Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

THE reading of Cæsar’s “Commentaries” makes us know that the Gauls with whom he contended were worthy opponents, ingenious in planning warfare and enthusiastic in fighting. Even the trained Roman legions had to work for their victories. Granting possible exaggeration, which is a sore temptation to a conqueror, eager to magnify the difficulties of his conquest, it is nevertheless clear that a radical change had transformed these fierce Gauls and irresistible Romans of a half century before Christ when, five hundred years later, a band of less than 10,000 “barbarians”, led by Clovis, swept across a comparatively unresisting Gaul.

What had happened in Gaul was what had happened in other parts of the Roman Empire. Money had concentrated in the hands of an insatiable few. To supply them and the government every stratum of society was squeezed of its smallest coin, until good men of middle-class position were willing to sell themselves into slavery to avoid the insistent demands of self-seeking tax collectors, and the government was meanly willing to accept the sacrifice because the supply of slaves was not being kept up since the victorious eagles had ceased to perch upon Rome’s banner.

In Paris conditions were not different from those in other parts of the province. The town was good to look upon with handsome Roman buildings, and it was ordered with due respect to the laws for whose making Rome had undoubted genius; but beneath this fair outside there shivered the soul of the dependent grown cowardly from abuse, lacking loyalty for what was unworthy of loyalty. The Gauls, who had adopted the language and manners of their conquerors, had become weak from overmuch reliance on the stronger power; the Romans had softened during years of peace. So it happened that when the barbarians from the north and east threatened Gaul they were bought off with gifts of land, and when, in 451, Attila, the Scourge of God, led into the north his fierce and hideous Huns whose only joy was bloodshed, the people of Paris prepared themselves for flight when he was still a long way off.

For every vital crisis in the life of the individual there is given a counterbalancing power of endurance; to groups this power is taught by the man or woman whom the circumstances develop as a leader. In this emergency, when the dreaded shadow of the hawklike Hun fluttered the citizens, and they were making preparations for deserting the town and taking into hiding such of their goods and chattels as they could, the leader developed in the unexpected form of a woman—Sainte Geneviève. Some say that Geneviève was, like Jeanne Darc a thousand years later, a peasant girl. Saint Germain of Auxerre, the story goes, on his way to “quenche an heresye” across the Channel, chanced to visit Nanterre where his prophetic eye espied the divine spirit in the little maid and his holy hand sealed her unto God. Another version insists that Geneviève belonged to a prominent family in Paris and that her family’s influence accounted for her sway over the people.

For sway them she did. At her bidding the women of the city fasted and fell on their knees and assailed God with prayer. Nearer and nearer came the foe, and the unbelieving reviled the maiden; but Saint Germain reproached them for their lack of faith and the miracle came to pass—the “tyrantes approachyd not parys.”

All quarrels were lost in the apprehension of this attack of a common enemy, and by the united effort of Gauls and Romans, of Burgundians, Visigoths and Franks, the dreaded Attila was defeated near Châlons in a battle so determined that the very ghosts of the slain, it was declared, continued the fight.

Freed of this menace to the whole country the victorious tribes again fell to quarreling among themselves. The Franks proved sturdiest and most persistent. Descended from Pharamond, who, perhaps, was legendary, their king, Mérovée, had led them against Attila. Now his son, Childéric, attacked Paris. Again Geneviève rescued her townsmen from famine, herself embarking upon the Seine, which probably was beset by the enemy along the banks, and returning with a boatload of provisions which, by miraculous multiplication, revictualed the whole hungry and despairing garrison.

Childéric’s son, Clovis, leading about 8000 men, in 481 made himself king of northern France with Paris as his capital, thus establishing the line of monarchs who called themselves Merovingians. “Paris,” he wrote in 500 A.D., “is a brilliant queen over other cities; a royal city, the seat and head of the empire of the Gauls. With Paris safe the realm has nothing to fear.”

Clovis had married an orthodox Catholic wife, Clotilde, who was eager for his conversion. Her arguments are said to have been far from gentle, but they seem to have been suited to her husband’s nature, for he was almost persuaded to make the great change at the time of the birth of his eldest child. The baby died within the week, however, and the king looked upon his loss as an act of vengeance on the part of his deserted gods. When the second child recovered from a serious illness he was convinced that Clotilde’s intercessions had saved its life, and again he inclined toward Christianity. An incident determined his acceptance of his wife’s faith. In the battle of Tolbiac against the Germans Clovis begged the aid of “the God of the Christians” to determine in his favor a wavering victory. He won the fight, and it is easy to believe the joy of Sainte Geneviève, when the monarch was baptized in the cathedral at Rheims. He seems to have been of simple mind. The fittings and the ceremonies of the vast church touched his spirit to submission. “Is not this the kingdom of heaven you promised me?” he asked of the bishop. Again, when he listened to the story of the crucifixion, he is said to have cried with an elemental desire for vengeance, “Oh, had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ!”

Sainte Geneviève died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her their patron saint. The hill that had been known as Mons Lucotetius they called Mont Sainte Geneviève, and on it they built a chapel to honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious establishment which bore Sainte Geneviève’s name. Except for a dormitory and refectory this monastery was torn down in the middle of the eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte Geneviève, secularized to-day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the good saint’s bones on the Grève, but some of the devoted preserved the ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in the neighboring church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey.