PARIS UNDER RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN
Louis XIII. was nine years of age when he came to the throne in 1610.
For a time the regent, Marie de' Medici, was content to suffer the great
Sully to hold office, but soon favouritism and the greed of princes, to
the ill-hap of France, drove him in the prime of life from Paris into
the retirement of his château of Villebon, and a feeble and venal
Florentine, Concini, took his place. The Prince of Condé, now a
Catholic, the Duke of Mayenne, and a pack of nobles who professed
solicitude for the wrongs of the _pauvre peuple_, fell upon the royal
treasury like hounds on their quarry. The court, to meet their demands,
neglected to pay the poor annuitants of the Hôtel de Ville, and this was
the only result to the _pauvre peuple_. In 1614, so critical was the
financial situation, that the States-General were called to meet in the
Salle Bourbon,[126] but to little purpose. Recriminations were bandied
between the noblesse and the Tiers Etat. The insolence of the former was
intolerable. One member of the Tiers was thrashed by a noble and could
obtain no redress. The clergy refused to bear any of the public burdens.
The orator of the Tiers, speaking on his knees according to usage,
warned the court that despair might make the people conscious that a
soldier was none other than a peasant bearing arms, and that when the
vine-dresser took up the arquebus he might one day cease to be the anvil
and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the common weal;
each order wrangled for its own privileges, and their meeting-place was
closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a royal ballet. No
protest was raised, and the States-General never met again until the
fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar pretext was
tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy, however, sat
a young priest of twenty-nine years of age, chosen for their orator,
Armand Duplessis de Richelieu, who made rapid strides to fame.
In 1616 the nobles were once more in arms, and Condé was again bought
off. The helpless court was in pitiful straits and the country drifting
to civil war, when Richelieu, who, meanwhile, had been made a royal
councillor and minister for foreign affairs, took the Condé business in
hand. He had the prince arrested in the Louvre itself and flung into the
Bastille; the noble blackmailers were declared guilty of treason, and
three armies marched against them. The triumph of the court seemed
assured, when Louis XIII., now sixteen years of age, suddenly freed
himself from tutelage, and with the help of the favourite companion of
his pastimes, Albert de Luynes, son of a soldier of fortune, determined
to rid himself of Concini. The all-powerful Florentine, on 24th April
1617, was crossing the bridge that spanned the fosse of the Louvre when
the captain of the royal Guards, who was accompanied by a score of
gentlemen, touched him on the shoulder and told him he was the king's
prisoner. "I, a prisoner!" exclaimed Concini, moving his hand towards
his sword. Before he could utter another word he fell dead, riddled with
pistol shots; Louis appeared at a window, and all the Louvre resounded
with cries of "_Vive le roi!_" Concini's wife, to whom he owed his
ascendency over the queen-mother, was accused of sorcery, beheaded and
burnt on the Place de Grève; Marie was packed off to Blois and Richelieu
exiled to his bishopric of Luçon. De Luynes, enriched by the confiscated
wealth of the Concini, now became supreme, only to demonstrate a pitiful
incapacity. The nobles had risen and were rallying round Marie; the
Protestants were defying the state; but Luynes was impotent, and soon
went to a dishonoured grave, leaving chaos behind him.
[Illustration: PONT NEUF.]
Richelieu's star was now in the ascendant. The king drew near to his
mother and both turned to the one man who seemed able to knit together
the distracted state. A cardinal's hat was obtained for him from Rome,
and the illustrious churchman ruled France for eighteen years.
Everything went down before his commanding genius, his iron will and his
indefatigable industry. "I reflect long," said he, "before making a
decision, but once my mind is made up, I go straight to the goal. I mow
down all before me, and cover all with my scarlet robe." The Huguenots,
backed by the English, aimed at founding an independent republic:
Richelieu captured La Rochelle[127] and wiped them out as a political
party. The great nobles sought to divide power with the crown: he
demolished their fortresses, made them bow their necks to the royal yoke
or chopped off their heads. They defied the king's edict against
duelling: the Count of Bouteville, the most notorious duellist of his
time, and the Count of Les Chapelles were sent to the scaffold for
having defiantly fought duels in the Place Royale in open noonday, at
which the Marquis of Buffy was killed. The execution made a profound
impression, for the count was a Montmorency, and the Condés, the
Orleans, the Montmorencys and all the most powerful nobles brought
pressure to bear on the king and swore that the sentence should never be
carried out. But Richelieu was firm as a tower. "It is an infamous
thing," he told the king, "to punish the weak alone; they cast no
baleful shade: we must keep discipline by striking down the mighty."
Richelieu crushed the Parlement and revolutionised the provincial
administrations. He maintained seven armies in the field, and two navies
on the seas at one and the same time. He added four provinces to
France--Alsace, Lorraine, Artois and Rousillon, humiliated Austria and
exalted his country to the proud position of dominant factor in European
politics. He foiled plot after plot and crushed rebellion. The
queen-mother, Gaston Duke of Orleans her second son and heir to the
throne, the Marquis of Cinq-Mars the king's own favourite--each tried a
fall with the great minister, but was thrown and punished with pitiless
severity. Marie herself was driven to exile--almost poverty--at
Brussels, and died a miserable death at Cologne. The despicable Gaston,
who twice betrayed his friends to save his own skin, was watched, and
when the queen, Anne of Austria, gave birth to a son after twenty years
of marriage, he was deprived of his dignities and possessions and
interned at Blois. The Marquis of Cinq-Mars, and the last Duke of
Montmorency, son and grandson of two High Constables of France, felt the
stroke of the headsman's axe.
In 1642, when the mighty cardinal had attained the highest pinnacle of
success and fame, a mortal disease declared itself. His physicians
talked the usual platitudes of hope, but he would have none of them, and
sent for the _curé_ of St. Eustache. "Do you pardon your enemies?" the
priest asked. "I have none, save those of the state," replied the dying
cardinal, and, pointing to the Host, exclaimed, "There is my judge." "At
my entry to office," he wrote to Louis XIII. in his political testament,
"your Majesty divided the powers of the state with the Huguenots; the
great nobles demeaned themselves as if they were not your subjects; the
governors of provinces acted as independent sovereigns. In a word, the
majesty of the crown was degraded to the lowest depths of debasement and
was hardly recognisable at all." We have seen how the cardinal changed
all that; yet Louis heard of his death without emotion, and simply
remarked--"Well, a great politician has gone." In six months his royal
master was gone too. Louis has one claim to distinction; he was the
first king of France since St. Louis who lived a clean life.
[Illustration: THE MEDICI FOUNTAIN, LUXEMBOURG GARDENS.]
Paris, under Marie de' Medici and Richelieu, saw many and important
changes. In 1612 a new Jacobin monastery was founded in the Rue St.
Honoré for the reformed Dominicans, destined to be later the theatre of
Robespierre's triumphs and to house the great Jacobin revolutionary
club.[128] In the same year the queen-regent bought a château and garden
from the Duke of Piney-Luxembourg, and commissioned her architect,
Solomon Debrosse, to build a new palace in the style of the Pitti at
Florence. The work was begun in 1615, and resulted in the picturesque
but somewhat Gallicised Italian palace which, after descending to Gaston
of Orleans and his daughter the Grande Mademoiselle, ends a chequered
career as palace, prison, house of peers, socialist-meeting place by
becoming the respectable and dull Senate-house of the third Republic.
The beautiful Renaissance gardens have suffered but few changes; adorned
with Debrosse's picturesque fountain, they form one of the most charming
parks in Paris. The same architect was employed to restore the old Roman
aqueduct of Arceuil and finished his work in 1624. In 1614 the
equestrian statue in bronze of Henry IV., designed by Giovanni da
Bologna, and presented to Marie by Cosimo II. of Tuscany, reached Paris
after many vicissitudes and was set up on the Pont Neuf by Pierre de
Fouqueville, who carved for it a beautiful pedestal of marble, whereon
were inscribed the most signal events and victories of Henry's reign.
This priceless statue was melted down for cannon during the Revolution,
and for years its site was occupied by a _café_. In 1818, during the
Restoration, another statue of Henry IV., by Lemot, cast from the melted
figure of Napoleon I. on the top of the Vendôme column, was erected
where it now stands. The founder, who was an imperialist, is said to
have avenged the emperor by placing pamphlets attacking the Restoration
in the horse's belly.
In the seventeenth century the Pont Neuf was one of the busiest centres
of Parisian life. Streams of coaches and multitudes of foot-passengers
passed by. Booths of all kinds displayed their wares; quacks,
mountebanks, ballad-singers and puppet-shows, drew crowds of listeners.
Evelyn describes the footway as being three to four feet higher than the
road; and at the foot of the bridge, says the traveller, is a
water-house, "whereon, at a great height, is the story of our Saviour
and the Woman of Samaria pouring water out of a bucket. Above is a very
rare dyall of several motions with a chime. The water is conveyed by
huge wheels, pumps and other engines, from the river beneath." This was
the famous Château d'Eau, or La Samaritaine, erected in 1608 to pump
water from the Seine and distribute it to the Louvre and the Tuileries
palaces. The timepiece was an _industrieuse horloge_, which told the
hours, days, and months.
[Illustration: PONT NEUF.]
In 1624 Henry the Fourth's great scheme for enlarging and completing the
Louvre was committed by Richelieu to his architect, Jacques Lemercier,
and the first stone of the Pavilion de l'Horloge was laid on 28th June
by the king. Lemercier was great enough and modest enough to adopt his
predecessor's design, and having erected the pavilion, continued
Lescot's west wing northwards, turned the north-west angle and carried
the north wing to about a fourth of its designed extent. The Pavilion
de l'Horloge thus became the central feature of the west wing, which was
exactly doubled in extent. The south-east and north-east towers of the
eastern wing of the old Gothic Louvre, however, remained intact, and
even as late as 1650 Sylvestre's drawing shows us the south-east tower
still standing and the east wing only partly demolished. Lemercier also
designed a grand new palace for the cardinal north of the Rue St.
Honoré, which was completed in 1636. Richelieu's passion for the drama
led him to include two theatres as part of his scheme: a small one to
hold about six hundred spectators, and a larger one, which subsequently
became the opera-house, capacious enough to seat three thousand.
Magnificent galleries, painted by Philippe de Champaigne and other
artists, represented the chief events in the cardinal's reign, and were
hung with the portraits of the great men of France. The courts were
adorned with carvings of ships' prows and anchors, symbolising the
cardinal's function as Grand Master of Navigation; spacious gardens,
with an avenue of chestnut trees, which cost 300,000 francs to train,
added to its splendours.
In this palace the great minister--busy with a yet vaster scheme for
building an immense Place Ducale, north of the palace--passed away
leaving its stately magnificence to the king, whose widow, Anne of
Austria, inhabited it during the regency with her sons, Louis XIV. and
Philip Duke of Orleans, the founder of the Bourbon-Orleans family. The
famous architect, François Mansard, was employed by her to extend the
Palais Royal as it was then called, which subsequently became infamous
as the scene of the orgies of Philip's son during his regency. The
buildings were further extended by Philip Egalité, who destroyed the
superb plantation of chestnut trees and erected shops along the sides of
the gardens, which as _cafés_ and gambling-saloons became a haunt of
fashionable vice and dissipation in the late eighteenth century. The
gardens of the royal palaces had always been open to well-dressed
citizens, but notices forbade entrance to beggars, servants, and all
ill-clad persons under pain of imprisonment, the carcan, and other
graver penalties. Egalité, however, to win popularity, opened his
gardens without restriction, and they soon became the forum of the
revolutionary agitation. Here Camille Desmoulins declaimed his
impassioned orations and called Paris to arms. The gambling-hells, of
which there were over three hundred, survived the Revolution, and
Blucher and many an officer of the allied armies lost immense sums
there. The Palais Royal became subsequently the residence of the Orleans
family, and now serves as the meeting-place of the Conseil d'Etat.
In the early seventeenth century nine lovers of literature associated
themselves for the purpose of holding a friendly symposium, where they
discoursed of books, and read and criticised each other's compositions;
the meetings were followed by a modest repast and a peripatetic
discussion. The masterful cardinal, who would rule the French language
as well as the state, called the nine together, and in 1635 organised
them into an Académie Française, whose function should be to perfect and
watch over the purity of the French tongue. The Parlement granted
letters-patent, limited the number of academicians to forty, and
required them to take cognisance of French authors and the French
language alone. The original nine, however, were far from gratified, and
always regretted the "golden age" of early days. Richelieu established
the Jardin des Plantes for the use of medical students, where
demonstrations in botany were given; he rebuilt the college and church
of the Sorbonne where his monument,[129] a masterpiece of sculpture by
Girardon from Lebrun's designs, may still be seen. He cheapened the
postal service,[130] established the Royal Press at the Louvre which in
twenty years published seventy Greek, Latin, Italian and French
classics. He issued the first political weekly gazette in France, was a
liberal patron of men of letters and of artists, and saw the birth and
fostered the growth of the great period of French literary and artistic
supremacy.
Another of Henry the Fourth's plans for the aggrandisement of Paris was
carried out by the indefatigable minister. As early as 867 the bishops
of Paris had been confirmed by royal charter in their possession of the
two islands east of the Cité, the Isle Notre Dame and Isle aux Vaches.
From time immemorial these had been used as timber-yards, and in 1616
the chapter of the cathedral was induced to treat with Christophe Marie,
contractor for the bridges of France and others, who agreed to fill in
the channel,[131] which separated the islands; to cover them with broad
streets of houses and quays, and to build certain bridges; but expressly
contracted never to fill up the arm of the Seine between the Isle Notre
Dame, and the Cité. The first stone of the new bridge which was to
connect the islands with the north bank was laid by Louis XIII. in 1614
and named Pont Marie, after the contractor. In 1664 a church, dedicated
to St. Louis, was begun on the site of an earlier chapel by Levau, but
not completed until 1726 by Donat.
The new quarter soon attracted the attention of rich financiers, civic
officers, merchants and lawyers, some of whose hôtels were designed by
Levau, and decorated by Lebrun and Leseur. Madame Pompadour's brother
lived there; the Duke of Lauzan, husband of the Grande Mademoiselle,
lived in his hôtel on the Quai d'Anjou (No. 17); Voltaire lived with
Madame du Châtelet in the Hôtel Lambert (No. 1 Quai d'Anjou). To the
_précieuses_ of Molière's time the Isle St. Louis (for so it was called)
became the Isle de Delos, around whose quays the gallants and ladies of
the period were wont to promenade at nightfall. _The Isle_, as it is now
familiarly known, is one of the most peaceful quarters of Paris, and
has a strangely provincial aspect to the traveller who paces its quiet
streets.
In 1622 Paris was raised from its subjection to the Metropolitan of
Sens, and became for the first time the seat of an archbishopric; the
diocese was made to correspond to the old territories of the Parisii.
Among the many evils attendant on a monarchy, which Samuel recited to
the children of Israel, that of the possibility of a regency might well
have found place. Louis XIV. was less than five years of age when his
father died, and once again the great nobles turned the difficulties of
the situation to their own profit. The queen-regent, Anne of Austria,
had retained in office Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu's faithful disciple,
chosen by him to continue the traditions of his policy. The new
cardinal-minister, scion of an old Sicilian family, was a typical
Italian; he had none of his predecessor's virile energy and directness
of purpose, but ruled by his subtle wit and cool, calculating patience.
"Time and I," was his device. He was an excellent judge of men, and
profoundly distrusted "the unlucky," always satisfying himself that a
man was "lucky," before he employed him. Conscious of his foreign
origin, Mazarin hesitated to take strong measures, and advised a policy
of conciliation with the disaffected nobles. Anne filled their pockets,
and for a time the whole language of the court is said to have consisted
of the five little words "_La reine est si bonne_." But the ambitious
courtiers soon aimed at higher game, and a plot was discovered to
assassinate the foreign cardinal. The Duke of Beaufort, chief
conspirator, a son of the Duke of Vendôme, and grandson of Henry IV., by
Gabrielle d'Estrées, was imprisoned in the keep at Vincennes, and his
associates interned at their châteaux.
The finances which Richelieu had left in so flourishing a condition were
soon exhausted by the lavish benevolence of the court, and were
unhappily in the hands of Emery (a clever but cynical official, who had
formerly been a fraudulent bankrupt), whose rigorous exactions and
indifference to public feeling aroused the indignation of the whole
nation. In 1646 23,800 defaulters lay rotting in the jails, and an
attempt to enforce an odious tax on all merchandise entering Paris led
to an explosion of popular wrath. The Parlement, by the re-assertion of
its claims to refuse the registration of an obnoxious decree of the
crown, made itself the champion of public justice. The four sovereign
courts of the Parlement met in the hall of St. Louis, and refused to
register the tax. "The Parlement growled," said the Cardinal de Retz,
"and the people awoke and groped about for laws and found none." Anne
was furious and made the boy-king hold a "bed[132] of justice" to
enforce the registration of the decree. But the Parlement stood firm,
declared itself the guardian of the public and private weal, claiming
even to reform abuses and to discuss and vote on schemes of taxation. So
critical was the situation that the court was forced to bend, and to
postpone the humiliation of the Parlement to a more convenient season.
The glorious issue of the campaigns of Condé against the Houses of Spain
and Austria seemed to offer a fitting occasion. On 26th August 1648,
while a Te Deum was being sung at Notre Dame for the victory of Lens,
and a grand trophy of seventy-three captured flags was displayed to the
people, three of the most stubborn members of the Parlement were
arrested. One escaped, but while the venerable Councillor Broussel was
being hustled into a carriage, a cry was raised, which stirred the whole
of Paris to insurrection. In the excitement a street porter was shot by
a captain of the Guards, the Marquis of Meilleraye, and the next morning
the court, aroused by cries of "Liberty and Broussel," found the streets
of Paris barricaded and the citizens in arms, even children of five or
six years carrying poignards. De Retz, the suffragan archbishop of
Paris, came in his robes to entreat Anne to appease the people, but was
snubbed for his pains. "It is a revolt," the queen cried, "to imagine a
revolt possible; these are silly tales of those who desire it: the king
will enforce order." De Retz, angry and insulted, left to join the
insurrection and to become its leader. The venerable president of the
Parlement, Molé, and the whole body of members next repaired to the
Palais Royal with no better success: the queen's only answer was a gibe.
As they returned crestfallen from the Palais Royal they were driven back
by the infuriated people, who threatened them with death, and clamoured
for Broussel's release or Mazarin as a hostage. Nearly all the
councillors fled, but the president, with exalted courage, faced them
and, answering gravely, as if in his judgment-seat, said, "If you kill
me, all my needs will be six feet of earth": he strode on with calm
self-possession, amid a shower of missiles and threats, to the hall of
St. Louis. The echo of Cromwell's triumph in England, however, seemed to
have reached the Palais Royal, and the queen-regent was at length
induced to treat. The demands of the people were granted and Broussel
was liberated, amid scenes of tumultuous joy.
In February of the next year the regency made an effort to reassert its
authority. The queen and the royal princes left Paris for the palace of
St. Germain and gathered an army under Condé: the Parlement taxed
themselves heavily, tried their hands at organising a citizen militia,
and allied themselves with the popular Duke of Beaufort, now at liberty,
and leader of a troop of brilliant but giddy young nobles. The Bastille
was captured by the Parlement, and the university promised its support
and a subsidy. This was the origin of the civil war of the Fronde, one
of the most extraordinary contests in history; its name is derived from
the puerile street fights with slings of the printers' devils and
schoolboys of Paris. The incidents of the war read like scenes in a
comic opera. A hundred thousand armed citizens were besieged by eight
thousand soldiers. The evolution of a burlesque form of cavalry, called
the corps of the _Portes Cochères_, formed by a conscription of one
horseman for every house with a carriage gate, became the derision of
the royal army. They issued forth, beplumed and beribboned, and fled
back to the city, amid the execrations of the people, at the sight of a
handful of troops. Every defeat--and the Parisians were always
defeated--formed a subject for songs and mockery. Councils of war were
held in taverns, and De Retz was seen at a sitting of the Parlement in
the hall of St. Louis with a poignard sticking out of his pocket: "There
is the archbishop's prayer-book," said the people. The more
public-spirited members of the Parlement soon, however, tired of the
folly. Mazarin won over De Retz by the offer of a cardinal's hat, and a
compromise was effected with the court, which returned to Paris in April
1649. The people were still bitter against Mazarin, and invaded the
Palais de Justice, demanding the cardinal's signature to the treaty,
that it might be burned by the common hangman.
Successful generals are bad masters, and the jackboot was now supreme at
court. Soon Condé's insolent bearing and extravagant demands, and the
vanity of his _entourage_ of young nobles, dubbed _petits maîtres_,
became intolerable: he was arrested at the Louvre and sent to the keep
at Vincennes. But Mazarin, thinking himself secure, delayed the promised
reward to De Retz, who joined the disaffected friends of Condé: and the
court, again foiled, was forced to release Condé, surrender the two
princes, and exile the hated Mazarin, who, none the less, ruled the
storm by his subtle policy from Cologne. Condé, disgusted alike with
queen and Parlement, now fled to the south, and raised the standard of
rebellion.
[Illustration: NOTRE DAME.]
The second phase of the wars of the Fronde became a more serious matter.
Turenne, won over by the court, was given command of the royal forces
and moved against Condé. The two armies, after indecisive battles, raced
to Paris and fought for its possession outside the Porte St. Antoine.
The Frondeurs occupied what is now the Faubourg St. Antoine: the
royalists the heights of Charonne to the east. It was a stubborn and
bloody contest. The armies were led by the two greatest captains of the
age, and fought under the eyes of their king, who with the queen-mother
watched the struggle from the eminence now crowned by the cemetery of
Père la Chaise. "I have seen not one Condé to-day, but a dozen," cried
Turenne, as victory inclined to the Royalists. The last word was,
however, with the Duke of Orleans: while he sat hesitating in the
Luxembourg, the Grande Mademoiselle ordered the guns of the Bastille to
be turned against Turenne, and the citizens opened the gates to Condé.
Again his incorrigible insolence and brutality made Paris too hot for
him, and with the disaffected princes he returned to Flanders to seek
help from his country's enemies. It was a fatal mistake, and Mazarin was
not slow to turn it to advantage. He prudently retired while public
feeling was won over to the young king, who was soon entreated by the
Parlement and citizens to return to Paris. When the time was ripe,
Mazarin had the Duke of Orleans interned at Blois, Condé was condemned
to death _in contumacio_: De Retz was sent to Vincennes. Ten councillors
of the Parlement were imprisoned or degraded, and in three months
Mazarin returned to Paris with the pomp and equipage of a sovereign. It
was the end of the Fronde, and of the attempt of the Parlement, a venal
body[133] devoid of representative basis, to imitate the functions of
the English House of Commons. The crown emerged from the contest more
absolute than before, and Louis never forgot the days when he was a
fugitive with his mother, and driven to lie on a hard mattress at the
palace of St. Germain. In 1655 the Parlement of Paris met to prepare
remonstrances against a royal edict: the young king heard of it while
hunting at Vincennes, made his way to the hall of St. Louis
booted[134] and spurred, rated the councillors and dissolved the
sitting.
The years following on the internal peace were a period of triumphant
foreign war and diplomacy. Mazarin achieved his purpose of marrying the
Infanta of Spain to his royal master; he added to and confirmed
Richelieu's territorial gains and guided France at last to triumph over
the Imperial House of Austria. On 9th March 1661, after handing Louis a
code of instructions for future guidance and commending his ministers to
the royal favour, the great Italian, "whose heart was French if his
tongue were not," confronted death at Vincennes with firmness and
courage. Mazarin was, however, a costly servant, who bled his adopted
country to satisfy his love for the arts and splendours of life, to
furnish dowries to his nieces, and to exalt his family. His vast palace
(now the Bibliothèque Nationale), with its library of 35,000 volumes,
was furnished with princely splendour. He left 2,000,000 livres to found
a college for the gratuitous education of sixty sons of gentlemen from
the four provinces--Spanish, Italian, German and Flemish--recently added
to the crown, in order that French culture and grace might be diffused
among them; they were to be taught the use of arms, horsemanship,
dancing, Christian piety and _belles-lettres_. A vast domed edifice was
raised on the site of the Tour de Nesle, and became famous as the
college of the Four Nations. It was subsequently expropriated and given
by the Convention to the five learned academies of France, and is now
known as the Institut de France.
[Illustration: THE INSTITUT DE FRANCE.]