Here, at its heart, the contrast between setting and monument in Second Empire Paris is at its most extreme, even though this setting is far richer and more plastic than that provided by the severely flat houses that surround the Arc de l’Étoile. Just as there, however, the use of a giant order on all the big blocks that form the place reveals the distinctly academic taste of the leading French architects in this period; but Blondel’s rounded pavilions, where two major streets come in on either side at an angle, provide an almost Baroque elaboration in the grouping of the various masses by which the complex space is defined (Plate [70C]). Certainly the result is very different from the large open areas surrounded by discrete blocks of plain geometrical shape favoured by Romantic Classicism.
The Opéra is sumptuous in a rather different way from the New Louvre (Plate [70B]). Yet in Garnier’s work, as in Lefuel’s, a generically Neo-Baroque effect is achieved with elements mostly High Renaissance in origin, but here Italian rather than French. The richly coloured marbles, the admirably placed sculpture by Carpeaux, and above all the fashion in which the masses pile up—from the ornate colonnade crowning the main façade, through the half-dome which expresses the auditorium externally, to the tall stage-house at the rear—is much richer plastically than the somewhat repetitive scheme of the New Louvre. The whole, moreover, is made fully three-dimensional by the comparable organization of the major elements at the sides and on the rear. Thus Garnier provided a visual equivalent to the complex ordering of his extremely elaborate plan, a plan the undoubted virtues of which can be fully appreciated only on paper (Figure [15]). Inside the Opéra the great staircase, the foyer, and the actual auditorium drip with somewhat brassy gold and the profusion of detail has a curiously un-Renaissance spikiness and lumpiness (Plate [71]). This quality underlines how un-archaeological was Garnier’s approach, how responsive he was (perhaps unconsciously) to the new tastes of the mid century that had produced the High Victorian[[189]] Gothic in England in the previous decade and fostered generally the international success of the Second Empire mode. When Eugénie asked him what the ‘style’ of the Opéra was—Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI—he replied with both tact and accuracy: ‘C’est du Napoléon III’.
Like the lushness of the New Louvre, Garnier’s lushness has an undeniably parvenu quality characteristic of the time and place; but the pace he set, however much emulated all over the world in later opera houses, and the peculiar capacity he showed for satisfying the taste for bombastic luxury of the third quarter of the century were never equalled by other architects, least of all by French ones. In the twin theatres flanking the Place du Châtelet,[[190]] which were built in 1860-2, Davioud, the architect of the Rotonde des Panoramas, made little attempt to vie with Garnier’s Opéra; but they are considerably more successful in their own right than is the Vaudeville in the Boulevard des Capucines of 1872 by A.-J. Magne (1816-85), which does. Garnier’s own Panorama Français of 1882 at 251 Rue Saint-Honoré has only a modest façade to the street.
Only one other work of Garnier himself rivals the Opéra, his Casino at Monte Carlo of 1878. The fine site that this occupies somewhat makes up for its tawdry finish in painted stucco, and the two-towered façade towards the bay has a properly festive air. The Casino and Baths he built at Vittel in 1882, his Observatory at Nice, and the Cercle de la Librairie of 1880 in the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris are considerably quieter in design. The Palais Longchamps[[191]] of 1862-9 in Marseilles by H.-J. Espérandieu (1829-74), who had worked for Questel and for Vaudoyer, two palatial museum blocks joined by a curved colonnade above an elaborate cascade, is more Neo-Baroque than most work of the period (Plate [70A]); but much of the credit should go to the sculptor Bartholdi whose earlier fountain project Espérandieu took over.
Figure 15. J.-L.-C. Garnier: Paris, Opéra, 1863-74, plan
Despite what has been said of the houses at the Rond Point, most Second Empire mansions in Paris, at least those built by leading architects, tend to be rather restrained in their general design and often quite archaeologically correct in their detailing. They are likely, moreover, to follow French seventeenth- or eighteenth-century models rather than those of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Italy. Already, in the Hôtel de Pontalba, Visconti had copied Versailles closely in the interiors, while his exterior followed the line of the early eighteenth-century hôtels particuliers. (This was drastically remodelled in the eighties.) Labrouste, in the Hôtel Fould, 29-31 Rue de Berri, which was built in 1856-8, was rather plausibly Louis XIII; while Alfred Armand (1805-88), a pupil of Leclerc and a frequent collaborator with Pellechet, in designing the Hôtel Pereire and its twin in the Place Pereire about 1855 approached the style Louis XVI as closely as Hittorff did round the Étoile. Nevertheless, study of Parisian exemplars inspired many foreign architects to design houses that could hardly be anything else but Second Empire.
This is largely explained by the special character of the publications[[192]] of C.-D. Daly (1811-93), a pupil of Duban, and of P.-V. Calliat (1801-81), a pupil of Vaudoyer, through which current French work of this period chiefly became known to the outside world. Almost as was the case at the opening of the century, when the volumes illustrating Prix de Rome projects made the higher aspirations of French architects better known to students abroad than their ordinary practice, the publications of this later day seem to have focused attention on certain aspects only of the French architectural scene, aspects prominent enough, but not altogether characteristic as regards public monuments and dominant official taste. Without knowledge of the French architectural past, without the inhibitions instilled early in French architects by their training at the École des Beaux-Arts, foreign architects readily derived from published sources a Second Empire mode considerably lusher than was generally approved for public use in French academic circles and made it very much their own. Even in public architecture foreigners must have seen current work with different eyes from the French.
For example, the Tribunal de Commerce on the Île de la Cité, an agency provided in 1858-64 with a building of its own instead of mere quarters in the Bourse, was supposed by French contemporaries to express in its detailing the Emperor’s personal enthusiasm for the quattrocento buildings that he had lately seen in Brescia. But posterity, like foreigners when the Tribunal was new, notes in this work of A.-N. Bailly (1810-92) the characteristic Second Empire mansards and the almost Neo-Baroque dome—which at Haussmann’s insistence was added to close the vista down the new north-south artery—not the uncharacteristically flat and delicately detailed façades. Far finer is the front of that section of the École des Beaux-Arts facing the Seine which was built by Bailly’s master Duban in 1860-2, finer and doubtless also truer to the most exigent taste of the day. Rather directly expressive of its interior uses—it houses exhibition galleries, etc.—the detailing of this façade is quite original without being at all cranky like Duc’s on the Palais de Justice, and the whole very subtle in composition (Plate [72B]). Much of the cold severity characteristic of the previous half-century remains; but Duban was clearly trying to be creative, not archaeological, so that one cannot properly apply stylistic names from the past, not even to the extent that it is possible to do so in the case of the New Louvre and the Opéra. However, such high distinction of design as Duban achieved here was rather rare in Second Empire Paris; it parallels in this period the equally exceptional distinction of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of the forties.
The accepted range of stylistic inspiration was so wide that it is often only a certain syncretism that gives buildings of this period, nominally in any one of half a dozen ‘styles’, a recognizably contemporary flavour. So also new methods of construction, rather than superseding masonry in toto and thereby demanding original expression as in Victor Baltard’s Central Markets, were more characteristically fused with it, as in the reading-rooms of Labrouste’s libraries. Of these only the later, that in the Bibliothèque Nationale, was built under the Second Empire (Plate [69]). Except for this Salle de Travail of 1861-9 and the Magasin or stacks, both so exciting to posterity, most of Labrouste’s other work at this institution, begun in 1855, is as derivative as his private houses; for the most part it is actually hard to say where the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings stop and his nineteenth-century additions and those of his successor J.-L. Pascal (1837-1920) begin.