Before considering English architecture in the years between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition, it will be well to turn to that of France. The drama of the supersession of a supposedly purely Classical school in painting by a purely Romantic one, the contrast between such giants as Ingres on the one hand and Delacroix on the other, cannot be matched in the tame course of French architecture in this period; only very rarely was the accomplishment of these great painters or of half a dozen others, ranging from Géricault and Bonington to Corot and Daumier, equalled in quality by a Henri Labrouste or a Duban. Although the art of Ingres is in many ways parallel to Romantic Classicism in architecture, no French architect of this generation really approaches him at all closely in stature, although he numbered several among his close friends. Still less is there among architects any rebellious Romantic of the distinction of Delacroix or any ‘independent’ comparable to Corot.

The Empire left a vast heritage of unfinished monuments. It is properly to the credit of the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe that these were brought to completion a generation after their initiation; but all the credit for them has in fact generally accrued to Napoleon himself. The intervening Restoration of the returned Bourbons, tired, reactionary and bigoted, gave its support largely to the construction of religious buildings. Appropriately, the first important new commission under Louis XVIII was for the Chapelle Expiatoire in memory of his brother Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. This chapel with its raised tomb-flanked forecourt, lying between the Rue Pasquier and the Rue d’Anjou off the Boulevard Haussmann, was begun in 1816 and completed in 1824 (Plate 18A). Somewhat less appropriately, it was Napoleon’s favourite architect Fontaine—his partner Percier had by this time retired—who received the commission. But the character of the project and of the regime led him to modulate his earlier imperial style from the festive and the triumphal towards the solemn and the funereal. Not an unworthy example of Romantic Classicism, this nevertheless lacks the crispness and clarity of the best contemporary German work. Nor does it much recall—as it well might have done—either the delicacy of the style Louis XVI or the ‘Sublime’ grandeur of the many projects for monumental cenotaphs designed by the previous generation of architects and by those of Fontaine’s own generation in their youth.

To restore the strength of the church, as the piety of the later Bourbons demanded, priests had to be trained in quantity. The next significant work undertaken in Paris after the Chapelle Expiatoire was the Séminaire Saint-Sulpice in the Place St Sulpice by É.-H. Godde (1781-1869); this was begun in 1820 and completed in 1838. So flat and cold are its façades that the observer may readily fail to note that the design somewhat approaches, perhaps unconsciously, the quattrocento Florentine. However, it quite lacks the archaeological character of Klenze’s Königsbau in Munich, designed only a few years later, or the vigour and assurance of Wimmel & Forsmann’s Johanneum in Hamburg. In fact, of course, it derives almost directly from Durand and not from any careful study of Grandjean de Montigny’s Architecture toscane. Somewhat more definitely Early Renaissance in detail are the Baths at Mont d’Or, built by L.-C.-F. Ledru (1771-1861), a pupil of Durand, in 1822, and the Barracks in the Rue Mouffetard in Paris as extended in 1827 by Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75). Both exploit a rusticated Tuscan mode somewhat as Klenze was doing in Munich, but much less archaeologically.

Shortly after the Séminaire, Godde undertook several Paris churches. Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou in the Rue St Dominique of 1822-3 replaced a church destroyed in the Revolution. Finer and considerably larger is Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrament in the Rue de Turenne, built in 1823-35. Both are barrel-vaulted basilicas in the tradition of Chalgrin’s Saint-Philippe-du-Roule; the latter is rather elegant in its dry severity, the former confused by various later additions behind the altar. Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle of 1823-30 is smaller and more modest, as are also two nearly contemporary Paris churches by A.-I. Molinos (1795-1850), Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Neuilly of 1827-31 and Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles in the Place du Dr Félix Lobligeois in Paris of 1828-9. All these churches lack externally the Grecian grandeur of scale of the London churches of the period built by the Inwoods and others (see Chapter 4), but the basilican plan provides interiors that are considerably more interesting than the galleried halls with which most English architects were satisfied at this time. Of course, such a highly original interior as that of Soane’s St Peter’s, Walworth, of 1822 is in a different class altogether.

A much larger and more prominent church than any of Godde’s or Molinos’s is Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in the Rue de Chateaudun, one of the few really distinguished products of this dull period. It was the result of a competition held in 1822 which was won by Lebas, Brongniart’s collaborator on the Bourse (Plate 18B). This five-aisled edifice was built at very great expense in 1823-36 and sumptuously decorated with murals that added as much as a sixth to the total cost. The basic model is again the Early Christian basilica but here interpreted in thoroughly Classical terms, with a tall temple portico rivalling those of London at the front and no vaults or arches except at the east end. Evidence of a certain eclecticism is the rich coffering of the ceiling in panels alternately square and cruciform; so also is the introduction of a domed chancel before the apse. Both features are certainly of cinquecento inspiration.

To modern eyes, attuned to the late fifth-and sixth-century basilicas of Ravenna, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette certainly has a far less Early Christian air than Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika in Munich of the next decade; but doubtless the great Imperial basilicas of Rome of the fourth and early fifth centuries, notably Santa Maria Maggiore with its trabeated nave colonnade, were originally something like it. In any case, Lebas’s church is a highly typical monument of Romantic Classicism and a major one. In France, as elsewhere, the accepted range of precedent now extended well beyond Greek and Roman antiquity to include Italian models of fifth- and of sixteenth-century date, if very little from the centuries between. Even before the construction of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the Belgian-born P.-J. Sandrié and Jacob Silveyra (1785-?) in building a big Parisian synagogue in the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth in 1819-20 had also followed rather closely the basilican formula.

The most important Parisian church of the second quarter of the century, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul off the Rue Lafayette, is also a five-aisled classical basilica (Plate 19). This was begun in 1824 by Lepère, but work was soon suspended. When it was carried to completion in 1831-44 Lepère’s son-in-law J.-I. Hittorff (1792-1867) took over, and he has generally received credit for the whole job. In utilizing a rising site, which required terraces and flights of steps in front, and in providing two towers, Lepère and Hittorff gave their church more prominence and a richer, if rather clumsily organized, three-dimensional interest.^[61] Hittorff’s archaeological studies in Sicily had made him an enthusiast for architectural polychromy, and to contemporaries the great novelty about Saint-Vincent-de-Paul was the proposal to use enamelled lava plaques on the exterior.^[62]

The French did not, like the Germans, turn to the use of tawny brick and terracotta in the second quarter of the century; but the interest of Hittorff and his generation in applied polychromy relates their work a little to that of the Romantic colourists in painting.^[63] Unfortunately almost none of this polychromy remains visible now; and so the shift away from the monochromy that is characteristic everywhere of Romantic Classicism down to this period is less evident in France than in other countries.

Especially fine is the open timber roof of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, although in fact only a part of the actual construction is exposed; while the fact that the colonnaded apse is wide enough to include the inner aisles as well as the nave gives a quite unprecedented spatial interest to the east end. Moreover, in this interior Hittorff achieved a rich warmth of tone quite different from the coldness of Godde’s and Molinos’s churches of the twenties. His Cirque des Champs Élysées of 1839-41 and Cirque d’Hiver of 1852 were even more brilliantly polychromatic both inside and out. But the most conspicuous extant works of Hittorff, the Gare du Nord of 1861-5, the Second Empire façades surrounding the Place de l’Étoile, and the decoration of the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Élysées with fountains and other features under the July Monarchy, provide today little evidence^[64] of this aspect of his talent once so notable to contemporaries at home and abroad.

Especially happy is the siting of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on the upper side of the new polygonal Place Charles X (now Place Lafayette), of which the other sides were filled in the twenties with consonant houses by A.-F.-R. Leclerc (1785-1853),^[65] a pupil of both Durand and Percier, and A.-J. Pellechet (1789-1871). Less characteristic of Romantic Classical urbanism than the squares and streets of Karlsruhe and Munich, this nevertheless well illustrates the dignity and the regularity of the houses then rising in the new quarters of Paris. The very considerable new quarter in Mulhouse, which was laid out and built up in 1826-8 by J.-G. Stotz (1799-?), a pupil of Leclerc, and A.-J.-F. Fries (1800-59), a pupil of Huyot, is more properly comparable with Karlsruhe.

Most of the new churches in the suburbs of Paris and the French provinces followed basilican models. The parish church of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which was brought at last to completion in 1823-7 by A.-J. Malpièce (1789-1864) and his partner A.-J. Moutier (1791-1874), a pupil of Percier, following the original designs of M.-M. Potain (1713-96) of the 1760s, is much more modest and somewhat less Roman. In Marseilles the younger M.-R. Penchaud (1772-1832), who designed in 1812 and built in 1827-32 the Palais de Justice at Aix on Ledoux’s earlier foundations, erected in 1824 a large Roman basilica for the local Protestants, doubtless with some conscious reference to Salomon de Brosse’s seventeenth-century Protestant Temple at Charenton of two hundred years earlier. By exception, however, the Protestant Temple at Orléans by F.-N. Pagot (1780-1844), a pupil of Labarre, which was built in 1836, is a plain cylinder in plan. Saint-Lazare in Marseilles, built by P.-X. Coste (1787-1879) and Vincent Barral (1800-54) in 1833-7, followed Notre-Dame-de-Lorette even more closely than does Penchaud’s Protestant church.

In the more modest parish church of Vincennes outside Paris, which rose in 1826-30, the very last years of the Restoration, J.-B.-C. Lesueur (1794-1883) was already using a rather Brunelleschian sort of detail that is not without a certain cool elegance. More definitely of the Renaissance Revival is Saint-Jacques-Saint-Christophe, the parish church of La Villette in the Rue de Crimée in Paris built by P.-E. Lequeux (1806-73) much later, in 1841-4. It is one of half a dozen that Lequeux began in the forties, in addition to designing the town halls of this and several other quarters of Paris. Lequeux employed definitely quattrocento detail somewhat more lavishly than Lesueur had done at Vincennes, and produced at La Villette one of the most satisfactory French churches of the Louis Philippe epoch. In building a small Norman church at Pollet near Dieppe in 1844-9, Louis Lenormand (1801-62), a pupil of his uncle Huvé, used Early Renaissance detail of a more French sort that may not improperly be called François I. Such detail was highly exceptional in ecclesiastical architecture even as late as the forties.

The housing of public services, initiated so actively by Napoleon, continued at a much reduced pace under Louis XVIII and Charles X. The Paris Custom House of 1827 by L.-A. Lusson (1790-1864), a pupil of Percier, with its great arched entrance rising from the ground and its similar transverse arches inside, was later transformed—three bays of it, at least—into a Protestant church by one of Lebas’s pupils, the German-born F.-C. Gau (1790-1853), for Louis Philippe’s German relatives in 1843. A similar reflection of Durand’s utilitarian models may be seen in the vast Government Warehouse at Lyons, begun in 1828 by L.-P. Baltard (1764-1846), Lequeux’s master, who had worked when very young with Ledoux on the Paris barrières. This contrasts notably in its consistent arcuation with the belated giant Corinthian colonnade that fronts Baltard’s Palace of Justice there, built in 1836-42, and parallels fairly closely the contemporary warehouses Schinkel was building in Berlin. More characteristic of the rather mixed official mode of the period is the Custom House of 1835-42 at Rouen by C.-E. Isabelle (1800-80), a pupil of Leclerc. This is of interest chiefly for the tremendous rusticated arch of the entrance, which quite overpowers the rest of the palazzo-like façade.

For educational institutions most new construction was subsidiary to existing buildings. At the École Polytechnique, A.-M. Renié (c. 1790-1855), a pupil of Percier and Vaudoyer, provided in 1828 a new arcuated and rusticated entrance hardly worthy of the school where Durand was now teaching a second generation of architects. P.-M. Letarouilly (1795-1855) made in 1831-42 additions that are less unworthy, but hardly more interesting, to Chalgrin’s Collège de France, built originally in the 1770s. But his great contribution, of course, was the Édifices de Rome moderne—the first volume of which appeared in 1840. Finally completed with the publication of the third volume in 1857, this was the bible of the later Renaissance Revival in France as of several generations of academic architects throughout the rest of the world. The École Normale Supérieure by the youngest Gisors (H.-A.-G. de, 1796-1866), a pupil of Percier, is a large, wholly new building of 1841-7; this looks forward to the Second Empire a little in its high mansard roof and seventeenth-century detailing, extremely dry and sparse though that is (see Chapter 8).

Private construction was for the most part very dull, whether in city, suburb, or country. As an example of the country houses that were built in some quantity, a typical project of 1830 for one by Hittorff may be illustrated (Figure 9). With its careful if rather uninteresting proportions, its rigid rectangularity, and the stiff chains of rustication that provide its sole embellishment, however, this rises somewhat above the general level of achievement of the period.

The François I character of the detailing of Lenormand’s Pollet church has been mentioned. In domestic architecture such national Renaissance precedent had rather greater success even if nothing very novel or original developed from it. In 1825 L.-M.-D. Biet (1785-1856), a pupil of Percier, brought to Paris the court façade of an early sixteenth-century house from Moret and applied it to a hôtel particulier—always called with no justification the ‘Maison de François I’—in a new residential area of Paris. This house shortly gave the name ‘François I’ to the entire quarter between the Champs Élysées and the Seine. The barrenness and brittleness of Biet’s own elevations were more of a tribute to his respect for the old work than to his creative ability.

Within the next few years houses built by such architects as L.-T.-J. Visconti (1791-1853), another pupil of Percier, and Famin tended to grow ever richer. In 1835 P.-C. Dusillion (1804-60), an architect otherwise more active abroad than at home, used François I detail with the lushest profusion on a house at 14 Rue Vaneau. The façade rather resembles an interior of the so-called style troubadour turned inside out. Much the same may be said for the block of flats built by Édouard Renaud (1808-86), a pupil of Leroy, at 5 Place St Georges in 1841. But this was rather an exception to the severity and regularity of Parisian street architecture under the Restoration. This was generally maintained, moreover, under the July Monarchy for blocks of flats, even by men like Visconti and Lesueur whose private houses were often very rich indeed.

Two country houses of 1840 make a more extensive and plausible use of François I features. One is the Château de St Martin, near St Paulzo in the Nièvre, built by Édouard Lussy (1788-1868), a pupil of Percier; this is elaborately picturesque in silhouette but still rigidly symmetrical. Another by J.-B.-P. Canissié (1799-1877), a pupil of Hittorff, at Draveil, S.-et-O., is somewhat irregular both in plan and in composition. But the style François I in the France of the second quarter of the nineteenth century had neither the general acceptance nor even the vitality—at that relatively low—of the revived ‘Jacobethan’ in contemporary England.

Even where a major sixteenth-century monument had to be restored and enlarged, as was the case with the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, the architects Godde and Lesueur were at some pains to regularize and chasten the unclassical vagaries of Boccador’s original design (Plate 22A). Most of the work by Lesueur was done after 1837; from 1853 Victor Baltard (1805-74), son of L.-P. Baltard, carried on; then the whole had to be rebuilt after it was burned under the Commune. The present rather similar edifice by Théodore Ballu (1817-74), a pupil of Lebas, was begun only in 1874, the year of his death, and eventually completed by his partner P.-J.-E. Deperthes (1833-98). Except for the high French roofs, looking forward like those by Gisors on the École Normale to the next period, the general effect of Lesueur’s work here was very Italianate.

A somewhat similar character can be seen in a few wholly new structures of more or less François I inspiration, for example the Museum and Library at Le Havre built by C.-L.-F. Brunet-Debaines (1801-62), a pupil of Vaudoyer and Lebas, in 1845. In such a major commercial work of this period as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, built by J.-L.-V. Grisart (1797-1877), a pupil of Huyot, and C.-M.-A. Froehlicher in 1838, it is hard to say whether the continuous arcading derived from French or from Italian sixteenth-century precedent. The iron-and-glass interiors were of more interest (see Chapter 7).

There has seemed no need to emphasize thus far, as regards its effect on architecture, the change of regime that took place in 1830, even though that date in the other arts of France is sometimes thought to mark the triumph of romantisme de la lettre over earlier Neo-Classicism. No such triumph took place in architecture, although it is evident that sources of inspiration other than the Antique were rather more frequently utilized after 1830 than before, if to nothing like the same extent as in Germany. Yet thanks to Victor Hugo and Guizot, Gothicism had by now acquired a less reactionary connotation than under the last Bourbons and was receiving the support, up to a point, of the July Monarchy (see Chapter 6).

For political reasons Louis Philippe desired especially to emphasize the continuity of his liberal monarchy with the more liberal aspects of the Empire and to reclaim for France the Napoleonic glories that the Restoration had denigrated. So Napoleon’s ashes were brought back to the Invalides, where Visconti, hitherto chiefly active in the domestic field, prepared in 1842 a setting for them as funereal as the Chapelle Expiatoire but more sumptuous in its use of coloured marbles. Napoleon’s Temple de la Gloire (the Madeleine) and his Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile were finally brought to completion, the one by Huvé in 1845, the other by Blouet in 1837, as has already been noted. Several new monuments, very much of the Empire type, were also erected in Paris.

Where Napoleon’s Elephant Monument was to have marked the site of the Bastille, J.-A. Alavoine (1778-1834), and after his death L.-J. Duc (1802-79), a pupil of Percier, erected in 1831-40 the gigantic Colonne de Juillet, rather less Imperial Roman and more French Empire than Napoleon’s Colonne Vendôme, but like that all of metal. In the centre of the Place de la Concorde there rose, with echoes of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (and less relevantly of Sixtine Rome), a real obelisk presented to Louis Philippe by the Khedive in 1833; thereafter, Hittorff ornamented in 1836-40 the square, the Champs Élysées, the Place de l’Étoile, and the Avenue de la Grande Armée with big fountains, lamp standards, and other pieces of elaborate urbanistic furniture.

While the Empire embellishment of Paris was thus finished up or complemented, the July Monarchy also developed a fantastically extensive activity in the construction of hospitals, prisons, and other such utilitarian structures. Vast and plain, these could hardly be duller in the eyes of posterity. Yet they derive quite directly from Durand’s admirable paradigms for such structures and more remotely from the social, if not the aesthetic, aspirations of such men of high talent as Ledoux and Boullée, who initiated Romantic Classicism before the Revolution. If a funerary edifice—the Chapelle Expiatoire—best epitomizes the architecture of the Restoration, some enormous public institution is the contemporary, if inappropriate, architectural equivalent of the Romantic arts of Delacroix and Berlioz in the thirties and forties! Very conspicuous, and quite characteristic of these as a class, is the Hôtel Dieu, beside Notre-Dame in Paris, although this was actually built^[66] very much later, in 1864-78, by A.-N. Diet (1827-90). It is the only one that can be readily seen without being jailed or certified; but most of them were amply presented in contemporary publications.

Penchaud, whose Marseilles Protestant church has already been mentioned, was one of the ablest and most productive provincial architects of the Restoration and Louis Philippe periods. His lazaret at Marseilles, built in 1822-6, is more Ledoux-like than the Aix Palace of Justice that he erected on Ledoux’s foundations and considerably more original than his triumphal arch of 1823-32 at Marseilles, called the Porte d’Aix. On this arch, however, the liveliness of the relief sculpture provides something of the same Romantic élan as that of Rude on the Arc de l’Étoile—Rude’s work dates, of course, from the Louis Philippe period. The Marseilles arch continues the Roman ideals of the Empire; the more significant lazaret revives the social and utilitarian ideals of the preceding Revolutionary period.

In Paris Lebas’s Petite Roquette Prison for young criminals, in the Rue de la Roquette, designed in 1825 and executed with some modification of the original project in 1831-6, hardly rivals his great church in interest; but the polygonal plan with machicolated round towers at the corners recalls both the special medievalism of Boullée and the Millbank Penitentiary^[67] in London of 1812-21 which Lebas had actually visited. Of more historical significance was the no longer extant Prison de la Nouvelle Force (or Mazas) commissioned in 1836 and built in 1843-50 by E.-J. Gilbert (1793-1874), a pupil first of Durand at the École Polytechnique and then of Vignon, the recognized leader in this field under Louis Philippe. Its radial cellular planning showed, like Barry’s Pentonville Prison of 1841-2 in London, the significant influence abroad of the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia built by John Haviland (1792-1852) in 1823-35. This plan was made known to Europeans by two reports on American prisons, one by William Crawford, published in London in 1834, and another by F.-A. Demetz and Blouet, published in Paris in 1837. On this prison J.-F.-J. Lecointe (1783-1858) was associated with Gilbert.

Much larger is Gilbert’s Charenton Lunatic Asylum of 1838-45 at St Maurice outside Paris, which he designed and built alone. The vast and orderly grid of this institution provides a community that is almost of the order of a complete town. The innumerable bare and regular ranges of wards are dominated by the temple portico of the centrally placed chapel, an ecclesiastical monument of some distinction that is unfortunately inaccessible to visitors. Such work, often as extensive in the provinces as near the capital, was much admired and studied by foreigners even quite late in the century. To the French, moreover, it carried a special prestige; the line of descent was direct from Boullée to Durand and from Durand to Gilbert and his provincial rivals, such as the brothers Douillard (L.-P., 1790-1869; L.-C., 1795-1878, a pupil of Crucy), who were responsible for the Hospice Général (Saint-Jacques) at Nantes built in 1832-6 (Plate 20). In the estimation of contemporaries, this was one of the two main lines of development in this period, balancing socially and intellectually the more aesthetic programme of polychromatic romanticization pursued by Hittorff, Henri Labrouste, and Duban.

Representational public buildings, although usually much less plain in design, are likely to be even more heavy-handed than the prisons and lunatic asylums. Their architects’ strictly functional approach was capable of achieving a rather bleak sort of distinction which should have been sympathetic to the twentieth century had they been better known. The Palace of Justice at Tours of 1840-50 by Charles Jacquemin-Belisle (1815-69), with its unpedimented Roman Doric portico, is typical enough of a very considerable number of large and prominent civic structures. Lequeux’s Paris town halls in the outlying arrondissements are just as dry but less monumentally Classical.

Happily there are a few finer public buildings, mostly in Paris, structures not least interesting for their bold use of metal and glass. Among early railway stations only the Gare Montparnasse of 1848-52 by V.-B. Lenoir (1805-63) and the engineer Eugène Flachat (1802-73) and the Gare de Strasbourg (Gare de l’Est) of 1847-52 by F.-A. Duquesney (1790-1849), a pupil of Percier, still stand in Paris. The Gare de l’Est, with its vast central lunette expressing clearly the iron-and-glass arched train-shed, is a most notable early station. The detailing, of a somewhat High Renaissance—at least not Greek or Roman—order, is pleasant but undistinguished (Plate 22B). This detailing has been effectively maintained in the modern doubling of the front of the station. The original shed by the engineer Sérinet was long ago replaced.

The other great Parisian structure of the forties in whose construction the visible use of iron played a prominent part, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in the Place du Panthéon, is especially distinguished for the originality and elegance of its detailing, even more as regards that of the masonry of the exterior than of the ironwork within (Plate 21). Henri-P.-F. Labrouste (1801-75), a pupil of Lebas and Vaudoyer, who designed this library in 1839 and built it in 1843-50, is the one French architect of the age whose name can be mentioned—though a little diffidently—with those of the great architects of the earlier decades of the century outside France, Soane and Schinkel, even if his contemporaries usually gave precedence to Gilbert or to Hittorff. Yet Labrouste hardly ranks for quality with a Dane of his own generation such as Bindesbøll, although his library is much more advanced both stylistically and technically than the contemporary Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.

Everywhere except in England this was a period, like the first quarter of the century, in which official architecture exceeded private in interest. Moreover, the priority that the erection of monuments of public utility, from markets and prisons to art galleries and libraries, received over the building of churches and palaces gave significant evidence of the rise of a new pattern of bourgeois culture. It is therefore quite appropriate that this library of Henri Labrouste’s should be the finest structure of the forties in France. The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is also one of the few buildings of the second quarter century anywhere in the world that has been almost universally admired ever since its completion, if successively for a variety of different reasons. The façade of the library, often ignored by those praising the visible iron structure of the interior (Figure 14), outranks in distinction almost all other contemporary examples of the Renaissance Revival anywhere in the world; but it is worth noting that the flanking administrative block and the Collège Sainte-Barbe also offer a premonition of the next period in their prominent mansard roofs. (Henri’s brother F.-M.-T. Labrouste (1799-1855) supervised the construction of the college.) The façade of Henri’s administrative block is a composition of real originality and exquisite co-ordination of parts to which the term Renaissance Revival need hardly be applied; this is what style Louis Philippe really means, or ought at least to mean.

By Charles X’s time the Salle des Cinq Cents at the Palais Bourbon, erected by the two older Gisors and Leconte in the 1790s, was in such a bad state that it was necessary to rebuild it, adding at the same time a library. J.-J.-B. de Joly (1788-1865) in 1828-33 followed closely the original design; but behind the scenes, as it were, he used a great deal of iron to ensure a lasting structure. He also embellished the walls with a richly coloured sheathing of French marbles and, in the library, with murals by Delacroix. With less originality, but with respect for a major monument of the seventeenth century, H.-A.-G. de Gisors much enlarged the Luxembourg for Louis Philippe in 1834-41, repeating Salomon de Brosse’s original garden façade, in order to accommodate a new chamber for the House of Peers. His chamber followed closely the earlier one there of 1798 by Chalgrin; the new chapel which he also provided at the Luxembourg has even more of the colouristic richness demanded by advanced taste in this period. The Luxembourg Orangery, later the Luxembourg Museum, which was built by Gisors in 1840 in an early seventeenth-century mode, used brick for the walls with only the dressings of stone, a rare instance of such external bichromy in the Paris of its day despite the lively interest in the employment of colour in architecture.

The present Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay was built in 1846-56 by Jacques Lacornée (1779-1856), who had completed in 1821-35 his master Bonnard’s earlier Ministry near by that was begun for Napoleon in 1814. Superimposed arch orders produce a rich and rather Venetian version of the Renaissance Revival not unrelated to the treatment of the somewhat exceptional Empire building on which he had worked. Duc began to plan the restoration and enlargement of the Palace of Justice in Paris as early as 1840, but the handsomest and most conspicuous portions of this elaborate complex date from the Second Empire. J.-F. Duban (1797-1870) started the restoration of the old Louvre, over which a hot controversy soon ensued, in 1848; the New Louvre, begun by Visconti in 1852 and carried forward after his death in 1853 by Lefuel, would be the prime monument of the succeeding period (see Chapter 8). Duban’s capacities in this period—he did his best work rather later (Plate 72B)—are better appreciated in the building for the École des Beaux Arts he completed in 1838 and in the elegant Early Italian Renaissance design of the Hôtel de Pourtalès of 1836 in the Rue Tronchet, perhaps the finest Paris mansion of its day.

However, it was not with such hôtels particuliers but with maisons de rapport, that is, blocks of flats, that the streets of Paris, like those of Berlin and Vienna, were mostly built up in these decades. Earlier ones, such as those in the Place de la Bourse, are very carefully composed yet almost devoid of prominent architectural features (Plate 27C). In the later thirties and above all the forties, however, the detail grew richer and more eclectic, while the façades were in general much less neatly composed. Not only were rich Italian or French Renaissance features popular but exotic oriental ornament was more than occasionally used. The planning became more complex and elastic also; but both in exterior design and in interior organization the type remained firmly rooted in late-eighteenth-century tradition. The Paris streets of the first half of the nineteenth century have a notable consistency of scale and character, since the cornice lines, and even the shapes of the high roofs, were controlled by a well-enforced building code and their eclecticism of style is little more than a matter of detail.

More than in other countries in this period, the major virtues of French architecture lay in the placid continuance of well-established lines. Traditions were being slowly eroded, but there was very little of that urgent desire to overturn the immediate past which coloured so significantly much English production of the thirties and forties. Nor was there the German capacity in this period for carrying over into medievalizing modes the basic discipline of established Romantic Classicism. Not surprisingly, French leadership in architecture, established under Louis XIV and renewed under Napoleon, was largely lost; it came back, however, with the Second Empire (see Chapters 8 and 9). All the same, architectural controversy flourished at home in these decades.

Quite naturally, French influence still remained largely dominant in contiguous Belgium and much of Switzerland. If Studer’s work in Berne falls under the German rubric of Rundbogenstil, in French-speaking Lausanne and Neuchâtel important commissions went to Frenchmen. An Asylum for the former city was designed by Henri Labrouste in 1837-8; another in the latter town, built a few years later, is by P.-F.-N. Philippon (1784-1866), a pupil of J.-J. Ramée who had also worked with Brongniart. Both are characteristically respectable examples of Louis Philippe work. Labrouste also designed a prison for Alessandria in Italy in 1840.

In Belgium, under Dutch rule from the fall of Napoleon down to 1830, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, begun in 1819 by the French architect L.-E.-A. Damesme (1757-1822), who had once worked on the Paris barrières with Ledoux, and completed by E.-J. Bonnevie (1783-1835), is a large but typical example of the theatres built in the French provinces by architects of the previous generation. It was not improved by an enlargement and remodelling of 1856, but the original temple portico is noble in scale and handsomely detailed. Characteristically, Damesme also built the Brussels prison. When a new generation of Belgian architects appeared led by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79), who had studied with Huyot, more international influences were evident. For example, Poelaert’s fine early school of 1852 in the Rue de Schaerbeek in Brussels shows little of Huyot but a good deal of Schinkel in its rationalistic handling of Grecian forms. Poelaert’s boldness here, which even suggests that of Alexander Thomson in his Glasgow work of this decade and the next, prepares one a little for his later Palace of Justice designed in the sixties (see Chapter 8).

The long pre-eminence of Italy in the arts came to an end even before the end of the old regime. Architects still flocked there, finding in each generation new sources of inspiration as first Renaissance palaces and then medieval churches succeeded Roman ruins as the preferred quarry of travellers of taste. But not after Piranesi was there an Italian architect with real international influence. At the opening of the new century doctrine flowed from Paris, not from Rome; increasingly, moreover, architects turned to England and Germany for still fresher ideas and ideals.

Only a few Italian cities were notably ornamented in this period; on the other hand, none were blighted, and much ordinary building hardly even bears clear indications of its date. The characteristic and prominent productions of the period are, however, quite up to the highest international standards. They have thus far been underestimated, not least by the Italians themselves, partly because they are so much overshadowed in interest by earlier work, partly because they carry in Italy for the first time since the Gothic the onus—not entirely justified—of following a foreign lead.

The Pope, like other legitimate sovereigns who returned to power after Napoleon’s fall, carried out existing projects, notably those for the Piazza del Popolo as planned by Valadier. He also initiated in 1817 the building of a new wing for the sculpture museum at the Vatican, the Braccio Nuovo by Raffaelle Stern (1774-1820). Completed in 1821, this is one of the finest of the many galleries in the line of descent from Simonetti’s Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican of which the first half of the nineteenth century saw so many (Plate 24). Taller and less ornately embellished than Klenze’s galleries in the Munich Glyptothek, and with rather stronger spatial articulation, this is none the less well within the Romantic Classical tradition as it had been established by the previous generation of French architects.

The principal architectural activity of the post-Napoleonic years in Rome and, indeed, of the whole later period of papal rule was the reconstruction after a fire of the great fifth-century basilica of San Paolo fuori-le-mura. Begun by Pasquale Belli (1752-1833) in 1825, with whom were associated the younger Pietro Camporesi (1792-1873) and F. J. Bosio (1768-1845), the supervision was taken over after Belli’s death in 1833 by Luigi Poletti (1792-1869), who completed the job in 1856. Following closely the august original in its dimensions and proportions, San Paolo has a truly Roman Imperial scale; but the hardness of the materials, the polish of their surfaces, and the cold precision of their handling recalls rather the contemporary Paris churches of Lebas and Hittorff without matching their relatively rich colour. A more modest Roman monument of this period in a conspicuous location is the Teatro Argentina by Camporesi.

The Teatro Carlo Felice in the Piazza de Ferrari in Genoa, built by C. F. Barabino (1768-1835) in 1827, is a more advanced and distinguished Romantic Classical structure of considerable originality, now badly damaged by bombing. Barabino was also responsible for designing the Camposanto di Staglieno at Genoa with its Pantheon-like chapel and its endless colonnades. Begun in 1835, this project was carried to completion by G. B. Rezasco (1799-1872).

Naples^[68] has more interesting monuments of this period to offer than Rome or Genoa. Yet San Francesco di Paola, which was built from designs by Pietro Bianchi (1787-1849) in 1816-24 in resolution of a vow of Ferdinand I, can hardly be considered much more original than San Paolo (Plate 26A). The interior is another of the innumerable copies of the Pantheon that were erected all over Europe and America in this period; but the Berninian quadrant colonnades in front are better handled than at Voronikhin’s Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg. The great saucer dome, moreover, is rather happily echoed in the two smaller domes on either side; they serve also to tie together the side colonnades and the pedimented portico. Above all, this church is most effective urbanistically. The colonnades enclose the square north of the Royal Palace in a quite Baroque way; while the church as a whole, because of the giant scale of its parts and its cleanly sculptural composition, stands as a discrete object in the best Romantic Classical way against the higher portion of the city that rises behind. Less happy in the city picture is the front of the San Carlo opera house, carried out a little earlier in 1810-12 by Antonio Niccolini (1772-1850), who also redecorated the interior in 1816-17 and again in 1841-4. This has adequate open space only at the sides; and the curiously high-waisted façade, in any case rather underscaled in its parts, must be seen in a perspective sharper than is becoming to most post-Baroque monuments (Plate 23B).

The throne room in the palace at nearby Caserta, decorated for Ferdinand II by Gaetano Genovese (1795-1860) in 1839-45, is a surprisingly worthy late pendant to de Simone’s contiguous interiors of more than a generation earlier, very rich indeed in its gold-and-white decoration, but superbly ordered. Genovese also carried out an extensive and tactful remodelling and enlargement of the Royal Palace in Naples in 1837-44, most notably the regularization of the long façade above the quay.

No other Italian city provides quite such prominent examples of individual Romantic Classical monuments as do Rome and Naples. The setting of San Carlo in Milan, built by Carlo Amati (1776-1852) in 1844-7, a rectangular recession from the line of the present-day Corso Matteotti, provides no such build-up for its Pantheon-like dome as does Bianchi’s San Francesco. The giant granite colonnades at the base of the contiguous blocks do, however, continue effectively the pedimented portico on either side of the little piazza. Only at Turin, almost more French than Italian always, were great squares and wide, arcaded streets carried out in this period, but without focal monuments of any particular distinction. These squares and streets vie with Percier and Fontaine’s in Paris, yet they also continue a local seventeenth-century tradition that was to remain alive down into the Fascist period.

The expiatory church in Turin, which paralleled in motivation Ferdinand I’s in Naples, the Gran Madre di Dio, was proposed in 1814 and built on the farther bank of the Po by Ferdinando Bonsignore (1767-1843) in 1818-31 to celebrate the departure of the French and the return of the House of Savoy to its capital (Plate 26B). This is a far duller and less original example of a modern structure based directly on the Pantheon than is the Tempio Canoviano of 1819-20 at Possagno.^[69] For this the great Romantic Classical sculptor of Italy, Thorvaldsen’s rival Antonio Canova, was the client and apparently also the designer.

It is not Bonsignore’s church that is notable in the Turin scene but the vast Piazza Vittorio Veneto opposite, laid out by Giuseppe Frizzi (1797-1831) in 1818 and later surrounded by fine ranges of arcaded buildings mostly carried out between 1825 and 1830 (Plate 26B). At the upper end of this tremendous square two quadrants draw in to meet the arcaded Via Po. Characteristically, the arcades here are supported on compound piers based on those in the seventeenth-century Piazza San Carlo but simplified and sharpened now to conform to Romantic Classical standards. Also a typical Turin feature, but new in this period, was the syncopation of the handsome iron balconies of the upper storeys. This theme marks most of the houses in the quarter contiguous to this square, a quarter built up over the next generation in a remarkably elegant and consistent way more than rivalling the contemporary districts of Paris or Vienna.

The other principal square of this period, on the farther side of the new quarter and at the outer end of the present-day Via Roma, is the Piazza Carlo Felice. This was laid out by the engineer Lombardi and by Frizzi in 1823, and has façades by Carlo Promis (1808-73) that also extend on both sides of the square along the broad Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II. Continuous arcades cross the street ends, as in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and the balconies are syncopated. The fine big trees in the square and along the Corso are a happy addition to the urban scene quite uncharacteristic of the rest of Italy.

The inner end of the Piazza Carlo Felice is not curved but semi-octagonal. Originally the outer end was open and defined only by rows of trees; later, in 1866-8, the handsome Porta Nuova Railway Station was built there by the engineer Alessandro Mazzuchetti (1824-94) and the architect Carlo Ceppi (1829-1921). Now this terminates the long central axis of the city which extends from the Royal Palace through the Piazza Castello, the Piazza San Carlo, and down the Via Roma to the Piazza Carlo Felice.

Turin has other monumental edifices of this period besides the Gran Madre di Dio. There are, for example, two later churches in the new quarter, San Massimo and the Sacramentine; the latter, by Alfonso Dupuy, was built in 1846-50 from a design of 1843, with later portico by Ceppi; the former in 1845-54 by Carlo Sada (1809-73). Both are domed, but less Pantheon-like than the Gran Madre. They lack, unfortunately, the elegance and delicacy of scale of the houses of the period in the streets that surround them.

Milan owes less than Turin to the architectural activity of this period. The present decoration of the interior of the opera-house, La Scala, which was built by Giuseppe Piermarini (1734-1808) in 1776-8, dates from 1830 and is by Alessandro Sanquirico (1774-1849). This is quite similar in the sumptuousness of its white-and-gold ornamentation to Genovese’s later throne room at Caserta. The square gatehouses at the Porta Venezia, built in 1826 by Rodolfo Vantini (1791-1856), are boldly scaled and effectively paired. The Palazzo Rocca-Saporiti of 1812 by Giovanni Perego (1776-1817) in the Corso Venezia with its raised colonnade rivals in interest Cantoni’s better-known Palazzo Serbelloni of the 1790s near by. The much smaller and considerably later Palazzo Lucini of 1831 in the Via Monte di Pietà by Ferdinando Crivelli (1810-55) is so expert an example of High Renaissance design that it can readily be taken for real cinquecento work. Paradoxically, such an extremely literate specimen of the Renaissance Revival is far less characteristic of Italy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century than of England or Germany. More typical of Italian taste in the thirties and forties are the buildings facing the flank of La Scala across the Via Verdi with their complex rhythm of fenestration and their very rich but still vaguely Grecian ornamentation. Eventually the Italians did, however, take up occasionally the Renaissance version of the international Rundbogenstil, and none too happily. For example, the Casa di Risparmio (known vulgarly as the Ca’ de Sass), built by Giuseppe Balzaretti (1801-74) in 1872 across the street from the refined and discreet Palazzo Lucini, is a stonier example of Tuscan rustication—as its nickname suggests—than was ever produced by the Northern Europeans who first revived the mode half a century earlier.

A charming ornament to a smaller city is the Caffè Pedrocchi^[70] in Padua of 1816-31 by Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1852), a pupil of Selva, and Antonio Gradenigo (1806-84). Delicate in scale, interestingly varied in the handling of solids and voids, and most urbane in the discretion of its carefully placed ornamentation, this is certainly the handsomest nineteenth-century café in the world and about the finest Romantic Classical edifice in Italy (Plate 23A). Exceptional in this period in the Latin world is the Neo-Gothic wing known as Il Pedrocchino attached to the café, designed by Jappelli and for the same client; this was completed in 1837.

Trieste in this period, like the cities of Lombardy and the Veneto, is more Italian than Austrian architecturally. As a result it outshines Vienna in the extent and the quality of its early nineteenth-century construction. The new buildings were largely concentrated around the Canal Grande, a rectangular lagoon extending inland from the Riva Tre Novembre. At the head of this rises Sant’ Antonio di Padova, built by Nobile in 1826-49, long after this former Trieste City Architect had been called to Vienna as head of the architecture section of the Akademie there. Occupying a position somewhat similar to that of the Gran Madre di Dio in Turin, Nobile’s church is considerably more interesting, particularly as regards the generous spatial organization of the interior. The Canal Grande is flanked by contemporary palaces that are harmonious with one another in scale but quite varied in detail. The largest and finest, facing the sea on the left, is the Palazzo Carciotti. This was completed in 1806 by Matthäus Pertsch, a Milan-trained architect who had provided in 1798 the façade of the Teatro Verdi here in Trieste. With its raised portico and small dome, the Palazzo Carciotti is one of the most prominent and successful Italian buildings of the opening years of the century.

At the other side of the Latin world, the Iberian peninsula participated rather less than the Italian in the advanced architectural movements of the first half of the century. In Madrid the Obelisk of the 2nd of May, built by Isidro Gonzalez Velasquez (1764/5-?) in 1822-40, and the Obelisk of La Castellana (1883), by Francisco Javier de Mariateguí, are rather modest specimens of a widely popular sort of erection compared to Smirke’s gigantic Wellington Testimonial in Dublin or Mills’s Washington Monument. The Palace of the Congress of 1843-50 by Narciso Pascual y Coloner (1808-70) is a dull example of that nineteenth-century Classicism that hardly deserves the qualification ‘Romantic’.

Italians, little employed elsewhere out of their own country in this period, provided the principal new public edifices of Lisbon. F. X. Fabri (?-1807) built the Palace of Arzuda, begun in 1802, and Fortunato Lodi (1806-?) the Garret Theatre more than a generation later in 1842-6; both are as uninspired as the contemporary monuments of Madrid. As late as 1867-75 the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon by the local architect Domingos Ponente da Silva (1836-1901) maintained the Classical mode at its most conventional. Already, with the establishment of the Braganza headquarters in Rio de Janeiro early in the century, Portuguese vitality was passing to the New World (see Chapter 5). Yet if Lisbon has no individual Romantic Classical monuments of much interest, the lower city, extending from the Praça do Commercio to O Rocio, is a splendid example of late-eighteenth-century urbanism, initiated after the earthquake of 1755 by Eugenio dos Santos de Carvalho (1711-60).

In the eighteenth century Petersburg owed its grandeur as a Baroque city largely to the work of imported Italian architects; but with the rise of French and English influence in the later decades of the old century and the first of the new the day of the Italians was over, there as elsewhere (see Chapter 1). Alexander I’s aspirations, after as well as before Waterloo, were wholly French, not Italian. The Committee for Construction and Hydraulic Works, indeed, which Alexander set up in 1816 to pass the designs of all public and private buildings in his capital, had a French military engineer, General Béthencourt, as its chairman. Yet the principal architect of the post-Napoleonic decades, Karl Ivanovich Rossi (1775-1849), although he had an Italian family name and was of Italian origin, was Russian-born and Russian-trained. Rossi’s General Staff Arches of 1819-29 and the vast hemicycle of which they are the centre continue happily the urbanistic tradition of the older generation; but the detail is Roman not Greek, and the taste altogether coarser and more provincial than that of Thomon and Zakharov (Plate 27B). This is even more true of his Alexandra Theatre of 1827-32 and his Senate and Synod of 1829-34.

August Augustovich Monferran (1786-1858), to whom was assigned the building of St Isaac’s Cathedral^[71] in 1817, a vast pile that he completed only in 1857 (Plate 27A), was French, despite the Russian form in which his name is here given, and actually a pupil of Percier. In his youth he had worked under Vignon on the Madeleine, moreover. Monferran lacked, like most of his own generation who remained in France, both the originality and the finesse of the earlier generation, just as Nicholas I lacked the taste of his brother Alexander I. A wealth of sumptuous materials, granites and marbles, marks this church, however, and the dome is of some importance in technical history because it is entirely framed in iron (see Chapter 7).

Another typical monument in the Napoleonic tradition rose also from Monferran’s designs, the Alexander Column of 1829 in the Winter Palace Square (Plate 27B). This may well be the largest granite monolith in the world—a typically Russian claim—but it quite lacks the elegance of Alavoine’s still later Colonne de Juillet in Paris or the scale of Mills’s Washington Monument. The Triumphal Gate of 1833 by Vasili Petrovich Stasov (1769-1848) is a trabeated Greek Doric propylaeon, somewhat comparable to Nobile’s Burgtor in Vienna; more significant is the fact that, like the July Column in Paris and Monferran’s great dome, not to speak of a curious Egyptian suspension bridge of this period in Petersburg, this structure is all of metal.

In 1840 the authority of the Committee of 1816 was terminated and in Petersburg, as so generally elsewhere in Europe, coherent urbanistic control came to an end. The great architectural period there was over as Moscow, with its nationalistic traditions, came more to the fore. Characteristically, the most important new church of the second quarter of the century, the Cathedral of the Redeemer of 1839-83, was built in the older capital and is the first major Russian example of Neo-Byzantine. One is not surprised to find that Konstantin Andreevich Ton (1794-1881), its architect, was German not French; for in a sense this represents a rather clumsy local variant of the German Rundbogenstil, continuing the particular eclectic line initiated by Klenze in his Munich Court Church more than a decade earlier.