PARIS OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS
In Philip Augustus (1180-1223) was reincarnated Charlemagne’s
wide-seeing spirit, and now it appeared at a time when it was possible
to turn vision into fact. Charlemagne saw the value of a united nation
under a centralized power but conditions were not ripe for the
fulfillment of his vision. Philip Augustus was alert in taking advantage
of the beginning made by Louis VI toward establishing the supremacy of
the king and in availing himself of certain feudal rights which previous
monarchs had not been strong enough to enforce. He insisted that his
vassals, great lords all of them, should submit themselves to his court;
that they should take him as arbiter of their disputes; that they should
ask his confirmation, as suzerain, of any privileges that they granted
to their vassals; and that they should make no changes in their fiefs
which should lessen their value to him. As suzerain the king was heir to
fiefs which fell vacant for any reason, and he acted as guardian for the
many minor children orphaned in the constant quarrels in which the
nobles engaged.
A strong grasp of all these hitherto unurged rights gave Philip a power
that enabled him to repress the disorders of the country, and sounded
the note for the downfall of feudal home rule which could not live
harmoniously with power centralized in the monarch.
Philip’s procedure divided his kingdom into bailiwicks, each containing
several provostships. Four times a year each _bailli_ appeared before
the assizes in Paris and reported on the condition of the land under his
care. Thrice a year he came to town bringing the revenues of his
bailiwick, and the king saw to it that the money was not turned over to
any body of lords, always hungry for more without Oliver’s excuse, and
accustomed to pocket any sums that strayed in their way. By the king’s
decree the financial report was made to a board consisting of a clerk
and of six burgesses. The burgesses were always Philip’s good friends.
He made it for their interest to be faithful to him, and with their aid
he played the barons against the church, the church against the barons,
and both against the bands of robbers that infested the kingdom. He
banished the Jews and confiscated their property, this for the same
spiritual benefit which he thought would profit the country by his
burning of heretics. Incidentally, the contents of the Hebrews’ coffers
hidden in the ghetto on the Cité did not come amiss for the filling of
the king’s own strong boxes in the palace not far away.
In the palace Philip’s father and grandfather had died, there he himself
was born, and there he married his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, to
whom he took so violent a dislike that he separated from her the next
day. The unlucky young woman appealed to the pope and the consequent
embroilment of Philip with the church on account of his subsequent
marriage with Agnes of Meran laid the whole kingdom under interdict. No
services were held in the churches even for marriages or burials and the
unhappiness caused the people was so great that at last Philip put away
Agnes and recalled Ingeborg. Because he loved Agnes tenderly he hated
Ingeborg all the more and her life of seeming favor was in reality one
of wretchedness.
When Philip came to the throne all the western part of what is now
France belonged to the king of England, Henry II. The Île de France was
cut off from the sea, and the frequent hostile actions of a vassal whose
possessions were greater than his own kept the young monarch constantly
involved in petty wars with a man so much older than he and so much more
skillful a tactician that he gained nothing and even came near losing a
part of what he had. Into the mind of the lad of fifteen these troubles
instilled a hatred of England and a determination to be free of this
perpetual annoyance and to obtain a hold upon land that seemed
unnaturally owned by a lord who was his vassal and yet lived over seas.
The years intervening between the growth of Philip’s determination and
his chance to put it into effect were filled with work which developed
the young king’s naturally strong character and intelligence. After
Henry’s death one of his troublesome sons succeeded him--Richard, who
has come down in history as “the Lion-hearted.” Richard was handsome and
brave, a man to stir the imagination and admiration of a fighting age,
but he was too impetuous and too active to apply himself to the study of
government. When the call came for the Third Crusade Richard found in it
an outlet for his energy for which he would not have to make excuse to
his deserted kingdom. He and Philip and Frederick of Germany all went to
the East, and there the French and English kings came to know each
other, Philip envying Richard’s dash and audacity and envied in turn for
the statesmanlike qualities which he was developing.
When it became evident that his presence would be of no help to a
crusade doomed to failure Philip insisted on withdrawing to France where
he knew that his coming would be of advantage; Richard stayed on with no
thought for his kingdom, hoping for further adventure. Philip put
himself in touch with conditions in and around the Île de France, took
advantage of all disturbances in his vassal’s provinces which would give
him even a slender foothold, and was ready to meet any act of Richard’s
successor, John, whatever it might be.
The opportunity came soon after John’s accession, for he could be
depended upon to open some loophole through his disposition toward
devious ways rather than straightforward. As lord of the western
provinces of France he was Philip’s vassal; as Duke of Brittany his boy
nephew, Arthur, was his vassal. When war broke out between France and
England and John went across the Channel to pursue it, he found that his
nephew, incited by Philip, without doubt, was laying claim to other
provinces than Brittany. The easiest way out of the difficulty was to
murder Arthur, which John is said to have done either with his own hand
or by the dirks of ruffians in his presence. After Philip had stormed a
fortress that had been looked upon as the chief defender of Rouen the
frightened Englishman fled home, and then Philip devised a plan of
making Arthur’s death work to his advantage. As John’s suzerain he
summoned him to Paris to answer for his nephew’s death before the king’s
court. John refused to appear unless he were promised a safe-conduct
not only to the city but home again. Philip refused to promise
protection for the return trip unless the court should declare John not
guilty of the charge against him. Philip hardly could have expected that
John would thrust his head into the noose, but it suited his purpose
quite as well that he should not. What he wanted was his land and that
he could take now with perfect justice when the court declared John
guilty of murder and of treason in disobeying the orders of his
overlord. The estates in France which John had inherited from his
father, those in the north, were confiscated to the French crown. It was
all much easier than fighting.
While diplomacy gained for Philip these northern possessions and the
power that went with them, he gained a like addition in the south by a
system of letting alone. Simon de Montfort, a noble of Normandy, entered
upon a crusade against the people of Albi, in Toulouse, a town and
district heretical enough to attract the attention of the persecutor and
rich enough to draw the gaze of the avaricious soldier of fortune. The
destruction that ensued laid waste a fair country and wiped out the
greater part of its population. A few years later the province fell in
to the crown in default of direct heirs to the ruling family of
Toulouse, and thus the south of France was added to the northern and
western possessions which were accumulating under Philip’s control.
Poor-spirited as was John, now called “Lackland,” he could not see
himself deprived of his own land and his rival growing rich in other
provinces without making some opposition. He entered into a coalition
with the German emperor and with the Count of Flanders, who was one of
Philip’s important vassals. Philip defeated the combined armies in the
battle of Bouvines (1214) and thereby made himself the most powerful
monarch in Europe. The success of the citizen soldiery established the
reputation of the burgesses as strong and intelligent fighters and
thereby struck terror to the hearts of nobles who were nursing plans of
rebellion like those of the captured Count of Flanders. Yet nobles were
one with burgesses in rejoicing over John’s final dismissal from any
governing part in northern France and over the defeat of the intruding
Germans. Never before in all her history had there been so universal a
feeling of what it meant to be a Frenchman and to serve a country whose
unity was symbolized by a king personally strong, strongly supported, in
very truth the head controlling the members.
It is an interesting fact that the same period that established the
supremacy of the king of France was marked in England by the check to
the royal domination administered to John Lackland when the barons
wrested from him the Magna Charta. Historians of other countries are apt
to speak of the French as volatile, capricious, delighting in
revolutions, of which the troubled fourscore years from 1789 to 1871 are
examples. It might be well to remember that the English, who pride
themselves on being neither volatile nor capricious, were less patient
than the men across the Channel. They, too, made their stand against
aristocratic privilege, and they did it five hundred years before the
long-suffering French; they, too, cut off their monarch’s head, and
Charles went to the block a hundred and fifty years before Louis mounted
the guillotine. Action and reaction are equal, prolonged repression must
result in corresponding expression. The evils of five centuries are
quickly cured if less than one century is devoted to the healing.
After the battle of Bouvines the victorious army marched to Paris in a
triumph which was participated in by every village along the way. Every
parish church held a service of thanksgiving, every crossroads was
packed with shouting peasants doing homage to the king, admiring the
nobles, and, above all, wonderstruck at the new military force whose
possible value they could see, even if it was not yet entirely clear
how great would be the weight of the “mailed fist” of the _bourgeois_.
At the very time when the power of the king was becoming dominant,
however, democracy showed itself even with impudence in the _fabliaux_,
the popular tales which betrayed the jealous spirit of the populace
toward the nobles and the clergy. These verses, marked by the _esprit
gaulois_ were characteristic of the period of the early middle ages as
were also the _chansons de geste_ which stirred the crusaders by their
recital of the valorous deeds of accredited heroes. “Renard the Fox,” a
long epic of three centuries’ growth, burlesques every aspect of the
social life of the middle ages, and its delicious fooling paints a more
vivid and more intimate picture than does the pen of any chronicler.
These lighter forms were not representative of all the thought of the
period, for Abélard’s thesis, ancient and ever new, that we should not
believe what we do not understand, and Saint Bernard’s refutation of
such a lack of faith were the most prominent instances of a mental
activity that found lodgment in schools and expression in pulpit
controversy and rostrum argument. Now, too, the professions and the arts
no longer were confined to the monasteries, but laymen became teachers
and writers and artists and craftsmen.
The opportunities of meeting in Paris like-minded people from all over
Europe for a long time had drawn students to Paris, and schools were
endowed for men of different nationalities. Philip united them under the
jurisdiction of the University. From very early days the region on the
south bank, just across from the eastern end of the Cité and extending
up Mont Sainte Geneviève has been given over to students. In the church
of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre they met with their instructors. Across the
alley on which the church faces still stands the house of the governor
of the Petit Châtelet before whom the young men appeared to adjust their
differences. Behind the church runs the rue du Fouarre on which many
colleges were situated, among them the Schools of France, Normandy,
Germany and Picardy. In 1202 this thoroughfare was called rue des
Escoliers, but when, by way of responding to Pope Urban V’s appeal for
self-denial, the students in the classes sat on bundles of straw bought
in the near-by hay market, the street changed its name to “Straw
Street,” to commemorate their good intentions. Near by, to-day, is a
modern street called “Dante,” after the Italian poet, who was not behind
his contemporaries in studying in Paris. Émile Loubet, the former
president of the French Republic, lives at number 5 on this street.
[Illustration: _Le Louvre au Tems de Philippe Auguste_
THE LOUVRE IN THE TIME OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS.
From an old print owned by the City of Paris.]
[Illustration: FRAGMENT OF THE WALL OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS AS IT LOOKS
TO-DAY.]
Not far away is the rue des Anglais, which was laid out before Philip
Augustus’s reign and took its name from the English students who
frequented it. A little farther west, creeping in the dark between
tilted houses, is the street, called since the fourteenth century, “of
the Parchment Workers,” and in the thirteenth century rue des
Escrivains. Two of the tiny dwellings, numbers 6 and 7, belonged in the
thirteenth century to the English cathedral of Norwich, which used them
as dormitories for the scholars which it supported at the French seat of
learning.
These houses are built around a microscopic courtyard, a plan persistent
in France through many hundred years. It is a plan seen to-day in many
modern dwellings, in the Banque de France, a seventeenth century
building, in the eastern end of the Louvre and in its pavement record of
the earliest quadrangular Louvre. It is a plan making for light and air
and it often permits the planting of a small garden within. The idea
sprang from the necessity of a fortification’s preserving a stolid and
impenetrable exterior while the life of its tenants, carried on within
the shelter of its walls, had something of pleasant environment.
So closely does Paris cling to her ancient traditions that even in the
twentieth century the schools and their students are removed but a few
yards from their medieval location. The students of to-day, too, have
their own traditions of dress and behavior which mark them as
inhabitants of the “Latin Quarter” even if they are kodaked at
Versailles on a holiday afternoon. They assume for themselves now
privileges which Philip Augustus encouraged them to take by making them
free from the regulations which the other citizens obeyed and subject
only to the ecclesiastical tribunal. This difference of attitude caused
many riots in the thirteenth century and they break out afresh in the
twentieth with a frequency which helps to occupy any idle moments of the
city police.
So great were the attractions of Paris offered not only to students but
to merchants that the population of the city grew to one hundred and
twenty thousand under Philip’s rule. The populous section on the south
or left bank of the river was matched by another on the north, chiefly
inhabited by merchants and artisans, and both of them were larger than
the original Cité on the island. The Cité was the administrative and
ecclesiastical center, for the king’s palace was not his only residence
but also a palace of justice, and crowded into the limits set by the
Seine were so many churches that one of them served a parish of only
twenty houses.
The northward growth of the city encroached upon the Halles as it had
upon the cemetery of the Innocents, and Philip recognized the necessity
of enclosing and roofing the markets. Such utilities as public ovens,
too, which had been a monopoly of some of the religious houses, he
opened to the citizens at large. He also instituted a water supply,
which, though far from ample, since it allowed only two quarts a day for
each inhabitant, was an earnest of good intentions.
The original tower of the Louvre seemed to Philip a good nucleus for an
enlarged fortification which should be at the same time a palace to
which he might withdraw from the palace in the crowded Cité. Around the
old donjon he built a rectangular fortress, its short end lying along
the river, its entrance defended by another huge tower whose work of
protection was reinforced by smaller towers, by a surrounding wall, and
by a moat. Down beneath the treasures of to-day’s Louvre and out under
the courtyard still run passages of this old building. They twist and
turn within walls of rough masonry and inflame the imagination with
thoughts of adventurous possibilities, of plots and prisoners and
escapes, until they land the wanderer of a sudden in the coal bin of the
hopelessly up-to-date furnace that heats the Hall of the Caryatides.
Across the river on the south bank stood another huge tower, best known
by its later name, the Tour de Nesle. It was from this tower, that, in
the fourteenth century, Jeanne of Burgundy, widow of Philip the Long, is
reputed to have had the people who displeased her dropped into the
river. Villon’s “Ballad of Old-Time Ladies” says:
“And where, I pray you, is the Queen,
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack’s mouth, down the Seine?”
Buridan was a professor in the University, and the author of the famous
assertion that if an ass were placed between two equally attractive
bundles of hay he would starve to death before he could determine which
one to eat first. The tale goes that Buridan’s friends, fearing the
outcome of his visit to the tower, were waiting in a boat and rescued
him. Dumas’ play, “La Tour de Nesle” is based on the legends surrounding
this old fortification, now existent only in a tablet placed on the
eastern wing of the Institute to mark its site.
A chain across the stream from the Louvre to the Tour de Nesle regulated
navigation, for it could only be taken down for the passage of boats by
permission of the provost.
Starting south from the Tour de Nesle ran
[Illustration: TOUR DE NESLE IN 1661.]
the wall whose erection Philip commanded when he first went off to the
wars, that his fair city might be well protected in his absence. It was
higher and heavier than its predecessors, with a battlemented top to
hide soldiers in action and frequent towers which served the triple
purpose of sheltering extra men, of storing weapons and of affording
points of observation somewhat above the wall itself. A dozen gates
opened each upon a drawbridge whose lifting compelled the invader to
cross a ditch in some way before he attempted to storm an entrance.
Leaving the Tour de Nesle the wall swept around Mont Sainte Geneviève
and back to the river at a point about opposite the center of the
present Île Saint Louis, east of the Cité. On the right bank it ran
north and west, keeping below the Priory of Saint Martin which lay
outside of it. Its course is traced on the pavement of the eastern
courtyard of the present Louvre, part of one of the towers is extant in
a government pawnshop in the Marais, a considerable section is to be
seen in the enclosure beside Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and its course is
marked elsewhere by an occasional fragment, by some street named
_Fossé_, or by a tablet placed by the Commission of Old Paris, which is
doing excellent antiquarian work in the preservation and marking of
historic buildings and localities.
The Paris of Philip Augustus was but a thirtieth part as large as the
Paris of to-day, but it had three hundred streets. Narrow, dark and
dirty alleys they were, the best of them, and even in this early century
the devastating epidemics of a later day were not unknown. A
contemporary historian says: “One day the king was in his castle of the
Louvre and was walking back and forth, pondering the affairs of the
kingdom, when there passed a heavy wagon whose wheels stirred up the
street and caused an insupportable odor to rise from it. When he smelled
this stench Philip experienced a profound nausea. At once he summoned
the provost and the burgesses of the city and he gave them orders to
pave the streets with large stones and strong, which was done.”
“Which was done in part” would have been nearer the truth, for, although
one public-spirited citizen gave a large sum, most of the contributions
were of the nature of samples from the shopkeepers’ stocks, and the
actual amount of paving accomplished was very little for many centuries
to come. As late as the sixteenth century Montaigne was deploring the
evil odors of the city he loved so well, and Arthur Young, at the end of
the eighteenth, compared the cleanliness of Paris most unfavorably with
that of London. In Philip’s reign ladies seldom went afoot, so thick
was the mud, composed of indescribable filth, and knights had good need
of armor in times of peace to protect them from buckets of water, poured
casually into the streets from abutting houses with only a cry of “_Gare
l’eau_” as a warning.
Nevertheless, in days of festival these same narrow streets might be
gorgeous to behold. When Philip Augustus returned from the battle of
Bouvines the whole city came out to meet him. Chanting priests, singing
girls, shouting urchins ushered him into a town decorated to do him
honor. From windows and balconies hung rich tapestries and carpets;
banners waved, and the sunlight flashed on glittering spearpoints by day
as bonfires made breastplates glitter at night.
It would be hard to find in all history so complete an instance of a
nation’s spiritual and mental growth expressing itself in outer form
rapidly and in transcendent beauty as is exhibited in the evolution of
Gothic architecture in France in the twelfth century. It originated in
the Île de France and within the span of this hundred years Paris was
rebuilt, bursting into the elegance and grace of the new style from the
heaviness of the old as a butterfly casts aside its constraining cocoon.
The nave of Saint Germain-des-Prés, is an example of the heavy-pillared,
round-arched building of the Romanesque era. The desire to give visible
form to the universal feeling of uplift brought to birth the ogive or
pointed arch which gave its name to “ogival” or Gothic architecture best
shown, of course, in churches. Higher and higher the arches pointed
skyward; lancet windows above helped to light the deep “vessel” or nave
(from the Latin _navis_, ship) and the roof crowned all at a dizzying
height.
Satisfying as this was from the point of view of beauty and of
symbolism, it gave rise to serious practical questions. How were such
lofty walls to be made strong enough to support the outward push of the
roof? The thirteenth century had come about before the problem was
solved entirely. By that time outer buttresses had been evolved strong
enough for their work yet so delicate that they were called “flying,”
spread as they were like the wings of a bird.
Decoration became more beautiful, also. Romanesque pillar capitals had
been adorned with conventional vegetation and strange beasts whose
originals never were on land or sea. The sculptors of the ogival period
took Nature as their teacher and France as their schoolroom and carved
the leaves and flowers and fruits that grew about them, the oak and
willow and rose-bush and clover and grape. Pinnacles gave an effect of
lightness to exteriors and their edges were
[Illustration: CHOIR AND NAVE OF NOTRE DAME, LOOKING WEST.]
[Illustration: NAVE OF SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS.]
decorated with _crochets_ (furled leaves) and tipped with _fleurons_ or
bunches of budding leaves.
High heavenward sprang spires from the western end of the churches, this
western façade forming an imposing entrance to the nave through whose
length the choir and altar at the eastern end, beyond the transepts,
looked mysteriously far away. From the roof at the junction of the nave
and the transepts a slender spire called a _flèche_ (arrow) shot upward
with exquisite grace.
The introduction of ogival architecture had a sudden and revolutionary
effect upon the art of painting. Before the twelfth century mural
decorations and the illumination of manuscripts had been the only
instances in France. When the broad expanses of wall above the
semicircular Romanesque arches vanished with the coming of the pointed
arch there was no place left except the windows for the depiction of the
lives of the saints, of scenes from Old Testament history and from the
life of Christ. Glass then became the artist’s medium.
The most illustrious examples of the new style to be found in modern
Paris are the cathedral of Notre Dame, the refectory of Saint
Martin-des-Champs, and the Sainte Chapelle built by Saint Louis in the
thirteenth century.
The cornerstone of Notre Dame was laid by Pope Alexander III in the
reign of Louis VII (1163.) The new cathedral covered the spot where the
Nautae had erected their altar to Jupiter, replaced the many times
repaired Merovingian cathedral of Notre Dame, and attached itself to the
ancient church of Saint Étienne, the original cathedral of Paris which
stood where Notre Dame’s sacristy now rises. This old edifice was not
taken down until the new was sufficiently advanced for the altar to be
consecrated, so that service beneath the cathedral roof never was
interrupted even for a day. The relics were removed to a new Saint
Étienne’s, built on Mont Sainte Geneviève.
Construction went on briskly through Louis’ reign and the four decades
of Philip Augustus’s and the three years of his successor’s, Louis VIII,
and work ended on the superb edifice in the twentieth year of the rule
of Saint Louis. It was a “quick job”--eighty-four years--as building
went in those days. The great mass never has been completed, for the
spires of the original plan have not been added. It has had its days of
decay and of restoration, the last attempt having returned its elaborate
west façade as closely as possible to its appearance in Philip
Augustus’s day when it was finished.
Inside and out it is magnificently harmonious,
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE DAME.]
a worthy setting for the scenes it has witnessed--scenes splendid,
startling, tragic. Here Saint Louis brought the Crown of Thorns and here
his funeral took place. Here Philip the Fair rode in on horseback after
the battle of Mons-en-Puelle and here he convened the first States
General--the first Assembly wherein the burgesses were represented.
Henry VI of England was crowned here, so was Marie Stuart, and here it
was that Napoleon set the imperial crown upon his own head and then
crowned Josephine. Here Henry IV, turned Catholic for the purpose of
gaining possession of Paris, heard his first mass, and here, during the
Revolution, a ballet dancer posed in the choir as the Goddess of Reason,
“in place of the former Holy Sacrament.”
Officially, the cathedral is the hub of France, for measurements along
the national highways are all made from the foot of its towers. Deep in
the hearts of the French people, too, is love for this splendid fane.
They love it as a summary of Gothic beauty, as a storehouse of history,
and, above all, as the moral fortress of the city, sheltering as it does
“Notre Dame de Paris,” the guardian of the city for five hundred years.