Representational public buildings, although usually much less plain in design, are likely to be even more heavy-handed than the prisons and lunatic asylums. Their architects’ strictly functional approach was capable of achieving a rather bleak sort of distinction which should have been sympathetic to the twentieth century had they been better known. The Palace of Justice at Tours of 1840-50 by Charles Jacquemin-Belisle (1815-69), with its unpedimented Roman Doric portico, is typical enough of a very considerable number of large and prominent civic structures. Lequeux’s Paris town halls in the outlying arrondissements are just as dry but less monumentally Classical.
Happily there are a few finer public buildings, mostly in Paris, structures not least interesting for their bold use of metal and glass. Among early railway stations only the Gare Montparnasse of 1848-52 by V.-B. Lenoir (1805-63) and the engineer Eugène Flachat (1802-73) and the Gare de Strasbourg (Gare de l’Est) of 1847-52 by F.-A. Duquesney (1790-1849), a pupil of Percier, still stand in Paris. The Gare de l’Est, with its vast central lunette expressing clearly the iron-and-glass arched train-shed, is a most notable early station. The detailing, of a somewhat High Renaissance—at least not Greek or Roman—order, is pleasant but undistinguished (Plate [22B]). This detailing has been effectively maintained in the modern doubling of the front of the station. The original shed by the engineer Sérinet was long ago replaced.
The other great Parisian structure of the forties in whose construction the visible use of iron played a prominent part, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in the Place du Panthéon, is especially distinguished for the originality and elegance of its detailing, even more as regards that of the masonry of the exterior than of the ironwork within (Plate [21]). Henri-P.-F. Labrouste (1801-75), a pupil of Lebas and Vaudoyer, who designed this library in 1839 and built it in 1843-50, is the one French architect of the age whose name can be mentioned—though a little diffidently—with those of the great architects of the earlier decades of the century outside France, Soane and Schinkel, even if his contemporaries usually gave precedence to Gilbert or to Hittorff. Yet Labrouste hardly ranks for quality with a Dane of his own generation such as Bindesbøll, although his library is much more advanced both stylistically and technically than the contemporary Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.
Everywhere except in England this was a period, like the first quarter of the century, in which official architecture exceeded private in interest. Moreover, the priority that the erection of monuments of public utility, from markets and prisons to art galleries and libraries, received over the building of churches and palaces gave significant evidence of the rise of a new pattern of bourgeois culture. It is therefore quite appropriate that this library of Henri Labrouste’s should be the finest structure of the forties in France. The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is also one of the few buildings of the second quarter century anywhere in the world that has been almost universally admired ever since its completion, if successively for a variety of different reasons. The façade of the library, often ignored by those praising the visible iron structure of the interior (Figure [14]), outranks in distinction almost all other contemporary examples of the Renaissance Revival anywhere in the world; but it is worth noting that the flanking administrative block and the Collège Sainte-Barbe also offer a premonition of the next period in their prominent mansard roofs. (Henri’s brother F.-M.-T. Labrouste (1799-1855) supervised the construction of the college.) The façade of Henri’s administrative block is a composition of real originality and exquisite co-ordination of parts to which the term Renaissance Revival need hardly be applied; this is what style Louis Philippe really means, or ought at least to mean.
By Charles X’s time the Salle des Cinq Cents at the Palais Bourbon, erected by the two older Gisors and Leconte in the 1790s, was in such a bad state that it was necessary to rebuild it, adding at the same time a library. J.-J.-B. de Joly (1788-1865) in 1828-33 followed closely the original design; but behind the scenes, as it were, he used a great deal of iron to ensure a lasting structure. He also embellished the walls with a richly coloured sheathing of French marbles and, in the library, with murals by Delacroix. With less originality, but with respect for a major monument of the seventeenth century, H.-A.-G. de Gisors much enlarged the Luxembourg for Louis Philippe in 1834-41, repeating Salomon de Brosse’s original garden façade, in order to accommodate a new chamber for the House of Peers. His chamber followed closely the earlier one there of 1798 by Chalgrin; the new chapel which he also provided at the Luxembourg has even more of the colouristic richness demanded by advanced taste in this period. The Luxembourg Orangery, later the Luxembourg Museum, which was built by Gisors in 1840 in an early seventeenth-century mode, used brick for the walls with only the dressings of stone, a rare instance of such external bichromy in the Paris of its day despite the lively interest in the employment of colour in architecture.
The present Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay was built in 1846-56 by Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856), who had completed in 1821-35 his master Bonnard’s earlier Ministry near by that was begun for Napoleon in 1814. Superimposed arch orders produce a rich and rather Venetian version of the Renaissance Revival not unrelated to the treatment of the somewhat exceptional Empire building on which he had worked. Duc began to plan the restoration and enlargement of the Palace of Justice in Paris as early as 1840, but the handsomest and most conspicuous portions of this elaborate complex date from the Second Empire. J.-F. Duban (1797-1870) started the restoration of the old Louvre, over which a hot controversy soon ensued, in 1848; the New Louvre, begun by Visconti in 1852 and carried forward after his death in 1853 by Lefuel, would be the prime monument of the succeeding period (see Chapter [8]). Duban’s capacities in this period—he did his best work rather later (Plate [72B])—are better appreciated in the building for the École des Beaux Arts he completed in 1838 and in the elegant Early Italian Renaissance design of the Hôtel de Pourtalès of 1836 in the Rue Tronchet, perhaps the finest Paris mansion of its day.
However, it was not with such hôtels particuliers but with maisons de rapport, that is, blocks of flats, that the streets of Paris, like those of Berlin and Vienna, were mostly built up in these decades. Earlier ones, such as those in the Place de la Bourse, are very carefully composed yet almost devoid of prominent architectural features (Plate [27C]). In the later thirties and above all the forties, however, the detail grew richer and more eclectic, while the façades were in general much less neatly composed. Not only were rich Italian or French Renaissance features popular but exotic oriental ornament was more than occasionally used. The planning became more complex and elastic also; but both in exterior design and in interior organization the type remained firmly rooted in late-eighteenth-century tradition. The Paris streets of the first half of the nineteenth century have a notable consistency of scale and character, since the cornice lines, and even the shapes of the high roofs, were controlled by a well-enforced building code and their eclecticism of style is little more than a matter of detail.
More than in other countries in this period, the major virtues of French architecture lay in the placid continuance of well-established lines. Traditions were being slowly eroded, but there was very little of that urgent desire to overturn the immediate past which coloured so significantly much English production of the thirties and forties. Nor was there the German capacity in this period for carrying over into medievalizing modes the basic discipline of established Romantic Classicism. Not surprisingly, French leadership in architecture, established under Louis XIV and renewed under Napoleon, was largely lost; it came back, however, with the Second Empire (see Chapters [8] and [9]). All the same, architectural controversy flourished at home in these decades.
Quite naturally, French influence still remained largely dominant in contiguous Belgium and much of Switzerland. If Studer’s work in Berne falls under the German rubric of Rundbogenstil, in French-speaking Lausanne and Neuchâtel important commissions went to Frenchmen. An Asylum for the former city was designed by Henri Labrouste in 1837-8; another in the latter town, built a few years later, is by P.-F.-N. Philippon (1784-1866), a pupil of J.-J. Ramée who had also worked with Brongniart. Both are characteristically respectable examples of Louis Philippe work. Labrouste also designed a prison for Alessandria in Italy in 1840.
In Belgium, under Dutch rule from the fall of Napoleon down to 1830, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, begun in 1819 by the French architect L.-E.-A. Damesme (1757-1822), who had once worked on the Paris barrières with Ledoux, and completed by E.-J. Bonnevie (1783-1835), is a large but typical example of the theatres built in the French provinces by architects of the previous generation. It was not improved by an enlargement and remodelling of 1856, but the original temple portico is noble in scale and handsomely detailed. Characteristically, Damesme also built the Brussels prison. When a new generation of Belgian architects appeared led by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79), who had studied with Huyot, more international influences were evident. For example, Poelaert’s fine early school of 1852 in the Rue de Schaerbeek in Brussels shows little of Huyot but a good deal of Schinkel in its rationalistic handling of Grecian forms. Poelaert’s boldness here, which even suggests that of Alexander Thomson in his Glasgow work of this decade and the next, prepares one a little for his later Palace of Justice designed in the sixties (see Chapter [8]).