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With its tale of illegitimacy, prison, stardom, exile, love affairs and tireless battles against critic, priest and king, Roger Pearson’s brilliant biography brings the father of Enlightenment vividly to life.
Read on for the first chapter, and click here to buy the book and find out more.
Curtain RiseImagine yourself in Paris, on the Left Bank of the Seine. Your stroll began in the formal gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg, and now you have come down the hill, in a long, gentle arc, past the Sorbonne and the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, to the river. In front of you, across the Pont Saint-Michel, lies the He de la Cite, with the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle soaring up from the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. Over to your right the cathedral of Notre-Dame sits foursquare at the end of the island, like squat cargo at the stern of a ship. On your left, stretching back at an angle, runs the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, while on the opposite bank the tidy ranges of the Louvre march west to the Tuileries gardens and north to the Palais Royal.
Today such a walk might have brought you down the Boulevard Saint-Michel. At the end of the seventeenth century, long before Baron Haussmann carved his broad, mob-exposing boulevards through the cluttered masonry of the medieval city, you could nevertheless have made a similar journey and noted these self-same landmarks. Your route would have been more tortuous, and the hazards would have been different: slops from above, after a maliciously brief warning, or filth underfoot. Indeed had you been well-born you would not have been walking at all.
Moreover, without the modern thoroughfare, you might have thought it rather a long way. For you would in fact have been proceeding from the perimeter of the city to its centre. At the end of the 1600s the capital of France numbered about half a million inhabitants, a quarter of its present total. The city boundaries extended from the Palais du Luxembourg in the south to the imposing gateways of the Porte Saint-Denis (recently built in 1672) and the Porte Saint-Martin (1674) in the north, and from the Arsenal and the Bastille in the east to the Tuileries palace in the west. Outside these boundaries lay the nascent 'faubourgs', or false burgs, the forerunner of the modern suburb. And beyond the Tuileries lay the Champs-Elysees with its bucolic but not notably Elysian fields.
For over 500 years Paris had been the largest city in Europe, though now it was being overtaken by London. With so many people crammed together into such a small area, space was at a premium and living conditions were primitive. As in London, the bridges — with the two exceptions of the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal - bore houses and shops. The Pont Neuf, begun in 1578 and completed in 1606, spanned - and still spans - the entire river by setting foot on the western tip of the lie de la Cite. Further west, downstream, the Pont Royal has no need of an island: completed in 1689, it allowed its first users to avoid city-centre congestion by proceeding directly across the Seine from the Tuileries to the rue du Beaune, and thence to all roads south.
Sanitation, where it existed, was rudimentary; fresh water was often in short supply; and accommodation for the majority was cramped and uncomfortable. Fire and epidemic were constant hazards. Public order was not guaranteed: for gentlemen a pistol or sword were pertinent accessories, while for ladies the most valuable accessory was a gentleman. A carriage was essential, if you could afford it. The streets were mostly narrow and unsalubrious, without pavements: little light penetrated between their tall facades, especially to the lower floors. Many had an open drain coursing down the middle, running with the sewage that was released from innumerable privies at dead of night or with the blood of daylight slaughter from a butcher's shop. It clotted on your shoes and turned them a ruddy brown. Sometimes the beast escaped the cleaver and fled, spattering terrified pedestrians in its panicked flight. The broader streets were strewn with horse dung as countless carts and some 10,000 carriages, private or for hire, pursued their frenzied course around the capital (though generally not all at once). Axle-grease posed a constant threat to clean stockings.
Smoke curled from thousands upon thousands of chimneys, in every season. Tanners and dyers, fishmongers and blacksmiths, churches with their rotting dead and hospitals with their purulent quick, all contributed to the pestilential fug. From tallow-factories rose the nauseous stench that was the price Parisians paid for their candlelight. There were no trees, save on the outer 'boulevards' — those former bulwarks, or ramparts, of the city's defensive walls that Louis XIV had turned into airy, tree-lined promenades in the 16708. Within these walls the atmosphere was foul and dank, lingering like congestion in the strangulated airways of the medieval city. Even along the Seine the wind found its passage impeded by the bridge-borne tenements, and the effluvia of this river-sewer wafted uncertainly on the breeze. Only on the houseless Pont Neuf did the air seem a little better: for it offered a large space in which to breathe (28 metres wide by 278 metres long) and a vantage-point from which to look up and catch a glimpse of the firmament, not just a tiny patch of sky or a dripping gutter. Here were the first pavements in Paris. Tucked away in the semicircular bays above each of the bridge's supports were small shops or stalls, nicely positioned to lure the leisured or to tempt the needy. And there was water, from the Samaritaine: Paris's first public water-fountain, pumping water up from the river and proclaiming its dubious generosity with a sculpture of the Good Samaritan. But even here the well-to-do who came to stroll or watch the fireworks and the river-jousts found it advisable to have a perfume bottle and a handkerchief at the ready to keep the fetid fumes at bay. No wonder the terrors of Hell retained such a powerful grip on the popular imagination: smoking fire and sulphurous brimstone were all around.
And the noise! The clatter of wheel on cobble, the crack of whip and driver's curse, the hawker's cry and the policeman's halloo, the urgent pleas of flower-girl and pamphlet-seller, the knowledgeable mutterings of the bou-cjuinistes whose stock of second-hand books might conceal a bibliophile's dream, the proud boasts of tooth-pullers and the screams of their grateful victims, street entertainers singing for their supper, or charlatans promising everything from a wrinkle-free forehead to a cure for all your ills. And army men hailing prospective young recruits, luring tomorrow's cannon-fodder with the offer of jam today: a drink, a girl, a good square meal.
Hellish as Paris was, most people just had to get used to it. But some moved out, like Louis XIV in 1683. At the end of the seventeenth century the Parisians' king was living at the magnificent palace of Versailles fourteen miles away (some three hours by carriage). Louis XIII had built a hunting-lodge there in 1624, and his son later decided to make it his principal royal residence in preference to the reek and bustle of Paris. Following marriage to the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660 the 22-year-old Louis XIV had initiated an ambitious and costly programme of building and garden design. Now, like Apollo, the Sun King dwelt at a mysterious, awe-inducing distance from his capital, ruling over a court of opulent splendour and a nation of some twenty million subjects.
During his reign and that of his predecessor, who had been ably guided by Cardinal Richelieu, France had overtaken Spain as the most powerful country in Europe. Once riven by sectarian strife — in the Wars of Religion that dominated French history in the second half of the sixteenth century — it had then found itself free to concentrate on its territorial ambitions. Over the period between Richelieu's rise to power in 1624 and Louis XIVs death in 1715, France was at war for on average two years out of every three. The periods 1635-59 and 1689-1713 were particularly bellicose. And expensive. At the end of the century the nation's coffers were virtually empty, and much administrative effort was going into devising and levying taxes. The King's fighting days were nearly over, and French military superiority would end with the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.
But, for the moment, glory shone all around: in royal pomp and circumstance, in architecture, in the theatre, in poetry and painting. If you had been standing on the Pont Neuf in the 16905, you could have thought you were at the centre of the world. A Gallic omphalos. For here you were in the capital of the greatest kingdom on earth. Parisian clothes, furniture and other luxury items were exported all over the world and regarded as the height of fashion. Yet you had only to travel ten minutes in any direction to purchase them direct. The French language was similarly exported. Throughout educated, upper-class Europe it had become the lingua franca of well-bred civility. It was the language of diplomacy, and the hallmark of sophisticated elegance in most European courts. For this was the Grand Siecle, the great age of French history and culture, and you were part of it. The acme of civilization. At least so it seemed if you were one of the people fortunate enough to belong to the Parisian elite. In a country where some four-fifths of the population eked a miserable existence from the land and barely a quarter of the male population — and significantly fewer women — could read, Parisian power and prestige lay with a tiny and very privileged minority of some two to three thousand people. Beneath them a much larger, prosperous and well-educated middle class aspired to join them. Their shared world was a small one, and — apart from Versailles itself — the centres of polite society were select and few: the theatre, the opera, the salon, or the gardens of the Tuileries, the Palais Royal, and the Luxembourg. In these beautiful places anyone who was anyone could be sure to meet a somebody. And at the heart of their political and professional world stood the parchment, not a parliament but courts and administrative offices that ruled over Paris and its environs in the name of the King. The law was a growth industry (by the 17605 the city would count one legal official to every eighty-five Parisians), and for its magistrates theparkment in its myriad manifestations was the surest ladder from bourgeois commonership to aristocratic bliss.
These were the places where people met and talked and strived. But communication in late-seventeenth-century France was severely circumscribed by a limited technology, the constraints of good manners and the watchful eye of the censor. This was a world with no telegraph or telephone. Travel was expensive or arduous, and often both. Law courts and academies may have brought the men together, but for women an evening at the Opera, the Comedie-Italienne, or the Comedie-Francaise was a vital opportunity for social intercourse, which is no doubt why so many members of the audience — male ana female — conversed during the performances. Supper-parties and balls, salon receptions and theatre visits, these were the privileged channels for the live exchange of information and opinion, while the circulating manuscript and the printed word offered the sole equivalent of the recording and the action replay. It was a small world in which appearances counted for everything and reputation was all.
But even a small world can have dark corners. The day-to-day running of the city was essentially in the hands of the Lieutenant of Police, a post created in 1667. Not only were the police there to ensure obedience to the law, they also played a key role in regulating and supervising food supplies, public health, street lighting, fire prevention, and the city's industries. They therefore constituted the executive arm of the Chatelet, the assembly of lower courts that were located on the Right Bank just north of the Palais de Justice and the parchment. The maintenance of public order was paramount. This meant ensuring that everyone had enough to eat (the provision of bread was subsidized), limiting firearm use, suppressing begging, and controlling gambling and prostitution. It also meant enforcing religious observance and suppressing potential subversion. The Lieutenant and his police governed the dark corners of Paris with the help of a spy network drawn from the ranks of the pious or the impecunious, and its members stood ready to inform on anyone thought to be a danger to religion or the monarchy. For within and without the pale of the Establishment there existed a city-wide web of clandestine publication and whispered conversation. Beyond the theatre and the opera lay fairground, coffee-house, and tavern, potential seedbeds of subversion and market-places for the exchange of satire, tract and pamphlet. Louis XIV's Pans may have been short on privacy, but it was long on subterfuge.
And so imagine, too, that you were present in the vicinity of the rue Samt-Andre-des-Arts on Monday, 22 November 1694. For there you might have witnessed an intriguing scene at the local church. A small group of well-dressed persons arrives at the entrance: a woman is carrying a babe-in-arms. After a short ceremony the priest signs a certificate stating that the baby, 'born on the previous day' and now named Francois-Marie, has been duly baptized into the Church of Rome. The godfather is wearing clerical garb, and the godmother has an almost aristocratic air. What could be more respectable? But wait . . . 'born on the previous day'? Little Francois-Marie looks as though he has been around much longer than that. Perhaps even nine months longer. No, this baby certainly wasn't born yesterday.
In all likelihood the greatest French dramatist after Corneille and Racine had just performed in his first starring role; and the future scourge of the Roman Catholic Church had just taken his first, irreverent bow. His death, some eighty-three years on, would be no less theatrical and no less irreverent. Then, on the Left Bank of the Seine, in the fine residence of his friends the marquis and marquise de Villette, he would defy the priests with a simulated incapacity to confess his sins and then proudly breathe his last. Eleven years later the street in which he died would be renamed the quai Voltaire. For by then the squealing infant had become a hero and a god.
© Roger Pearson, 2005
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