Although France was less affected by the Picturesque in the first half of the nineteenth century than England, the Renaissance Revival had permitted some straying from the more rigid paths of Romantic Classicism in the thirties and forties (see Chapters 3 and 6). The earliest French work of the twenties that may seem of Italian Renaissance inspiration is very severe and flat, approximating occasionally the effects of the German Rundbogenstil yet consistently disdaining that mode’s tendencies towards either medievalism or originality in detail. Gradually, under Louis Philippe, there were changes: on the one hand, there arose an interest in later periods of the Italian Renaissance; on the other, there came an increasing and less peripheral use of sixteenth-century and even later native models. Common to both these developments was an evident desire for richer and more plastic effects.[[178]] What above all distinguishes the mature Second Empire mode, even more in other countries than in France, is the elaboration of three-dimensional composition by the employment of visible mansard roofs and of pavilions at the ends and centres of buildings, these last capped either with especially tall straight-sided mansards or, even more characteristically, with convex or concave ones. Such features are rare before 1850 in France and almost unknown elsewhere.[[179]]
The return of the mansard in France is harder to document than its appearance as a new element of architectural composition in other countries, for in France it had never passed out of use as a practical device for providing usable attics. With the increasing emulation of sixteenth-century French models in the second quarter of the century tall roofs of a more medieval sort began to be used with some frequency. Biet’s ‘Maison de François I’ of 1825 did not have them; but ten years later they are very prominent on the François I house Dusillion built in the Rue Vaneau. Moreover, Lesueur in the late thirties could hardly avoid their use when extending the sixteenth-century Hôtel de Ville (Plate [22A]). As noted earlier, it seems to have been H.-A.-G. de Gisors, at the École Normale Supérieure built in 1841-7, who first re-introduced on a prominent building mansards of seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century character, and in association with detailing that suggests, vaguely at least, the style Louis XIV. By the late forties the use of such mansards was fairly common in France, although they rarely received much emphasis.
Had Dusillion in 1849-51 built the mansarded mansion for T. H. Hope[[180]] in Paris rather than in London therefore, or the Danish-born but Paris-schooled Detlef Lienau (1818-87)[[181]] his mansarded Hart M. Shiff house of the same date in France rather than in America, neither would have been especially notable. But in the England and the United States of the mid century emulation of French models was in itself novel. Dusillion’s and Lienau’s mansards, moderate enough by French standards, suggested to the English and the Americans a way by which edifices of generically Renaissance character could be given something of the bold silhouette that high pointed roofs provided for Victorian Gothic structures. Like Barry’s loggia-topped towers and his corner chimneys, mansards appealed directly to the mid century’s characteristic desire to break sharply away from the flat-surfaced, and nearly flat-topped, cubic blocks of Romantic Classicism. Pavilion composition offered a similar resource for the plastic modelling of façades.
In 1851, following immediately after the Hope house, came the designing of the Great Western Hotel at Paddington in London by the Hardwicks. This was still, one should note, before the Second Empire actually began in France. Gawky though this hotel is, and very uncertain in its use of French precedent, contemporaries generally recognized its inspiration as derived from the period of Louis XIV. The complex massing and the broken skyline, with roofs of different heights and pavilion-like towers at the ends, are much more obviously a premonition of the Second Empire mode in the form the world outside France would shortly adopt it than were the London and New York houses of two years earlier. Unlike Dusillion and Lienau, moreover, the architects of the Great Western Hotel, recognized masters of the dying Greek Revival as well as of the rising Gothic and Renaissance Revivals, were not French-trained.
If the international Second Empire mode had thus, in a sense, beginnings outside France, it is nevertheless true that its spiritual headquarters was in Paris. The prestige of the new Emperor’s capital, a prestige rapidly regained after more than a generation of desuetude, quite as much as the visual appeal of multiple mansards and pavilioned façades, explains the world-wide success of the mode during, and even well after, the eighteen years that the Second Empire lasted.
It was in 1852 that Napoleon, then Prince-President, made himself Emperor. He had already signalized, a few months earlier, his ambition to revive the splendours not alone of his uncle’s rule but those of earlier French monarchs by his decision to complete the Louvre[[182]]—or more accurately to connect the Louvre with the Tuileries. This was a project over which generations of architects had struggled on paper and at which several abortive starts had already been made. Visconti received the commission, not Duban, who had been engaged since 1848 on what was proving a highly controversial restoration of the old Louvre. Visconti was chosen not for his reputation as a private architect but largely because a succession of public projects for new library buildings in Paris that he had been asked to prepare under Louis Philippe and even under the Second Republic had all fallen through, and it was felt he deserved an important commission from the State. Perhaps also his Tomb of Napoleon I at the Invalides made him especially sympathetic to Napoleon III.
A viable scheme for the New Louvre was produced by the sixty-year-old Visconti with very great rapidity. Counting on the great size of the Cour du Carrousel to obscure the awkward lack of parallelism between the Louvre and the Tuileries, he planned two hollow blocks extending westward at either end of the existing western front of the old Louvre. Beyond these blocks narrower wings, in part built already, would connect with the two ends of the Tuileries Palace in which French rulers usually lived. In the middle of the court fronts of the side blocks there were to be large pavilions, echoing Le Mercier’s in the centre of the west wing of the old Louvre, and other smaller pavilions to mark the salient corners towards the Place du Carrousel. Although the new constructions were intended to house various things—two ministries, a library, stables for the Tuileries, etc.—they were designed comprehensively with no specific indication of what would go on behind the long walls and inside the various pavilions. The New Louvre was not a palace or Royal residence; but like the old Louvre, which by this time housed several disparate activities—most notably the chief art gallery of France—it was meant to be representationally palatial.
In 1853 Visconti died and H.-M. Lefuel (1810-80), a pupil of Huyot, took over. Lefuel very much enriched the design and thereby provided the prime Parisian exemplar of the Second Empire mode, at least as the world outside France came to know it in the late fifties and sixties. Heavily though Lefuel leaned on the precedents provided by the various sections of the old Louvre, it is important to stress that his design did not represent, in the way of the first half of the century, a specific ‘revival’. For one thing, the old Louvre, begun by Pierre Lescot late in François I’s reign and carried forward by a succession of architects in the next four hundred years, offered a wide range of suggestions but no one consistent model. The most characteristic and striking features of the New Louvre, the corner pavilions, were those that were most eclectic in inspiration and in their total effect most nearly original (Plate [68]). No part of the old Louvre is as boldly plastic as these pavilions with their rich applied orders set far forward of the wall-plane; only Le Mercier’s Pavillon de l’Horloge on the old Louvre offered precedent for the great height of all the new pavilion roofs and in particular for the convex mansards, like square domes, over the central pavilions flanking the Cour du Carrousel.
Sumptuous as was Goujon’s sculptural investiture of the earliest work in the court of the old Louvre, this was delicate in scale and very flat; much of the sculptural decoration of the new pavilions follows Goujon fairly closely, but even more—some of it nearly in the round—is so bombastically plastic as almost to justify the term ‘Neo-Baroque’. Although there is actual early-seventeenth-century precedent for most of their individual details, the very lush stone dormers set against the high straight mansards of the corner pavilions are particularly novel in effect. For the next thirty years, and even longer, such features of the New Louvre would be imitated all over the western world yet, paradoxically, they had much less influence in France and almost none in Paris.
As far as the outside world—particularly perhaps England and the United States, but hardly less Latin America—was concerned the New Louvre was the prime architectural glory of Second Empire Paris and the symbol, par excellence, of cosmopolitan modernity. Burghers in Amsterdam and Montreal, vacationers in Yorkshire and silver-miners in the Rocky Mountains all expected to find echoes of it in the sumptuous new hotels they frequented; Latin Americans continued to emulate it even into the twentieth century. Yet in the real Paris of the Second Empire, the Paris which is largely still extant today, the New Louvre is but one prominent structure among many and, as has been said, not even a very typical one.