Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [148]
Having completed his massive fortification, Philip is said to have embraced his architect and announced, “There is now a king, and a France.” Unquestionably Paris was now far more secure, and it was not until almost two centuries later, after major hostilities once again broke out between France and England, that a French king decided to update his capital’s defenses.
By this time (the late fourteenth century), the burgeoning city had grown into a cramped metropolis that was pushing hard against the confines of Philip’s outdated wall. Given England’s crushing victories on French soil, France’s king Charles V determined to do something about the antiquated ramparts that so indifferently defended—and so grievously constrained—his people.
His solution was to build a new wall, encircling a far larger area. But unlike Philip, he chose to place this bristling new fortification around only the commercial Right Bank, which by this time had far outstripped the university-centered Left Bank in growth and prosperity. Leaving the Left Bank to whatever protection Philip’s ramparts could still provide, Charles flung his bulwarks in a wide arc from approximately the site of the present Place du Carrousel (in the midst of today’s Louvre) in the west to his formidable new fortress, the Bastille, in the east.
Photo Credit 30.1
Moving the old city gates outward along such major thoroughfares as rue Saint-Denis and rue Saint-Martin to the north, and rue Saint-Antoine and rue Saint-Honoré to the east and west, he in effect created a new and larger shell for the prospering Right Bank city within. He also provided protection for the new royal palace at the Hôtel Saint-Paul (the site now bounded by rue Saint-Paul, rue Saint-Antoine, and rue du Petit-Musc in the fourth, near the Bastille) and the Louvre, which he now converted into a royal residence.
Some two centuries later, as religious and civil warfare engulfed France, yet another Charles (Charles IX) and a Louis (Louis XIII) extended this wall in an arc from the Saint-Denis gate westward, to encompass the city’s growing Right Bank. The wall now stretched from the Bastille in the east to a point ending between the present-day Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries in the west.
Remnants of this wall unexpectedly came to light during recent renovations of the Musée de l’Orangerie (Place de la Concorde, 1st), where a lengthy section has now been preserved. You can also find vestiges of the Bastille’s counterscarp (in the Bastille station of the No. 5 Métro line) as well as the site of Charles V’s Saint-Honoré gate, marked by a bas-relief of Jeanne d’Arc’s head (161–163 rue Saint-Honoré, 1st).
Most importantly, though, you can still trace the course of Louis XIII’s wall as you stroll down the Grands Boulevards, from the Place de la Madeleine (8th) in the west all the way to the Place de la Bastille in the east, for the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, laid out these most Parisian of all promenades along the course of his father’s defensive wall, which he pulled down in the wake of satisfying victories over all his enemies. The word “boulevard” itself, historians remind us, derives from an old Germanic word for “bulwark.”
Louis XIV, who never did things by halves, also demolished the old fortified entry gates of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, erecting in their place the triumphal arches that still remain (bordering the tenth). These arches framed ceremonial entries into the city until the nineteenth century, when the Arc de Triomphe took