Thomas Jefferson's Paris

by Howard C. Rice

Overview

This handsomely illustrated picture book provides a remarkable glimpse of the Paris Jefferson knew—Paris on the eve of the French Revolution. The houses, gardens, bookshops, and landmarks of the time are brought to life through commentary and drawings, paintings, and maps.

Originally published in 1976.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691616995
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1638
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.80(h) x 1.50(d)

Read an Excerpt

Thomas Jefferson's Paris

---

By Howard C. Rice Jr.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05232-8

---

CHAPTER 1

A Summary View of Jefferson's Paris

From its beginnings as a cluster of huts on an island in the Seine, Paris has grown in ever-expanding circles. The map of its growth suggests the cross-section of the trunk of some great tree. The concentric rings, now broad, now thin, record the fair weather and the droughts in the city's history. If we trace the ring that represents the limits of the Paris that Thomas Jefferson knew — the Paris of the 1780's — we find that it covers but half the area of the Paris we know today. If we take as our modern point of reference, not the city's legal limits, but the whole metropolitan area of Greater Paris, then Jefferson's Paris appears to us not much bigger than Roman Lutetia appeared to Jefferson's contemporaries. Paris, being highly conscious of its own history, has always enjoyed making such comparisons. There was published in 1787, for example, a finely engraved map showing the successive rings of the city's growth (Fig. 1). It was an appropriate time to print such a record, for in the 1780's a new city wall, the Wall of the Farmers-General, was being built.

This new "wall of circumvallation," as Jefferson called it, was not a fortification like several of the earlier city ramparts or the later wall built by Thiers in the 1840's, but a tax barrier designed to make the collection of municipal customs duties more effective. As such it was not popular and served to increase public criticism of the Farmers-General, the forty financiers to whom the King farmed out the internal revenue of his kingdom. The new wall ("clôture" as it is termed on the map shown here) provoked a storm of pamphlets, satirical verse, puns and other witticisms — the most famous of which is the now proverbial "le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant" The wall was inextricably related to the problems of public finance then agitating the country — problems that had been aggravated by France's participation in the War of American Independence. The architect charged with the construction and design of the wall and the tollhouses punctuating it, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, was inevitably drawn into the great debate. The Wall of the Farmers-General was authorized in 1782; in January 1785 the plans drawn up by Ledoux were approved and work was begun. Supported by the Minister of Finance, Calonne, Ledoux's fortunes suffered an eclipse when his patron was replaced in 1787 by Lomenie de Brienne. Reinstated in his functions after much intrigue, Ledoux was again dismissed in 1789 by still another Minister of Finance, Monsieur Necker.

The general hostility to the new wall made it difficult for people to view objectively Ledoux's designs for the tollhouses (bureaux) which were to flank each of the forty-seven gates (barrières). Even Jefferson, echoing the current mood, referred sarcastically to "the palaces by which we are to be let in and out." Ledoux himself apparently did not associate the tollhouses with oppression or vexations. He saw in them a magnificent opportunity to create for Paris a garland of gateways, of propylaea, worthy of the great city. Harking back to Palladio and to Piranesi as sources of suggestion, Ledoux devised a series of variations on classic themes, in which mass, material, light and shade, rather than superficial decoration, created the design (Figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). In spite of mutilation during the Revolution, when some of them were sacked as symbols of oppression (see Fig. 171), most of the gatehouses survived down to the middle of the nineteenth century. Four of them are still standing today: the Rotonde de Monceau (Parc Monceau), the Rotonde de la Villette (Place de Stalingrad), the Barrière du Trône (Place de la Nation, Cours de Vincennes), and the Barrière d'Enfer (Place Denfert-Rochereau). Situated along the line of the old FarmersGeneral Wall, on avenues still anachronistically referred to as the outer bulwarks (les boulevards extérieurs), they provide convenient landmarks for staking out Jefferson's Paris. More than that, they greet us at the entrance to the eighteenth-century city as symbols of the new architecture of the day and as evidence that Paris under the reign of Louis XVI was, as Jefferson phrased it, "every day enlarging and beautifying."

Turning from Ledoux's new palaces along the city limits and penetrating into the heart of the city, the Ile de la Cité, we find there symbols of the older Paris that was fast disappearing. The bridges that linked the island with the right and left banks — forming part of the great north-south axis of the city — were still lined with houses as they had been for centuries. But, in 1787, Jefferson was able to report among the "wonderful improvements" in Paris: "one of the old bridges has all its houses demolished and a second nearly so" (Figs. 8, 9). "Come hither, stranger," exulted one of Jefferson's French contemporaries, "come and behold the view we have prepared for you: the city has indeed changed in appearance in the past quarter century! We've waged such war against the Visigoths, we've protested so long in our books, that the barbarians have not been able to shut their ears to our cries of derision: they have mended their ways in spite of themselves. Triumphantly do I pace these unshackled bridges, pointing the finger of scorn at the Rue de la Pelleterie which still dares obstruct my view!" Another contemporary, seeking to epitomize in lapidary inscriptions the architectural achievements of the reign of Louis XVI, included in his litany the words: "Ponts Découverts" (Fig. 10).

Bridges, too, provide convenient landmarks for measuring the city's growth. In Jefferson's day only a handful of bridges spanned the Seine: the Pont au Double, the Pont Saint-Charles, the Petit Pont, and the Pont Saint-Michel, leading from the Left Bank to the lie de la Cité; and the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change, leading from the Island to the Right Bank. The Pont de la Cité linked the big island with the smaller He Saint-Louis, while the Pont de la Tournelle and the Pont Marie, joining the lie Saint-Louis to either bank, were the easternmost bridges in Paris. In the other direction the Pont Neuf, the "new bridge" completed in the reign of Henri IV, crossed the western tip of the Ile de la Cité. Beyond this there was only the Pont Royal, built in the reign of Louis XIV, crossing the river near the Château des Tuileries. Downstream to the west of the Pont Royal there were no more bridges within Paris, and, beyond the city limits, none at all until one reached the Pont de Sèvres on the road to Versailles.

New bridges were, however, being planned and one of these was finally begun during the period of Jefferson's residence in Paris. This was the Pont Louis XVI, designed by Perronet, which was to cross the Seine from the Place Louis XV (Place de la Concorde) to the Palais Bourbon, thus providing a more direct route from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Work on the Pont Louis XVI was started in 1787, although the symbolic first stone was not laid until 11 August 1788. In the presence of many royal officials (including Jefferson's friend Ethis de Corny) there was placed beneath the cornerstone a box containing among other things six exemplars of the medal struck to commemorate the occasion (Fig. 11 ). The bridge, which was not completed until several years later, has undergone many transformations and changes of name (now die Pont de la Concorde), but Duvivier's medal preserves the appearance of the Pont Louis XVI as it was originally conceived.

Walls and bridges were by no means the only wonderful improvements that Paris displayed for the visitor's admiration. The city had indeed greatly changed in appearance during the quarter-century preceding Jefferson's arrival there. The Place Louis XV designed by the architect Jacques-Ange Gabriel had been completed in the 1770's; the enlarged Palais Royal (Victor Louis) was opened in 1784, with work still in progress; the dome of the Halle aux Bleds (Legrand and Molinos) had been finished in 1782. A new Théâtre Italien (Jean-François Heurtier) had been built between 1781 and 1783, a new Théâtre Français (De Wailly and M.-J. Peyre) opened its doors in 1782, while the new Mint (Jacques-Denis Antoine) was erected on the Quai de Conti in the 1770's. To all of these we shall return for closer inspection. Churches, too, were being built or improved. Soufflot's grandiose temple, the Church of Sainte-Geneviève ( our Panthéon ), crowning the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter, was finally completed only in 1789 (Fig. 12 ). A new north tower was being added under Chalgrin's supervision to the Church of Saint-Sulpice. On the Right Bank a new Church of the Madeleine was under construction (although it was not to receive its final form until early in the nineteenth century). Brongniart had just finished a Doric chapel and cloister for the Capuchin Noviciate (Saint-Louis d'Antin, Lycée Condorcet) (see Fig. 49). In the Faubourg du Roule, Chalgrin was completing the basilica known as the Church of Saint-Philippe du Roule.

Public buildings like those just mentioned account for only a part of the changes in Paris. "On bâtit de tous côtés," wrote Sébastien Mercier, "— there's money only for building. Huge mansions are springing up as if by magic, and whole new quarters are being formed of magnificent dwellings." We shall often have occasion to borrow a phrase from Sébastien Mercier, whose Tableau de Paris remains the incomparable and inexhaustible chronicle of Louis XVI Paris. Jefferson himself was familiar with the book. The Tableau de Paris, he wrote to his friend James Madison when sending him a copy, "is truly a picture of private manners in Paris, but presented on the dark side and a little darkened moreover. But there is so much truth in its ground work that it will be well worth your reading. You will then know Paris (and probably the other large cities of Europe) as well as if you had been here years." Jefferson did not need to read Mercier to know that building was going on everywhere in Paris. "The stone of Paris," he observed, "is very white and beautiful, but it always remains soft, and suffers from the weather." The scaffolding, the piles of stone, the sound of the stonecutter's chisel and carpenter's hammer, met him at every turn. Moreover, he himself was to rent, successively, as his Paris residence, two of the new mansions in two of the new quarters.

The "new quarters" of Jefferson's day were chiefly those included in the wide ring of territory between the old boulevards of Louis XIV Paris and the Wall of the Farmers-General. As one example we may take the neighborhood of the Chaussée d'Antin. This thoroughfare stretched northward from the old boulevard toward the slopes of Montmartre, crossing at right angles the Chemin de Saint-Lazare, which skirted the base of the hill. The old semi-rural estates here began to be cut up into building lots by the middle of the eighteenth century, but not until the reign of Louis XVI did the builders hold full sway. Here, along the Chaussée d'Antin and the streets that soon branched out from it, Ledoux and other fashionable architects designed houses for bankers, speculators, and opera singers. And here, in the Cul-de-sac Taitbout, Jefferson lived during his first year in Paris. In the autumn of 1785 he moved to another new quarter, the Faubourg du Roule, where he resided in the Hôtel de Langeac for the last four years of his stay in France. Until the middle of the eighteenth century a royal nursery (pépinière) had extended from the Champs Elysées northward to the Chemin du Roule (now the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré), covering an expanse bounded approximately by the present Rue de Berri and Rue La Boétie. In 1772 this property came into the possession of the Comte d'Artois who, following the example of other princely speculators, soon had it cut up into building lots and thus started another new real estate development. The Hôtel de Langeac, where Jefferson made his home, was situated on a portion of the former Pépinière bordering the Champs-Elysées.

Not all the new residences were confined to such new quarters as the Chaussée d'Antin and the Faubourg du Roule. The hôtels that Jefferson came to know in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and in the Faubourg Saint-Germain dated in most cases from the early years of the century; they were to him, not the latest examples of modern building, but yesterday's or day-before-yesterday's houses. Nevertheless, even here, there were occasional new structures going up. Along the Seine, for example, not far from the Prince de Condé's recently enlarged Palais Bourbon, the Hôtel de Salm stood forth in all its fresh whiteness — inviting the admiration of all visitors to the capital, not the least of whom was Thomas Jefferson (Figs. 13, 14).

If there is any truth in the French saying "Quand le bâtiment va, tout va," then the Paris of the 1780's was most certainly a prosperous growing city. Indeed, some appreciation of this building fever is necessary to understand the generally optimistic mood in which public opinion approached the beginning of the French Revolution. Later apologists of the Ancien Régime, the victims of the Revolution, have looked back nostalgically to the Paris of the 1780's as the time of the only true douceur de vivre. In so doing they have transfixed the city in their own static memories and made it seem stationary and unchanging. Yet, when one attempts to live in the Paris of the 1780's with Jefferson and see it from day to day through his eyes, it is impossible not to feel it as a living, forwardlooking, rapidly evolving city.

In some respects the Revolution marked a pause in the city's growth. The physical appearance of Paris did not change much in the decade of the 1790's. There was little new construction, nor was there any significant destruction of the existing buildings. To be sure, royal statues were toppled, crown properties were nationalized and "défleurdelysés," religious edifices were laicized, mansions of the émigrés found new owners, and the way was thus prepared for speculators and future changes. It was primarily, however, a period in which old buildings were put to new uses. Mercier, when he published his Nouveau Paris in 1798, as a sequel to his earlier Tableau, could note changes in names, in speech, in manners and dress, but the old landmarks had not changed, for, as he aptly remarked, "Poiseau passe, le nid demeure" — the birds have flown but the nest remains.

It was not until the early years of the nineteenth century, under the reign of Napoleon, that the "beautifying and improving" of Paris was resumed, often along lines that had already been envisaged by the architects and planners of the Ancien Régime. And it was not until the middle of the century, during the Second Empire, that Baron Haussmann began the transformations that gave Paris the characteristic appearance we associate with the modern metropolis. But even Haussmann and his collaborators did not really obliterate the old. Taking the landmarks created by earlier generations as their fixed points, they set them off, linked them together with new thoroughfares, and in so doing superimposed on the older city a new network of avenues. Beneath this modern design the warp and woof formed by the older streets remain, and thus Jefferson's Paris is still there for us to explore. Haussmann's avenues have shifted the emphasis away from the older arteries. Dust and smoke and weather, the great levelers, have often reduced to a common hue the new buildings of successive generations. Our task here is not so much to reconstruct in our imagination houses that have disappeared as it is to view familiar streets in the light of their older significance and look with fresh eyes at buildings that are still standing.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Thomas Jefferson's Paris by Howard C. Rice Jr.. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• Preface, pg. vii
• Contents, pg. ix
• Chapter 1. A Summary View of Jefferson's Paris, pg. 1
• Chapter 2. The Center of Jefferson's Paris Palais Royal, Halle aux Bleds, Rue Saint-Honoré, pg. 13
• Chapter 3. The Center of Jefferson's Paris Place Louis XV, Tuileries, Louvre, pg. 25
• Chapter 4. New Quarters: The Chaussee d'Antin and the Boulevards, pg. 37
• Chapter 5. New Quarters: The Grille de Chaillot and the Faubourg du Roule, pg. 51
• Chapter 6. Left Bank: The Faubourg Saint-Germain, pg. 61
• Chapter 7. Left Bank: The Quartier Latin and the Jardin du Roi, pg. 77
• Chapter 8. Environs of Paris: The Road to Versailles Passy, Auteuil, Sevres, Chaville, Versailles, pg. 91
• Chapter 9. Environs of Paris: Bois de Boulogne, Mont Calvaire, & the Road to Saint-Germain, pg. 103
• Chapter 10. Adieu to Jefferson's Paris, pg. 115
• Notes, pg. 127
• List of Illustrations, pg. 141
• Index, pg. 149

Editorial Reviews

"Literate, charming, and ... brilliantly well-informed, the book is surely an essential acquisition for the library of the Jefferson or eighteenth-century Paris enthusiast."

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"Literate, charming, and ... brilliantly well-informed, the book is surely an essential acquisition for the library of the Jefferson or eighteenth-century Paris enthusiast."—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

From the Publisher