1 Author’s italics.
2 On account of their Frankish origins, Aldous Huxley once claimed the modern French to be “Germans that have gone partially Latin.”
3 It is also an interesting mathematical fact, perhaps illustrative of just how dark the preceding centuries had been, that Capet, founder of the first true French dynasty, stands chronologically almost exactly midway between Julius Caesar and de Gaulle.
4 Perhaps also indicative of the relative lack of stress of the epoch is the longevity of men like Suger himself, and three women of such different backgrounds as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (eighty-two), Hildegard of Bingen (eighty-one) and Héloïse (sixty-three) (d. 1165), all far in excess of the average life-span of the Middle Ages as a whole.
5 Originally access from the parvis of Notre-Dame was via a flight of thirteen steps, but, with the accumulated detritus of the ensuing ages, the level of the whole Île de la Cité has been raised up to four metres from the earliest days of Lutetia so that you now enter on the same level. Fascinating to visit is the recently created museum beneath the actual parvis, which shows the ancient foundations of the Île back to Roman days.
6 The History of My Calamities, as he described it (written in Latin), remains one of the great works of literature—as do the Letters of Abelard and Heloise (tr. B. Radice, 1974).
7 Saint Bernard, like a Soviet inquisitor of the 1930s, led the prosecution, accusing Abelard of heading an international conspiracy, bent on destroying ecclesiastical authority. It has a modern ring about it.
8 It has to be remembered that all learning in France was still expressed in Latin.
9 The Latin word Universitas originally meant a corporation of any kind; it was not until later in the Middle Ages that it came to denote a place of higher learning.
10 Their intimacy had evidently extended, in the innocent way of the Middle Ages, to once sharing a bed in Paris.
11 To be an accomplished tournament knight provided a source of income on a par with that of the professional football or soccer star of the twentieth century.
12 Modern French historians are sceptical that an absolute monarch of the Middle Ages would have made such a speech with its appeal to populist emotions.
13 He was not alone among Jew-persecuting Christian monarchs of the time; Edward I—also in financial straits—is recorded as having hanged 200 Jews in 1278, accusing them of habitual “coin-clipping,” subjected them to ransom ten years later, and finally expelled them from both England and Aquitaine.
14 The sophism was that the unfortunate donkey lacked any determining motive to direct him to one or the other.
15 Something like one in four of the population, and this may well have been an underestimate.
16 He was reported to have received an English emissary whilst lying naked on a bed and caressing two Barbary goats.
17 The lineage now had to go obliquely to the Valois-Angoulême branch, with a common ancestry back to Saint Louis, as did the Bourbon line which was also to produce Henri IV. François was both cousin once removed and—via his Queen, Claude— son-in-law to Louis.
18 Though it had already largely become, in the words of one famous Frenchman, Voltaire, neither Holy, nor Roman—nor an Empire.
19 To cover her living costs there, her lover imposed a tax of 2 livres on every church bell, about which Rabelais commented: “The King has hung all the bells of the kingdom around the neck of his mare.”
20 Henri’s sister to the Duke of Savoy and his daughter to Philip II of Spain.
21 The Huguenots originated from Geneva, the name supposedly derived from the opprobrious German Eidgenossen, or “fellow oath-taker.”
22 As they passed by the hangings at Amboise, a French nobleman (Jean d’Aubigny) remarked to his eight-year-old son, prophetically: “They have beheaded France, those hangmen . . . after mine, your head must not be spared in avenging those honourable heads.”
23 In fact, Henri III had had another option which (foolishly, as things turned out) he let slip. In the sixteenth century the Poles, progressively democratic for those days, elected their kings. Henri let his name go forward but couldn’t quite make up his mind. The Polish offer was withdrawn; he returned to Paris, to be murdered a short while later. He would have done better to settle for Poland!
24 Courting dangerous unpopularity, Nostradamus also told Catherine that her sons would not perpetuate the Valois line. He prophesied, too, the death of Henri IV.
25 The title was annulled on his death, Henri coming to the throne; otherwise, in the nineteenth century, the last Bourbon king would have been Charles XI.
26 “Pends-toi, brave Crillon, nous avons combattu à Arques, et tu n’y étais pas là!” (Voltaire’s version of Henri IV’s somewhat lengthier original). This was unfair; Crillon was one of the outstanding French military leaders of the sixteenth century; after the next battle—at Ivry—Henri IV dubbed him “le brave des braves.” The famous hotel in Paris was named after him.
27 By comparison, in 1576, as a reprisal for the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre, the Protestants had mounted 25,000 to threaten Paris with siege; it never took place. In 1870, the Prussians were to invest Paris with an initial force of approximately 150,000.
28 It was said of this formidable Pope that, during his first year in office, more heads were displayed on spikes along the Ponte Sant’Angelo than there were melons for sale in the markets of Rome. Perhaps fortunately for France, Sixtus died while the siege was under way.
29 To maintain his claim to the throne of France, Philip II is estimated to have spent 30 million ducats, or more than 600 million francs.
30 Popularly believed to have been said to his current mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, at Saint-Denis, 1 March 1593, though some historians question its authenticity, preferring to ascribe it to an invention of his enemies who were endeavouring to cast doubts on the sincerity of his conversion.
31 Sporadic fighting in the provinces was to continue over the next four years until Brittany, almost totally pro-League, finally gave in.
32 An ill-starred building, running at right angles to the river, west of the earlier Louvre buildings and Napoleon’s later Arc du Carrousel, it saw the downfall of Louis XVI, Napoleon I, Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III before it was finally burned down by the Communards in 1871 and was removed altogether by the Third Republic; almost certainly a benefit, architecturally, in that its removal displays the Louvre in all its true, uncluttered grandeur.
33 The name was given it under the First Empire, as a reward from a competition organised by Lucien Bonaparte, as to which département could raise the greatest amount of tax.
34 Over the centuries it fell on hard times, serving (before the First World War) as a coal depot, a jam factory and an enterprise dealing in rabbit skins. Damaged in the fighting of 1944, it was rescued by André Malraux and—after restoration work that took longer than the original construction—today houses a small library. Sadly, little or nothing of the original interior remains, save the courtyard and a magnificent open chimney.
35 A post created in the thirteenth century.
36 In Dumas’ story, Buckingham is the favourite of Queen Anne, on whom she bestows controversial diamonds; Richelieu endeavours to expose her to the King, but d’Artagnan and Co. rescue the diamonds in the nick of time. The dashing Buckingham’s assassination is set up by the villainess of the novel, the mysterious “Milady,” in the pay of Richelieu.
37 Which, contemplating Byron’s famous verse from Don Juan, “What men call gallantry, and the Gods adultery” might well be translated “turned to adultery instead of tragedy.”
38 Originally organisations without a home, the Académies had to wait for Mazarin to build the superb Institut de France complex. With its glistening cupola, its two arms seem to reach out to embrace the very heart of Paris from its eminence on the Left Bank of the Seine.
39 A fate not dissimilar to the rebel generals of Algiers who revolted against de Gaulle, in the 1960s.
40 For her services, Catherine was rewarded with the sumptuous Hôtel de Beauvais, which still graces the Marais, on Rue François Miron.
41 In earlier ages, girls who had lost their virtue would occasionally be taken jeeringly to be “married” at the church of Sainte-Marine—the “wedding ring” made of straw.
42 Dispiriting, by parallel, is that in post–Cold War Britain the first decade of real security in the twentieth century seems to have produced little more by way of artistic creativity than a very grubby bed, displayed in the Tate Modern with all the fanfares of a Mona Lisa!
43 It appears, however, that Molière had been suffering from tuberculosis long before this final appearance on the stage, and that his friends had begged him to stay away.
44 She lived to be ninety-three (1608–1701); Ninon de Lenclos to be eighty-five—yet another testimony to the vigour of some Parisiennes.
45 “Oh! la belle statue! Oh! le beau piédestal! Les Vertus sont à pied, le Vice est à cheval ” proclaimed one, pinned on the neck of the horse.
46 Later “Philippe-Égalité,” the turncoat regicide, cousin of the King who himself ended on the guillotine.
47 Younger brother of Louis XVI, who later became the reactionary Charles X, last of the Bourbons.
48 Her brother, the reformist, gentle Emperor Leopold, had recently died. More specifically, his successor declared war on France, not as Emperor, but as King of Hungary and Bohemia.
49 Laborie’s eight-volume study, Paris sous Napoléon, was published between 1900 and 1913, and incomplete by the beginning of the First World War. Written a century after the events it describes, it reads with remarkable freshness and little prejudice. A mine of information for scholars of the period, in England it appears to have been little read; the set I borrowed out of London Library appears to have lain there dormant for the best part of a century, its pages still uncut. Finding it, I felt a little like the Prince in La Belle au Bois Dormant.
50 So it remains today, though (as of 2002) the roses seem neglected, and some disrepair hangs over Malmaison. Its shutters removed (why?), the frontage looks bleak, reflecting the general air of sadness.
51 The faithful dog in fact somehow survived, to become adopted by King Gustavus IV of Sweden; on its collar read the inscription “I belong to the unhappy Duc d’Enghien.”
52 Depressed in his later years after the fall of the Empire, he drowned himself in 1835.
53 It is worth noting that, before 1808, few British soldiers had fought on the European continent. (At Waterloo, only 35,000 of Wellington’s troops would be English, the other 43,000 German and Dutch.) Thus it could be said that Napoleon himself gave Wellington the opportunity to open a vital “Second Front” in Portugal and Spain.
54 I am expressing a highly personal prejudice.
55 Though later in his life Hugo was to become a passionate opponent of his nephew, Napoleon III.
56 Napoleon II, the tragic one-and-only son of Bonaparte and Marie-Louise, died of TB, aged only twenty-two, in Vienna, a virtual prisoner of his Austrian grandfather.
57 “C’est une frénésie, une contagion, Nul n’en est à l’abri, dans nulle région.”
58 Who, in fact, would be Kaiser Wilhelm II, leading a united Germany into the First World War against France.
59 Edmond was now writing alone, his beloved brother, Jules, having died painfully— of syphilis—earlier in the summer.
60 Quinet, a distinguished historian, and idealistic patriot, was also rated as an expert on Germany.
61 There remains some controversy as to whether he or Thomas Edison could properly claim to be the father of the moving picture. Edison’s “Kinetograph,” patented in 1894, was an immobile studio affair weighing 1000 lb; Lumière’s cinématographe, hand-cranked and weighing less than 20 lb, could reasonably claim to be the first commercially viable projector.
62 A nice, typically Parisian, anecdote concerns the lifts under the German occupation of 1940. When the Wehrmacht took possession of the tower, a piece of foreign machinery essential to running the lifts was found missing, and could not be replaced; so the Germans had to walk up all through the war; then—with the Liberation in 1944—the missing piece was mysteriously rediscovered.
63 Under which 3,120,000 Germans were transported to the front in 11,000 trains.
64 On the other side, the Germans also suffered (though, because of the greater imaginativeness of the French writers, perhaps not quite to the same extent); typical of German bourrage de crâne were the reports at the beginning of the war that French shells did not explode and their bullets tended to go clean through their victims without causing excessive damage.
65 Popularly, it was misnamed “Big Bertha,” like the weapons that smashed the forts at Liège and Verdun; but those in fact were short-range mortars, while the “Paris Gun” was an extremely long (112-feet) barrelled rifle. Germans called it either the Pariser Gun or Langer Max.
66 On my first trip abroad as a child before the war, I still remember being struck by the skinny-legged, ricket-ridden and emaciated children by the railway track as the train approached the Gare du Nord.
67 As A. J. P. Taylor remarked of the Barthou declaration of 17 April 1934, “the French had fired the starting pistol for the arms race. Characteristically they then failed to run it.” Three decades later the Anglo-Saxons were to find parallels in de Gaulle’s withdrawal from NATO, when he declared that henceforth France felt strong enough to dispense with its benefits.
68 Literally, “the cut of a sickle.”
69 At the war’s end, each of the tiny number of survivors was given the freedom of the Soviet Union and his own private Yak plane; one of the few recorded instances of Soviet recognition of Allied assistance in the Second World War.
70 In the rafles of July 1942, 12,884 foreign Jews were rounded up, of whom three-quarters were women and children.
71 An enthusiastic and key participant was René Bousquet, secrétaire général of the police, who somehow managed to emerge untainted from the post-war épurations until finally his past caught up with him in the 1990s.
72 On recent English language release as The Sorrow and the Pity. For a long time it was banned in France.
73 Still to this day there are questions as to whether Moulin was betrayed by his fellow résistants, or by the Communists; and indeed whether he himself may have been turned.
74 It was subsequently reckoned that two crucial weeks on the advance to the Rhine were lost by the Allies through the diversion to liberate Paris.
75 “Putain,” meaning “whore.”
76 Mysteriously, by the end of the century attitudes would be roughly reversed.
77 Equivalent, roughly, to the “silent majority.”
78 The nickname came perhaps because metropolitan Frenchmen scornfully considered their feet to have been burned black by too much sun.
79 Who became a friend of the author, on his release from prison, in the 1970s.
80 Would de Gaulle, one wonders, have been so assiduous in wooing Adenauer had he been able to foresee German reunification, three decades later?
81 But it would be 3.4 million by end of 1993.
82 By a most curious coincidence, Captain de Gaulle had also been wounded and taken prisoner at Verdun—in 1916, the year Mitterrand was born.
83 In December 1981, Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson generated bitter protests when he stated that the arrest of Solidarity activists in Poland was a purely internal affair.
84 US reckoning, as of the 1980s, was that—by suddenly cutting it off—the Kremlin could hold the whole of Europe in fee. The pipeline is now a major asset for Europe’s energy-hungry markets.
85 In noting the contrast in protests against nuclear weaponry inside France compared with, for instance, Britain and West Germany in the early 1980s, it has been suggested that
86 On a point of some relevance to the de Gaulle-Adenauer and Mitterrand-Kohl entente of the past half-century, a recent survey showed that at many French secondary schools German, not English, was chosen as a second language.