Download PDF | Simone Roux, Paris in the Middle Ages, trans. Jo Ann McNamara, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
280 Pages
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
Paris 1s AS old as European history can recall. Caesar occupied the settlement of the Gallic tribe called the Parisii and the Romans called it Lutetia. The Franks reverted to the tribal name, perhaps hoping that a linguistic coincidence would somehow reinforce their claim to a Trojan origin. As Simone Roux states in her original introduction to the French edition of this volume, the city could easily serve as a focal point for a history of France as it grew and flourished. Down the centuries, the city and its people wink in and out of the pages of chronicles, romances, letters, records of all sorts, giving historians glimpses of its people but little insight into their daily lives. Roman soldiers in the camp at Lutetia emerge to proclaim Julian the Apostate emperor in 360.
A century later, the starving people of the Gallo-Roman city can be glimpsed carrying loaves of bread baked from the flour that their resident saint, Genovefa, had carried through a tightening Frankish blockade. Repeatedly through the turbulent history of the Merovingian dynasty, Parisians crowd into the churches for asylum or to give thanks for royal victories. The administrators of the wealthy Carolingian abbey of Saint-Germain-desPrés reveal the toiling peasants on their farms. In the ninth century, the people of Paris supported their Count Eudes Capet against a Viking siege by pouring flaming oil and wax, boiling water, and cold stones down upon their attackers. And when the city had become the capital of the Capet dynasty’s burgeoning kingdom of France, students and prostitutes passed one another on the staircases of the houses where the early scholars of the Latin quarter gave their lectures.
Roux rightly observes that these vivid glimpses do not make up a serious history either of the city or the people who dwelt there. At best, they ‘are extras playing against a backdrop for the dramas of warriors and kings. Without written sources to document their lives, the Parisians who filled those streets and occupied those buildings became a people without history. What little purchase they may have had upon the sands of time vanished when the carts containing the royal archives were accidentally burned at the battle of Bouvines in 1214. Ironically, however, the same battle brought a large part of the land that was to make up modern France into Capetian hands. In the wake of that success, Paris was to become one of the preeminent cities of Europe, adorned with stately edifices that we still admire, filling with immigrants and visitors from far and wide. Roux’s history of the city’s life begins when it acquired its characteristic lineaments, nestled securely within the walls that Philip Augustus built and that his people affectionately dubbed the enceinte, the womb of the city. By the middle of the thirteenth century, its farmland and vineyards were rapidly being transformed into a coherent city articulated by a network of streets and bridges, a magnet for ambitious peasants who sought a better destiny as citizens of a bustling capital.
The book before us aims to chronicle the lives of these Parisians as active players over the course of a dozen generations. In the prosperous era of Saint Louis IX, the crusading king, the city took the lead in creating the culture and society we now recognize as “medieval.” The royal court attracted nobles and financiers who generated the funds for the city’s physical adornment. Paris was headquarters of the military order of Knights Templar, who spearheaded the military expeditions that brought the king and his warriors to the Holy Land and, almost inadvertently, introduced many of the monetary innovations that formed a base for the capitalist economy. Its splendid churches, notably the Cathedral of Notre Dame, embodied the new architectural style that art historians would later dub “Gothic.” The University of Paris pioneered new “scholastic” learning that drew students from all the nations of Europe to settle on the city’s left bank. Tradesmen and artisans flocked to supply this population with a dazzling array of goods from illuminated manuscripts to peacock feathered hats. Parisian manners and Parisian style acquired that flair and distinction that have continued to mark them down to our own times.
For all its commonplace routine, daily life in medieval Paris was not without history. The prosperous and well-ordered city of Philip the Fair gave way to a beleaguered and blighted urban scene between the mid-fourteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries, The initial ravages of the Black Death and the early defeats in the Hundred Years War had disastrous impacts on the people of the city. The relief offered in the prosperous reign of Charles V was followed by renewed plague and warfare, hostilities that extended also to the clergy, wracked by the Great Schism when a contested papacy echoed the political divisions within France. Paris was in the center of the power struggles between the dukes of Orléans and Burgundy. The assassinations and exiles of great men rebounded on their humbler followers and the ordinary citizens who depended on the aristocracy as customers and patrons. The very buildings of the city itself suffered decay. People reduced to penury squatted in deserted houses or haunted the streets. Parisians resisted exploitation under the leadership of their mayor, Etienne Marcel, and suffered the violence that accompanied his fall. They rejoiced in the restoration of the monarchy under Charles VII with the support of Joan of Arc. Roux’s account ends in the turbulent, vital city of Louis XI rendered immortal to generations of admirers by the modern novelist Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
Roux’s remarkable book, however, firmly eschews the romantic and the fictional in its composition. Even the religious life so intrinsic to the medieval experience is given short shrift in her account, so anxious is she not to pander to a modern tendency to see this period as something alien and strange. From beginning to end, she insists on presenting a Paris inhabited by ordinary people with the same concerns for their physical welfare and prosperity as any modern urban population. Hers is a concrete, palpable city whose graceful buildings had to be paid for and whose winding streets had to be cleaned of offal and cleared of pigs.
The people who filled those streets are no less palpable. Every individual cited in the volume has left at least one imprint on the documentary legacy of late medieval Paris. Indeed, Roux is scrupulous in noting the difficulties of chasing medieval names from one citation to another as they shift in the perceptions of recorders in an age where the naming system had not yet been standardized. She has lent no space to literary sources; no fictional or composite characters appear. No examples of common habits have been borrowed from other cities on the plausible grounds that they must have been followed in Paris as well. Even descriptions of food or clothing closely follow the documented preferences of Parisians of this period. Unique anecdotes from university, monastic or hagiographic records are eschewed in favor of documents of practice.
By happy accident, Paris enjoys several unique sources from which an imaginative historian can build up a picture of its vanished life. Roux makes good use of the illuminations in surviving books like the 7rés Riches Heures and draws extensively from the housekeeping manual written by an anonymous author known as Le Mesnagier de Paris. More consistently, however, the historical shape of the Parisian population was defined by royal authority as surely as its geography was determined by the king’s walls. Roux has chosen to rely on those rich deposits of evidence left by a growing bureaucracy anxious to replace agricultural space with urban space, to order the streets and name the houses, to classify tax payers and regulate workers, to establish criminal records. In brief, the city that emerges from Roux’s research is the king’s city despite the exclusion of court gossip and royal adventures. Her history is a narrative of the ruler and his subjects, the imposition of order and the efforts of the population to escape or profit from it. She has recaptured a daily life viewed from the Chatelet, the center of royal government.
The reader can never escape the tyranny of the recorder. What we know about these Parisians is very largely what the king’s officials wanted to know about them. Individuals swim up out of the shadows that surround their private lives only to pay their taxes or fines for some misdemeanor or to suffer a penalty for disturbing the king’s peace. The law-abiding poor are lost to these records as are the dependents of the tax-paying rich. Occasionally, some people succeeded in imposing their own perceptions on the record, as in the craft regulations submitted to the provost of Paris for inclusion in the Livre des métiers. But those who chose not to submit voluntarily to royal surveillance lost their opportunity for documentary immortality. No author is more uncompromising than Roux in recognizing the severe limits of the official gaze. She notes repeatedly the gaps and voids in history’s record of the full lives that were lived behind closed doors or even in the broad glare of the sunlit streets when the recorder’s pen was still.
The sources that remain tend to reveal a vertical city, a city of hierarchies. The entwined nature of diverse power structures is readily elicited from the documents at hand and Roux is at her best in tracing their interrelationships: the influence of financial power on political authority, the administrative control that restrained and channeled commercial and productive activity, the intellectual and spiritual authority of the church in opposition to the temptations of the material world. Rising families deployed their members across all three bases. Competing bodies of sources vividly illustrate the interplay of mutual interests and on-going conflicts that generated a historical record. Indeed, one may venture to remark that history is a product of the exercise of power and particularly that the written record is an instrument of power, proclaiming who owes what to whom. Even in the Limbourg brothers’ glowing illuminations, peasants exist only to till their lords’ fields, neatly dressed and pleasing to the noble reader's eye. Even in the intimacy of the private house, the life we see is life as the elderly husband of a young bride wished it to be. Our view of the workshop is the view of the employer who laid out the rules for his workmen and -women.
No power is so pervasive as the power of property. In surveying this work, the reader can hardly escape its grasp. The ownership of real estate defines the city, its exploitation dictates the ongoing changes in its physical fabric as houses and shops were built up to generate revenue for the holders of deeds, who in turn would be called to pay taxes on the new buildings. Goods of all sorts were produced to furnish the ever larger houses and adorn and amuse their inhabitants. Prisons were built to house the criminals who interrupted the orderly exchange of property. It is profoundly sobering to reflect that people in historical records often have no existence at all except in their relationship to property. The conscientious historian must all too often admit that the joys and sorrows of her subjects are beyond her grasp while their debts and profits are often all too plain.
Roux is exceptionally sensitive to the lacunae in her information and warns us at every turn that her picture can achieve little more than to light up isolated spots in the darkened panorama of life in the city of the past. She is also an exceptionally ingenious interpreter of the limited sources available to her. This care is particularly rewarding in her attempts to sketch out the possibilities of a horizontal city. Without marriage or birth records, she teases out kinship ties where she can among the tax lists and deeds of sale. Social and professional networks are brought to light from incidental references and from craft regulations. She has at least recovered some of the bare outlines of a society of voluntary relationships that served to lighten the burdens of hierarchical authority and bring pleasure into the lives of hardworking men and women. She has definitively revealed a more chaotic world than we are accustomed to imagine. For example, the records she has assembled of who actually occupied these old streets, seem to belie the old belief that workers were organized in specified quarters. They apparently lived and worked where space was available to them just as people do now.
In some instances she has been able to chart social changes over time. A largely agricultural, servile population evolves into a body of relatively free citizens. In turn, they sort themselves by class and gender lines. For example, the decline in women’s employment opportunities that many recent historians have suspected seems to be confirmed by Parisian hearth tax records. The architectural record, slim as it is, indicates that over the course of Roux’s chosen centuries, people developed a most intense sense of individual privacy, evidenced by the proliferation of rooms within their dwellings and the grow- ing habit of designating particular rooms for particular purposes. Again, Roux is highly attentive to the specificity of such claims. Clearly, property once again has intervened to affect the trends of the emotions. All people may have desired heightened individuation and more dramatic displays of their personal tastes, but only the wealthy could realize those goals in their physical contexts and only they could record their ambitions.
Roux’s purpose, in any case, was not to attempt a psychological history, which would, of necessity, involve entering into individual minds rather than their social context. Her vision of daily life is a collective one, but I venture to predict that no one who reads this colorful and detailed book will again engage with individuals who lived in late medieval Paris without a heightened awareness of the people who jostled them in the streets, supplied their daily necessities, and catered to their exotic whims.
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK AIMS to construct a history of Parisian women and men during the last three medieval centuries. Witnesses have long attempted to describe this dazzling city and to relate its history. In every century, they have viewed the capital from a different angle and enriched the long list of books devoted to it. Indeed, with so much already written, this enterprise might well be judged useless, but I hope to prove in a few words that this is not so.
The present inquiry works within more modest limits than did some older works on Paris. In the Middle Ages themselves, historians felt bound to go back to the city’s fabulous origins, encompassing the whole history of the kingdom and its people. They often incorporated their tale of Paris into the broad sweeps of time and space where history’s prestige and grandeur lay. In 1371, Raoul de Presles inserted a brief history of Paris into a French translation of Saint Augustine’s City of God.' Fourteenth-century writers claimed a Trojan origin for the city, based on the Roman military camp there called Lutetia. Moreover, as “Paris” (for the Gallic tribe called Parisi) replaced Lutetia as the city’s name, they linked it with willful duplicity to Paris, the seducer of Helen of Troy. Thus they endowed the city with an antiquity as glorious as befitted the capital’s high rank, and the city’s legendary history was confounded with that of the entire kingdom in the mists of this distant past. It goes without saying that this perspective takes us very far indeed from the daily life of shopkeepers and artisans.
In the sixteenth century, Gilles Corrozet emancipated the capital’s history from these pretentious wrappings and gave the landmarks of his contemporary city a larger place.? His La Fleur des Antiquités, a combined history and guide, went through ten editions and expansions between 1532 and 1555, undeniable proof of its smashing success. After that, works on Paris multiplied and diversified. Fascinating as it would be to pursue the historiography of Paris, we only need to illustrate a few preliminary reflections as we seek out a history that has been generally disdained or forgotten.
Paris is a political capital where the great dramas of national history were written, and they engrossed the attention of contemporary witnesses and later historians. The city itself—its grand monuments as well as its streets and ordinary houses—was often treated as no more than a backdrop. The lives of most of its inhabitants were reduced to furtive allusions. The global drama left Parisians no more than a vague role as extras absorbed into the background. Whether they lived in the thirteenth or the sixteenth century, they were mentioned only in passing, as though nothing ever changed among them. In defense of the capital’s medieval historians, we must admit that banal, everyday matters are far less well documented than the deeds and wars of sovereigns. It is hard to spot new things as they happened among the population, but we will find at least a few trends in the course of our inquiry.
This study is restricted to the last three centuries of the medieval period. It would not be impossible to extend our history earlier than the thirteenth century, but that would require a different focus.* We would have to deal with documentation treating the city in a very secondary way. Our history would become more global, entwined with the Capetian rise to power, the adaptation of feudalism to this burgeoning force, and the history of ancient monasteries and later religious establishments. We could make Paris the focal point for the general flowering of the West that began at the end of the tenth century and see our city evolve into the beautiful capital of Philip Augustus’ kingdom. But it is only at that moment that the city’s own history becomes possible, as sources begin recording the development of its space and its buildings, testifying to the swelling of its population.
It is not so clear that we should stop with the end of the fifteenth century. All things considered, traditional historical divisions are not particularly valid for urban history. Making the cut at the beginning of modern times is simply a convenient response to the principle that “one who embraces too much is badly strained.” The three centuries we have chosen are a comfortable length, enjoy a certain unity, and constitute, without doubt, a medieval foundation for Parisian urban history. Three centuries cover a dozen generations, a history long enough to grasp the evolutions and mutations that reveal how an epoch lived and functioned.
Three different organizational patterns defined medieval Paris and her people, and this study is divided accordingly.
Part One examines the overall Parisian space, encircled by the walls of the enceinte and organized by the diverse authorities who governed it. We trace its more detailed aspects in the city streets, and seek to understand how this space was peopled, whence Parisians came, and how they were transformed into city dwellers who sometimes thought of themselves as a people superior to all others.
Part Two looks at the ruling elements of medieval society in three hierarchies that checked, complemented, and sometimes overlapped one another. The big city was first of all a place where fortune’s opportunities could best be exploited effectively, structuring a hierarchy of money and wealth. Second, all sorts of political authorities had agents, officers, delegates, and representatives in Paris. They ranked social status in degrees of honor and success in the milieu of the political capital, the resident city of kings and their courts, the permanent seat of the major organs of government. Finally, both of these ladders of power and prestige had to be related to the Church, which united all forms of earthly superiority and consolidated them in the common effort to win salvation. The morality of the age proclaimed that each of these hierarchies was willed by God, eternal, and intangible. They ordered the lives of ordinary Parisian women and men, who incorporated them into their own behavior, ambitions, and demands.
In Part Three, we seek to uncover the lives of the majority of people, so firmly positioned within the limits fixed by these rulers. In workplaces and shops, masters of households and employers of all sorts organized work so that people could earn their bread. Paris was an enormous center of consumption, a capital serving a rich clientele, a place of production and exchange, all functions that offered employment and hope for social ascent. Solidarities within crafts and associations facilitated mutual aid and defined ordinary sociability. These more egalitarian ties that people chose for themselves rendered the bonds imposed by familial and social hierarchies more bearable. At this point, we approach themes that emerge when daily life is at the heart of the analysis: lodging, nourishment, clothing, the apportionment of time between work and rest. Many questions arise around these subjects, and we must be wary of the risk of anachronism when deficient documentation tempts us to fill the void with more modern information. Our questions simply cannot be answered unless the medieval sources permit it.
Our plan in this book is intended to impose some clarity on a complex panorama. A cleared road, however, often crosses paths that run into one another. So the same themes often appear at different points in the analysis. Any history involves the pretense that for the sake of study we can separate certain elements that were, in fact, intimately mixed. Thus, while the world of the Church is given a dedicated chapter, every element in our inquiry had its religious aspects. It would be in vain to pretend that we could ever seize the exact and
complete reality of daily life in the capital, even at the end of the Middle Ages when the sources become more abundant and far more explicit. The historian must never forget the gaps that remain in the shadows of her study and must always acknowledge areas whose lines are not very well disentangled. Much research remains to be done, and many things may yet be uncoyered that could shed light in areas still unclear. There are still more books to be written on the history of Paris.
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