The Panthéon was finally finished in the decade after Soufflot’s death by his own pupil Maximilien Brébion (1716-c. 1792), J.-B. Rondelet (1743-1829), a pupil of J.-F. Blondel, and Soufflot’s nephew (François, ?-c. 1802). Well before that, a whole generation of French architects had developed a mode, similar to Adam’s in England, which is usually called, despite its initiation long before Louis XV’s death in 1774, the style Louis XVI. Whether or not this mode in its inception owed much to English inspiration is still controversial. In any case it was widely influential outside France from the seventies to the nineties, and in those decades both French-born and French-trained designers were in great demand all over Europe, except in England; and even in England French craftsmen were employed. With that completely eighteenth-century phase of architectural history this book cannot deal, even though most of the architects who after 1800 had first made their reputation under Louis XVI, or even earlier under Louis XV. The style Louis XVI and the English ‘Adam Style’ were over, except in remote provinces and colonial dependencies, by 1800.
In various executed works of the decades preceding the French Revolution it is possible to trace the gradual emergence of mature Romantic Classicism in France, as also to some extent in the executed buildings and, above all, the projects of the younger George Dance (1741-1825)[[12]] in England. But it is in the extraordinary designs, dating from the eighties, by two French architects a good deal younger than Soufflot that the new ideals were most boldly and completely visualized. In the last twenty-five years these two men, L.-E. Boullée (1728-99) and C.-N. Ledoux (1736-1806), have increasingly been recognized as the first great masters of Romantic Classical design if not, in the fullest sense, the first great Romantic Classical architects. Boullée built little and few of his projects and none of the manuscript of his book on architecture, both now preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale, were published—or at least not until modern times.[[13]] Yet they must have been well known to his many pupils—including J.-N.-L. Durand, who was the author of the most influential architectural treatise of the Empire period, and doubtless to others as well (see Chapters [2] and [3]).
Ledoux was from the first a very successful architect, working with assurance and considerable versatility in the style Louis XVI from the late sixties, particularly for Mme du Barry. He became an academician and architecte du roi in 1773 and spent the next few years at Cassel in Germany. His major executed works are in France, however, and belong to the late seventies and eighties. These are the Besançon Theatre of 1775-84, the buildings of the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans near there of 1775-9—he had been made inspecteur of the establishment in 1771—and the barrières or toll-houses of Paris, which were built in 1784-9 just before the Revolution. In this later work most of the major qualities of his personal style, qualities carried to much greater extremes in his projects, are readily recognizable; his earlier work was of rather transitional character and not at all unlike what many other French architects of his generation were producing.
The massive cube of the exterior of Ledoux’s Besançon Theatre, against which an unpedimented Ionic portico is set, can already be found, however, at his Château de Benouville begun in 1768; the later edifice is nevertheless much more rigidly cubical and much plainer in the treatment of the rare openings. In the interior Ledoux substituted for a Baroque horseshoe with tiers of boxes a hemicycle[[14]] with rising banks of seats and a continuous Greek Doric colonnade around the rear fronting the gallery. The extant constructions at Arc-et-Senans are less geometrical; instead of Greek orders there is much rustication and also various Piranesian touches of visual drama. It was this commission which set Ledoux to designing his ‘Ville Idéale de Chaux’; that was his greatest achievement, even though it never came even to partial execution, nor could perhaps have been expected to do so, so cosmic was the basic concept.
The barrières varied very widely in character; some were very Classical, others in a modest Italianate vernacular; some were rather Piranesian in their bold rustication, the Besançon Theatre. The most significant, however, were notable for the crisp and rigid geometry of their flat-surfaced masses. The extant Barrière de St Martin in the Place de Stalingrad in the La Villette district of Paris consists of a tall cylinder rising out of a very low, square block; this is intersected by a cruciform element projecting as three pedimented porticoes beyond the edges of the square (Plate [2A]). Although the range of Ledoux’s restricted detail here is not very great, it is varied to the point of inconsistency all the same. The rather heavy piers of the porticoes are square, with capitals simplified from the Grecian Doric; yet around the cylinder extends an open arcade of Italian character carried on delicate coupled columns.
Had Ledoux’s ideas been known only from his executed work, he would probably not have been especially influential; certainly he would not have attained with posterity the very high reputation that is his today. Inactive at building after the Revolution—he was even imprisoned for a while in the nineties—he concentrated on the publication of his designs both executed and projected. His book L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation appeared in 1804, and a second edition was published by Daniel Ramée (1806-87) in 1846-7. This book has a long and fascinating text which is sociological as much as it is architectural; but it is in its plates, both of executed work and projects, that Ledoux’s originality can best be appreciated. By no means all of his ideas, known before the Revolution to his pupils and undoubtedly to many others as well, passed into the general repertory of Romantic Classicism; some of the most extreme are hardly buildable. The ‘House for Rural Guards’ is a free-standing sphere, a form that he utilized as space rather than mass in the interior of a project for a Columbarium. For the ‘Coopery’, the coopers’ products dictated the target-like shape (Plate [2B]). The ‘House for the Directors of the Loue River’ is also a cylinder set horizontally, but a much more massive one, through which the whole flood of the river was to pour to the thorough discomfort, one would imagine, of the inhabitants. Even where the forms are more conventional, as in the project for the church of his ‘Ville Idéale’ of Chaux—a purified version of Soufflot’s Panthéon: cruciform, temple-porticoed, and with a Roman saucer dome—or for the bank there—a peristylar rectangle with high, plain attic, flanked at the corners by detached cubic lodges—the clarity and originality of his formal thinking is very evident, and was apparently influential well before his book actually appeared in 1804. Masses are of simple geometrical shapes, discrete and boldly juxtaposed; walls are flat and as little broken as possible, the few necessary openings mere rectangular holes. Minor features are repeated without variation of rhythm in regular reiterative patterns; the top surfaces of the masses, whether flat, sloping, or rounded, are considered as bounding planes, not modelled plastically in the Baroque way.[[15]]
Much of this is common to the projects of Boullée, more widely known than Ledoux’s in the eighties because of his many pupils. The simple geometrical forms, the plain surfaces, the reiterative handling of minor features, all are even more conspicuous in his designs and generally presented at a scale so grand as to approach megalomania (Plate [2C]). Boullée could be, and often was, more conventionally the Classical Revivalist than Ledoux; he was also perhaps somewhat less bold in using such shapes as the sphere cube and the pyramid. His inspiration was on occasion medieval (of a very special South European ‘Castellated’ order), and he thereby laid the foundations for that more widely eclectic use of the forms of the past which makes the Romantic Classical a syncretic style, not a mere revival of Roman or Greek architecture. Various projects of the eighties by younger men, such as Bernard Poyet (1742-1824) and L.-J. Desprez (1743-1804), of whom we will hear again later, were of very similar character.
Both Boullée and Ledoux, but particularly Ledoux, were interested in symbolism. In that sense their architecture was not essentially abstract, despite the extreme geometrical simplicity of their forms, but in their own term parlante or expressive and meaningful. So special and personal is most of their symbolism, however, that even when quite obvious, as with the ‘Coopery’, it was hardly viable for other architects. When Ledoux gave to his Oikema or ‘House of Sexual Education’ an actual plan of phallic outline (which would be wholly unnoticeable except from the air) he epitomized the hermetic quality of much of his architectural speech. It is understandable that, of the many who accepted his architectural syntax, very few really attempted to speak his language. Such symbolism belonged on the whole to an early stage of Romantic Classicism; after 1800 architectural speech was generally of a much less recondite order. Yet to each of the different vocabularies employed by Romantic Classicists—Grecian, Egyptian, Italian, Castellated, etc.—some sort of special meaning was commonly attached. Thus a restricted and codified eclecticism provided, as it were, the equivalent of a system of musical keys that could be chosen according to a conventional code when designing different types of buildings.
One cannot properly say that international Romantic Classicism derives to any major degree from Ledoux and Boullée; one can only say that their projects of the eighties epitomized most dramatically the final ending of the Baroque and the crystallization of the style that succeeded it. Many French architects of the generation of Poyet and Desprez, however, such as J.-J. Ramée, Pompon, A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer, L.-P. Baltard, Belanger, Grandjean de Montigny, Damesme, and Durand (to mention only those whose names will recur later) came close to rivalling even the grandest visions of Ledoux and Boullée in projects prepared in the nineties.[[16]] After such exalted work on paper, the buildings actually executed by this generation of Romantic Classicists often seem rather tame. So also were the glorious social schemes of the political revolutionaries much diluted by the functioning governments of Consulate and Empire before and after 1800.
Only in England did the decades preceding the French Revolution produce any development in architecture at all comparable in significance to what was taking place then in France. But there also it is the projects rather than the executed work of Dance—of which very little remains except his early London church of All Hallows, London Wall, of 1765-7—that modern investigators have come to realize led most definitely away from the transitional ‘Adam Style’ towards Romantic Classicism. His Piranesian Newgate Prison, begun in 1769, was demolished in 1902. By 1790, both in France and in England, the new ideas had taken firm root, however, and other countries were not slow to accept the mature style once it had been fully adumbrated.