ALSO BY ALISTAIR HORNE

Back into Power ALISTAIR HORNE TheLand isBright Canada and the canadians ThePrice of Glory: Verdun 1916 TheFall of : TheSiege and the Commune 18;0-71 . Tb Lose a Ba#le: 1940 Seven Ages of Paris The Terrible Year: TheParis Commune1871 Death of a Generation SmallEarthquake in Cht1e 2002 : 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. Henceforth her renewed intercession to save the city - with varying degrees of Pepin saw himself entitled to wield the Sword of God, consequently success. inaugurating a special relationship whereby various French rulers through the ages, down to Napoleon and his imperial nephew, could claim prerogatives to intervene in Vatican affairs. The closing years of the century saw the arrival of Pepin's son Charlemagne, a rather less attractive character than his portraits and MEROVINGIANS, CAROLINGIANS AND CAPETIANS subsequent canonization would suggest. Crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 by Pope Leo III, who anointed him as 'his excellent son', Charle­ magne fought forty-seven campaigns in as many years; his great (though A dynasty of Frankish rulers, most of them louts, their name appropri­ short-lived) empire extended from the Pyrenees to the Elbe, but he ran ately derived from the Latin for 'ferocious', now entered the scene, it all from Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), not from Paris. Once again Paris Pushing in from the east and devastating the Gaul lands as they went, had an absentee ruler who did nothing for her, and she was not even they came to be known as the Merovingians. Clovis, with his bride mentioned in his last will and testament. Nevertheless, subsequent city Clotilde, father Childeric and sons Clotaire and Childebert, moved into elders (somewhat surprisingly) were to erect a statue to him in front of Paris from Clovis's temporary capital at Rheims. As the Merovingians Notre-Dame. Charlemagne's son, the first of eighteen kings named Louis, wrangled and split among themselves, there followed two and a half in fee to the papacy and under the thumb of his second wife, let it all dark centuries of chaos and internecine savagery for Paris - its name go, allowing the empire to end up, by the turn of the century, dismem­ now changed permanently from Lutetia. Clovis managed to kill off most bered into seven parts. of his family; after each killing he built a church in contrition. He was a Meanwhile, as the Carolingians wrangled, and all Europe sank into a great church-builder. kind of lethargy, in the ninth century a new warrior race emerged from They were not gentle or nice people, these Frankish forebears of the the north. The Norsemen, and their kinsmen the Danes, surged out of modern-day Parisian, but at least, under Clovis, the notion of Paris as a bleak Scandinavia to invade the British Isles and Russia as far as Kiev, capital city first became accepted, because that was where he had his and even reached Constantinople. In 845, it was the turn of Paris, when palace. His descendant Dagobert (629-39), on his interment (he died of 120 longboats, decorated like terrifying black sea-dragons and bearing dysentery, aged only thirty-six) at Saint-Denis, established the tradition thirty pairs of oars, attacked the city (unexpectedly) from upstream. of burial there for subsequent kings of France. But during these dark Once again the population fled, and the Norsemen carried off tons of years the country found itself fragmented, and refragmented, among booty, including the magnificent bronze roof of Saint-Germain-le-Dore. short-lived nations with strangely Orwellian names such as Neustria and Defenceless Paris was attacked again in 852 and 856, when more 6 INTRODUCTION FROM CAESAR TO ABELARD 7 churches lost their roofs, and yet again in 858, in 861 and in 865. As in time, was to appear more immediate, and would certainly endure for the time of Attila, Paris shrank back into the original ten hectares of the longer, than any since the Romans of Julius Caesar. When the millen­ Ile de la Cite. The wooden walls of Roman days were hastily recon­ nium dawned, the vulnerable new France ruled over by the Capetians structed, while to defend its two bridges - the Grand Pont connecting it consisted of no more than the diminutive domain called the Ile de to the Right Bank and the Petit Pont to the Left - two wooden towers France, with Paris at its centre, surrounded by the hostile states of were erected, called chdtelets,or 'little castles'. Burgundy, Flanders, Normandy, Aquitaine and Lorraine. She was poor, In 885, when Charlemagne's imperial structure had all but disinte­ her vassals powerful and her rulers inhibited by linguistic anarchy grated and the throne of France was ta all intents vacant, there came wherein few spoke a common language; and she was heavily dependent the city's worst tribulation. Setting forth from England, a force of Norse­ on the support of the Church. But by 1328, when the Capetian dynasty men under the command of Siegfried captured Rauen and headed on had run its course, the Kingdom of France had become the most united up the Seine. Fourteen hundred boats reached Paris, conveying a formi­ and potent in Western Europe. dable force of some 30,000 hirsute warriors. Led by a heroic Comte de Little is known of Hugues Capet (the surname came as a sobriquet Paris, Eu des, who was to prove himself France's hommefort, Paris refused because of the abbeys whose cappahe wore). He seems to have been a to surrender - the first time that any city had resisted the terrible timid and anomalous character who achieved little of distinction before Norsemen. Paris was besieged for ten grim months, but at last, after dying of smallpox after a reign that lasted only nine years. His heir, some highly dubious negotiations, Siegfried was bribed with 700 livres accorded the nickname of Robert le Pieux, became the first ruler almost of silver and allowed a free passage, both ways, to carry the war since the Romans to bother seriously about the reconstruction of Paris. upstream to Burgundy, and leave Paris in peace. Siegfried then repeated His most memorable act was to restore the Palais de la Cite, which had the procedure, 'subjecting unhappy Burgundy to the worst winter it had stood on Roman foundations for a thousand years and was now showing ever known'. Not surprisingly, the episode was to lead to centuries of signs of dilapidation, but he also set about rebuilding the Paris abbeys instinctive mistrust and hatred of Paris by the Burgundians, culminating of Saint-Germain-des-Pres and Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, which had lain during the Hundred Years War in their alliance with the English. in ruins ever since the Norse raids and the First Siege of Paris. In 911, the Norsemen were bought off definitively by giving them Yet Paris remained the unimpressive capital of an unimportant state. the duchy of Normandy, which they had in fact already been occupying The queen of Henri I (1031-60), Anne of Kiev, corning from a supposedly for a number of years. Thereby the dread pirates acquired a territorial backward country, was not taken by her husband's domain; nose in air, base, a certain respectability and a religion. For the next century the she wrote to her father, Yaroslav the Great, complaining that it was 'a superabundant energies of these new Normans, under Duke Rollo, were barbarous country where the houses were gloomy, the churches ugly directed notably against the British Isles, culminating in the overthrow and the customs revolting'. of King Harold at Hastings in 1066. In France, there followed more years Then, after several more dim Capetian kings, there arrived the first of anarchy, chaos and exhaustion, until the turbulent tenth century of the significant rulers of the dynasty, Louis VI, Le Gros. approached its end with Louis V dying devoid of heirs, thus ringing down the curtain on the Carolingian dynasty. Now a great-nephew of Eudes, Hugues Capet - a true Frenchman, or at least a man with a French-sounding name - opens the new millennium for France. In 987 he was duly elected king by assembled French barons. A month later he SUGER AND THE TWELFTH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE was crowned in Rheims Cathedral, thereby establishing a fresh prece­ dent, like Dagobert's interment at Saint-Denis. As the energetic Normans swarmed across the English Channel and then began to reorganize the The three decades spanned by Louis VI's reign (1108-37) represent an sleepy and backward Saxon England they had conquered, so a new important turning point, not just in the artisti~ development of Paris, threat to France was about to take shape - a threat that, from time to but in the cultural history of the West as a whole. Until one considers