THE History of Paris, says Michelet, is the history of the French monarchy. The aim of the writer in the following pages has been to narrate the story of the capital city of France on the lines thus indicated, dwelling, however, in the earlier chapters rather more on its legendary aspect than perhaps an austere historical conscience would approve. But it is precisely a familiarity with these romantic stories, which at least are true in impression if not in fact, that the sojourner in Paris will find most useful, translated as they are in sculpture and in painting on the decoration of her architecture both modern and ancient, and implicit in the nomenclature of her ways. Within the limits of time and space allotted for the work no more than an imperfect outline of a vast subject has been possible. The writer has essayed to compose a story of, not a guide to, Paris. Those who desire the latter may be referred to the excellent manuals of Murray, BÆdeker and of Grant Allen—the last named being an admirable companion for the artistically-minded traveller. In controversial matter, such, for instance, as the position of the ancient Grand Pont, the writer has adopted the opinions of the most recent authorities.

The story of Paris presents a marked contrast with that of an Italian city-state whose rise, culmination and fall may be roundly traced. Paris is yet in the stage of lusty growth. Time after time, like a young giantess, she has burst her cincture of walls, cast off her outworn garments and renewed her armour and vesture. Hers are no grass-grown squares and deserted streets; no ruined splendours telling of pride abased and glory departed; no sad memories of waning cities once the mistresses of sea and land; none of the tears evoked by a great historic tragedy; none of the solemn pathos of decay and death. Paris has more than once tasted the bitterness of humiliation; Norseman, and Briton, Russian and German have bruised her fair body; the dire distress of civic strife has exhausted her strength, but she has always emerged from her trials with marvellous recuperation, more flourishing than before.

Since 1871, when the city, crushed under a two-fold calamity of foreign invasion and of internecine war, seemed doomed to bleed away to feeble insignificance, her prosperity has so increased that house rent has doubled and population risen from 1,825,274 in 1870 to 2,714,068 in 1901. The growth of Paris from the settlement of an obscure Gallic tribe to the most populous, the most cultured, the most artistic, the most delightful and seductive of continental cities has been prodigious, yet withal she has maintained her essential unity, her corporate sense and peculiar individuality. Paris, unlike London, has never expatiated to the effacement of her distinctive features and the loss of civic consciousness. The city has still a definite outline and circumference, and over her gates to-day one may read, EntrÉe de Paris. The Parisian is, and always has been, conscious of his citizenship, proud of his city, careful of her beauty, jealous of her reputation. The essentials of Parisian life remain unchanged since mediÆval times. Busy multitudes of alert, eager burgesses crowd her streets; ten thousand students stream from the provinces, from Europe, and even from the uttermost parts of the earth, to eat of the bread of knowledge at her University. The old collegiate life is gone, but the arts and sciences are freely taught as of old to all comers; and a lowly peasant lad may carry in his satchel a prime minister’s portfolio or the insignia of a president of the republic, even as his mediÆval prototype bore a bishop’s mitre or a cardinal’s hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a FranÇois Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, from the days of the Maillotins to those of the Commune, have throughout the crisis of her history ensanguined her streets with the blood of citizens.[1] Let us remember, however, when contrasting the modern history of Paris with that of London, that the questions which have stirred her citizens have been not party but dynastic ones, often complicated and embittered by social and religious principles ploughing deep in the human soul, for which men have cared enough to suffer, and to inflict, death.

Those writers who are pleased to trace the permanency of racial traits through the life of a people dwell with satisfaction on passages in ancient authors who describe the Gauls as quick to champion the cause of the oppressed, prone to war, elated by victory, impatient of defeat, easily amenable to the arts of peace, responsive to intellectual culture; terrible, indefatigable orators but bad listeners, so intolerant of their speakers that at tribal gatherings an official charged to maintain silence would march, sword in hand, towards an interrupter, and after a third warning cut off a portion of his dress. If the concurrent testimony of writers, ancient, mediÆval and modern, be of any worth, Gallic vanity is beyond dispute. Dante, expressing the prevailing belief of his age, exclaims, “Now, was there ever people so vain as the Sienese! Certes not the French by far.”[2] Of their imperturbable gaiety and the avidity for new things we have ample testimony, and the course of this story will demonstrate that France, and more especially Paris, has ever been, from the establishment of Christianity to the birth of the modern world at the Revolution, the parent or the fosterer of ideas, the creator of arts, the soldier of the ideal. She has always evinced a wondrous preventive apprehension of coming changes. The earliest of the western people beyond Rome to adopt Christianity, she had established a monastery near Tours a century and a half before St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, had organised his first community at Subiaco. In the Middle Ages Paris became the intellectual light of the Christian world. From the time of the centralisation of the monarchy at Paris she absorbed in large measure the vital forces of the nation, and all that was greatest in art, science and literature was drawn within her walls until, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she became the centre of learning, taste and culture in Europe.[3] During the first Empire and the Restoration, after the tempest was stilled and the great heritage of the Revolution taken possession of, an amazing outburst of scientific, artistic and literary activity made Paris the Ville LumiÈre of Europe.

Paris is still the city in Europe where the things of the mind and of taste have most place, where the wheels of life run most smoothly and pleasantly, where the graces and refinements and amenities of social existence, l’art des plaisirs fins, are most highly developed and most widely diffused. There is something in the crisp, luminous air of Paris that quickens the intelligence and stimulates the senses. Even the scent of the wood fires as one emerges from the railway station exhilarates the spirit. The poet Heine used to declare that the traveller could estimate his proximity to Paris by noting the increasing intelligence of the people, and that the very bayonets of the soldiers were more intelligent than those elsewhere. Life, even in its more sensuous and material phases, is less gross and coarse,[4] its pleasures more refined than in London. It is impossible to conceive the pit of a London theatre stirred to fury by a misplaced adjective in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the FranÇais or the OdÉon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of MoliÈre or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic pathos, and the subtle comedy of their great dramatists. To witness a premiÈre at the FranÇais is an intellectual feast. The brilliant house; the pit and stalls filled with black-coated critics; the quick apprehension of the points and happy phrases; the universal and excited discussion between the acts; the atmosphere of keen and alert intelligence pervading the whole assembly; the quaint survival of the time-honoured “overture”—three knocks on the boards—dating back to Roman times when the Prologus of the comedy stepped forth and craved the attention of the audience by three taps of his wand; the chief actor’s approach to the front of the stage after the play is ended to announce to Mesdames and Messieurs what in these days they have known for weeks before from the press, that “the piece we have had the honour of playing” is by such a one—all combine to make an indelible impression on the mind of the foreign spectator.

The Parisian is the most orderly and well-behaved of citizens. The custom of the queue is a spontaneous expression of his love of fairness and order. Even the applause in theatres is organised. A spectacle such as that witnessed at the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, the most solemn and impressive of modern times, is inconceivable in London. The whole population (except the Faubourg St. Germain and the clergy) from the poorest labourer to the heads of the State issued forth to file past the coffin of their darling poet, lifted up under the Arc de Triomphe, and by their multitudinous presence honoured his remains borne on a poor bare hearse to their last resting-place in the PanthÉon. Amid this vast crowd, mainly composed of labourers, mechanics and the petite bourgeoisie, assembled to do homage to the memory of the poet of democracy, scarcely an agent was seen; the people were their own police, and not a rough gesture, not a trace of disorder marred the sublime scene. The Parisian democracy is the most enlightened and the most advanced in Europe, and it is to Paris that the dearest hopes and deepest sympathies of generous spirits will ever go forth in

It now remains for the writer to acknowledge his indebtedness to the following among other authorities, which are here enumerated to obviate the necessity for the use of repeated footnotes, and to indicate to readers who may desire to pursue the study of the history of Paris in more detail, some works among the enormous mass of literature on the subject that will repay perusal.

For the general history of France the monumental Histoire de France now in course of publication, edited by E. Lavisse; Michelet’s Histoire de France, RÉcits de l’Histoire de France, and ProcÈs des Templiers; Victor Duruy, Histoire de France; Histoire de France racontÉe par les Contemporains, edited by B. Zeller; Carl Faulmann, Illustrirte Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst; the Chronicles of Gregory of Tours, Richer, Abbo, Joinville, Villani, Froissart, Antonio Morosini; De Comines; GÉographie Historique, by A. Guerard; Froude’s essay on the Templars; Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, by T. Douglas Murray; Paris sous Philip le Bel, edited by H. Geraud.

For the later Monarchy, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, the Histories of Carlyle, Mignet, Michelet and Louis Blanc; the Origines de la France Contemporaine, by Taine; the Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VIII.; the Memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon, of Madame Campan, Madame VigÉe-Lebrun, of Camille Desmoulins, Madame Roland, Paul Louis Courier; the Journal de Perlet; Histoire de la SocietÉ FranÇaise pendant la Revolution, by J. de Goncourt; Goethe’s Die Campagne in Frankreich, 1792; LÉgendes et Archives de la Bastille, by F. Funck Brentano; Life of Napoleon I., by J. Holland Rose; L’Europe et la Revolution FranÇaise by Albert Sorel; Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution, by C. D. Hazen. For the particular history of Paris, the exhaustive and comprehensive Histoire de la Ville de Paris, by the learned Benedictine priests, Michel FÉlibien and Guy Alexis Lobineau; the so-called Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, edited by L. Lalanne; Paris Pendant la Domination Anglaise, by A. Longnon; the more modern Paris À Travers les Ages, by M. F. Hoffbauer, E. Fournier and others; the Topographie Historique du Vieux Paris, by A. Berty and H. Legrand. Howell’s Familiar Letters, Coryat’s Crudities, and Evelyn’s Diary, contain useful matter. For the chapters on Historical Paris, E. Fournier’s Promenade Historique dans Paris, Chronique des Rues de Paris, Enigmes des Rues des Paris; the Marquis de Rochegude’s Guide Pratique À Travers le Vieux Paris, and the excellent Nouvel ItinÉraire Guide Artistique et ArchÉologique de Paris, by C. Normand, now appearing in fascicules published by the SociÉtÉ des Amis des Monuments Parisiens, have been largely drawn upon and supplemented by affectionate memories of an acquaintance with the city dating back for more than thirty years, and by notes of pilgrimages, under the guidance of a member of the Positivist Society of Paris, made in 1891 through revolutionary Paris and Versailles.

For personal help and information the writer desires to express his obligations to Monsieur Lafenestre, Director of the Louvre: Monsieur L. BÉnÉdite, Director of the Luxembourg; Monsieur G. Redon, architect of the Louvre and the Tuileries; Professor A. Legros; and for help in proof-reading to Mr James Britten.