Paris in 1788 — Garden of the Enlightenment
Seeds of modernity planted in Paris by King Louis XIV grew to produce a bitter fruit.
Paris in 1788 was poised for change. The stage was set for the French Revolution. The capital of the most powerful country in Europe remained, in many respects, stuck in Medieval times. King Louis XIV took the first steps that would transform Paris into a modern city a century earlier. However, the Age of Enlightenment intervened. New ideas about the natural law and the rights of the individual circulated freely in the city. These ideas undercut the authority of the monarchy and fueled the desire for more radical change.
Louis XIV was known for two things: the magnificence of his court at Versailles and his aversion to Paris. Louis XIV ruled France for 72 years, between 1643 and 1715, a period when France was the most powerful country in Europe. He styled himself as the “Sun King,” claiming, by divine right, supreme authority over all around him. However, Paris was a rogue planet capable of disrupting the perfect order Louis XIV sought to project.
Louis XIV inherited the title of king at the age of four. Through his childhood and adolescence the young king resided in Paris under the protection of his mother, the Queen Regent, and her principal advisor Cardinal Mazarin. In 1648, Paris rose in rebellion against the royal court, an event known as the Frond. At age twelve Louis XIV and his mother were forced to flee from the royal palace.
The experience of the Frond marked Louis XIV psychologically. He would never feel safe in Paris. As soon as he was able, when he assumed the full authority as king at the age of majority, Louis XIV left Paris for the small village of Versailles. Here the Sun King would reign over a perfectly ordered world that he could create.
At Versailles Louis XIV built the most extravagent palace in the world. The gardens, eight square kilometers of lawns, flower beds, sculpted hedgerows, statuary, and flowing fountains, were designed to impress on visitors the power of the king. Wild nature brought into perfect order demonstrated the “victory of intelligence over brutal impulses of obscure powers.”[1] This display legitimized the king’s claim to absolute power and France’s claim to preeminence among nations.
Meanwhile, a different kind of garden was growing in Paris. The reign of Louis XIV coincided with the start of the Age of Enlightenment, and dangerous new ideas were circulating in the city’s theaters, cafes, and private salons. Ideas such as John Locke’s theory of natural rights and Isaac Newton’s theories of gravity and mechanics.
These were ideas capable of unleashing obscure powers and upending a social order that had persisted for centuries. Locke claimed that that legitimacy of government derived not from God but from the consent of the people. Newton’s success in explaining the motions of the planets showed that nature is governed by laws that operate with mathematical precision and implacable power.
But, Louis XIV needed Paris to thrive. He could not have created Versailles without it. The palace and gardens of Versailles symbolized the absolute power of the monarchy, but they were also the product of the industry and resources of the nation.
Paris was then, as it is today, the economic engine of France. A significant portion of the taxes collected by the royal treasury came out of Paris. Although he physically distanced himself from the city, Louis XIV could not rule as he wished, in the style of absolute authority, without Paris paying the bills.
Louis XIV wanted to make Paris a monument to his glory, as Roman emperors had done in Rome, their capital city. Working through his capable First Minister of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV embellished Paris with new parks and public buildings, and monuments.
Louis XIV also removed the Phillip Augustus wall, which had defended the city since the 13th century, on the Left Bank, and walls built by Charles V (14th century) and Louis XIII (16th century) to accommodate the growing city on the Right Bank. In their place, Louis XIV constructed wide, tree-lined streets — the original boulevards, which became a favorite destination for the leisure classes to stroll, ride in their carriages, and be seen. The following boulevards trace the path of the destroyed walls on the Right Bank: boulevards Beaumarchais, du Temple, Saint-Martin , Saint-Denis , de Bonne-Nouvelle , Poissonnière , Montmartre , des Italiens , des Capucines and the Madeleine.
Paris remained wall-less, an open city, until the end of the 18th century. Another defensive wall, the last, would be built in the mid-19th century. The wall that marked the outer limits of Paris in 1788 — the Farmers General wall — had an entirely different purpose.
Colbert established the Royal Academy of Sciences, in 1699. It was one of Colbert’s most successful projects. The Academy gathered together a group of world-class scientists to work on the most challenging problems of the day. Its creation cast Louis XIV as a forward-looking leader, thoroughly in tune with the progressive thinking of his time, a champion of Enlightenment virtues of objectivity, rationality, and reason.
The Academy had its offices in the one of the king’s apartments in the Louvre; today, it is part of the Institute of France located directly across the Seine. Members of the new Academy of Sciences joined other scientists employed by the king in medical research at the Jardins du Roi, established in 1635 and now part of the Musée de la Nature and the Jardins des Plantes. These institutions made Paris a center for development of modern science and innovation during the 18th century.
Colbert also built a state-of-the-art astronomic observatory in Paris for the use of the Academy. Initially, the work of the Academy focused on the strategically important topics of mapping, global navigation, and time keeping. The observatory is located on a hill in what was then rural countryside at the end of rue Saint Jacques. In addition to its telescopes the observatory contained other equipment and laboratories used by the Academy.
The location of the observatory established the position of the Paris Meridian, the reference line of longitude used by French cartographers in creating maps of France and the world. English cartographers set “zero longitude” at the location of the observatory at Greenwich, England. The Greenwich Meridian was adopted as the worldwide standard line of zero longitude by international agreement in 1884. The path of the Paris Meridian through the city is marked by a series of bronze discs inscribed with the word “Arago” for François Arago, the director of the Paris Observatory between 1830 and 1853.
The Paris Meridian played a key role in an Enlightenment project by members of the Academy of Sciences to establish a rational system of weights and measures. This initiative gave the world the metric system. The distance measured across France along the Paris Meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona, Spain, was used established the length of the standard meter — initially specified as one ten-millionth of the distance between the the North Pole and the equator.
Colbert established a number of state-supported workshops to boost the economy. Their products were designed to compete with luxury goods imported into France from foreign manufacturers, such as glassware from Venice and fine cloth from Belgium, and expand the export market for French manufactured goods. One of these workshops still in operation is the Gobelins Manufactory, located on Avenue des Gobelins in the Latin Quarter neighborhood of the Left Bank. The Gobelins Manufactory made tapestries and carpets.
In 1788, the area around the Gobelins workshops was an industrial corridor. Mills and tanneries and dye works lined the banks of the Bievre River, and the road now called Avenue des Gobelins was a well-traveled route into Paris. It brought travelers to the markets and workshops lining rue Mouffetard in the heart of the Latin Quarter, one of Paris’ oldest streets, which still exists under this name.
The name Mouffetard hints at the general conditions in the area - “Mouffette” translates as “skunk” in English. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau recorded his first impressions of Paris on arriving from Italy along the route passing by the Gobelins Manufactory: “little dirty and stinking alleys, ugly black houses, the air of filthiness, beggars, carters, menders, criers of herbal teas and old hats.” [2]
Conditions in this poor, working class neighborhood contrasted starkly with those in the gentrified neighborhood of the Marais on the Right Bank. Aristocratic families had palatial “hotels particular” and the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie lived in town homes built in the neoclassical style. Here was the Paris of cafes and private salons where the Enlightenment took root and flourished. The Place des Vosges, built in the 17th century, is an example of this new Paris that still feels contemporary today.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert gained influence in the royal court as a government reformer. His particular area of expertise was state finances — taxes. Colbert is widely credited with saying, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the most feathers with the least amount of hissing.” [3] Therefore, one of Colbert objectives in matters concerning Paris was to collect taxes as efficiently as possible.
Colbert faced a daunting task in reforming taxes. France had evolved a complex system of taxation over the course of several centuries before Colbert. Nine different types of taxes were collected, and tax rates varied from one region to the next and even by city. Separate taxes were collected by private firms, known as tax farms, based on contracts negotiated with the royal treasury.
Colbert succeeded only in simplifying the administration of taxes by consolidating collection of separate taxes into a fewer number of contracts held by firms know as general tax farms. Detailed knowledge of the tax system afforded the owners of these tax farms, Farmers General, the opportunity to accumulate great wealth.
In the middle of the 18th century seeds planted by Colbert had grown to produce a perfect flower of the Enlightenment, the unfortunate Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794). Lavoisier was the embodiment of the Enlightenment virtues: objective; rational; reason personified; a member of the bourgeoisie educated in law and science.
Lavoisier was a rising young star in the Academy of Sciences. Lavoisier had a head for numbers, and he revolutionized the science of chemistry by making it a quantitative science.
Lavoisier also was a partner in the general tax farm that held the rights to collect taxes in Paris. He set his mind to the task of optimizing collection of the Octroi, the tax on goods imported into Paris. For this purpose, he proposed encircling Paris with the wall known as the Farmers General Wall .
The wall would channel the flow of goods into Paris through toll gates, or barrières. This would simplify the collection of taxes and make it more difficult to avoid taxes by smuggling goods into the city. Construction of the wall started in 1784 and would continue into the 19th century, with various repairs and changes. The design called for 54 toll gates in a wall 24 kilometers long. Each toll gate had a unique design in the neoclassical style. Four of the original barriers still exist: the rotunda in Parc Monceau, the Villette rotunda, the Barrière du Trône at Place de la Nation, and the Barrière d’Enfer at Place Denfert-Rochereau.
The reaction of Paris residents was swift and negative. Comparison with a goose held in its pen waiting to be plucked was unavoidable. The fact that the wall was being constructed by men with soft hands and clad in silk coulottes, the knee breeches favored by the bourgeoisie and aristocratic class, recalled the inequities of life in the city. The tax system favored the rich at the expense of the working class and poor. Justifiably, tax farmers had a reputation for greed and corruption.
When revolution came, it started at the Farmers General Wall. Historians date the start of the French Revolution at July 14, 1789, when with the storming of the Hotel de Ville and the Bastille. But, one day earlier, on the night of July 12–13, an angry mob of working class sans-coulottes destroyed parts of the hated Farmers General Wall and set fire to several of its toll gates.
Therefore, efforts by Louis XIV and Colbert to modernize Paris contributed, indirectly, to sparking the revolution that brought an end to the French monarchy and earned Paris its reputation as a revolutionary city.
References:
[1] Louis XIV, 1992. The Way to Present the Gardens of Versailles. Editions de la Réunion des Musées nationaux, Paris.
[2] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. Paris: Gallimard, Folio, Book 4th (1730–1731), page 211–212
[3] Courtilz de Sandras, Gatien, 1695. The life of John Baptist Colbert, late minister and secretary of state to Lewis XIV, the present French king done into English from a French copy printed at Cologne this present year, 1695. Published online by Jewell, William. The Golden Cabinet of True Treasure. London: John Crosley, 1612. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, 2011. [online: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A34769.0001.001/1:6?rgn=div1;view=toc ; accessed 1 Dec 2022]
