How the Sun King cleaned up Paris City of Poison, City of Light
Tim Smith-Laing enjoys a romp through the dark alleys and boudoir poisonings of the crime-infested 17th-century city
Before the city’s Hauss mannification, when old Paris was razed in favour of airy boulevards and open prospects, it could hardly have been called “the City of Light”. Indeed, to judge by Holly Tucker’s evocative portrait, 17th-century Paris counted among the darkest places on Earth. Not just at night, when citizens “battened down their homes and stores […] like sailors preparing for a storm”, but during the day, too, when the sun could barely pry into narrow, busy streets, ankle-deep in mud that “attached itself to clothes, the sides of buildings, and the insides of nostrils”.
More than that – at least until the intervention of Nicolas de la Reynie, whom Tucker calls its “First Police Chief ” – Paris’s darkness stretched to its morals, too. From the brawls and knifings among the lower classes to the murderous bank and boudoir politics of the nobles, 17th-century Paris was, Tucker writes, the “crime capital of the world” – a place so dark in all aspects that it threatened to eclipse even the Sun King’s brightness.
Tucker is a deft scene-setter, and there is an enjoyable whiff of The Untouchables about her evocation of the Parisian underworld, Louis XIV’s decision to clamp down on it, and the entry of her hero, La Reynie.
Paris, she writes, “reached its boiling point on one hot August day in 1665, when the Criminal Lieutenant himself was murdered in broad daylight”. The two brothers responsible were caught and sentenced to the grisly death of having every bone in their bodies shattered, alive, before an eager crowd of spectators, but even so it was clear that a new broom was required.
The post of Lieutenant General of Police was then inaugurated with authority to oversee “city safety, gun control as prescribed by royal ordinances, street cleaning, flood and fire control”, as well the prisons at Châtelet, and to stamp out any “unsanctioned gatherings” of the type that might lead to a resurgence of the Fronde uprisings of 1648-53.
The ideal candidate, Louis’s minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert wrote, would be “a man of the robe and a man of the sword”, bearing “ermine […] on his shoulder” and “the strong spur of the knight” on his boots. His recommendation was La Reynie.
In practice, the middle-aged, widowed La Reynie seems to have been more a diligent civil servant than a breaker down of doors and buster of heads. Among his first actions were the installation of 2,736 lanterns to illuminate the city and a “mud tax” to pay for washing the streets.
As for the daily grind of individual crimes, La Reynie bore his knight’s spurs with uncompromising sternness. Tucker records his recommendation, directly to Louis himself, of a punitive prison sentence for a man caught blaspheming “after being hit, in his tender parts, during a handball match”. So much for mitigation.
La Reynie might be remembered only as an obscure figure in the history of urban ordinances had it not been for his role in uncovering a scandal that ended up touching even Louis himself: the Affair of the Poisons.
In 1672, rumours of poisoning among the upper classes were suddenly made concrete by the discovery of a cache of papers and poisons belonging to a conman and murderer, Godin de Sainte-Croix.
Passed to La Reynie’s men on Sainte-Croix’s death, the evidence directly implicated the Marquise de Brinvilliers in the murder of her father, François Dreux d’Aubray, erstwhile Civil Lieutenant of Paris – a death previously ascribed to natural causes. When captured four years later, Brinvilliers stated that “half the nobility [had] done the same things”, and if she was minded to talk, she could take them down with her.
After her execution, wondering how many other sudden sicknesses among the nobility could have been murder by poison, La Reynie pressed on with the investigation, which took up the next decade of his life and reached all the way from the rooms of a backstreet abortionist to the king’s bedchambers.
It is excellent material for a romp, which is precisely what Tucker makes of it. Darting through the streets of Paris and the bedrooms of Versailles, her book rides roughshod over any number of subtleties, but it is never less than gripping and enjoyable, animated by Tucker’s eye for detail and the gruesomeness of events.
Part dogged detective work, part witch hunt, La Reynie’s investigations culminated in a special tribunal that “met 210 times, questioned 442 people, put 218 of them in prison, executed 34, and sentenced another 28 to life in the prisons or the galleys”.
Among those implicated was the most famous, glamorous and longlasting of Louis’s mistresses, Athenaïs de Montespan – condemned to finish out her days locked up in a convent.
If the questions that Tucker could have raised – the real extent of the poisonings, the validity of evidence extracted under torture, the social history of witchcraft, and so on – go largely unbroached, it seems unfair to complain when the story is so good. As she says, you couldn’t make it up.
‘At night, citizens battened down their homes like sailors preparing for a storm’