Paris to the Past by Ina Caro

Author:Ina Caro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

HENRY IV in PARIS

Line 1 and Line 7 Métro

THERE IS SOMETHING SO EXCITING ABOUT PARIS ONCE HENRY IV arrives. Almost immediately, he began to bring peace and prosperity to a city that had been ravaged by thirty years of war. It was as though the moment he dismounted his medieval steed in Paris, he exchanged the reins of his warhorse for those invisible reins we call the forces of history, turned them in the direction of urban transformation, and reshaped a city torn by war and neglect. For Henry, Paris was the unhealthy heart of the ailing nation he sought to cure.

His reign, which began in 1589, followed the regency of Catherine de Médicis and the reigns of her three foppish sons, a thirty-year period of nine civil wars called collectively the Wars of Religion. (I say Catherine de Médicis’s three sons because her husband, Henry II, who valued the manly ideals of chivalry above all, was disgusted by them—one of them, who was to become King Henry III, was a pedophile and transvestite—and wanted nothing to do with them. Once, after taking a look at them, he asked the stalwart Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV to be his son, and when he refused, he asked him to become his son-in-law by marrying his daughter Marguerite of Valois. Henry of Navarre, as a descendant of St. Louis, was next in line to be king, but there was a problem with fanatically Catholic Paris accepting this particular Henry. Although baptized a Catholic at the insistence of his father, he had been brought up a Calvinist by his mother, and, at the time he became king, he was the leader of the Huguenot forces fighting the Catholic League.

I will not go into the consequent fanaticism of the Huguenots—which resulted in the destruction of untold priceless works of religious art—or the fanaticism of the Catholics—which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Frenchmen—or how valiant a leader Henry IV was in battle. I will wait instead for historians to make up their minds whether these nine wars were religious wars or political wars—wars in which the feudal aristocracy sought to regain the power and independence it had been gradually losing as power became increasingly centralized in the person of the king. But whether they were religious or political, or both, they destroyed rather than produced monuments we could visit today, so I will skip instead directly to Henry IV’s statement, which he either made or should have made, that Paris is “worth a Mass,” and which he was said to have made at the Hôtel de Sens.

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