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Gallo-Roman Paris

The mediæval scribe in the fulness of a divinely-revealed cosmogony is wont to begin his story at the creation of the world or at the confusion of tongues, to trace the building of Troy by the descendants of Japheth, and the foundation of his own native city by one of the Trojan princes made a fugitive in Europe by proud Ilion's fall. Such, he was very sure, was the origin of Padua, founded by Antenor and by Priam, son of King Priam, whose grandson, yet another Priam, by his great valour and wisdom became the monarch of a mighty people, called from their fair hair, Galli or Gallici. And of the strong city built on the little island in the Seine who could have been its founder but the ravisher of fair Helen—Sir Paris himself? The naïve etymology of the time was evidence enough.

But the modern writer, as he compares the geographical position of the capitals of Europe, is tempted to exclaim, Cherchez le marchand! for he perceives that their unknown founders were dominated by two considerations—facilities for commerce and protection from enemies: and before the era of the Roman road-makers, commerce meant facilities for water carriage. As the early settlers in Britain sailed up the Thames, they must have observed, where the river's bed begins somewhat to narrow, a hill rising from the continuous expanse of marshes from its mouth, easily defended on the east and west by those fortified posts which, in subsequent times, became the Tower of London and Barnard's Castle, and if we scan a map of France, we shall see that the group of islands on and around which Paris now stands, lies in the fruitful basin of the Seine, known as the Isle de France, near the convergence of three rivers; for on the east the Marne, on the west the Oise, and on the south the Yonne, discharge their waters into the main stream on its way to the sea. In ancient times the great line of Phœnician, Greek and Roman commerce followed northwards the valleys of the Rhone and of the Saone, whose upper waters are divided from those of the Yonne only by the plateau of Dijon and the calcareous slopes of Burgundy. The Parisii were thus admirably placed for tapping the profitable commerce of north-west Europe, and by the waters of the Eure, lower down the Seine, were able to touch the fertile valley of the Loire. The northern rivers of Gaul were all navigable by the small boats of the early traders, and, in contrast with the impetuous sweep of the Rhone and the Loire in the south and west, flowed with slow and measured stream:[5] they were rarely flooded, and owing to the normally mild winters, still more rarely blocked by ice. Moreover, the Parisian settlement stood near the rich cornland of La Beauce, and to the north-east, over the open plain of La Valois, lay the way to Flanders. It was one of the river stations on the line of the Phœnician traders in tin, that most precious and rare of ancient metals, between Marseilles and Britain, and in the early Middle Ages became, with Lyons and Beaucaire, one of the chief fairs of that historic trade route which the main lines of railway traffic still follow to-day. The island now known as the Cité, which the founders of Paris chose for their stronghold, was the largest of the group which lay involved in the many windings of the Seine, and was embraced by a natural moat of deep waters. To north and south lay hills, marshes and forests, and all combined to give it a position equally adapted for defence and for commerce.

The Cité.

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The Parisii were a small tribe of Gauls whose island city was the home of a prosperous community of shipmen and merchants, but it is not until the Conquest of Gaul by the Romans that Lutetia, for such was its Romanised name, joins the great pageant of history. It was—

"Armèd Cæsar falcon-eyed," [6]

who saw its great military importance, built a permanent camp there and made it a central entrepôt for food and munitions of war. And when in 52 B.C. the general rising of the tribes under Vercingétorix threatened to scour the Romans out of Gaul and to destroy the whole fabric of Cæsar's ambition, he sent his favourite lieutenant, Labienus, to seize Lutetia where the Northern army of the Gauls was centred. Labienus crossed the Seine at Melun, fixed his camp on a spot near the position of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and began the first of the historic sieges for which Paris is so famous. But the Gaulish commander burnt the bridges, fired the city, and took up his position on the slopes of the hill of Lutetius (St. Genevieve) in the south, and aimed at crushing his enemy between his own forces and an army advancing from the north. Labienus having learnt that Cæsar was in a tight place, owing to a check at Clermont and the defection of the Eduans, by a masterly piece of engineering recrossed the Seine by night at the Point du Jour, where the double viaduct of the girdle railway crosses to-day, and when the Gauls awoke in the morning they beheld the bannered host of the Roman legions in battle array on the plain of Grenelle beneath. They made a desperate attempt to drive them against the river, but they lost their leader and were almost annihilated by the superior arms and strategy of the Romans. Labienus was able to join his master at Sens, and the irrevocable subjugation of the Gauls soon followed. With the tolerant and enlightened conquerors came the Roman peace, Roman law, Roman roads, the Roman schoolmaster; and a more humane religion abolished the Druidical sacrifices. Lutetia was rebuilt and became a prosperous and, next to Lyons, the most important of Gallo-Roman cities. It lay equidistant from Germany and Britain and at the issue of valleys which led to the upper and lower Rhine. The quarries of Mount Lutetius produced an admirable building stone, kind to work and hardening well under exposure to the air, whose white colour may have won for Paris the name of Leucotia, or the White City, by which it is sometimes known to ancient writers. Cæsar had done his work well, for so completely were the Gauls Romanised, that by the fifth or sixth century their very language had disappeared.[7]

But towards the end of the third century three lowly wayfarers were journeying from Rome along the great southern road to Paris, charged by the Pope with a mission fraught with greater issues to Gaul than were the Cæsars and all their legions. Let us recall somewhat of the appearance of the city which Dionysius, Rusticus and Eleutherius saw as they neared its suburbs and came down what is now known as the Rue St. Jacques. After passing the arches of the aqueduct, two of which exist to this day, that crossed the valley of Arcueil and brought the waters of Rungis,[8] Paray and Montjean to the baths of the imperial palace and the public fountains, they would discern on the hill of Lutetius to their right, the Roman camp, garrison and cemetery. Lower down to the east they would catch a glimpse of a great amphitheatre, capable of accommodating 10,000 spectators.[9]

Remains of Roman Amphitheatre.

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On their left, where now stands the Lycée St. Louis, would be the theatre of Lutetia, and further on, the imposing and magnificent palace of the Cæsars, with its gardens sloping down to the Seine. The turbulent little stream of the Bièvre flowed by the foot of Mons Lutetius on the east, entering the main river opposite the eastern limit of the civitas of Lutetia, gleaming white before them and girdled by the waters of the Seine. A narrow eel-shaped island, subsequently known as the Isle de Galilée, lay between the Isle of the Cité and the southern bank; two islands, the Isles de Notre Dame and des Vaches, divided by a narrow channel to the east, and two eyots, the Isles des Juifs and de Bussy, to the west. Another islet, the Isle de Javiaux or de Louviers, lay near the northern bank beyond the two eastern islands. Crossing a wooden bridge, where now stands the Petit Pont, they would enter the forum under a triumphal arch. Here would be the very foyer of the city; a little way to the left the prefect's palace and the basilica, or hall of justice;[10] to the right the temple of Jupiter. As they crossed the island they would find it linked to the northern bank by another wooden bridge (the Grand Pont) replaced by the present Pont Notre Dame.[11] In the distance to the north stood Mons Martis (Montmartre), villas nestling on its slopes and crowned with the temples of Mars and Mercury, four of whose columns are preserved in the church of St. Pierre: to the west the aqueduct from Passy bringing its waters to the mineral baths located on the site of the present Palais Royal. A road, now the Rue St. Martin, led to the north; to the east, fed by the streams of Menilmontant and Belleville, lay the marshy land which is still known as the quarter of the Marais.

Denis, who by the mediæval hagiographers is invariably confused with Dionysius the Areopagite, and his companions, preached and taught the new faith unceasingly and met martyrs' deaths. In the Golden Legend he is famed to have converted much people to the faith, and "dyde do make many churches, and at length was brought before the judge who dyde do smyte off the hedes of the thre felawes by the temple of Mercurye. And anone the body of Saynte Denys reysed hymselfe up and bare his hede beetwene his armes, as the angels ladde hym two leghes fro the place which is sayd the hille of the martyrs unto the place where he now resteth by his election and the purveance of god. And there was heard so grete and swete a melodye of angels that many that herd it byleuyd in oure lorde."

The work that Denis and his companions began was more fully achieved in the fourth century by the rude Pannonion soldier, St. Martin, who also evangelised at Paris. He is the best-known of Gallic saints, and the story of his conversion one of the most popular in Christendom. When stationed at Amiens he was on duty one bitter cold day at the city gate, and espied a poor naked beggar asking alms. Soldiers in garrison are notoriously impecunious, and Martin had nothing to give; but drawing his sword he cleaved his mantle in twain, and bestowed half upon the shivering wretch at his feet. That very night the Lord Jesus appeared to him in a dream surrounded by angels, having on His shoulders the half of the cloak which Martin had given to the beggar. Turning to the angels, Jesus said: "Know ye who hath thus arrayed Me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptised, hath done this." After this vision Martin received baptism and remained steadfast in the faith. The illiterate and dauntless soldier became the fiery apostle of the faith, a vigorous iconoclast, throwing down the images of the false gods, breaking their altars in pieces and burning their temples. Of the Roman gods, Mercury, he said, was most difficult to ban, but Jove was merely stupid[12] and brutish, and gave him least trouble.

On the 16th of March 1711, some workmen, digging a burial crypt for the archbishops of Paris under the choir of Notre Dame, came upon a wall, six feet below the pavement, which contemporary antiquarians believed to be the wall of the original Christian basilica over which the cathedral was built, but which modern authorities affirm to have been part of the old Gallo-Roman wall of the Cité. In the fabric of this wall the early builders had incorporated the remains of a temple of Jupiter, and among the débris were found the fragments of an altar raised to Jove in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar by the Nautæ, a guild of Parisian merchant-shippers, and the table of another altar on whose foyer still remained some of the very burnt wood and incense used in the last pagan sacrifice. The mutilated stones, with their rude Gallo-Roman reliefs and inscriptions,[13] may be seen in the Frigidarium of the Thermæ, the old Roman baths by the Hôtel de Cluny, and are among the most interesting of historical documents in Paris. The Corporation of Nautæ Parisiaci, one of the most powerful of the guilds, among whose members were enrolled the chief citizens of Lutetia, who dedicated this altar to Jove, were the origin of the Commune or Civil Council of Paris, whose Provost[14] was known as late as the fourteenth century as the Prévôt des Marchands d'Eau. Their device was the Nef, or ship, which is and has been throughout the ages, the arms of Paris, and which to this day may be seen carved on the vaultings of the Roman baths.

In the great palace of which these baths formed but a part was enacted that scene so vividly described in the pages of Gibbon,[15] when, in 355, Julian, after his victories over the Alemanni and the Franks, was acclaimed Augustus by the rebellious troops of Constantius. He had admonished the sullen legions, angry at being detached from their victorious and darling commander for service on the Persian frontier, and had urged them to obedience, but at midnight the young Cæsar was awakened by a clamorous and armed multitude besieging the palace, and at early dawn its doors were forced; the reluctant Julian was seized and carried through the streets in triumph, lifted on a shield, and for diadem crowned with a military collar, to be enthroned and saluted as emperor. In after life the emperor-philosopher looked back with tender regret to the three winters he spent in Paris before his elevation to the imperial responsibilities and anxieties. He writes of the busy days and meditative nights he passed in his dear Lutetia, with its two wooden bridges, its pure and pleasant waters, its excellent wine. He dwells on the mildness of its climate, where the fig-tree, protected by straw in the winter, grew and fruited. One rigorous season, however, the emperor well remembered[16] when the Seine was blocked by huge masses of ice. Julian, who prided himself on his endurance, at first declined the use of those charcoal fires which to this day are a common and deadly method of supplying heat in Paris. But his rooms were damp and his servants were allowed to introduce them into his sleeping apartment. The Cæsar was almost asphyxiated by the fumes, and his physicians to restore him administered an emetic. Julian in his time was beloved of the Lutetians, for he was a just and tolerant prince whose yoke was easy. He had purged the soil of Gaul from the barbarian invaders, given Lutetia peace and security, and made of it an important, imperial city. His statue, found near Paris, still recalls his memory in the hall of the great baths of the Lutetia he loved so well.

The so-called apostasy of this lover of Plato and worshipper of the Sun, who never went to the wars or travelled without dragging a library of Greek authors after him, was a philosophic reaction against the harsh measures,[17] the bloody and treacherous natures of the Christian emperors, and the fierceness of the Arian controversy. The movement was but a back-wash in the stream of history, and is of small importance. Julian's successors, Valentinian and Gratian, reversed his policy but shared his love for the fair city on the Seine, and spent some winters there. Lutetia had now become a rich and cultured Gallo-Roman city.