Twenty Centuries of Paris

by Mabell S. C. Smith

The town was forced, also, to pay her share of the war indemnity and of the support of the garrisons with which the allies saddled the frontier and the chief cities. One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a day was the sum which Paris expended in hospitality toward her very unwelcome guests. Needless to say there was not much ready money for improving the city.

One reverent monument, the Chapelle Expiatoire, the king did begin to the memory of his brother. The bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been buried in the graveyard behind the Madeleine. Their remains were removed to Saint Denis in 1815, but the small domed chapel, hemmed in to-day by busy Paris streets, rises in remembrance of them and sanctifies the one great grave before it in which lie the bodies of two thousand unrecorded victims of the Revolution, while the barrier on right and left is formed by the tombs of the seven hundred Swiss guards slain in defense of their sovereigns when the mob stormed the Tuileries on the tenth of August, 1792.

The renewed religious feeling introduced by the royalists expressed itself in the erection of two churches, Saint Vincent-de-Paul and Our Lady of Loretto, both in the style of Latin basilicas, though Saint Vincent’s is made majestic by two square towers not unlike those on Saint Sulpice. The approach to Saint Vincent’s is by two semicircular inclined planes, divided by a flight of steps—a handsome entrance. There are but few at all like it in all Paris. More interesting than the architecture of these churches is their position, on the north and just within the “exterior boulevards” which mark Louis XVI’s wall. Population must have increased heavily in this district to call for two churches of large size and so near together. Many of the fifty-five new streets laid out in this reign must have been in this section.

An engraving of 1822 shows that the Champs Élysées had become a field for the performances of mountebanks, jugglers, rope-walkers, stilt-walkers, and wandering musicians.

Louis died unlamented. He had been fat when first he entered the Tuileries; his manner of life was not one calculated to reduce adipose tissue. His subjects joked about his habits by punning upon his name, calling Louis Dixhuit (Louis XVIII) Louis des Huitres (Oyster Louis). He was the last king to die in Paris or even in France, and the last to be buried with his kind in Saint Denis.

That Charles X, Louis’ brother, was prepared to follow that royal custom when the time came seems proven by his immediate return to the traditions of his ancestors. He was consecrated and crowned in the cathedral at Rheims which had witnessed the coronation of Clovis and that of every French king since Philip Augustus in the twelfth century. Like the Grand Monarque he “touched for the king’s evil,” believed in the divine right of kings, and thought himself allwise in the conduct of government and his people all-foolish. He recalled the Jesuits whom Louis XV had banished and mulcted the masses to make restitution to the royalists whose property had been confiscated when they fled from Revolutionary France.

Paris forgot that she had loved him in his gay and spendthrift youth, forgot the passing amusement of his coronation festivities in the Place du Carrousel, forgot that his armies were winning some successes along the Mediterranean, forgot everything but hatred when he outraged her confidence by disbanding the National Guard, on whose loyalty and prudence the whole city relied.

When he tried to force through the legislature a bill to muzzle the press, to censor all other publications and to forbid freedom of speech in the universities, that body flatly refused to follow his instructions. So determined was Charles to have his own way that this rebuff and the victories of the liberals in the election of 1830 taught him no lesson, and on July 26 of that year he issued a proclamation which brought about a second Revolution. He declared the new liberal legislature dissolved and summoned another to be chosen by the votes of property-holders only. He appointed a Council of State from his own sympathizers, and he abolished the freedom of the press. Thiers’ paper, the National, and the Courrier issued a prompt protest against these tyrannical Ordinances, and were as promptly suppressed. Crowds gathered before the newspaper offices where Thiers showed the understanding and the grasp of the situation which later made him prime minister under Louis Philippe and first president of the Third Republic.

It was not only the excitable classes—the right bank artisans and the left bank students—always ready for a fight, who engaged in this attempt to overthrow the king; the whole city took part, either by fighting or by taking into their houses fugitives hard pressed by the royal troops. The city was heavily garrisoned and the citizens naturally were at a disadvantage against well-trained, well-equipped regulars. They fought, however, with the ingenuity and the joyousness which always has marked the Parisian when he seized such opportunities. The narrowest streets in the old sections—just north of the City Hall around the church of Saint Merri, near the markets, and on the Cité—were barricaded and served for three days as a bloody battleground. On the twenty-eighth the bell on the City Hall rang out its summons and the republican tricolor side by side with the black flag of death told the crowd better than words for what they were to contend. Until the afternoon there was no fiercer struggle than here and on the near-by bridge to the Cité, where a youth, planting the tricolor on the top of the middle arch, was shot, crying as he fell, “My name is Arcole! Avenge my death!” At least his death is remembered, for the bridge still bears his name, Arcole.

Encouraged by their successes of the day, the people on the next morning marched to the Louvre where they fought and fell and were buried by hundreds beneath Perrault’s colonnade. They poured through the Tuileries as in the days of the Revolution, and they carried the throne from the Throne Room to the Place de la Bastille where they burned it as a symbol of tyranny. By way of expressing their feeling for the dignitaries of the church they sacked the archbishop’s palace beside Notre Dame on whose towers the tricolor floated. When night fell twenty-four hours later at least five thousand Parisians had fallen in what they called, nevertheless, the Three ‘Glorious’ Days of July. Paris and Paris alone had achieved a revolution for all France.