City of Light

National Review, August 11, 2003 by Richard Brookhiser

Seven Ages of Paris, by Alistair Horne (Knopf, 480 pp., $35)

Whether we go to Paris in the flesh, braving traffic, strikers, Arabs, and the indigenous rock and roll, or visit it from the comfort of our chairs, we need a guide. None could be better than Alistair Horne, the English journalist and historian who, after numerous volumes of French history, has drawn together this relaxed, witty, and seemingly omniscient love letter.

The story of a nation's capital will cover much of the nation's history, a truth that the French, who have the same love/hate relationship with Paris that Americans have with Washington, D.C., or New York, will resent, even as they acknowledge it. Horne covers all the necessary wars, kings, and revolutions, though he takes politics with a grain of salt. He dismisses Philippe le Bel, Louis XIV, and Napoleon-heroic consolidators, in the conventional view-as tyrants and warmongers. The only great French leader he seems to like is Henri IV, who decided that Paris was worth a Mass, and gave his subjects peace and quiet. They were so grateful to him that, after he was murdered by a lone fanatic in 1610, a mob seized the body of the assassin, which the executioner was drawing and quartering, and tore it to pieces in their wrath. The executioner, who, according to law, was supposed to burn the residue, had nothing left to torch but the assassin's shirt.

Urban life is not natural to our species, and our efforts to make it work have been attended with much difficulty. Horne's details of the brute practicalities of city living are as fascinating as they are repulsive. In the 13th century, "each rainfall turned [the streets] to a mud enriched by the droppings of horses and domestic animals, the waste from the tanneries and butcheries, and of the residents themselves in their houses innocent of any plumbing; and there were the forbidden swine to root through it and churn it all up." Improvements, such as pavement, an innovation begun by Philippe II, were regularly outpaced by growth. The first administrator to get a handle on the problem of Paris was Baron Haussmann, the creator/destroyer who worked for Napoleon III, replacing congested warrens with spacious boulevards. Many Parisians deplored his handiwork. The Goncourt brothers thought he had turned their city into "some American Babylon of the future."

Despite political and daily difficulties, Parisians have always sought to enjoy themselves. Horne surveys culture high and low, and women, mostly low. It is hard to pick one courtesan out of such a cavalcade, but I would vote for Mlle George (nee Marguerite Josephine Weimer), the tragedian of the first Empire whose lovers included Napoleon, Czar Alexander, and the Duke of Wellington. "Sadly," Horne notes, "in her old age she was reduced to keeping the chalets de necessite (public lavatories) at the Paris Exposition of 1855."

Horne ends with a set piece on Pere Lachaise, the cemetery where so many Parisians, both Frenchmen and foreigners, from Abelard and Heloise to Jim Morrison, have come to rest. This is a risky gambit: Meditations on Pere Lachaise are a cliche of the literature of Paris. Yet Horne pulls it off, sweetly showing the life that is in the midst of death. In the Sixties Gaston Palewski, a Gaullist functionary, complained to Horne that he had been wait-listed for a plot. Not to worry, his mistress Nancy Mitford assured him: "Every once in a while they dig up the old bones, and then grind them up to make cosmetics for Chanel."

A history of Paris published in America at the present moment is inevitably entangled with the news. Without intending to, Seven Ages of Paris addresses several aspects of the current unpleasantness. As the war with Iraq approached, and the war within the Security Council raged, the Internet filled with jokes about French cowardice and incompetence. I got the one about the new French army rifle-never fired, only dropped once-about a dozen times. Horne gives the lie to such stuff. Even apart from the great commanders, like Napoleon or the Marshal de Villars, who saved the nation at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the French time and again show themselves to be brave and resourceful. The siege of Paris, lasting from September 1870 to January 1871, ended the Franco-Prussian War in humiliation and defeat, but was brightened by intrepid men using hot-air balloons to take messages in and out of the surrounded city. The second German attempt to take the city, in August and September 1914, was stopped by Gen. Joseph Gallieni, a 65-year-old retired officer suffering from prostate cancer, who decided, in the face of politicians' doubts, to stand and fight. When a colleague asked him where the line of retreat would be in case they were overwhelmed, Gallieni answered, "Nowhere." The oncoming Germans left a gap in their front; 600 red Renault taxis ferried troops to the spot, each making two round-trips a day, and the enemy was stopped.

The third German attack, in 1940, was followed by four years of occupation. When it ended, Gen. Charles de Gaulle marched down the Champs-Elysees and held a Te Deum at Notre Dame, exposing himself to German and Communist snipers. Malcolm Muggeridge was in the cathedral when shots rang out. "The huge congregation who had all been standing suddenly fell flat on their faces . . . There was a single exception; one solitary figure, like a lonely giant. It was, of course, de Gaulle. Thenceforth, that was how I always saw him-towering and alone."