Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace (COPA Films; TV documentary, dated 2022, copyright 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 14) I watched a quite intriguing program on PBS from French television called Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace, produced by Sally Black and directed by Stéphane Jacques. It was actually about two lost palaces on the Île de Cité (“island of the city”), an oblong island in the middle of the Seine River between the Right and Left Banks. It’s best known today as the site of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, and until recently it was also the home of the French national police in a building called the Palais de la Justice. Then the French police moved out and into a new building just north of the Paris city limits, which turned archaeologists and architects loose on whatever had been under the structures. The first Palais de la Cité was actually built during the Roman occupation of France in 52 B.C. and began as a military fortification, but it soon acquired a fancy residential wing to allow for the Roman emperor to be housed there. It lay pretty much in ruins for the 400 or so years between the final fall of the (Western) Roman Empire in 476 A.D. and the emergence of the unified Kingdom of France in the ninth century. The grounds of the Palais were the center of a French Resistance movement against the attempt of the Vikings to conquer France in 885 A.D., which led to the gradual accumulation of buildings on the site, including a new palace for the royal residence. (The Viking invasion of France was apparently the factual basis for the video game Assassin’s Creed, which got name-checked in this program, though the Wikipedia page on Assassin’s Creed lists its real-life origins as the cult of the Hashashins in medieval India, whose name produced the words “assassin” and “hashish.”)

The palace on the Île de la Cité became known as the Palais de la Cité, and at least one building from it still survives: the spectacular Church of Saint-Chapelle. This is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture that in at least one aspect goes beyond the usual notion of a Gothic cathedral. Ordinary Gothic buildings are supported by what are called “flying buttresses,” great arms that essentially cling to the sides of the building and are there to hold up the walls. The main chapel of Saint-Chapelle is a wide-open giant room without flying buttresses or any other visible means of support, which led the team of experts investigating the building as it stands to wonder just how it had held up over the years. The team included architect Uves Ubelmann (from a company called Iconon), Marjorie Coulon, Pierre-Yves Le Pogem, Maxim Loutierierre, Dadie Couturier, Didier Busson, Evelyne Demeaux (curator of medieval collections at the Chateau de Chantilly library), archaeologist Gregory Chaumier, Hervelyne Damieux and two chemists expert at reproducing medieval paints, Maggie Choubert and Evelyne Poulier. They based their attempted reconstruction (through digital modeling) of the Palais de la Cité largely on the work of pioneering 19th century French archaeologists Eugène-Violette Le Pac and especially Théodor Vaquier, whose specimen collections are still housed in a Paris museum and have largely been preserved over time. They theorized that the walls of Saint-Chapelle were held up by the flying buttresses in a basement room below the main chapel, and also by iron rings centered around the structure. As this show argued, the builders of Saint-Chapelle basically invented reinforced concrete centuries before it was rediscovered and became a standard building material.

The show chronicled various monarchs who reigned from the Palais de la Cité, including Philippe Auguste (the longest-reigning medieval monarch of France; he was king from 1180, when he assumed the throne at just 15, to his death in 1223); his grandson Philippe Le Bel (the name means “The Beautiful,” and judging from his portrait on French coins of the period, that he was; he took the throne at 17 and reigned from 1285 until his death in 1314); and Charles V, who was King of France during the attempt by British King Edward III and his oldest son, Edward the Black Prince, to conquer France in the 1300’s. Charles V had to deal not only with a foreign threat but a domestic one as well. The internal threat was led by a man named Étienne Marcel who had the title “Provost of Merchants,” which the Wikipedia page on Charles V describes as being the medieval equivalent of the Mayor of Paris today. Marcel’s fighters managed to kidnap Charles V from the Palais de la Cité and hold him, and while Charles eventually regained power he decreed that the palace was not sufficiently secure and ordered that neither he nor any future royals would live there. So after 300 years of serving as both the royal residence and the administrative center of the growing French state (and the growing French bureaucracy that ruled it), the palace lost its status as such but various agencies of the French government still ran their affairs from it. The show didn’t say where the French kings lived in between the closure of the Palais de la Cité in the 1350’s and the construction of Versailles by Louis XIII in 1624 – it was originally a hunting lodge but Louis XIV ordered it expanded to a full-scale palace in the early 1660’s – but according to Wikipedia, it was mainly in the Louvre, which was a palace before it was repurposed as the most famous art museum in the world.

The ultimate objective of the team behind the excavation of the Palais de la Cité was to create a digital model of it, including reproducing the giant hall that contained life-sized statues of the first 43 kings of a unified France, for which they needed exact reproductions of the colors with which the statues – especially the bright blue or red outfits they had worn – had been painted. That’s how Maggie Chambert and Evelyne Poulier got involved; they knew how to make blue paint from lapis lazuli (a super-rare stone that came mostly from what is now Afghanistan) and they could reproduce the original color of the royal robes the French kings depicted in the statues would have been wearing. They had the immeasurable help of a Treatise on Painting written by Cennino Cennini in 1844, which according to the description on amazon.com “covers a wide range of topics related to painting, including materials, techniques, and the principles of composition.” Chambert and Poulier used Cennini’s recipes to mix their own paint colors, with the result that even though the sculptures in the great hall are only digital models, they still glow with fire-bright colors that, according to the show’s narration, give the lie to the common stereotype (reinforced by Terry Gilliam’s films) that the Middle Ages looked dark and dingy.