Henri IV: Place du Pont Neuf
LOCATION: Pont Neuf: Place Dauphine; Louvre; Square du Vert Galant; Place des Vosges
MÉTRO: Pont Neuf
The story of Henri IV in Paris is best told from high on the Pont Neuf, the New Bridge, the best-loved creation of France’s most beloved king. Henri IV (1553–1610) sits here on the bronze horse in the middle of this street over water, the longest and widest of the Parisian bridges that connect the Left and Right banks. The statue faces the elegant triangle of Place Dauphine, another jewel designed by the king who professed himself a simple cowboy: “I rule with my arse in the saddle and my gun in my fist.” Centuries after his death by assassination, the streets of Paris were still singing his praises.
Vive Henri Quatre
Vive ce roi vaillant
Vive le bon roi
Vive le vert galant!
The religious fanatics of the war-torn city hated Henri. The mad Catholic who stabbed him to death sixteen years after his coronation was the one assassin—out of at least twenty-three others—who tried to kill him and actually succeeded. Jesuits, Protestants (called Huguenots, Calvinists, or Reformists), and the militant Catholic League, they never stopped plotting their murderous revenge against the soldier-king bon viveur who from 1589 (when Henri III died, making Henri IV next in line to the throne) to 1593 had led his Protestant troops against the rebel Catholics of Paris. Bombarding the city from the heights of Montmartre and the bell tower of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he had hoped to force and finally starve it into submission to a Protestant king.
But then Henri IV renounced his heretic past in the abbey of Saint-Denis in 1593 and six months later was crowned king in Chartres Cathedral. After thirty years of civil war between Catholics and Huguenots, followed by Henri’s four-year Siege of Paris, ordinary Parisians didn’t care, at this point, whether Henri’s conversion was pure or cynical. What mattered was that his submission to Rome meant no more war. According to Desmond Seward’s The First Bourbon: Henri IV of France and Navarre, there is no evidence that he ever said, “Paris vaut bien une emesse.” (Paris is worth a Mass.)
He had once written to a friend, “Those who genuinely follow their conscience are of my religion—as for me, I belong to the faith of everyone who is brave and true.” The Catholic League, in thrall to a dogmatic hierarchical authority, sneered at this shameful twist, the new heretical standard of individual conscience. So Protestant! So moderne! But ordinary city dwellers—merchants, craftsmen, bankers, artists, masons, burghers, the poor—they were all sick of hunger, sick of the ruins which papists and Huguenots and Henri himself had made of their city. The streets ran with feces—animal and human—the mud thick with blood and rotting body parts. The economy of France was another ruin.
Henri made sure not to burden the workers with the costs of his extensive building and reconstruction projects. To pay for the Pont Neuf, for instance, he taxed every cask of wine that came into the city. Enthroned in the Louvre palace, issuing pardons to all combatants, making his visionary plans for the restoration of the broken city, he won the people’s allegiance. “We must be brought to agreement by reason and kindness,” he wrote, “and not by strictness and cruelty which serve only to arouse men.” In this magnanimous spirit, he drafted and signed the Edict of Nantes, granting tolerance and freedom of worship to the reformist religion in 1598 (the same year he undertook the Pont Neuf, originally planned by the Valois king Henri III). Such was his popularity that even the most rigid Catholics chose not to make war against Henri’s mandated tolerance.
Born into the House of Bourbon and raised in the southwest, in the kingdom of Navarre, at the time a small independent realm in the Basque country between France and Spain, he had the Gascon temperament described by Balzac as “bold, brave, adventurous, prone to exaggerate the good and belittle the bad,… laughing at vice when it serves as a stepping stone.” At every stage, he was a charmer, “his eyes full of sweetness,… his whole mien animated with an uncommon vivacity,” to quote one magistrate. The northern, more cerebral French regarded the men of the South, who spoke Provençal, as foreigners.
He was baptized in the Catholic Church but was given a Protestant tutor after his parents converted to Protestantism. When his father—but not his mother—returned to the Church, he gave his son a Catholic tutor. The boy, however, kept his mother’s reformed faith, even while studying in Catholic Paris at the College of Navarre on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève.
The Wars of Religion raged during his adolescence when he left the College of Navarre and returned to his family’s kingdom. He saw for himself the torture and barbarism each of the warring sects inflicted on the other. In 1572, he once again left home to travel north to Paris where his arranged marriage with the Catholic Marguerite de Valois (Margot), sister of the Valois king Charles IX and daughter of the royal poisoner Queen Mother Catherine de Medici, was seen at first as an occasion of joy, a sign that the papists and the Huguenots would now stop killing each other. (For Marguerite’s bridal emotions, see “La Reine Margot: Legends and Lies,” here.)
Thousands of Protestant nobles came to Paris to enjoy the party. They were invited to occupy rooms in the Louvre. (Some stayed home in their châteaux, possessed of a strange sense of foreboding.) The marriage festivities, despite the bride and groom’s distaste for each other, obvious during the ceremony outside the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, lasted almost a week. Then, to the signal of triumphant Christian church bells, horror exploded. What became known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, of Protestants by Catholics—raged throughout the next three nights and days.
The Protestant bridegroom, expecting death, hid in the Louvre and later, under “house arrest” in the corridors of the Château de Vincennes, at that time a state prison.
Plotting but failing to escape from Paris over the next four years, Henri played the game of pretending to enjoy the pleasures of the city, hunting in the royal forests landscaped under François I (Bois de Boulogne and Fontainebleau) as well as gambling, tennis, women, strolling through the gardens of the Louvre. The new bride tried to help her husband escape. Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Reine Margot portrays her as Henri’s loyal protector.
Finally he got away, home to Navarre, hoping never to set eyes on Paris again. Following the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, there were eight more civil wars involving Catholics and Protestants. Henri saddled up to join the nonstop bloodletting over whose religion was the True one, the surest ticket to paradise. No wonder he came to detest the absurdities of partisan religion, wanting no part of it once he was king. The slaughter ended only on the day he genuflected to Rome in Saint-Denis. War had not worked; conversion, he realized, was the only way to win over Catholic Paris and be crowned Rex Christianissimus, Most Christian King. (Montaigne believed that though a firm Calvinist under his mother’s influence, Henri’s warm earthy personality was more suited to the Catholic faith than to the icy purity of Protestantism.)
What was not understood about Henri in 1594 when as king he settled into the Louvre palace and took jubilant carriage rides onto the Île de la Cité to hear High Mass at Notre-Dame was his love of beauty. He was determined to transform the filthy ruins of Paris into a place fit for civilized human beings: “To make this city beautiful, tranquil, to make [it] a whole world and a wonder of the world.” A visionary and a pragmatist, by the time he was murdered, he had made the medieval city of Paris into a modern capital: “the Capital of the World” as it came to be called, for centuries.
For the Traveler
From the day it opened, in 1606, the Pont Neuf, like its creator, delighted Paris. People came in droves to enjoy its wide openness—unclogged by houses or shops—where musicians and acrobats engaged the strolling crowds making merry along the never-before-seen sidewalks, a wonder of Europe. According to seventeenth-century travel writers, the Pont Neuf offered the most magnificent view in the entire world. Parisians and tourists could gaze at the river, the monuments and hôtels along the riverbanks, and the trees and hills in the distant silvery light.
And still we come, day and night, our delight quickened with the colors of the sky, the Seine a kind of music.
Leaving behind Henri in his bronze saddle and twenty-first-century tourists, we walk north from the Pont Neuf onto the Right Bank en route to the Louvre palace where Henri’s friend Montaigne had first set eyes on the beautiful Reine Margot (see here).
Bearing left into Quai du Louvre and, in two blocks, right into rue de l’Amiral de Coligny, you will soon pass the lovely parish church of the ancient royal families, Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, where the devout Margot, the new Queen of Navarre, attended Mass. Built on the site of a Viking camp, the church faces the great door of the Louvre, which admits you to the Cour Carrée (Square Courtyard), the oldest part of the Louvre. It was from the belfry of Saint-Germain, that the church bell—“la Marie”—rang out in the dawn of August 24, summoning Catholics to launch the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Encouraged by Henri’s new Valois mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, and her crazy son King Charles IX, Catholic mobs trapped the Protestant wedding guests inside the Louvre and hacked them to death. “Kill them all, kill them all!” the insane king screamed from the palace windows as corpses and body parts were hurled from the roof, landing in the courtyards. Lingering in the hush of the Cour Carrée on blue summer nights when the Louvre stays open late (Wed and Fri until 9:45), the story of the royal bloodbath feels like a blood-and-guts movie plot—not real, this could never happen!
The slaughter lasted for more than three days. Thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris, most dumped in the Seine. Ten, possibly thirty thousand died throughout provincial France. In Rome, the pope and his College of Cardinals attended a triumphant Te Deum, the cannon of the Castel Sant’Angelo fired salutes in celebration of mass murder. King Philip of Catholic Spain was said to smile for the first time in his life.
Returning now to the Pont Neuf, (leaving Henri behind, hidden in his new bride’s closet as Alexandre Dumas has it), descend its staircase behind the cheval de bronze to Pointe de la Cité which is occupied by the lovely Square du Vert-Galant, a garden at the original level of the Île de la Cité. It’s named for the lusty galant up on the bridge, the “gay blade” astride his horse. Here, away from the crowds, you can contemplate, through a screen of willow trees bordering the square, the lifeline of Paris, the city’s main street, the river Seine. From the tip of the Île, you can see the majestic “power” architecture of the Louvre: in the distance its celebrated long gallery—Grande Galerie or Galerie du Bord de l’Eau—which Henri had built. From the beginning of his reign, he worked on the enlargement of the Louvre though the gallery project itself—to connect the royal Louvre with Catherine de Medici’s Tuileries palace. As a prisoner after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and then as king, Henri loved to stroll the length of the Louvre, his riverfront Grande Galerie adding a quarter of a mile to his walk. He also designed the original Orangerie at the far end of what is now the Tuileries gardens which were first planted by his homicidal mother-in-law. (Today’s Musée de l’Orangerie was built in 1852 on the site of the original gallery, next to the Place de la Concorde.) The best view of the Grande Galerie is from one bridge west of the Pont Neuf, on the Pont des Arts (recently liberated from its Love Locks), which extends between the Institut de France on the Left Bank and the Louvre, on the Right.
King Henri’s transformations of war-zone Paris survive today in some of his most glorious projects: the most celebrated is the Place Royale, now known as the Place des Vosges; the lovely Place Dauphine, dedicated to his son who became Louis XIII; rue Dauphine, the extension of the Pont Neuf into the Left Bank; and the Hôpital Saint-Louis in northeast Paris, just off the Canal Saint-Martin. Proud of his urban renewal projects and the cleaned-up city streets, he wrote to Cardinal de Joyeuse, the French ambassador to papal Rome:
This is to give you news of my buildings and of my gardens and to assure you that I haven’t lost any time … In Paris you will find my long gallery which goes to the Tuileries completed.… a pond and many beautiful fountains … my plantings and my garden very beautiful; the Place Royale which is near the Porte St Antoine …
At the end of the Pont Neuf, a beautiful street which goes to the Porte de Buci, plus two to three thousand workshops which work here and there for the embellishment of the city, so much that it is unbelievable how much you find changed.
Place Royale (Place des Vosges)
MÉTRO: Saint-Paul; Chemin Vert
DIRECTIONS: Or a twenty-minute walk east from Pont Neuf along the quays to rue Saint-Paul; turn left and walk a few blocks north to rue Saint-Antoine; a short walk east to rue de Birague, which leads through the Pavillon du Roi into the Place.
Architecture, Henri told his friends, along with war and women, was his greatest delight. A legendary lover (though he seldom bathed and was said to reek of garlic), he had many mistresses. The children of-the-blood lived in a royal nursery in Saint-Germain where they were raised on an equal footing and visited frequently by their father. As a husband he was a failure. He and Marguerite Valois, La Reine Margot (see here), finally divorced so that Henri could marry Marie de Medici for her fortune and pay off France’s war debts. But the Italian Marie of Tuscany was less accepting of his infidelities than the unfaithful Margot had been. The bedrooms of the Louvre palace rang with her operatic screaming and weeping sometimes lasting all night.
Abroad in the city, Henri enjoyed himself. He liked the nearby quartier of the Marais (marshland) on the northern bank of the Seine, where charming hôtels had been built in the sixteenth century. He had friends here and sometimes partied all night with one mistress or another, returning to the Louvre and the furious Marie at eight o’clock in the morning. Maybe it was at the end of a long high-spirited night in the Marais that the urban visionary king, noticing in the light of dawn all that vacant land of the quartier Tournelles—including a dump and a horse market—conceived the idea to build there a large open beautiful public space … surrounded by buildings of brick and stone, a gorgeous red brick and golden stone … with vendors in arcades and workshops for artisans and for silk workers in the factories he would open, making silk a French industry, thus eliminating the Italian competition, this lively colorful site, bordered by rows of lime trees, would offer commerce and entertainment, music, literature, art, and sex in the salons of the handsome brick and stone pavilions to be built around a large square, a rich cultural mix … a Place Royale … a Royal Square! As his carriage rumbled west on rue Saint-Antoine, a street since the Roman occupation in 52 BC, Henri imagined the particulars of the Place that would be his masterpiece. All the way back to the Louvre, as the sun rose over the city, he dreamed it. To this day, Place des Vosges, in all seasons, is a ravishing dreamworld in the early morning light, private and silent, waking up at noon with the arrival of schoolchildren and visitors. Sundays are festivals of families and tourists looking for brunch.
Henri ordered his Place built in eighteen months, visiting the construction site every day. But problems arose, slowing things down, changing his plans.
And then the king who loved tolerance and beauty and the city of Paris was dead, his aorta punctured by a dropout monk with a kitchen knife on rue de la Ferronniere (still clogged today with the traffic that in 1610 stalled Henri’s carriage to the mad François Ravaillac’s advantage). All Paris changed … everyone began to wail and cry, with women and girls tearing their hair out … Henri, who had once declared kindness and mercy the primary virtues of a prince, would hardly have approved his assassin’s punishments—torn limb from limb in the Place de Grève, drawn and quartered, boiled alive.
His reign had been a golden age. He gave the city peace, a measure of prosperity, and a culture of beauty and energy. These days he probably would not turn up his nose at the tourists strolling south off the Pont Neuf onto his very commercial rue Dauphine on the Left Bank, the glut of hotels, bars, the giddy foreign teenagers, pierced and coiffed in the colors of a rainbow, their elders pointing out the pretty cross streets. Rue Christine—the couples making out, accordions playing “I Love Paris,” the poodles in arms, the crowded rue de Buci just ahead. Neither bigot nor snob, the king of pluralism loved the carnivalesque of Paris streets, the exuberant and improvisatory freedom of a great city.
Nearby
VEDETTES DU PONT NEUF www.pontneuf.net. Sightseeing boats depart from the north side of the Square du Vert-Galant. An enchanting ride, especially at night.
LA TAVERNE HENRI IV 13, Place du Pont Neuf, 75001. Tel: 01.43.54.27.90. Every day except Sunday, noon–3; 7–12:30. A small old wine bar, also serving delicious charcuterie, tartines, hot plats du jour. “The archetype of the great bistro à vin” in the words of The New York Times, for Parisians one of the best wine bars in Paris. On the western tip of Place Dauphine just across from Henri IV’s statue on the Pont Neuf.
ACTION CHRISTINE Métro: Saint-Michel; Odéon. 4, rue Christine, off rue Dauphine. Henri called rue Dauphine his “beautiful street.” Tel: 01.43.25.85. A small movie theater with deep red velvet seats, showing restored classic American films.