paris by rail with all the nation’s frontiers. That same year—though it was considered too dangerous for King Louis-Philippe—Queen Amélie took the first train in Paris. Working girls could now go and dance in the Forest of Loges, once the favoured retreat of Diane de Poitiers, for only seventy-five centimes. The enterprise was backed by a banker from Vienna, James de Rothschild, who had arrived as Austrian consul-general in 1810, liked what he saw and swiftly become naturalized. Five years later those fearful for the King’s safety found justification when a terrible accident occurred as an engine axle fractured on a fast train returning from Versailles. Of 700 Parisians who had been on a jaunt to see the fountains, 48 were killed and 110 injured.

  Nevertheless, the railways continued to spread outward, with lines to Orléans and Rouen both opened in 1843, and it was soon possible to reach Calais from Paris in nine hours. At the same time, to accommodate the passengers a new form of architecture began to manifest itself in Paris—the gare du chemin de fer. Some, like the Gare Saint-Lazare, the city’s first (built in 1836, and immortalized by the Impressionists), and the Gare d’Orsay (built in 1898, and one day to house those painters’ works), were structures of considerable beauty in their own right.

  As the money began to flow again, a whole new smart area began to be created south of the Champs-Elysées, around a country house which had once belonged to François I; so all the streets were given Renaissance names like Jean Goujon, Bayard, Cérisoles, Clément Marot and, of course, François I. But they were no safer at night than before. On the Left Bank, the Faubourg Saint-Germain ended just short of the Invalides, “at a terrace and a ditch.” Emptied of its inhabitants by the Revolution, and with many of its grand houses still left vacant during the Napoleonic era, life now came slowly back to the status quo ante as the émigrés crept home during the Restoration. Once again, the stately portes-cochères of the Rue de Grenelle protected the same grand names—the Hôtels de Berwick, de Maurepas, de la Motte-Houdancourt, d’Harcourt, de la Salle, d’Avaray, de Lamoignon. The owners would be seen driving down the Rue du Bac, the principal artery linking the two banks, on their way to pay court at the Tuileries, or to the Opéra on Mondays, the Comédie Italienne on Thursdays.

  Slowly the grandeur of the Left Bank became overshadowed in Saint-Germain by new breeds of Parisian—the Romantics and, further east, the Bohemians, the “Mimis” freezing in their garrets in the Latin Quarter. One of the most important undertakings of the new regime was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, set up in 1819 on the Quai Malaquais. Swiftly it re-established Paris’s pre-eminence in architectural education, attracting student architects from abroad, while the “Beaux-Arts style” was to influence public building until as late a
s the First World War. Here the students laboured away in ateliers, cramped studios to which twenty or thirty of them would be attached, often directed by independent architects of distinction.

  * Within a year of its completion in 1840, it became a favourite jumping-off place for the unreconcilable and broken hearted.

  LIFE FOR THE POOR

  One of the most remarkable features in all the history of France is the way in which, following two crushing nineteenth-century military disasters—Waterloo in 1815 and the capitulation to Prussia and the Commune of 1871—each time there was an extraordinary blossoming in the gentler and more enduring works of humanity. It was almost as if they came in direct response to catastrophe on the military plane. Following 1871, it would be the burst of liberating colour and joy that was Impressionism; in 1815, it was the unique flowering of the great French novel, from Balzac and Hugo to Gautier, Flaubert and Daudet, from Dumas père and fils to Zola, Maupassant and Anatole France. Once the great dead hand of Napoleonic censorship was lifted from the arts, literature, and most especially the novel, began to flourish as never before. Founders of romantisme, the literature of revolt, artistic as well as political—Germaine de Staël (living just long enough to rejoice in the final fall of her arch-enemy), Chateaubriand, Sten-dhal and the poetic geniuses of Lamartine and Vigny—were followed closely by giants like Balzac (1799–1850) and later Hugo (1802–85).

  Balzac and Hugo took it upon themselves, virtually for the first time, to tell of poverty in Paris, to describe what it was like to be really poor, in debt, pursued by the police, struggling to emerge from the underclass. The very stink of the Paris of the poor, the stale cabbage and untuned plumbing, with her hollow-cheeked, pale and sallow denizens, seeps out from Balzac’s Père Goriot in this description of the quartier where Goriot himself, a once prosperous vermicelli merchant, lives in abject poverty:

  that illustrious valley of flaking plasterwork and gutters black with mud; a valley full of suffering that is real, and of joy that is often false, where life is so hectic that it takes something quite extraordinary to produce feelings that last … the houses are gloomy, the walls like a prison … washed in that shade of yellow which so demeans all the houses in Paris …

  Balzac’s preoccupation with the belief that “wealth is virtue,” and with the corruption that went hand in hand with it, was to run throughout his vast work, the Comédie Humaine and its ninety-odd novels and tales. Dumas père would echo the theme in The Count of Monte Cristo, portraying a society where everything—whether social standing or revenge—can be bought at a price. It would pick up speed during the bourgeois era of Louis-Philippe, reaching its apogee there, and on through the Paris of the Second Empire, finding revival under the Third Republic, and with echoes even down to the Paris of Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac. As the Restoration took root, many of the positive social gains achieved during the Revolution and under Napoleon evaporated. Gradually as the gaps between Parisian classes widened, the poor becoming poorer, the rich becoming infinitely richer, it was not long before the politician-historian Guizot was codifying the principle of enrichissez-vous—with the unspoken rider “and leave politics to me.” During the early days of the Restoration, there were reckoned (by Eugène Sue) to be 30,000 thieves in Paris, their numbers swollen in the first instance by the thousands of impoverished ex-officers of the Grande Armée conducting dubious card games and ever on the look-out for an easy touch. Then came the fresh influx from the provinces. The immense pull of Paris at that time is well described by Balzac in Le Cabinet des antiques as:

  a city that swallows up gifted individuals born everywhere in the kingdom, makes them part of its strange population, and dries out the intellectual capacities of the nation for its own benefit. The provinces themselves are responsible for the force that plunders them … And as soon as a merchant has amassed a fortune, he thinks only of taking it to Paris, the city that thus comes to epitomize all of France.

  Inevitably, living conditions became far worse in the fastest-growing sections of the city where the poorest people lived, while the baneful consequences of overcrowding cause Balzac’s lawyer Derville in Le Colonel Chabert to exclaim, after listing all the variants of despicable human behaviour he has witnessed in the city, “I shall move to the country with my wife; Paris frightens me.” A report by the département of the Seine in 1829 found that of “the 224,000 households in Paris at least 136,000 must be described as being poor, and a further 32,000 households as living on the edge of poverty.” Within the areas where the over-populous classes laborieuses eked out a wretched existence, there was—initially—an ominous quietness; but all the time there was building up a new classe dangereuse that would one day erupt and spew out once again like lava into bourgeois Paris.

  As before, these quartiers of the poor lay often cheek by jowl with those of the new rich. Behind the glitter of the Champs-Elysées and the grands boulevards marched rows of mean hovels, while a notable district for prostitutes lay between the elegant Avenue de l’Opéra and the Rue Richelieu. These “unfortunates,” as they were euphemistically called, proliferated; in the Palais Royal area their numbers were put at one for every sixty-three inhabitants, and in the Saint-Honoré quartier at one for every forty-two. The labyrinth of narrow streets, where vice and crime flourished, remained places of gloom and terror until the days of Haussmann, particularly at night—and in general the streets of Paris were just as squalid, malodorous and overcrowded as they always had been.

  HEALTH AND HYGIENE

  Under the Restoration and Louis-Philippe, health and hygiene in Paris lagged disgracefully, despite all Napoleon had done to improve the city’s drains. If anything, with the surging population increase, the situation had worsened. There was no efficient, centralized means of collecting rubbish and filth, still deposited daily on the streets by the 224,000 households. One contemporary report describes how the dirt would:

  remain lying there for an indeterminate time … Hardly has half of it been swept up when the rest is scattered in the gutters, blocking the water from draining away; it only disappears when strong rains flood the drains …

  Bad gases and pestilential miasmas rise up to the place where the trash collects, not to mention that the sludge gets stuck between the paving stones. But that is not all. A far worse and unhealthier stench streams from the underground sewers that benumbs passers-by, and forces residents to leave their houses.

  Still running directly and untreated into the Seine, the sewage “creates a swamp on the banks that pollutes the water used for washing or drinking by half the inhabitants of Paris.”

  By comparison with Paris—even though the drains of Windsor would kill off Prince Albert—London was a sweet-smelling city. Households had a flush-sewage system working, while the Paris sewers still served mainly as street drains. Cesspools had to be emptied periodically, resulting in a disgusting and insalubrious smell. While Parisians would “barely consume seven litres of water per day,” according to Balzac, “every citizen of London has the use of sixty-two litres.” Even by 1848 only 5,300 Parisian households were connected to the rudimentary and clogged-up sewage system, and would have to await Haussmann, and beyond, for better things.

  Just outside the city things were worse. Up at Montfaucon (now in the 10th arrondissement), the former site of the hideous gibbets, fallen into disuse since the early seventeenth century, had become revolting knackers’ yards and the depots of collected sewage. Out of them highly infectious streams trickled back down into the city and into her water reservoirs. From all this it was hardly surprising that, in 1832, Paris would be stricken with a major cholera epidemic, one of the worst in her history, its spread helped by the filthy streets. The first victim was claimed on 19 February; by 5 April there were 503 cases; on the 12th, as many as 1,020. The Opéra Comique was turned into an emergency hospital, and the hard-line Prime Minister, Casimir Périer, died of the disease, after visiting the Hôtel Dieu.

  Day after day car
ts rattled through the disease-bearing streets piled high with corpses. Inevitably, the government was accused of having poisoned the wine supply, and when the heir to Louis-Philippe’s throne courageously visited the hospital wards he was denounced by the opposition for wanting to inspect the misery of the people. By the time the ravages of the epidemic were over, 18,402 Parisians had died. From a sociological point of view, the spread of its victims was pointed: in rich areas like the Chaussée d’Antin only eight per thousand succumbed, whereas in the poor districts such as the Hôtel de Ville fifty-three per thousand perished. Thus cholera was manifestly a disease of poverty and overcrowding. Clearly something radical had to be done.

  In June 1833 a new, energetic Prefect of the Seine—Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Comte de Rambuteau—was appointed. But his plan for Paris was a continuation of Napoleon’s embellissement, and little else. Stately monuments and beautiful public gardens, and some thirty new streets and a few bridges were built. But Rambuteau prided himself on being thrifty and, during most of his fifteen years in office, on average only 15 per cent of the total city expenditure went on the upkeep and improvement of the infrastructure. In September 1837, Balzac—incurably optimistic—wrote to his lover, Mme. Hanska, “In ten years we shall be clean, we shall no longer talk of the mud of Paris, and then we shall be so magnificent that Paris will truly be seen as a lady of the world, the first among queens, wreathed in walls.” But it was not to be. In 1849, Paris would be struck by yet another plague of cholera, this time claiming more than 19,000 victims.