The Unruly City by Mike Rapport

Author:Mike Rapport
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

WITHIN DAYS, PARIS had become a functioning capital city again. The National Assembly soon followed the king, opening for business in Paris on 19 October. After a brief spell during which it crammed into the assembly room of the Êveché, the residence of the archbishop of Paris next to Notre-Dame Cathedral (which proved disastrous when the public gallery gave out a frightening creak before collapsing under the weight of the spectators), it eventually moved into the Manège, Louis XV’s boyhood riding school, on the northern edge of the Tuileries Gardens. Henceforth, both the king and the National Assembly were housed within a few hundred yards of each other. Along with the king and the National Assembly came the ministries, which took over some of the secondary royal palaces and mansions in the city, an invasion of officialdom that turned the west end of Paris, especially around the Place Vendôme and the Place Louis XV, into an administrative district interlocking with the political axis of the Tuileries and the Manège: in some blocks, there were thirty or forty public officials for every hundred residents. The very character of this central part of the city was transformed.12

The Revolution also consciously wanted to reverse the centralisation of authority represented by the defunct absolute monarchy and to disseminate it among the citizenry. This made the real spatial impact, not just in Paris, but across all France. The nationwide political framework was constructed in December 1789—a uniform system of local government in the shape of eighty-three departments, which are still the fundamental building blocks of French administrative and political life. Cities, towns and villages became ‘communes’, and the larger ones such as Paris and Marseilles, with a mayor, general council and attorney general, would soon be broken down into electoral wards called ‘sections’.

At every level, government would be run by elected councils and officials—and they had to meet somewhere. In the elections to the Estates-General in the spring of 1789, each of the sixty electoral districts of Paris had required spaces in which to meet, and in all of them the only available public buildings that were large enough were parish churches and convent chapels. Yet this was also a perfectly natural choice: churches were public spaces, the habitual and regular gathering places of the community. Over the course of 1789, therefore, many of Paris’s 200 churches and chapels had been embellished with political symbols, so that these once-familiar landmarks on the cityscape for a time transmitted dual messages. Alongside the Catholic imagery of the cross, of martyrs, saints, Christ and the Virgin, alongside the coats of arms of long-departed aristocratic and royal patrons, one could now see the secular symbols of the new order. In between religious services, one could hear the boiling sound of debate and, after July 1789, see citizens to-ing and fro-ing down the aisles wearing the tricolour cockade. Political notices outlining the formal business of the assemblies were now nailed up alongside religious ones, and there was usually a guardhouse

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