Construction of the Madeleine, begun in 1807, dragged on interminably. J.-J.-M. Huvé (1783-1852) succeeded Vignon as architect in 1828 and, like the Arc de l’Étoile, the edifice was finally finished only under Louis Philippe in 1845. The interior has a somewhat funereal solemnity, more characteristic of the post-Napoleonic regimes than of the period of its initiation. The rather obvious temple form of the exterior is redeemed by the superb siting, the really grand scale, and the rich pedimental sculpture by Lemaire. Like Chalgrin’s arch, Vignon’s Madeleine has continued to provide a major monumental nexus in the urbanism of Paris ever since.
Also proposed in 1806 but not initiated until 1808 was the Bourse by A.-T. Brongniart (1739-1813), another architect who had, like Gondoin and Chalgrin, made his mark long before the Revolution (Plate [8B]). Again a free-standing peripteral structure like the Madeleine, the Bourse has suffered somewhat from its enlargement in 1902-3 by J.-B.-F. Cavel (c. 1844-1905) and H.-T.-E. Eustache (1861-?). Nearly square originally and unpedimented—and also set much closer to the ground—it must always have lacked the monumental presence of the Madeleine. But the interior with its ranges of arcades, derived almost as directly from a Louis XIV monument—in this case the court of the Invalides by Libéral Bruant—as Chalgrin’s arch was from that of Blondel, is very characteristic of the sort of reiterative composition generally favoured by Romantic Classicism. L.-H. Lebas (1782-1867) was associated with the elderly Brongniart from the start, and after Brongniart’s death the building was finished in 1815 by E.-E. de Labarre (1764-1833). Labarre was responsible also for the Colonne de la Grande Armée at Boulogne; this was proposed in 1804 and begun in 1810, but, like so many Napoleonic monuments, not finished until Louis Philippe took up its construction again in 1833. It was finally completed by Marquise in 1844.
In 1799 a fire made it necessary to rebuild the Théâtre de l’Odéon; but the original design of M.-J. Peyre (1730-88) and Charles de Wailly (1729-98), dating back to 1779, was repeated in 1807 with little change, as was also the case in 1819 when it was rebuilt again after another fire. This provides excellent evidence of the continuity of Romantic Classical style in France before and after the Revolution (see Chapter [3]).
Napoleon had in mind the erection of various less monumental and more utilitarian structures than the Bourse and the Odéon; some of these were started, and one or two even finished, before the Empire came to an end. Behind one section of the façades in the Rue de Rivoli an enormous and rather dull General Post Office was begun in 1810 and eventually completed to serve as the Ministry of Finance under Charles X in 1827. Another ministry (Foreign Affairs) on the Quai d’Orsay was designed in 1810 by J.-C. Bonnard (1765-1818) and even begun in 1814; this was eventually carried to completion by Bonnard’s pupil Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856) in 1821-35. With its rich ordonnance of columns and arches, Bonnard’s façade had an almost High Renaissance air, or so it would appear from extant views of a structure long ago destroyed.
The Marché St Martin of 1811-16 by A.-M. Peyre (1770-1843), the Marché des Carmes of 1813 by A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer (1756-1846), and the Marché St Germain of 1816-25 by J.-B. Blondel (1764-1825), with their clerestory lighting and open timber roofs, are typical of the more practical side of Romantic Classicism.[[31]] The simple masonry vocabulary of these Parisian markets, so straightforward and without Antique pretension, was considered to be Italian (see Chapter [2]).
The Napoleonic building flurry barely reached the provinces before its short course was over. The theatre in Dijon, begun about 1805 by Jacques Célérier (1742-1814), may be mentioned; but such plain square blocks with frontal porticoes could have been, and were, built in almost precisely the same form thirty years before—for example Ledoux’s theatre at Besançon of 1775-84. At Pontivy in Brittany, then called Napoléonville, the younger Gisors built a Préfecture in 1809 and a Palace of Justice with associated prisons two years later. A rather dull church, Saint-Vincent at Mâcon, repeating a model that had been new at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule forty years earlier, was also erected by him in 1810. The pair of front towers was a novelty suggested by an earlier project of Lebas.
It is quite characteristic of this period, so ready (as the French have been ever since) to employ elderly architects and so content with stylistic innovations that dated from before the Revolution, that Mathurin Crucy (1749-1826) rebuilt in 1808-12 the theatre in Nantes—very like that at Dijon—in exactly the same form as it had originally been designed by him in 1784-8; while he also finished in 1809-12 the Bourse and Tribunal de Commerce there which he had begun in 1791, just after the Revolution started, with no change in the original design. The setting of his theatre in the Place Graslin provided by continuous ranges of five-storey houses is presumably contemporary; despite the rather high roofs, the façades are notably crisp and smooth. The rusticated arcuation of the lower storeys might make plausible a date in the 1780s, but the rather thin and geometrically detailed iron balcony railings suggest rather the first or second decade of the new century, when the theatre was rebuilt.
If the imperial effort in France barely extended outside Paris except for the interior alterations that Percier and Fontaine carried out in the royal châteaux at Versailles, Compiègne, Saint-Cloud, and Fontainebleau—major examples of Empire decoration but not of architecture—the emperor and his nominees left their mark on most of the great cities of continental Europe. The Palazzo Serbelloni in the Corso Venezia, where Napoleon stayed in Milan, had been built by Simone Cantoni (1736-1818) in 1794. Similar to French work of the 1780s, it would probably have impressed the Emperor as still quite up-to-date. He ordered in 1806 the laying out in Milan of the Forum Bonaparte, according to the designs of Giannantonio Antolini (1754-1842), and the erection of a conventionally Roman triumphal arch, the work of Luigi Cagnola (1762-1832?), which was finally completed in 1838.
In Rome the development of the Piazza del Popolo, like the Forum Bonaparte a work of urbanism rather than of architecture, was based by Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1859), an Italian despite his French name and ancestry, on a project he had made as early as 1794. This project was modified by him under the Empire to incorporate ‘corrections’ by the younger Gisors and L.-M. Berthault (1771?-1823). Execution of the project actually began only in 1813 after Pope Pius VII returned from his Napoleonic captivity; Valadier carried it forward to ultimate completion in 1831. Valadier’s Roman church work, such as his new façade for San Pantaleone of 1806, just off the present-day Corso Vittorio Emanuele, is mostly too dull to mention; his domestic work was somewhat more interesting, but with little personal or even Italian flavour.
In Naples Leconte, who had worked with the two Gisors on the Salle des Cinq Cents in Paris, remodelled the San Carlo opera house in 1809 for Murat—it was, however, refronted in 1810-12 and rebuilt in 1816-17 (see Chapter [3]). In association with Antonio de Simone, Leconte also decorated rooms in the Bourbon Palace at Caserta,[[32]] originally built by Vanvitelli in 1752-74, for this Napoleonic brother-in-law. But the finest Empire things in the area were the Sala di Marte and the Sala di Astrea there, which de Simone, working alone, had begun to decorate slightly earlier in 1807 for Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte (Plate [25]). As with so many architectural projects of the brief period of the Empire, it was left to a returning legitimate sovereign, in this case Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, to finish the job. Unlike the greater part of Percier and Fontaine’s work in the French palaces, these rooms at Caserta are interior architecture, not just interior decoration, and fully worthy in their scale and their sumptuous materials of the magnificent spaces, created almost half a century earlier by Vanvitelli, which they occupy. This is the more remarkable as de Simone was really a decorator not an architect.