Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands of the northern tribes. The Roman Empire had found in Gaul the last stronghold of its civilization. There were large cities, fine buildings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the barbarians, a youthful race at the destructive stage, these represented but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated onslaughts ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were destroyed, fields and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died.

The successors of Clovis for one hundred and fifty years tricked their wives, murdered their rivals, and assassinated their nearest of kin if they stood in their way. Clovis divided his kingdom among his four sons. One of them was killed in battle soon after and left his three children to the care of their grandmother, Clotilde, with whom they lived in the great palace on the left bank. Just like the wicked uncles in many a fairy tale two of Clovis’s surviving sons obtained possession of the little boys by stratagem and took them away to the palace on the Cité. Then they sent to Clotilde a messenger who bade her choose between the shears and the sword—the shears which should clip the children’s locks and thereby sever their claims to the throne and send them into the Church, and the sword of death. In a passion of indignation Clotilde exclaimed that she would rather see them dead than shorn. Claiming this cry as their authorization the two men set about the murder of their nephews. Childebert, king of Paris, proved somewhat less brutal than his brother (he loved flowers enough to plant a garden at the Roman palace) and would have saved the children—they were hardly more than babies—but Clotaire stabbed two of them with his own hand. Then he married their mother. The third boy escaped, came under the tutelage of Saint Séverin and entered a Benedictine monastery. When he was a man grown he established a religious house at a spot a few miles from Paris called Saint Cloud from his name, Clodoald. Here, on a height above the river, stood the château where Napoleon effected the coup d’ état that made him First Consul, and whence Charles X issued the decrees that brought about the Revolution of 1830. The building was burned during the troubles of 1870, but the park with its fine allées of trees and its fountains is one of the playgrounds of modern Paris.

Clotaire had done away with the possible rivalry of his nephews but he had a bitter enemy in his brother Thierry. This amiable relative plotted his assassination. He invited him to a feast and stationed his desperadoes behind a curtain whence they should spring out upon their victim. Some friend of Clotaire’s, chancing to pass by, noticed below this apparently innocent screen a row of feet unaccounted for, and guessed the project of their owners. Warned of his danger Clotaire came amply guarded and caused his brother extreme annoyance by his evident knowledge of his plan and its consequent frustration. Thierry gave him a silver dish by way of souvenir of this pleasant occasion, but he repented him of this generosity as soon as Clotaire was out of sight and sent his son to replevin the gift.

One of Clotaire’s sons, Chilpéric I (who died in 584) gave his daughter in marriage to the son of the king of the Visigoths in Spain. A great train came to Paris to fetch the bride, and the appearance of these rough Goths and the thought of her approaching separation from her parents and friends so afflicted the young girl that her father determined to secure companionship for her. He commanded some chosen young people—girls and youths of her own age—and also some entire families to go with her into Spain. So great was the opposition to this high-handed proceeding that it became necessary forcibly to seize the unwilling recipients of the honor in order to be sure of their presence when the expedition started. Some of those who were to be separated from their kindred committed suicide in despair over their banishment. “In Paris there reigned a desolation like Egypt,” says sympathetic Gregory of Tours. Robbed of their children the rich Parisians found the country also robbed of gold and silver vessels and of handsome raiment, for the queen heaped into her daughter’s bridal coffers the treasures that she had obtained from the nobles in the course of years under the guise of revenue. So loath were the princess’s attendants to follow her fortunes and so lacking were they in loyalty that her retinue on arriving in Spain was lessened not only by the daily desertions of all who could manage to escape, but by the defection in a body of no less than fifty men.

Frédégonde, the bride’s mother, was a woman of forceful will and of unbridled passions. The list of deaths for which she was responsible reads like a roster of the royal family. Although of low birth she attracted the attention of the king, Chilpéric, and induced him to put aside his wife, Audovère. Chilpéric then married Galsuinthe, sister of Brunehaut, wife of his brother Sigebert. Frédégonde soon compassed Galsuinthe’s death and then achieved her ambition and became queen herself. Brunehaut naturally was indignant as well as sorrowful at her sister’s death, clearly the work of an assassin. She urged her husband to vengeance and he declared war against Chilpéric. His activity was not of long duration, however, for he, too, fell a victim to Frédégonde’s ferocity. Brunehaut saved her life only by claiming the asylum of the cathedral of Paris. Not long after she married Mérovée, a son of Chilpéric and Audovère. Then Frédégonde disposed of her by inducing Sigebert’s subjects to claim their queen and by insisting that Chilpéric should deliver her over to them. Mérovée, at her command, was shorn and imprisoned and hounded until he sought death at the hands of a servant. His brother was stabbed. Their mother, Audovère, was not safe even in the cloister, for she was murdered in her retreat. Chilpéric himself was the next victim, killed by a knife-thrust as he returned from the chase. He was succeeded by an infant son, Clotaire II (613-628), and Frédégonde spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce devotion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his guardians.

Brunehaut outlived her enemy, Frédégonde, by many years and finally met her death at the order of Frédégonde’s son. After a stormy career during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age—she was eighty—did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and displayed to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in Paris where now the rue Saint Honoré crosses the rue de l’Arbre Sec, and not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain, the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious life in private and governing with justice and intelligence. “Great king Dagobert” he was called, and he was regarded impartially as a “jolly good fellow” and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the Cité, and he rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and enthusiasm.

In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a race of “Rois Fainéants” (“Do-nothing Kings”), dissolute, lazy, leaving the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the coarse pleasures of another.

The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries and a half was the establishment of churches and religious houses. The Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a victor. He was content to learn the language of the conquered race and the mysticism of religion spoke to him winningly. Throughout the years when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son, Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a church was dedicated to the same saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint Séverin, the tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original buildings that we see on these sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit that has reared one structure after another upon ground once consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen hundred years ago.

The story of the foundation of the church of Saint Vincent is interesting from several points of view. Clovis divided his possessions among his four sons, giving Paris to Childebert. Childebert had no notion of staying cooped up in this northern town, and he went as far afield as Saragossa in search of war. During the course of his siege of that city he beheld its citizens marching about bearing what seemed to be a relic of especial sanctity. It proved to be the cloak of Saint Vincent in which they were trusting to save them from their assailants. It did not betray their trust, for Childebert became filled with eagerness to possess a relic which could inspire such confidence, and offered to raise the siege if they would give him the tunic. When he returned to Paris Saint Germain of Autun persuaded him to build a church for its protection and to establish an abbey whose members should make it their first duty to pay honor to the relic. This abbey was called later Saint Germain-des-Prés, the name which the abbey church bears to-day. It stands no longer in the meadows, but raises its square Merovingian tower above one of the busiest parts of Paris. Except for this tower the church was burned in the ninth century, but it was rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the nave with its semi-circular arches is one of the few remaining examples in the city of the Romanesque architecture of which this was a characteristic. The choir shows in its arches and windows the hand of a later builder who was inclining toward the pointed Gothic.