Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/311

P A K I S 289 provost of Paris, and his lieutenants named by the sovereign. His main duties were to regulate the price of provisions and to control the incidence of taxation on merchandise. He was the chief inspector of bridges and public wells, superintendent of the river police, and com mander of the guard of the city walls, which it vas also his duty to keep in repair. And, finally, he had juris diction in commercial affairs until the creation of the consular tribunals by L Hopital (Lalanne, Diet, historique <le la France}. The violent attempts made by Etienne Marcel in the 14th century, and those of the communes of 1793 and 1871, showed what reason royalty had to fear too great an expansion of the municipal power at Paris. The town council met in the 13th and 14th centuries in an unpretending house on Ste Genevieve, near the city walls on the left side of the river. The municipal assem blies were afterwards held near the Place de Greve, on the right side of the river, in the " Maison aux Piliers," which Francis I. allowed to be replaced by an imposing hotel de ville. The last of the direct descendants of Capet, and the first two Valois did little for their capital. Philip the Fair, however, increased its political importance by making it the seat of the highest court in the kingdom, the parle- ment, which he organized between 1302 and 1304, and to which he surrendered a part of his Cit6 palace. Under the three sons of Philip the Fair, the Tour de Nesle, which stood opposite, on the site now occupied by the buildings of the Institute, was the scene of frightful orgies, equally celebrated in history and romance. One of the queens who, if the chronicles are to be trusted, took part in these expiated her crimes in Chateau-Gaillard, where she was strangled in 1315 by order of her husband, Louis X. During the first part of the war of the Hundred Years, Paris escaped being taken by the English, but felt the effects of the national misfortunes. Whilst destitution excited in the country the revolt of the Jacquerie, in the city the miseries of the time v/ere attributed to the vices of the feudal system, and the citizens seemed ready for insurrection. The provost of the merchants, Etienne Marcel, equally endowed with courage and intellect, sought to turn this double movement to account in the interest of the Paris in 1380. municipal liberties of Paris and of constitutional guarantees. The cause which he supported was lost through the violence of his own acts. Not content with having massacred two ministers under the very eyes of the dauphin Charles, who was regent whilst his father John lay captive in London, he joined the Jacquerie, and was not afraid to call into Paris the king of Navarre, Charles the Bad, a notorious firebrand who at that time was making common cause with the English. Public sentiment, at first favourable to Marcel s schemes, shrank from open treason. A watch was set on him, and, at the moment when, having the keys of the town in his possession in virtue of his office, he was pre paring to open one of the gates, he was assassinated by order of Jean Maillard, one of the heads of the milice, on the night of July 31, 1358. Marcel had enlarged Philip Augustus s line of fortifications on the right side of the river, and had commenced a new one. When he became king in 1364, Charles V. forgot the outrages he had suffered at the hands of the Parisians during his regency. He robbed the Louvre to some extent of its military equipment, in order to make it a convenient and sumptuous residence ; his open-work staircases and his galleries are mentioned in terms of the highest praise by writers of the time. This did not, however, remain always his favourite palace ; having built or rebuilt in the St Antoine quarter the mansion of St Paul or St Pol, he was particularly fond of living in it during the latter part of his life, and it was there that he died in 1380. It was Charles V. who, in conjunction with the provost of the merchants, Hugues Aubriot, erected the famous Bastille XVIII. - 37