MEROVINGIAN PARIS
The reading of Cæsar’s “Commentaries” makes us know that the Gauls with
whom he contended were worthy opponents, ingenious in planning warfare
and enthusiastic in fighting. Even the trained Roman legions had to work
for their victories. Granting possible exaggeration, which is a sore
temptation to a conqueror, eager to magnify the difficulties of his
conquest, it is nevertheless clear that a radical change had transformed
these fierce Gauls and irresistible Romans of a half century before
Christ when, five hundred years later, a band of less than 10,000
“barbarians”, led by Clovis, swept across a comparatively unresisting
Gaul.
What had happened in Gaul was what had happened in other parts of the
Roman Empire. Money had concentrated in the hands of an insatiable few.
To supply them and the government every stratum of society was squeezed
of its smallest coin, until good men of middle-class position were
willing to sell themselves into slavery to avoid the insistent demands
of self-seeking tax collectors, and the government was meanly willing
to accept the sacrifice because the supply of slaves was not being kept
up since the victorious eagles had ceased to perch upon Rome’s banner.
In Paris conditions were not different from those in other parts of the
province. The town was good to look upon with handsome Roman buildings,
and it was ordered with due respect to the laws for whose making Rome
had undoubted genius; but beneath this fair outside there shivered the
soul of the dependent grown cowardly from abuse, lacking loyalty for
what was unworthy of loyalty. The Gauls, who had adopted the language
and manners of their conquerors, had become weak from overmuch reliance
on the stronger power; the Romans had softened during years of peace. So
it happened that when the barbarians from the north and east threatened
Gaul they were bought off with gifts of land, and when, in 451, Attila,
the Scourge of God, led into the north his fierce and hideous Huns whose
only joy was bloodshed, the people of Paris prepared themselves for
flight when he was still a long way off.
For every vital crisis in the life of the individual there is given a
counterbalancing power of endurance; to groups this power is taught by
the man or woman whom the circumstances develop as a leader. In this
emergency, when the dreaded shadow of the hawklike Hun fluttered the
citizens, and they were making preparations for deserting the town and
taking into hiding such of their goods and chattels as they could, the
leader developed in the unexpected form of a woman--Sainte Geneviève.
Some say that Geneviève was, like Jeanne Darc a thousand years later, a
peasant girl. Saint Germain of Auxerre, the story goes, on his way to
“quenche an heresye” across the Channel, chanced to visit Nanterre where
his prophetic eye espied the divine spirit in the little maid and his
holy hand sealed her unto God. Another version insists that Geneviève
belonged to a prominent family in Paris and that her family’s influence
accounted for her sway over the people.
For sway them she did. At her bidding the women of the city fasted and
fell on their knees and assailed God with prayer. Nearer and nearer came
the foe, and the unbelieving reviled the maiden; but Saint Germain
reproached them for their lack of faith and the miracle came to
pass--the “tyrantes approachyd not parys.”
All quarrels were lost in the apprehension of this attack of a common
enemy, and by the united effort of Gauls and Romans, of Burgundians,
Visigoths and Franks, the dreaded Attila was defeated near Châlons in a
battle so determined that the very ghosts of the slain, it was declared,
continued the fight.
Freed of this menace to the whole country the victorious tribes again
fell to quarreling among themselves. The Franks proved sturdiest and
most persistent. Descended from Pharamond, who, perhaps, was legendary,
their king, Mérovée, had led them against Attila. Now his son,
Childéric, attacked Paris. Again Geneviève rescued her townsmen from
famine, herself embarking upon the Seine, which probably was beset by
the enemy along the banks, and returning with a boatload of provisions
which, by miraculous multiplication, revictualed the whole hungry and
despairing garrison.
Childéric’s son, Clovis, leading about 8000 men, in 481 made himself
king of northern France with Paris as his capital, thus establishing the
line of monarchs who called themselves Merovingians. “Paris,” he wrote
in 500 A.D., “is a brilliant queen over other cities; a royal city, the
seat and head of the empire of the Gauls. With Paris safe the realm has
nothing to fear.”
Clovis had married an orthodox Catholic wife, Clotilde, who was eager
for his conversion. Her arguments are said to have been far from gentle,
but they seem to have been suited to her husband’s nature, for he was
almost persuaded to make the great change at the time of the birth of
his eldest child. The baby died within the week, however, and the king
looked upon his loss as an act of vengeance on the part of his deserted
gods. When the second child recovered from a serious illness he was
convinced that Clotilde’s intercessions had saved its life, and again he
inclined toward Christianity. An incident determined his acceptance of
his wife’s faith. In the battle of Tolbiac against the Germans Clovis
begged the aid of “the God of the Christians” to determine in his favor
a wavering victory. He won the fight, and it is easy to believe the joy
of Sainte Geneviève, when the monarch was baptized in the cathedral at
Rheims. He seems to have been of simple mind. The fittings and the
ceremonies of the vast church touched his spirit to submission. “Is not
this the kingdom of heaven you promised me?” he asked of the bishop.
Again, when he listened to the story of the crucifixion, he is said to
have cried with an elemental desire for vengeance, “Oh, had I been there
with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ!”
Sainte Geneviève died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over
which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her
their patron saint. The hill that had been known as Mons Lucotetius
they called Mont Sainte Geneviève, and on it they built a chapel to
honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a
church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint
Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious
establishment which bore Sainte Geneviève’s name. Except for a dormitory
and refectory this monastery was torn down in the middle of the
eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte Geneviève,
secularized to-day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built
and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the
Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that
is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in
those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the
good saint’s bones on the Grève, but some of the devoted preserved the
ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in
the neighboring church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth
century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey.
The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred
years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands
of the northern tribes. The Roman Empire had found in Gaul the last
stronghold of its civilization. There were large cities, fine
buildings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the
barbarians, a youthful race at the destructive stage, these represented
but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated onslaughts
ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes
who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were destroyed, fields
and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early
Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but
the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up
where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were
bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the
same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died.
The successors of Clovis for one hundred and fifty years tricked their
wives, murdered their rivals, and assassinated their nearest of kin if
they stood in their way. Clovis divided his kingdom among his four sons.
One of them was killed in battle soon after and left his three children
to the care of their grandmother, Clotilde, with whom they lived in the
great palace on the left bank. Just like the wicked uncles in many a
fairy tale two of Clovis’s surviving sons obtained possession of the
little boys by stratagem and took them away to the palace on the Cité.
Then they sent to Clotilde a messenger who bade her choose between the
shears and the sword--the shears which should clip the children’s locks
and thereby sever their claims to the throne and send them into the
Church, and the sword of death. In a passion of indignation Clotilde
exclaimed that she would rather see them dead than shorn. Claiming this
cry as their authorization the two men set about the murder of their
nephews. Childebert, king of Paris, proved somewhat less brutal than his
brother (he loved flowers enough to plant a garden at the Roman palace)
and would have saved the children--they were hardly more than
babies--but Clotaire stabbed two of them with his own hand. Then he
married their mother. The third boy escaped, came under the tutelage of
Saint Séverin and entered a Benedictine monastery. When he was a man
grown he established a religious house at a spot a few miles from Paris
called Saint Cloud from his name, Clodoald. Here, on a height above the
river, stood the _château_ where Napoleon effected the _coup d’ état_
that made him First Consul, and whence Charles X issued the decrees that
brought about the Revolution of 1830. The building was burned during the
troubles of 1870, but the park with its fine _allées_ of trees and its
fountains is one of the playgrounds of modern Paris.
Clotaire had done away with the possible rivalry of his nephews but he
had a bitter enemy in his brother Thierry. This amiable relative plotted
his assassination. He invited him to a feast and stationed his
desperadoes behind a curtain whence they should spring out upon their
victim. Some friend of Clotaire’s, chancing to pass by, noticed below
this apparently innocent screen a row of feet unaccounted for, and
guessed the project of their owners. Warned of his danger Clotaire came
amply guarded and caused his brother extreme annoyance by his evident
knowledge of his plan and its consequent frustration. Thierry gave him a
silver dish by way of souvenir of this pleasant occasion, but he
repented him of this generosity as soon as Clotaire was out of sight and
sent his son to replevin the gift.
One of Clotaire’s sons, Chilpéric I (who died in 584) gave his daughter
in marriage to the son of the king of the Visigoths in Spain. A great
train came to Paris to fetch the bride, and the appearance of these
rough Goths and the thought of her approaching separation from her
parents and friends so afflicted the young girl that her father
determined to secure companionship for her. He commanded some chosen
young people--girls and youths of her own age--and also some entire
families to go with her into Spain. So great was the opposition to this
high-handed proceeding that it became necessary forcibly to seize the
unwilling recipients of the honor in order to be sure of their presence
when the expedition started. Some of those who were to be separated from
their kindred committed suicide in despair over their banishment. “In
Paris there reigned a desolation like Egypt,” says sympathetic Gregory
of Tours. Robbed of their children the rich Parisians found the country
also robbed of gold and silver vessels and of handsome raiment, for the
queen heaped into her daughter’s bridal coffers the treasures that she
had obtained from the nobles in the course of years under the guise of
revenue. So loath were the princess’s attendants to follow her fortunes
and so lacking were they in loyalty that her retinue on arriving in
Spain was lessened not only by the daily desertions of all who could
manage to escape, but by the defection in a body of no less than fifty
men.
Frédégonde, the bride’s mother, was a woman of forceful will and of
unbridled passions. The list of deaths for which she was responsible
reads like a roster of the royal family. Although of low birth she
attracted the attention of the king, Chilpéric, and induced him to put
aside his wife, Audovère. Chilpéric then married Galsuinthe, sister of
Brunehaut, wife of his brother Sigebert. Frédégonde soon compassed
Galsuinthe’s death and then achieved her ambition and became queen
herself. Brunehaut naturally was indignant as well as sorrowful at her
sister’s death, clearly the work of an assassin. She urged her husband
to vengeance and he declared war against Chilpéric. His activity was not
of long duration, however, for he, too, fell a victim to Frédégonde’s
ferocity. Brunehaut saved her life only by claiming the asylum of the
cathedral of Paris. Not long after she married Mérovée, a son of
Chilpéric and Audovère. Then Frédégonde disposed of her by inducing
Sigebert’s subjects to claim their queen and by insisting that Chilpéric
should deliver her over to them. Mérovée, at her command, was shorn and
imprisoned and hounded until he sought death at the hands of a servant.
His brother was stabbed. Their mother, Audovère, was not safe even in
the cloister, for she was murdered in her retreat. Chilpéric himself was
the next victim, killed by a knife-thrust as he returned from the chase.
He was succeeded by an infant son, Clotaire II (613-628), and Frédégonde
spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce
devotion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his
guardians.
Brunehaut outlived her enemy, Frédégonde, by many years and finally met
her death at the order of Frédégonde’s son. After a stormy career
during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and
grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she
opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age--she was
eighty--did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and
displayed to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a
wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in
Paris where now the rue Saint Honoré crosses the rue de l’Arbre Sec, and
not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain,
the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire
II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and
praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious
life in private and governing with justice and intelligence. “Great king
Dagobert” he was called, and he was regarded impartially as a “jolly
good fellow” and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the Cité, and he
rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit
Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and
hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and
enthusiasm.
In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a
race of “Rois Fainéants” (“Do-nothing Kings”), dissolute, lazy, leaving
the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled
slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the
coarse pleasures of another.
The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries
and a half was the establishment of churches and religious houses. The
Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a
victor. He was content to learn the language of the conquered race and
the mysticism of religion spoke to him winningly. Throughout the years
when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at
least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built
the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son,
Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of
Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a church was dedicated to the same
saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further
enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint Séverin, the
tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original buildings that we see on these
sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit
that has reared one structure after another upon ground once
consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen
hundred years ago.
The story of the foundation of the church of Saint Vincent is
interesting from several points of view. Clovis divided his possessions
among his four sons, giving Paris to Childebert. Childebert had no
notion of staying cooped up in this northern town, and he went as far
afield as Saragossa in search of war. During the course of his siege of
that city he beheld its citizens marching about bearing what seemed to
be a relic of especial sanctity. It proved to be the cloak of Saint
Vincent in which they were trusting to save them from their assailants.
It did not betray their trust, for Childebert became filled with
eagerness to possess a relic which could inspire such confidence, and
offered to raise the siege if they would give him the tunic. When he
returned to Paris Saint Germain of Autun persuaded him to build a church
for its protection and to establish an abbey whose members should make
it their first duty to pay honor to the relic. This abbey was called
later Saint Germain-des-Prés, the name which the abbey church bears
to-day. It stands no longer in the meadows, but raises its square
Merovingian tower above one of the busiest parts of Paris. Except for
this tower the church was burned in the ninth century, but it was
rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the nave with its
semi-circular arches is one of the few remaining examples in the city of
the Romanesque architecture of which this was a characteristic. The
choir shows in its arches and windows the hand of a later builder who
was inclining toward the pointed Gothic.
The Merovingian kings were buried here. After the founding of Saint
Denis the royal remains were removed to that abbey church.
The north bank church of Saint Vincent also received the name of Saint
Germain, but this was to honor Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, the friend of
Sainte Geneviève. This early edifice also was destroyed, but was rebuilt
by Robert the Pious, and the later building held the bell which rang for
the massacre of Saint Bartholomew a thousand years later.
These churches and monasteries were the means of preserving whatever of
learning persisted through this period of return to primitive living.
Every one of them was a center of information, and every one of them
taught freely what it knew of agriculture and of the homely arts.
Further the Church was thoroughly democratic. A bishop’s miter lay in
every student’s portfolio, as a marshal’s baton hid in the knapsack of
each one of Napoleon’s soldiers.
[Illustration: SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS.]
Of larger government, however, the bishops had small knowledge, and
Paris, left to their guidance while the kings roamed abroad, lost her
high prestige. She did not regain it under the next dynasty.