[Illustration: PANORAMA OF PARIS.]
TWENTY CENTURIES
OF PARIS
BY
MABELL S. C. SMITH
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
[Illustration: Arms of the City of Paris.]
COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY.
_Published October, 1913._
TO
M. P. G.
_Un rayon de soleil a ses entrées partout._
SARDOU
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. EARLIEST PARIS 1
II. MEROVINGIAN PARIS 16
III. CARLOVINGIAN PARIS 32
IV. PARIS OF THE EARLY CAPETIANS 44
V. PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS 69
VI. PARIS OF SAINT LOUIS 90
VII. PARIS OF PHILIP THE FAIR 105
VIII. PARIS OF THE EARLY VALOIS 129
IX. PARIS OF CHARLES V 153
X. PARIS OF THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR 165
XI. PARIS OF THE LATER FIFTEENTH CENTURY 189
XII. PARIS OF THE RENAISSANCE 199
XIII. PARIS OF THE REFORMATION 214
XIV. PARIS OF HENRY IV 230
XV. PARIS OF RICHELIEU 248
XVI. PARIS OF THE “GRAND MONARQUE” 260
XVII. PARIS OF LOUIS THE “WELL-BELOVED” 274
XVIII. PARIS OF THE REVOLUTION 287
XIX. PARIS OF NAPOLEON 310
XX. PARIS OF THE LESSER REVOLUTIONS 338
XXI. PARIS OF LOUIS NAPOLEON 355
XXII. PARIS OF TO-DAY 369
APPENDIX 385
INDEX 395
MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Panorama of Paris _Frontispiece_
Arms of the City of Paris To-day _Copyright page_
OPPOSITE PAGE
Map of Paris 1
Lutetia under the Romans (Map) _page_ 7
Interior of the Roman Palais des Thermes 10
Amphitheater of Lutetia at Present Time 10
Saint Germain des Prés 30
France at Time of Hugh Capet (Map) _page_ 45
The Louvre in Time of Philip Augustus 78
Fragment of Wall of Philip Augustus 78
Tour de Nesle in 1661 82
Choir and Nave of Notre Dame, looking West 86
Nave of Saint Germain des Prés 86
Cathedral of Notre Dame 88
The Sainte Chapelle, erected by Louis IX 100
Interior of the Sainte Chapelle 100
Hôtel de Cluny 116
Hôtel de Sens 116
The Old Louvre _page_ 161
Arms of City of Paris under Charles V “ 164
Oldest Known Map of Paris _between_ 182 _and_ 183
Churches of Saint Etienne-du-Mont and Sainte
Geneviève in 17th Century 190
Jubé in Church of Saint Etienne-du-Mont 190
Church of Saint Séverin 194
Church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois in 1835 198
Tour de Saint Jacques de la Boucherie 198
The College of France 206
House of Francis I on the Cours-la-Reine 206
Cellier’s Drawing of Hôtel de Ville _page_ 208
Column at the Hôtel de Soissons “ 223
Hôtel Carnavalet 224
The Samaritaine 240
Statue of Henry IV on the Pont Neuf 240
The Archbishop’s Palace 252
Richelieu’s Palais Cardinal, later called Palais
Royal 252
Palace of the Luxembourg 256
Court of Honor of National Library 256
Hôtel des Invalides 272
Saint Sulpice 272
Elysée Palace, Residence of President of France 280
Chamber of Deputies (Palais Bourbon) 280
Church of Sainte Geneviève, now the Pantheon 284
The Odéon 290
The Comédie Française about 1785 290
“The Convention,” by Sicard 308
Rue de Rivoli 326
Triumphal Arch of the Carrousel 330
Triumphal Arch of the Star 330
Napoleon’s Tomb 336
The Bourse 346
Church of the Madeleine 346
The Successive Walls of Paris _between_ 366 _and_ 367
The Strasbourg Statue 360
The Eiffel Tower 360
The New Louvre 370
Hôtel de Ville 374
Mairie of the Arrondissement of the Temple 376
Salle des Fêtes, Hôtel de Ville 376
Portions of the Louvre built by Francis I,
Henry II, and Louis XIII 378
Colonnade, East End of Louvre, built by Louis
XIV 378
Section of Louvre begun by Henry IV 380
Northwest Wing of Louvre, built by Napoleon I,
Louis XVIII, and Napoleon III 380
Plan of the Louvre _page_ 382
[Illustration: Map of Paris]
_Twenty Centuries of Paris_
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST PARIS
France has been inhabited since the days when prehistoric man
unconsciously told the story of his life through the medium of the
household utensils and the implements of war which he left behind him in
the caves in which he dwelt, or which his considerate relatives buried
with him to make his sojourn easy in the land beyond the grave. From
bits of bone, of flint, and of polished stone archæologists have
reconstructed the man himself and his activities through the early ages.
Of contemporary information, however, there is none until the
adventurous peoples of the Mediterranean pushed their way as traders and
explorers into the heart of Gaul, and then wrote about their
discoveries. The Gauls, they said, were largely Celtic in origin and had
displaced an earlier race, the Iberians, whom they had crowded to the
southwest. They were brave, loyal, superstitious, and subject to their
priests, the Druids. Their dress showed that they had made great
advance in knowledge over the cave men, for they wore colored
tunics--which meant that they knew how to spin and weave and dye--and
brazen helmets and shields and gold and silver girdles--which meant that
they could work in metal.
Such industries prove that the nomadic life was over, and, in truth,
there were many towns throughout Gaul, some of them of no mean size,
furnished with public utilities such as wells and bridges, and
surrounded by fields made fertile by irrigation. An independent spirit
had developed, too, for in about the year 500 B.C. the chiefs and nobles
rebelled against the lay authority of the Druids. Then these chiefs and
nobles seem to have ruled “without the consent of the governed,” for
Cæsar relates that before he went to Gaul in 58 B.C. the lower classes
had rebelled against the upper, and, with the aid of the Druids, had
beaten them.
It is from Cæsar, too, that we first learn something about Paris.
“Lutetia,” he calls it, “a stronghold of the Parisii,” who were one of
the three or four hundred tribes who dwelt in Gaul. Lutetia--“Mudtown”
Carlyle translates the name--was not much of a stronghold, for its
fortifications could have been nothing more than a stockade encircling
the round huts which made up the village occupying an island in the
Seine, the present “Cité” (from the Latin _civitas_), and connected
with both banks by bridges. It was only about half a mile long and an
eighth of a mile wide. It was large enough and strong enough, however,
to serve as a refuge for the tribesmen in time of war. Probably such a
haven was not an unusual arrangement. Not far from Paris is another
instance in Melun which has grown around the village which the Romans
called Melodunum, built in the same way on an island in the river.
In the spring of 53 B.C. Cæsar summoned delegates from all the tribes of
Gaul to meet at Lutetia, but the rebellion of the year 52 in which the
Parisii joined determined the Roman general to destroy the town and
crush the tribe. He sent Labienus with four legions to carry out his
plans. The Gauls chose as their leader Camulogenus of the tribe of the
Aulerci, an old man, but skilled in warfare. He took advantage of the
marsh on the right bank of the river and so stationed his troops as to
prevent the approach of the Romans to the little town. Labienus first
tried to make a road across the bog by laying down hurdles plastered
with clay. This proved too much of an undertaking, so he slipped away
“at the third watch” and retraced his steps to Melodunum. There he
seized fifty ships which he filled with Roman soldiers and with them
threatened the town so effectually that it yielded to him. Then he
repaired the bridge, crossed to the left bank, and once more began his
march toward Lutetia. When the Lutetians heard of this move from
refugees, they burned their town and destroyed its bridges. Labienus put
a Roman knight in command of each of the fifty ships which he had
captured and ordered them to slip silently down the river for about four
miles under cover of darkness. Five steady cohorts he left to guard the
camp, and another five he despatched up the river after midnight with
instructions to carry their baggage with no attempt at quiet. In the
same direction he sent certain small boats whose oars were to meet the
water right noisily. He himself led a body of soldiers in the direction
which the ships had taken. When the Gauls were informed by their scouts
of the seeming division into three bands of the Roman army they,
naturally but unwisely, made a like division of their own men. In the
battle that ensued--probably near the Ivry of to-day--the Gauls resisted
with such courage that very few took refuge in flight, preferring to
fall with the valiant Camulogenus. The Gauls left to watch Labienus’s
camp tried to aid their fellows when they heard of the battle in
progress, but they could not withstand the attack of the victorious
Romans, whose cavalry cut down all but the few who managed to escape to
the wooded hills.
So it happens, rather humorously, that the earliest written account of
Paris is that telling of the destruction which left its site a clean
slate upon which the Romans might begin to write its story. For five
hundred years they wrote, until the Frankish invasion swept its
destructive might across Romanized Gaul.
In five hundred years much may be brought to pass, and the Paris that
Sainte Geneviève saved from Attila the Hun (451 A.D.) and in which
Clovis established himself (481) was a town vastly different from the
stockade-defended hamlet which Labienus set out to destroy. While its
position was selected by the Gauls because it could be easily defended,
it was evident in later and more peaceful times that the city could be
developed into a valuable commercial station. The Seine and its
tributaries, the Marne and the Oise, proved highways on which the
products of a large district could be carried to the distributing
center, Lutetia, whence they could be packed north or south or to the
coast provinces over the masterly roads which always made an important
feature of the Roman colonizing policy. There are Paris streets to-day
which follow these same roads into the country.
Roman civilization made its last stand in Gaul, and Paris became one of
the flourishing places which the Romans knew how to encourage. As soon
as the strength of the builders permitted, the town ceased to be
confined to the island and spread on both sides of the river. A bridge,
fortified at the mainland end, connected the island with the right bank
and with the road threading its way northward to avoid the marsh whose
name (Marais) is still given to a district of the city. Where now on the
north shore is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville there has
always been an open place, originally kept free for the landing of
merchandise from the river boats. This open place was called the Grève
or Strand, and the busy scenes enacted upon it sometimes included
quarrels between the masters and the longshoremen. Such a dispute came
to be called a _grève_, the French word to-day for a strike.
Where now the Palais Royal rises on the right bank, a reservoir held
water to supply the public baths. Tombs clustered along the roads
leading north and east, for cemeteries were not allowed within Roman
cities. Otherwise the north side of the river with its unwholesome marsh
was but scantily populated.
Far different was the southern or left bank, sloping pleasantly to the
Seine from Mons
[Illustration: LUTETIA UNDER THE ROMANS.]
Lucotetius. This hill is now known as Mont Sainte Geneviève and is
crowned by the church, Saint Étienne-du-Mont, that holds her tomb, and
by the Pantheon, long dedicated to her, but now a secular building. This
southern district was drained by the little stream, Bièvre, whose waters
in later times were believed to hold some chemical properties which
accounted for the brilliancy of the tapestries made in the Gobelins
factory situated on its banks. Fields, fruitful in vines and olive
trees, clustered around villas which the Romans knew well how to build
for comfort and beauty, and which the conquered Gauls were not slow to
adopt, modifying the form to their needs as they modified the Roman
dress, covering with the graceful toga the business-like garments of
older Gaul.
The later emperors came often to Lutetia. They, too, saw the beauty of
the river’s left bank connected with the Cité by a fortified bridge.
Some one of them, probably Constantius Chlorus, built a palace of
majestic size with gardens sweeping to the river bank, and here in
Lucotecia, Lutetia’s suburb, Constantine the Great and his two sons
lived when they visited this part of Gaul. Constantine’s nephew, Julian,
called the Apostate because of his adherence to the old philosophies,
spent parts of three years here.
“I was in winter quarters,” he wrote, “in my dear Lutetia, which is
situated in the middle of a river on an island of moderate size joined
to the mainland by two bridges. The winter is less severe here than
elsewhere, perhaps because of the gentle sea breezes which reach
Lutetia, the distance of this city from the sea being only nine hundred
stadia. This part of the country has excellent vineyards, and the people
cultivate fig-trees which they protect against the winter’s cold by
coverings of straw.”
In the huge palace where Julian found himself so happy his physician,
Oribasius, prepared an edition of the works of Galen, the first book
published in Paris; and here it was--or perhaps in the palace on the
Cité--that in 361 the rebellious Roman soldiers proclaimed Julian as
their emperor. Of the palace there is left to-day what was probably but
a small part of the original building, but which is, in reality, a
section of no small size. It was that portion of the structure which
contained the baths, and it gave its name to the building--Palais des
Thermes (Palace of the Baths). One room, preserved in fair condition and
showing the enduring Roman brick and stone-work, is sixty-five feet long
and thirty-seven feet wide and springs to a vaulted height of fifty-nine
feet. It is used as a museum of Gallo-Roman remains. The baths were
supplied with water by an aqueduct some eleven miles in length,
fragments of which have been found at various parts of its course. At
Arcueil, a town three miles from Paris, named from the Latin word
_arculus_, a little arch, there still remain parts of two arches whose
small stones are held by the extraordinarily tenacious Roman cement and
are varied by occasional thin, horizontal layers of red tiles. At
present they are built into the walls of a _château_ which has recently
been bequeathed to the town for an old men’s home.
Somewhere south of the palace and not far from it was a garrison to
protect the suburb and the Cité from southern invasion. That it was not
greatly needed during this peaceful and prosperous period seems proved
by the fact that Lutetia’s amusement ground was not within its easy
reach, but on the eastern slope of Mons Lucotetius. Here at some time
during the Roman occupation, perhaps during the second or third century,
an amphitheater was built, and here emperors and generals and merchants,
Romans and Gauls, gazed upon the pageants and contests of the arena.
Christianity wrought a milder mood in her believers and even before the
invasion of the Franks the stone seats of the ellipse had been converted
to other uses. Enough was discovered, however, some thirty
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE ROMAN PALAIS DES THERMES.]
[Illustration: AMPHITHEATER OF LUTETIA AT PRESENT TIME.]
years ago to permit an adequate idea of the original appearance.
To Julian has been attributed the rebuilding of the Cité, and
excavations at different points have unearthed remains unmistakably of
Roman workmanship, which show that the island was completely surrounded
by a wall. Probably some of the stones of the amphitheater went into it.
This fortification has been related to the fourth century, and it is
known that on the spot in the Cité where the Palais de Justice now
houses the law courts, an administrative building of some kind has stood
since this same early date. One of Julian’s successors, Maximus, erected
a triumphal arch near the cathedral in 383, and it is probable that
other pretentious structures justified the erection of the protecting
wall.
The cathedral was a church dedicated to Saint Étienne, modest as
compared with its medieval successor, Notre Dame, whose sacristy is
placed on the same spot, yet showing that concentration of the arts in
their expression of religious spirit which has made the churches of
Europe at once the treasure-house of the student and the devotee, the
inspiration of the poet, and the joy of the lover of color and of line.
Both of these Christian churches have stood on ground already dedicated
to religion, for under the choir of Notre Dame there was discovered in
1711 a pagan altar, now the chief relic of the museum in the Thermes.
The inscription on the stone places it in the reign of the emperor
Tiberius (14-37 A.D.), the successor of the great Augustus. Its
inscription reads: “When Tiberius was emperor the Parisian Watermen
publicly raised this altar to Jupiter, best and greatest.”
[Illustration: THE NAUTÆ STONE.]
These Watermen (Nautae) seem from early days to have been an important
guild, first as carriers of merchandise and later as an administrative
body. In the twelfth century the band was called the Brotherhood of
Water Merchants, and its head the Provost of the Water Merchants, a name
given in shortened form--Provost of the Merchants--to the first
magistrate of the city up to the time of the Revolution at the end of
the eighteenth century. Even to-day such of the duties of the Prefect of
the Seine as apply not to the Department of the Seine but to the city
of Paris alone are comparable to those of the Provost of the Merchants.
From the seal of the Nautae, a boat, has developed the present coat of
arms of the City of Paris.
It was about the middle of the third century that the altar to greatest
Jupiter began to be deserted by its worshipers, for it was then that
Saint Denis came to Paris to preach the new religion, and with his
coming and the Emperor Constantine’s conversion Christian churches began
to be built. Even the martyrdom of Saint Denis, who, according to
Gregory of Tours, “ended his earthly life by the sword,” was no check to
believers. Legend has it that his head was stricken off on Montmartre,
the hill towering above Paris on the north, and to-day crowned by the
pearl-white dome of the basilica of the Sacré Coeur gleaming,
mysterious, through the city’s eternal haze. The hill’s name has been
said to mean “Mount of Mars,” because of a pagan altar raised upon its
summit, or “Mount of the Martyr,” referring to the death of Saint Denis.
Either derivation may be defended, and neither contradicts the story
that the holy Bishop of Paris, decapitated, picked up his head and
carried it for several miles before a kindly-disposed woman offered him
burial. Over his remains a chapel was raised, restored about two
centuries later by Sainte Geneviève, and replaced in 630 by the basilica
which Dagobert I (602-638) erected to house fittingly that most holy
relic, the head of the saint. The existing church was begun about five
hundred years later by Suger, the minister of Louis VI who adopted the
_oriflamme_ of Saint Denis as the royal standard of France. The flag
hung above the altar and was used only when the king went into battle
himself. Since the English victory on the field of Agincourt (1415) it
has not left the church. The banner (in replica) stands to-day in the
choir behind and to the left of the high altar. Throughout the church
are the tombs of the Kings of France from Dagobert to Louis
XVIII--twelve centuries of royal bones.
The canonization of Martin, bishop of Tours, the soldier saint who did
not hesitate to divide his cloak with the shivering poor, received early
recognition in Paris, where, indeed, he has always been popular. In what
was in Roman days the country but is now well within the city limits a
chapel was reared in his honor on the spot where he stopped to cure a
leper when he was on his way to Paris. In the eleventh century it was
replaced by the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, which developed into
one of the huge monastic establishments which were each a little world
in itself during the middle ages. Another chapel to Saint Martin rose at
the mainland end of the bridge leading from the island to the right
bank.
It was a fair and prosperous city that the world conquerors had nursed
beside the Seine; it remained for time to prove whether its five
centuries of growth had made it strong and sound or whether its heart
was rotten and its roots uncertain of their hold.