Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

In addition to the constant disturbances that agitated the streets the city was in a pitiable state in other ways. Famine and plague had done their work thoroughly, and the population was much reduced; the always exorbitant taxes drove property owners out of the city into the country, which they found in such bad case that even the wolves went from the country into the city, and made nightly raids upon the cemeteries. Children died in the streets from hunger, dogs were eaten as a delicacy, and the demands of beggars upon the seemingly well-to-do were more in the nature of threats than appeals.

Henry V died in August, 1422, and Charles the Well-Beloved followed him to the grave in October of the same year. Henry’s body lay in state at Saint Denis before it was taken to England. Charles’s subjects came to view the remains of their poor tortured king during the three weeks that it rested at the Hôtel Saint Paul before being taken to Notre Dame and then to Saint Denis. Over his grave at Saint Denis the little English prince, Henry VI, only a few months old, was acknowledged king of France. The duke of Bedford became regent, and the English rose was quartered on the arms of Paris.

The rightful king, Charles VII, crowded out of Paris, fought with small success through the middle of France, until Jeanne Darc, the inspired peasant of Domremy, led his forces to such success that she dared besiege Paris. She established her army on the northwest of the city before the St. Honoré Gate, and there she fell, wounded by a shaft, but a short distance from the spot where her equestrian statue stands now on the Place des Pyramides. It would have been easier for her if death had come to her then than later in the flames of the Rouen market place.

It was about a month before her trial—some seven years after the death of Charles VI—that Henry VI was crowned king of France in the cathedral of Notre Dame (1431). The English lords made a brave showing at the ceremony, but there were few of the French nobles present, though many sent representatives who wore their escutcheons. So niggardly were the English after the service at the church that the people, who were accustomed to liberal largesse on such occasions, declared that there would have been more generosity shown at the wedding of a bourgeois jeweler.

Charles, who had been consecrated at Rheims in 1429 as the fulfillment of the dearest wish of the Pucelle, tried once more, in 1436, to win his city from the English. This time his general, the Constable de Richemont, entered by the Porte Saint Jacques on the south and advanced through the city unresisted. The English, to the number of about fifteen hundred, took refuge in the Bastille, whence they were starved out in short order and escaped by the Porte Saint Antoine into the fields. A year later Charles made his official entry into the town which he had left nineteen years before when the provost rescued him from the onslaught of the Burgundians. It was a solemn scene when the restored king knelt before the altar of Notre Dame to give thanks for his return.

When he went to the palace on the Cité he must have stood in need of all the composure that religion could give him for there he saw among the statues of the kings of France the statue of Henry V of England! Charles did not have it taken down. It stood with mutilated face to make public show of his scorn.

The English captured at Pontoise were drowned at the Grève soon after. Paris no longer welcomed the stranger.

The city itself was forlorn enough. So poorly was it protected that again wolves made their way through the gates which their keepers were too languid or too indifferent to guard properly. It is said that in one week of the month of September, 1438, no fewer than forty persons were killed by the hungry beasts in Paris and its immediate neighborhood. Twenty-four thousand dwellings stood vacant.

Charles reorganized the administration of Paris, restoring the elections of city officials which his father had suppressed, and establishing a fairly satisfactory arrangement of taxes. A marked addition to the royal power lay in the organization of a standing army devoted to the royal interests. It was thus that he utilized the energy of the adventurers who had grown irresponsible through the disturbed state of the country. By the aid of these soldiers he was enabled to put down the nobility who tried to revolt from his new ordinances and place the dauphin, afterwards Louis XI, on the throne. Louis did not object, but Charles enlisted the good-will of the bourgeoisie, and, chiefly because he did not ask them for money or soldiers, they gave both to him with such willingness that the lords took heed that a new power was confirming the royal attitude. It was not the end of his troubles with the dauphin who remained ever rebelliously opposed to his father, but when one lord was obliged to let the Parliament of Paris arbitrate his quarrels, and when another was thrust into a sack and thrown into the Seine their turbulence was at least discouraged.

With his domestic troubles thus quieted Charles could devote his attention to the war with England, and he did so in painstaking contrast to the almost lethargic indifference of his earlier years. The contest dragged its weary length along until October, 1453 when Charles marched victorious into Bordeaux. Calais was all that was left to England.