From a town on the Seine to the City of Light

Seven Ages of Paris

Alistair Horne

Alfred A. Knopf: 436 pp., $35

*

That Paris would grow into the capital of a kingdom stretching from the Pyrenees to the Rhine was not a given. But the tiny Roman colony established on a fluvial island in a bend of the Seine did, from the start, offer several key assets: a mild climate, a navigable waterway propitious to the development of major commerce, two river arms providing natural protection. The town prospered, soon extending concentrically on either bank. The island, later known as the Ile de la Cite, remained at its heart; it contained the medieval quarter, and on it stand the cathedral of Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle and, since more recent time, the Palais de Justice and other administrative buildings.

As Alistair Horne shows in his pleasurable and instructive “Seven Ages of Paris,” every major period has left its imprint. Remnants of the medieval ramparts built by Philippe Auguste can still be seen today. The great architectural landmarks, inseparable from the high points in French history, are familiar to every tourist: the Louvre, which Francois I transformed into an elegant palace; Henry IV’s splendid Pont-Neuf and Place Royale, now known as the Place des Vosges; Louis XIII’s creation of a whole new elegant residential island, the Ile Saint-Louis; Louis XIV’s Invalides and the stately hotels particuliers in the Marais district (one of them now housing the Musee Carnavalet); Napoleon’s Rue de Rivoli and his triumphal arches; the broad new tree-lined avenues and boulevards, as well as the parks and symmetrical apartment buildings with their wrought-iron balconies, created by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, which gave Paris its modern face; the Belle Epoque’s art nouveau entrances to the Metro’s stations; and the Palais de Chaillot facing the Eiffel Tower, both of them built for World Expositions glorifying the achievements of the Third Republic.

A city of lasting monuments, Paris is also a city of revolutions, of upheavals and demolitions, of turmoil and political storms. It has been the scene of catastrophes and humiliating defeats. But resilience seems to be in its character. Some of its problems, even until quite recently, have been related to squalid conditions. When Vautrin, Balzac’s outlaw-diagnostician of 19th century Parisian corruption, describes Paris as a mud hole, a bourbier, he is not merely speaking metaphorically. Paris over the ages, as Horne repeatedly reminds us, has been afflicted with problems of sanitation, by slums, slime, inadequate sewers, decaying garbage, lack of drains, occasional floods and lethal epidemics, such as plague and cholera. Rulers tried, not always successfully, to combat pollution and street violence. Louis XIV was eager to solve the water problem. Napoleon was as concerned with clean water supply as he was with violence in the crowded quarters. To be sure, Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III’s urban planner, cleared the worst slums, destroying some historic sites in the process -- only to displace the growing proletariat toward new slums and eventual bidonvilles at the periphery of the capital.

Horne’s previous work prepared him well for this book on the history of Paris. His books on the Napoleonic period after the victory of Austerlitz (1805), the Prussian siege of Paris and the incendiary days of the Commune (1870-71), the terrible battle of Verdun (1916) in World War I and the savage war of Algeria (1954-62), which Charles de Gaulle brought to a welcome though inglorious end, all qualify him to tell a story that links the most dramatic moments of French history to a city he obviously loves. The title of one of his books, “The French Army and Politics (1870-1970),” is only one indication of his range. He seems to be especially at home in the social and political history of post-Revolutionary France, which explains also, in part, why he moves more swiftly over previous periods.

For “Seven Ages of Paris” evidently covers much more than the last 200 years. After a briskly paced introduction going back to Caesar’s time, Horne’s story begins in the 12th century, each “age” centered on key figures, such as Philippe Auguste, Saint-Louis, Henry IV, the brilliant ministers Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Georges Clemenceau, De Gaulle -- surveying along the way the Capetians’ struggle against the Plantagenets, the persecution of the Jews, the advent of the Bourbon dynasty, the Sun King’s abandonment of Paris in favor of Versailles, the collapse of the ancien regime and reign of the guillotine, the alternating euphoria and anxiety of the Napoleonic era, the deceptive glitter of the Second Empire, the frivolous splendors of the Belle Epoque marred by scandals and the divisive Dreyfus case, the carnage of the Great War, the ideological tensions at the time of the Front Populaire, the dark years of the Nazi occupation and the majestic salvational figure of De Gaulle.

Always assessing personalities and events in terms of their effect on the city of Paris, Horne is at the same time knowledgeable and colorful. Whether describing cruel executions, macabre scenes of the Black Death or the vendetta-like purges after the Liberation, he projects a very personal voice that communicates passion as well as compassion. He has his villains (Philippe le Bel, Louis XV) as well as his heroes, among whom the most prominent is surely Henry IV, who found Paris in terrible condition. That king’s passion for building and rebuilding, and preference for a new style exemplified by the splendid Place Dauphine with its red brick and festoons of stone work, as well as his dedication to order and prosperity, make him stand out, according to Horne, as a wise urban regulator and a supremely tasteful architect of Paris.

The book is written with gusto and love: an Englishman’s love of Paris and of France, tempered by irony, humor and occasionally some impatience, though without any trace of condescension. Horne has a keen journalist’s eye for realistic details. He provides careful vignettes but also proceeds by large brushstrokes, moving ahead by means of relatively short sections with fetching subtitles. He is not reluctant to give his own opinions of the Bastille Opera House, the Tour Montparnasse and the Church of St. Sulpice. And he displays engaging directness and honesty, as when -- talking about the collaborators, the denunciation and deportation of the Jews and the overly zealous French police -- he asks himself whether the English would have behaved any better had they experienced Nazi occupation.

Now and then, Horne indulges in the anecdotal. He does not spare his reader the gory details of tortures and executions. Aphorisms, bons mots, historical pronouncements and colorful quotes are frequently given without making totally clear where, when and under what circumstances they were uttered or recorded. Considering the magnitude of the documentation, Horne’s sources are at times, of necessity, secondhand. The system of references he adopted is often frustrating. If one is lucky to find a given quote identified, it is only by the last name of an author in a chapter-by-chapter list at the end of the book; one then has to look up another list, also given chapter by chapter, which provides the full name, followed by the title. In many cases, however, there is no identification at all. Some readers may like to know, for instance, where exactly one can find Henry IV’s statement “I rule with my arse in the saddle,” Marshall Petain’s complaint about the “sinister action” of the milice, Victor Hugo’s observation that the Middle Ages wrote things down “in stone” (the reference to Andre Maurois is simply not good enough) or Andre Malraux’s comment about television and the Devil.

When it comes to his own literary judgments, Horne can be a little hasty. Surely, Marivaux’s theater reflects more than the “essential frivolity” of his age, and Greek classical tragedy can hardly be described as conveying “the theme of impotence.” But such statements only momentarily interrupt the pleasure provided by this ambitious and skillful narrative that covers nine centuries of the history of Paris with considerable brio and fervor.