In any case the character of real Gothic architecture in France, as in most other European countries, made unlikely a programme of revival based chiefly on parish churches in the way of Pugin’s. The Continental Middle Ages had most notably produced cathedrals, and it was for new churches of near-cathedral scale that the re-use of Gothic was likely to be proposed. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, built by J.-E. Barthélémy (1799-1868) in 1840-7 on the heights of Ste Cathérine above Rouen, opens the serious phase of the Revival in France. It has a superb site and is best appreciated from a considerable distance, but the silhouette is not happy and the execution is rather hard and cold. Saint-Nicholas at Nantes was begun in 1839 just before the Rouen church by L.-A. Piel (1808-41), a confused Romantic character who died a monk, and taken over in 1843 by J.-B.-A. Lassus (1807-57), a pupil of Lebas and Henri Labrouste. It is very hard to accept this church as even in part the production of Lassus, the erudite archaeologist who brought out in 1842 the first volume of a major monograph on Chartres Cathedral and who undertook in 1845, together with the better-known E.-E. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), the restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris after sharing with Duban the responsibility for restoring the Sainte-Chapelle. Rather more plausible—at least in the sense that it merges fairly successfully with the original fourteenth-century nave to which it is attached—is the façade of Saint-Ouen at Rouen built in 1845-51 by H.-C.-M. Grégoire (1791-1854), a pupil of Percier.
Sainte-Clotilde was finally begun in 1846, as has been noted, and completed after Gau’s death by Ballu in 1857 (Plate [55B]). This ambitious urban church of cathedral scale lacks almost as completely as those just mentioned the personal qualities of design and the integrity of revived medieval craftsmanship that give character, if not always distinction, to the churches of Pugin, Carpenter, and other leading English Gothic Revivalists of the forties. Nor does it have the grandeur of proportion of Scott’s Nikolaikirche in Hamburg, to which it is more comparable in size and pretension (Plate [52B]). The style is Rayonnant, or French fourteenth-century, and the material good freestone, but deadly mechanical and quite characterless in the detailing. The parts seem somehow too large for the whole. Ballu’s west towers, for example, are excessively tall for so stubby a plan, and the chapel-surrounded chevet is too elaborate for even an urban parish church.
Two later churches by Lassus, Saint-Nicholas at Moulins, built in collaboration with L.-D.-G. Esmonnot (1807-80) in 1849, and Saint-Pierre at Dijon of 1853 hardly rival Sainte-Clotilde in size, elaboration, or even plausibility. Viollet-le-Duc was rather more of an executant architect than Lassus, even though in this decade and the next most of his vast energy and very considerable archaeological knowledge went into the restoration of medieval monuments. At Notre-Dame in Paris the Chapter House that he designed is a wholly new construction of 1847 not unworthy of comparison with the best work of Scott in these years. The block of flats (Plate [56]) he built at 28 Rue de Berlin (now de Liège) in Paris in 1846-8—his first executed building—may better be compared with the most advanced English secular Gothic of its date, Salvin’s Peckforton, say, or Butterfield’s St Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The front is so simple and straightforward in composition that it fits between more conventional façades with no awkwardness, and the rather plain detailing has the ‘realism’ that was coming to be admired by this date in the most advanced English circles.
The Romanesquoid design of Fontaine’s Chapelle-Saint-Ferdinand of 1843 has been mentioned. The use of such forms was in the forties even more exceptional in France than in England. In 1852 Didron estimated—probably with some exaggeration—that over two hundred Neo-Gothic churches had been built or were building in France, a record which compares statistically, if in no other way, with English church production in this period. None of them, however, is as impressive to later eyes as Saint-Paul at Nîmes, which follows with notable success the alternative Romanesquoid mode of Fontaine’s chapel. C.-A. Questel (1807-88), a pupil of Blouet and Duban, the architect of this church, had evidently studied the Romanesque with the care and enthusiasm usually lavished on the Gothic by his generation, and the result is so great an advance over Fontaine’s work that the resemblance is merely nominal. Thus might the Camdenians have hoped to build had they considered the twelfth-century Romanesque of France as worthy of conscientious emulation as the fourteenth-century Gothic of England. Saint-Paul is a large cruciform edifice, rib-vaulted throughout in a proto-Gothic way, and crowned with a great central lantern. The detail is plausible in its design, neither too skimpy nor too elaborate, although the execution lacks any real feeling for medieval craftsmanship in stone. Questel’s church, however, is as much of an exception as Fontaine’s chapel. No Romanesque Revival got under way in the forties in France in the way that one did to a certain extent in Germany, and the few other Romanesquoid churches of high quality belong to the next period (see Chapter [8]).
Minor evidence of French interest—and rising interest—in the Picturesque is not hard to find in these decades, but that is all there is. No Picturesque modes comparable to those of the Anglo-Saxon world became widely popular. In the first decade of the century the brothers Caccault built at Clisson[[141]] in the Vendée a whole village based on their memories of the Roman Campagna, a more considerable essay in the Italian Villa vein than anything carried out in England. But the asymmetrically towered Italian Villa[[142]] did not mature in France in the way that it did in England, Germany, and the United States. Séheult’s Recueil of 1821, of which a second edition appeared in 1847, is one of the earliest and richest repositories of inspiration drawn from rustic Italian building; but the edifices Séheult illustrated, however Picturesque in other ways, are all symmetrical and quite in the Durand tradition. J.-J. Lequeu (1758-c. 1824)[[143]] had produced bolder projects a generation earlier. These are often asymmetrical, generally quite wildly eclectic, and very vigorously plastic; but such things rarely, if ever, came to execution in France except as garden fabricks. Lequeu had no success at all in his later years.
Moreover, the Rustic Cottage mode seems to have struck no real roots in France, even though the painter Hubert Robert and the architect Richard Mique (1728-94), in designing the fabricks of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau at the Petit Trianon in 1783-6, had followed native rather than English rural models. Under the Restoration and the July Monarchy inspiration came generally from English Cottage books. Visconti’s Château de Lussy, S.-et-M., of 1844, though a fairly large structure, is really in the English Cottage mode with an asymmetrically organized plan and an irregularly composed exterior. This is almost unique and, in any case, quite undistinguished. A more vigorous flow of rustic influence entered France via Alsace and directly from Switzerland. The Chalet aux Loges of 1837 by Bonneau near Versailles was, as its name implies, a Swiss Chalet, but it quite lacked the integrity of structural expression and the originality of plastic organization of Eidlitz’s Willoughby house in Newport, R.I., which is, of course, considerably later in date. Occasional imitations of the style François I, such as the already mentioned country house by Canissié at Draveil, S.-et-O., have some irregularity both of outline and of plan; but in general the François I of the July Monarchy, like so much of the Jacobethan of Early Victorian England, is Picturesque only in detail, not in general conception.
In 1840 the elder Bridant, who also built Chalets in the succeeding years around the lake at Enghien, a watering-place on the outskirts of Paris, built a Gothic ‘Castel’ on the plain of Passy, then a fairly open suburb. This was markedly asymmetrical and consistently medieval in detail. The contemporary fame of this enlarged garden fabrick—for such it really was—indicates its unique position in contemporary production, as unique as Moffatt’s Gothic house in Park Lane in London. L.-M. Boltz, an architect of Alsatian if not German origin but a pupil of Henri Labrouste, had some success with a less feudal mode, half-timbered and asymmetrical, in the forties—a house of 1842 at Champeaux, S.-et-M., was typical.
This modest influx into France of Picturesque models from contemporary Germany as well as from contemporary England might lead one to assume that the Picturesque, if not the Gothic Revival, was more significant in Central Europe. In Germany and Austria, however, as also in Scandinavia, Picturesque and medievalizing tendencies mostly merged with Romantic Classicism in the Rundbogenstil rather than standing apart, thus constituting neither an opposition eventually rising to triumph in the English way, nor a mere gesture of aberrant protest as in France.
Schinkel’s interest in Gothic has already been touched on, but none of his more ambitious Gothic projects ever got beyond the drawing-board (see Chapter [2]). There are fewer such, in any case, belonging to his later than to his earlier years. Moreover, the Gothic of the early projects naturally belongs to the contemporary High Romantic world of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey and Latrobe’s alternative design for the Baltimore Cathedral, not to the ethical and archaeological milieu of Pugin and the Camdenians. Most of the virtues—by no means negligible—of his Berlin Werder Church of the twenties are not Gothic virtues—not at any rate as Englishmen of the succeeding decades understood them—they are rather Romantic Classical virtues. The principal interest of his earlier Kreuzberg Memorial lies in its cast-iron material, a material anathema to Pugin as a ‘modernistic’ innovation. The Babelsberg Schloss, based principally on the modern castles that he saw on his visit to England in 1826, makes no pretensions to archaeological correctness in the way of Pugin’s Alton Castle of about 1840 or Salvin’s still later Peckforton.
A few Castellated mansions of more local inspiration, such as Hohenschwangau in Upper Bavaria, as reconstructed by J. D. Ohlmüller (1791-1839) in 1832-7, are closer in spirit to Pugin’s and Salvin’s ideals. Hohenschwangau, like certain castles built in this period on the Rhine, exploits the Picturesque possibilities of a fine site and the nostalgic overtones of a district with a romantic medieval past. Schloss Berg in Bavaria, which owes its present very domesticated Gothic character to the work done there by Eduard Riedel (1813-85) in 1849-51, hardly deserves mention in this connexion any more than do Schinkel’s more or less medievalizing country houses, so crisp and regular is their design. Curiously enough, the vast Schloss at Schwerin, begun by G. A. Demmler (1804-86) in 1844, is a more elaborate and extensive example of François I than anything this period produced in France (Plate [57B]). It is also notably Picturesque, with innumerable towers and gables disposed around the sides of an irregularly polygonal court. Stüler carried this extraordinary pile to completion after Demmler left Schwerin in 1851. Not very Picturesque, but representing another sort of medievalism, were two Venetian Gothic houses Am Elbberg in Dresden, built with considerable archaeological plausibility by an architect named Ehrhardt in the mid forties. They provide a curious premonition of Ruskin and the High Victorian Gothic of England (see Chapter [10]). Semper’s Gothic Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden has already been mentioned.