Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

Henry I (1031-1060), no weakling but not a man of administrative ability, followed his father’s example as a builder. One of his benefactions was the Priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs which was begun in the last year of his reign on the site of a former establishment which had been destroyed by the Normans. It lay well out of the city on the old Roman road leading to the north and was a huge place, a fortified village in itself and quite independent of Paris. A wall of considerable size furnished with round towers surrounded an enclosure in which were a church, a refectory, a cloister, a chapter-house, an archive tower, a field for the pasturing of cattle, gardens for the raising of vegetables, and a cemetery for the burial of the dead. The wall has gone to-day except for one of the round towers which was preserved and rebuilt through the intercession of Victor Hugo when the straightening of a street called for its destruction. The field and gardens and the cemetery are now hidden beneath houses and pavements, but the church, whose erection lasted from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, and the refectory, finished in the thirteenth century, have been preserved as parts of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established by the Convention in 1794 as a technical school and museum of machines and scientific instruments. The church, secularized, serves as an exhibition hall for machinery, an incongruous and somewhat shocking combination. The refectory is put to the more suitable use of housing the technical library. Both are exquisite examples, and the church is the oldest existing instance in the city, of that Gothic architecture which sprang into being in the twelfth century as if to symbolize with its stretching height and its soaring spires, its delicate workmanship and its brilliancy of light and coloring, the aspiration toward the high and the beautiful which filled men’s desires after they came in contact with the appealing mysticism and the dazzling loveliness of the East.

Like his father Henry had trouble with his wives—there were three of them—and the marital affairs of his son, Philip I (1060-1108), were even more involved. Becoming violently infatuated with Bertrade, the fourth wife of the Count of Anjou, Philip sent away his wife, Bertha, and arranged with Bertrade during a church service that she should submit to being kidnapped. No bishop would marry them and it was only after long search that a priest was found sufficiently timid or sufficiently avaricious to yield his conscience to the royal demand. Excommunication followed promptly, and for twelve years the coming of Philip and Bertrade to a city silenced the church bells, which rang out joyfully again as they left. So bad was the effect upon his people of their king’s obstinate wrong-doing that the pope at last consented to an examination of the royal offender. All the bishops of France met in Paris on the first day of December, 1104. The Bishop of Orleans and the Bishop of Paris waited upon Philip and asked whether he were prepared to change his manner of life. He said that he was and accordingly appeared before the ecclesiastical body barefooted and seemingly penitent. Kneeling he promised atonement and swore to put aside Bertrade. Bertrade took a similar oath. Neither of them kept it, but so willing was everybody to feign blindness after this form of expiation that two years later the monks of Saint Nicholas at Angers received them both cordially, and Bertrade’s discarded husband dined at the same table with his successor and slept in the same room with him.

Philip never was a friend of the church though he did not in later life carry into effect depredations such as he planned when young, a real theft, in fact, which, through a miraculous intervention, never came to pass. Feeling a twinge of royal poverty—which does not mean that he was really very poor—he went with one of his officers to Saint Germain-des-Prés to take possession of some part of its riches. As they approached the treasury the king’s companion was stricken blind, a circumstance that put the thieving monarch to flight in terror. Yet the check was not lasting for he and his courtiers so corrupted some of the nunneries and monasteries of Paris that the Bishop of Paris was obliged to disperse the establishments. One of the largest, a convent, was on the Cité on the site of the present Prefecture of Police.

Having all this trouble with the pope and the church on his hands it is not to be wondered at that Philip was not stirred by Peter the Hermit’s preaching of the First Crusade. Indeed, no great ruler went on this first expedition, though the enlistment of many strong lords and their feudal following, and the unwise rush of whole families—women and children as well as men and youths—lost many lives to France in this most French of all the crusades.

Though not of a temper to sympathize personally with a love of learning Philip had intelligence enough and kingly pride enough to see the advantage to Paris of a concentration of schools in his capital. He never interfered with the teaching of the religious houses, and during his reign and immediately after at least four schools had obtained a more than local reputation. As the church of Saint Denis sheltered the tombs of the kings it was fitting that the abbey should instruct the sons of the nobles; the cathedral of Notre Dame stood in the heart of the Cité, and there the sons of the merchants were trained, one of their teachers being William of Champeaux whose eloquence knew no equal until it was matched and surpassed by one of his pupils, a young man from Brittany, Abélard. Abélard learned what many others have learned before and since, that it is both tactless and unprofitable to outshine your so-called “betters.” He was sent away from Paris. It was not long before he was summoned back by general acclaim, and joined the lecturers of the third great school of the time, the favorite of the foreign students, that of the abbey of Sainte Geneviève. His popularity there so displeased William of Champeaux that he severed his connection with the school of Notre Dame and founded the school and abbey of Saint Victor, on the south bank, east of the island. This abbey was suppressed during the Revolution and Napoleon built on its site the Halle aux Vins where the city’s supply of wine is stored in bond.

Of these four schools the one to which Abélard attached himself acquired a drawing reputation throughout all Europe, and scholars from England and Germany and Italy sought him eagerly, often enjoying the privilege of sitting under him at the expense of a long journey on foot and of a life of privation when Paris was reached. Abélard’s thesis was “Do not believe what you cannot understand”—the time-honored cry of the independent thinker. The conservatives bided their time; there was no use contending with a man in whom youth, beauty, learning and eloquence flowered in a magical persuasiveness.

Unfortunately for Abélard’s career he was invited by Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral, to enter his household as tutor of his niece, Héloise. It was a rash experiment. In a narrow street of the Cité, twisting about in the space north of the cathedral, the section where the canons and canonesses used to live, there is still shown the site of the garden where tutor and pupil, soon grown lovers, met in secret and plighted a troth that was to bring upon them both suffering and shame—for Abélard the end of his rise in the church, for Héloise, the cloister. They were married and lived for a time where now stands number nine on the Quai aux Fleurs, looking across the Seine to the right bank. Fulbert separated them, but even the conservatives were shocked at the hideous revenge which sent Abélard away from Paris only to be reunited with Héloise after her death in a convent twenty years after the death of her lover. To-day their tomb in Père Lachaise is the most visited of all the resting places of the illustrious in this famous cemetery.

Louis VI (1108-1137), called “the Wideawake” and “the Fat,” was a monarch who did much and planned more. Tall, handsome, energetic, serious, he was the author of policies which in later days developed important results. His accession found his kingdom surrounded by nobles who were nominally his subjects but really enemies of uncommon vigor awaiting the first chance to take their liege lord by surprise. He needed something more than his present resources to cope with the situation, and he met it by making for his son an advantageous marriage which won him the adherence of Poitou and Guienne, and by permitting in his adversaries’ domains, but not in his own, the establishment of communes—self-governing towns which paid for their privileges by supporting him against the nobles who ordinarily would have received their feudal obedience. Both these steps proved of substantial value to the crown, the first adding a large piece of territory to the royal possessions in the next reign, and the other developing a new social class, the bourgeoisie or town dwelling class, whose democratic spirit grew so rapidly that Louis IX in the next century had to check its advance if he would have his own unchecked. It has never been long subdued, however; it smoldered until it burst into the flame of the Revolution; it persists to-day as the genius of the Third Republic.

Paris never was a commune, but, in compensation for remaining under the rulership of the king and his provost (who lived in the Grand Châtelet built to defend the northern end of the bridge from the Cité as the Petit Châtelet held the southern bank) it received certain unusual privileges. Among them was the monopoly of water transportation between Paris and Mantes granted by Louis VI to the Corporation of Water Merchants. This corporation was the most powerful of the merchants’ guilds in whose hands rested the municipal administration.

Louis’ methods, and those of his schoolmate and adviser, Suger, abbot of Saint Denis, encouraged the growth of the city, for in this reign it began once more to increase briskly on both banks of the river. As in the earlier centuries, the pleasant country on the left bank proved more attractive than did the rough land on the right. The south side permitted streets to wander as widely as they willed, but on the north the newcomers were pushed into a crowded section along the river. Marsh and forest behind separated this compact district from Saint Martin-des-Champs. Even at this early stage the northern settlement, grouped around the Grève where the shipping was concentrated, was becoming the business part of Paris. At a discreet distance outside were the markets on exactly the spot where the Halles Centrales stand to-day, and just within the settlement Louis built for the benefit of the market men and women the church of Saint Jacques-la-Boucherie, now entirely destroyed except for a sixteenth century tower which stands in ornate dignity in a leafy square around which nineteenth century steam trams and twentieth century automobiles hoot and whirl.