Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. William Walton

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      During the long reign of Philippe-Auguste, which even the modern historians call "glorious," the power of the nobles was seriously impaired. The Cour du Roi retained the organization it had received, but its importance increased with that of the royal authority, and the most powerful vassal of the king of France saw himself dispossessed of his fiefs by its decree. The feudal power was attacked in one of its most cherished rights, that of private warfare, by a royal ordinance compelling the observance of a truce of forty days after any injury, so that no one might be assailed without warning. Any seigneur might be at once vassal and suzerain, but when Philippe acquired the fief of the Amiénois, for which he was to render homage to the Bishop of Amiens, he refused, saying that the king of France should be the vassal of no man. "To the feudal contract, between man and man, symbolized by the homage and the investiture, the thirteenth century saw succeed the democratic contract between a man and a group, between seigneurs and subjects, carrying an engagement written and public. Then began the conquest of liberty—liberty of the person, of the family, and of the property; liberty administrative and political; economic liberty. … Of the total sum of partial contracts intervening between the king and the provinces, cities and corporations, has been formed the great national contract tacitly concluded between him and the people." (M. Imbart de la Tour.)

      Notwithstanding war, famine, and pestilence, Paris had outgrown the fortifications of Louis le Gros, and, before he departed for the Crusade, Philippe-Auguste ordered the bourgeois of the city to construct a new wall, solidly built of stone, with towers and gates. This was commenced in 1190; the faubourgs were surrounded with a wall of more than two mètres in thickness, faced with masonry, flanked by five hundred towers and pierced with fifteen gates. Its course can be traced on any good map of modern Paris, and the size of the mediæval city thus compared with that of the present one. On the right bank of the river it began with a tower that was called "the tower which makes the corner," and which stood near the northern end of the present Pont des Saints-Pères. Thence it passed to the Porte-Saint-Honoré, near the present Oratoire and the statue of Coligny on the Rue de Rivoli, which was defended by two towers, struck northerly to the site of the present square formed by the intersection of the Rues Jean-Jacques-Rousseau and Coquillière, just north of the Bourse, where was a gate called Bahaigne. Here it turned eastward, cut off the commencements of the Rues Montmartre and Montorgueil, traversed also the Rue Française, and, following the direction of the little Rue Mauconseil, arrived at the Rue Saint-Denis, where was another gate called Porte-Saint-Denis, or Porte aux Peintres. Continuing in this direction, it traversed the Boulevard Sébastopol and the Rue Saint-Martin, enclosing the Rue aux Ours, followed the Rues Grenier-Saint-Lazare and Michel-le-Comte, traversed the Rue du Temple, and came to a tower erected nearly on the site of the Mont-de-Piété of to-day, between the Rues des Francs-Bourgeois and des Blancs-Manteaux, opposite to the Palais des Archives. Remains of this tower were discovered in 1878, in demolishing some old houses to make way for the enlargement of the Mont-de-Piété; it served to enclose a circular staircase. The wall continued to follow the Rue Francs-Bourgeois to another gate, the Porte Barbette, at the intersection of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple with the Rue des Rosiers; then, beginning to trend south, it followed nearly the Rue Malher to the Place Birague, not far from where the Rue de Rivoli becomes the Rue Saint-Antoine. Here was another gate, the Porte Baudet or Baudoyer. Thence the line of fortification, crossing the locality of the present church Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, descended to the river in the direction of the Rue des Barres, and ended on the quai, at the Porte Barbel-sur-l'Yeau. Vestiges of this tower were also found in 1878.

      On the south side of the river the wall was not commenced till 1208, when that on the northern side was completely terminated. Instead of making a close junction with that on the other shore, it took its start somewhat to the eastward of the "corner tower," at the famous Tour de Nesle, on the locality now occupied by the right wing of the Bibliothèque Mazarine and the Hôtel des Monnaies. It crossed the Rue Dauphine and halted on the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts at the Porte Buci; crossed the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where was another gate, the Porte des Cordeliers, afterward Porte Saint-Germain; descended the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where was the Porte de Fert or d'Enfer, which became the Porte Saint-Michel under Charles VI. From this gateway the wall continued southeasterly to that of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, between the Rue Soufflot and the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, just south of it, enclosed the Place du Panthéon, crossed the Rue Descartes at the Porte Bordet or Bordel, crossed the Rue Clovis, and traversed the locality at present occupied by the buildings of the École Polytechnique. Continuing in a northerly direction, it reached the Porte Saint-Victor near the present junction of the Rue Saint-Victor and the Rue des Écoles, and finally arrived at the Quai de la Tournelle by following a direction parallel to that of the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard.

      It was to Philippe-Auguste also that the city of Paris was indebted for its first paved streets. In 1185, five years before the wall of fortification was begun, he was in one of the great halls of his palace in the Cité, and approached a window whence he was in the habit of watching the traffic on the Seine. Some heavy wagons or carts were being drawn through the streets at the time, says the historian Rigord, and such an insupportable odor was stirred up from the mud and filth that the king was obliged to leave the window, and was even pursued by it into his palace. From this occurrence came his resolve to carry out a work from which all his predecessors had shrunk because of the great expense involved, and which, indeed, discouraged the bourgeois and the prevost of the city when the royal commands were laid upon them. Instead of carrying it out for all the streets and by-ways of the capital, they appear to have contented themselves with paving the environs of the palace, and the two streets which traversed the Cité from north to south and from east to west, and which were called the croisée de Paris. This paving was effected by means of square stones fifteen centimètres long and fifteen to eighteen thick. The bourgeoisie found the expense so heavy that under Louis XIII half of the streets of Paris were still unpaved.

      In 1204, the king charged the prévôté of Paris to pay to the prior and the monks of Saint-Denis de la Chartre thirty sous parisis for the privilege of building on their land, and he commenced the construction of the Louvre. The site had long been occupied by a sort of suburban house of entertainment, and the king resolved to erect a strong château, commanding the Seine. This château was square, the thick walls pierced with small windows and loopholes arranged without order, surrounded by wide and deep ditches, and completed by a great tower rising in the middle. Over the pointed roof floated the royal banner, and within were confined the State prisoners, and the royal treasures, crown-jewels, and Trésor des Chartres. In 1200, this indefatigable monarch conceived the idea of uniting all the different schools established in Paris under one head, but the corporation of the Université was not constituted until twelve years later.

      The life and reign of Louis VIII, son of Philippe-Auguste and father of Saint-Louis, have recently been made the subject of special research by M. Petit-Dutaillis, whose history may serve to give his short reign of three years a greater importance in the eyes of subsequent students than it has received. He surrounded himself with the same political advisers that had served his father, and was inspired by the same political and administrative principles: the death of King John and the birth of the infant Henry III caused his expedition to England, while still Dauphin, to fail, and in his attempt to unite the crowns of Hugues Capet and of William the Conqueror he had against him the influence of the Pope. His energetic and persevering obstinacy won for him the surname of "the Lion;" and, moreover, he was haunted "by those visions of sanctity and of power to which the clerical and classical education gave birth, the sole general ideas which enlightened and enlarged the darkened and narrow brains of the men of the Middle Ages." The French historians are of the opinion that it was to his father's victory of Bouvines that England was indebted for her Magna Charta.

      His entry into Paris after his coronation at Reims is described enthusiastically by the chroniclers of the times. "The whole city turned out before him; the poets chanted odes in his praise, the musicians filled the air with the sound of the vielle [hurdy-gurdy!], of fifes, of tambours, of the psalterion and of the harp." Another admires the richness of the garments: СКАЧАТЬ