“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.”
“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.”
“Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.”
which may be inadequately translated, “The wall walling Paris makes Paris wail.”
The over-florid architecture of Louis XV’s reign showed signs of betterment under the younger Louis through the influence of the Greek. The best and, indeed almost the only remaining examples are the church of Saint Louis d’Antin which Louis built as a chapel for a Capuchin convent, and the Odéon, a theater.This building has a dignified façade, but around the remaining three sides runs an arcade filled with open-air book shops whose widely varied stock is more picturesque than appropriately placed. Its actors are the students graduated in the second rank from the government school of acting. Those of the first grade make up the company of the Comédie Française whose playhouse stands in columned ugliness to-day attached to the corner of the Palais Royal.
The drama always has been fostered in Paris, but up to Molière’s time no especial provision was made for the presentation of the play from which the people derived so much pleasure. In early times the performance took place in the street. In the fifteenth century the clerks attached to the court held in the palace of the Cité performed farces in the great hall of the palace, using Louis IX’s huge marble table as a stage. In the sixteenth century a troupe remodeled for its use a part of the Hôtel of Burgundy of which a fragment is left in the Tower of John the Fearless. In the seventeenth century a disused tennis court in the Marais housed a company of players. Molière and his actors occupied the hall of a half-ruined residence opposite the eastern end of the Louvre until it was torn down, when they moved to the Palais Royal.
Street fairs were enormously popular. They
THE ODÉON.
THE ODÉON.
THE ODÉON.
THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE ABOUT 1785.
THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE ABOUT 1785.
THE COMÉDIE FRANÇAISE ABOUT 1785.
were often conducted by hospitals or religious houses. The best known are the Fair of Saint Germain and the Fair of Saint Laurent, both the left and the right banks being served by these two entertainments. There were side shows and mountebanks of all kinds, and some old verses say that “as one approaches his ears are as full as bottles with noise.”
In summing up the causes of the Revolution soon to let loose the pent-up fury of generations of repression, the economic and social reasons are easily seen. To English minds the only wonder is that the people endured so long the steady curtailment of opportunity and that they were so long deluded by the magnificence of royalty. The lower classes were taxed inordinately, even on necessities. The nobility (of whom there were some two hundred thousand as against England’s five hundred) and the clergy were not taxed at all, and when the Minister of Finance suggested to the assembled Notables, whom Louis was forced to summon, that they should bear their share of the government support, they resented the idea as insulting. Not only were the taxes heavy, their collection was farmed out to tax-gatherers who were permitted to take in lieu of salary as much more than the original tax as they could squeeze out of their victims. And, as if this drain, long continued and ever increasing,were not enough, Louis XV had collected advance taxes.
Politically, the power of the French monarch was practically absolute. The nobility and clergy almost invariably supported him, voting two to one against the Third Estate in the States General, and, as this body had not convened for nearly two hundred years before Louis XVI summoned it, it hardly could be regarded as a check to absolutism. Trial by jury had fallen into complete disuse and no man was sure of his personal liberty or of undisturbed ownership of his property, and, at the same time, he was denied freedom of belief and of speech.
But independence of belief and of speech was fast increasing, and its growth is an evidence of the intellectual change which is one of the causes of the Revolution, less evident but not less powerful than those which affected the economic, social and political status of Frenchmen. Paris was the center of this intellectual and literary activity. In Paris lived or sojourned the men whose advanced thinking was percolating through all classes of society—Voltaire and Montesquieu, who pleaded for liberty and a constitutional government, and Rousseau whose appeals for individual freedom of politics, religion and speech subordinated to the good of the whole, crystallized in the war cry “Liberty, Equality andFraternity” which has become the watchword of modern France. In Paris, too, were published the famous philosophical and economic articles of the Encyclopedia, often with difficulty in evading the police, and often interrupted by the prison visits of its contributors, Diderot being sent to the Bastille immediately upon the appearance of the first volume.
Skepticism permeated the upper classes, irreligion the lower.
Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars’ attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers had been heard before; in the crowded tenements of the eastern quarter around the Saint Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable license in the name of Liberty was watching for an opportunity to test its strength.
It made its first trial amid the excitements of the election to the States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed to suggest any solution of the country’s problems. It met in the spring of 1789, the first time in one hundred and seven-five years. Riots were frequent, prophetic of the struggle with theking which began as soon as the sitting opened at Versailles. Louis closed the hall to the assemblage and they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by which they bound themselves not to disband until they had prepared a written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent Assembly, the nobility and clergy joined them at the king’s request, and they voted thereafter not by classes but as individuals.
Some of the Third Estate knew definitely what they wanted. A peasant declared that he was going to work for the abolition of three things—pigeons, because they ate the grain; rabbits, because they ate the sprouting corn; and monks, because they ate the sheaves.
Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court, Desmoulins, a young journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais Royal, declaring that the fact of the king’s surrounding his family with Swiss soldiers was an introduction of force that made the wise regard the Bastille as a menace to the city.
The facts seem to be that most of the prisoners were well cared for, so well fed that Bastille diet was a town joke, and, as a picture by Fragonard shows, might even entertain their friends.
On July 14, 1789, two days after Desmoulins’ speech, the Parisians poured against the fortressa horde of citizens armed with weapons taken from the Hôtel des Invalides. They forced the first drawbridge, burned the governor’s house and easily compelled his surrender, since the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition. The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so under Louis’ mild rule, seized the captain and hurried him to the Grève where they struck off his head and carried it about the city on a pike—the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to know an appalling number. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry was begun the next day and lasted through five years. Lafayette sent one of the keys to General Washington.
So thoroughly did the Bastille symbolize oppression in the public mind of France that the anniversary of the day of its fall has been made the national holiday.
One of the schemes proposed for the decoration of the vacant square was the erection of an enormous elephant to be made from guns taken in battle by Napoleon. A plaster model stood in theplacefor several years, the same animal which served as a refuge for the street urchin, Gavroche, in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” After 1830 the present “July Column” waserected to the memory of the victims of the “Three Glorious Days” of the Revolution of that year.
Upon hearing of the Fall of the Bastille the king made concessions to the Assembly and then went to Paris accompanied by a huge and motley crowd armed with guns and scythes. The mayor went through the ceremony of presenting him with the keys of the city in token of its loyalty, while at almost the same time Lafayette was organizing the citizens into the National Guard, who wore a cockade made up not only of red and blue, the colors of Paris, but of white, the royal hue.
The nobles, awakened to the danger of a general insurrection, tried to put a stop to the rioting and incendiarism that was spreading over the country by offering to yield their privileges. This concession proved but a sop, for the people’s hunger was now unappeasable. Louis continued to spend most of his time at Versailles to the dissatisfaction of the Parisians. When they heard of the expressions of loyalty uttered by the king’s body-guard at a banquet they voted that the court had no right to feast while Paris was suffering for bread, marched to Versailles and forced the king, the queen, and the little dauphin—the baker and his wife and the baker’s boy, they called them—to go back with them to town. Marie Antoinettehad succeeded in making herself extremely unpopular, both with the nobility who objected to her independence of the laws of etiquette to which they were accustomed, and with the people, who called her the “Austrian Wolf,” and who really believed her to be sinister and wicked instead of a gay and affectionate young woman, whose worst fault was thoughtlessness. If she had had before but small knowledge of the opinion in which she was held by her subjects she discovered it during this ten-mile drive when her carriage was surrounded by east-end roughs and disheveled women from the Halles who had only been deterred from killing her as she stood beside her husband at Versailles by her display of dauntless courage, and who crowded upon her now, yelling indecencies and shaking their fists at the king and the uncomprehending little prince and his sister. This return to Paris was called the “Joyous Entry.”
Arrived at Paris they went to the Tuileries and passed a sleepless night in the long-deserted palace which seems to have been despoiled even of its beds. There they lived for many months, willingly served only by a few faithful guards and daily insulted by people who came to see the tyrants and to watch the “Wolf’s Cub” dig in the little fenced enclosure which he called his garden. The king’s brother and his closestfriends fled from the country, leaving him to face his troubles alone.
The first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated upon the Field of Mars by a great festival. Undeterred by a violent rainstorm a hundred thousand people passed before an Altar of the Fatherland erected in the middle, and after taking part in a religious service, listened to Lafayette, who was the first to swear to uphold the Constitution, and to Louis, who declared: “I, King of the French, swear to use the power which the constitutional act of the State has delegated to me, for the maintenance of the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by me.”
The Assembly confiscated church property and gave to the state the control of the clergy. Then it ordered the clergy to take an oath to support the Constitution. Because this implied an acknowledgment that the action of the Assembly was justifiable the pope forbade the clergy to take the oath. At first the king vetoed this bill, called the “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” and then he sanctioned it. It was this vacillation that caused the distribution in Paris of the cartoon of “King Janus.”
The Assembly worked hard in the old riding school near the Tuileries, and formulated many political changes which did not live and manycivil improvements which were more enduring. Mirabeau used his strength for order; but popular clubs, the Jacobins and Cordeliers, which took their names from the old religious buildings in which they met, were constantly stirring the fiercest passions of the people, and principles closely akin to anarchy were taught in the press of Danton and Desmoulins, sincere believers in revolution.
Despairing of achieving peace from within the king entered into a secret arrangement with several other European rulers, by which they were to invade France and subdue his subjects for him, and in June, 1791, he tried to escape from the country with his family and to join his allies. They stole forth at night from the Tuileries and managed to leave the city, but they were recognized and sent back, making their way once more to the palace through a huge and sullen crowd. The clubs clamored for the king’s deposition and the people rioted in the Field of Mars against Lafayette and the mayor of Paris, who dispersed them at the command of the Assembly.
In the autumn the Assembly finished the preparation of the constitution and disbanded, to be succeeded at once by the Legislative Assembly, whose leaders, the Girondins, were antiroyalists, but not active republicans. War wasdeclared against Austria, but distrust and discontent led the French army to reverses of which the revolutionary press made the most.
It happened to be on the anniversary of the flight of the royal family that the Marais and the Faubourg Saint Antoine again gave up their hordes, who lashed themselves into fury as they pushed their way through the chamber where the Assembly was sitting, and then surged on to the Tuileries. Without doubt their intention was murder, but once more, as when Marie Antoinette fronted them at Versailles, they stopped abashed before a calm which they could not understand. Louis donned the scarlet liberty cap which they handed him, the queen allowed a similar “Phrygian bonnet” to be put upon the dauphin, and the mob stood appeased and even admiring. Yet only a few days later Lafayette, the defender of the Assembly, was forced to flee from the country. The Reign of Terror had begun.
The threatened approach of the foreign enemy was the signal for a final attack upon the royal family. Early on one August morning the National Guard and the Swiss Guards massed themselves about the palace to withstand the assault of the crowd whose ominous roar was heard growing momentarily louder as it poured westward under the leadership of a brewer of theFaubourg St. Antoine. The guards gave their life valiantly, but they were hacked to pieces in the struggle which Thorwaldsen’s famous Lion commemorates at Lucerne. The victorious rabble set fire to the palace, which was partly destroyed, and then rushed before the Assembly, demanding that it dissolve in favor of a National Convention. In the old riding school the king and queen, their children and the king’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, took refuge, staying crowded into a small room while the Assembly discussed the question of what should be done with them. After three days and nights of extreme discomfort they were removed to the tower of the ancient Temple.[5]
Paris was the very heart of the Terror. The rabble had learned its power and unscrupulous leaders permitted brutality and urged violence. A casual word was enough to cause anybody, man, woman or child, to be arrested as a suspect and thrown into prison. If he did not die there, forgotten, he came out only to be taken before a so-called tribunal which listened to false charges, practically allowed no denial or protest, declared its victims, in detachments, guilty of “conspiring against the Republic” and sent them straightway to the guillotine.
This instrument was invented by a physician, Dr. Guillotin, to provide a humane method of capital punishment. Its victims would feel no pain he said; only a refreshing coolness! It was set up in various parts of the city. In the Place Louis XV, then called the Place de la Révolution, the scaffold was erected near the statue of Liberty to which Mme. Roland addressed her famous exclamation: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” Around it gathered a daily crowd, some, the industriously knitting women described in “A Tale of Two Cities,” who came as to a vaudeville performance; some, fanatics, equally joyous over the downfall of hated aristocrats or of plebeian “enemies of the Republic,” others, monsters who rejoiced in blood, no matter whose. Pitiful, indeed, were those who came day after day to watch the tumbrils approaching from the east through the rue Royale from the rue Saint Honoré for some friend whose appearance here might solve the mystery of an unexplained disappearance. In a little over two years two thousand and eight hundred people lost their heads in this place; one thousand three hundred were slain in six weeks in the Square of the Throne; scores more suffered in the small square where the Sun King had held his Carrousel, and yet others in the Grève before the City Hall.
Even such slight semblance of the forms of justice as preceded the ride to the guillotine was denied to hundreds of people, many of them innocent of any fault. Almost a thousand of such victims were massacred in the early days of September following the incarceration of the royal family. Bands of authorized assassins held pretended court in the prisons and butchered the helpless prisoners. At the Abbaye, the old prison of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Près, the unfortunates were killed in the square before the church. It was in this prison that Mme. Roland wrote the “Memoirs” that give us one of the most vivid contemporary pictures that we have of these awful days. Here, too, Charlotte Corday spent the days between her murder of Marat and her passage to the guillotine.
If there is one more moving spot than another in the Paris of to-day it is the Carmelite Convent near the Palace of the Luxembourg. Behind the old monastic buildings, almost deserted now, lies one of those unexpected gardens which make Paris wonderful in surprises. Surrounding houses shut out the roar from the stone-paved street. In a central pool a lone duckling, surviving from Easter Day, swims briskly as playful goldfish nip the webs of his busy feet. It is all as peaceful and as remote from scenes of eitherpain or joy as achâteaugarden in the provinces. Yet here at the garden entrance of the building one hundred and twenty parish priests were hacked down in cold blood at the command of a coward who urged on his ruffians through a grated window. The stains are still red in a tiny room above where the swords of some of the assassins dripped blood against the plastered wall, and down in the crypt are piled the skulls of the slaughtered, here crushed by a heavy blow, there pierced by a bayonet thrust or a pistol bullet.
During this time when the mutual suspicion of the moderate Girondists on the one hand and of the radical group, Robespierre, Marat and Danton and their friends, on the other, brought about the arrest of no fewer than three hundred thousand suspects, all sorts of places were pressed into service as prisons, even buildings so unsuitable as the College of the Four Nations (the Institute) and the Palace of the Luxembourg. In the latter was detained Josephine, who was afterwards to marry Napoleon.
Five months after his capture the king was tried by the Convention, which had succeeded the Legislature and had formally declared the Republic, and twenty-four hours after his conviction “Citizen Capet” was beheaded on the same charge that had brought thousands of his subjects to the scaffold, that of having “conspired againstthe Republic.” He died bravely, his last words silenced by an intentional ruffle of drums.
The queen was removed from the Temple to the Conciergerie where she was kept in close confinement, never without guards in her room, until she went through a form of trial which sent her to execution in the October after Louis’ death. Her courage, so often tested, was superb, and her composure failed her only when a woman standing on the steps of Saint Roch to watch the tumbrils pass, spat upon her. Mme. Elizabeth was guillotined a few days later. The dauphin probably died in the Temple of ill-treatment, though tales persisted of an escape to the provinces and even to America. The little princess was the only member of the pathetic group to live through this time of horror. She married the duke of Angoulême.
Internal dissensions grew sharper. The extremists made use of the lawless Paris rabble against the more moderate element and a number of prominent Girondists were seized and plunged into the Conciergerie only to leave it to march singing to the guillotine. Marat’s death by the knife of Charlotte Corday could not stay the turmoil.
There were grades of radicalism even among the extremists. The most advanced struck at the very basis of social agreement. Religion they declared out of date and substituted the worship of Reason. The Goddess of Reason, a dancer, they installed with her satellites in the most sacred part of Notre Dame, Saint Eustache became the Temple of Agriculture, Saint Gervais the Temple of Youth, Saint Étienne-du-Mont the Temple of Filial Piety, Saint Sulpice the Temple of Victory. Other sacred buildings were put to more practical uses—the Convent of the Cordeliers became a medical school, the Val-de-Grâce a military hospital, Saint Séverin a storehouse for powder and saltpeter, Saint Julien, a storehouse for forage, the Sainte Chapelle a storehouse for flour.
The observation of Sunday as a day of rest was abolished, and men and animals died of fatigue. Many churches were closed, for “We want no other worship than Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” cried the radicals.
Robespierre of a sudden took a stand against such a display of irreligion, probably that he might have yet another accusation to bring against his enemies. To replace the Cult of Reason he established with grotesque rites a Worship of the Divine Being, acting himself as the high priest. The ceremony took place in the Tuileries Garden where there is still standing the stone semicircle built for the occasion. Robespierre was adorned with a blue velvet coat,a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top boots and he carried a symbolic bouquet of flowers and ears of wheat. After he had made a speech there were games and the burning of effigies of Atheism, Selfishness and Vice.
Destruction and change reigned. Churches were mutilated if the statue of some ancient saint wore a crown; the relics of Sainte Geneviève were burned on the Grève; the Academies were suppressed; no street might be named after a saint; no aristocrat might keep thedeof his name.
The very calendar was altered, the new year beginning on September 22, 1792, which was the first day of the Year I of the Republic.
The division of the year into twelve months was unaltered, but instead of weeks each month was divided into three decades of ten days each. This necessitated the addition at the end of the twelfth month of five extra days so that the new calendar might agree with that used by other peoples. These days were called by the absurd name,Sansculottides. The months were given names made appropriate by the season or the customary weather. They were:
October,Vendémiaire, “Vintage month”November,Brumaire, “Fog month”December,Frimaire, “Hoar-frost month”January,Nivose, “Snow month”February,Pluviose, “Rain month”March,Ventose, “Wind month”April,Germinal, “Sprout month”May,Floréal, “Flower month”June,Prairial, “Meadow month”July,Messidor, “Harvest month”August,Thermidor, “Heat month”September,Fructidor, “Fruit month.”
October,Vendémiaire, “Vintage month”November,Brumaire, “Fog month”December,Frimaire, “Hoar-frost month”January,Nivose, “Snow month”February,Pluviose, “Rain month”March,Ventose, “Wind month”April,Germinal, “Sprout month”May,Floréal, “Flower month”June,Prairial, “Meadow month”July,Messidor, “Harvest month”August,Thermidor, “Heat month”September,Fructidor, “Fruit month.”
October,Vendémiaire, “Vintage month”November,Brumaire, “Fog month”December,Frimaire, “Hoar-frost month”January,Nivose, “Snow month”February,Pluviose, “Rain month”March,Ventose, “Wind month”April,Germinal, “Sprout month”May,Floréal, “Flower month”June,Prairial, “Meadow month”July,Messidor, “Harvest month”August,Thermidor, “Heat month”September,Fructidor, “Fruit month.”
On the other hand some excellent constructive work was accomplished by the foundation of several schools and libraries, of several museums, among them the Louvre, and of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, established in the ancient priory of Saint Martin-des-Champs. Thanks to the good sense of a private individual many architectural relics of priceless value were saved from destruction and converted into a museum in what is now the Palais des Beaux Arts. After the Revolution most of them were restored whence they had come.
It has been computed that the Revolution cost France 1,002,351 lives. To make up these figures Robespierre was now killing two hundred people a week. At last, when he tried to establish his own position with some show of legality the end of the Terror was in sight. For the moment, however, it seemed as if there were only increased horror, for the Parisians took possession of
“THE CONVENTION.” MODEL OF GROUP BY SICARD, TEMPORARILY PLACED IN THE PANTHEON.
“THE CONVENTION.” MODEL OF GROUP BY SICARD, TEMPORARILY PLACED IN THE PANTHEON.
“THE CONVENTION.” MODEL OF GROUP BY SICARD, TEMPORARILY PLACED IN THE PANTHEON.
Robespierre and fought fiercely in his defence against the supporters of the Convention. It was the Grève, the theater of many wild scenes, which furnished the battleground. Robespierre and the mob were defeated and when Robespierre went to the guillotine, with his face, which has been described as looking like a “cat that had lapped vinegar,” bound up because of a wound, then the Terror died with him. Thousands of suspects were released at once from prison, and the city, except for the vicious element whose worst spirit he incarnated, breathed freely once again.
So strong was the reaction that the royalists hoped for a return of power, and even marched against the Tuileries where the Convention was sitting. They were hotly received, however, by the troops of the Convention, one of whose officers, Bonaparte, killed royalist pretenses now only to revive imperial aspirations later on.
NAPOLEON was a very young and unsophisticated Corsican when, in October, 1795, he commanded the troops that protected the Convention, in session in the Tuileries, against the Paris “sections” and the National Guard which had deserted to the royalists. He was still young, but a man rotten with ambition when, after Waterloo, he fled to Paris, and, in the Palace of the Élysée, signed his abdication of the throne of his adopted country. In the twenty years intervening he had raised himself to the highest position in the army, and he had won the confidence of an unsettled people so that they turned to him for governmental guidance, and made him consul for ten years, then consul for life and then emperor.
In the two decades he had done great harm, for, abroad, he had embroiled in war every country of Europe, and at home he had exhausted France of her young men and had left the country poorer in territory than when he was first made consul. Nevertheless, by the inevitable though sometimes inscrutable law of balance,the evil he had wrought was not without its compensating good. The countries of Europe learned as never before the meaning of the feeling of nationality and of the value of coöperation, while France—which, with her dependencies, Napoleon, at the height of his career, had spread over three-fifths of the map of western Europe—had gained self-confidence and stability and had crystallized the passionate chaos of the Revolutionary belief in the rights of man.
Aside from his military and political genius Napoleon’s character underwent a striking development as his horizon enlarged. He belonged to a good but unimportant family which dwelt in a small town. His early manner of living was of the simplest, yet he grew to a love of splendor and to a knowledge of its usefulness in impressing the populace and in buying their approbation.
Paris is connected with Napoleon throughout his whole career. He first appears when but a lad, brought to the Military School with several other boys by a priest. He lived in modest lodgings, at one time near the markets, and at another near the Place des Victoires.
In 1795 the Convention drew up a new constitution by which the government was vested in a Directory of five members. Even in its early days Napoleon wrote from Paris to his brother of the change following upon the turbulent, sordid period of the Revolution. “Luxury,pleasure and art are reviving here surprisingly,” he said. “Carriages and men of fashion are all active once more, and the prolonged eclipse of their gay career seems now like a bad dream.”
In the midst of this agreeable change to which even his natural taciturnity adapted itself he met and married Josephine, widow of the Marquis de Beauharnais who had been guillotined under the Terror. They both registered their ages incorrectly, Napoleon adding and Josephine subtracting so that the discrepancy between them, she being older, might appear less. This marriage introduced Napoleon to a class of people into whose circle he would not otherwise have penetrated on equal terms, and he learned from them many social lessons which he put to good use later. Yet Talma, the actor, when accused of having taught Napoleon how to walk and how to dress the part of emperor, denied that he could have given instruction to one whose imagination was all-sufficient to make him imperial in speech and bearing. No descendant of a royal line ever wore more superb robes than Napoleon the emperor on state occasions, and the elegance of the throne on which he sat was not less than that of his predecessors.
Bonaparte had risen slowly in the army because of his open criticism of his superiors, but by the time of his marriage he had become a general, and three days after his wedding he wasdespatched to Italy to meet the allied Italians and Austrians. Less than two years later the war was ended by the Peace of Campo Formio. In the two months preceding its negotiation Bonaparte had won eighteen battles, and had collected enough indemnity to pay the expenses of his own army, to send a considerable sum to the French army on the Rhine and a still greater amount to the government at home.
When it came to making gifts to Paris he had the splendid beneficence of the successful robber. Indemnities were paid in pictures as well as in money, bronzes and marbles filled his treasure trains, and the Louvre was enriched at Italy’s expense. Of the wealth of rare books, of ancient illuminated manuscripts, of priceless paintings and statuary pillaged from Italy’s libraries, monasteries, churches and galleries, even from the Vatican itself, no count has ever been made. With such treasures as Domenichino’s “Communion of Saint Jerome” and Raphael’s “Transfiguration” under its roof and with booty arriving from the northern armies as well as the southern, it is small wonder that the Louvre became the richest storehouse in the world. After Napoleon’s fall many of the works of art were returned whence they had come, but enough were left to permit the great palace to hold its reputation.
In the turmoil of the Revolution it had beenimpossible for any one person to please everybody. Napoleon was distrusted by a large body of the Parisians for the part that he had played in the support of the Convention in October, 1795, and these people Bonaparte set himself to conciliate. The Directory, also, was jealous of him. It meant that the victorious general must tread gently and not seem to have his head turned by the honors paid to his successes. There were festivals at the Louvre where his trophies looked down upon the brilliant scene, and at the Luxembourg, superbly decorated, upon the occasion of his formal presentation to the Directory of the treaty of Campo Formio. There were gala performances at the theaters at which the audience rose delightedly at Napoleon if he happened to be present, and the Institute elected him a life member. This honor gave him the excuse of wearing a civilian’s coat, and, although when in Italy he had dined in public like an ancient king, here he lived quietly on the street whose name was changed to “Victory Street,” by way of compliment, and showed himself but little in public, the more to pique the curiosity of the crowd which acclaimed Josephine as “Our Lady of Victories.”
If he had had any hope of being made a member of the government at this time, he soon saw that he was not yet popular enough to carry asudden change, and that, indeed, it behooved him, as he himself said, to “keep his glory warm.” To that end he set about arousing public sentiment against England. He concluded, however, that an invasion was not expedient at that time, and set sail for Egypt, taking with him the flower of the French army not only for their usefulness to himself, but that their lack might embarrass the government if need for them should arise in his absence.
A curious bit of testimony to the non-religious temper of the time is the bit of information that though Bonaparte included in his traveling library the Bible, the Koran and the Vedas, they were catalogued under the head of “Politics.”
In the next year and a half Napoleon met with both successes and reverses. He learned that, as he had foreseen, the Directory was involved in a war with Italy which threatened its financial credit and its stability, while at home its tyrannical rule was adding daily to its enemies. Bonaparte saw his chance and determined to leave Egypt, to put himself at the head of the Italian armies and then to go to Paris, fresh from the victories which he was sure to win, and to present himself to the people as their liberator. Leaving his army and setting sail with a few friends he touched at Corsica where he learned that France was even riper for his coming thanhe had supposed, and accordingly abandoned the Italian plan and went directly home. So hopefully did the people look to him for relief from their troubles that his whole journey from Lyons to Paris was one long ovation, while his reception by the Parisians was of an enthusiasm which betrayed much of their feeling toward the government and promised much to the man who would bring about a change.
Napoleon was only too glad to accommodate them. He tested the opinion of the chiefs of the Directory and skillfully put each man into a position where he felt forced to support the general. Josephine played her part in the political intrigue; Lucien Bonaparte, who had been elected President of the Five Hundred by way of compliment to his brother, played his. According to pre-arrangement the Council of the Ancients sitting in the Tuileries decreed that both houses should adjourn at once to Saint Cloud that they might be undisturbed by the unrest of Paris, and that Bonaparte be appointed to the command of the Guard of the Directory, of the National Guard, and of the garrison of Paris, that he might secure the safety of the Legislature.
Napoleon, who was waiting for the order at his house (not far north of the present Opéra) rode to the Tuileries and accepted his commission. The next day, at Saint Cloud, he utilized his popularity with the soldiers to force the dissolution of the Directory. The result was gained by trickery but it was nevertheless satisfactory to the people who went quietly about their affairs in Paris while the excitement was on at Saint Cloud and expressed themselves afterwards as amply pleased with thecoup d’état. A new constitution was adopted. The government was vested in three consuls, Napoleon, on December 15, 1799, being made First Consul for ten years. All three consuls were given apartments in the Tuileries but one of the others had the foresight never to occupy a building from which he might be ejected by the one who said to his secretary when he entered it, “Well, Bourienne, here we are at the Tuileries. Now we must stay here.”
Stay there he did, and the palace saw a more brilliant court than ever it had sheltered under royalty. Josephine was a woman of taste and tact, and the building which Marie Antoinette found bare even of necessary furnishings at the end of her enforced journey from Versailles, the wife of the First Consul arrayed in elegance and used as a social-political battle field in which she was as competent as was her husband in the open. “I win battles,” Napoleon said, “but Josephine wins hearts.” Dress became elegant once more and not only women but men were as richlyattired as if the Revolution with its plain democratic apparel had not intervened. Once more men wore knee breeches and silk stockings, and it was only the aristocrats whose property had been confiscated who advertised their poverty by wearing trousers, “citizen fashion.”
“Citizen,” as a title, fell into disuse, and once again “Monsieur” and “Madame” were used as terms of address. At first the consuls were addressed as “Citoyen premier consul,” “Citoyen second consul,” and “Citoyen troisième consul.” The clumsiness of these titles induced M. de Talleyrand to propose as abbreviations “Hic, Haec, Hoc.” “These would perfectly fit the three consuls,” he added; “Hicfor the masculine, Bonaparte;haecfor the feminine, Cambacérès, who was a lady’s man, andhoc, the neutral Lebrun, who was a figurehead.”
Napoleon’s acquaintance with other capitals spurred him to emulate their beauties and his knowledge of engineering helped him to bring them into being in his own. He opened no fewer than sixty new streets, often combining in the result civic elegance with the better sanitation whose desirability he had learned from his care of the health of his armies. He swept away masses of old houses on the Cité, he tore down the noisome prisons of the Châtelet and the tower of the Temple and laid out squares on their sites,he built sidewalks, condemned sewage to sewers instead of allowing it to flow in streams down the center of the streets, introduced gas for lighting, and completed the numbering of houses, an undertaking which had been hanging on for seventy-five years.
He added to the convenience of the Parisians by building new bridges, two commemorating the battles of Austerlitz and Jena, and one, the only foot-bridge across the river, called the “Arts” because it leads to the School of Fine Arts and the Institute which houses the Academy of Fine Arts. He made living easier by opening abattoirs and increasing the number of markets. He helped business enterprises by constructing quays along the Seine and by establishing the Halle aux Vins where wine may be stored in bond until required by the merchants. This market also relieved such congestion as had turned the old Roman Thermes into a storehouse for wine casks. New cemeteries on the outskirts, one of them the famous Père Lachaise, the names upon whose tombs read like a roster of the nineteenth century’s great, lessened the crowding of the graveyards and the resulting danger in the thickly settled parts of the city.
The First Consul’s methods of reducing to order the disorder of France grew more and more stifling, his basic principle more and more that ofcentralization. Independence of thought as it found expression in politics, he silenced as he silenced the newspapers and censored all literary output. He set in action the modern machinery of the University of France, and he supervised the planning of the entire elementary school system, so centralized, that it is possible to know in Paris to-day, as he did, “What every child of France is doing at this moment.”
Unhampered trade and commerce, improved methods of transportation, a definite financial system headed by the Bank of France, a uniform code of laws—all these contributions to stability were entered into in detail by the marvelous visualizing mind whose vision could pierce the walls of the Tuileries and foresee that battle would be waged at the spot called Marengo on the map lying on the table.
Early in 1800 war was renewed in Italy and Napoleon in person superintended the perilous crossing of the Alps. Yet although the news of the victory at Marengo was celebrated in Paris with cheers and bonfires, the successes of the French armies in Italy and in Germany did not secure full popularity to the First Consul in Paris, for on Christmas Eve, 1800, an attempt was made upon his life as he was driving through a narrow street near the Tuileries. The bomb which was meant to kill him fell too far behindhis carriage, however, and the only result of the plot was that he was provided with an excuse for ridding himself by exile and execution of some two hundred men whom he looked upon as his enemies.
In 1802 the Peace of Amiens put a temporary stop to the war, and Napoleon looked to France to reward him for winning glory and territory for the French flag. Already he was impatient of the ten-year limitation of his power, and it was his own suggestion that the people should be asked, “Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be made Consul for life?” This referendum resulted overwhelmingly in his favor. He was appointed Consul for life with the right not only to choose his successor but to nominate his colleagues. Then he encouraged French manufactures, he regulated taxes, he established art galleries in Paris and the departments, incidentally banishing the artists’ studios whose establishment had been allowed in the Louvre and in the side chapels of the church of the Sorbonne. He offered exemption from military service to students and other people to whom it would be a hardship, such as the only sons of widows, he assisted scientific men, among them our own Robert Fulton who, in 1803, built a steamboat which sank in the Seine. The nobility, whom Napoleon encouraged to return from exile, were allowed to use their titles,thereby establishing a precedent for the time when he himself would be creating dukes. For the moment he declared an aristocracy of merit by founding the Legion of Honor to which men are eligible by distinguished service to France in any field. The nation felt a soundness and a comfort that it had not known for many a long year.
Even the outside nations that had been at war with France thought it safe to visit it again and Paris was full of travelers who admired the new rue de Rivoli whose arcades run parallel with the Tuileries gardens. They found, too, that the old names of before the Revolution were being adopted once more—the Place de la Revolution became again the Place Louis XV—and the old etiquettes and elegances of royalty resumed. Josephine’s aristocratic connections helped to relate the old nobility with the new court and its “new” members whose fortunes had risen with their leader’s. Much of the glitter of the Tuileries came from the great number of soldiers always in evidence, for Napoleon’s suspicious nature caused him to have a large military escort wherever he went. His professional zeal prompted the careful review of the troops which he made every Sunday, and which was one of the “sights” for the tourists of the day who lookedwith an approach to awe upon the exact lines of grenadiers drilled to an astonishing accuracy.
As in the days of Francis I and Louis XIV the classical in art and language touched the pinnacle of popularity. With the government in the hands of “Consuls” it was appropriate that the legislative body should be called the “Tribunate.” The Tribunate held its sessions in the Palais Royal which had been called Equality Palace during the Revolution and was now christened Palace of the Tribunate.
It was through the Tribunate that Napoleon manipulated the offer of the title of Emperor which was made to him in 1804. It came as the crown of his ambition because it was the recognition of both his military skill and his political and administrative ability. He expressed his feeling when he refused the suggestion for an imperial seal of “a lion resting” and proposed instead “an eagle soaring.”
Success is a heady draught. At the beginning of his career Bonaparte used to compliment his generals by saying, “Youhave fought splendidly.” After a time he said, “Wehave fought splendidly.” Still later his comment was, “You must allow thatIhave won a splendid battle.”
With the pope Napoleon had made an arrangement, the Concordat, by which he restoredthe Roman Catholic as the national church of France. The papal power was not accepted as in other countries, but the treaty gave him a hold over the pope so that when the new emperor, to conciliate the royalists who were all Romanists, summoned him to assist at his coronation, Pius VII felt himself constrained to obey. He was lodged in the Pavilion of Flora, the western tip of Henry IV’s south wing of the Louvre, overlooking the Seine.
Napoleon and Josephine had been married only with the civil ceremony, as was the custom during the Revolution. On the day before the coronation Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle, married them with the religious ceremony in the chapel of the Tuileries. The celebration of the Concordat had been conducted magnificently in Notre Dame, but the coronation on December 2, 1804, was the most splendid of the many splendid scenes upon which the Gothic dignity of the cathedral had looked down. In preparation, many small buildings round about were pulled down and many streets suppressed or widened. Decorated with superb tapestries, resounding with the solemn voices of the choir, the ancient church held a scene brilliant with the uniforms of generals and the rich costumes of officers of state and of representatives from all France, aflutter with plumes and glittering with thebeauty and the jewels of the fairest women of the court. It was a scene unique in history, for never before had a man of the people commanded so superb a train every one of whom was alert with a personal interest in a ceremony which meant his own elevation as well as that of the aspirant to the power of that Charlemagne whose sword and insignia he had caused to be brought for the occasion.
The pope and his attendants advanced in dignified procession, acclaimed by the solemn hail of the intoning clergy. Before the high altar the Holy Father performed the service of consecration, anointing for his office the man who had been chosen to it by the will of the people. Then, as he was about to replace the gold laurel wreath of the victor with a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, Napoleon characteristically seized it and placed it on his own head.
With his own hands, too, he crowned Josephine. She was dressed like her husband in flowing robes of purple velvet heavily sown with the golden bee which Napoleon had copied from those found in the tomb of Childéric, father of Clovis, and which he had adopted as the imperial emblem because he wanted one older than the royalistfleur-de-lis. Followed by ladies of the court, her mantle borne by her sisters-in-law, who had been made princesses, Josephine knelt, weeping, before Napoleon, who placed her crownlightly on his own head and then laid it upon that of his empress. David’s famous picture hanging in the Louvre has saved this moment for posterity.
On the night before the coronation the city was plastered by royalist wits with placards which read: “Final performance of the French Revolution. For the benefit of a poor Corsican family.”
A fortnight later the emperor and empress were entertained by the city fathers at a banquet. The Hôtel de Ville had been gorgeously done over for the coronation, the throne room being hung with red velvet sown with the imperial bee. On the return of the distinguished guests to the Tuileries the streets were illuminated, and on the Cité a display of fireworks lighted up the ancient buildings.
The “poor Corsican family” did indeed profit by the successes of its prosperous member. After the coronation the imperial court far exceeded in elegance the court of the Consulate. Many of the ancient offices—Grand Almoner, Grand Marshal, Grand Chamberlain—were revived from the days of the Bourbons; many of them, indeed, were held by members of the old nobility; and it was one of Louis XVI’s former ambassadors to Russia who held the post of Master of Ceremonies, instructing, rehearsing