How Paris Became Paris

Love in Paris is totally unlike all other kinds of love,” Honoré de Balzac

This is little time for such a big city,” Gaspar de Vega admitted, “but I didn’t remark a single notable building, and the only interesting thing about the city is its size.”

This was the capital Henri IV found in 1598: a city an expert had decreed a virtual architectural wasteland.

Emma Bovary: “What was this Paris like? What a boundless name! She repeated it in a low voice, for the mere pleasure of it; it rang in her ears like a great cathedral bell; it shone before her eyes.”

often “bought things you didn’t really need.” Lister cautioned that “luxury like a whirlpool draws people into its extravagance.” Louis XIV himself “couldn’t understand how it was that there were so many husbands crazy enough to let themselves be ruined because of their wives’ outfits”; and the person who reported his remarks, the Duc de Saint-Simon, went the king one better: “He could have added—because of their own outfits as well.”

Bernier pronounced the panorama “all the more remarkable because it was almost entirely artificial, the work of human hands.” Technology and urban planning had thus created the notion of a cityscape, an urban landscape, a magnificent scene made by man rather than nature. Paris had no longer just an isolated monument

Italy had the finest churches, but “for the streets … and common buildings, [Paris] infinitely excels any city elsewhere in Europe.”

absolutely full of people.

The Sun King was thus the first ruler to respond to the changing nature of warfare and of national defense: from the seventeenth century on, each European country’s line of defense shifted from individual cities to the nation’s perimeters. Louis XIV replaced an architecture of paranoia with an architecture of openness; he thereby made Paris the first open city in modern European history.

Colbert, both from 1669, illustrate this. The first is a list of major construction projects that ends: “grandeur and magnificence everywhere.” The second could be called the categorical imperative of Louis XIV’s monarchy: “This is not a reign that does things on a small scale.”

Louis XIV’s reply was categoric: “I want to know everything about everything.”