CHAPTER 3
FRANCE AND THE REST OF THE CONTINENT
Before considering English architecture in the years between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition, it will be well to turn to that of France. The drama of the supersession of a supposedly purely Classical school in painting by a purely Romantic one, the contrast between such giants as Ingres on the one hand and Delacroix on the other, cannot be matched in the tame course of French architecture in this period; only very rarely was the accomplishment of these great painters or of half a dozen others, ranging from Géricault and Bonington to Corot and Daumier, equalled in quality by a Henri Labrouste or a Duban. Although the art of Ingres is in many ways parallel to Romantic Classicism in architecture, no French architect of this generation really approaches him at all closely in stature, although he numbered several among his close friends. Still less is there among architects any rebellious Romantic of the distinction of Delacroix or any ‘independent’ comparable to Corot.
The Empire left a vast heritage of unfinished monuments. It is properly to the credit of the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe that these were brought to completion a generation after their initiation; but all the credit for them has in fact generally accrued to Napoleon himself. The intervening Restoration of the returned Bourbons, tired, reactionary and bigoted, gave its support largely to the construction of religious buildings. Appropriately, the first important new commission under Louis XVIII was for the Chapelle Expiatoire in memory of his brother Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. This chapel with its raised tomb-flanked forecourt, lying between the Rue Pasquier and the Rue d’Anjou off the Boulevard Haussmann, was begun in 1816 and completed in 1824 (Plate [18A]). Somewhat less appropriately, it was Napoleon’s favourite architect Fontaine—his partner Percier had by this time retired—who received the commission. But the character of the project and of the regime led him to modulate his earlier imperial style from the festive and the triumphal towards the solemn and the funereal. Not an unworthy example of Romantic Classicism, this nevertheless lacks the crispness and clarity of the best contemporary German work. Nor does it much recall—as it well might have done—either the delicacy of the style Louis XVI or the ‘Sublime’ grandeur of the many projects for monumental cenotaphs designed by the previous generation of architects and by those of Fontaine’s own generation in their youth.
To restore the strength of the church, as the piety of the later Bourbons demanded, priests had to be trained in quantity. The next significant work undertaken in Paris after the Chapelle Expiatoire was the Séminaire Saint-Sulpice in the Place St Sulpice by É.-H. Godde (1781-1869); this was begun in 1820 and completed in 1838. So flat and cold are its façades that the observer may readily fail to note that the design somewhat approaches, perhaps unconsciously, the quattrocento Florentine. However, it quite lacks the archaeological character of Klenze’s Königsbau in Munich, designed only a few years later, or the vigour and assurance of Wimmel & Forsmann’s Johanneum in Hamburg. In fact, of course, it derives almost directly from Durand and not from any careful study of Grandjean de Montigny’s Architecture toscane. Somewhat more definitely Early Renaissance in detail are the Baths at Mont d’Or, built by L.-C.-F. Ledru (1771-1861), a pupil of Durand, in 1822, and the Barracks in the Rue Mouffetard in Paris as extended in 1827 by Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75). Both exploit a rusticated Tuscan mode somewhat as Klenze was doing in Munich, but much less archaeologically.
Shortly after the Séminaire, Godde undertook several Paris churches. Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou in the Rue St Dominique of 1822-3 replaced a church destroyed in the Revolution. Finer and considerably larger is Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrament in the Rue de Turenne, built in 1823-35. Both are barrel-vaulted basilicas in the tradition of Chalgrin’s Saint-Philippe-du-Roule; the latter is rather elegant in its dry severity, the former confused by various later additions behind the altar. Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle of 1823-30 is smaller and more modest, as are also two nearly contemporary Paris churches by A.-I. Molinos (1795-1850), Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Neuilly of 1827-31 and Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles in the Place du Dr Félix Lobligeois in Paris of 1828-9. All these churches lack externally the Grecian grandeur of scale of the London churches of the period built by the Inwoods and others (see Chapter [4]), but the basilican plan provides interiors that are considerably more interesting than the galleried halls with which most English architects were satisfied at this time. Of course, such a highly original interior as that of Soane’s St Peter’s, Walworth, of 1822 is in a different class altogether.
A much larger and more prominent church than any of Godde’s or Molinos’s is Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the Rue de Chateaudun, one of the few really distinguished products of this dull period. It was the result of a competition held in 1822 which was won by Lebas, Brongniart’s collaborator on the Bourse (Plate [18B]). This five-aisled edifice was built at very great expense in 1823-36 and sumptuously decorated with murals that added as much as a sixth to the total cost. The basic model is again the Early Christian basilica but here interpreted in thoroughly Classical terms, with a tall temple portico rivalling those of London at the front and no vaults or arches except at the east end. Evidence of a certain eclecticism is the rich coffering of the ceiling in panels alternately square and cruciform; so also is the introduction of a domed chancel before the apse. Both features are certainly of cinquecento inspiration.
To modern eyes, attuned to the late fifth-and sixth-century basilicas of Ravenna, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette certainly has a far less Early Christian air than Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika in Munich of the next decade; but doubtless the great Imperial basilicas of Rome of the fourth and early fifth centuries, notably Santa Maria Maggiore with its trabeated nave colonnade, were originally something like it. In any case, Lebas’s church is a highly typical monument of Romantic Classicism and a major one. In France, as elsewhere, the accepted range of precedent now extended well beyond Greek and Roman antiquity to include Italian models of fifth- and of sixteenth-century date, if very little from the centuries between. Even before the construction of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the Belgian-born P.-J. Sandrié and Jacob Silveyra (1785-?) in building a big Parisian synagogue in the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in 1819-20 had also followed rather closely the basilican formula.
The most important Parisian church of the second quarter of the century, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul off the Rue Lafayette, is also a five-aisled classical basilica (Plate [19]). This was begun in 1824 by Lepère, but work was soon suspended. When it was carried to completion in 1831-44 Lepère’s son-in-law J.-I. Hittorff (1792-1867) took over, and he has generally received credit for the whole job. In utilizing a rising site, which required terraces and flights of steps in front, and in providing two towers, Lepère and Hittorff gave their church more prominence and a richer, if rather clumsily organized, three-dimensional interest.[[61]] Hittorff’s archaeological studies in Sicily had made him an enthusiast for architectural polychromy, and to contemporaries the great novelty about Saint-Vincent-de-Paul was the proposal to use enamelled lava plaques on the exterior.[[62]]
The French did not, like the Germans, turn to the use of tawny brick and terracotta in the second quarter of the century; but the interest of Hittorff and his generation in applied polychromy relates their work a little to that of the Romantic colourists in painting.[[63]] Unfortunately almost none of this polychromy remains visible now; and so the shift away from the monochromy that is characteristic everywhere of Romantic Classicism down to this period is less evident in France than in other countries.
Especially fine is the open timber roof of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, although in fact only a part of the actual construction is exposed; while the fact that the colonnaded apse is wide enough to include the inner aisles as well as the nave gives a quite unprecedented spatial interest to the east end. Moreover, in this interior Hittorff achieved a rich warmth of tone quite different from the coldness of Godde’s and Molinos’s churches of the twenties. His Cirque des Champs Élysées of 1839-41 and Cirque d’Hiver of 1852 were even more brilliantly polychromatic both inside and out. But the most conspicuous extant works of Hittorff, the Gare du Nord of 1861-5, the Second Empire façades surrounding the Place de l’Étoile, and the decoration of the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Élysées with fountains and other features under the July Monarchy, provide today little evidence[[64]] of this aspect of his talent once so notable to contemporaries at home and abroad.