Seven Ages of Paris (10 page)

Hastening home to Paris, he found a sea of internal troubles arisen in his absence, including a bizarre peasant uprising known as the revolt of the pastoureaux. Their origins obscure, their alleged goal was to deliver the King from imprisonment, and they wandered in bedraggled, penniless bands from village to village in the northern provinces, finally descending on Paris as a horde incremented by thieves, vagabonds, gypsies and tarts. Initially they found much sympathy in a populace now fed up with crusading and with a Church grown fat on privilege and corruption. Estimated at 60,000 strong, they killed several priests, threw others into the Seine, wounded a large number and indulged in various acts of apostasy. Eventually their assaults extended to the propertied nobility and the Jews. Driven out of Paris by a populace that swiftly tired of them, the pastoureaux then moved on to cause trouble in Rouen and Orléans. On the King’s return, they were mercilessly hunted down and hanged as far away as Aigues Mortes, the great embarkation port created by the Crusaders at the mouth of the Rhône. This anticlerical jacquerie, like other similar movements in medieval France, left behind no legacy.

Back in Paris, Louis continued the work of consolidating and building on the institutions created by Philippe Auguste. He was the first to realize that such a complex organism as that which his grandfather had created could not be administered like private family property. Under him, the various organs of state in Paris began to split like amoebas, giving rise to the Grand Conseil, in charge of political matters, the Chambre des Comptes, and the Parlement. (The last had nothing whatever in common with the Parliament of England, created about the same time. It was not a representative assembly but in fact filled the role of the supreme court of appeal in the kingdom.) The royal baillis, administrators and tax collectors, were made subject to audit by enquêteurs. Louis also created the national archives (the first records of which had been destroyed, as we have seen, at the Battle of Fréteval in 1194), in which were preserved all royal acts, treaties, title deeds and judgements. It also first housed the priceless collection of illuminated manuscripts, such as those of Denis the Areopagite, which show in marvellous detail life in medieval Paris, eventually to find their way into the Bibliothèque Nationale. In addition Louis founded Paris’s first hospital for the blind, the Vingt-Quinze, which could offer shelter to 300, and a home for prostitutes, the Filles-Dieu. Throughout his reign finances were healthy, with receipts exceeding expenditures. His organization of resources was such that from Paris he could despatch food to any part of the country that was famine-stricken. The burden of taxation imposed under Philippe Auguste was alleviated, a new middle class came into being in Paris, and, by the end of his reign, the country as a whole had never known such material prosperity.

In 1259 Louis signed a conclusive peace, the Treaty of Paris, with Henry III, designed to bring to an end the age-old struggle with England. National-minded Frenchmen, especially in retrospect, found it hard to comprehend why— negotiating from a position of strength—Louis gave so much away to the defeated, in the shape of territories like Gascony and Guienne in the south-west. Some have claimed that it led to the Hundred Years War. Nevertheless, it was an act of astonishing, modern-minded moderation, and gave the fair-minded King a reputation as a mediator to whom all Europe would resort in his lifetime—including even Henry III when in dispute with his own barons. “Never had a united Christendom come closer to realization,” comments André Maurois.

Louis’s reign also saw a new flowering of thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and philosophy attained a fresh significance; literature flourished with such works as the Roman de la Rose and its anatomy of courtly love; and the great gothic cathedrals, such as Notre-Dame, were completed. The piety of Saint Louis was also to bequeath to Paris one of its greatest jewels, the Sainte-Chapelle. In 1239, Louis acquired the purported “Crown of Thorns” from the Emperor of Constantinople, Baudouin II. A wily oriental, Baudouin knew a good thing when he saw it coming and charged the King an outrageously high price (more than four times what the whole chapel was to cost). The acquisition of this most priceless relic placed France firmly in the forefront of Christendom. To house it, and further relics subsequently acquired on the Crusades, in 1242 Louis began building the Sainte-Chapelle, completed in the record time of six years.

There it sits to this day, having survived wars and revolutions, protected within the confines of the largely disappeared Palais de la Cité, a miracle of filigree stonework. Dramatically it counterpoints the grimly solid, dark pessimism of the adjacent Conciergerie, with its sad, damp little court, “for the women,” dating back to the Revolution, its open washing trough and huge spikes to prevent intruders from climbing into the Palais de Justice. Inside, the lower chapel, dedicated to the Virgin, with its low ceiling painted with a star-studded sky, is darkly mysterious, its powerful external buttressing sharply contrasting with the delicacy of the ethereal upper level. Here all is open space, flooded with coloured light from its renowned thirteenth-century stained-glass windows. Atop it all, its thirty-three-metre spire (made from cedar in the nineteenth century, an exact replica of the medieval original), springs boldly skywards, a masterpiece of refinement visible from almost every vantage-point in Paris.

In 1257, under Saint Louis’s confessor, Robert de Sorbon, the University of Paris now gained its enduring name of the “Sorbonne.” By the end of the thirteenth century, it had attained the constitutional form that would carry it through the rest of the Middle Ages, and a century later it had as many as forty colleges. Robert de Sorbon started off the University library with a bequest of sixty-seven volumes; thirty years later the collection numbered 1,017 titles, all painstakingly written on parchment and often exquisitely illuminated. Of these only four were in French, the remainder still in Latin.

If gown took it out on town from time to time in medieval Paris, it was perhaps not surprising. The students, aged between fifteen and thirty, had a pitiably hard life. Often their backs bore the signs of heavy beating, inflicted by less amiable masters than Abélard. Bitterly cold in winter, with only one much patched garment to their name, they would lodge:

in a poor house with an old woman who cooks only vegetables and never prepares a sheep except on feast days. A dirty fellow waits on the table and just such a person buys the wine in the city … After the meal, a student sits on a rickety chair and uses a light, doubtless a candle, which goes out continually and disturbs the ideas.

The next day’s lectures would began at 5 a.m. Receiving no stipend, the scholar would often have to pay extortionate rents for these meagre lodgings himself—as well as find a way of paying his master’s wages, for, likewise receiving no regular salaries, each professor had the right to teach for whatever fees he could extract from such students as he could persuade to come to his lectures.

The Saint-King’s pious achievements, however, could not in the end save him. Against the counsel of the Pope and his own family, helmeted in the searing heat of high summer in 1270, Louis rashly set off from Aigues Mortes on a new crusade, the Eighth. In Tunisia, his army was decimated by sun and plague at Carthage, and he himself, aged fifty-six, succumbed. There was widespread mourning across France. He left the country with unprecedented prosperity, and a moral prestige which carried inestimable weight in foreign affairs. For the next two centuries the landed gentry would clamour for a return to “the good customs of Saint Louis.” Louis’s saintly moral standards were to lead the kingdom inexorably towards an absolute monarchy, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses. By the end of his reign, medieval France had created for herself a civilization that was identifiably entirely her own. Saint Louis left behind him a capital that was to “change no more,” for “All the organs of public life, like those of a living body had come into existence, had found their place and, on the whole, were to retain it.”

Houses might be built and rebuilt, but Paris would remain the same, growing “concentrically like a tree”—first of all to fill out the undeveloped areas embraced by Philippe Auguste’s protective wall.

A NEW HARSHNESS

Louis’s heir, Philippe III—otherwise known as “Le Hardi”—ruled for only fifteen years and indeed made little impact on Paris. He spent most of his reign away from the capital campaigning, notably in the disastrous war with Aragon. His greatest dynastic success was to marry his second son to Joan of Navarre, the independent kingdom down on the Pyrenees. It was Navarre which, several centuries later, was to provide France with perhaps the greatest of all her kings, Henri IV. Philippe’s first son died, possibly of poisoning; so, in 1285, his second son succeeded to the throne as Philippe IV.

Mystery and controversy surround Philippe IV, who was swiftly to prove one of France’s most unpleasant, indeed most disastrous kings, leaving in his wake catastrophe for the country and misery in Paris. Under him a new depth of savagery manifested itself in the life of Paris, a dark retreat from the enlightenment of Suger and Philippe Auguste. The new King was called “Le Bel” on account of his fair but icy good looks, but few reliable personal descriptions of him survive. Like his saintly grandfather, he wore a hair shirt much of his life, but his was a ferocious kind of piety, and during his reign the Inquisition which Saint Louis had introduced into France was exploited to grim and terrible ends in Paris.

His protagonists among French historians claim that Philippe further cemented and consolidated the fundamental institutions of France, and further extended her territories. All his revisions of the body politic—such as the diminution of feudal powers—tended, however, only to increase the power of the throne, advancing it further towards absolute monarchy. In Paris, in contrast to London, where the Lords and the Commons were willing to sit together as a legislature, the three Estates (the Clergy, the Nobility and the Third Estate or non-privileged classes) remained separate, thereby making impossible a joint, national representation—a failing that would impede the development of democracy in France right through to the Revolution of 1789. Systematically Philippe applied himself to the destruction of all external and internal rivalry, and to achieve all this he brought in hard-faced, wily lawyers from the provinces. The first meetings of the Estates, later to become the Estates-General, took place under Philippe, but the periodic consultations he granted to them tended only to confirm legislation already promulgated by him. In Philippe’s Paris the Parlement evolved into a more stable and responsible affair, comprised of lords spiritual and temporal, meeting twice a year for a session of two months, and acting as both a court of appeal and an advisory council.

Trouble started with Philippe’s extravagant plans, in 1298, to rebuild the Palais de la Cité of his ancestor Philippe Auguste to more sumptuous standards, so that it would be “the most beautiful that anyone in France ever saw.” It would house under one roof all the functions of administration, treasury and justice of the kingdom. It was a triumph of late gothic art, where even the sinister vaults of the Conciergerie beneath were works of great beauty. In a Great Hall divided by two massive naves, under whose columns statues of past kings surveyed the scene, would sit his Parlements and Estates. This sombre chamber, with its Salle des Pas Perdus above, still survives today, close to Saint Louis’s ethereal Sainte-Chapelle. Even closer, possibly too close for comfort, was one of the four great defensive towers, known as the Tour Bonbec, or Blabbing Tower, so called because it was there that torture loosened prisoners’ tongues. Philippe’s Palais de Justice (incorporated into the Palais Royal, which he had vastly extended) was staffed with a costly army of permanent salaried officials.

Philippe le Bel was never to complete his awe-inspiring Palais Royal, or to enjoy it. Deservedly he became known as France’s most spendthrift king. Under him the cost of running France was six times as much as it had been under Philippe Auguste less than a century earlier, even allowing for inflation. Apart from the money poured into the new Palais, where his predecessors had sought territorial aggrandizement by war and conquest he resorted to outright purchase. All of this led to appalling and recurrent financial difficulties, forcing Philippe to search constantly for fresh sources of revenue. He invented new taxes like the maltôte, a levy on corporate business, an income tax earmarked for “the defence of the realm”; he cancelled debts to the Crown; and he ruthlessly confiscated personal treasures and fortunes. Most notoriously he introduced rampant inflation by adulterating the currency, reducing its weight in gold at the mint—the first French king to do so. Shamelessly he admitted, “We have been forced to have these pieces coined which perhaps lacked some of the weight and alloy of those struck by our predecessors.” Under Philippe’s cruel laws, private counterfeiters were subject to the hideous penalty of being boiled alive, but, as counterfeiter-supreme, the King himself was untouchable. Riots against inflation by the impoverished commerçants of Paris in 1307 were ruthlessly crushed, with twenty-eight offenders publicly hanged on the eve of Epiphany from elms at the four entries to the city. There would be no wider revolt.

Yet none of this was enough to fund the outpouring from the royal exchequer. He therefore turned his eyes towards the moneylenders—first of all the Lombards, who had moved up from their native northern Italy and made themselves extremely wealthy (and, consequently, unpopular), not least in funding the Crown during the early days of Philippe le Bel’s reign. He next came down on the Jews. After their brutal expulsion by Philippe Auguste, Jewish communities had gradually trickled back to re-establish themselves in France. Particularly in the south they flourished, setting up admirable intellectual centres in their schools, and accruing considerable wealth. In 1288, three years after Philippe’s accession, thirteen Jews of both sexes were burned at the stake in Troyes—a foretaste of what was to follow. Under instructions transmitted through his counsellor Guillaume de Nogaret, beginning in the summer of 1306 all Jews were ordered out of France, condemned as usurers, their property confiscated.