Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

The Parisians not only objected to the continual financial drain made upon them by the king’s constant appeals for money for his minions, but they openly showed themselves favorable to the Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic party.

For his own defense Henry brought into the city a band of Swiss soldiers. To the citizens it was the final outrage. Every section of the town hummed with preparations for revolt. A rumor of an attack upon the Temple made Henry send a body of troops there. For the first time in the history of Paris the people made use of a defense habitual with them two centuries later. They erected across the streets barricades made of barriques (hogsheads) filled with earth, took shelter behind them and attacked the mercenaries so vigorously that the Duke of Guise was forced to come to their rescue. The day after the Day of Barricades the troops sent to the defense of the Temple helped the populace seize it. When the governor of the Bastille went to the palace, and, entering the Great Hall, summoned the sixty members of the Parliament of Paris then in session, to follow him, and led them in their red and black robes through the streets to the prison where they were held for ransom, the citizens felt themselves to be in real possession of the town.

Henry had been warned of trouble on the Day of Barricades by a man who made his way to the royal apartments by the staircase existing even now in a corner of the Hall of the Cariatides. Reversing the direction taken by the Empress Eugénie when the news of the battle of Sedan reached Paris on the fourth of September some three hundred years later, the king fled through the Louvre westward, gained the stables of the Tuileries, mounted a horse, and fled once more, though not pursued as he had been in Poland. The Parisians did not want to keep him.

In an effort to bring about better conditions Henry had made concessions to the Huguenots. Indignant at what they considered as treachery to his own religion the Catholics organized a League, of which the popular duke of Guise was the head. The duke’s power over the people, as he had shown it when he stopped the attack upon the king’s Swiss guard, and his connection with the League brought about Guise’s assassination by Henry’s order. The Parisians were enraged by the loss of their favorite, shut the gates against Henry, and prepared themselves to withstand a siege. Henry was forced to join the Protestant army of his cousin, Henry of Navarre, at Saint Cloud, on the Seine a few miles below Paris. There the king was assassinated by a young Jacobin novice sent out from the city.

Thus Paris was responsible for the crown’s passing at this juncture to the House of Bourbon whose representative, Henry of Navarre, who now became Henry IV, was one of the Protestants to whom the city was fiercely opposed.

CHAPTER XIV
PARIS OF HENRY IV

HENRY IV (1589-1598), came to the throne after a career of strife which by no means ended at his accession. His family were ardent Protestants. Henry was born in the country and received an outdoor training which made him hardy and vigorous in wide contrast to the debauched youths who sat upon the throne in Paris. The religious wars were seething all through his boyhood. When he was but fifteen his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, a woman of exceptional courage and address, presented him to the Protestant army and he was made general-in-chief, with Admiral Coligny as his adviser. When he was nineteen he agreed to the marriage with Marguerite of Valois which was to reunite the contending parties—or to serve as a bait to entice the chief Protestants of the country to Paris, according as one interprets Catherine de Medicis.

Breaking harshly in upon the wedding festivities the bell of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois clanged its awful knell, and when the horror was over Protestant Henry was lucky still to be alive. It behooved him to be prudent, and he accepted Charles IX’s commanding invitation to stay in Paris. Here he was under surveillance, and here he learned the ways of the most corrupt court that France had known up to that time, immoral, deceitful, treacherous, the women in every way as bad as the men.

During these years Henry diplomatically declared himself a convert to Catholicism, but it was a change for the moment; he had reverted long before the monk’s dagger made him King by slaying Henry III.

This murder meant an accession of hard work for Henry of Navarre for the League under the Duke of Mayenne and supported by Spain and Savoy was determined to accept no Protestant as ruler. Henry won a brilliant victory at Arques and another at Ivry.