In 1860 came, at last, Garnier’s chance: a competition was announced for a design for a new imperial academy of music, and out of 163 competitors Garnier was one of five selected for a second competition, in which, by unanimous vote, he carried off the first prize, and the execution of the design was placed in his hands. Begun in 1861, but delayed in its completion by the Franco-German War, it was not till 1875 that the structure of the present Grand Opera House of Paris was finished, at a cost of about 35,000,000 francs (£1,420,000). During the war the building was utilized as the municipal storehouse of provisions. The staircase and the magnificent hall are the finest portion of the interior, and alike in conception and realization have never been approached. Of Garnier’s other works, the most remarkable are the Casino at Monte Carlo, the Bischoffsheim villa at Bordighera, the Hôtel du Cercle de la Librairie in Paris; and, among tombs, those of the musicians Bizet, Offenbach, Massé and Duprato. In 1874 he was elected a member of the Institute of France, and after passing through the grades of chevalier, officer and commander of the Legion of Honour, received in 1895 the rank of grand officer, a high distinction that had never before been granted to an architect. Charles Garnier’s reputation was not confined to France; it was recognized by all the countries of Europe, and in England he received, in 1886, the royal gold medal of the Royal Institute of Architects, given by Queen Victoria. Besides his monograph on the temple of Aegina, he wrote several works, of which Le Nouvel Opéra de Paris is the most valuable. For the International Exhibition of 1889 he designed the buildings illustrating the “History of the House” in all periods, and a work on this subject was afterwards published by him in conjunction with M. Ammann. Not the least of his claims to the gratitude of his country were the services which he rendered on the various art juries appointed by the state, the Institute of France, and the École des Beaux-Arts, services which in France are rendered in an honorary capacity. Garnier died on the 3rd of August 1898.
(R. P. S.)
GARNIER, MARIE JOSEPH FRANÇOIS [Francis] (1839-1873), French officer and explorer, was born at St Étienne on the 25th of July 1839. He entered the navy, and after voyaging in Brazilian waters and the Pacific he obtained a post on the staff of Admiral Charner, who from 1860 to 1862 was campaigning in Cochin-China. After some time spent in France he returned to the East, and in 1862 he was appointed inspector of the natives in Cochin-China, and entrusted with the administration of Cho-lon, a suburb of Saigon. It was at his suggestion that the marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat determined to send a mission to explore the valley of the Mekong, but as Garnier was not considered old enough to be put in command, the chief authority was entrusted to Captain Doudart de Lagrée. In the course of the expedition—to quote the words of Sir Roderick Murchison addressed to the youthful traveller when, in 1870, he was presented with the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London—from Kratie in Cambodia to Shanghai 5392 m. were traversed, and of these 3625 m., chiefly of country unknown to European geography, were surveyed with care, and the positions fixed by astronomical observations, nearly the whole of the observations being taken by Garnier himself. Volunteering to lead a detachment to Talifu, the capital of Sultan Suleiman, the sovereign of the Mahommedan rebels in Yunnan, he successfully carried out the more than adventurous enterprise. When shortly afterwards Lagrée died, Garnier naturally assumed the command of the expedition, and he conducted it in safety to the Yang-tsze-Kiang, and thus to the Chinese coast. On his return to France he was received with enthusiasm. The preparation of his narrative was interrupted by the Franco-German War, and during the siege of Paris he served as principal staff officer to the admiral in command of the eighth “sector.” His experiences during the siege were published anonymously in the feuilleton of Le Temps, and appeared separately as Le Siège de Paris, journal d’un officier de marine (1871). Returning to Cochin-China he found the political circumstances of the country unfavourable to further exploration, and accordingly he went to China, and in 1873 followed the upper course of the Yang-tsze-Kiang to the waterfalls. He was next commissioned by Admiral Dupré, governor of Cochin-China, to found a French protectorate or a new colony in Tongking. On the 20th of November 1873 he took Hanoi, the capital of Tongking, and on the 21st of December he was slain in fight with the Black Flags. His chief fame rests on the fact that he originated the idea of exploring the Mekong, and carried out the larger portion of the work.
The narrative of the principal expedition appeared in 1873, as Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine effectué pendant les années 1866, 1867 et 1868, publié sous la direction de M. Francis Garnier, avec le concours de M. Delaporte et de MM. Joubert et Thorel (2 vols.). An account of the Yang-tsze-Kiang from Garnier’s pen is given in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog. (1874). His Chronique royale du Cambodje, was reprinted from the Journal Asiatique in 1872. See Ocean Highways (1874) for a memoir by Colonel Yule; and Hugh Clifford, Further India, in the Story of Exploration series (1904).
GARNIER, ROBERT (c. 1545-c. 1600), French tragic poet, was born at Ferté Bernard (Le Maine) in 1545. He published his first work while still a law-student at Toulouse, where he won a prize (1565) in the jeux floraux. It was a collection of lyrical pieces, now lost, entitled Plaintes amoureuses de Robert Garnier (1565). After some practice at the Parisian bar, he became conseiller du roi au siège présidial et sénéchaussée of Le Maine, his native district, and later lieutenant-général criminel. His friend Lacroix du Maine says that he enjoyed a great reputation as an orator. He was a distinguished magistrate, of considerable weight in his native province, who gave his leisure to literature, and whose merits as a poet were fully recognized by his own generation. He died at Le Mans probably in 1599 or 1600.
In his early plays he was a close follower of the school of dramatists who were inspired by the study of Seneca. In these productions there is little that is strictly dramatic except the form. A tragedy was a series of rhetorical speeches relieved by a lyric chorus. His pieces in this manner are Porcie (published 1568, acted at the hôtel de Bourgogne in 1573), Cornélie and Hippolyte (both acted in 1573 and printed in 1574). In Porcie the deaths of Cassius, Brutus and Portia are each the subject of an eloquent recital, but the action is confined to the death of the nurse, who alone is allowed to die on the stage. His next group of tragedies—Marc-Antoine (1578), La Troade (1579), Antigone (acted and printed 1580)—shows an advance on the theatre of Étienne Jodelle and Jacques Grévin, and on his own early plays, in so much that the rhetorical element is accompanied by abundance of action, though this is accomplished by the plan of joining together two virtually independent pieces in the same way.
In 1582 and 1583 he produced his two masterpieces Bradamante and Les Juives. In Bradamante, which alone of his plays has no chorus, he cut himself adrift from Senecan models, and sought his subject in Ariosto, the result being what came to be known later as a tragi-comedy. The dramatic and romantic story becomes a real drama in Garnier’s hands, though even there the lovers, Bradamante and Roger, never meet on the stage. The contest in the mind of Roger supplies a genuine dramatic interest in the manner of Corneille. Les Juives is the pathetic story of the barbarous vengeance of Nebuchadnezzar on the Jewish king Zedekiah and his children. The Jewish women lamenting the fate of their children take a principal part in this tragedy, which, although almost entirely elegiac in conception, is singularly well designed, and gains unity by the personality of the prophet. M. Faguet says that of all French tragedies of the 16th and 17th centuries it is, with Athalie, the best constructed with regard to the requirements of the stage. Actual representation is continually in the mind of the author; his drama is, in fact, visually conceived.
Garnier must be regarded as the greatest French tragic poet of his century and the precursor of the great achievements of the next.