From Paris: Its Sites, Monuments and History, compiled from the principal secondary authorities by Maria Hornor Lansdale, With an Introduction by Hilaire Belloc, Illustrated; Philadelphia: The International Press, The John C. Winston Co., 1898; pp. 1-42.
1PARIS : ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY
WHEN a man looks eastward from the western heights that dominate the city, especially from that great hill of Valerian (round which so many memories from Ste. Geneviève to the last war accumulate), a sight presents itself which shall be the modern starting-point of our study.
Let us suppose an autumn day, clear, with wind following rain, and with a gray sky of rapid clouds against which the picture may be set. In such a weather and from such a spot the whole of the vast town lies clearly before you, and the impression is one that you will not match nor approach in any of the views that have grown famous; for what you see is unique in something that is neither the north nor the south; something which contains little of scenic interest and nothing of dramatic grandeur; something which men have forborne to describe because when they have known Paris well enough to comprehend 2 that horizon, why then her people, her history, her life from within, have dominated every other interest and have occupied all their powers. Nevertheless this sight, caught from the hill-top, shall be our first introduction to the city; for I know of no other which so profoundly stirs the mind of one to whom the story and even the modern nature of the place is unknown.
There lies at your feet — its fortifications some two miles away — a great plain of houses. Its inequalities are lost in the superior height from which you gaze, save where in the north the isolated summit of Montmartre, crowned with the scaffolding of its half-finished church, looks over the city and answers the hill of Valerian.
This plain of houses fills the eye and the mind, yet it is not so vast but that, dimly, on the clearest days the heights beyond it to the east can be just perceived, while to the north the suburbs and the open country appear, and to the south the hills. Whiter than are the northern towns of Europe, yet standing under a northern sky, it strikes with the force of sharp contrast, and half explains in that one feature its Latin origin and destiny. It is veiled by no cloud of smoke, for industry, and more especially the industry of our day, has not been the motive of its growth. The fantastic and even grandiose effects which are the joy of London will never be discovered here. It does not fill by a kind of gravitation this or 3 that group of arteries; it forms no line along the water-course, nor does it lose itself in those vague contours which the necessity of exchange frequently determines, for Paris was not made by commerce; nor will any theory of material conditions and environment read you the riddle of its growth and form. It is not the mind of the on-looker that lends it unity, nor the emotions of travel that make it, for those who see it thus, one thing. Paris, as it lies before you from those old hills that have watched her for two thousand years, has the effect and character of personal life. Not in a metaphor nor for the sake of phrasing, but in fact; as truly as in the case of Rome, though in a manner less familiar, a separate existence with a soul of its own appeals to you. Its voice is no reflection of your own mind; on the contrary, it is a troubling thing, like an insistent demand spoken in a foreign tongue. Its corporate life is not an abstraction drawn from books or from things one has heard. There, visibly before you, is the compound of the modern and the middle ages, whose unity convinces merely by being seen.
And, above all, this thing upon which you are looking is alive. It needs no recollection of what has been taught in youth, nor any of those reveries which arise at the identification of things seen with names remembered. The antiquarian passion, in its best form pedantic and in its worse maudlin, finds little room in the first aspect of Paris. Later, it 4 takes its proper rank in all the mass of what we may learn, but the town, as you see it, recalls history only by speaking to you in a living voice. Its past is still alive, because the city itself is still instinct with a vigorous growth, and you feel with regard to Paris what you would feel with regard to a young man full of memories; not at all the quiet interest which lies in the recollections of age; still less that happy memory of things dead which is a fortune for so many of the most famous cities of the world.
Whence proceeds this impression, and what is the secret of its origin? Why, that in all this immense extent an obvious unity of design appears; not in one quarter alone, but over the whole circumference stand the evidences of this creative spirit. It is not the rich building for themselves in their own quarter, nor the officials concentrating the common wealth upon their own buildings; it is Paris, creating and recreating her own adornment, realizing her own dreams upon every side, insisting on her own vagaries, committing follies which are her own and not that of section of her people, even here and there chiselling out something as durable as Europe.
Look at the great line before you and note these evidences of a mind at work. Here, on your right, monstrous, grotesque and dramatic in the extreme rises that great ladder of iron, the Eiffel, to its thousand feet, meant to be merely engineering, and therefore christened at its birth by all the bad fairies, but 5 managing (as though the spirit of the city had laughed at its own folly) to assume something of grace, and losing in a very delicate grey, in a good curve, and in a film of fine lines, the grossness which its builders intended. It stands up, close to our western standpoint, foolishly. It is twice as high as this hill of Valerian from which we are looking; its top is covered often in hurrying clouds, and it seems to be saying perpetually: “I am the end of the nineteenth century; I am glad they built me of iron; let me rust.” It is far on the outskirts of the town, where all the rest of the things that Paris has made can look at it and laugh contentedly. It is like a passing fool in a crowd of the University, a buffoon in the hall; for of all the things that Paris has made, it alone has neither wits nor soul.
But just behind it and somewhat to the left the dome you see gilded is the Invalides, the last and, perhaps, the best relic of seventeenth century taste, and with that you touch ground and have to do with Paris again; for just beneath it is Napoleon, and in the short roof to the left of it, in the chapel, the flags of all the nations. Behind that, again, almost the last thing the eighteenth century left us, is the other dome of the Pantheon. How great a space in ideas between it and the Invalides! Between Mansard and Soufflot! Its dome is in a false proportion; a great hulking colonnade deforms its middle; its sides and its decorations are cold and bare. The gulf 6 between these two, compared, is the gulf between Louis XIV. and the last years of decay that made necessary the Revolution. It stands, grey, ugly and without meaning, the relic of a grey and ugly time. But you note that it caps a little eminence, or what seems, from our height and distance, to be a little eminence. That hill is the hill of Ste. Genevieve, “Mons Lucotetius,” Mont Parnasse. On its sides and summit the University grew, and at its base the Revolution was born in the club of the Cordeliers.
It will repay one well to look, on this clear day, and to strain the eyes in watching that hummock — a grey and confused mass of houses, with the ugly dome we spoke of, on its summit. A lump, a little higher than the rest, half-way up the hill, is the Sorbonne; upon the slopes towards us two unequal square towers mark St. Sulpice — a heap of stones. Yet all this confusion of unlovely things, which the distance turns into a blotch wherein the Pantheon alone can be distinguished, is a very noteworthy square mile of ground; for at its foot Julian the Apostate held his little pagan circle; at its summit are the relics of Ste. Genevieve. Here Abelard awoke the “great curiosity” from its long sleep, and here St. Bernard answered him in the name of all mystics. Here Dante studied, and here Innocent III. was formed. Here is the unique arena where Catholicism and the Rationalists meet, and where a great struggle is never completed. Here, as in symbol of that 7 wrestling, the cross is perpetually rising above and falling from the Pantheon — now torn down, now reinstated. Beneath that ugly dome lie Voltaire and Rousseau; in one of the gloomy buildings on that hill Robespierre was taught the stoicism of the ancients and sat on the bench with Desmoulins; at its flank, in the Cordeliers, Danton forged out the scheme of the Republic; it was thence that the fire spread in ’92 which overthrew the old régime ; here, again, the students met and laughed and plotted against the latest despotism. It was from the steps of that unlovely Pantheon, with “To the great men of France” carved above him, that Gambetta declared the third Republic. It was the 4th of September, 1870, and it rained.
There is, however, in the view before you another spot, touching almost the hill which we have been noting, and of yet more importance in the story of the city, though it may not be so in the story of the world, — I mean the Island of the Cité.
From this distance we cannot see the gleam of the water on either side of it; moreover, the houses hide the river and the bridges. Nevertheless, knowing what lies there, we can make out the group of buildings which is the historic centre of Paris, and from whence the town has radiated outwards during the last fourteen centuries.
We are five miles away, and catch only its most evident marks. We see the square mass of the 8 Palais, whence, uninterruptedly, for eighteen hundred years the government has held its courts and its share in the administration of the town. Perhaps, if it is very clear, the conical roofs of the twin towers of the Conciergerie can be made out; and, certainly, to the right of them we see the high-pitched roof and the thin spire of the Sainte Chapelle, which St. Louis built to cover the Holy Lance and the Crown of Thorns. But the most striking feature of the Island and the true middle of the whole of Paris will be clear always even at this distance, — I mean the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
The distance and the larger aspect of nearer things make exiguous the far towers as they stand above the houses. You look, apparently, at a little thing, but even from here it has about it the reverence of the middle ages. In that distance all is subdued; but these towers, which are grey to a man at their very feet, seem to possess to a watcher from Valerian the quality of a thin horizon cloud.
I know not how to describe this model of the middle ages — built into the modern town, standing (from whichever way you look) in its very centre, so small, so distant, and yet so majestic. Amiens and Rheims, Strasburg, Chartres and Rouen — all the great houses of the Gothic, as they pass before our minds, have something at once less pathetic and less dignified. They are no larger than Notre Dame; they have not — even Rheims has not — her force of repose, of 9 height and of design. But they stand in provincial cities. The modern world affects, without transforming, their surroundings. Amiens stands head and shoulders above the town; Rheims, as you see it coming in from camp, looks like a great sphinx brooding over the champaign and always gazing out to the west and the hills of the Tourdenoise; Strasburg is almost theatrical in its assertion; Chartres is the largest thing in a rural place, and is the natural mother of the Beauce, the patroness and protectress of endless fields of corn; and even Rouen, though it stands in the hum of machinery and in the centre of countless industries, is so placed that, come from whichever way you will, it is the dominant fact in the town.
But Notre Dame is always one of many things and not the greatest. She was built for a little Gothic town and a huge metropolis has outgrown her. The town was once, so to speak, the fringe of her garment; now she is but the centre of a circle miles around. There are but three spots in Paris from which the old church alone takes up the minds, as do the churches of the provincial towns; I mean from the Quai de la Tournelle, from the Parvis, and from the Place de Grève. And yet she gradually becomes more to the spirit of those who see her than do any of these other churches, for the very anomaly of her position leads to close observance, and she touches the mind at last like a woman who has been continually 10 silent in a strange company. To a man who loves and knows the city, there soon comes a desire to constantly communicate with the memories of the Cathedral. And this desire, if he is wise, grows into a habit of coming close against the towers at evening, or of waiting under the great height of the nave for the voices of the middle ages.
Notre Dame thus lost in distance, central and remote, is like a lady grown old in a great house, about whose age new phrases and strange habits have arisen, who is surrounded with the youth of her own lineage and yet is content to hear and understand without replying to their speech. She is silent in the midst of energy, and forgotten in the many activities of the household, yet she is the centre of the estate, and but for her the family would be broken up and the home grow desolate. And to me at least, when I see in that famous view her square towers draped and veiled by distance, it has something of the effect made by a single small harbor-light which shines when one is coming in at the dead of a night, and with sweeps from lack of wind, while all about one, in a high port-city and in the great black landscape of cliffs, no other beacon is showing.
There stands, then, in the midst of our view this little group of the Island of the Cité, the old Roman town with which so much of our history will deal. As the eye turns to the left, that is to the northern half of the town, it is passing over the place of its 11 great expansion. It is here that Paris has worked and has grown, while Paris of the centre governed and Paris of the south thought and studied. It is in this half of the city that we shall note her greatest theatres, her most famous modern streets, her houses of rich men, her palaces, even her industries.
But this northern half has little to distinguish it in a general panorama; here and there a spire or tower or a column, but as a rule only a mass of high houses in which even the distant Louvre seems to possess no special prominence, and in which the Palais Royal, the Madeleine, the Bourse are so many roofs only, conspicuous in nothing but their surface. The old world makes but little effect from the distance at which we stand, and indeed is less apparent in the northern half of the city even to a spectator who is placed within its streets. Close against the Island you may perhaps catch the fine square tower of St. Jacques, the last of the Gothic; but with that exception the view of the left side is modern. If we may connect it with any one period or man rather than another, it is Napoleon that its few prominent points recall. Between us and the heart of the city is the ridge of Passy; less than a mile from the fortifications and on the summit of this ridge the great Triumphal Arch full of his battles and his generals’ names.
You may see beyond it, towards the more central parts of the town, a line here and there of those straight streets so many of which he planned, and 12 nearly all of which are due to his influence upon Paris. Thus opening straight before you, but miles away, running to the Louvre and on to the Hotel de Ville, is that Rue de Rivoli which is so characteristically his, obliterating, as did his own career, the memories of the Revolution. Running over the spot where the riding-school stood, and where Mirabeau helped to found a new world, draining the Rue St. Honorè (that republican gulf) of half its traffic, it strikes the note of the new Paris which the nineteenth century has designed.
Just off the line of this street you may catch the bronze column, the Vendôme, which again perpetuates Napoleon; it stands well above the houses and rivals the other column which distance scarcely permits us to discern, and which overlooks the site of the Bastille.
But when we have noted these few points, have tried to make out the new Hotel de Ville (as distant and less clear than Notre Dame), and have marked the great mass of the opera roof, the general aspect of the northern bank is told. There is nothing on which the eye rests as a central point. Only in itself, and without the aid of monuments, the great expanse of wealth and of energy fringing off into the industries of the northern and western roads shows us at once the modern Paris that works and enjoys.
One last feature remains to be spoken of while we are still looking upon the view at our feet, and before 13 we go down into the city to notice the closer aspect of its streets and buildings. I mean the hill of Montmartre. It lies on the extreme left as we gaze, that is in the northernmost part of the city, just within the fortifications, and rises isolated and curiously steep above the whole plain of the northern quarter. No city has so admirable a place of vantage, and in no other is the position so unspoiled as here. For centuries, from the time when it was far outside the mediæval walls, Montmartre has been the habitation of bohemians and chance poor men. Luckily it has remained undisturbed to this day. And if you climb it you look right down upon the town from the best and most congenial of surroundings. Nothing there reminds you of a municipality forcing you to acknowledge the site and the view. There is not a park or statue, not even a square. A ramshackle café with dirty plaster statues, a half-finished church, a panorama of the true Jerusalem (the same all falling to pieces with old age and neglect), a number of little houses and second-rate villas, a few dusty studios; this is the furniture of the platform beneath which all Paris lies like a map.
Long may it remain so untouched. For the hill is now truly Parisian. The tourist does not hear of it, even the systematic traveller avoids it. But it is dear to the student, and to that type in which Paris is so prolific. I mean the careless and disreputable young men who grow up to be bourgeois and pillars 14 of society. For them the slopes of the hill are almost sacred ground. Half the minor verse of Paris has been born here, and that other hill of the Latin quarter has arranged, as it were, for its play-ground in this forsaken and neglected place. Paris inspires you well as you look down upon it from such surroundings, and for one who understands the race there is a peculiar pleasure in noting that officialism, which is one product or rather aspect of the national character, has spared Montmartre to the carelessness and excess which is its paradoxical second half. Not so long ago a crazy windmill marked the summit. It has disappeared, but it is characteristic of the hill that it should have lingered to so late a date. Not another square yard of Paris, perhaps, has been so left to chance as this admirable opportunity for the interference of official effect.
Such, imperfectly described, is Paris when you see it first from the highest of the western hills. But our insistence upon this or that particular point must not misrepresent to the reader the general effect. These domes, arches, towers, spires — even the hills, are but incidents in the vast plain of houses with which our summary began, and which is the note of the whole scene. What is this plain, seen from within? What is the character of its life, its architecture, its monuments? Above all, what surmise gradually rises in us as we pass through its streets 15 and try to discover the historic foundations upon which all this modern society rests? To answer these questions let us go in to the city by one of the western gates and gain close at hand an impression of her buildings and streets.
This is what you will notice as you pass through the thoroughfares of Paris. Two kinds of streets, and, to match them, two kinds of public buildings; and yet neither clearly defined, but merging into one another in a fashion which, as will be seen later, gives the characteristic of continuity to the modern town.
As an example of the first, take the Rue St. Honoré; as an example of the second, its immediate neighbor the Boulevard des Italians. The Rue St. Honoré is narrow, paved with square stones, sounding like a gorge on the sea-coast. Its houses are high, and with hardly a pretence of decoration. Their stone or plastered walls run grey and have black streaks with age. Commonly an old iron balcony will run along one or more of the upper stories. They are covered with green-grey Mansard roofs, high in proportion to the buildings. From these look the small windows of attics, where, in the time these houses were built, the apprentices and servants of the bourgeois householders were lodged. The ground floor, as everywhere in Paris, is a line of shops. The street is not only narrow and high, but sombre in effect. Here and there (but rarely) an open court, 16 looking almost like a well, lets in more light. The street is not straight, but follows the curves of the old mediæval artery upon which it was built. You would look in vain for the Gothic in such streets as these. Even the Renaissance has hardly remained. Their churches and their public buildings date from much the same time as the houses. They are uniformly of the seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. It was in such surroundings that the grand siècle moved, and in such hotels lived the dramatists and the orators of the Augustan age of literature. These streets, all of much the same type, are the old Paris. They are least disturbed, perhaps, in the Latin quarter. They are, of course, not to be found in all that outer ring of the city which has been the creation of our own time, and in fine they still make up a good proportion of the circle within the boulevards, which is the heart of Paris. It is in them that you will note the famous sites of the last two hundred years almost unchanged, and waiting under their influence the student can at last reproduce the scenes and the spirit of the Revolution.
Whole sections of the town — the Ile St. Louis, for example — show no architecture but this, and the high, sad houses, the narrow, sombre streets, the age-marked grey walls are still the impression left most vividly on one who knows a little more of Paris than the Grand Hotel.
Through these old quarters, cutting them up, as it 17 were, into isolated sections, run like a gigantic web of straight lines the modern streets. The foundation of the system is the ring of internal boulevards. Here and there great supplementary avenues cut through the heart of the city within their limits, and finally the inner and the outer boulevards are similarly connected with a series of broad streets lined with trees. Thus the new Paris holds the old, as a framework of timbers may hold an old wall, or as the veins of a leaf hold its substance.
And what is to be said of these new streets and of the new quarters about the interior of the city? It is the fashion to belittle their effect, and more especially do foreigners, whose foreign pleasures are catered for in the newest of the new streets, compare unfavorably this modern Paris with the old. They are heard to regret the rookeries of the Boucherie. They would not have the tower St. Jacques stand in a public square, and some, I dare say, have found words even for the great space in front of Notre Dame and for its statue of Charlemagne.
This attitude with regard to the new Paris seems to me a false one. Certainly its architecture suffers from uniformity. Light rather than mystery, comfort rather than beauty, has been the object of its design. They are to be regretted, but they are the characters of our generation. And Paris being a living and a young city, not a thing for a museum, nor certainly a place for fads and make-believes, it is well that our 18 century should confess itself even in the Haussman-ized streets, in the wide, shaded avenues of three or even five-carriage roads side by side, and the perpetual repetition of one type of modern house.
Moreover, Paris is here very true to the character she has maintained in each one of her rebuildings. She shows the whole spirit of the time. If she gives us, in a certain monotony and scientific precision and an over-cleanliness, the faults of the new spirit, she certainly has all its virtues. Her taste is excellent. These open spaces and broad streets make, for the monuments, vistas or approaches of an admirable balance. You will see them lead either to the best that is left of her past or to the more congruous designs of her modern public buildings, and the effect, never sinking to the secondary, often rises to the magnificent. Take (for example) the present treatment of the Tuileries. The Commune burnt that old palace, leaving the three sides of the Louvre surrounding a gaping space. It has been harmonized with the Tuileries gardens by planting, and the whole great sweep down from the Arc de l’Etoile, through the Tuileries gardens to the court of the Louvre is, as it were, an approach to the palace. The grandeur of that scene has the demerit of being obvious, but is has also the singular value of obtruding nothing that can offend or distract the eye.
Even the Avenue de l’Opera, with the huge building at the end of it, will bear praise. If it lacks 19 meaning yet it does not lack greatness, and the Opera itself has something in it of the fantastic which avoids the grotesque. It is a “Palais du Diable,” and it is not a little to say for a modern building that it holds the statuary well and harmoniously, especially when there are such groups in that statuary as “La Danse.”
Moreover, if you will notice, Paris does not so announce her failures; no great avenue leads up to and frames, for instance, the Trocadero.
As to the silly reasoning that any rebuilding was an error, it is fit only for a club of antiquarians. Paris has rebuilt herself three separate times, and had she not done so we should have none of those architectural glories which are her pride to-day. The Revolution was not the first profound change of ideas that the city experienced. The great awakening that made the University turned Paris into a Gothic city almost in a generation. The “Grand Siècle” swept away that Gothic city and replaced it by the tall houses that yet mark all her older quarters. In this last expansion Paris is but following a well-known road of hers, and the people who will come long after us will find it a good thing that she did so.
This also is to be noted: that if Paris is somewhat negligent of what is curious, yet she is careful of what is monumental. As we shall see in this book, the twelfth and even the sixth centuries — the fourth also in one spot — come against one in the midst of a 20 modern street. Much that has been destroyed was not destroyed by the iconoclasm of the nineteenth, but by the sheer lack of taste of the eighteenth century — a time that could add the horrible false-Renaissance portico to the exquisite Cathedral of Metz and that was capable of the Pantheon, pulled down without mercy. We suffer from it yet.
There is one feature which is perhaps not over-obvious in the buildings of Paris and which it is well to point out in this connection, especially as it is the modern parallel of a spirit which we shall find in all the history of the town. I mean a remarkable historical continuity.
Paris to the stranger is new. Or at least where it evidently dates from the last or even from the seventeenth century, it yet seems poor in those groups of the middle ages which are the characteristic of so many European towns, and one would say at first sight that it was entirely lacking in many relics of still earlier times. This impression is erroneous, not only as to the actual buildings of the city, but especially as to its history and spirit. But it is not without an ample excuse. There is nothing in Paris so old but that its surroundings give it a false aspect of modernity, nor is there any monument so venerable but that some part of it (often some part connected with the identity of the main building) dates from our own time.
The reason for this is twofold. First, Paris has 21 never been checked in its development. You find no relics because it has never felt old age, and that species of forgetfulness which is necessary to the preservation of old things untouched has never fallen upon her. For, if you will consider, it is never the period just past which we revere and with which we forbear to meddle; it is always something separated by a century at least from our own time. It needs, therefore, for the growth of ruins, and even for the preservation of old things absolutely unchanged, a certain period of indifference in which they are neither repaired nor pulled down, but merely neglected. Thus we owe Roman ruins to the dark ages, much of the English Gothic to the indifference of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such periods of indifference Paris has never experienced. Each age in her history, at least for the last six hundred years, has been “modern,” has thought itself excellent, has designed in its own fashion. And on this account the conductor of Cook’s tourists can find in the whole place but little matter for that phrase so dear to his flock: “It might have stepped out of the middle ages.”
Secondly, Her buildings are at the present moment, and have been from the time of the Revolution, kept to a use, repaired and made to enter into the present life of the city. The modern era in Paris has had no sympathy with that point of view so common in Europe, which would have a church or a 22 palace suffer no sacrilegious hand, but remain a kind of sacred toy, until it positively falls with old age, and has to be rebuilt entirely. The misfortune (for example) which gives us in Oxford the monstrosity of Balliol new buildings in the place of the exquisite fourteenth century architecture of which one corner yet remains to shame us; or, again, the condition of the west front of Peterborough Cathedral, which (apparently) must either be rebuilt or allowed to fall down — such accidents to the monuments of the past Paris has carefully avoided. She was taught the necessity of this by the eighteenth century conservatism, and if she is too continually repairing and replacing, it is a reaction from a time when the stones of the capital, like the institutions of the state, had been permitted to rot in decay.
There are one or two points of view in Paris from which this character is especially notable. We shall see it best, of course, where the oldest monuments naturally remain, — I mean in the oldest quarter of the city. Stand on the northern quay that faces the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice, and look at their walls as they rise above the opposite bank of the stream. What part of this is old and what new? Unacquainted with the nature of the city, it would be impossible to reply. That Gothic archway might have been pierced in this century; the clock-tower, with its fresh paint and the carefully repaired moulding on its corners, might be fifty years old. Those 23 twin towers of the Conciergerie might be of any age, for all the signs they give of it. Part of that building was destroyed in the Commune, and has been rebuilt. Which part? There is nothing to tell. It is only when we know that it is against the whole genius of the people to imitate the styles of a dead age, — when we are told (for example) that such things as “the Gothic Revival,” under which we groan in England to-day, and which is the curse of Oxford and Hampstead, has not touched Paris, — it is only when we appreciate that the French either create or restore, but never copy, that we can see how great a work has been done on this one building.
The wall and the towers before you are not a curiosity or a show; decay has not been permitted to touch them; they are in actual service to-day in the working of the law-courts. Yet hat corner clock-tower was the delight of Philippe le Bel. It was Philippe the Conqueror who built those two towers, with their conical roofs, and from one of their windows he would sit looking at the Seine flowing by, as his biographer describes him; through that pointed archway St. Louis went daily to hear the pleas in the Palace gardens; from such and such a window the last defense of Danton was caught by the mob that stretched along the quay and over the Pont Neuf.
Or, again, take a contrasting case — on where a spectator would believe all to be old, and yet where the moderns have restored and strengthened. As you 24 stand on the quays that flank the Latin quarter and look northward to the Island and the whole southern side of Notre Dame, it is not only the thirteenth century at which you gaze; at point upon point Viollet le Duc rebuilt and refaced many of the stories — some, even, of the carvings are his work; yet you could never distinguish in it all what aid the present time had given to the work of St. Louis.
As for the Sainte Chapelle, it is at this day so exactly what it was when St. Louis first heard Mass in it, — and that has been done at the expense of so much blue and gold, just such color as he used, — that the traveller will turn from it under the impression that he is suffering at the hands of the third Republic, and will say, “How gaudy!” It is only when you not that the stained glass is the gaudiest thing in the place that you begin to feel that here alone, perhaps, in Europe, the men who designed the early Gothic would feel at home.
And if this continuity in her buildings is so striking a mark of modern Paris, and goes so far to explain her newness, you will find something yet more remarkable in the preservation of her sites. To take but three. The place of the administration, of the central worship and of the markets are as old as the Roman occupation. The Louvre has grown steadily from similar use to similar use through more than a thousand years; the Hotel de Ville, through more than seven hundred. And a man may go over the 25 Petit Pont from the southern bank, cross the Island, and come over to the northern side by the Pont Notre Dame, and be following step by step the road that so spanned the two branches of the stream centuries and centuries ago, — not the road of Roman times, but one earlier yet, — back in the vague time when the Cité was a group of round Gaulish huts, and when two rough wooden bridges led the traveller across the Seine on his way to the sea-coast.
And this continuity in buildings and in places is matched by one spirit running all through the action of Paris for fifteen hundred years. This is the fixed interest of her history, and it is this which so many men have felt who in the studios, or up on the hill of the University, though they had learned nothing of the past of the city, yet fell about them a secular experience and a troubling message difficult to understand — that seems to sum up in a confused sound the long changes of Christendom and of the West.
Well, what is the peculiar spirit, the historical meaning, of the town whose outer aspect we have hitherto been describing? No history can have value — it would perhaps be truer to say that no history can exist unless while it describes it also explains. Here we will have to deal with a city many of whose actions have been unique, much of whose life has been dismissed in phrases of wonder, of fear, or of equally impotent anger. If this is all that a book 26 can do for Paris, it had better not have been written. To stand aghast at her excesses, to lift up the hands at her audacity, or to lose control over one’s pen in expressing abhorrence for her success, is to do what any scholar might accomplish, but it would be to fail as an historian. Why has Paris so acted? The answer to that question, and a sufficient answer, alone can give such a story value. What is her nature? What is, if we may use a term properly applicable only to human beings, her mind?
You will not perceive the drift towards the true reply by following any of those laborious methods which stultify so much of modern analysis. You will not interpret Paris by any examination of her physical environment, nor comprehend her by one of those cheap racial generalizations that are the bane of popular study. In all the great truths spoken by Michelet, one is perhaps pre-eminent, because it seems to include all the others. He says: “La France a fait la France;” and if this be true (as it is) of the nation, it is more especially true of the town. There is within the lives of individuals — as we know by experience — a something formative that helps to build up the whole man and that has a share in the result quite as large as the grosser part for which science can account. So it is with states, and so, sometimes, with cities. A destiny runs through their development which is allied in nature to the human soul, and which material circumstance 27 may bound or may modify, but which certainly it cannot originate.
In the first place Paris is, and has known itself to be, the city-state of modern Europe. What is the importance of that character? Why that certain habits of thought, certain results in politics which we can observe in the history of antiquity, are to be noted repeating themselves in the actions and in the opinions of Paris. It is a phenomenon strange to the industrial nations of to-day yet one with which society will always have to deal, perhaps at bottom the most durable thing of all, that men will associate and act by neighborhood rather than by political definitions. And this influence of neighborhood, which (with the single important exception of tribal society) is the greatest factor in social history, has formed the village community and the walled town whose contrast and whose coexistence are almost the whole history of Europe. When great Empires arise, a fictitious veil is thrown over these radical things. Men are attached to a wide and general patriotism covering hundreds of leagues, and even in the last stages of decay and just before the final cataclysm, Rhetoricians love to talk of a federation of all peoples, and merchants ardently describe the advent of a universal peace. But even in such exceptional periods in the history of mankind, the village community and its parallel the city are the real facts in political life; and when, in the inevitable fall and the subsequent reconstruction 28 of society, the fictions are destroyed and the phrases lose themselves in realities, these fundamental and original units re-emerge in all their ruggedness and strength.
Upon the recognition of such units the healthy life of the middle ages reposed; in the satisfactory and human conditions of such societies the arts and the enthusiasms of Greece took life. It is in the autonomous cities of Italy that our civilization reappeared, and the aristocratic conceptions upon which the social order of Europe is still founded sprang from the isolation and local politics of the manor.
In a time when the facility of communication has been so greatly augmented, and when therefore the larger units of political society should be at their strongest, Paris proves to the modern world how enduring the ultimate instincts of our political nature may be.
The unit that can practically see, understand and act at once and together; the “city that hears the voice of one herald,” is living there in the midst of modern Europe. By a paradox which is but one of many in French politics, the centre which first gave out to other societies the creed of the large self-governing state, the power whence radiated the enthusiasm even for a federal humanity, “the capital of the Republic of mankind” from which poor Clootz, the amiable but mad German Baron, dated his correspondence — this very town is itself an example of 29 an intense local patriotism, peculiar, narrow and exclusive.
Paris acts together, its citizens think of it perpetually as of a kind of native country, and it has established for itself a definition which makes it the brain of that great sluggish body, the peasantry of France. In that definition the bulk of the nation has for centuries acquiesced, and the birthplace of government by majority is also the spot where distinction of political quality and the right of the head to rule all the members is most imperiously asserted.
It is from this standpoint that so much of her history assumes perspective. By recognizing this feature the chaos of a hundred revolts assumes historical order. You will perceive from it the Parisian mob, with all the faults of a mob, yet organizing, creating and succeeding; you will learn why an apparently causeless outburst of anger has been fruitful, and why so much violence and so much disturbance should have aided rather than retarded the development of France.
It is as the city-state (and the metropolis at that) that Paris has been the self-appointed guardian of the French idea. Throughout the middle ages you will see her anxious with a kind of prevision to safeguard the unity of the nation. For this she watches the diplomacy of the Capetians and fights upon their side, for this she ceaselessly stands watch with the King over feudalism and doubles his strength in every 30 blow that is dealt against the nobles. It is this feature that explains her attitude as the ally of Philip the Conqueror, her leaning later on the Burgundian house, her hatred of the southerner in the person of the Armagnac.
You will find it, without interruption, guiding her conduct in the history which links the middle ages to our own time. She is the faithful servant of Louis XI.; she is the bitter fanatic for religious unity in the religious wars. Thus you see her withstanding Henry IV. to the last point of starvation, and thus a population, careless of religion, yet forces a religious formula upon the Huguenot leader; and when the first Bourbon accepted the mass with a jest, it was Paris which had exacted, even from a conqueror, the pledge of keeping the nation one.
In the Revolution all this character appears in especial relief. She claims to think for and to govern France; she asserts the right by her energy and initiative to defend the whole people and their new institutions from the invader, and she ratifies that assertion by success. With this leading thought she first captures, then imprisons and finally overthrows the King; lays (on the 2d of June) violent hands upon the Parliament, directs the terror, and then, when her system is no longer needed, permits in Thermidor the overthrow of her own spokesman.
If the condition of the city is considered, the 31 causes of this strong local unity will become apparent. Paris is a microcosm. She contains all the parts proper to a little nation, and by the reaction of her own attitude this complete character is intensified; for since she is the head of a highly organized state all is to be found there. Here is at once the national and the urban government; the schools for every branch of technical training. Here is the centre of the arts — not by a kind of accident such as will make the London artists live in Fitz-Johns Avenue, nor by the natural attraction of the great schools of the past, nor through peculiar collections such as cause the congeries at Munich, at Venice, or at Florence or at Rome, but by a deliberate purpose: by the placing within the walls of the city of all the best teaching that the concentrated effort of the nation can secure.
Within her walls are all the opposing factors of a vigorous life. She is not wholly student nor wholly industrial nor wholly mercantile, but something of all three. Even the noble is present to add his little different note to the harmonious discord of competing interests; and, alone of the great capitals of the world, she is the seat of the old University of the nation. Here, running wild through a whole quarter of the city, is that vigorous youth, undiscoverable in London or in Berlin; I mean the follies, the loves and the generous ideals of the students. They keep it fresh with a laughter that is lacking in the centres 32 of the modern world, and they supply it with a frank criticism bordering on intellectual revolt, which the self-satisfaction of less fortunate capitals, mere seaports, or simple military centres, fatally ignores. They, from their high attic windows on the Hill, interpret her horizons; and, as they grow to fill the ranks of her art and science, help to keep the city worthy of the impressions with which she delighted their twentieth year.
And Paris has also the last necessary quality for the formation of a city-state. I mean that her stories are so many memories of action which she has undertaken unaided, and that her view of the past is one in which she continually stands alone. It is a record of great sieges, in which no outer help availed her, and in which she fell through isolation or succeeded by her own powers. More than one of her monuments is a record of action that she undertook before the nation which depends upon her was willing to move; and she records herself, from the Column of July to the Arsenal of the Invalides, the successful leader in movements that the general people applauded but could not design.
Her history has finally produced in her what was in the middle ages but a promise or perhaps a thing in germ, — I mean the sentiment and the expression of individuality. The story of her growth from the dim origins of her political position under the early Capetians, through the episode of Etienne Marcel to the 33 definite action of the seventeenth century and finally of the Revolution, is the story of a personality growing from mere sensation to self-recognition, and to functions determinate and understood. It is a transition from instinct to reason, and at its close you have, as was expressed at the opening of this chapter, a true and living unit, not in metaphor but in fact, with a memory, a will, a voice, and an expression of its own.
Such is the first great mark of Paris, and with that clue alone in one’s hand the maze is almost solved.
But, if Paris has these characteristics of continuity and of being the city-state, she has also a third, which, while it is less noticeable to her own citizens, is yet more interesting to the foreigner than the other two. She is the typical city, at least of the western civilization, — I mean, her history at any moment is always a reflection peculiarly vivid of the spirit which runs through western Europe at the time. To say that she leads and originates, which is a commonplace with her historians, is not strictly true; it is more accurate to say that she mirrors. It cannot be denied that her action at such and such a crisis has differed from the general action of the European cities; nor can it be forgotten that her course has more than once produced a sense of sharp and sometimes painful contrast in the minds of her neighbors. Paris has not been typical in the sense of being the average. That character would have produced a 34 history devoid of features, whereas all the world knows that the history of Paris is a series of strong pictures too often overdrawn. If she has been the typical city of the west, it is rather in this sense, that on her have been focussed the various rays of European energy; that she has been the stage upon which the contemporary emotions of Europe have been given their Personæ, through whose lips they found expression; that she has time and time again been the laboratory wherein the problems that perplexed our civilization have always been analyzed and sometimes solved.
It may be urged that every city partakes of this character, and that the civilization which has grown up upon the ruins of Rome is so much of a unity that its principal cities have always reflected the spirit of their time. This is true. But Paris has reflected that spirit with a peculiar fidelity. While it has, of course, been filled with her own strong bias of race and of local character, yet her treatment of this or that time has been remarkable for proportion; you feel, in reading of her past action, that not the north or the south, not this people or that, but all Europe is (so to speak) being “played” before your eyes. The actors are French and, commonly, Parisian; the language they speak is strange and the action local, yet the subject-matter is something which concerns the whole of our world, and the place given to each part of the movement is that which, on looking over the 35 surrounding nations, we should assign to it were we charged with drawing up an accurate balance of the time.
Before pointing out the historical examples which show how constantly Paris has been destined to play this international rôle, it is well to appreciate the causes of such a position. First among these comes the feature which has been discussed above. The fact that she contains within her walls all the parts of a state fits her for the character of representative, and makes her action more complete than is the case with another European city. The interests of exchange and of commerce, of finance (which in this age may almost be called a separate thing); the struggle between the proletariat and capital; the unsatisfied quarrel between dogmatic authority and the inductive method; militarism, and the reaction it creates; even the direction which literature and discussion may give to these energies, — all these are found within the city, and the general result is a picture of Europe. But this quality of hers is not the only cause of her typical character. Geographical position explains not a little of its origin. She is of Latin origin and of Latin tradition; her law and much of her social custom is an inheritance from Rome, yet the basis of the race is not Latin, and among those in the studios who almost reproduce the Greek, there is hardly a southern face to be found. Her lawyers and orators will model themselves upon Latin phrases, but you 36 would not match their expression among the Roman busts; and it has been truly said that the Italian profile was more often met with in England than in northern France. Even the insular civilization of England, which has had so great an effect upon the politics, if not the society, of the world, is to be found strongly represented in this medley. For England looks south (or, at least, the England which once possessed so great an influence did so), and Paris is the centre of those northern provinces upon whom the British influence has been strong. Though this part of her thought is of less importance than some others, yet it is worth carefully noting, for it has been neglected to a remarkable degree. It is from this that you obtain in Parisian history the attempts at a democracy based upon representation; it is from this, again, that the principal modern changes in her judicial methods are drawn; and so curiously strong has been the attraction of English systems for a certain kind of mind in Paris, that even the experiment of aristocracy and of its mask — a limited monarchy — has been tried in these uncongenial surroundings. The greatest of the men of ’93 regret the English alliance. Mirabeau bases half his public action upon his memories of the English whigs. Lamartine delights in calling England the Marvellous Island.
And, if we go a little deeper than historical facts and examine those subtle influences of climatic condition (which, as they are more mysterious, are also 37 of greater import than obvious things), we shall find Paris balanced between the two great zones of Europe. It is hard to say whether she is within or without the belt of vineyards; a little way to the south and to the east you find the grapes; a little way to the north and west, to drink wine is a luxury, and the peasants think it a mark of the southerner. There are days in Chevreuse, in the summer, when a man might believe himself to be in a Mediterranean valley, and, again, the autumn and the winter of the great forest of Marly are impressions purely of the north. The Seine is a river that has time and again frozen over, and the city itself is continually silent under heavy falls of snow. Yet she has half the custom of the south, her life is in the open air, her houses are designed for warmth and for sunlight; she has the gesture and the rapidity of a warmer climate.
For one period of her history you might have called her a great northern city, when she was all Gothic and deeply carved, suited to long winter nights and to weak daylight. But in the course of time she has seemed partly to regain the traditions of the Mediterranean, so that you have shallow mouldings, white stone and open streets, standing most often under a grey sky, which should rather demand pointed gables and old deep thoroughfares. The truth is that she is neither northern nor southern, but, in either climate (they meet in her latitude) an exile, satisfying neither, and yet containing both of 38 the ends between which Europe swings; so that, in all that is done within Paris, you are at a loss whether to look for influence coming up from the Mediterranean, or to listen for the steep waves and heavy sweeping tides of the Channel and the North Sea. Only with one part of Europe — a part which may later transform or destroy the west — she has no sympathy, — I mean that which lies to the east of the Elbe. She was a town of the Empire, and the darker and newer part of Europe is as much a mystery to her as to the nations which are her neighbors.
If you will notice her first prominence, you will discover that Paris rises upon Europe just where the modern period begins. It is as a town of the lower Empire, of the decline, of the barbarian invasions, of the advent of Christianity. Paris first becomes a great city just as the civilization to which we belong starts out upon its adventures, and her history at once assumes that character upon which these paragraphs insist. She receives the barbarian; the mingled language is talked in her streets; her palace is the centre of the Teutonic monarchy, which has carved its province from the Empire; of the two extremes, she seems to combine either experience. She does not lose her language (like the Rhine valley), nor her religion and customs (like Britain); but, on the other hand, she is strongly influenced by the conquest, and knows nothing of that lingering Roman civilization, almost untouched by the invader, which left to Nimes, 39 Arles and the southern cities a municipal organization lasting to our own day. At the outset of her history she includes the experience of the south and of the north.
During the Carlovingian epoch she loses her place for a time; but, with the rise of the nationalities that followed it, and with the invasions, she is not only intimately concerned but again furnishes the example of which we have been speaking. She sustains siege after siege; like the Europe of which she is the type, she finally, but with great pain, beats off the pirates, and in her walls rises the first and what is destined to be the most complete type of the national kingships. The Robertian House was neither feudal nor a reminiscence of imperial power; it was a mixture of both those elements. It was founded by a local leader who had defended his subjects in the “dark century,” and in so much it attaches closely to the feudal character; on the other hand, its members are consecrated kings; they have the aim of a united and centralized power, and in this they hold even more than do the Ottos to the Imperial memory.
Note how, as Europe develops, the experience of Paris sums up that of the surrounding peoples. The Roman law finds her an eager listener, but it does not produce in her case the rapid effect which you may notice in some of the Italian cities. Custom weighs hard in the northern town, and Philip Augustus, after all his conquests, could never hear the 40 language which the professors of Bologna used to Barbarossa just before his defeat. On the other hand, the power of the king which that law was such a powerful agent to increase, was not destined to suffer from repeated reaction as it did in England, and the kings of Paris never fell beneath a direct victory of aristocracy such as that which crushed John at Runnymede, and centuries later destroyed the Stuarts.
The struggle between government and feudalism was destined to last much longer in France than it did in the neighboring countries, and as it goes on, Paris sees all its principal features, and the crown finally triumphs only in that same generation of the seventeenth century which saw the complete success of the aristocracy in England and in the Empire.
In the religious world the experience of Paris has been equally typical. She heard the first changes of the twelfth century; the schoolmen discussed in her University; Thomas Aquinas sat at table with her king. When the sixteenth century shook and split the unity of Christendom, its treble aspect was vividly reflected in Paris. The evangelical, the Catholic and the Humanist are represented distinctly and in profusion there; for it is in Paris that Calvin dedicates his book, that Rabelais is read, and, finally, that the St. Bartholomew is seen. She does not change her creed at the word of a dynasty, nor is she swept by the same purely religious zeal for reform 41 that covers Geneva and so much of Holland; nor does she stamp out the new movement with the east of the Italian or the Spaniard; but all the powers of the time seem to concentrate in her, and, as she has always done, she pays heavily for being the centre of European discussion. The appeal with her (as elsewhere) is to arms, and the struggle is still continuing under Louis XIV., when its importance wanes before the rise of a rationalism around which the future battles of her religious world will be fought.
This is always the lesson of her history and the way we should read it if we wish to understand. We are looking down into a little space where all our society is working out its solutions. Whether we dwell upon the Gothic Paris of Louis XI., fixing nationality and centralized government, or upon the Paris of ’93, — cutting once for all the knot of eighteenth century theories, — or the Paris of ’48, where the old political and the new economic problems met; or upon the Paris of 1871, where the older social forces and the love of country just managed to defeat the revolt of the new proletariat; in whatever aspect or at whatever time, she is always the picture of Europe, catching, in a bright and perhaps highly colored mirror, the figures which are struggling in the nations around her. And it is in this character that her history will be most easy of comprehension and will leave with us an impression of greatest 42 meaning. But whenever we think of the city we do well to remember Mirabeau: “Paris is a Sphinx.” He added, “I will drag her secret from her;” but in this neither he nor any other man has succeeded.