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. 447-502.
PARIS : ITS SITES, MONUMENTS AND HISTORY
447THE interest of revolutionary Paris is so entirely historical that it is not easy to introduce the story of its buildings. To give the reader a full conception of what those buildings mean, it would be necessary to tell the story of the Revolution. Since this is impossible, let us describe the leading features of Paris during those few years. Many of these will be understood from the two preceding chapters. For example, the great size of the city, its full, wide exterior streets, its very great population (probably three-quarters of a million), whose exact number have never been properly ascertained on account of the hopelessly slipshod methods of the old régime. Then, again, the reader will have a clear conception of the social condition of the great capital which so violently reassumed the leadership of France; its great majority of artisans whom the Constitution of 1791 disfranchised and turned into disorderly mobs; the fact that the court and aristocracy had abandoned the city for a century, and that the leaders of the political movement could only be the lawyers and the professional classes. Again, it is evident that the rapid growth of a city which had become three-quarters 448 the size of Philadelphia or Chicago, and more than twice the size of San Francisco, produced a kind of chronic famine under the conditions of the old régime. Imagine a place with that population with all the vexatious mediæval taxes levied upon its food-supply and interfering with its communications and exchange; with no police save that hopeless jumble of conflicting jurisdictions, the Châtelet, the Prévôté, and the occasional military force of the guard, and then you will easily comprehend the “spontaneous anarchy” of ’89. To make a bird’s-eye view, as it were, of the physical movement of the Revolution within the houses of Paris, you must conceive the city as a great whirlpool. Huge outlying suburbs, full of the hungry artisans, send in by a kind of centripetal force the mobs which whirl around the brains of the leaders at the centre. This is not only a metaphor, it is a topographical truth. The heat of the Revolution, its focus, is within two square miles or less. The Revolutionary Tribunal on the Island of the Cité, the Mairie in the same place, also the police, are the centre. Then in an outer ring are the Jacobins, the Tuileries, the Cordeliers, the Hôtel de Ville; and, without being too fantastic, we may imagine this great maelstrom throwing from its outer circumference like irresistible currents the armies, the commissioners, the orders to the provinces, and, finally, the propaganda of democracy which has transformed Europe.
449The outer part of that great circle was already beginning to be modernized with its white houses, great spaces, straight roads and boulevards. The centre was old, tortuous, dark and high, and pressed around Notre Dame, whose towers were embedded in houses. The faubourgs send in their streams by easy great roads, and the central streets, as narrow as lanes, condense the flood into violent eddies and torrents. Thus you have the tumultuous waves of the Place de Grève on the 5th of October and the 9th Thermidor. Thus also you have the mill-stream of that Revolutionary gorge, the Rue St. Honoré, pouring its victims into the grinding of the guillotine on the Place de la Revolution, which was its outlet and its pool.
One thing remains to be said; the sites of the Revolution have disappeared, and by a curious irony the Commune of 1871 destroyed the central landmarks that yet remained. The theatre of the Tuileries in which all the great debates were heard, the prefecture of the police, the hall of the Revolutionary Tribunal from whence Danton’s loud voice was heard beyond the river, the Hôtel de Ville where Robespierre made his last stand, have all been consumed. It is almost true to say that one single historic room remains — the hall in which the Cordeliers debated is now the Musée de Puytren, full of skeletons and physiological anomalies.
It was on the 12th of July, 1789, that Camille Desmoulins brought to the eager crowds gathered in 450 the Palais Royal the news of Necker’s dismissal, and told them that the German and Swiss guards stationed on the Champ de Mars only awaited the cover of darkness to attack them; their sole hope lay in at once arming and preparing to resist. Then followed the procession through the streets with the wax busts of Necker and the Duke d’Orléans carried aloft, the pillaging of gunsmiths’ and bakers’ shops, for they were hungry as well as resentful, and that night of fearful tumult and disorder, the first and typical night of the French Revolution.
The Assembly of Electors, chosen to elect deputies to the States General, were in session at the Hôtel de Ville; thither came the crowds the next day, demanding that the Guet and the Garde de la Ville should be disarmed and their weapons given to them, and that they, the people, should be formed into a Garde Bourgeoise. These things the Assembly not unnaturally hesitated to do, particularly as, in its character of a municipal governing body for Paris, it was entirely self-constituted. The people, however, knew how to insist. “The doors,” says the procès verbal, “were beaten in, the arms seized, and an instant later a man, barelegged, barefooted, clad only in a shirt, was seen shouldering the gun of a disarmed city guard and proudly acting as sentinel at the door of the Grand’ Salle.” The Electors then organized the “Milice Parisienne,” christened three days later by its newly-elected commandant, the Marquis de La 451 Fayette, the Garde Nationale. Article ten of the resolution provides that the colors shall be those of the city, and that each member shall wear, therefore, a blue and red cockade. On the 17th, when the King — brought in procession from Versailles by deputies of the tiers état, La Fayette, Lally-Tollendal, and others — wished to wear one, white, the royal color, was added, and the tricolor created.* Louis XVI. had come by the same route as that followed by Henry IV. when he entered Paris, the same keys had been presented to him on a silver tray, and Lally-Tollendal wound up his speech by saying, in allusion to the Béarnais: “He reconquered his people, now the people have reconquered their King,” which was strictly true. So the King mounted to the Grand’ Salle and showed himself to enthusiastic crowds from a window directly over the bas-relief of the great founder of his house. Bailly was elected “First Mayor of Paris” by acclamation, and everything passed with great good humor. Less than three months later a crowd, composed chiefly of women from the Halles, who had gathered in the Place de Grève in the hope of hanging a baker accused of false weights, lost its victim through the unprecedented activity of the National 452 Guard in his behalf. Then some one began to talk of plots — plots at the court — and some one else cried, “To Versailles!” In a moment the thing was decided. Bailly and La Fayette refusing to give them arms, the guards were overpowered, the doors beaten down, and the mob swarmed into the Hôtel de Ville and up to the Arsenal, situated beneath the roof. Here they met with an obstacle. Abbé Lefebvre, the man who in July had prevented an explosion of powder by which the Hôtel de Ville would have been utterly wrecked, and who had, in consequence, been made guardian of the Arsenal, threw himself across the little stair leading to the belfry and declared they would have to kill him before going further. He was strung up to a cross-beam, but a man in the crowd disguised as a woman cut him down.
Maillard, who was leading the mob, had trouble in preventing them from setting fire to the Hôtel de Ville after pillaging it. At last he got them all out on the Place de Grève. The tocsin had been ringing for some time and fresh bands of men and women were constantly arriving, horses from passing carriages were hitched to the heavy guns, women seated themselves astride of them, and the procession started for Versailles. On the next day, October 6th, they returned, a hooting, yelping pack of furies, escorting the royal family in their midst, and bearing on high the heads of those of the bodyguard, who had remained faithful to their posts. Marie Antoinette 453 showed the first sign of emotion in passing the notorious street lamp at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie, but when she and the King had passed up the stairway under a roof of crossed pikes and sabres, and found themselves in the Grand’ Salle, her self-control returned. She reminded the Mayor of some words he had omitted in the address he delivered in the King’s name to the people. “His Majesty,” said Bailly, “returns to his good city of Paris with joy” — “and with confidence,” added the Queen. “It is better,” continued the Mayor, “than if I had said those words myself.”
The Corps Municipal, or Commune, was organized on the 21st of May, 1792. When, in cases of special emergency, the ninety-six notables were called in to deliberate with them, they became the Conseil Général. This body remained almost uninterruptedly in session in the Grand’ Salle of the Hôtel de Ville from May to August. Between one and two o’clock on the night of the 9th-10th of that month the Faubourg St. Antoine proclaimed a state of Insurrection, and Huguenin, at the head of the representatives of the twenty-eight sections who were favourable to the petition of Mauconseil, established himself in a room close by the Grand’ Salle. The two Communes, one legal and the other insurrectionary, remained in session side by side until five o’clock. M. de Mandat, summoned to answer certain charges connected with the disposal of the Garde Nationale 454 at the Tuileries, was heard and acquitted by the first, but as he was about leaving the Hôtel de Ville was stopped by the other, questioned amid a frightful uproar, and dismissed from his command, which was at once assumed by the brewer Santerre. Mandat was shot as he was leaving the Hôtel de Ville. The efforts made by the legal Commune to reclaim and save him had been answered by Huguenin with the declaration that he and his associates were the representatives of the “peuple souverain” and all powerful, and that from thenceforth the other body was nothing. Two members only and the Mayor, Pétion, were taken into the new Council, and the Commune of August 10th was created. That same night Marat, crowned with laurels but shaking with fear, was brought thither in triumph from his cellar, and Robespierre soon followed. These two men, Robespierre particularly, understood perfectly that in order to control a Revolution where the sovereignty of Paris had replaced that of the throne, the possession of the Hôtel de Ville was of the first necessity. Marat was there constantly, and had a tribune for himself and the reporter of his new newspaper, the Journal de la République (successor to L’Ami du Peuple ), set up in the Grand’ Salle, while Robespierre, less conspicuous, nevertheless used the Hôtel de Ville as the base of all his operations. Here were soon concentrated the various departments of the Government. Directory and municipality, mayoralty 455 and prefecture, the bureaus of the police, of the post (the violation of the mails was one of the Commune’s most effectual detective systems), even the direction of the opera and theatre, were for a time centred at the Hôtel de Ville, where the strictest censorship was exercised.
Efforts were made from time to time by the Assembly to force the Commune to answer for some of its acts, but Huguenin, the nominal leader, paid no attention to the summons. Then, on the 30th of August, the Assembly ordered that the sections should be called together to elect a new Commune; the Hôtel de Ville met this by decreeing the September massacres.
“The members of the insurrectionary Commune,” says M. Wallon in La Terreur, “finding themselves about to be turned out of doors, not as usurpers only but as thieves, threw themselves into that horrible carnage.” A Comité de Surveillance directed the work, and when it was over reported to Robespierre in the Grand’ Salle of the Hôtel de Ville.† Here he was seen by Mme. de Staël, brought thither to explain her attempt to leave Paris. Manuel helped to save her by letting her take refuge in his room while awaiting her passport. She tells of looking out of the window and seeing the people streaming back to 456 the Place de Grève, barearmed, bloody, and shouting horribly.
The “Terror” was directed from the Hôtel de Ville, or Maison Commune as it was called, in legal phraseology, and everything done in the name of the “Municipality of Paris.” It was the tocsin rung there on the 31st of May, 1793, by Marat, with his own hands, that recalled the twenty thousand volunteers, supposed to be well on their way to the Vendée, under Henriot. Under compulsion from them the convention voted the arrest, on June 2d, of the twenty-two Girondins, the Committee of Twelve, and the two Ministers, Clavière and Lebrun. And it was at the Hôtel de Ville that Robespierre sat hesitating, pen in hand, on the night of the 9th Thermidor. After the arrest of himself, Saint Just, and Couthon, he had been offered his liberty at the Luxembourg prison and had refused; it would be illegal, it would place him as a lawbreaker at the head of a mob, without order or authority to rest on. He insisted on being taken to the Mairie in the Rue de Jerusalem, but on arriving there he was received with acclamations, and set at liberty in spite of himself. His associates, meanwhile, also set free, had returned to the Hôtel de Ville and were sending him urgent messages to come while there was yet time, and by taking the direction of affairs forestall the action of the Convention. Still he refused. At last Auvergnat Coffinhal, vice-president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, succeeded in moving him, but it 457 was too late. Robespierre, skulking in at night like a thief, instead of riding up boldly in broad daylight, could accomplish nothing. The Convention, inspired by Barras, decreed that Robespierre and the Commune were “hors la loi,” and the effect was startling. The tribunes of the Grand’ Salle, where the Commune was in permanent session, became suddenly deserted when the announcement was made by Payan, the agent-general, who affected to laugh at it. It was made the rallying cry in the streets, with the result that by midnight Barras had a force of some four thousand Canonniers and National Guardsmen at the Place de Carrousel, while the Place de Grève was almost empty. At about one o’clock Henriot, disturbed by the quiet, descended bareheaded and sword in hand; no one was to be seen. After going as far as the arcade of St. Jean, to see if any bands were coming down the Rue St. Antoine, and finding there the same silence and emptiness, he returned, wild with rage, to report to the others. They had assembled in a room on the right of the Grand’ Salle, called then Salle de l’Egalité, and later, from the color of its hangings, the Cabinet Vert. Their only hope now lay in the Sections des Faubourgs; if these should assemble on the Place at daybreak the expected attack might be repulsed. They accordingly began preparing proclamations to be issued at once in the name of the Commune. That to the Section des Piques (the Place Vendôme), important from its 458 position close to the Tuileries, was completed. “Courage, patriots of the Section of Pikes,” it ran; “freedom triumphs; already those whose firmness made them the dread of traitors are at liberty. . . . The rallying point is the Commune, from whence brave Henriot will carry out the orders of the Committee of Execution, created to save the country.”
The names of Payan, Legrand, Louvet and Lerebours were written at the foot of this document, and Robespierre, still hesitating, still deterred by his sense of the illegality of the act, was urgently besought to sign. He had finally taken up a pen and written the first two letters of his name, Ro——, when a clamor was heard in the Place de Grève; in the moment of intense listening that followed the pen dropped from his hand. It was the Section des Gravilliers, recruited from the quarters of St. Martin and the Temple, hitherto among their most powerful adherents, now led by Leonard Bourdon, an ally of Barras. All further doubt was ended; to every one of those men death was coming in a few days or hours; it was only a question of what form it would take, and this some of them preferred to decide for themselves. Hardly had Bourdon begun to range his men in front of the Hôtel de Ville when a shot was heard from within, quickly followed by another, and a man appeared on the cornice in front of the window, took a few steps, and flung himself down on the lines of bayonets beneath; almost at the same instant the figure of 459 another man was seen being violently hurled from a window of the second floor on to a pile of broken bottles in a corner of the Place.
The first shot was fired by Lebas; it killed him instantly. The other was Robespierre’s unsuccessful attempt on himself, which only resulted in breaking the under jaw. It was his brother who threw himself from the cornice; while the other figure was that of “brave Henriot,” pitched headlong by Coffinhal, who accused him, with rage, of having ruined everything. Both of these men were picked up alive, but only to be executed with twenty others on the same day. Numbered in this first “batch” were Robespierre, Saint Just, Couthon, Fleuriot, the Mayor, and the shoemaker Simon. Between then and the 22d there were ninety-two more executed, and then it was finished; the Terror was over. As has been said, the Hôtel de Ville had narrowly escaped being blown up by an explosion of gunpowder; it now ran as great a risk at the hands of the Assembly. “After the St. Bartholomew,” said Fréron in a speech before the Convention, “I should have demanded the destruction of the Louvre . . . As I now demand that of the Hôtel de Ville, that Louvre of the tyrant Robespierre.”
It was saved by the common sense of Bourdon, who said that it was the property of the people of Paris, and Granet added that the stones of Paris were not responsible; “punish the guilty individuals and demolish nothing.” During the Revolution, however 460 the pictures, sculptures and inscriptions, all savoring of royalty or aristocracy, had been destroyed. An order issued in March, 1792, by the “Municipalité de Paris,” directs the substitution of the words “Publicité, Responsabilité, Sauve Garde du Peuple” for the inscription over the entrance, and another of the following August the removal of the figure of Henry IV.
After the murder of Féraud in the following year a mob of “Terrorists” succeeded in gaining possession of the Hôtel de Ville, but were quickly driven out, and for eight years no governing body held its sessions there, so general was the dread that any form of power established in that place would form the basis of a new Commune.
The law of February 17, 1800, creating a Prefect of Police and another of the Seine, designated the Hôtel de Ville, as the official residence of the latter. M. Frochot, the first to hold this office, annexed the buildings of St. Esprit and the site of the ancient church of St. Jean, pulled down, except the large chapel of the Communion, by a man named Beltha during the Terror. It was in this chapel, called the Salle St. Jean, separated from the Hôtel de Ville only by a narrow alleyway, that Chaumette held his famous Revolutionary audiences. It was now reserved for the meetings of certain scientific societies, and for drawling lots and other business connected with the conscription.
461In 1804, when preparations for the coronation of the Emperor were being made, the Hôtel de Ville was magnificently fitted out from top to bottom. The Salle du Trône, once more called by its old name, was entirely hung with crimson velvet, covered with bees in gold relief. (In 1830, when these were removed to give place to new ones ornamented with fleurs-de-lis, the walls were found to be still covered with Revolutionary placards of the time of the Commune.) On December 16th Napoleon and Josephine were received in the transformed building by Frochot. In the court where the imperial banquet was spread was erected the Salles des Victoires, on a level with the throne room, while the lower floor was given up to the ball-room and the banquet-hall for the guests. Magnificent fireworks were shown from the opposite bank on the Island of the Cité, in which Napoleon’s journey across the Alps was represented. When the festival was over the Emperor and Empress returned to the Tuileries between a double line of illuminations reaching all the way from the Grève.
Napoleon came alone to the entertainment given on his return from Vienna in 1809, and ten days later his divorce from Josephine was announced. In 1812 the Hôtel de Ville was again chosen as the rallying point of a revolution, but one that failed. General Malet proposed to establish himself there at the head of a Provisional Government, after spreading the false report of the Emperor’s death. Frochot lost 462 his head completely, and forgetting that if the Emperor were dead the Empress and Roi de Rome were still at the Tuileries, prepared to submit, an oversight that cost him his double office of Prefect and Councillor of State.
The plans for rebuilding the Hôtel de Ville under Napoleon were frustrated by his fall in 1815, and the great sum of money which had been voted for the purpose was swallowed up in the enormous sums the presence of the allies in Paris cost the city.
On the day of the capture of the Bastille, July 14, 1789, some of its defenders were killed by the mob in the Place de Grève. M. de Launay was struck down on the threshold of the Hôtel de Ville by a cook named Denot; M. de Losme-Salbray was killed under the arcade of St. Jean; and two Canonniers — Invalides — were hung from the corner lamp of the Rue de la Vannerie (the street has now been engulfed by the Avenue Victoria, and the exact spot would be a little south-west of the present Place de l’Hôtel de Ville). The lamp, dismounted so as to leave its iron cross-rod free to act as a gibbet, was not replaced for four weeks, and in that time became so famous, by reason of the number and standing of its victims, that we find Camille Desmoulins proclaiming himself “Procureur Général de la Lanterne.” It was called the King’s Corner, and from a niche above the lamp the features of the grand Roi looked benignantly down at the executions, each one of 463 which was a blow aimed at royalty itself. Foulon was hung there on the 22d of July. Twice the rope broke, but the people refused to dispatch him with swords offered for the purpose; he was made to wait a quarter of an hour until a new rope could be brought. He had been accused of saying that if the people could not get bread they might eat hay. His body was cut down accordingly, his mouth stuffed with hay, and the head stuck on the end of a pike and promenaded through the streets. Foulon was seventy-four years old, and could not offer any resistance, but with his son-in-law Berthier, the next victim, it was different; he fought so vigorously that he had nearly managed to escape, when a pistol-shot struck him, and he fell directly beneath the lamp.
On April 29, 1792, the first trial of the guillotine was made on the Place de Grève, a common criminal being taken for the experiment. After the execution of nine officers, émigres, in October of that year, the guillotine was moved to the Carrousel, and stayed there for six months before being moved to the Place de la Révolution, where it had already been set up for Louis XVI.
Probably, though, the most degrading sights ever witnessed at the Grève were during the excesses committed by Chaumette in the name of reason. In the winter of 1793 the crowd warmed itself there at bonfires made out of the pillaged woodwork of St. Jean and St. Gervais. The chapel of the Virgin was 464 used as a dance-hall, and on the 21st of November a band of looters, who had been going through the churches of the Latin Quarter, returned to the Place de Grève with the relics of Ste. Geneviève, which were burned there, and a “procès verbal,” prepared by a creature named Fayan, sent to the Pope. Chaumette, in the face of Robespierre’s vigorous disapproval of these things, failed in his effect to convoke the “sections” and obtain their support. The attempt ended in the arrest and execution of the nineteen Hébertists. Chaumette, whose hiding-place was perfectly well known by the Convention, was let alone for a time, in order to give the faubourgs a chance to make some demonstration in his behalf. Not a section rose; and, brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he was condemned and promptly executed.
To treat of the Bastille, we must return to the 13th of July, 1789. Throughout the entire day the guardians of the fortress had been on the alert. A private message from Versailles had warned the Governor, M. de Launay, that something was to be attempted; he had therefore closed all the gates, raised the drawbridges, and doubled the number of sentinels; but beyond the tocsins rung from the various church steeples, and a certain ominous murmur rising from the closely-packed Quartier de St. Antoine, nothing occurred. On the 14th, at ten o’clock in the morning, three men wearing uniforms, and calling themselves deputies of the city, but having nothing to show in the way of an 465 order, appeared at the outer grating and demanded to speak with the Governor. He met them on the small drawbridge, but on seeing the enormous throng of people who had assembled, withdrew with them into the fortress. While the interview was going on the people succeeded in gaining the outer court; then a real deputy, M. de la Rozière, arrived, demanding, in the “name of the nation and the country,” that the cannons on the walls of the Bastille should be dismounted, “so as to reassure the people of Paris.” M. de Launay answered that it was not in his power to comply, and advised la Rozière to return to the Committee of Electors and assure them that the guns were not a menace, but would only be used if the Bastille were first attacked. The crowd, alarmed at the so-called deputies’ long absence, now grew threatening. A demonstration caused the outer drawbridge to be raised; then the attack became real. At a critical moment the mob was reinforced by the arrival of the bands who had just seized the arms from the Hôtel des Invalides, but they could hardly have succeeded in taking the great fortress had not the garrison deserted the Governor. A signal was made from the walls by one of the officers, and in a very few moments the inner drawbridge was lowered. A number of the officers and men were shot on the spot. De Launay, who had tried to blow up the Bastille when he found his garrison had deserted him, and de Losme were saved by Elie, only, as we have seen above, to be 466 murdered, the one on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville and the other close by, while the Provost of the Merchants, de Flesselles, accused of sending word to de Launay to hold out, as reinforcements would be sent him, was shot in the Place de Grève. Some of the mob left at the Bastille busied themselves in releasing the prisoners — only seven in number and three of those insane. They were carried in triumph through the streets, dazed and uncomprehending, while the people greeted them with wild rejoicings. Others dismounted the guns and rolled them over into the moat, and already some were hard at work with picks and crowbars demolishing the towers. The documents and registers were scattered or destroyed, and everything worth taking carried off.‡
To put a stop to all this the Committee of Electors ordered the Bastille to be cleared of every one, and appointed a commandant, the Sieur Soulès, to protect it with a guard of thirty or forty inhabitants of the Quartier. Two attempts were made to supplant this guard. In the first, which was headed by a young avocat — no other than Danton — Soulès was arrested, and came near being killed in the streets. At last the Assembly of Electors decreed the immediate destruction of “this monument of despotism and tyranny.” The proclamation was made in all the quarters 467 of Paris to the sound of trumpets, and in the name of La Fayette, as Commander-General of the National Guard.
Polloy, one of the “Conquerors of the Bastille,” as they called themselves, had charge of the work. He had eighty-three models made out of stone taken from the fortress, and presented one to each department, together with the various relics, such as bullets, bits of iron, keys, and so forth. By the time the first anniversary came around the Bastille was razed and trees planted on the lines of its walls, so as to trace a sort of ground plan of the building. The trees were called by the names of the different departments of France, an obelisk that stood in the centre was covered with commemorative inscriptions, and over each approach was the legend, Ici l’on danse!
In the following year Voltaire’s body lay here in state from the 10th to 11th of July when it was taken to the Pantheon, and it was here that the great fête of the “Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic” was celebrated on August 10, 1793, the enormous plaster statue of the Regeneration occupying the centre of the Place.
This great Place which extended far beyond what had been the limits of the Bastille, was for many years a most desolate spot — bare, wind-swept, dusty, and muddy by turns. Under Napoleon a scheme was set on foot to erect a fountain there in the form of a colossal elephant, to be made out of guns taken in the 468 Friedland campaign. The model was made and the foundations placed, but the plan was never carried out, and it was not till twenty years later that anything further was attempted on the spot.§
The ancient church and burial-ground of St. Paul, reached from the Bastille by following the Rue St. Antoine for a short distance and then turning down the Rue St. Paul, were suppressed during the Revolution. Among the celebrated persons buried there were Rabelais in 1553, and the Man with the Iron Mask in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Almost the last interment was that of the four skeletons found chained in a dungeon of the Bastille. In 1791 the church, being without clergy, was closed; it was subsequently sold as national property and torn down, the new proprietors being in such haste to rebuild that they did not stop to clear away the sepulchres beneath. Fifty years later some excavations made on the spot brought a number of human bones to light, as well as a number of wooden and leaden coffins, still intact.
The once wealth and popular church and convent of l’Ave Maria had become poor and obscure by the latter part of the eighteenth century; instead of a hundred nuns it had but forty-nine, it was deeply in debt, and its building were falling into ruins. The 469 Commune converted it into a barrack, which in turn became a market, whose name alone now recalls the old religious establishment of the Poor Clares.
Close by, the church of the Celestins, which we have seen endowed by Charles V. and enriched with magnificent works of art by the Orléans family, was still an object of wonder and admiration to art lovers in the eighteenth century. Among the innumerable sculptured tombs of historic interest were those containing the hearts of Francis II., of Henry II. and Catherine de Médicis, of Charles IX. and his brother, the Duc d’Anjou, and of the Constable Anne de Montmorency.
When during the Revolution the mob broke into this church, it was the Orléans chapel that was the especial object of its fury. Everything was destroyed or taken away. The carved wooden bookcases of the convent library were given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, and their contents added to the enormous collection in the “depot of books from suppressed convents.”
The Celestin convent was at this time deserted, the order having been suppressed some ten years before the Revolution. When the buildings were turned into barracks the church was left standing, and used as a storehouse and stable until it was pulled down in 1849. Among the vast number of leaden coffins unearthed at that time was one whose inscription showed it to contain the remains of Anne of 470 Burgundy, Duchess of Bedford, and daughter of Jean Sans Peur. The statue belonging to it had been taken to the Versailles Museum.
We spoke in the last chapter of the prison reforms instituted by Louis XVI. and Necker, when most of the Châtelet prisoners were taken to La Force. The Revolutionary Government, however, reopened the Châtelet prisons, and they were the scene of one of the most horrible of the September massacres. “Two hundred and fourteen prisoners were killed at the Grand Châtelet; none of them confined for political reasons. Most of those accused of manufacturing or circulating false assignats (paper money of the Revolution) had been sent there, as well as persons who had received it unwittingly and tried to pass it on. Of these was M. d’Espréménil’s brother-in-law (who managed to escape). . . . He told me that as he came out of the Châtelet . . . he plunged up to his knees in a stream of blood. . . .”
In 1802 most of the Châtelet building were torn down to make room for an open Place with a fountain, but the Morgue was not moved to the Marché Neuf until about 1807.
In 1791 Barrère obtained a decree from the Assembly ordering that the Louvre should be the residence of the King, that it should be connected with the Tuileries, and that the gallery with its pictures and statues should become a “museum célèbre.” There was noting strikingly original in any of these 471 suggestions. The first two dated from Charles V. and Henry IV., and for the past ten years Count d’Angiviller, superintendent of the buildings, had been working for the realization of the last.
Another decree of August of the same year gave to all artists the right to exhibit in the Salon of the Louvre, whether they belonged to the Academy of Painting or not; and a few months later the entire Palace was declared devoted to “the study of the arts.” This was simply throwing open the doors to a mob of vandals, every dauber claimed the right of asylum for himself and his family, and in few days the Louvre was filled from garret to cellar with a mob which, under pretext of removing all traces of royalty, completely sacked it. In a very short time its condition was so bad as, or worse than, that from which we have seen de Marigny extricate it with so much pains and labor.
The academies were definitely suppressed in 1793, but they had ceased to exist some time earlier. The room which had been formerly set aside for the use of the Academy of Inscriptions, with its rich collection of bronzes, gobelins, marble busts and portraits, was completely rifled, as was the room of the Académie Française, except for its register, happily secured in time by the Abbé Morellet.
Little shops and stalls sprang up in all the vestibules and along the base of the walls. Mercier tells of the strings of herring which hung along the side 472 toward the Seine, drying in the sun. In the east vestibule was a great market for engravings. Opposite, on the Place St. Germain l’Auxerrois, Ange Pitou established the “theéâtre Ambulant,” from which he sang those royalistic couplets that caused his arrest fifteen different times, and finally sent him into three years’ exile.¶
The museum of the Louvre was opened on August 10, 1793, the anniversary of what Barrère calls the “melancholy day of August 10th.” In September of the same year Marat’s bust was placed in front of the east façade of the Louvre, his chief association with which was carrying off of four complete printing-presses from the royal printing-bureau to use for his Journal de la République, successor to l’Amie du Peuple. Anisson Duperron, the director, having denounced this theft to the Assembly, was executed in the following year. This bureau, under the name of the Printing-House of the Revolution, was moved elsewhere. Pierre Didot asked and obtained permission to occupy the vacant rooms in the Louvre, so as to continue the issue of his great edition of the classics. The Racine which he and his brother Fermin got out in 1801-1805 has been pronounced the “masterpiece of typography of all countries and ages.”
The exhibition of the works of art brought from 473 Italy, held in the ground floor of the Petite Gallery, called the attention of the entire country to the condition of the Louvre, and soon after, the First Consul began to lay plans for carrying out the project of so many sovereigns of France — i.e., the uniting the Louvre with the Tuileries. The Rue du Carrousel was opened in 1800 (though not completely until after the demolition of the Hôtel Brionne, eight years later), and the Rue de Rivoli, named from a recent victory of the Italian campaign, in the same year. A private company obtained the contract for an iron bridge to cross the Seine directly opposite the southern entrance to the Louvre, with rights of toll until the 15th of June, 1897.¥ This bridge, resting on nine iron arches, was opened to the public in 1804, and took its name — Pont des Arts — from the Louvre, called altogether at that time the Palais des Arts.
Two months after he was proclaimed Emperor, Napoleon took active steps towards restoring and completing the Louvre. Against the advice of the expressly-appointed commission, he decided to repeat Perrault’s third order in three of the façades of the courtyard, and in May, 1806, in order that the workmen might be unhampered, all the “artists” domiciled in the Louvre were turned out, most of them being given some indemnity. They had had possession for twelve years.
Napoleon I. built the small pavilion on the north-west 49 of the Louvre, but the plan of Percier and Fontaine for connecting the palace with the Tuileries, though adopted, was never carried out.
To return to the year 1789. The States-General had met at Versailles in May, and on the 17th of June the tiers état constituted itself into the National Assembly; then followed the oath of the tennis-court and the other events that culminated in the riotous demonstrations of the 12th of July, the taking of the Bastille, and, finally, the forced removal of the royal family from Versailles to the Tuileries on the 6th of October.
The palace had been practically unoccupied for fifty-seven years, and when the strange procession arrived towards nine o’clock at night nothing was ready; even the commonest necessities were wanting. “Folding-beds were put up,” writes an eye-witness, “and they passed a very bad night.”
The next day the royal furniture was brought from Versailles, and the King established himself in what had once been the Dauphin’s apartments; the queen and her children were lodged close by. The Pavillon de Flore in the south aisle was occupied by Mme. de Lamballe and Mme. Elizabeth.
The ancient “parterre de Mademoiselle” had long since given place to the three courtyards, called Royale, des Princes and des Suisses, separated from one another by low buildings, where troops and horses were lodged; three gates gave access to these courts 475 from the Place du Carrousel. The garden, protected by terraces and the drawbridge on the south and west, on the north had only an ordinary wall. It could be readily entered from the gardens of the two convents and the private houses on the Rue St. Honoré, from the passage des Feuillants, and from the Manège, and no steps were taken to put it in a state of defence, the necessity not seeming to have occurred to any one.
The Assembly, after looking about for a suitable place to hold its meeting, finally established itself in the Manège — riding-school — lying north of the Tuileries garden, and separated from the Feuillant convent only by a narrow passage-way. It lay directly in the line of the present Rue de Rivoli and the south end of the Rue Castiglione — and the site of the Feuillant convent is covered to-day by the block of buildings standing east of the Rue Castiglione, and divided in two by the Rue du Mont Thabor. The Feuillant Club, born of a split in that of the Jacobin, numbered La Fayette, Mirabeau, Siéyès, Bailly, and other friends of a constitutional monarchy among its members. It was broken up by the events of August 10th.
The Constituent Assembly held its meetings in the riding-school for twenty-two months, the King being present on only three occasions: on February 4, 1790, to recognize the rights of man and citizens; on September 14, 1791, to take the oath of the Constitution; 476 on the 30th of the same month, to close the Assembly — the attempted flight of the royal family had occurred in the preceding June.
A small engraving of the time shows the little group of fugitives making their way towards the carriage waiting in the Marigny gateway (directly south of the present arc de Triomphe du Carrousel). The King leads, carrying a lantern, followed by one of the bodyguard with the Dauphin in his arms; then comes the Queen, Madame Elizabeth, Mademoiselle and Mme. de Tourzel. The Princess of Lamballe had gone on ahead, and was to meet them at Montmédy. In contrast to this silent departure was the tumultuous return on the 25th, witnessed by an enormous throng, which filled every corner of the Place Louis XV. and the Champs Elysées, and swarmed over the trees and roofs of the surrounding buildings.
When the Constitution was adopted in September the King gave a great fête in the Tuileries garden. He and his family were greeted with enthusiasm and vivats, and a few weeks later the new Legislative Assembly substituted “roi des Français” for “roi de France,” and gave the King an arm-chair like that occupied by the President, when he came to open its sessions. On the 20th of the June following the mob forced an entrance into the Tuileries to the very presence of the King. Louis XVI. seems on this occasion to have behaved with tact and firmness, and the good humor of the crowd amounted almost to enthusiasm 477 when, like the incident of the Dauphin and the parti-colored cap of Etienne Marcel, he placed on is head the “bonnet rouge.” The invasion of the palace less then two months later (August 10th) ended in the massacre of the Swiss Guards and the sacking of the Tuileries, when the royal family, yielding to the solicitations of Rœderer, had crossed the garden and taken refuge with the National Assembly. After spending forty-eight hours in tiny room behind the president’s chair, they were removed under arrest to the Temple.
The new Assembly was holding its sessions as well in the riding-school, which was now supplied with furniture and carpets from the Tuileries, whose golden fleurs-de-lis proclaimed their origin (some of the pieces bore the royal arms). It was here that the trial of the King took place. Beginning on the 11th of December (1793), it terminated on the 17th of January a majority of twenty-five voting for sentence of death.
In the following May the convention had the Tuileries Theatre rearranged and freshly decorated, and held its meetings there. Marat’s funeral was celebrated at the palace, and a wooden obelisk placed in the Carrousel in his honor. The fête of “the Supreme Being” was held in the Tuileries garden on June 8, 1794 (20 Prarial), Robespierre delivering the oration and acting as high priest. It was just seven weeks prior to his fall.
478Between the Tuileries and the Champs Elysées was the great Place Louis XV., laid out by Gabriel as a setting for the equestrian statue of that King, voted by the city of Paris on his recovery at Metz. During the Revolution this statue was melted into sou pieces and the guillotine set up in its stead, the square being rechristened Place de la Revolution. Here, beside a multitude of less well known persons, were executed: The King on January 21, 1793; Charlotte Corday in the following July; the Girondists on October 2d and the Queen on October 16th; Philippe Egalité on November 16th; the Hébertists in March, ’94; the Dantonists in April; Mme. Elizabeth on May 12th; and finally, in July, Robespierre, Saint Just, Couthon, Simon, and the other leaders of the Terror.
The Place was given its present name under the Directory, and again called Louis XV. by the Restoration. The Pont de la Concorde is the work of Perronet, and was built between 1787 and 1793. The name of the Place Louis le Grand, lying to the north-east, was changed in 1793 to Place des Piques, and again, under the Directory, to Place Vendôme. Louis XIV.’s statue having been melted down by the Convention, Napoleon determined in 1806 to erect a column in its stead. This column of the Grand Army, or Vendôme as it is always called, was modelled after Trajan’s column in Rome, and cast from twelve hundred cannon taken from Russia and Austria. It 479 was crowned by a statue of the Emperor by Chaudet. A few weeks after the return of the Bourbons this statue was taken down, broken in pieces, and used for the new statue of Henry IV. on the Pont Neuf, and for eighteen years a white flag surmounted the column of the Grand Army.
In October, 1795, when the Royalists backed by some of the sections of Paris, prepared to resist the new plan of government, Barras directed Bonaparte, then a general of brigade, to conduct the movements of the troops. The sections took their stand in the Rue St. Honoré, in front of the Church of St. Roch, and a terrific battle ensued, resulting in their complete rout and the promotion of Bonaparte, first to the rank of second in command, and later, on the retirement of Barras, to be commander-in-chief. The church, which is chiefly remarkable for this association with the Jour des Sections, was built by Le Mercier for Louis XIV., the portico being added in 1736 by De Cotte. Bossuet, who died near by in the Rue Ste. Anne, lay there in state before being taken to Meaux for burial.
The government was now in the hands of the Council of Ancients, the Council of Five Hundred and the Directoire (the Convention having closed its memorable session of upwards of three years, after the Jour des Sections). On November 9, 1799, the Council of Ancients announced its immediate removal to St. Cloud, where General Bonaparte was to 480 defend the seat of national representation; the general, and “the warriors who accompanied him,” then took oath faithfully to preserve the Republic, and the session was adjourned, and it was many years before the old hall of the Convention was again made use of. Three months later, when the First Consul arrived in the Carrousel, on his way to take up his residence in the Tuileries, the walls were still placarded with such notices as royalty has been abolished in France never to return, while liberty-trees and bullet-holes recalled the 10th of August.
After reviewing the troops Bonaparte when through the palace apportioning out the different suites. “Well, Bourrienne,” said he to his secretary, “here we are at the Tuileries; now the thing is to stay.” The Pavillon de Flore was given to Lebrun, but Cambacères astutely declined to establish himself in the palace. “I think it is a mistake,” said he to his colleague, “for us to come here. Before very long the General will want to have the Tuileries to himself, and then we shall have to get out; I had rather never go in.”
The attempt made to blow up the First Consul on the 3 Nivôse, IX. (December 24, 1800) failed in its object, but the destruction of forty-six houses in the neighborhood of the Carrousel opened the way to improving the approach to the Tuileries, and suggested to Napoleon the often-projected plan of uniting it with the Louvre, a plan which he, like his predecessors, 481 was not able to carry out. In November, 1804, Pius VII. arrived in Paris, and was lodged in the Pavillon de Flore. The Emperor’s secretly-performed religious marriage with Josephine took place in the Tuileries chapel on December 1st, followed the next day by the magnificent coronation ceremony at Notre Dame.
Almost all accomplished by Napoleon at the Tuileries was done between 1805 and 1813 — the chapel, theatre and council chamber, built on the site of the old hall of the Convention, the Arc de Triomphe of the Carrousel, and the continuation of the north gallery, designed to connect it with the Louvre. It was also during this period that those fêtes, the most magnificent Paris has ever seen, were held there. The ceremony of Josephine’s divorce was performed in the Emperor’s cabinet in December, 1809, and in the following April that of his marriage with Maria Louisa in the Grand Salon of the Louvre.
The fête on March 20, 1811, to celebrate the birth of the King of Rome, in the Tuileries was the last great day of the Empire, which ended three years later with the flight of the Empress and her child, and the arrival at the palace on April 12, 1814, of the Comte d’Artois, a younger brother of Louis XVI. On alighting from his carriage in front of the Pavillon de l’Horloge he is described as being so overpowered by the rush of recollections that his attendants 482 were obliged to support him into the palace of his fathers.
The months preceding Napoleon’s escape from Elba, the Hundred Days, and the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., were too crowded with events of political importance to allow leisure for building, and the Tuileries remained pretty much as Napoleon left it until the Revolution of 1830. In a decree of February 18, 1806, he had provided for the erection of a triumphal arch, to be placed at the road-point de l’Etoile (so-called from the figure made by the branching out of eleven avenues from it), and to be commemorative of the victories of the French army. The corner-stone was laid on August 15th of the same year, the Emperor’s birthday, under the direction of the architect Chalgrin. On his death five years later he was succeeded by Goust, but the work was arrested by the events of 1814, and not seriously taken up again until the reign of Louis-Philippe.
Another great work undertaken by the Empire was the building of the church of the Madeleine. Letters-patent, signed by Louis XV. in 1763, provide for a large new church to be built for the accommodation of the rapidly-increasing population of the western quartiers, these having outgrown the little church of la Madeleine de la Ville l’Evéque. Contant d’Ivry, as architect, was soon replaced by Couture, and on plans of his, the work had progressed so far that the columns were two-thirds 483 of their projected height when the Revolution put a stop to everything. In 1806 it was proposed to finish the building, and various suggestions were made for its destination; it could be used for a public library, or a Pantheon, like that at Rome, but the Emperor settled the question by deciding that it should be a Temple of Glory; a gift from himself to the soldiers of the Grand Army. He selected among the one hundred and twenty-seven plans proposed that by Pierre Vignon, and Couture’s work was completely demolished, even to the foundations, which were now dug to a depth of twenty feet, but his plan for the façade was preserved. Then came 1814, and it was some years before the building, restored to its original destination, was taken up again. It was finished in 1842.
We will now turn to the Palais Royal, in a sense the birthplace of the Revolution, for the action of the Prince in refusing to allow the police to enter “Chez lui” made it the natural meeting-place of the Revolutionists.
The Duke of Orléans, nearly ruined in building the new galleries, was obliged to sell them to private individuals as soon as they were finished. Among the new proprietors was Jousserand, who moved his café (Foy) down from the Rue de Richelieu into the garden itself. It was in front of this café that Camille Desmoulins appeared on July 12, 1789, covered with dust, and mounting a table announced to the people 484 who thronged around him that Necker had been dismissed and that they must at once fly to arms. As he distributed leaves from the tree over his head, to be worn as cockades, the crowd throughout the garden began stripping the trees and taking up the cry, “Aux armes!” Just then Desmoulins recognized some squads of police who had managed to introduce themselves into the enclosure and were trying to surround him; pulling a pair of pistols from his pocket he pointed them out, and in a moment the crowd had seized and carried them off. The tumultuous scenes that followed have been already alluded to in this chapter.
The Palais Royal continued to be a central rallying-point for all parties, its cafés serving in lieu of clubs. The Café Foy in particular was claimed first by one and then by another; in possession of the Monarchists at night, it would be recaptured by the Jacobins in the morning. Finally, a bonnet de liberté fastened against the wall, with the intimation that Jousserand’s head would fall when it did, settled the politics of the café; the royalists came there no more.
It was in a little restaurant in the cellar of No. 113 Gallerie de Valois that Le Pelletier de Saint Fargeau tried to hide on the eve of the execution of Louis XVI. He had been supposed to be of the King’s party until the moment when his cowardly vote was cast. Recognized by a former member of the bodyguard, as he sat at one of the small tables 485 eating his dinner, he was stabbed, and died without speaking. The murderer, whose name was Pâris, escaped. He had come to the Palais Royal with the intention of assassinating the Duke of Orléans, who, however, gained less than three months more of life by escaping then. Arrested on April 4th of the same year, while dining in company with M. de Monville, Philippe Egalité was taken to the Abbaye, and only saw the Palais Royal once again, when the cart that was bearing him to the guillotine halted in front of it.
Every fluctuation of popular feeling found its expression in the Palais Royal. There Duval d’Espréménil was nearly killed by the frantic Jacobins, the Pope and La Fayette were both burned there in effigy, and later the Jacobin club itself, when the people had grown less afraid of it, in the guise of a mannikin with “Carmagnole” and “bonnet rouge.” So pestilential did the Palais Royal become at times, from the standpoint of order and decency, that even Chaumette suggested closing it to the public in 1793. At another time it was proposed to turn it into a barrack, and, again, to cut four streets through it. None of these ideas were carried out; and, as a fact, the buildings that surround the garden of the Palais Royal to-day are very much the same as in Philippe Egalité’s time.
During all these scenes of tumult and outrage a number of book-stores gained a peaceable renown within the Palais Royal precincts. Probably the best 486 known of these belonged to the publisher Jean Gabriel Dentu, who established himself in the wooden gallery about the year 1792. His shop became the resort of the literary men of the day. The Journal des Dames was published there, and later, in 1819, he founded the Drapeau Blanc in conjunction with Martinville. He was succeeded by his son, Gabriel André, and his grandson, Edouard, well-known to the present generation of littérateurs.
From the neighboring quartier des Halles poured forth that wild mob of October 5, 1789, that returned the next day to Paris, triumphant and horrible, bringing with it “le boulanger, la boulangère, et le pitit mitron.” The women of this quartier continued to play a conspicuous part in the Revolution, as members of the famous tricoteuses of the Faubourg St. Antoine and the woman’s club of the Rue Mauconseil, and of that other club which held its meetings in the parish church of St. Eustache. It was in this church that the Feast of Reason was celebrated in 1793 on almost as great a scale as at Notre Dame, tables laden with food and drink being placed around the choir, and the half-intoxicated, wholly distraught crowd dancing madly outside around a great bonfire made of stalls, balustrades and carvings pillaged from the building; most of the furnishings of the church had, however, been saved and sent to the Petits-Augustins Museum. The church was reopened for divine service in June, 1795, but for some time was 487 also used for the meetings of the Municipal Councillors. By 1804, however, it had resumed much of its former aspect, and when Pius VII., who had come to Paris to crown Napoleon Emperor, went there to bless a statue of the Virgin, nothing was wanting to complete the dignity and richness of the ceremony.
For six weeks after their arrest, in August, ’92, the members of the royal family were confined together in the small, square tower of the Temple, the large tower meantime being made ready for the King. All adjoining buildings were torn down, even the nearer trees were felled, the wall of the enclosure was raised, and as far as possible all windows overlooking it were walled up.
Here the King, now cut off from his family, spent the last months of his life. He was allowed to see his wife and children and Madame Elizabeth on the eve of his execution (January 21, ’93), and to receive the sacrament early in the morning, the sacred vessels being hastily brought in the night from the neighboring Capucin convent in the Marais.
The Princess de Lamballe had long since been removed to La Force, where she was one of the victims of the September massacres of ’92. Marie Antoinette was sent to the Concièrgerie in the following August, and in May, 1794, Madame Elizabeth was taken from the Temple, and, accused with twenty-four others of conspiring against France, executed within a fortnight. The Dauphin, whose 488 health had been completely shattered by the brutalities of the man Simon and his wife, lived for ten months after the 9th Thermidor had introduced a more humane system into the prisons, and died in the room in the great tower previously occupied by his father. Madame Royale, the only one of the original five to regain her liberty, was take to Bâle in December, 1795, and exchanged for some French prisoners held by Austria. She had passed over three years in the Temple. She afterwards married her first cousin, Louis, Duke of Angoulême, eldest son of Charles X.
The Temple tower was used as a state prison until Napoleon, uneasy at the increasing number of pilgrimages of which it was the object, yielded to Fouchè’s wishes and had it torn down. The Rotunda, built in 1781, was used as an old clothes fair, a sort of adjunct to the Marché du Temple.
The entire Quartier du Temple underwent a change during the Revolution. Owing to the preponderance of private dwellings and religious establishments, it had been hitherto one of the quietest, least bustling corners of Paris. Now its hôtels were occupied for the most part by offices connected with the government, while the decree of 1792 closed churches and convents alike, driving the inmates forth to get a living as best they could.
After the attack on the Tuileries of August 1`0, 1792, the prisons of Paris overflowed with men and 489 charged with being accomplices in what was called the “Conspiracy of the Court.” The September massacre began at La Force at eight o’clock in the morning. A Commissary sent by the Commune to liberate the ladies of the court, either purposely or through oversight failed to include Madame de Lamballe, who, though she escaped that day, was interrogated by Hébert and Lhullier the next morning and condemned. An effort made to save her as she left the prison failed, and she was murdered in a narrow alleyway, between the Rue du Roi de Sicile and Rue St. Antoine. The body was hacked and insulted, and the head, stuck on a pike, carried through the streets and to the Temple, to be exhibited to Marie Antoinette. From then till the 9th Thermidor La Force was used entirely as a state prison, and rapidly became as unhealthy, as overcrowded and as horrible as the worst prisons of the old régime.
The great Hôtel de Soubise and the adjoining Hôtel de Strasbourg, left vacant after the death in 1787 of the Maréchal de Soubise, and the departure of the Cardinal de Rohan to a safer part of his diocese, were first used by the Revolutionists as a depôt for gunpowder and then for barracks. Under Napoleon they were devoted to their present use, i.e., a museum of archives.
We will now cross over to the Cité and see what marks the Revolutionary period set upon the cradle of the great Capital.
490The thirty hours’ session of the Parliament, that ended in the arrest of d’Espréménil and de Monsabert, was held, of course, in the Grand’ Chamber of the Palais; that was in May, 1787, and from then on the Revolutionary movement steadily gained ground in the Palais de la Cité, until it became in a sense its headquarters, co-operating with and strengthening the Hôtel de Ville.
On the 11th of August, 1792, the royal statues were everywhere thrown down, the bronze one of Henry IV., on the Pont Neuf, was spared for twenty-four hours, when some one in the Assembly having announced that the Béarnais was not a “Constitutional King,” his statue followed the others. The “Samaratine” went because it was too suggestive of the Bible, and the chimes, moreover, did not play airs sufficiently patriotic in character.
The Parliament was suppressed by an act of Assembly in 1790, and the hôtel of the First President given to the “Mayor of Paris;” there was also established there later that terrible Comité de Surveillance of the Commune, replaced in 1800 by the Prefecture of Police. The Tribunal of Executioners, at the time of the September massacres, held its meetings in the Cour de Mai, at the foot of the great stair, and near the arcade on the right as you ascend. The murders went on for twenty-four hours, even in the courtyards and corridors of the Palais. Thirty-six men only escaped, common criminals of the worst 491 class; but all the women but one (she had killed a member of the guard) were spared on condition that they would devote themselves to the cause; they did so by joining the company of the “tricoteuses.”
The Revolutionary Tribunal, formed on the 10th of March, 1793, took possession of the Grand’ Chambre the same day, and lost no time in ordering the removal of the hangings decorated with “unconstitutional coats of arms” and the substitution of “more analogous tapestries;” the hall took the name of Salle de l’Egalité. Later, when the enormous number of prisoners made it impossible for the Tribunal to get through its work unaided, a branch was established in the Salle St. Louis, called Salle de la Liberté. It was there that Danton was tried and condemned, and that he defended himself with such fury that his voice, thundering through the open windows, reached and strangely moved the crowds gathered on the Quai de la Ferraille, across the river.
Before the grotesquely-costumed Tribunal of the Grand’ Chambre there appeared in turn Charlotte Corday, the Queen, the Girondins, Madame Roland, and hundreds of others. The sittings were so prolonged that Fouquier on coming out of them could sometimes hardly drag himself to the pallet he had put up for himself in a cabinet close to the Concièrgerie; and so imbued was his mind with his frightening task that one day while crossing the Pont Neuf 492 with Séran he suddenly paused and began to sway, declaring that the Seine had turned to blood.
The first cell occupied by Marie Antoinette was the old Council chamber of the Concièrgerie, but after the plot called the “affair of the Carnation” she was removed (September 11th) to the one described in the Diurnal of Beaulieu, under date of October 16, 1793 (the day of her execution), as the “most damp, unhealthy, fetid and horrible prison on Paris.” It is this cell that is shown to-day as the cachot de la reine. The Girondins after their arrest were kept for some time in the Granaries of the Carmelite convent, and then brought to the Palais and confined in the new chapel, built after the fire of 1776; it was there that Riouffe, also imprisoned in the Concièrgerie at the time, heard them singing and talking together throughout the entire night preceding their execution. Robespierre passed several hours after the 9th Thermidor in a small cell between that of the queen and this chapel, of which it later became the sacristy.
The Sainte Chapelle miraculously escaped destruction during the Revolution. Used first as a storehouse for flour, the relics having been sent to St. Denis, and then as a club-house, the Consulate turned it into a storehouse for archives. Within the present generation there could still be read these words traced on the jamb of the porch of the lower church: Propriété Nationale a’ vendre. 493
As we cross the Cité to the Cathedral church we find that the decree of 1792 has swept away all that were left of the churches and religious houses, once so plentiful in this part of Paris, those not actually demolished being turned to secular uses. Notre Dame itself escaped, but with the loss of the “gothiques simulacres” of the Kings of France on the portal, of its invaluable archives, of countless statues and ornaments, and of its treasure. It was owing to the intervention of Dupuis, who declared that the planetary system was set forth on one of the portals, that they and much else were preserved.
The Cathedral, closed on the 7th of November, 1793, was reopened on the 20th of the same month for the second and most horrible of Chaumette’s Feasts of Reason, when the corps du ballet of the opera danced directly in front of the high altar, their skirts fairly brushing against an overturned statue of the Virgin. In the following May the words “Temple of Reason” were removed from the west front and “The French people recognize a Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul” substituted; but it was eight years more before the services of the church were definitely re-established. The magnificent coronation of the Emperor and Empress by Pius VII. took place in Notre Dame in December, 1804, and seven years later the baptism of the King of Rome, the last great function of the Empire.
494The fate of the small churches which once clustered so thickly about the Cathedral offers but little variety. Ste. Geneviève des Ardents, St. Christopher and St. Jean le Rond were pulled down in the middle of the eighteenth century to make room for new buildings; the others, five in number, were all sold as national property during the Revolution, and put to various uses — storehouses, studios, shops — one, Ste. Marine, was turned into a popular theatre; none of them are now standing.** The churches were not alone the objects of the Revolutionists’ activity. As we cross the Petit-Pont and mount the hill of Ste. Geneviève we find that a number of schools, and colleges as well, have been closed and sold as national property, to be turned to uses that the most ordinary buildings would have served equally well. Such was the fate of St. Yves (on the left as you go up the Rue St. Jacques), of the Collège de Beauvais, or Lisieux, of the Church of St. Jean de Latran, of the Collèges des Grassins, de Reims and de Tréguier, and the Church of St. Etienne des Grès. The Collège de Montague, the extreme rigor of whose régime was scored by Rabelais, became in turn a military hospital and a barrack, being finally pulled down to make room for the Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève. The Collège Ste. Barbe (more fortunate than most) was reopened in 1800 as a college of arts and sciences, and two years later regained its old name.
495The college of Louis le Grand, formerly the property of the Jesuits, was, after their expulsion from France, made over to the University, which here established its headquarters, its library, and archives. In the course of the succeeding quarter of a century, until the Revolution, that is, it gradually concentrated the scholars of no less than twenty-six small colleges in its lecture-halls, and thus, by assuming the proportions and character of a national institution (the first lyceum of France), saved its own life. The name, of course, was changed for a time (it was by turns the Collège Egalité, the Prytanée, and the Lycée Impérial), and a part of the building served as a gaol, but the college was never actually closed nor the courses suspended. The Sorbonne, less fortunate, was closed in 1892, its library confiscated, and the buildings rented for a factory.
When Mirabeau died in 1791 the new Church of Ste. Geneviève was still unfinished, and his body was deposited temporarily in the old building. As yet the nation had not definitely broken with the Church. The office for the dead was recited in St. Eustache and a funeral sermon preached by a member of the Order of Jesus. Less than a month later the National Assembly ordered that the remains of Voltaire should be brought to Paris and placed in the Church of Ste. Geneviève de Paris, and a few days after that we find the name of Pantheon applied to it for the first time in a petition, signed by artists, men of letters 496 and scientists, asking that the remains of J. J. Rousseau might be deposited there as well. The people of Montmorency objected so strongly, however, that the body was not removed from Esmenonville till three years later. The deputy Lepelletier de Saint Fargeau†† was buried there in 1793 by order of the Convention, and in the same year Chénier, after exposing Mirabeau’s correspondence with the court, demanded that Marat’s body should replace his in the Pantheon. This was done, the remains of Mirabeau being buried in a corner of the cemetery of St. Etienne du Mont, whither those of Marat followed in a little more than a year.
Passing over to the Quartier St. André des Arts, we find the wealthy and venerable monastery of the Augustines replaced by a game market, built in 1809. The community was suppressed in 1790, everything of value carried off, and the buildings sold as national property. All that is left to-day to remind us of a college that numbered among its masters the tutor of Philippe le Bel is the name given to one of the streets that bounded it and a few odd volumes from its library in the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
The Church of St. André des Arts, filled with interesting tombs, after being sold as national property in the Revolution, was torn down. In 1809 the city bought back the site and laid it out in a square, 497 whose name is all that now recalls the ancient church where André Duchesne, the “Father of French History,” was buried. The neighboring Church of St. Severin was more fortunate. Placed at the disposal of the administration of powder and saltpetre in 1794, it somehow escaped destruction, was reopened in 1803 as a place of worship, and when St. Pierre aux Beufs was pulled down in 1837 its portal was removed and set up on the west front of St. Severin; most of the church as we see it to-day dates from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with modern restorations. The Hôtel de Cluny, confiscated and sold as national property, most luckily fell into the hands of M. du Sommerard, an archæologist of rare talent and learning; it was he who turned the building into a museum and laid the foundation of the present collection.
The Collège d’Harcourt went through the usual experience of confiscation and partial demolition, followed by partial restoration; it was again used as a place of public instruction in 1820. Under Louis XVIII., when a third royal college was decided upon (Louis le Grand and Henry IV. were the others), this ancient college was chosen and given the name of St. Louis.
A very little to the north-west stood the famous convent of the Cordeliers, whose early history has already been given; its celebrity dates from the Revolution, when its refectory was used for the 498 meetings of the Club des Cordeliers, so called from having started in the lately-suppressed district of that name. Its other title was Société des Amis des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, and its principal aim was to maintain a close watch upon every act of the ministers, departments, and the Commune. Driven from the Cordeliers in 1791, the society held its meetings in various parts of Paris, until it finally disappeared shortly after the execution of its leaders in 1794. Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, Hébert, Cloots, Fournier, Chaumette, and others of the most opposite views, were numbered at one time or another among the members of this club, uniting on the common ground of enmity to the throne, the church, and the Jacobin Constitution. It was they who first put forth the device, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. The Cordeliers convent was turned into an Ecole de Médicine. The present Ecole Pratique stands on the site of the church, and anatomical collections occupy the old refectory, under the name of Musée Du Puytren.
The seminary of St. Firmin was established in the seventeenth century in the House of the Bons Enfants St. Victor, which we have seen standing at the angle of the Rues St. Victor and the Rue des Fossés St. Bernard as far back as the thirteenth century. The pious head of this college, M. Vincent, better known to posterity as St. Vincent de Paul, had lately moved his new community, the Priests of the Mission, 499 to the Faubourg St. Denis. During the Revolution the seminary of St. Fermin, converted into a prison, was the scene of the murder of seventy-seven out of a party of ninety-two priests who had been confined there; the remnant managed to escape. The buildings, after serving various purposes, were entirely demolished. The abbey of St. Victor, which lay to the east, had been in existence for more than seven hundred years when the Revolution came to put an end to it. Fortunately, the most valuable of its possessions, the library, numbering thirty-five thousand printed volumes and some three thousand manuscripts, fell into the hands of Ameilhon, who was able to preserve the greater part of it intact. To-day the site of the religious house founded by Guillaume de Champeaux, after his controversy with Abelard, is occupied by the Halle aux Vins.
The neighboring Collège des Ecossais, suppressed in 1793, and used as a prison, held Saint Just for a few hours on the 9th Thermidor. Subsequently a private school was opened there, and the buildings are still standing (on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, opposite the Rue Clovis). In the church, once filled with tombs and memorial slabs, may be seen the marble support of the bronze urn in which the brains of James II., who died at St. Germain in 1701, were placed after his death. The urn was stolen during the Revolution, but only a few years ago the leaden box in which the relic had been placed was discovered 500 in the course of some repairs. The great Collège de Navarre, which we have seen founded by the wife of Philippe le Bel, Jeanne, Queen of Navarre, in 1304, though confiscated by the government in 1793, fortunately escaped destruction (except for the chapel, which was pulled down). Its ancient buildings, completely restored, have been used ever since the days of the first Napoleon by the Ecole Polytechnique. They stand north-east of St. Etienne du Mont, and reach as far as the Rue Monge.
The ancient foundation, where poor scholars from Asia received a Christian education, and which became later the Collège de la Marche, was, after the Revolution, rented by its late principal and opened on the 6 Brumaire, years VI., as a private institution of learning. This school existed until 1834.
Some half dozen other unimportant colleges and religious houses closed during the Revolution need not detain us, but at St. Germain des Prés most serious changes have taken place. When the Abbey’s right to administer justice in the faubourg was restricted in 1636 to its own inclosure, the prison standing on the Rue Ste. Marguerite, and outside the abbey walls, was ceded to the state, and became the notorious Abbaye Prison. At first it was only used for military offenders, and it was there that eleven members of the Gardes Françaises were confined at the breaking out of the Revolution for refusing to use their guns against the people. Word of this 501 having been brought to the Palais Royal on June 30, 1789, a mob led by Loustalot, author of the Révolutions de Paris, rushed to the prison, and liberating the soldiers, conducted them in triumph to the Palais Royal. On the night of August 10, 1792, a number of the Swiss Guard and others, taken prisoners at the Tuileries, were confined there. Among these was M. de Chantereine, colonel in the Constitutional Guard of Louis XVI.; he committed suicide a few days later. At the time of the September massacre seventy-one persons were murdered at the Abbaye (M. de Sombreuil, former Governor of the Invalides, and Cazotte, the writer, escaped). It then lost the character of a military prison and was used for offenders of every class. It was here that Mme. Roland wrote her memoirs, and that Charlotte Corday awaited her trial. Not far away, at the corner of the Rue de la Chaise and the Rue de Sèvres, stood the Abbaye au Bois, a convent and fashionable girls’ school; it was also used as a prison in the Revolution. Mme. Récamier established herself there in 1814, and remained until her death, thirty-five years later; her celebrated Salon, of which Chateaubriand was the ruling spirit, has made its name famous. To return to St. Germain des Prés. The church, used first as a meeting-place for the citizens of the section (de l’Unité), was converted later into a powder factory, and most of its historic relics were destroyed or disappeared. Of the eight twelfth century statues that ornamented the 502 entrance to the old towers no trace remains, but some of the tombs of the Merovingian Kings were taken to St. Denis, Alexander Lenoir having first obtained their removal to his museum in the abandoned convent of the Petits Augustins. Finally, in 1797, all but the church and palace of the ancient abbey buildings were pulled down and the Rues de l’Abbaye and Bonaparte opened on the site. This was only a small detail of that general plan by which Paris was to become the great modern capital of Europe; a plan which, though not fully carried out by the first Napoleon, was destined to be magnificently realized by his nephew and the men of the Second Empire.
Footnotes
* There are various other theories as to the origin of the tricolor. One is that it was the livery of the Duke of Orléans, and another that it represented the three orders: people, noblesse, and clergy. Camille Desmoulins’ suggestion of green had been abandoned because it was the livery of the Comte d’Artois.
† It is maintained by some historians that the members of the Commune were not responsible for the September massacres, and are only to be blamed for not preventing them.
‡ One of the Electors of Paris, who managed to save some of the papers, deposited them safely in the abbey of St. Germain des Prés.
§ It is in this model, which stood for many years in a corner of the Place, that Victor Hugo lodges petit Gavroche in Les Misérables.
¶ The hero of Alexander Dumas’ book is not identical with this personage.
¥ This was bought back by the city in 1848.
** See pages 164, 165.