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Summary
Summary
An unprecedented history of Paris -- the result of a 25-year labor of love undertaken by the renowned English historian. Beginning his narrative in the 12th century and ending in the mid-20th, Alistair Home divides the city's history into seven ages: the Medieval Paris of Abelard and Heloise and of Philip Augustus, who made the city into the intellectual capital of Europe; Renaissance Paris under the first Bourbon king, Henry of Navarre, who proclaimed the city worth a mass; the glittering 18th-century capital of Louis XIV -- the Sun King -- and Louis XV; revolutionary and Napoleonic Paris, a place both of splendor and of terror and tribulation; the 19th-century city of the Commune, the Exhibition, and the Bloody Week of 1871; the Paris of La Belle Epoque and the cultural ferment that lasted until the outbreak of war in 1914; and, finally, occupied Paris, from its worldshattering fall to the Germans in 1940 to its joyful liberation at the end of World War II. Horne's telling of the story of Paris is as impassioned as it is comprehensive, as anecdotal as it is historically informed. A landmark history of the city, and a delight for anyone who has fallen under its indelible spell.
Author Notes
Alistair Allan Horne was born in London, England on November 9, 1925. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force, but failed to qualify for pilot training because of poor eyesight. He later joined the Coldstream Guards, attaining the rank of captain. When the war ended, he was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and stationed in Cairo where he monitored Soviet activity in the Balkans. He received a master's degree in English in 1949 from Jesus College, Cambridge.
Before becoming an author, he was a foreign correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and a spy for MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service. His books included The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870-71; To Lose a Battle: France 1940; Small Earthquake in Chile: A Visit to Allende's South America; The French Army and Politics, 1870-1970; Seven Ages of Paris; The Age of Napoleon; La Belle France: A Short History; and Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year. The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 won the Hawthornden Prize and A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 won the Wolfson Prize. He wrote several memoirs including A Bundle from Britain and But What Do You Actually Do?: A Literary Vagabondage. He was knighted in 2003. He died on May 25, 2017 at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
London is male, New York sexually ambivalent, writes Horne. But "has any sensible person ever doubted that Paris is fundamentally a woman?" The renowned historian (The Fall of Paris, etc.) thus conceives of his history of the city of lights as "linked biographical essays, depicting seven ages... in the long, exciting life of a sexy and beautiful, but also turbulent, troublesome and sometimes excessively violent woman." Horne's admittedly idiosyncratic seven ages begin in the 13th century, when King Philippe Auguste made Paris the administrative and cultural center of France. The second age was that of the Protestant Henri of Navarre (later King Henri IV) who, after unsuccessfully besieging the city, converted to Catholicism because, he said, "Paris is worth a mass," and began "to clear away the cluttered medieval quartiers... and replace them with an orderly, classical elegance." The third era was that of King Louis XIV, a period of amazing cultural flowering, though the Sun King moved the seat of government away from Paris, to Versailles. Napoleon brought to Paris a postrevolutionary stability and grandeur, and began to construct a modern sewer system. Under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, during the city's fifth age, Paris was remade, but the era ended with the bloodletting of the Commune. Age six took the city from the belle epoque through the beginning of WWII, and the last from the occupation to 1969. Horne brings to this brilliant and entertaining account the same urban passion that Peter Ackroyd brought to his recent "biography" of London-and it is sure to delight Francophiles everywhere. 8 pages of color and 16 pages of b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Nov. 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Horne, a prolific and popular British historian, is the author of a trilogy on French history: The Price of Glory (1962), The Fall of Paris (1965), and To Lose a Battle (1969). His years of research have resulted in a particular love of Paris, which now results in a book synthesizing all he has learned about the French capital. He divides the history of Paris into, as the book's title indicates, seven great epochs, each one representing an important transition in the city's evolution. The first of the seven eras is the age of King Phillipe Auguste ("the first ruler to make [Paris] his administrative capital") and the last is the stewardship of Charles de Gaulle ("bringing a certain order and opening the path to a grand renouvellement of France" ). We also visit the Paris of Louis XIV (who abandoned it for his chateau at Versailles) and the pre^-World War I Belle Epoque ("it felt like a period that would last forever" ). A rich, vigorously fresh study for history lovers. --Brad Hooper
Choice Review
Perhaps the most distinguished popular historian of France writing in English, Horne is best known among academic historians as the author of successful narratives on Napoleon, the Paris Commune, Verdun, and the Algerian War. He has also written on many other 19th- and 20th-century topics. That background is much in evidence here, where he sometimes borrows from his previous publications. This work tracing the history of Paris, and often of France, from the Middle Ages to De Gaulle is strongest on the last two hundred years and sprinkles comparative references from the modern era amid tales of earlier times. The narrative concentrates in traditional fashion on high politics and society, architecture, and the demi-monde. Stories of battle and revolt alternate with discussions of dress and prostitution. University instructors may not want to assign the entire volume (most will probably prefer more scholarly and focused monographs), but they might select individual chapters for their evocative anecdotes and verve, and lovers of Paris and tourists in search of a pleasing supplement to the most common travel guides will find the book enjoyable and generally reliable. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Public libraries, general collections, and undergraduates. D. G. Troyansky Texas Tech University
Guardian Review
Paris seems a study in continuity or, at least, in survival. Of all the great European cities it is the one to have escaped 20th- century destruction most effectively. The mordant will point out that while London had its blitz, Warsaw its rising and Leningrad its siege, France had its Vichy. And the suddenness of that collapse, the causes of that collective defeatism of a nation - despite the loss of some 100,000 Frenchmen in arms between 1939 and the subsequent calamity of May 1940 - remains one of the terrible imponderables of French history. Visiting the Quai d'Orsay on the 16th of that month, in the first week of his premiership, Winston Churchill saw the diplomats pushing wheel-barrows of archives on to the bonfires in the foreign office's gardens. The cynicism that had ani mated French diplomacy from Richelieu to Talleyrand, a tool that had upheld both glory and national unity, had now become a part of the popular psychology and - as a counsel of mere survival - proved to be a useful rationaliser of a national shame. Colette's mother, recalling her reaction to the earlier set of Prussian invaders in 1870, said that she just went home and buried the good wine. And her daughter, taking the cue, published her work in such Vichy publications as the Gringoire and La Gerbe. Last month at its annual public debate the Academie Francaise debated the idea of honour, this year being the bicentenary of Napoleon's foundation of the Legion d'Honneur - those baubles of which the dictator was himself so contemptuous as mere means to "lead men by the nose". But the long shadow, and the one in which Le Pen-ism has flourished, is the dishonour of 1940. It is an unmentionable among those " immortels " whom De Gaulle refused to join when elected, because the academie of 1940-44 had proved to be as collaborationistas its most famous member, Marshal Petain. The ideal historian of Paris therefore has to be more than an analyst of urban design, of architectural shifts, of the court's removal from the Louvre to Versailles, of that authoritarian Alsatian the Prefet Haussmann - the central planner who destroyed the urban intimacies of the streets and who created the boulevards that replaced the Paris of Hugo's Miserables in what had once been a swamp. As always in Parisian history, fashion is no laughing matter. Whether in the history of the stone on which the steely light descends, or in the Renaissance red bricks they replaced, this is also a history of violence, of a grandeur whose rhetoric conceals an abiding fragility of order and government. Parisians are always ready for the "manifestation", taking to the streets in their thousands. The history of taste is, in Paris, a history of power: of the means by which the many may be swayed, seduced and governed by the few. It was a royal edict of 1783 which limited the height of the buildings, and which preserved the 18th-century look of the city. And it was central authority that controlled the architectural shifts, that created the sewerage system which ended the flow of human ordure into the Seine, and that eventually (as late as Napoleon) created a clean and reliable water supply by digging a 100 kilometre-canal from the river Ourcq. To this monumental task of describing what he calls - in Shakespearian mode - the "seven ages" of Parisian history, Alistair Horne brings his own experience of almost four decades of writing, much of which has been devoted to the question of France. And his is truly a history of the "mentalites" that animated the city as well as of the powerful who built for glory and intrigued for a foot- hold on destiny. Horne is a sure-footed guide from Abelard and Eloise to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. This is an inspirational work of scholarship and love. Horne excels on the 19th and 20th centuries and has made marvellous use of the printed sources and histories, such as Jules Michelet's 17-volume history of France, Alphonse Aulard's 1912 study of the Paris of the first empire and Maurice Druon's six volumes on the high middle ages, as well as of French historiography. He is, in the best sense of the word, an amateur of Paris past and present - informed, reliable, enthusiastic, too knowledgeable to be the Anglophone Francophile, but also too charitable to be untouched by " la condition Parisienne ". He knows where the Parisian bodies are buried and he also knows the cost, in human terms, of the lives of both the obscure and the grand that went into the making of a city. The seven ages have both their heroes and their villains. Philippe Auguste, in the course of his reign (1180-1222), is recognised as the first true lover and adorner of Paris - the Capetian king who at the battle of Bouvines saw off the Plantaganet English - and who established the security of France by being, as contemporaries said admiringly, as cunning as a fox. The equally adroit Henri IV, who solved the religious quarrels of the 16th century by cynical conversion to Catholicism, is credited with both intelligence and a grand vision of how to embellish Paris, an ambition whose most eloquent testament was the Place Royale (today's Place des Vosges - so named by Napoleon because of that departement's good record in raising revenue). Louis XIV is seen as mostly a very bad thing. After moving to Versailles he only visited Paris infrequently, which is a sign of a lack of taste in any human being. But the court's removal was also a long-term disaster for the monarchy as it established a distance both geographic and political between itself and the city of Paris. This book complements Hilaire Belloc's Paris (published in 1900, not 1920 as the bibliography claims). Horne's Anglo-Saxon judiciousness - twinned with Belloc's Latin vigour - are now the two essential tools for the English speaker on the Paris streets who wishes to hear the ghosts speak. Hywel Williams's Chronology of World History is published by Cassell next year. To order The Seven Ages of Paris for pounds 22 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-paris.1 [Alistair Horne] excels on the 19th and 20th centuries and has made marvellous use of the printed sources and histories, such as Jules Michelet's 17-volume history of France, Alphonse Aulard's 1912 study of the Paris of the first empire and Maurice Druon's six volumes on the high middle ages, as well as of French historiography. He is, in the best sense of the word, an amateur of Paris past and present - informed, reliable, enthusiastic, too knowledgeable to be the Anglophone Francophile, but also too charitable to be untouched by " la condition Parisienne ". He knows where the Parisian bodies are buried and he also knows the cost, in human terms, of the lives of both the obscure and the grand that went into the making of a city. The seven ages have both their heroes and their villains. Philippe Auguste, in the course of his reign (1180-1222), is recognised as the first true lover and adorner of Paris - the Capetian king who at the battle of Bouvines saw off the Plantaganet English - and who established the security of France by being, as contemporaries said admiringly, as cunning as a fox. The equally adroit Henri IV, who solved the religious quarrels of the 16th century by cynical conversion to Catholicism, is credited with both intelligence and a grand vision of how to embellish Paris, an ambition whose most eloquent testament was the Place Royale (today's Place des Vosges - so named by Napoleon because of that departement's good record in raising revenue). Louis XIV is seen as mostly a very bad thing. After moving to Versailles he only visited Paris infrequently, which is a sign of a lack of taste in any human being. But the court's removal was also a long-term disaster for the monarchy as it established a distance both geographic and political between itself and the city of Paris. - Hywel Williams.
Kirkus Review
A fittingly illuminating history of la ville lumiere and of the great men and women who have passed beneath the gates of the French capital. English historian and biographer Horne (A Bundle from Britain, 1994, etc.) obviously prefers Paris--which, in a well-worn turn, he conceives of as being "fundamentally a woman"--to his native "dear, sedate old London town," and this portrait bears all the marks of his affection for the cold, rainy, and notoriously snooty metropolis. Horne opens with a view of Paris as it was in its early days as the Roman colony of Lutetia, then confined to an island in the middle of the Seine, whose water, the emperor Julian wrote, "is pleasant to drink, for it is very pure and agreeable to the eye"; rough-and-tumble in Roman times, it was scarcely more civilized when the Merovingian king Clovis, having murdered most of his family--"they were not gentle or nice people," Horne writes understatedly, "these Frankish forebears of the modern-day Parisian"--founded his capital there fifteen hundred years ago. Few of the characters in Horne's narrative qualify as gentle or nice, and his pages are full of bloody episodes that illustrate the city of light's darker side: the slaughter of its Jews in the 14th century, and again in the 20th; the deaths of some 25,000 Parisians during the 1871 Commune, "larger by far . . . than the bloodletting of the Terror of 1793"; episodes of ethnic turmoil today. Still, Horne's take on Paris past and present is as much celebratory as cautionary. Altogether, his approach is a tad on the old-fashioned side, preferring to highlight the mighty deeds of the noble and highborn to the daily life of the masses, fodder for generations of annalistes. That said, Horne does a commendable job of distilling an impressive amount of material in an eminently readable narrative that shows just how important Paris is to the history of the West, and indeed the world. A lively primer of Parisian history, just the right companion for travelers to the city seeking a deeper understanding of the view before them.
Library Journal Review
Noted historian Horne took 25 years to craft this history of Paris, from the 12th century to the present. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Age One Philippe Auguste 1180-1314 Sunday at Bouvines I only wish this pile of stones could be silver, gold or diamonds . . . the more precious the materials of this castle, the greater pleasure I will have in possessing it when it falls into my hands. Prince Philippe (later King Philippe Auguste), aged nine, in 1174 The Build-Up Some important battles in history have a surreptitious way of crystallizing what has gone before, as well as putting down a kind of marker for what is about to occur. They can also affect the pattern of events far beyond the battlefield itself. It is perhaps what makes historians call them "decisive." Bouvines, fought on 27 July 1214, was one of those. It was won by France against a powerful coalition of foes headed by King John of England, on a Sunday. This in itself was unusual, for in those days of religious correctness knights and kings on the whole observed the sabbath as far as battle was concerned. Bouvines was, moreover, to set the future shape not only of France but of Britain, too-and it would be fundamental to the development of the capital city Paris was to become. Some fifteen kilometres equidistant from the present-day cities of Tournai (in Belgium) and France's Lille, Bouvines lies in soggy Flanders, site of the terrible battlefields where the destiny of France was to be played out exactly seven centuries later, 200 kilometres north-east of Paris. When France's King Philippe Auguste arrived on the throne in 1180,* aged fifteen, he inherited a tiny state, a fraction the size of Plantagenet England and its European dependencies, land-locked and surrounded by powerful rivals. How then did he come to find himself fighting-and winning-such a key battle in so unpromising a corner of Europe? The then King of England, Henry II, was an imposing, authoritarian ruler who, at least in the early stages of his reign, seemed to have everything going for him. His French father, the Plantagenet Duc d'Anjou, brought him the rich territories of Anjou and Normandy; and he acquired England through his marriage to the unhappy Matilda, heiress to William the Conqueror's son Henry I. Between Matilda and her cousin King Stephen, England had been reduced to anarchy and, by the time Henry Plantagenet came to the throne in 1154 at the age of twenty-one, was only too ready for the smack of strong rule. In short order, Henry found himself reigning unchallenged from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, his short-lived Angevin Empire looming over the diminutive plot that was Louis VII's France. With conspicuous cunning, Henry set about the encirclement of that plot by a network of alliances, and at times during his reign it looked as if the best the Capetians could expect would be to become vassals of the Angevin Empire controlled from Westminster and Rouen. Yet the murder in 1170 of Archbishop Thomas à Becket-apparently invoked if not actually ordered by the King-turned things upside down. The "turbulent priest" became an instant international martyr, and a saint. Henry could wear a horsehair shirt and have himself flogged in Avranches Cathedral by way of atonement, yet his image, and his power, would never quite recover from this particular bloodstain. Louis, France and Paris were saved. Storing up trouble for himself and the Angevin Empire, the increasingly unpopular Henry now carried out a Lear-like break-up of his territories between his sons, Henry the Young (aged fifteen in 1170), Richard (the future Coeur de Lion, aged twelve) and Geoffrey (eleven). John, born only in 1167, was left out of the carve-up-thus to be known henceforth in France as "Jean-Sans-Terre." As Lear discovered, this was to prove folly in the extreme. Prince Henry, though already crowned in anticipation in 1170 and strategically married to the daughter of Louis VII, was treated by his father-in-law as if he were already king, but in fact was never to succeed-dying in 1183. In 1173, a general insurrection, the product of widespread popular discontent, broke out against Henry. With his customary vigour, however, over a period of two years he crushed one by one all the coalitions mounted against him. Meanwhile in 1176 the worst flood of the Seine in memory swept away both bridges, carried off mills, houses and livestock on the crumbling banks, and came close to engulfing the whole city. Attempting a form of flood control untried in modern times, Louis and his entire court and every undrowned monk and priest, headed by the Bishop of Paris, went in procession to the edge of the swirling waters. Holding aloft a nail from the True Cross, the Bishop prayed: "In this song of the Holy Passion, may the waters return to their bed and this miserable people be protected!" The rain stopped, and the waters ebbed just in time. The uprising of 1173 had demonstrated the fundamental Achilles' heel of Henry's empire-the divisiveness of his quarrelsome sons, greedy for territory and glory. Their future adversary Philippe, heir to the ageing Louis, saw it. Aged only nine, standing before Henry's seemingly unassailable fortress at Gisors, and showing his future mettle, he is said to have remarked to his entourage, "I only wish this pile of stones could be silver, gold or diamonds . . . the more precious the materials of this castle, the greater pleasure I will have in possessing it when it falls into my hands." He would have to wait the best part of a generation. In 1180 Louis VII died, and Philippe Auguste succeeded him, aged only fifteen. As he grew into the job, Philippe earned a reputation for being rusé comme un renard (cunning as a fox). The only existing contemporary pen-portrait of him describes him as: a handsome, strapping fellow, bald but with a cheerful face of ruddy complexion, and a temperament much inclined towards good-living, wine and women. He was generous to his friends, stingy towards those who displeased him, well versed in the art of stratagem, orthodox in belief, prudent and stubborn in his resolves. He made judgements with great speed and exactitude. He was keen to seek the counsel of intelligent men of humble birth, notably Brother Guérin, Bishop of Senlis, and Barthélemy de Roye, and he restricted his advisers at court to a very small circle. He was to give the French monarchy (in the words of the historian André Maurois) "the three instruments of rule which it lacked: tractable officials, money and soldiers." He was also to be one of the first true lovers of the city of Paris. France was soon at war again. By the facts of life of the twelfth century, this signified skirmishes interrupted by frequent truces, but without any grand battle-until Bouvines in 1214. By the fifth year of his reign, through a combination of skilful campaigning in Picardy and the dowry of his first queen, Isabelle of Hainault, the young Philippe had managed to expand his kingdom substantially northwards and southwards, including the key city of Amiens. Almost immediately, he found himself at war with the mighty Henry. It seemed like David taking on Goliath, but Philippe was cunning in his strategy of isolating the old King by forming alliances with his sons, first Geoffrey, then Richard (Prince Henry having died barely three years after his father-in-law Louis)-and also with Barbarossa, the German Emperor. Henry, stricken by rheumatism and a painful fistula, was already old beyond his years. At the beginning of 1188, Philippe, having split the Angevin Empire and doubled his forces through his alliance with Richard, was poised to move into Henry's Normandy. Then suddenly news came from the Middle East that the Saracen, Saladin, had taken Jerusalem and was threatening Antioch. The Pope, Clement III, commanded the Christian kings to cease fighting each other and embark on a fresh crusade (the Third). But before they could set out, Henry had died, on 7 July 1189, in the chapel of his French château of Chinon, to be buried in his Abbey of Fontevrault. On the 20th, Richard was crowned duke of Normandy in Rouen, and king of England in London on 3 September. He and Philippe Auguste then departed, as allies and close friends, for the Holy Land. Despite the romanticized portrait of him given in British Victorian history books, Richard Coeur de Lion was something of a brute. He was arrogant and quarrelsome, with a habit of sowing hatred and rancour around him. At home (which he rashly left in the treacherous and incompetent hands of his brother, Jean-Sans-Terre) he was accepted as a neglectful, popular absentee ruler, as befitting the repute of a knight errant. In contrast, Philippe left his kingdom well organized and in good hands, as set down in a famous document, the Testament of 1190. Among other things, this provided for the construction of a continuous fortified wall or enceinte girdling Paris, making her impregnable to any enemy assailant for the first time in her history. It was just as well, because he and his friend Richard (their intimacy had evidently extended, in the innocent way of the Middle Ages, to sharing a bed in Paris) were soon to become the most bitter enemies. Reaching Genoa together, the two leaders first fell out over the number of ships each was to provide for crossing the Mediterranean. In Sicily there were English charges of bad faith against Philippe, accused of conniving in the destruction of Richard's army. Finally arriving in the Holy Land, the two kings managed to tip the balance in the terrible Siege of Acre, already under attack for two years. But by the time of its capitulation in July 1191, intrigues plus the stresses of a grim campaign had seriously undermined the Anglo-French entente. To the enduring fury of Richard, Philippe now decided to break off from the Third Crusade and head for home. The Count of Flanders had died during the Siege, and Philippe had his eyes on the Count's possessions in Artois and Vermandois. Richard, on the other hand, in the story so well known to generations of English schoolchildren, during his journey home fell foul of the German Emperor Henry VI, who kept him locked up for many long months in the Danube fortress of Dürrenstein, pending payment of ransom. Unfounded rumours ran round Paris that Richard had tried to poison Philippe at Acre, and even to have him assassinated in his own capital on his return. Rashly, and acting in deplorably bad faith with Richard's evil brother John, Philippe endeavoured to bribe the Emperor with a substantial sum to continue to keep Richard under lock and key. The Emperor Henry thoughtfully revealed all to Richard, who finally reached London in March 1194. Immediately he launched a fresh war against his former friend. It was to last five years, with a continuity and intensity rare in the twelfth century. Much of the English King's fighting on French soil was carried out by a particularly brutal mercenary, Mercadier, who moved with utmost speed and ruthlessness from one province to another. No quarter was given, with both sides issuing orders to blind or drown prisoners-of-war. Predictably, John switched sides as soon as his brother set foot in Normandy and surrendered Evreux, having first massacred all his French allies there. On 3 July 1194, Philippe Auguste suffered his most humiliating defeat, at Fréteval in the Vendôme, losing his baggage train, his treasury and the national archives. To bottle Philippe up in Paris and to prevent him ever again threatening Normandy, Richard constructed an unassailable fortress at Château Gaillard on a key bend in the Seine, still a most imposing castle commanding the approaches to Paris. Defeat followed defeat for Philippe. Swayed by Richard's superior diplomatic skill, the Emperor Henry also joined in against Philippe, announcing his intention of annexing the right bank of the Rhône. By the end of 1198, it looked as if France would be sliced up once again and become a fiefdom of either Richard or the Emperor. Once again, intervention from afar saved the day. After news had come from Spain that the Moors were threatening a new invasion, the new Pope, Innocent III, applied irresistible pressure to the combatants to reach a truce. The results were extremely tough on Philippe, obliging him to forfeit all of Normandy save the citadel of Gisors-on which as a nine-year-old he had first set eyes-and with it he in effect lost all the fruits of his campaigning over the previous ten years. Had he died at this point, he would have been remembered with scorn as a historical nobody, and it seemed it would be only a matter of time before Richard renewed the war, with a final drive on Paris. Then the two sides' fortunes were abruptly reversed. While besieging a rebel fortress in Limousin with the dread Mercadier on 26 March 1199, Richard was wounded in the left shoulder by a bolt from a crossbow. Gangrene set in, and the warrior-king soon died. All the defenders of the besieged city were hanged, but-just before he died-Richard with a last chivalrous gesture requested that his assailant be spared and given a sum of money. The moment he was dead, however, Mercadier had the sharpshooter flayed alive and impaled. "King Richard is dead, and a thousand years have passed since there died a man whose loss was so great," sang the troubadours. In Paris, Philippe Auguste no doubt heaved a sigh of relief. Now there would be only weak, evil and hated Jean-Sans-Terre to deal with. the papal role All through Capetian France's struggles against the Plantagenets, Louis VII and his son had to contend with a powerful, and often unpredictable, player on the sidelines. Stalin's sneering question to Churchill during the Second World War-"How many divisions has the Pope?"-would have been answered in the twelfth century with "a great many." At the wave of the papal crucifix, or with the despatch of a legate, each pope could summon up armies and nations to bring pressure to bear on miscreant rulers. In the Middle Ages, thoughts of death and eternal damnation were uppermost in all people's minds. Upon the spiritual state of grace at the moment of death depended happiness, or misery, for the whole of eternity. Though by the later Middle Ages views on the afterlife had lost some of their certainty, in the twelfth century notions of Purgatory were little considered; it was a straight choice between the Bosom of Abraham and the Cauldron of Hell. Such was the dread of eternal damnation, such the dread of excommunication or an "interdict" upon a whole nation, that the mere threat could reverse policies or even overturn thrones. Perhaps never again would the power and influence of the Pope be greater. Excerpted from Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. ix |
| Preface | p. xiii |
| A Note on Money | p. xvii |
| Introduction: from Caesar to Abelard | p. 1 |
| Age 1 1180-1314: Philippe Auguste | |
| 1. Sunday at Bouvines | p. 17 |
| 2. Capital City | p. 28 |
| 3. The Templars' Curse | p. 42 |
| Age 2 1314-1643: Henri IV | |
| 4. Besieged | p. 57 |
| 5. "Worth a Mass" | p. 75 |
| 6. Regicide, Regent and Richelieu | p. 88 |
| Age 3 1643-1795: Louis XIV | |
| 7. The Move to Versailles | p. 105 |
| 8. A Building Boom | p. 119 |
| 9. Death of the Ancien Regime | p. 135 |
| Age 4 1795-1815: Napoleon | |
| 10. Empire and Reform | p. 159 |
| 11. "The Most Beautiful City That Could Ever Exist" | p. 173 |
| 12. Downfall of an Empire | p. 196 |
| Age 5 1815-1871: The Commune | |
| 13. Constitutional Monarchy and Revolt | p. 211 |
| 14. The Second Empire | p. 230 |
| 15. L'Annee Terrible | p. 251 |
| Age 6 1871-1940: The Treaty of Versailles | |
| 16. Belle Epoque | p. 279 |
| 17. The Great War | p. 303 |
| 18. The Phoney Peace | p. 323 |
| Age 7 1940-1969: De Gaulle | |
| 19. The Occupation | p. 353 |
| 20. "I Was France" | p. 375 |
| 21. Les Jours de Mai | p. 402 |
| Epilogue: Death in Paris--the Pere Lachaise Cemetery | p. 413 |
| Notes | p. 423 |
| Bibliography | p. 428 |
| Index | p. 437 |
