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PARIS

PARIS. In the early modern period Paris became the city it has been for most of its modern history: the true capital of France, one of the great cities in the world, and a cosmopolitan center of European cultural and intellectual life. Before the sixteenth century, its profile was less grand. Besides its status as a legal and ecclesiastical center, dense with courts and churches, its main claim to renown was the Sorbonne, perhaps the leading university in all of Europe, which attracted students and scholars from far and wide. Though the political capital of the realm, it was not the primary residence of French kings, who mostly remained itinerant, preferring Fontainebleau or the royal castles of the Loire valley to Paris. This would change in the course of the sixteenth century. After 1528, Francis I (ruled 1515–1547) made Paris his principal place of residence. When Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) triumphantly entered Paris in 1598 he proclaimed: "Only now am I king of France." His reign would initiate a series of changes that set Paris on its modern course.

GOVERNANCE

Unlike other French cities, Paris was never granted a charter of liberties that guaranteed a measure of independence from the crown. Its very geography was dominated by seigneurial powers: primarily the king, the archbishop of Paris, and the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, each of which had the right to exercise fiscal and legal control over parts of the city. Paris did have its own governing institutions, but even here there was division, competition, and overlapping jurisdictions. The main site of municipal government was the Hôtel de Ville, where the prévôt des marchands, along with four échevins (aldermen), sixteen quarteniers (district officers), and twenty-four city councillors exercised their power. The Hôtel de Ville regulated river traffic, collected rents from market stalls, and received various fees and duties from commercial transactions. It was rivaled by the Châtelet, which had jurisdiction over the city's courts and prisons. Although the Parlement of Paris had authority over a wide expanse of northern and central France, it paid particular attention to the city's affairs, frequently challenging the power of both the Hôtel de Ville and the Châtelet. Finally, a royal appointee, the prévôt of Paris, rendered justice in the king's name.

PARIS AND THE KING

Francis I's decision to reside in Paris symbolized the monarchy's renewed commitment to the capital, manifested by a new royal chateau in the Bois de Boulogne and the refurbishing of the Louvre. But it was not until after the Wars of Religion that the imprint of the royal hand began to be seen throughout in the city. Henry IV extended the Louvre, constructed the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), and completed the Pont-Neuf, the major bridge across the Seine. His widow, Marie de Médicis, erected her own palace, the Luxembourg. She was emulated by Cardinal Richelieu, whose Palais Cardinal became the center of a new area of urban development. The reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) witnessed a veritable boom in public squares. Pioneered under the first Bourbon, they became emblematic of the monarchy's hold on the city, with their royal statues standing in the squares' center. Louis's personal dislike of Paris is legendary, but his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had visions of the capital as a second Rome. He demolished the old walls, graced the periphery with tree-lined boulevards, and installed new public fountains and street lanterns throughout the city.

Colbert's attempts at urban improvement were matched by royal intrusion into the city's governance. In 1666 he created the conseil de police and the following year the office of lieutenant de police, which exercised a broad range of policing activities. Thus not only crime in its myriad forms, but also much of the city's daily life came under royal super-vision and control, largely through the forty commissaires de police and a corps of inspectors who were responsible for patrolling Paris's neighborhoods. The prévôt des marchands, once elected from the mercantile elite, now tended to be chosen by the king from among his officials. The city's neighborhood officials were stripped of their former functions. In short, even though Louis XIV rarely set foot in his capital, monarchical authority prevailed over its municipal institutions as never before.

URBAN EXPANSION AND DEVELOPMENT

But other aspects of the city were in fact escaping royal control. Paris was growing and expanding, in part because of the enlarged royal administration, which fostered a steady increase in the number of officials, lawyers, judges, and aristocrats living in the city. Its population went from 250,000 in the mid-sixteenth century to nearly 700,000 on the eve of the Revolution. Much of that growth was in the burgeoning population of artisans and tradesmen who served the wealthy residents, catering to the varied tastes and expanding needs of urban consumers. In the early part of the seventeenth century, as part of the so-called Catholic Renaissance, the number of convents increased dramatically. The whole seventeenth century witnessed a building boom of aristocratic townhouses, with once marginal areas of the city, such as the Marais, transformed into choice neighborhoods for the elite. The poor too increased in number, attracted to the city by its charitable institutions. Urban growth began to run up against the obstacles of the city's traditional limits, something that the crown was intent on preserving. In 1638, an attempt was made to fix the city's boundaries by placing thirty-eight markers designating the limits of urban expansion, but to no avail. In 1670 Paris's city walls were finally torn down, a concession that its suburbs, especially those of Saint-Antoine, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Martin, were already part of the urban landscape.

In the eighteenth century Paris was second only to London in size among European cities. It had a reputation as a well-policed city, with its commissaires and police spies prowling its neighborhoods, backed up by the royal guard. It was also a city known for its amenities and improvements. In the late seventeenth century gas lanterns were installed throughout the city. Some of the clutter and crowding, so characteristic of early modern cities, was steadily eliminated in the course of the eighteenth century. In 1756 shops and stalls were removed from the Pont-Neuf. After Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot's reforms in the 1770s, the dead were no longer interred within the city limits; the Cimetière des Innocents, a gathering spot for all sorts of disreputable people, was closed in 1780, as was the Cour des Miracles, a notorious beggars' haunt. The Place Louis XV, soon to be known as the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde), was constructed, offering Parisians a large expanse of open cityscape for strolling and congregating. The rue Royale, an extended boulevard, cut across a large swath of the city, connecting the newly constructed church of the Madeleine with the Place Louis XV. Although Baron Georges Eugène Haussman's great urban thoroughfares would only appear in the late nineteenth century, eighteenth-century Paris was already graced with several boulevards. The crown was still concerned with unauthorized urban growth, however. A series of edicts in the eighteenth century attempted to restrain the growth of Paris within fixed limits. And in 1780, the Farmers-General had a ten-foot wall constructed around the city to ensure the proper collection of taxes.

CAPITAL OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The royal court was at Versailles, but the city was the true center of the realm's cultural and intellectual life, especially after Louis XIV's death in 1715. It was the capital of print, with over 100,000 titles produced by its printing presses in the course of the century. The city's populace was relatively literate: in the latter part of the century, 90 per cent of the men and 80 per cent of the women signed their wills. Paris was Europe's prime theater venue, combining such establishment institutions as the Comédie Française and the Opéra with comic opera and a vibrant boulevard theater. It was a center of Freemasonry, with over one hundred lodges. A salon culture flourished among the city's cultivated elite in which ladies of fashion hosted gatherings that fostered the new sensibility of the Enlightenment. Art galleries, libraries, coffeehouses, and other meeting places abounded, many novel to the eighteenth century, which together served to create a kind of Parisian public. At the top of the cultural hierarchy were the royal academies: the Académie Française, the Académie des Sciences, and the Société Royale de Médecine, which by the second half of the century had largely been conquered by philosophes of the Enlightenment. Indeed, enlightened men of letters such as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were commanding figures on the Parisian public stage, rivaling royalty in renown and importance. Eighteenth-century Paris was rich in by-ways for the cultivation and circulation of new intellectual and cultural trends, making it not only the capital of the Enlightenment, but the creative center of European culture for the next century.

See also Academies, Learned; Cities and Urban Life; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; France; Francis I (France); Henry IV (France); Louis XIV (France); Salons; Universities; Versailles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

L'Estoile, Pierre. The Paris of Henry de Navarre, as seen by Pierre de l'Estoile. Translated and edited by Nancy Lyman Roelker. Cambridge, Mass., 1958. Translation of Mémoires-journaux. (1574–1611).

Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Panorama of Paris: Selections from Tableau de Paris. Based on the translation by Helen Simpson. Edited by Jeremy D. Popkin. University Park, Pa., 1999. Translation of Tableau de Paris (1782–1788).

Secondary Sources

Diefendorf, Barbara B. Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth Century: The Politics of Patrimony. Princeton, 1983.

Duby, Georges, ed. Histoire de la France urbaine. Vol. 3, La ville classique de la renaissance aux révolutions, edited by Roger Chartier. Paris, 1980–1985.

Isherwood, Robert M. Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford and New York, 1986.

Kaplow, Jeffry. The Names of Kings: The Parisian Laboring Poor in the Eighteenth Century. New York, 1972.

Ranum, Orest. Paris in the Age of Absolutism. Rev. ed. University Park, Pa., 2002.

Roche, Daniel. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass., 1998. See Chapter 20.

——. The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Translated by Marie Evans and Gwynne Lewis. Berkeley, 1987. Translation of Peuple de Paris (1981).

ROBERT A. SCHNEIDER