IN Philip Augustus (1180-1223) was reincarnated Charlemagne’s wide-seeing spirit, and now it appeared at a time when it was possible to turn vision into fact. Charlemagne saw the value of a united nation under a centralized power but conditions were not ripe for the fulfillment of his vision. Philip Augustus was alert in taking advantage of the beginning made by Louis VI toward establishing the supremacy of the king and in availing himself of certain feudal rights which previous monarchs had not been strong enough to enforce. He insisted that his vassals, great lords all of them, should submit themselves to his court; that they should take him as arbiter of their disputes; that they should ask his confirmation, as suzerain, of any privileges that they granted to their vassals; and that they should make no changes in their fiefs which should lessen their value to him. As suzerain the king was heir to fiefs which fell vacant for any reason, and he acted as guardian for the many minor children orphaned in the constant quarrels in which the nobles engaged.

A strong grasp of all these hitherto unurged rights gave Philip a power that enabled him to repress the disorders of the country, and sounded the note for the downfall of feudal home rule which could not live harmoniously with power centralized in the monarch.

Philip’s procedure divided his kingdom into bailiwicks, each containing several provostships. Four times a year each bailli appeared before the assizes in Paris and reported on the condition of the land under his care. Thrice a year he came to town bringing the revenues of his bailiwick, and the king saw to it that the money was not turned over to any body of lords, always hungry for more without Oliver’s excuse, and accustomed to pocket any sums that strayed in their way. By the king’s decree the financial report was made to a board consisting of a clerk and of six burgesses. The burgesses were always Philip’s good friends. He made it for their interest to be faithful to him, and with their aid he played the barons against the church, the church against the barons, and both against the bands of robbers that infested the kingdom. He banished the Jews and confiscated their property, this for the same spiritual benefit which he thought would profit the country by his burning of heretics. Incidentally, the contents of the Hebrews’ coffers hidden in the ghetto on the CitÉ did not come amiss for the filling of the king’s own strong boxes in the palace not far away.

In the palace Philip’s father and grandfather had died, there he himself was born, and there he married his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, to whom he took so violent a dislike that he separated from her the next day. The unlucky young woman appealed to the pope and the consequent embroilment of Philip with the church on account of his subsequent marriage with Agnes of Meran laid the whole kingdom under interdict. No services were held in the churches even for marriages or burials and the unhappiness caused the people was so great that at last Philip put away Agnes and recalled Ingeborg. Because he loved Agnes tenderly he hated Ingeborg all the more and her life of seeming favor was in reality one of wretchedness.

When Philip came to the throne all the western part of what is now France belonged to the king of England, Henry II. The Île de France was cut off from the sea, and the frequent hostile actions of a vassal whose possessions were greater than his own kept the young monarch constantly involved in petty wars with a man so much older than he and so much more skillful a tactician that he gained nothing and even came near losing a part of what he had. Into the mind of the lad of fifteen these troubles instilled a hatred of England and a determination to be free of this perpetual annoyance and to obtain a hold upon land that seemed unnaturally owned by a lord who was his vassal and yet lived over seas.

The years intervening between the growth of Philip’s determination and his chance to put it into effect were filled with work which developed the young king’s naturally strong character and intelligence. After Henry’s death one of his troublesome sons succeeded him—Richard, who has come down in history as “the Lion-hearted.” Richard was handsome and brave, a man to stir the imagination and admiration of a fighting age, but he was too impetuous and too active to apply himself to the study of government. When the call came for the Third Crusade Richard found in it an outlet for his energy for which he would not have to make excuse to his deserted kingdom. He and Philip and Frederick of Germany all went to the East, and there the French and English kings came to know each other, Philip envying Richard’s dash and audacity and envied in turn for the statesmanlike qualities which he was developing.

When it became evident that his presence would be of no help to a crusade doomed to failure Philip insisted on withdrawing to France where he knew that his coming would be of advantage; Richard stayed on with no thought for his kingdom, hoping for further adventure. Philip put himself in touch with conditions in and around the Île de France, took advantage of all disturbances in his vassal’s provinces which would give him even a slender foothold, and was ready to meet any act of Richard’s successor, John, whatever it might be.

The opportunity came soon after John’s accession, for he could be depended upon to open some loophole through his disposition toward devious ways rather than straightforward. As lord of the western provinces of France he was Philip’s vassal; as Duke of Brittany his boy nephew, Arthur, was his vassal. When war broke out between France and England and John went across the Channel to pursue it, he found that his nephew, incited by Philip, without doubt, was laying claim to other provinces than Brittany. The easiest way out of the difficulty was to murder Arthur, which John is said to have done either with his own hand or by the dirks of ruffians in his presence. After Philip had stormed a fortress that had been looked upon as the chief defender of Rouen the frightened Englishman fled home, and then Philip devised a plan of making Arthur’s death work to his advantage. As John’s suzerain he summoned him to Paris to answer for his nephew’s death before the king’s court. John refused to appear unless he were promised a safe-conduct not only to the city but home again. Philip refused to promise protection for the return trip unless the court should declare John not guilty of the charge against him. Philip hardly could have expected that John would thrust his head into the noose, but it suited his purpose quite as well that he should not. What he wanted was his land and that he could take now with perfect justice when the court declared John guilty of murder and of treason in disobeying the orders of his overlord. The estates in France which John had inherited from his father, those in the north, were confiscated to the French crown. It was all much easier than fighting.

While diplomacy gained for Philip these northern possessions and the power that went with them, he gained a like addition in the south by a system of letting alone. Simon de Montfort, a noble of Normandy, entered upon a crusade against the people of Albi, in Toulouse, a town and district heretical enough to attract the attention of the persecutor and rich enough to draw the gaze of the avaricious soldier of fortune. The destruction that ensued laid waste a fair country and wiped out the greater part of its population. A few years later the province fell in to the crown in default of direct heirs to the ruling family of Toulouse, and thus the south of France was added to the northern and western possessions which were accumulating under Philip’s control.

Poor-spirited as was John, now called “Lackland,” he could not see himself deprived of his own land and his rival growing rich in other provinces without making some opposition. He entered into a coalition with the German emperor and with the Count of Flanders, who was one of Philip’s important vassals. Philip defeated the combined armies in the battle of Bouvines (1214) and thereby made himself the most powerful monarch in Europe. The success of the citizen soldiery established the reputation of the burgesses as strong and intelligent fighters and thereby struck terror to the hearts of nobles who were nursing plans of rebellion like those of the captured Count of Flanders. Yet nobles were one with burgesses in rejoicing over John’s final dismissal from any governing part in northern France and over the defeat of the intruding Germans. Never before in all her history had there been so universal a feeling of what it meant to be a Frenchman and to serve a country whose unity was symbolized by a king personally strong, strongly supported, in very truth the head controlling the members.

It is an interesting fact that the same period that established the supremacy of the king of France was marked in England by the check to the royal domination administered to John Lackland when the barons wrested from him the Magna Charta. Historians of other countries are apt to speak of the French as volatile, capricious, delighting in revolutions, of which the troubled fourscore years from 1789 to 1871 are examples. It might be well to remember that the English, who pride themselves on being neither volatile nor capricious, were less patient than the men across the Channel. They, too, made their stand against aristocratic privilege, and they did it five hundred years before the long-suffering French; they, too, cut off their monarch’s head, and Charles went to the block a hundred and fifty years before Louis mounted the guillotine. Action and reaction are equal, prolonged repression must result in corresponding expression. The evils of five centuries are quickly cured if less than one century is devoted to the healing.

After the battle of Bouvines the victorious army marched to Paris in a triumph which was participated in by every village along the way. Every parish church held a service of thanksgiving, every crossroads was packed with shouting peasants doing homage to the king, admiring the nobles, and, above all, wonderstruck at the new military force whose possible value they could see, even if it was not yet entirely clear how great would be the weight of the “mailed fist” of the bourgeois.

At the very time when the power of the king was becoming dominant, however, democracy showed itself even with impudence in the fabliaux, the popular tales which betrayed the jealous spirit of the populace toward the nobles and the clergy. These verses, marked by the esprit gaulois were characteristic of the period of the early middle ages as were also the chansons de geste which stirred the crusaders by their recital of the valorous deeds of accredited heroes. “Renard the Fox,” a long epic of three centuries’ growth, burlesques every aspect of the social life of the middle ages, and its delicious fooling paints a more vivid and more intimate picture than does the pen of any chronicler. These lighter forms were not representative of all the thought of the period, for AbÉlard’s thesis, ancient and ever new, that we should not believe what we do not understand, and Saint Bernard’s refutation of such a lack of faith were the most prominent instances of a mental activity that found lodgment in schools and expression in pulpit controversy and rostrum argument. Now, too, the professions and the arts no longer were confined to the monasteries, but laymen became teachers and writers and artists and craftsmen.

The opportunities of meeting in Paris like-minded people from all over Europe for a long time had drawn students to Paris, and schools were endowed for men of different nationalities. Philip united them under the jurisdiction of the University. From very early days the region on the south bank, just across from the eastern end of the CitÉ and extending up Mont Sainte GeneviÈve has been given over to students. In the church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre they met with their instructors. Across the alley on which the church faces still stands the house of the governor of the Petit ChÂtelet before whom the young men appeared to adjust their differences. Behind the church runs the rue du Fouarre on which many colleges were situated, among them the Schools of France, Normandy, Germany and Picardy. In 1202 this thoroughfare was called rue des Escoliers, but when, by way of responding to Pope Urban V’s appeal for self-denial, the students in the classes sat on bundles of straw bought in the near-by hay market, the street changed its name to “Straw Street,” to commemorate their good intentions. Near by, to-day, is a modern street called “Dante,” after the Italian poet, who was not behind his contemporaries in studying in Paris. Émile Loubet, the former president of the French Republic, lives at number 5 on this street.

Not far away is the rue des Anglais, which was laid out before Philip Augustus’s reign and took its name from the English students who frequented it. A little farther west, creeping in the dark between tilted houses, is the street, called since the fourteenth century, “of the Parchment Workers,” and in the thirteenth century rue des Escrivains. Two of the tiny dwellings, numbers 6 and 7, belonged in the thirteenth century to the English cathedral of Norwich, which used them as dormitories for the scholars which it supported at the French seat of learning.

These houses are built around a microscopic courtyard, a plan persistent in France through many hundred years. It is a plan seen to-day in many modern dwellings, in the Banque de France, a seventeenth century building, in the eastern end of the Louvre and in its pavement record of the earliest quadrangular Louvre. It is a plan making for light and air and it often permits the planting of a small garden within. The idea sprang from the necessity of a fortification’s preserving a stolid and impenetrable exterior while the life of its tenants, carried on within the shelter of its walls, had something of pleasant environment.

So closely does Paris cling to her ancient traditions that even in the twentieth century the schools and their students are removed but a few yards from their medieval location. The students of to-day, too, have their own traditions of dress and behavior which mark them as inhabitants of the “Latin Quarter” even if they are kodaked at Versailles on a holiday afternoon. They assume for themselves now privileges which Philip Augustus encouraged them to take by making them free from the regulations which the other citizens obeyed and subject only to the ecclesiastical tribunal. This difference of attitude caused many riots in the thirteenth century and they break out afresh in the twentieth with a frequency which helps to occupy any idle moments of the city police.

So great were the attractions of Paris offered not only to students but to merchants that the population of the city grew to one hundred and twenty thousand under Philip’s rule. The populous section on the south or left bank of the river was matched by another on the north, chiefly inhabited by merchants and artisans, and both of them were larger than the original CitÉ on the island. The CitÉ was the administrative and ecclesiastical center, for the king’s palace was not his only residence but also a palace of justice, and crowded into the limits set by the Seine were so many churches that one of them served a parish of only twenty houses.

The northward growth of the city encroached upon the Halles as it had upon the cemetery of the Innocents, and Philip recognized the necessity of enclosing and roofing the markets. Such utilities as public ovens, too, which had been a monopoly of some of the religious houses, he opened to the citizens at large. He also instituted a water supply, which, though far from ample, since it allowed only two quarts a day for each inhabitant, was an earnest of good intentions.

The original tower of the Louvre seemed to Philip a good nucleus for an enlarged fortification which should be at the same time a palace to which he might withdraw from the palace in the crowded CitÉ. Around the old donjon he built a rectangular fortress, its short end lying along the river, its entrance defended by another huge tower whose work of protection was reinforced by smaller towers, by a surrounding wall, and by a moat. Down beneath the treasures of to-day’s Louvre and out under the courtyard still run passages of this old building. They twist and turn within walls of rough masonry and inflame the imagination with thoughts of adventurous possibilities, of plots and prisoners and escapes, until they land the wanderer of a sudden in the coal bin of the hopelessly up-to-date furnace that heats the Hall of the Caryatides.

Across the river on the south bank stood another huge tower, best known by its later name, the Tour de Nesle. It was from this tower, that, in the fourteenth century, Jeanne of Burgundy, widow of Philip the Long, is reputed to have had the people who displeased her dropped into the river. Villon’s “Ballad of Old-Time Ladies” says:

Buridan was a professor in the University, and the author of the famous assertion that if an ass were placed between two equally attractive bundles of hay he would starve to death before he could determine which one to eat first. The tale goes that Buridan’s friends, fearing the outcome of his visit to the tower, were waiting in a boat and rescued him. Dumas’ play, “La Tour de Nesle” is based on the legends surrounding this old fortification, now existent only in a tablet placed on the eastern wing of the Institute to mark its site.

A chain across the stream from the Louvre to the Tour de Nesle regulated navigation, for it could only be taken down for the passage of boats by permission of the provost.

Starting south from the Tour de Nesle ran

the wall whose erection Philip commanded when he first went off to the wars, that his fair city might be well protected in his absence. It was higher and heavier than its predecessors, with a battlemented top to hide soldiers in action and frequent towers which served the triple purpose of sheltering extra men, of storing weapons and of affording points of observation somewhat above the wall itself. A dozen gates opened each upon a drawbridge whose lifting compelled the invader to cross a ditch in some way before he attempted to storm an entrance.

Leaving the Tour de Nesle the wall swept around Mont Sainte GeneviÈve and back to the river at a point about opposite the center of the present Île Saint Louis, east of the CitÉ. On the right bank it ran north and west, keeping below the Priory of Saint Martin which lay outside of it. Its course is traced on the pavement of the eastern courtyard of the present Louvre, part of one of the towers is extant in a government pawnshop in the Marais, a considerable section is to be seen in the enclosure beside Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, and its course is marked elsewhere by an occasional fragment, by some street named FossÉ, or by a tablet placed by the Commission of Old Paris, which is doing excellent antiquarian work in the preservation and marking of historic buildings and localities.

The Paris of Philip Augustus was but a thirtieth part as large as the Paris of to-day, but it had three hundred streets. Narrow, dark and dirty alleys they were, the best of them, and even in this early century the devastating epidemics of a later day were not unknown. A contemporary historian says: “One day the king was in his castle of the Louvre and was walking back and forth, pondering the affairs of the kingdom, when there passed a heavy wagon whose wheels stirred up the street and caused an insupportable odor to rise from it. When he smelled this stench Philip experienced a profound nausea. At once he summoned the provost and the burgesses of the city and he gave them orders to pave the streets with large stones and strong, which was done.”

“Which was done in part” would have been nearer the truth, for, although one public-spirited citizen gave a large sum, most of the contributions were of the nature of samples from the shopkeepers’ stocks, and the actual amount of paving accomplished was very little for many centuries to come. As late as the sixteenth century Montaigne was deploring the evil odors of the city he loved so well, and Arthur Young, at the end of the eighteenth, compared the cleanliness of Paris most unfavorably with that of London. In Philip’s reign ladies seldom went afoot, so thick was the mud, composed of indescribable filth, and knights had good need of armor in times of peace to protect them from buckets of water, poured casually into the streets from abutting houses with only a cry of “Gare l’eau” as a warning.

Nevertheless, in days of festival these same narrow streets might be gorgeous to behold. When Philip Augustus returned from the battle of Bouvines the whole city came out to meet him. Chanting priests, singing girls, shouting urchins ushered him into a town decorated to do him honor. From windows and balconies hung rich tapestries and carpets; banners waved, and the sunlight flashed on glittering spearpoints by day as bonfires made breastplates glitter at night.

It would be hard to find in all history so complete an instance of a nation’s spiritual and mental growth expressing itself in outer form rapidly and in transcendent beauty as is exhibited in the evolution of Gothic architecture in France in the twelfth century. It originated in the Île de France and within the span of this hundred years Paris was rebuilt, bursting into the elegance and grace of the new style from the heaviness of the old as a butterfly casts aside its constraining cocoon.

The nave of Saint Germain-des-PrÉs, is an example of the heavy-pillared, round-arched building of the Romanesque era. The desire to give visible form to the universal feeling of uplift brought to birth the ogive or pointed arch which gave its name to “ogival” or Gothic architecture best shown, of course, in churches. Higher and higher the arches pointed skyward; lancet windows above helped to light the deep “vessel” or nave (from the Latin navis, ship) and the roof crowned all at a dizzying height.

Satisfying as this was from the point of view of beauty and of symbolism, it gave rise to serious practical questions. How were such lofty walls to be made strong enough to support the outward push of the roof? The thirteenth century had come about before the problem was solved entirely. By that time outer buttresses had been evolved strong enough for their work yet so delicate that they were called “flying,” spread as they were like the wings of a bird.

Decoration became more beautiful, also. Romanesque pillar capitals had been adorned with conventional vegetation and strange beasts whose originals never were on land or sea. The sculptors of the ogival period took Nature as their teacher and France as their schoolroom and carved the leaves and flowers and fruits that grew about them, the oak and willow and rose-bush and clover and grape. Pinnacles gave an effect of lightness to exteriors and their edges were

decorated with crochets (furled leaves) and tipped with fleurons or bunches of budding leaves.

High heavenward sprang spires from the western end of the churches, this western faÇade forming an imposing entrance to the nave through whose length the choir and altar at the eastern end, beyond the transepts, looked mysteriously far away. From the roof at the junction of the nave and the transepts a slender spire called a flÈche (arrow) shot upward with exquisite grace.

The introduction of ogival architecture had a sudden and revolutionary effect upon the art of painting. Before the twelfth century mural decorations and the illumination of manuscripts had been the only instances in France. When the broad expanses of wall above the semicircular Romanesque arches vanished with the coming of the pointed arch there was no place left except the windows for the depiction of the lives of the saints, of scenes from Old Testament history and from the life of Christ. Glass then became the artist’s medium.

The most illustrious examples of the new style to be found in modern Paris are the cathedral of Notre Dame, the refectory of Saint Martin-des-Champs, and the Sainte Chapelle built by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century.

The cornerstone of Notre Dame was laid by Pope Alexander III in the reign of Louis VII (1163.) The new cathedral covered the spot where the Nautae had erected their altar to Jupiter, replaced the many times repaired Merovingian cathedral of Notre Dame, and attached itself to the ancient church of Saint Étienne, the original cathedral of Paris which stood where Notre Dame’s sacristy now rises. This old edifice was not taken down until the new was sufficiently advanced for the altar to be consecrated, so that service beneath the cathedral roof never was interrupted even for a day. The relics were removed to a new Saint Étienne’s, built on Mont Sainte GeneviÈve.

Construction went on briskly through Louis’ reign and the four decades of Philip Augustus’s and the three years of his successor’s, Louis VIII, and work ended on the superb edifice in the twentieth year of the rule of Saint Louis. It was a “quick job”—eighty-four years—as building went in those days. The great mass never has been completed, for the spires of the original plan have not been added. It has had its days of decay and of restoration, the last attempt having returned its elaborate west faÇade as closely as possible to its appearance in Philip Augustus’s day when it was finished.

Inside and out it is magnificently harmonious,

a worthy setting for the scenes it has witnessed—scenes splendid, startling, tragic. Here Saint Louis brought the Crown of Thorns and here his funeral took place. Here Philip the Fair rode in on horseback after the battle of Mons-en-Puelle and here he convened the first States General—the first Assembly wherein the burgesses were represented. Henry VI of England was crowned here, so was Marie Stuart, and here it was that Napoleon set the imperial crown upon his own head and then crowned Josephine. Here Henry IV, turned Catholic for the purpose of gaining possession of Paris, heard his first mass, and here, during the Revolution, a ballet dancer posed in the choir as the Goddess of Reason, “in place of the former Holy Sacrament.”

Officially, the cathedral is the hub of France, for measurements along the national highways are all made from the foot of its towers. Deep in the hearts of the French people, too, is love for this splendid fane. They love it as a summary of Gothic beauty, as a storehouse of history, and, above all, as the moral fortress of the city, sheltering as it does “Notre Dame de Paris,” the guardian of the city for five hundred years.