French architecture in the 19th century is affected, more so than elsewhere in Europe, by four factors: a strong classicist tradition, strong state centralism, a strong institutional dominance, and frequent regime changes.
Classicism, with its orientation on Roman antiquity, endured from the Grand siècle to Napoleon’s regime; its imprint on Paris as a latter-day Rome and as the dominant cultural centre of Europe meant that French classicism was not so much a national as a Europe-wide school. The focus on Paris – with the rest of France as a tardy trend-follower – is manifest in the fact that the most important architectural handbook, Louis Hautecœur’s 7-volume Histoire de l’architecture classique de France (1943-57), dispenses with naming the location when discussing buildings in the capital. Regional inflections emerged only hesitantly and post-1918. On of these was a Breton regionalism under the influence of the Seiz Breur movement in decorative arts; it was represented by James Bouillé (1894–1945) and the militant separatist Olier Mordrel (1901–1985.
Institutionally, Parisian and classicist dominance was enshrined in the architectural school attached to the École des Beaux-Arts, founded in 1816 as the continuation of the Ancien Régime’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. Its Académie d’architecture, with its system of ateliers led by established architects and attracting trainees from all over Europe, monopolized the major government commissions. Its awards and prizes, notably the annual Grand Prix de Rome, consolidated its prestige, attracted “ideal” designs characterized by large-scale theatricality, and perpetuated the established and purportedly timeless dominance of classicism (personified in the institute’s sécretaire perpetuel Antoine-Chrystostome Quatremère de Quincy, who was in charge until 1839). The Prix de Rome enabled its laureates to spend a sojourn in the Eternal City, where an Académie de France à Rome had been established as early as 1666.
The 19th century, with its ongoing struggle between autocracy and democracy, its revolutions and constitutional changes, necessitated for each incoming new regime its own architectural manifestations and self-legitimations in the country’s public spaces, resulting in sharp period demarcations. It also necessitated a certain amount of political flexibility on the part of architects (Quatremère de Quincy, already an authority in the closing days of Louis XVI’s reign, survived as a veritable Talleyrand of the arts), while a certain amount of continuity was also vouchsafed by the completion of projects begun under previous regimes.
Most projects of the First Republic remained utopian, or else ephemeral (triumphal arches, altars and obelisks for political celebrations and solemnities), and made no distinction between the national and the universal. Their monumentalism closely followed the style of the 35 barrières (tollgates) around Paris, designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in 1785 in propylaean style. The 1791 decision to reconstruct the church of St Genevieve (begun in 1757 in classicist style) as a National Pantheon was to leave a rare lasting landmark.
Similarly, the periods of Directoire and Consulate left few lasting architectural traces; most ambitious projects were unaffordable (such as a Palais pour l’Assemblée nationale) and remained mere plans. The period’s most important legacy was institutional: the École polytechnique, founded in 1794. Its engineering approach to architecture (as laid down in Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s influential Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique, 1802) prioritized Vitruvian utilitas over venustas, strengthening anti-baroque tendencies in favour of clear simplicity, which in turn was represented as a nationally French characteristic.
The public works undertaken by Napoleon tended to merge classicism with this utilitarian approach, involving fountains, hospitals, abattoirs, market halls and bridges. But Napoleon’s ambition to turn Paris into a model city and an urban monument to French imperial grandeur also left its traces in subsequent history. Monuments would henceforth be erected and retrofitted according to the regime of the day, an example being the successive crowning figures on the Trajan-style Colonne nationale on the Place Vendôme. Succeeding regimes left different traces. An early presence of Neo-Gothic in the streets of Paris was the Chapelle expiatoire (1816-26) erected by the restored King Louis XVIII on the place where the corpses of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been thrown into a common grave. The corpses themselves were solemnly reinterred in the restored royal chapel of Saint-Denis. (A cycle of regime changes later, Napoleon’s corpse was to be reinterred, after retrieval from St Helena, in the Invalides, 1841.) Churches of the Restoration period referred to early-Christian basilicas, invoking also the French Church’s “Gallican” autonomy under Roman central authority (e.g. Hittorff’s St-Vincent-de-Paul Church, 1825-44). The one regime that remained uncommemorated in Paris’s public space was the First Republic. The Colonne de Juillet that the July Monarchy dedicated to itself in 1831-40 acquired an unintended “1789” significance owing to the fact that it was situated on the Place de la Bastille.
Notwithstanding these vicissitudes, the endurance of these monuments across regimes testified to a trans-political celebration of French grandeur, particularly under Louis-Philippe. Such was the case with the Colonne de la Grande Armée, erected to the glory of Napoleon’s armed forces in Boulogne and finished as a national monument in 1833. Chalgrin’s Arc de Triomphe was initially planned to celebrate the victory of Austerlitz (1804) and to link, by way of a boulevard across the Champs Élysées gardens, to a joint complex incorporating Louvre and Tuileries; it, too, was only realized in the 1830s and involved a fundamental restructuring of what became the Place de La Concorde, a contentious space where in 1792 the guillotine had stood and Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been decapitated. The redesigned Place de La Concorde, by the Cologne-born Jacques Hittorff, attempted to merge and submerge these antagonistic memories into a space of national unity and permanence, involving eight statues allegorically gathering great French cities in this metropolitan focal point, from Bordeaux and Marseille to Brest and Strasbourg. (A similar gathering of allegorical city-maidens was performed by Hittorff in the later stages of his career in the frontage of the Gare du Nord, 1864.)
The spoliation and destruction of ancient ecclesiastical and royal monuments during the French Revolution (the abbey of Cluny, the church of St-Martin in Tours, the royal tombs in Saint-Denis) had provoked a salvaging counter-movement. Valuable monuments were stored in what in 1795 became a Musée des monuments français, under Alexandre Lenoir. These collections, inventorized and ordered in projects such as Alexandre de Laborde’s Les monuments de la France classés chronologiquement (1816), would feed a new celebration of medieval Gothic as a nationally French style. The inauguration of Charles X as king of France in Reims Cathedral already made use of Gothic elements.
The taste for Gothic was heightened under the influence of Romantic authors like Victor Hugo (Notre Dame de Paris, 1830) and Charles de Montalembert (Du vandalisme et du catholicisme dans l’art, 1839). Neo-Gothic churches were built during the July Monarchy in a first breach with neoclassicist dominance; France here followed wider European trends, as is obvious from the fact that Ste Clotilde (1846-56), designed by Cologne-born Franz Christian Gau, was modelled after the cathedral of the architect’s native city. From the mid-century onwards, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc became the most prominent proponent of Neo-Gothicism, stressing not merely its religious but also its rational design features. Anticlerical himself, Viollet-le-Duc saw Gothic as a markedly urban building style, harking back to the medieval city communes. Prosper Mérimée, appointed in 1834 as inspector-general of the country’s historical monuments, selected a number of buildings in need of restoration, the work often undertaken by Viollet-le-Duc (Ste-Marie-Madeleine, Vézelay, as of 1840; Notre-Dame, Paris, as of 1844). Other restorations were done by Félix Duban (1797–1870; Prix de Rome laureate in 1823), such as the châteaux of Blois and Dampierre and (together with Viollet-le-Duc) the Sainte-Chapelle. The experiences won in the process of building new (Neo-Gothic) city churches or restoring old ones were laid down in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française (1854-68). Its doctrine was that buildings needed to be restored not necessarily to the state they had been in, but as they must have been intended to be. The Château of Pierrefonds (fr. 1857) and the city ramparts of Carcassonne (fr. 1853) applied this principle to profane structures. The “pure”, 13th-century Gothic became normative as a national-historical style: thus, the cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand was given an ideal-typical two-spired façade in 1866-84. Church interiors were often also retrofitted in Neo-Gothic style. A deliberately different stylistic orientation was chosen in Marseille, which saw itself as France’s gate to the Levant and whose churches were constructed in Neo-Byzantine style: Vaudoyer’s Cathedral (“La Major”, 1852-96) and Espérandieu’s Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (1853-64). A similar style was chosen later for the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre, impelled by an Ultramontane-Catholic, anti-secularist and conservative campaign following the defeat of 1871.
This medievalism went against established academic conventions: Quatremère de Quincy had dismissed Gothic taste as a debilitating and stultifying influence. But even in the academic institutions his neoclassicism was eroding. In expeditions to Sicily undertaken in the 1820s, Hittorff had found that ancient architecture and sculpture had been polychromed – a sharp departure from the marble-white vision of neoclassicism, opening possibilities for a more colourful modern style (L’architecture antique de la Sicile, 1826; Architecture polychrome chez les Grecs, 1830). Classicism itself became more eclectic from the mid-century onwards, and historicism began, in the Second Empire, to look to other periods besides classical antiquity or the Gothic Middle Ages. Renaissance architecture and Loire châteaux inspired the enormous expansion of the Louvre by Louis Visconti and Hector Lefuel (1853-70), and baroque inspired the Opéra (1862-75) of Charles Garnier. In the Third Republic the reconstruction of the Hôtel de Ville, badly damaged during the Commune, highlighted its Renaissance origins, setting a stylistic register that was followed for the mairies of the capital’s arrondissements and of the provincial cities countrywide. This historicism was overlaid with an approach in which engineering utilitarianism and imperial grandeur continued to interact. A radical overhaul of the Parisian street and boulevard system was enacted under Napoleon III’s auspices by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, once again modernizing the city with amenities like bridges, parks, squares and fountains, hospitals, military barracks, market halls and a sewage system, while clearing slums and inaccessible hotbeds of radical-proletarian mobilization.
A new, industrially-inspired steel-girder architecture became visible in the new railway stations and in pavilions constructed for the world fairs and universal expositions that dominated the century’s later decades. Alexis Barrault’s Palais de l’Industrie was constructed in 1852 as a competitive imitation of London’s Crystal Palace, and intended for the World Fair of 1855; it was replaced by the Grand Palais (built as a “monument dedicated by the Republic to the glory of French art” for the Universal Exposition of 1900). The World Exhibition of 1889, which also commemorated the centenary of the French Revolution, left the Eiffel Tower as a lasting landmark on the Parisian skyline.
