The sixteenth-century rooms at Carnavalet also hint at the way Parisians turned their blossoming city into a bloodbath. There is a glowering portrait of Catherine de’ Medici, the mother of three Kings of France and the reputed instigator of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when 15,000 Protestants were killed in the space of twenty-four hours. In the portrait, Catherine’s eyes are as dark as her widow’s weeds, her expression as stony as if it was a marble sculpture instead of an oil painting—enough to turn anyone into a Catholic.
Which is exactly what happened to her son-in-law, King Henri IV, who was so terrified by the massacre that he renounced his Protestant faith. In the museum, he is commemorated in the most bizarre fashion of all—a narrow corridor is dominated by hunks of a massive statue of Henri that used to stand on the Pont Neuf. It was hacked to pieces by a revolutionary mob in 1792, and the Carnavalet somehow obtained a giant boot, an arm, a hand, and an amputated horse’s leg.
And it is the museum’s Revolution section that is the most fascinating, because these turbulent years are presented from the point of view of an ordinary Parisian citizen of the time. There are banners that were waved during meetings and demonstrations, obviously home-made, because one of them misspells the key word liberté as libeté. (But then, education for all was one of the revolutionaries’ key demands.)
There is also a collection of portraits of officials in revolutionary uniform. It was obviously a shrewd move at the time to have oneself painted this way, as proof of one’s patriotic zeal. And what is intriguing about the pictures is that most of them are very primitive, suggesting either that the sitters were too poor to pay a decent artist, or that all the good portrait painters had fled the country with their best clients, the aristos.
Political events also inspired a rash of revolutionary knick-knacks. The museum has an inkstand with the catchy slogan unité et indivisibilité de la République, a plate showing le patriote satisfait (the well-fed patriot) and—eerily—some intricate ivory working models of the guillotine. The weirdest exhibit, though, has to be a watch that tells ‘revolutionary’ time, with a day of 10 hours divided into 100 minutes of 100 seconds. It’s surprising that the idea didn’t catch on—with each revolutionary hour lasting the equivalent of 2.4 of our hours, the Parisian’s legendary two-hour lunchtime would have lasted the equivalent of 4.8 modern hours. Definitely worth revolting for.
The objects commemorating the end of the monarchy are just as down-to-earth. There is a re-creation of Louis XVI’s cell at the Temple prison, with furniture that was spirited away by sympathizers after his death and donated to the museum later. He had a decent enough bed, a bookcase, and even a miniature billiard table—probably for his son Louis-Charles, who died in prison aged ten, after three years of incarceration.
The museum even has Louis XVI’s prison laundry list. In two weeks, he sent out seventeen shirts, eight pairs of stockings, two caleçons (underpants or perhaps trousers), seven items of miscellaneous linen and three sheets to be washed. It doesn’t seem excessive, except when you remember that the only fresh linen many of the other prisoners got was a scarf to hold their hair out of the way when the guillotine blade came down on their neck.
Paris shoots itself in the foot (and elsewhere)
Immediately after the Revolution, Paris lapsed into a period of pleasure and violence, often with the two of them combined.
The most famous piece of architectural masochism was demolishing the Bastille, of course. Though this was a cleansing act, because the notorious prison was a symbol of aristocratic oppression—although, as mentioned earlier, it was almost empty on 14 July 1789—many of its previous inmates had been locked up for nothing more damning than inconveniencing an aristo.
More dubious, perhaps, was the wholesale destruction of ancient buildings just because of their religious connections. A whole series of paintings at the Carnavalet show triumphant post-revolutionaries pulling Paris’s churches to pieces stone by stone. Notre-Dame survived (albeit with decapitated statues) only by proving itself useful as a food depot and being adopted by the newly atheist Parisians as a church devoted to the god of Reason.
The only building of note to attract the attention of the city’s post-revolutionary painters figures in a twee little oil sketch of a mass in the Chapelle Expiatoire. Smartly dressed Parisians stand or kneel, facing a statue of a very sexy-looking Marie Antoinette in a negligée. The artist was obviously a fan of hers.
The Chapelle Expiatoire was built in 1815, and it seems strange to see the former royal anti-heroine being hero-worshipped on canvas so soon after both her head and her regime were toppled. But as early as 1815, after Napoleon Bonaparte’s spell as a self-elected Emperor, the royals had returned, and it was Louis XVIII who commissioned the Chapelle as a mausoleum for his brother Louis XVI and sister-in-law Marie Antoinette, on the site where their bodies were buried after execution.
Amazingly, the building came through the whole of the turbulent nineteenth century unscathed, and it can still be visited today. It is an eerily peaceful place despite its location a stone’s throw from boulevard Haussmann. The gardens leading to the Greek temple-like mausoleum are lined with twin rows of graves, which have always been empty. They represent the King’s bodyguards, the Swiss Guards, about 600 of whom were massacred when Louis was arrested in the Tuileries Palace in August 1792 (yes, the Tuileries gardens used to contain a Renaissance palace, built by Catherine de’ Medici—it was another victim of the Revolution).
Inside the Chapelle, the tombs of Louis XVI and his wife are said to be situated exactly where the bodies were discovered, which must be why the
