Modern Paris

Valois-Angoulême rulers Bourbon kings 1515 - 1547 François I 1589 - 1610 Henri IV 1547 - 1559 Henri II 1610 - 1643 Louis XIII 1559 - 1560 François II 1643 - 1715 Louis XIV, the sun king 1560 - 1574 Charles IX 1574 - 1589 Henri III THE BEGINNING 0F THE RENAISSANCE The city’s resurgence following a series of horrors - the Hundred Years’ War, the Civil War, epidemics of plague, and famines - started slowly after the beginning of the fifteenth cenbury. It was prompted primarily because the large landowners of the Ile de France, chief among them the cathedral chapter of Notre-Dame, were able to increase profits from agriculture after the witbdrawal of troops. Paris won back its position as a central market, where grain and wine from the Ile de France were traded for fish, salt, eggs, and vegetables from Normandy. And the first rudiments of local industry were esbablished: along the bank of the Bièvre, cloth-dying factories were set up after 1443 by the Italian Canaglia and the Fleming Jean Gobelin. The Parisian bourgeoisie invested in the sea trade of Toulouse, Marseille, and Rouen. A stratum of society that lived from the profits of capital developed. It was Parisian money that ransomed François I from Spanish imprisonment in 1526 after his defeat in the Battle of Pavia. Two years after his return from Madrid, François I wrote to the city of Paris: “ It is our intention in future to spend the greater part of our time in our good city of Paris and its surroundings rather than in other parts of the kingdom…” Thus ended the long period in which the kings had ruled from their castles in the Loire Vallcy. Nevertheless, François I had the châteaux of Chambord and Blois constructed and expanded, invited Leonardo da Vinci and other Italian Renaissance artists to work on them, and thereby laid the foundations for a first form of the French Renaissance. The king’s decision not only reestablishes the political center of the country in the Ile de France, but also led to the development of Paris and its environs as the artistic center of the country. As early as 1528, work began in Fontainebleau, and soon the Renaissance châteaux of St. Germain-en-Laye and Madrid were constructed (the latter, no longer existing, at the edge of the Bois de Bologne). Paris began to be surrounded by a wreath of royal or princely residences and hunting lodges: Anet, for the mistress of Henri II, Diane de Poitiers; the châteaux of the Montmorency, Ecouen and Chantilly ; Versailles, the most important; and Compiègne. These edifices, along with their parks and forests, profoundly affected the local landscape. When in Paris, François I resided in the Hôtel de Tournelles and in the Louvre, which had remained essentially unchanged since the time of Charles V. In 1528, the king commanded that the route connecting the Pont au Change, which led to the palace on the Ile de la Cité, and the Louvre be expanded into a broad quay along the Seine this is the present-day Quai de la Mégisserie, which was constructed between 1530 and 1539. Next, the king had sections of the old Louvre torn down so that the construction of a modern palace could begin. Pierre Lescot and Jean GouJon began this renovation in 1546, and François I died in the following year. In 1559, following the unfortunate death of Henri II, at a tournament at the Hôtel de Tournelles, Henri’s widow, Catherine de Médicis, finally abandoned the east of the city to move into the Louvre, at that time still a construction site. In 1563 Catherine de Médicis requested that Philibert de l’Orme build her a palace outside the city walls, some 550 yards to the west of the Louvre, the Tuileries, thereby laying the groundwork for a construction problem that would occupy almost every French ruler up to Napoleon III: how to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries. For Catherine’s was an initial step in a direction that would prove decisive for the city’s further development; it established a commanding axis radiating westward from the palace, one for which André Le Nôtre, roughly a hundred years later, would submit the first artistic conception . The first step toward connecting the two palaces was the construction of the Petite Galerie, but only in 1610, under Henri IV, was the two-story connecting corridor, the Grande Galerie along the Seine, completed. The presence of the Tuileries led to the rise of a new quarter to the north of it, the faubourg St-Honoré - for which the chapel of St. Roch was erected in 1578 - and thus to the expansion of the city to the west. But it also highlighted the critical problem of the city in the sixteenth century - its expansion beyond the medieval city walls. A royal edict of 1548 had forbidden any further expansion of the faubourgs, a prohibition dictated not only by military considerations - for in the event of war, it would be impossible to defend this part of the city - but also by concern for the rights of the guilds and for the economy; the citizens of the faubourgs were not subJect to the city’s tax laws, and their craftsmen were not regulated by its guilds. But only two years later, at the urging of the prévôt des marchands, who thought it better to protect the faubourgs than to destroy them, Henri II decided to have a new wall drawn about the enlarged area of tbe city, which - especially on the Left Bank, where the ring wall had not been expanded since the time of Philippe Auguste - spread well beyond the fortifications. In spite of long negotiations between the king and the city, virtually no construction was undertaken except in the west on the Right Bank: at the insistence of Catherine de Médicis, a “ Porte Neuve” was constructed at the end of the Jardin des Tuileries, from which fortfied trenches were dug in a large arc around the new Faubourg St-Honoré to the Porte St-Denis. Louis XIII had a new wall constructed along these trenches, on the course of the western portion of the later Grands Boulevards. The only additional fortification, by Charles IX, son of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis, merely involved some bulworks and bastions on the Right Bank at the Arsenal and at the Porte St-Antoine. On the Left Bank, work was abandoned for lack of funds. The city thus had to expand within the narrow circuit of the medieval walls, and, increasingly, the remaining fields, vineyards, pastures, and gardens had to be sacrificed to new construction. It is estimated that between 1500 and 1610, the close of Henri IV’s reign, the population doubled - from roughly 200,000 to roughly 400,000 in- habitants. In 1539, the Crown began to issue various edicts to make the purchase of building sites easier, and Henri IV even commanded, in 1609, that properties be auctioned if the owners were unable to commence reconstruction or new building within six months. But in spite of these measures, by the middle of the sixteenth century, a housing shortage began to be felt - and it would only grow more intense during the course of the succeeding centuries. As early as 1550, it was no longer possible for citizens with small incomes to rent an entire house, and buildings began to be broken up for multiple renters or owners. The population density led to troubles with the water supply and a worsening of hygienic conditions. The kings sought to deal with these problems by building new wells (Fontaine des Innocents) and pumps on the bridges over the Seine (La Samaritaine, on the Pont Neuf, was built under Henri IV), digging drainage canals (the first covered one, égout de Ponceau, was constructed in 1605), paving the streets, and making proclamations about their cleanliness and illumination. After 1599, along with the prévôts, a grand voyer de France supervised the streets and squares in the public interest. The state’s ability to dispose of property to accommodate new streets was drastically expanded: thus François Miron, who was both prévôt royal and prévôt des marchands under Henri IV was able to have three property owners who had resisted the laying out of the Rue du Ponceau hanged with a single rope, and Henri IV himself threatened the Augustinian monks who, in 1606, refused to sell a portion of their grounds for the extension of the Rue Dauphine: he warned that if their garden walls were not demolished within a day, he would have them blasted down with cannon fire. The kings themselves rnade new construction sites available. In 1543, François I arranged that a row of hôtels that belonged to the royal family but were not inhabited, chiefly the Hôtel St-Paul, be sold and the properties divided into smaller parcels. A few years later, the prior of the neighboring church of Ste. Catherine was given permission to sell some of its land as building lots. Thus the cultivated fields of the Couture Ste-Catherine, which had once been swampland, made way for a new quarter, Marais which became a favored residential area for the nobility because it was still largely open. After Henri II was kiIled in the tournament at the Hôtel de Tournelles. Catherine de Médicis put this hôtel up for sale, without immediate success. It would be left to Henri IV to have a row of uniform hôtels built here around a newly created square, the Place Royale place des Vosges, the first planned square in Paris.

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