in 1412 and 1413; but so violent were their excesses that the most timid rose in revolt, and the decimated bourgeoisie managed by a bold stroke to recover possession of the town. The Armagnacs again entered Paris, but their intrigues with England and their tyranny rendered them odious in their turn; the Burgundians were recalled in 1418, and returned with Caboche and a formidable band of pillagers and assassins. Perrinet Leclerc, son of a bourgeois guard, secretly opened the gates to them one night in May. The king resided in the Hôtel St Paul, an unconscious spectator of those savage scenes which the princes Louis and John, successively dauphins, were helpless to prevent.
The third dauphin, Charles, afterwards Charles VII., managed to put an end to the civil war, but it was by a crime as base as it was impolitic—the assassination of John the Fearless on the bridge of Montereau in 1419. Next year a treaty, from the ignominy of which Paris happily escaped, gave a daughter of Charles VI. to Henry V. of England, and along with her, in spite of the Salic law, the crown of France. The king of England made his entry into Paris in December 1420, and was there received with a solemnity which ill concealed the misery and real consternation of the poor people crushed by fifteen years of murders, pillage and famine. Charles VI. remained almost abandoned at the Hôtel St Paul, where he died in 1422, whilst his son-in-law went to hold a brilliant court at the Louvre and Vincennes. Henry V. of England also died in 1422. His son Henry VI., then one year old, came to Paris nine years later to be crowned at Notre Dame, and the city continued under the government of the duke of Bedford till his death in 1435.
The English rule was a mild one, but it was not signalized by the execution of any of those works of utility or ornament so characteristic of the kings of France. The choir of St Severin, however, shows a style of architecture peculiarly English, and Sauval relates that the duke of Bedford erected in the Louvre a fine gallery decorated with paintings. Without assuming the mission of delivering Paris, Joan of Arc, remaining with Charles VII. after his coronation at Reims, led him towards the capital; but the badly conducted and abortive enterprise almost proved fatal to the Maid of Orleans, who was severely wounded at the assault of the gate of St Honoré on the 8th of September 1429. The siege having been raised, Charles awaited the invitation of the Parisians themselves upon the defection of the Burgundians and the surrender of St Denis. The St Jacques gate was opened by the citizens of the guard to the constable de Richemont[1] on the 13th of April 1436; but the solemn entry of the king did not take place till November of the following year; subsequently occupied by his various expeditions or attracted by his residences in Berry or Touraine, he spent but little time in Paris, where he retired either to the Hôtel St Paul or to a neighbouring palace, Les Tournelles, which had been acquired by his father.
Louis XI. made equal use of St Paul and Les Tournelles, but towards the close of his life he immured himself at Plessis-les-Tours. It was in his reign, in 1469, that the first French printing-press was set up in the Sorbonne. Charles VIII. scarcely left Plessis-les-Tours and Amboise except to go to Italy; Louis XII. alternated between the castle at Blois and the palace of Les Tournelles, where he died on the 1st of January 1515.
Francis I. lived at Chambord, at Fontainebleau, at St Germain, and at Villers-Cotterets; but he proposed to form at Paris a residence in keeping with the taste of the Renaissance. Paris had remained for more than thirty years almost a stranger to the artistic movement begun between 1498 and 1500, after the Italian expedition. Previous to 1533, the date of the commencement of the Hôtel de Ville and the church of St Eustache, Paris did not possess, apart from the “Court of Accounts,” any important building in the new style. Between 1527 and 1540 Francis I. demolished the old Louvre, and in 1541 Pierre Lescot began a new palace four times as large, which was not finished till the reign of Louis XIV. The buildings were not sufficiently advanced under Henry II. to allow of his leaving Les Tournelles, where in 1559 he died from a wound received at a tournament. His widow, Catherine de’ Medici, immediately caused this palace to be demolished, and sent her three sons—Francis II., Charles IX. and Henry III.—to the unfinished Louvre. Outside the line of the fortifications she laid the foundations of the Château des Tuileries as a residence for herself.
Of the three brothers, it was Charles IX. who resided most at the Louvre; it was there that in 1572 he signed the order for the massacre of St Bartholomew. Henry III. remained for the most part at Blois, and hardly came to Paris except to be witness of the power of his enemies, the Guises.
Taking advantage of the absence of the kings, the League had made Paris a centre of opposition. The municipal militia were restored and reorganized; each of the 16 quarters or arrondissements had to elect a deputy for the central council, which became the council, or rather faction, of The Sixteen, and for four years, from 1587 to 1591, held the city under a yoke of iron. Henry III., having come to the Louvre in 1588, unwillingly received there the duke of Guise, and while endeavouring to take measures for his own protection provoked a riot known as the Day of the Barricades (May 12). It was with difficulty that he escaped from his palace, which at that time had no communication with the country, and which Henry IV. afterwards proposed to unite with the Tuileries in order to provide a sure means of escape in case of need.
When, after the murder of the duke of Guise at Blois at the close of 1588, Henry III. desired to return to Paris, he was not yet master of the city, and was obliged to besiege it in concert with his presumptive heir, the king of Navarre. The operations were suddenly interrupted on the 1st of August 1589, by the assassination of the king, and Henry IV. carried his arms elsewhere. He returned with his victorious forces in 1590. This second siege lasted more than four years, and was marked by terrible suffering, produced by famine and the tyranny of The Sixteen, who were supported by the intrigues of the king of Spain and the violent harangues of the preachers. Even the conversion of the king did not allay the spirit of fanaticism, for the king’s sincerity was suspected, and the words (which history, however, fails to substantiate), “Paris is surely worth a mass,” were attributed to him. But after the coronation of the king at Chartres the commonalty of Paris, weary of intriguing with strangers and Leaguers, gave such decided expression to its feelings that those of its leaders who had kept aloof, or broken off from the faction of The Sixteen attached themselves to the parlement, which had already evaded the ambitious designs of the king of Spain; and after various negotiations the provost of the merchants, L’Huillier, offered the keys of the city to Henry IV. on the 22nd of March 1594. The king met no resistance except on the part of a company of German landsknechts, which was cut in pieces, and the students of the university, who, steeped in the doctrines of the League, tried to hold their quarter against the royal troops, but were dispersed. The Spanish soldiers who had remained in the town decamped next day.
Henry IV., who carried on the building of the Louvre, was the last monarch who occupied it as a regular residence. Attempts on his life were made from time to time, and at last, on the 14th of May 1610, he fell under Ravaillac’s knife near the market-house in Rue de la Ferronnerie.
Whether royalty gave it the benefit of its presence or not, Paris continued all the same to increase in political importance and in population. Here is the picture of the city presented about 1560 by Michel de Castelnau, one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the 16th century:—
“Paris is the capital of all the kingdom, and one of the most famous in the world, as well for the splendour of its parlement (which is an illustrious company of thirty judges attended by three hundred advocates and more, who have reputation in all Christendom of being the best seen in human laws and acquainted with justice) as for its faculty of theology and for the other tongues and sciences
- ↑ Arthur, earl of Richmond, afterwards Arthur III. (q.v.), duke of Brittany.
