Despite the harsh Middle Ages and ordeals of the wars of religion,
Paris established itself as a major European capital.
In the 17th and 18th centuries,
the city reflected the French kings' dreams of grandeur
But to escape a seething population, the Bourbons abandoned Paris.
The capital was home to the greatest minds of the Enlightenment.
But the brilliant image of Parisian artistic and intellectual life
concealed the harsh reality.
Society was racked by poverty.
The source of deepening discontent.
In less than a century, Paris would witness
3 revolutions and 2 empires.
All historians would agree that Paris,
at the end of the 18th century,
was the revolutionary capital of Europe.
PARIS A capital tale
PARIS Capital of Revolutions
After the Fronde, Louis XIV kept his distance from the capital.
He nevertheless tried to make Paris the showcase of his power.
As for Louis the 14th's relationship with Paris...
He didn't come to Paris very often.
When he did come he would stay at the Louvre,
or, to be precise, at the Tuileries Palace.
That's the grandeur of Louis XIV's time: The Louvre was opened up to artists.
Louis XIV and his ministers
desired not only political and military supremacy
but culturial supremacy too.
To achieve this, to realize their ambitions,
they granted allowances to scientists, scholars and French and foreign artists.
Tragedians Racine and Corneille, and musicians Lully and Moliere,
occupied center stage at Versailles and the Palais Royal.
Artists and scientists met in the Great Gallery at the Louvre,
which became the capital's intellectual center.
The works of various academies
newly created by the king, including the Académie Frangaise,
were exhibited here.
In Louis the XV's reign, in the Age of Enlightenment,
Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau governed a Republic of Letters.
These new authors shone in the Parisian salons such as...
Madame Joffrin's famous salon.
Previously, there had been Madame de Lambert's salon.
There was Mademoiselle de I'Epinay's salon.
In fact, there were a great many salons
where philosophers, artists, thinkers and writers
met and exchanged ideas.
A real intellectual life existed. In Versailles, not Paris.
Parisian intellectual life took off
in the sumptuous mansions of the Marais.
Literary and philosophical criticism became popular.
Satirical tracts were circulated in the capital,
denouncing the failures of government and of society.
Artists and intellectuals met at the Procope,
the haunt of Diderot,
d'Alembert and Voltaire.
This famous restaurant would become an incubator of revolutionary ideas.
Paris had two faces. Luxurious and spiritual
in the west, sinking into poverty in the east.
Paris had a population of about 500,000, the most populated city in Europe.
The long Spanish Succession War had just ended.
Then there was the severe economic crisis and famine of 1709.
So it was basically what we would call a Third-World city today.
At the time in some areas of Paris people lived in over-crowded dwellings
with very few comforts
and absolutely no sanitation.
Living conditions for working-class populations in these districts,
whether employed or out of work, were absolutely unbelievable.
Every day dozens of poor wretches died in the capital,
crammed into beds at Hétel-Dieu hospital
or in the street, in utter destitution.
Paris had become a theatre of horrors.
In medieval times, the poor were seen as children of Christ.
Poverty was not considered a vice.
You had to help the poor.
But in this new age, the poor became idle and dangerous people.
In the very heart of Paris, there were still no-go areas
given over to vagrancy, prostitution and begging.
Some areas were named "Cour des Miracles", or Courts of Miracles.
In these unsavory places,
beggars' infirmities miraculously disappeared at nightfall.
Organized into a corporation of beggars,
they elected their monarch, who went by the name
the King of Thune.
In the slang of the time, "thune" was the alms
given to the poor, a simple coin.
The Court of Miracles
was a kind of containment area,
and yet apart from all the images, literary and so on,
it also tells us about urban management problems
in a much more general way.
One of the instruments of the restoration
of order in the city of Paris is symbolized by the creation
of the post of Lieutenant General of Police in 1667.
The Lieutenant General of Police's task was to curb the growth of crime.
Nicolas de la Reynie, France's first cop,
destroyed the capital's most famous den of thieves:
the Court of Miracles.
A repressive policy was conducted against those on the margins of society.
But it was difficult to regulate a population that lived on the street.
In those days, you could simply open your door,
set up your table and chairs and sit down to work or chat.
Children played in the streets.
There were all sorts of activities the police objected to
and cracked down on.
There were districts where criminal activity was rife
which the police kept a close watch on.
The best example of this is Palais-Royal,
where there were theaters, gambling dens and prostitution.
So if there was a trouble spot in Paris in the 15th century,
it was definitely the area around the royal palace.
Numerous illicit activities took place
in the gardens of the Palais Royal and the surrounding inns.
The area was notorious as a meeting place
for streetwalkers, who came here to practice their trade.
They referred to it as "doing the palace."
The authorities condemned prostitution.
These ladies of the night were harassed,
arrested, banished or locked up.
The sole objective was to clean up the streets.
- Madame. - Father.
For our good works.
Of course, Father.
In 1782, the corporation of tax farmers, the Ferme Générale,
put the idea to Louis XVI
of imprisoning Paris, so a new wall was built.
Barriers were erected where a toll was exacted from the Parisians
who were no longer allowed to circulate freely.
Some of these tollhouses still exist today,
such as the Rotonde de La Villette and the two pavilions
at Denfert-Rochereau.
Tempers flared in an already seething capital.
In 1789, the people rose up in revolt.
Riots and demonstrations were evidence of the widening gulf
between the population and the monarchy.
All over the capital,
Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI were bitterly criticized.
One important thing about the 18th century which mustn't be overlooked
is that, even though education had not made great advances,
more and more people knew how to read and write.
Ideas could be circulated much more easily.
Plus newspapers appeared.
Public opinion was openly expressed
in the Journal de Paris, the capital's first daily newspaper.
Parisians were influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment
whose 3 core ideas were human autonomy,
the human end purpose of our acts and universalism.
Diderot and d'Alembert
incorporated the manifesto of this revolutionary philosophy
in a 17-volume work, the Encyclopédie.
It assessed man's ability
to master and understand the world.
This liberation of thinking revealed the combined tyranny
of the Church and the absolutist State.
The people of Paris gradually became the "tribunal of opinion"
Paris, like all very young cities,
was a city that was not necessarily calm.
There was tension in Paris.
All the same, I'm not sure that, on the eve of the French Revolution,
everyone was perfectly aware in Paris
of the huge problems that existed.
In the middle of an economic crisis,
the king let Paris's elected representatives
take over the city's affairs.
For 5 years
the municipal council was in the vanguard
as the fate of the monarchy was played out.
At Versailles, the nobility, clergy and the Third Estate
formed a national assembly.
The king's position was weakened.
Since it was always the same people who were asked to pay,
the same thing happened as in the time of Etienne Marcel.
A section of the bourgeoisie refused.
Here too it began as a bourgeois revolution which used the people
to march on Versailles.
Unemployment began to appear.
In those days, étre en gréve - to be on strike -
meant you were on the Place de Greve,
I.e. the present Place de I'Hotel de Ville.
But the bourgeoisie did not want to pay
for the State's bankruptcy.
So all these people were available to go to the Bastille and take weapons.
Tension rose further when Louis XVI tried to disband the National Assembly.
The deputies of the Third Estate then urged the capital to rise up.
The people were after weapons.
"To the Bastille!" they cried.
The most incredible castle ever built was never used to defend the city.
It was only used as a prison.
In fact, it was the symbol of arbitrary monarchy.
Anyone could be imprisoned upon production
of a letter with the king's seal, on the strength of a denunciation.
Such a letter was enough to have someone imprisoned in the Bastille.
It was the symbol of royal authority.
The Bastille embodied what Parisians could no longer bear:
the excesses of absolute monarchy.
In the Ancien Régime, you had to pay for prison.
Free prison stays were a achievement of the French Revolution.
So the type of cell you had depended on your financial means.
The pailleux were prisoners who sat or slept on straw
because that was all they could afford.
There would be several of them to a cell.
The pistole was a cell for those who had a bit of money.
These prisoners were given trestle beds and they were only two to a cell.
Distinguished inmates had an individual cell
and were allowed to have paper and ink.
The Marquis de Sade even turned his cell into a suite with room service.
Pardon the intrusion, Marquis.
You fool! Again and again you insist on terrifying me.
Yes, sir, I'll inform the warden.
Where were we?
On 14 July 1789 the people were determined
to fight royal authority.
They went to the Bastille. And they took it pretty easily.
They were even a bit surprised themselves.
The Parisians stormed the castle.
The governor, De Launay,
invited a handful of men in to negotiate.
But then he raised the drawbridge
and ordered the troops to shoot without warning.
This barbarous act incensed the mob who had been joined
by mutinous soldiers of the Gardes Frangaises.
Within two or three hours, the rebels were inside.
Much to their amazement, the Bastille was a sordid ghost town
with only a few invalid soldiers.
The storming of the Bastille was much stronger as an image...
if only because of its size.
It was reputed to be impenetrable.
The fact is, it was so huge that it should never have been taken.
But it simply fell. I think that everyone was surprised.
The governor of the Bastille, De Launay,
and the provost of Paris merchants, Flesselles,
were massacred by the revolutionaries.
What were the police doing?
The paradox of the Paris police force,
which was a model for all Europe in the 18th century,
is that it collapsed like a house of cards in 1789.
The Lieutenant General of Police disappeared,
the police inspectors vanished.
There may have been less disorder than we might imagine today.
If there had been that much disorder, there would have been total chaos.
But at no time was there total chaos.
There was no hatred against the king, I don't think, at the time.
King went to the Hétel de Ville, Paris City Hall,
to show that "his good city of Paris"... From Francis I onwards,
the kings said "the good city of Paris"...
The king wanted to show there was an alliance between the monarchy
and the "good city of Paris".
Bailly, the Paris mayor, gave the king the keys to the city.
Paris was the king's city.
Determined to remain with the king, the National Assembly moved its deputies
to the Salle du Manége,
or Riding Hall, in the Tuileries Palace.
In the east of the capital, the Bastille began to be dismantled.
I imagine there were
a few entrepreneurs who saw it as an extraordinary opportunity.
A huge amount of stone was up for grabs.
Stones from the Bastille were used to build the Pont de la Concorde.
One entrepreneur even made
miniature Bastilles as patriotic souvenirs.
It was basically an opportunity
to clear Paris, the Rue Saint-Antoine eastwards.
This opportunity was seized and it became very symbolic,
Large demonstrations are still held at Bastille.
For large demonstrations
people don't head for the Place de la Concorde, they go to Bastille.
It's still a place of revolution.
At the beginning of the 1790s,
Paris had still not freed itself from the monarchy.
And then things began to change.
There was an ever wider gulf between the royal family,
which was supposed to be
the Parisians' protector, and the citizens of Paris.
This gap widened, the final split coming when the king fled to Varennes.
This was the very worst thing
that the king and the royal family could have done.
1791. The king had been thinking about leaving Paris for months.
An escape plan was devised.
The royal family left the Louvre in secret during the night of June 21.
In the morning, news of Louis the 16th's departure spread through Paris.
La Fayette sent couriers in every direction.
The royal family was eventually arrested in Varennes in the Meuse.
On June 23,
Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette returned to the capital under escort.
The atmosphere was strange.
Contemporaries say this return from Varennes
was met with the strangest of silences.
According to several witness accounts,
the king passed before a strangely silent crowd.
When the huge carriage passed, there was barely a sound.
The royal family's return to the Tuileries sealed their tragic fate.
The flight to Varennes marked a radical turning point.
Those in favor of a republic would use this event to show Louis XVI
was an enemy of the Revolution.
In August 1792,
the Paris Commune had the royal family imprisoned in the Temple's tower.
At the same time, the Revolutionary Tribunal
was set up on the lie de la Cite, in the Conciergerie.
The Conciergerie
was used as a prison by the Revolutionary Tribunal.
This tribunal was held in the king's former throne room.
It was a very symbolic choice. The prisoners were called
from the city's prisons. This became known as the "evening call".
It basically meant they had to go before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
They stayed at the Conciergerie
while awaiting the tribunal's decision.
There were only two possibilities:
either they were sentenced to death or they were acquitted.
In January 1793,
the king himself was tried by the deputies of the National Convention.
The decision was final: death by the guillotine.
On January 21, Louis XVI was decapitated at the Place de la Revolution.
A huge crowd squeezed onto the Tuileries terrace.
They made a real performance
of the kings execution,
as they did of the queen's execution.
They felt the need to make it as theatrical as possible.
There was a concern for publicity in all this.
As part of this political propaganda effort,
the National Convention demanded Marie Antoinette's head.
On 15 October 1793,
the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced the Austrian to death.
The following morning she left through the Conciergerie's gates
and traveled by cart to the Place de la Revolution.
Around midday, Marie Antoinette climbed the ladder leading to the scaffold.
A few minutes later, the blade fell.
A man grabbed the queen's head to show it to the crowd. Paris rejoiced.
The capital had swept away centuries of absolute monarchy.
Irony of history.
This square, built by Louis XV,
put an end to the Bourbons' rule.
Named Place de la Révolution in 1792,
it was renamed Place de la Concorde at the end of the Reign of Terror.
For, in the year 1793, the capital was to experience more horror.
The Reign of Terror began.
Arbitrary arrests were followed by summary executions.
The Revolutionary Tribunal had unlimited powers.
It became the Extraordinary Criminal Tribunal.
Paris was ruled by force and repression.
The Committee for Public Safety changed hands.
Danton stepped aside in favor of Robespierre.
Every street corner was dangerous.
Everyone knew everyone else in their neighborhood.
Nowadays if you see a stranger you don't give it a second thought.
But at the time, as everyone was outside
- people spent little time at home as it was too uncomfortable -
you immediately denounced anyone who was not,
or did not appear to be, a local.
A first denouncement would set the ball rolling.
You were asked to denounce people.
Then you denounced even more people. It was in your interest to do so
before they denounced you. It spiraled out of control.
All this informing led to more and more executions and imprisonment.
This terrible period claimed tens of thousands of victims.
2870 people were executed during the French Revolution,
which is a huge number.
Among the most well-known are Madame de Barry, Bailly,
Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday and then Danton.
A number of Montagnards too, including Robespierre.
Fouquier-Tinville was sentenced to death as well.
The end of the Terror came about because some deputies and club members
realized they were for the chop next.
What was known as the Plaine,
I.e. no-one had ever heard apparently,
ended up forming a league to topple Robespierre.
They knew they were going to be carted off to the guillotine.
That's how it ended.
On 28 July 1794
it was Robespierre's turn to mount the scaffold.
Revolutionary Paris had turned against its masters.
On the eve of the French Revolution,
Paris had 600,000 inhabitants.
It's said that, after the revolution, the population numbered about 400,000.
That's a pretty big difference. A great many people left Paris.
They fled because the situation was becoming unbearable.
Some behind because they could not afford to leave.
Again, it was the poorest members of society
who suffered the most.
Once again, Paris was left to its own devices.
The rebel city needed a leader.
There were two Directories between 1795 and 1799.
They wanted to prevent Parisians from pressurizing further the Assembly.
To remain in power,
the regime relied increasingly on military men.
General Bonaparte, returning in triumph to Paris,
put an end to a decade of revolution.
It's indisputable.
Napoleon was wary of Paris.
Anyone would have been.
Paris had overthrown Louis XVI stormed the Tuileries Palace...
Paris was a rebellious city.
Then of course there was the Fronde in the reign of Louis XIV.
Paris had always caused trouble, starting with Etienne Marcel's uprising.
In short, Paris was revolutionary.
Paris was frightening. And Paris frightened Napoleon.
To such a degree that the very first thing Napoleon did,
and that all his successors would do until 1871,
was control Paris.
From Napoleon onwards,
a prefect under the government's command controlled Paris.
With Paris under tight control,
Bonaparte could become Emperor Napoleon I.
On 2 December 1804, from the Tuileries to the Pont Neuf,
from Quai des Orfévres to Notre Dame, the city was decorated for the occasion.
Napoleon brought prestige back to Paris.
After Napoleon's coronation, Paris became the capital of an empire
that grew and grew until it covered at least one third of Europe.
Napoleon pictured Paris as the capital of the Great Empire.
Inspired by Rome, he displayed his military successes in the city.
On the Place Vendome, Napoleon had a bronze column erected
to commemorate the Battle of Austerlitz.
Modeled on Trajan's Column in Rome, it is 44 meters high.
Composed of 98 stone drums, its shaft is covered with bronze plates
made out of cannon taken from enemy armies.
It is topped by a statue of Napoleon I as Caesar.
Although honored with the Emperor's military successes,
the city had more immediate needs.
There was daily life, routine.
Paris was a dirty, poorly-maintained city,
a badly-lit, dangerous city.
Paris needed more light, a bit of a tidy-up, a cleaning.
Why have you not yet demolished the old lie de la Cité neighborhood?
The ruins aren't good enough for rats.
Cambacéres, you must accord to me the finances to divert the Ourcq river
towards the top of La Villette.
The waters will spread to every fountain in Paris.
The biggest issue in Paris was water.
Napoleon's great idea was to bring water to the city.
At the time, water carriers walked the city streets with buckets of water.
One bucket held 15 liters. But you had to pay for your bucket.
Then you used it for whatever you liked.
There were very few water fountains in Paris,
so Napoleon wanted to install a lot more.
That's why he brought water to Paris
from the river Ourcq.
In 1802, the digging of the 60-kilometer-long Canal de I'Ourcq
marked the start of the city's mains water supply.
Built in 1808,
the Bassin de Villette is Paris's largest man-made body of water.
It links the Canal de I'Ourcq and the Canal St-Martin.
This water network supplies the capital's fountains.
At the same time, he decided to embellish the fountains.
For Bastille, he planned a monumental statue of an elephant
with water coming out of its trunk.
It was an extraordinary and brilliant idea.
This fountain only ever existed as a plaster model.
Victor Hugo made it Gavroche's home in Les Misérables.
Another of Napoleon's great ideas
was to build a main road through the city from east to west
which would open up the capital and make it lighter.
Napoleon ordered the building of this communication route
between the capital's the east and west.
Lined with buildings with elegant facades
typical of the Neo-Classical style,
the street immortalized Napoleon's famous Italian campaign battle: Rivoli.
But Napoleon dreamt above all
of a grandiose project befitting his status as emperor.
The King of Rome's palace will forever imprint in stone
the character of Paris.
It will be more majestic than the Kremlin.
The finest palace, past or present.
Majesty, we've resumed construction.
We will soon link the Bois de Boulogne to Port Maillot,
to the hills of Chaillot.
We are making the city both administrative and military.
And a residence for my son.
The King of Rome at the summit of Paris.
On his son's birth in 1811
Napoleon thought of building a new palace to house the imperial family.
This palace was to be as large as Louis XIV's
and dominate Paris from the hill of Chaillot.
But fate decided otherwise.
Paris had been the capital of the empire but this was the end.
The curtain was going to fall.
Well, it fell in 1815. But it began to fall in 1814.
The Allies entered Paris.
And this proud city, which had dominated the great empire, dominated Europe,
suddenly found itself with Cossacks on the Champs-Elysées,
who shouted a famous word: "bistrot!"
Meaning, "Quick, hurry up and serve me!"
The Cossacks were on the Champs-Elysées, and the curtain fell.
Lack of time and money
meant the emperor's grand plans to redevelop Paris came to nothing.
But Napoleon did leave a monumental mark
on the capital.
In honor of his Great Army, he built the Arc de Triomphe
and La Madeleine church.
In the Vivienne district he also began work on the Palais Brongniart,
the future home of the city's stock exchange.
At Napoleon's behest,
the Champs-Elysées was no longer just a pleasant place for a stroll
but a magnificent avenue too.
In the first half of the 19th century, in the 9th arrondissement, the city
witnessed the birth of a district that drew writers, painters and musicians:
Nouvelle Athénes, or New Athens.
Paris became the capital of Romanticism.
The greatest artists of the day met at the home of the painter Ary Scheffer.
His closest friends included writers George Sand and Ernest Renan,
the composer Frederic Chopin and poet Alphonse de Lamartine.
Hailed by his generation, Lamartine had a special place in Parisian life.
In 1830, he entered politics
at a time when Paris was plagued by its old rebellious demons.
In the first half of the 19th century,
Paris seems to have been a city in a
quasi-permanent state of insurrection.
The old heart of Paris erupted periodically.
The Hétel de Ville district remained a hotbed of revolt.
In 1830, yet again, the capital had to deal with a revolution.
The Revolution of 1830 was a bourgeois revolution.
It was the bourgeoisie who demanded greater freedom.
Bankers, traders... They were clearly the leaders of this revolution
against Charles X's authoritarianism.
Images of the barricades of 1830 show us that, generally speaking,
even on the barricades, class differences were still respected.
The people did not give the orders, the people obeyed.
The bourgeoisie commanded the barricades.
Here is a student, perhaps of the Ecole Polytechnique,
so a young bourgeois but a bourgeois all the same.
He would control the maneuver, show people where to shoot,
and it was he, especially if he had uniform,
as students of the Ecole Polytechnique had,
who embodied leadership and therefore the respect of order.
As for the people, they simply obeyed.
In 1830, the word "democracy" still frightened people.
In July 1830, led by the bourgeoisie, the people of Paris rose up.
Erected barricades and confronted Charles X's armed troops.
After a lengthy period of parliamentary unrest,
the king attempted to restore absolute monarchy.
The revolt turned into a republican revolution
known as The Three Glorious Days.
Firstly what do you call a revolution if you remove the word "revolution",
a word that still worried people?
Hence the expression "The Three Glorious Days",
which does not use the word "revolution".
Secondly, by stressing the word "three"
- Three Glorious Days - you give it a time limit.
The revolution lasted 3 days, not 4, not 5, not 6.
Hence a revolution is something that must be ended as quickly as possible
because otherwise you never know where it might lead.
This 3-day revolution led to the abdication of Charles X
and his self-imposed exile.
The Second Restoration was no more.
Louis-Philippe had himself proclaimed King by the Chamber of Deputies.
Thus the July Monarchy began.
To commemorate the Three Glorious Days,
the July Column was erected on the site of many Parisian revolutions:
the Place de la Bastille.
Its bronze shaft bears the names of the revolution's 504 victims.
In reaction to social tension and growing poverty,
the Parisian bourgeoisie migrated further to the west of the capital.
Great cholera epidemics ravaged the city's working-class districts,
spreading through the center's narrow, winding dirty streets.
In 1832, the disease claimed 30,000 victims
in the capital.
The city's morgue overflowed with bodies transported by barge along the Seine.
The first theories of hygiene appeared at this time.
These were implemented by Prefect Rambuteau.
He undertook to improve living conditions
by giving Parisians "water, air and shade."
But there was growing social inequality.
The social divide in Paris was actually pretty similar
to that which can be seen today and also really quite different.
Why similar?
Like today, you had wealthy districts and poor districts.
So the traditional east/west Paris divide is not a recent thing.
It began fairly early on in the history of Paris.
And I don't think it's over yet.
But the different social classes may have been in closer contact
simply because there were phenomena then that no longer exist today.
Fried fish, fruit and vegetable, bread, cake and bread sellers,
delivery boys, water carriers...
In the 19th century,
the array of traders on the Paris streets
meant that different social classes had some contact with one another.
In 1840 Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers
began negotiations with England for the return of Napoleon's ashes,
to restore King Louis-Philippe's prestige.
On 15 December during a grandiose ceremony, the hearse entered Paris.
The million Parisians lining the route cried, "Long Live the Emperor!"
The cortege entered the lnvalides where it was met by the king in person.
Napoleon I now rests in the Church of the Dome
in accordance with the will he made on Saint Helena:
"It is my wish that my ashes repose on the banks of the Seine
"amid the French people that I loved."
The main beneficiary of this operation was the Bonapartist movement.
Within 8 years,
it brought to power Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor's nephew.
That year, 1848, peace was still a long way off.
1848 was an event that traumatized many people at the time
because it occurred during the Republic,
and the Republic was supposed to be an ideal of liberty and equality.
But in 1848 the term that was emphasized the most,
in a sense, was "fraternity".
And yet in June 1848 civil war broke out.
The regime of the July Monarchy had had its day.
The political and economic crisis had worsened.
Social discontent was at its height.
Spurred on by the liberals
and republicans, the people rose up again
and managed to wrest control of the capital.
This revolt represented a grave danger for the government.
The proletariat and those on the margins were described
as "savages in the city".
The revolt lasted about 3 or 4 days,
with extremely violent battles.
There were maybe 3,000, maybe 4,000 victims.
The scale had changed.
This wasn't a revolution that claimed a few dozen or a few hundred lives.
This was on a whole new scale.
It was a veritable massacre,
a massacre of workers who were taken prisoner and shot without trial.
The aim of the 1848 Revolution
was to get rid of the monarchical system
in order to introduce a republican system of government.
Elections were held.
This was more than a revolution in that people wanted to introduce
a new system.
And this regime change came about in February 1848.
Louis-Philippe was forced to abdicate.
His throne was burned at the foot of the July Column in Place de la Bastille.
The revolutionaries seized the Palais Bourbon
and proclaimed a provisional government.
The 2nd French Republic was born.
Lamartine was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.
The republican government, which came to power in February 1848,
adopted a whole series of measures that people had hoped for.
The most important of these included restrictions in working hours
restrictions in working hours
- 10 hours in Paris, 11 in the provinces -
the abolition of slavery and universal suffrage for men.
For the first time in history, all Frenchmen had the right to vote.
In the presidential elections of December 1848,
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte became the first president
of the republic.
But 4 years later, following a coup d'état,
the 2nd Republic was replaced by the 2nd Empire.
Napoleon Ill mounted the throne.
In 1870, after six months of intense fighting
with Prussia, France was defeated.
As Paris tried to get its breath back,
the Prussians were at the city's gates again.
The Parisians had no strength left.
On the eve of the Paris Commune,
the terrible experience of the Prussian siege,
which lasted several months, had left its mark on the city's people.
They had given their all defending their city and nation
and it left them deeply scarred.
The two important words are Commune and Paris.
It was the city and its people that rose up.
The Revolution of 1871 was a popular revolution
in the sense that it was a revolution of the people.
During the night of March 18, Adolphe Thiers and his government
sent in the army to seize the cannons on the hill of Montmartre.
But the people of Montmartre were not prepared
to surrender arms paid for with the Parisians' money.
The insurgents, known as the Communards, clashed with the troops.
The Commune began on March 18 on the hill of Montmartre.
In the early hours, the first workers to arrive in Montmartre
were the washerwomen.
They saw the army
hitching up the cannons and taking them away.
They rushed over to the soldiers
and cried, "No! Stop! Stop!"
They alerted the Vigilance Committee of Montmartre.
And then the National Guard was called.
This was a citizens' militia
that had defended the city during the siege.
They fraternized for a few hours, then the general,
exasperated, told the crowd to move.
The crowd refused to budge.
So he told his soldiers to take aim.
And then, at one point, he said, "Fire! Shoot!"
In those few seconds, the incident turned into a revolution
because the soldiers refused to shoot.
They laid down their arms.
Known as the Versaillais,
Thier's army was made up of 130,000 experienced soldiers.
Facing them were 12,000 or so men from the ranks of the National Guard
as well as ordinary citizens.
The Communards erected barricades in Montmartre, Ménilmontant
and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The insurrection had begun!
The people also rushed to the Tuileries
and occupied the palace as a sign of the destruction of order.
The Communards
had put up a huge banner in the throne room,
the imperial room par excellence, which said,
"People, the gold that exudes from these walls is your sweat.
"You own what you have created."
The idea that the product of labor should belong to the workers
was at the heart of the Commune's ideal.
The Commune stormed the city hall and made it their headquarters.
The rebels elected a council whose composition was largely working class:
skilled workers, employees and teachers.
The Communards immediately declared a series of revolutionary measures:
free compulsory secular education, the organization of labor
and, most importantly, the separation of Church and State.
This really was a revolution.
People wanted to change society.
There was a real desire to change society, to change living conditions,
to change human relations.
This wasn't simply a communitarian revolution,
or a communist revolution.
It was about changing social traditions,
the relationship between men and women, women and children.
All of this was very well thought out.
There were all sorts of ideas, and it's in this respect
that it was a revolution and a very important revolution.
Towards the end of April,
the Commune realized that, unfortunately,
it was very likely the Versaillais would attack,
their dreams of federalism would not be realized...
and the battle would take place in Paris.
The Communards erected military barricades all over the capital.
The people of Paris were ready for confrontation.
The first battles led to the shooting of federate prisoners by the Versaillais.
In retaliation, the Communards took hostages and threatened to shoot them
if the Versaillais carried on shooting their men.
There was now a force of 200,000 to 300,000 men,
which was ready to attack.
At one point, Paris was bombed every day.
On Sunday May 21, Bloody Week began.
In the face of the Versaillais's swift conquest of western Paris,
the Communards withdrew to their historic districts
to defend every street.
The barricades gradually gave way.
On May 23, the hill of Montmartre fell into the hands of the Versaillais.
There were executions all over the place.
Rebels who had been taken prisoner were shot on the barricades.
It was absolutely systematic.
They also rounded up people in Paris, according to very vague criteria,
put them in chains and took them from Chételet
along the Seine to Lobau barracks.
Once there, they closed the door and executed them immediately,
I.e. they didn't even take the time to line people up in front of the wall.
They were shot like rabbits.
Ten minutes later, the next group would arrive.
This went on for 4 days.
Two to three thousand people are estimated to have been executed
at Lobau barracks.
The mutilated city was torn apart.
Paris has never been demolished, never been hit by an earthquake,
never suffered flooding, or very rarely.
The worst destruction it has suffered was during the Commune.
There's no doubt about it. The fires lit by the Communard
destroyed a good part of the city.
The fire destroyed a number of important monuments
including the Tuileries Palace, the Palais de Justice
and the Cour des Comptes.
By some miracle, the Louvre survived
but the arches on the Rue Castiglione collapsed.
Paris City Hall was deliberately set alight.
Only the walls and chimneys survived.
But Belleville resisted.
Belleville symbolizes the Commune's resistance.
The Communards carried on fighting there on the 26, 27, 28, 29 of May,
right till the very last day.
And Pére Lachaise cemetery, in the heart of Belleville,
with its "Federates Wall" became a key symbol.
Despite a few pockets of resistance
in Ménilmontant and Belleville, Paris the rebel was recaptured.
The street fighting ended in Pere Lachaise cemetery.
The Paris Commune is one of the most
terrible episodes in the capital's history.
Never had so much blood been shed on the city's streets.
Even now there is disagreement about the number of victims.
Estimates range from 8,000 to over 30,000.
We'll never know for sure.
When it comes to Bloody Week, the real question is,
how could we French, or more specifically Parisians,
have been involved in a massacre of such proportions
when we are supposed to be, in inverted commas,
"the Beacon of Civilization."
So, in people's minds, it was a terrible thing.
It was a bloody, violent, destructive revolution.
But at the same time it was the revolution of ideas:
ideas that have survived until today.
Even now, many ideas that we hear are ideas that first appeared
during the Paris Commune.
The world's first workers' revolution, the Paris Commune,
ended over sixty years of insurrection.
The revolutions of the Parisians have dictated France's political evolution.
A century later barricades reappeared on the capital's streets,
one fine day in May 1968.
In 1873, the conservative government
re-established "moral order".
The National Assembly decreed the construction of Sacré-Coeur Basilica
to expiate the crimes of the Commune.
Shaped by the splendors and tragedies of its history,
"Paris the incandescent" was the source of an entire nation's dreams of liberty.
But the City of Light was still in search of its luster.
The strength of its past would carry the capital towards modernity.
Subtitles - Vdm