Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [147]
Centuries after the Romans, when Paris was struggling with yet another onslaught—this time from the Norse—Eudes, Count of Paris, built a wooden precursor to Louis VI’s Châtelet at the entrance to the wooden bridge linking the Right Bank to the Île de la Cité. (Eudes wisely built a similar defense on the Left Bank as well.) Not only did this Châtelet and its stone successor protect the Cité, but by the twelfth century it anchored a wooden stockade that some historians believe encircled a portion of the Right Bank, which by then was emerging as the city’s commercial quarter.
Nothing remains of this stockade, of course, although you can find hints of its former presence. Its eastern gate, Porte Baudoyer, bestowed its name on Place Baudoyer (4th). Winding its way across the quarter, rue François-Miron follows the path of an ancient road that entered the stockade through Porte Baudoyer, linking Paris to the east.
Wooden defenses and the crumbling remains of Roman walls seemed to have done the job for a while, but by the late twelfth century a new threat—this time from the king of England—set the French to building a far sturdier set of fortifications. Philip II (later called Philip Augustus) responded vigorously to the fact that the English monarch (the famed Richard the Lionheart) was also the duke of Normandy and half of France besides. Philip surrounded Paris with stone ramparts ten feet wide and thirty feet high, punctuated by a battery of towers and reinforced with a deep ditch. He also erected a formidable riverside castle, the Louvre, to the immediate west of these fortifications, providing extra muscle in the direction from which the enemy was expected to attack.
Neither Lionheart nor his immediate successors put Philip’s fortifications to the test, but you can still see this fortress’s massive foundations, recently excavated and now dramatically displayed beneath the Louvre’s Cour Carrée.
You can also find fragments of Philip’s eight-hundred-year-old wall. The best known of these are the section near the Panthéon (rue Clovis at rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, 5th) and the impressive tower-to-tower stretch along rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul (4th).
There are other lesser-known remnants of this ancient fortification, some of which turn up in surprising places. On the Right Bank, for example, take a look at the stunning fifteenth-century Tour Jean-sans-Peur (now open to the public at 20 rue Étienne-Marcel in the second), which incorporates a portion of Philip’s wall, including the base of one of its many towers. On nearby rue des Francs-Bourgeois (4th), Crédit Municipal’s inner courtyard contains a splendid tower base (with newer top) plus an outline of the diagonal course the wall took through these parts, en route to the river.
On the Left Bank, at 4 cour du Commerce Saint-André (6th), the Catalonian tourist office has preserved a magnificent three-story tower from Philip’s wall, incorporating it into a chic renovation. Closer to the river, at 27 rue Mazarine (adjoining Passage Dauphine, 6th), you will find a beautifully restored wall section plus a tower base on the first and second subterranean levels of a parking garage.
Once you get the hang of it, you’ll know where to look. Philip repeated his monumental towers every sixty meters along the wall, which extended from the Louvre and a matching Left Bank tower on the west to the rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul segment and its Left Bank counterpart to the east. The Tour Jean-sans-Peur portion stands close