Especially happy is the siting of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on the upper side of the new polygonal Place Charles X (now Place Lafayette), of which the other sides were filled in the twenties with consonant houses by A.-F.-R. Leclerc (1785-1853),[[65]] a pupil of both Durand and Percier, and A.-J. Pellechet (1789-1871). Less characteristic of Romantic Classical urbanism than the squares and streets of Karlsruhe and Munich, this nevertheless well illustrates the dignity and the regularity of the houses then rising in the new quarters of Paris. The very considerable new quarter in Mulhouse, which was laid out and built up in 1826-8 by J.-G. Stotz (1799-?), a pupil of Leclerc, and A.-J.-F. Fries (1800-59), a pupil of Huyot, is more properly comparable with Karlsruhe.
Most of the new churches in the suburbs of Paris and the French provinces followed basilican models. The parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which was brought at last to completion in 1823-7 by A.-J. Malpièce (1789-1864) and his partner A.-J. Moutier (1791-1874), a pupil of Percier, following the original designs of M.-M. Potain (1713-96) of the 1760s, is much more modest and somewhat less Roman. In Marseilles the younger M.-R. Penchaud (1772-1832), who designed in 1812 and built in 1827-32 the Palais de Justice at Aix on Ledoux’s earlier foundations, erected in 1824 a large Roman basilica for the local Protestants, doubtless with some conscious reference to Salomon de Brosse’s seventeenth-century Protestant Temple at Charenton of two hundred years earlier. By exception, however, the Protestant Temple at Orléans by F.-N. Pagot (1780-1844), a pupil of Labarre, which was built in 1836, is a plain cylinder in plan. Saint-Lazare in Marseilles, built by P.-X. Coste (1787-1879) and Vincent Barral (1800-54) in 1833-7, followed Notre-Dame-de-Lorette even more closely than does Penchaud’s Protestant church.
In the more modest parish church of Vincennes outside Paris, which rose in 1826-30, the very last years of the Restoration, J.-B.-C. Lesueur (1794-1883) was already using a rather Brunelleschian sort of detail that is not without a certain cool elegance. More definitely of the Renaissance Revival is Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe, the parish church of La Villette in the Rue de Crimée in Paris built by P.-E. Lequeux (1806-73) much later, in 1841-4. It is one of half a dozen that Lequeux began in the forties, in addition to designing the town halls of this and several other quarters of Paris. Lequeux employed definitely quattrocento detail somewhat more lavishly than Lesueur had done at Vincennes, and produced at La Villette one of the most satisfactory French churches of the Louis Philippe epoch. In building a small Norman church at Pollet near Dieppe in 1844-9, Louis Lenormand (1801-62), a pupil of his uncle Huvé, used Early Renaissance detail of a more French sort that may not improperly be called François I. Such detail was highly exceptional in ecclesiastical architecture even as late as the forties.
The housing of public services, initiated so actively by Napoleon, continued at a much reduced pace under Louis XVIII and Charles X. The Paris Custom House of 1827 by L.-A. Lusson (1790-1864), a pupil of Percier, with its great arched entrance rising from the ground and its similar transverse arches inside, was later transformed—three bays of it, at least—into a Protestant church by one of Lebas’s pupils, the German-born F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), for Louis Philippe’s German relatives in 1843. A similar reflection of Durand’s utilitarian models may be seen in the vast Government Warehouse at Lyons, begun in 1828 by L.-P. Baltard (1764-1846), Lequeux’s master, who had worked when very young with Ledoux on the Paris barrières. This contrasts notably in its consistent arcuation with the belated giant Corinthian colonnade that fronts Baltard’s Palace of Justice there, built in 1836-42, and parallels fairly closely the contemporary warehouses Schinkel was building in Berlin. More characteristic of the rather mixed official mode of the period is the Custom House of 1835-42 at Rouen by C.-E. Isabelle (1800-80), a pupil of Leclerc. This is of interest chiefly for the tremendous rusticated arch of the entrance, which quite overpowers the rest of the palazzo-like façade.
For educational institutions most new construction was subsidiary to existing buildings. At the École Polytechnique, A.-M. Renié (c. 1790-1855), a pupil of Percier and Vaudoyer, provided in 1828 a new arcuated and rusticated entrance hardly worthy of the school where Durand was now teaching a second generation of architects. P.-M. Letarouilly (1795-1855) made in 1831-42 additions that are less unworthy, but hardly more interesting, to Chalgrin’s Collège de France, built originally in the 1770s. But his great contribution, of course, was the Édifices de Rome moderne—the first volume of which appeared in 1840. Finally completed with the publication of the third volume in 1857, this was the bible of the later Renaissance Revival in France as of several generations of academic architects throughout the rest of the world. The École Normale Supérieure by the youngest Gisors (H.-A.-G. de, 1796-1866), a pupil of Percier, is a large, wholly new building of 1841-7; this looks forward to the Second Empire a little in its high mansard roof and seventeenth-century detailing, extremely dry and sparse though that is (see Chapter [8]).
Private construction was for the most part very dull, whether in city, suburb, or country. As an example of the country houses that were built in some quantity, a typical project of 1830 for one by Hittorff may be illustrated (Figure [9]). With its careful if rather uninteresting proportions, its rigid rectangularity, and the stiff chains of rustication that provide its sole embellishment, however, this rises somewhat above the general level of achievement of the period.
The François I character of the detailing of Lenormand’s Pollet church has been mentioned. In domestic architecture such national Renaissance precedent had rather greater success even if nothing very novel or original developed from it. In 1825 L.-M.-D. Biet (1785-1856), a pupil of Percier, brought to Paris the court façade of an early sixteenth-century house from Moret and applied it to a hôtel particulier—always called with no justification the ‘Maison de François I’—in a new residential area of Paris. This house shortly gave the name ‘François I’ to the entire quarter between the Champs Élysées and the Seine. The barrenness and brittleness of Biet’s own elevations were more of a tribute to his respect for the old work than to his creative ability.
Figure 9. J.-I. Hittorff: Project for country house for Comte de W., 1830, elevation
Within the next few years houses built by such architects as L.-T.-J. Visconti (1791-1853), another pupil of Percier, and Famin tended to grow ever richer. In 1835 P.-C. Dusillion (1804-60), an architect otherwise more active abroad than at home, used François I detail with the lushest profusion on a house at 14 Rue Vaneau. The façade rather resembles an interior of the so-called style troubadour turned inside out. Much the same may be said for the block of flats built by Édouard Renaud (1808-86), a pupil of Leroy, at 5 Place St Georges in 1841. But this was rather an exception to the severity and regularity of Parisian street architecture under the Restoration. This was generally maintained, moreover, under the July Monarchy for blocks of flats, even by men like Visconti and Lesueur whose private houses were often very rich indeed.