ALISTAIR HORNE Seven Ages of Paris

ALSO BY ALISTAIR HORNE Back into Power ALISTAIR HORNE TheLand isBright Canada and the canadians ThePrice of Glory: Verdun 1916 TheFall of Paris: TheSiege and the Commune 18;0-71 . Tb Lose a Ba#le: France 1940 Seven Ages of Paris The Terrible Year: TheParis Commune1871 Death of a Generation SmallEarthquake in Cht1e 2002 Napoleon: Master of Europe 1805-1807 The French 4� and Politics 1870-1970 A Savage War of Peace: Algeria1954-1962 Macmillan:1.894-1956 Macmi1lan: 1957-1986 A Bundlefrom Britain TheLonely Leader: Mon'ly1944-45 (withDavid Montgomery) 'felling Lives (editor) MACMILLAN INTRODUCTION From Caesar to Abelard Get down on your knees and prayl I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come. Sainte Genevieve, in AD 451 ORIGINS Mythomanes of Paris (of which there are many), seeking to imbue the city's past with even more glamour than is already its due, claim that its progenitor was that Paris of legend, son of Priam, who so upset three competitive goddesses and whose passion for Helen launched one of the longest wars in history. Philippe Auguste, his poets and his historians were especially partial to the Trojan Connection: a 'Catalogue' or family tree dating from the latter years of Philippe's reign is captioned, 'These are the names of the kings of the Franks who came from Troy.' (Hence, in a direct line, derived the Phrygian caps of ancient Troy, sported by those terrifying maenads of the Great Revolution, the tricoteuses.)Others dedicated to discovering the earliest origins of Paris, marginally less romantic, reckon its true founder - in purely archaeological terms - to have been a tiny mollusc in some dark Jurassic Age called a nummulite. This provides a link to Venus, goddess of love, also born out of a shell - a myth celebrated on the Renaissance Fontaine des Innocents close to where Henri IV met his assassin. Other early Parisiens (in the Neolithic Age) were less feminine - giant, mammoth-like elephants who lumbered down from their habitat on the slopes of Belleville and what is now Pere Lachaise Cemetery, to slurp from the (still pure) waters of the Seine. The less starry-eyed trace the true origins of Paris back to the Romans, who under the leadership of Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul 1 2 INTRODUCTION FROM CAESAR TO ABELARD 3 in the first century BC. In AD 358, the twenty-five-year-old Emperor Julian natural capital for trade early in the Middle Ages, never to lose this found Lutetia (as the Roman colony on the Ile de la Cite was called), primacy. Meanwhile nearby stone quarries enabled her rulers to float with its vineyards, figs and gentle climate, so thoroughly agreeable that down vast quantities of building material to construct her walls and he refused a summons to lead legions to the Middle East. 'My dear fortifications. Lutetia,' he wrote. 'It occupies an island in the middle of the river; By the end of the first century AD, Christianity had arrived in Paris, wooden bridges link it to the two banks. The river rarely rises or falls; as followed shortly thereafter by the first martyrs. Dionysius, or Denis, it is in summer, so it is in winter; the water is pleasant to drink, for it is came from Rome and was probably Greek. Aged ninety, he was arrested very pure and agreeable to the eye.' Julian sojourned there three years, for denying the divinity of the Emperor, imprisoned on what is now the thus in effect making Paris de facto capital of the Western Empire, Quai aux Fleurs, close to the modem Prefecture de Police, and then counterpart of Constantinople in the East. Indeed he proclaimed himself dragged up the Roman highway that still bears his name northwards emperor on the Ile de la Cite. (The next such ceremony was to be from the Seine. On top of a hill overlooking the city where stood a Napoleon Bonaparte's in 1804.) The Roman tradition became dear to temple to Mercury, he and two supporters were decapitated. According later rulers of 'Lutece'. In his godlike splendour, the Roi Soleil would tap to legend, he picked up his head with its long white beard, washed it in into it, content to see himself portrayed as Hercules on the Porte Saint a nearby stream, and continued walking for 'six thousand paces'. The Martin. The Great Revolution and its heirs reinvented such artefacts as spot where he finally dropped and was buried became a holy place. consuls and senators, tribunes and togas. Napoleon I emulated Trajan's Eventually the cathedral of Saint-Denis was built on its site, subse Column to proclaim his victories over his Russian and Austrian foes at quently to become the burial place of French kings from Dagobert Austerlitz in the Place Vendome. Napoleon III reverently clad the statue onwards. His place of execution became the 'Mons Martyrum' - or of his great uncle atop it in a toga, and, when things were going badly Montmartre; and the city annals chalked up their first revolutionary for him in 1869, went to pay homage to the Roman ruins of Lutetia. A martyr as well as their first bishop. less pleasant legacy dating from Roman days was the entertainment of With the death of the benevolent Julian and the collapse of Roman roasting stray cats alive, on the ill-omened Place de Greve, which power after the best part of six centuries, various 'barbarians', pushed continued until Louis XIV ended it in the seventeenth century. westwards by some unrecorded pressure in Central Asia, came trampling It was not only the gentle allure of muddy Lutetia, its vineyards and ' in from the east - Vandals, Franks, Avars and Huns. The Ile de France - the 'clear and limpid' waters of the Seine that attracted the Romans. one of the most ancient provinces of France, formed by the rivers Seine, From earliest days the navigable Seine and the north-south axis which Marne, Ourcq, Aisne and Oise - even then presented an enticing land of intersected it at the Ile de la Cite formed one of Europe's most important milk and honey, and Paris trembled. In 451, the worst of the lot, the crossroads. The island itself constituted a natural fortress, all but unas Huns under their fearsome leader Attila, crossed the Rhine heading sailable - except when unprincipled barbarians like the Norsemen took westwards. At Cologne they were reported to have massacred 11,000 it from the rear by floating down from upstream, whence the wine, virgins. Parisians prepared for a mass exodus, piling their belongings on wheat and timber from Burgundy normally came. In the ages before to wagons with solid wooden wheels. But a fifteen-year-old orphan girl road or rail transport, the Seine - in marked contrast to the estuarial, called Genevieve, who had come close to fasting to death in her convent shallow and narrow Thames - was an ideal river for major commerce. - like another French teenager nearly a thousand years later - had a Its broad and deep currents were not too swift, and hard turf or stone vision. She exhorted the populace not to leave, telling them, 'Get down lined most of its banks. Early descriptions of Paris comment on the on your knees and pray! I know it, I see it. The Huns will not come.' She extraordinary capacities of the waters of the Seine to support heavy was proved right. Unlike Hitler, they stayed away, eventually to be loads. Together with its tributaries, the Oise and the Marne, the Seine driven back across the Rhine ..Contemporary wits explained Genevieve's linked up most of northern France and reached out southwards and 'miracle' by suggesting that there were not 10,000 virgins· in Paris to eastwards, up to Montargis, Auxerre, Troyes and numerous lesser towns. make it worth Attila's while. A more likely explanation was that Attila It enabled Paris to dominate commerce in the north, making her a had opted to head for Orleans to deal with his Visigoth foes there. 4 INTRODUCTION FROM CAESAR TO ABELARD 5 Whatever the reasons behind Attila's deviation, Genevieve's inter Austrasia. Constant warring meant that rulers spent little time in Paris, cession was rated a miracle. Less successfully she later led the Parisians which remained an unhygienic settlement of rude wooden huts, incen against the barbarian and pagan Franks. Embodying the spirit of resist diarized at regular intervals. ance, and living to the ripe old age of ninety, she helped convert the In the eighth century, a new threat distracted and menaced Paris, conquering Frankish king Clovis, and became the patron saint of Paris. this time from the south, in the form of the Saracens. Their progress was Her bones rested in the Pantheon, until scattered by the revolutionaries halted at Poitiers (732) by Charles Martel, but to raise funds for his of 1789. Slender and austere in its elongation, her 1920s statue stands campaigns he had to sack the abbeys and churches of Paris (his chosen imposingly on the Left Bank's Pont de la Tournelle, close to the area capital was Teutonic Metz). A special deal between Martel's successor, associated with her - christened Mont Sainte-Genevieve in her honour Pepin (founder of the Carolingian dynasty), and a beleaguered Pope was and eventually to embrace the Sorbonne. At various desperate moments to be of historic importance for both Paris and France. In exchange for in subsequent Paris history, when fresh barbarian hordes emerged from being anointed and crowned in the basilica of Saint-Denis in July 754 the east, mass supplications were made to Sainte Genevieve calling for by Pope Stephen, Pepin guaranteed to restore him to Rome.

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