1

History and Geography

The resplendent Ancien Régime (‘Old Regime’) court epitomized by Louis XIV’s Versailles (1661–1770; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.1) was long in the making. Between the end of the Middle Ages, at some point around the late fifteenth century, and the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, the kings of France gradually solidified their power over noble vassals as they extended their domain. The French kings of the House of Valois were only princes among many in the fifteenth century. The Hundred Years War (1337–1453) over the French Crown, which pitted them against the English kings of the House of Plantagenet, demonstrated the fragility of their rule. On 21 May 1420, King Charles VI (r. 1380–1422) signed the humiliating Treaty of Troyes by which he disowned his son, Charles, and made the English king Henry V his heir. But Valois fortunes turned. In 1453, Charles VI’s son, King Charles VII (r. 1422–61), defeated the English army with a decisive victory at Castillon, near Bordeaux. Along with the provinces of Guyenne, Gascogne and Normandy recovered from the English, Charles VII incorporated the Dauphiné region to the royal lands. His successors, Louis XI (r. 1461–83) and Charles VIII (r. 1483–98), enlarged the territories under Valois control with the provinces of Anjou, Maine, Provence, Burgundy, Picardy and Brittany. The kingdom of France at the turn of the sixteenth century hence covered a significant portion of modern France.

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France was geographically, politically and culturally diverse. Three principal language groups divided its territory: the langue d’oïl – including French – in the north, the langue d’oc in the south and franco-provençal around Lyon. Other regions used non-Romance languages such as Breton, Flemish, Basque and – with the incorporation of Alsace and Lorraine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Alsatian and other Germanic dialects. Courts of justice administered law differently, each region having its own system of jurisprudence. In the north, courts functioned according

to the principles of customary law; in the south, they followed Roman law. In the pays d’états (territories incorporated into France after the fifteenth century) – such as the duchy of Brittany and the duchy of Burgundy – the local elite retained political representation in regional parlements (sovereign courts of justice) and enjoyed special privileges, including reduced taxation. Unlike leaders of modern nation-states who sought territorial continuity and engineered cultural homogeneity, early modern sovereigns fought primarily to affirm dynastic claims.

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Along with its political and cultural pre-eminence, the court was also the epicentre of the kingdom’s religious system. The Rex Christianissimus (the ‘Most Christian King’, a title accorded to the kings of France since Charles VI) displayed his piety at daily Mass, at major Catholic celebrations, at royal births and funerals and, most importantly, at his coronation. The latter served to proclaim the divine origin of the French monarchy. Thirteenth-century codifications of the ceremony amplified its mystical nature. Ecclesiastical peers of France anointed monarchs with chrism from the Holy Ampulla, a receptacle allegedly brought down from heaven by a dove for the christening of the Frankish king, Clovis (r. 509–511). According to tradition, French kings possessed thaumaturgic powers (the capacity to perform miracles) and could heal scrofula (an infection of lymph nodes) with a touch. The king’s coronation oath to protect the Church and expel heretics from his kingdom confirmed the union of Church and State.

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The rise of the Reformation in France, stimulated by the conversion of John Calvin (1509–64), complicated this traditional narrative. François (Francis) I (r. 1515–47) and his son Henri (Henry) II (r. 1547–59) had attempted, without success, to stop the mass conversion of Catholics to Protestantism. Henri II’s widow, Catherine de’ Medici (regent 1560–63), and her sons, François II (r. 1559–60), Charles IX (r. 1560–74) and Henri III (r. 1574–89), failed to prevent eight devastating civil uprisings known as the Wars of Religion, which lasted from 1562 to 1598. Powerful princely families and their foreign allies challenged the monarchy’s monopoly over political and religious matters. Henri IV (r. 1589–1610), the first king of the Bourbon dynasty, neutralized the powerful leaders of the Catholic League and vanquished their foreign supporters. With the 1598 Edict of Nantes 1598, he allowed Protestants to practise their faith in designated cities while confirming the primacy of Catholicism.

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The survival of the French monarchy after the Wars of Religion testifies to its remarkable resilience. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, Henri IV and his able minister Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, set out to reconstruct the kingdom. Under the reign of Louis XIII (r. 1610–43) and during the minority of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), the chief royal ministers Cardinal de Richelieu and his protégé and successor, Cardinal Mazarin, worked to increase the power and dignity of the crown. They also levied heavy taxes, which led to the civil war known as the Fronde (1648–52). After reaching a durable compromise with the nobility, King Louis XIV inaugurated a period of domestic stability as he embarked on a costly policy of territorial expansion (see Map 58.1, p. xxx). The latter was pursued with help from military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), who constructed a ring of citadels along all of France’s borders including the fortress-town of Neuf-Brisach (1698–1702.)

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Louis XIV also gave the French court its mature form. At the end of the sixteenth century, Henri III had already codified ceremonies at the court of France, notorious at the time for its informality. King Louis XIV brought court etiquette and ceremonial to a new level. He greatly expanded the court as he set up multiple offices in his household, increasing the opportunities for noble service. In 1682 he put an end to the court’s peripatetic existence by providing a permanent setting at Versailles (1661–1770; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.1). Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his energetic minister, furthered a state policy on the arts and implemented the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1655), Royal Academy of Dance (1661), French Academy in Rome (1666), Royal Academy of Music (1669) and the Royal Academy of Architecture (1671).

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Despite demographic and economic expansion during the eighteenth century, the politics of prestige that resulted in constant warfare and the inefficiency of the taxation system needed to fund the military led to the severe financial crises of the 1770s and 1780s. Entrenched privileges gained by all social classes blocked necessary reforms. The basic structure of the Ancien Régime had already collapsed when Parisian crowds stormed the Bastille prison on 14 July 1789, an event that marked the beginning of the French Revolution. At its height, revolutionary leaders abolished titles of nobility, the royal academies and, on 21 September 1792, the

monarchy itself. On 21 January 1793 they guilotined Louis XVI (r. 1774–93) on the Place Louis-XV (today Place de la Concorde) in Paris (1748–75; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.2), bringing the multi-secular political institution to a dramatic end.

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It is ironic that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), the Corsican nobleman who owed his spectacular rise to the revolutionary movement, styled himself Emperor of the French (r. 1804–14/15). With his imperial coronation in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on 2 December 1804, the establishment of a new court, and a marriage to a Habsburg princess, Marie-Louise de Habsburg-Lorraine, Napoleon mimicked the forms of the Ancien Régime as he brought the first French Republic (1792–1804) to an end. His removal paved the way to the French throne of Louis XVI’s two brothers, Louis, comte de Provence (as Louis XVIII, r. 1814/15–24), and Charles, comte d’Artois (as Charles X, r. 1824–30). For his coronation on 28 May 1825, Charles, the last king of the direct Bourbon line, revived the minutiae of Ancien Régime coronations. His was a nostalgic attempt to recapture Ancien Régime values and beliefs of France, definitely overtaken by different political ideals and industrialization.

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Culture and Society

The monarchy and the nobility shaped the politics and culture of pre-industrial Western Europe. The French court was a particularly successful example of a political system controlled by a landed aristocracy. At the apogee of the Ancien Régime, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, the king of France and his court served as a model for all European princes, a testimony of their success, even in the eyes of their enemies.

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The court was the vital political, administrative and cultural centre of the kingdom of France. Despite the king’s ‘divine’ rule and the fundamental laws of the kingdom – a political construction that the Cardinal de Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, engineered with particular determination – the French monarch constantly negotiated with powerful interest groups. The pre-eminent members of the three orders of French society – the clergy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie – controlled much of France’s economy and politics through extensive kinship and patronage networks. The nobility led the orders and provided the cultural model that elites emulated. Wealthy commoners could enter the nobility by purchasing ennobling royal offices, and merchants who served the king as financial and fiscal agents could enter the nobility as well. Legal professionals who joined the Parlement de Paris and other provincial parlements joined the noblesse de robe (nobility of the robe). Pre-eminent aristocratic families of the noblesse d’épée (nobility of the sword, the old nobility) contributed leaders to the upper levels of the clergy and the army, and monopolized the most prestigious positions within the royal household by hereditary right.

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Political theorists of the time stressed the need for greater clarity of the French polity. Their illusory conception of society as one of orders required repeated affirmations of social hierarchies on the public stage. Distinction resulting from privilege defined these hierarchies. The ruling classes were not the only ones enjoying dispensations. To varying degrees, all inhabitants of the kingdom of France benefited from advantages. Their social condition, profession and place of residence determined entitlements. The clergy and the nobility, of course, profited especially from social inequality. Most noble families did not pay the taille (direct property tax), despite relying upon their estates for the major portion of their income.

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Power struggles between the members of the highest nobility played out at court. This is where courtiers secured royal favours and lucrative offices for themselves, their extended family and their clientele; where they forged alliances and arranged marriages of convenience; and where they affirmed their prestige and honour in ceremonial displays for which architecture and the arts were essential. Most importantly, the court was the stage from which the king claimed his often-contested pre-eminence over the kingdom’s nobility. At court he glorified his dynasty’s fame to the benefit of domestic and foreign grandees.

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The public enactment of ritual distinguished court society. Ceremonies of public devotion and political celebrations crowded the yearly calendar. The omnipresent Catholic Church multiplied its processions, Te Deums (Christian hymns), beatifications, canonizations, pilgrimages, veneration of relics and public prayers for the monarch. Kings and princes, city officials and corporations sponsored festivities to celebrate military victories, peace treaties, marriages, royal births and funerals, triumphal entries and royal coronations.

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Along with political and economic power, the monarchy and the nobility dictated the cultural aspirations of the social elites. The duty to safeguard dynastic honour led to the ostentation of expenditure. Architecture and the fine arts were part of a larger material culture that included all manner of luxury goods (furniture, tapestries, objets d’art, decorative objects, dress and even ornamental food) and played a key role in the display of power. In vehement opposition to the mercantile values of the urban merchants, aristocrats pursued a wilful destruction of wealth. This imperative – although hardly tenable for most nobles, whose patrimony was limited – intersected with the contemporary taste for the ephemeral. Eighteenth-century moralists, for instance, complained that the sums the ruling classes spent on fireworks, temporary architecture and stagesets prevented the permanent improvement of living conditions. As first among the nobles, the French king excelled in the strategies of prestige founded on material dissipation and excess.

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During the Ancien Régime, guilds regulated the work of artisans in the artistic and luxury trades that catered to the nobility. Architects, however, did not have their own guild. Master masons, master carpenters and even entrepreneurs could take on the architect’s principal roles, those of designer and building supervisor. Nor did specialized architectural education exist. As for any other building worker, future architects apprenticed with a master who was often a member of their extended family.

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A different model of architectural education and practice, emerged with the expansion of the royal court. During the seventeenth century, the Bâtiments du Roi, the department of the king’s household that built and looked after the crown’s properties, became a fully developed administrative unit. It oversaw the maintenance of the king’s residences, furnished building designs for courtiers favoured by the king, estimated building costs, prepared the royal family’s lodgings on their travels and, of course, built new buildings. Its Superintendent (or General Director, depending on the period) also oversaw the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, and the French Academy in Rome), the king’s manufactories (Gobelins, Savonnerie, Aubusson, Beauvais), and the keeping of the King’s Garden (today the Jardin des Plantes) in Paris.

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The Bâtiments du Roi also kept the monopoly of the guilds in check. The king’s architects, an elite group of professionals employed by the Bâtiments (from 1726 the Royal Academy of Architecture attempted, unsuccessfully, to restrict this title to its members) needed not follow the guilds’ rules and prescriptions. Like other artists who belonged to the royal academies, the king’s architects practised their profession under his protection.

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Jules Hardouin-Mansart modernized the office of the First Architect after his appointment to this position in 1686. He developed the large organization necessary to fulfil Louis XIV’s ambitious building programme. At a time when most architects worked at home with the help of a few assistants, if any, Hardouin-Mansart led numerous collaborations. Several draughtsmen recopied his drawings or refined his initial designs. Others helped him supervise construction sites. In Louis XIV’s service at the apogee of his building campaigns, Hardouin-Mansart transformed architectural practice from a small-scale artisanal enterprise into a full-fledged professional operation.

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If court culture changed architectural practice, it also transformed architectural training. In 1671, the Royal Academy of Architecture inaugurated a formal curriculum for architects. Mathematician, engineer and architect François Blondel was the Academy’s first director and also its first professor. He lectured twice a week on architecture and other topics pertinent to building such as geometry and statics. Lessons were public and free. Only the young men sponsored by one of the Academy’s members, however, could join its student body. These students enjoyed the privilege of competing for the Academy’s prizes, particularly the prestigious Grand Prix awarded annually from 1720 until the Academy’s abolition in 1793. The king usually rewarded Grand Prix winners with funding for a period of board and lodging at the French Academy in Rome. During their Roman sojourn the royal pupils recorded antique and contemporary architecture in sketchbooks and in large measured drawings kept by the Academy for reference. It groomed its pupils to serve the king in his architectural endeavours.

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Students of the Royal Academy of Architecture were taught design in the offices of their patrons. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Academy’s school had lost its prestige. Jacques-François Blondel, the most famous educator of his time, took advantage of its decline to open his private École des Arts in 1742. Unlike students at the Academy, Blondel’s pupils followed a demanding curriculum, covered in a multi-volume publication, the Cours d’architecture, ou Traité de la décoration, distribution & construction des bâtiments (Course in Architecture, or Treatise on the Decoration, Arrangement and Construction of Buildings, 1771–77). In a strange reversal, the École des Arts’ success was such that the king appointed Blondel as one of the Royal Academy of Academy’s professors in 1762.

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After the sweeping away of the Ancien Régime institutions by the French Revolution, the École des Beaux-Arts – the Academy’s successor – adopted the same educational system. Created in 1806 as the École Impériale et Spéciale des Beaux-Arts, it began offering architecture courses in 1819. Like its predecessor, the École des Beaux-Arts held several competitions throughout the year, the culmination of which (in the final year of training) was the Grand Prix de Rome. Students spent most of their time preparing entries for the École’s competitions in the atelier of an experienced architect and professor. During their residency in Rome, the Grand Prix laureates sent envois back to Paris that consisted of detailed reconstructions of monuments from Roman or Greek antiquity. When they returned to France, the state appointed them as Architectes du Gouvernement.

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The emergence during the mid-eighteenth century, of a different type of building professional – the engineer – further challenged the Academy. Early engineering schools such as the École Royale des Ponts et Chaussées (founded in 1747) and the École Royale du

Génie at Mézières (founded in 1748) included architecture in their curricula. In fact, Jacques-François Blondel was professor of architecture at the Ponts et Chaussées in 1750. Like the students of the École des Arts, aspiring engineers studied freehand drawing, architectural theory and architectural design. They also participated in competitions whose briefs were remarkably close to those of the Royal Academy of Architecture.

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Although more focused on science, and a produce of the French Revolution, the École Polytechnique – founded in 1794 as the École Centrale des TravauxPublics, changing its name a year later – also dispensed architectural education. As the professor of architecture at the Polytechnique from 1797 to his death in 1834, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand simplified architectural pedagogy. He structured his teaching method exclusively around geometry. He instructed his students how to combine elementary architectural components (walls, vaults, trusses, simplified versions of the Classical orders, etc.) according to geometrical operations (fig. 60.3). The simplicity of Durand’s method, devoid of any considerations other than its own formal logic, ensured its success.

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Despite architecture’s peripheral position within the curriculum at the École Polytechnique, Durand profoundly influenced nineteenth-century architectural education. His publications were bestsellers. Their success with students of the École des Beaux-Arts rested on the strong affinities between Durand’s approach to design and the one imparted at the École des Beaux-Arts, despite the increasing divide between the engineers and architects in the later part of the century.

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Architecture

The values and social practices of the nobility informed the function and meaning of architecture in Early Modern France. Whether civic or religious, the vast majority of the buildings of this period are the result of noble patronage.

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The nobility valued above all pedigree and honour. Wars often resulted from competing hereditary claims and antagonistic demonstrations of dynastic pre-eminence. Architecture served as a weapon in arenas of noble rivalry. To enhance their family’s repute, noble patrons selected physical or symbolic traits from buildings associated with prestigious historical periods. By implementing these architectural elements into their own constructions, they sought to associate themselves with past merit. Renaissance rulers partook of the power and glory of the Roman Empire by having their artists emulate antique forms. With the reverence for antiquity, the elite of the French Renaissance combined the veneration for a glorious medieval past.

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It would be reductive, however, to interpret Early Modern architecture in France as pure political propaganda. Contemporary princes were hardly modern dictators who manipulated the media to their own repressive ends. The arts they sponsored played a performative role. Through ritualized ostentation, nobles and their lower-status counterparts constructed their respective identities. Ancien Régime French polity upheld innate human inequality. It adhered to the divinely ordained hierarchy by which all members of society, from the humblest peasant to the most powerful lord, held a specific position that came with particular privileges and duties. Political ceremonies and their material settings shaped this purposeful social order. Architecture and the visual and decorative arts did not merely adorn ritualized pageantry; they actively fashioned the body politic.

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The acute interest in the material manifestations of power converged with a belief in the numinous qualities of objects. Miracles and magic permeated Early Modern culture, whose practices were ‘reliquary’: contemporaries believed that inanimate objects such as relics possessed operative properties. The belief in the potency of form sheds light on the persistence of the Gothic during the French Renaissance. Twentieth-century art historians have often criticized Early Modern French architects and patrons for ‘misunderstanding’ the lessons of Italy, disparaging their designs because they apparently failed to implement the geometric clarity and the archaeological correctness of the Italian Renaissance. In his discussion of King François I’s work at the Château de Blois (1515–18), for instance, Anthony Blunt remarked that French architects ‘had not yet absorbed the basic principles of Renaissance architecture’. However, if we are to study buildings less as formal compositions and more as ‘bearers of meanings’, in the words of architectural historian Günter Bandmann, we can better attend to their peculiarities.

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THE FLAMBOYANT

The study of Flamboyant Gothic architecture, the French Gothic style of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, benefits from such an approach. In Flamboyant churches, architects purposefully juxtaposed forms on the basis of their votive associations. At the basilica church of Notre-Dame de l’Épine (1400–1543), the decorative virtuosity of the west façade, typical of Flamboyant designs, coexists with

an austere interior that reproduces thirteenth- and fourteenth-century models. Similarly, the builders of the Church of Saint Eustache in Paris (begun 1532, consecrated 1637) modelled its plan on that of the prestigious Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris (begun early 1160s; Key Buildings, Chapter 47, p. xxx). Yet they replaced the ogival ribs of the original with semicircular arches, and decorated the piers’ Gothic colonnettes with Classical capitals. Even such a fervent admirer of Classicism as King Louis XIV ordered the churchwardens of Sainte Croix in Orléans (original building 1278–1329, rebuilt 1599–1829, fig. 60.4) to complete the cathedral in the Gothic style, so strong was the symbolic power of medieval forms even during the Grand Siècle (the ‘Great Century’, the seventeenth century).

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The abrupt contrasts resulting from the collage of memorial and devotional elements at L’Épine and Saint Eustache produced formal complexity and dissonance. Art historian Henri Zerner has argued that late medieval patrons adhered to this ‘aesthetic of the disparate’ as they did to ‘picturesque’ massing and decoration. Jacques Coeur shared these formal preferences at his Grand’Maison or Hôtel in Bourges (begun 1443; Key Buildings, Chapter 47, p. xxx, fig. 60.5). There, Coeur, the immensely rich treasurer of Charles VII, varied building masses, modulated roof profiles and contrasted decorative surfaces. He emulated the prestigious architecture of Charles V and that of his brother, Jean, duc de Berry, who already had a spectacular Ducal Palace (1384–98) built in that city.

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The quasi-regal patronage of the noble upstart Jacques Coeur matched that of Jacques d’Amboise and Georges d’Amboise, scions from an ancient noble family. As abbot of Cluny from 1485 to 1514, Jacques constructed the Hôtel de Cluny (1485–98) in Paris. In his hôtel (urban residence of the French nobility) he echoed Coeur’s Hôtel: an escalier à vis hors d’oeuvre (external spiral staircase), a sign of social pre-eminence since Charles V’s building of the Grande Vis at the Louvre (1364–69), animated the hôtel’s façade. As at Bourges, Cluny’s architect decorated the tall dormer windows with Flamboyant ornament and family arms, and vaulted the elegant chapel with complex ribbing painted in vivid colours.

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Jacques’s brother Georges – a cardinal, bishop of Montauban, archbishop of Narbonne and Rouen, prime minister of Louis XII and legatus a latere (the highest representative of the pope to foreign powers) in France and Avignon – had higher architectural ambitions than his sibling. An unsuccessful candidate to the papacy, Georges designed his Château de Gaillon (1498–1510) as a direct challenge to his adversary, Pope Julius II. At Gaillon, d’Amboise incorporated references to Ancient Rome. He articulated Gaillon’s entrance châtelet (small château) and the gateway giving onto the court of honour (the so-called Genoa gateway) with superimposed ‘triumphal’ arches. To stress historical connections, these imitated the portal at the Castel Nuovo in Naples (1452–72; Key Buildings, Chapter 58, p. xxx) erected to commemorate Alfonso I’s victory over René of Anjou, comte de Provence, and the superimposed loggias of the Torricini façade of the Ducal Palace of Urbino (begun c. 1464; Key Buildings, Chapter 58, p. xxx). The Gaillon portal became a canonical motif in French noble residential architecture.

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EARLY RENAISSANCE

Like Georges d’Amboise, King François I, the most important patron of the Early Renaissance, strove to outshine Italian princes. His military victory at Marignano (1515) confirmed his reputation as a superb soldier and strengthened his claims over Italian territories. His exceptional artistic and architectural patronage matched his military valour. François dispatched agents to Italy to acquire precious paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and other luxurious objects. Like his predecessors Charles VIII and Louis XII, he invited Italian artists to his service. While he failed to lure Michelangelo Buonarotti to France, he convinced Leonardo da Vinci to become his royal architect and engineer.

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According to the sixteenth-century Italian painter and chronicler Giorgio Vasari, the Château de Fontainebleau (1528 onwards; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.6) under

François’s rule became ‘almost a new Rome’. Having embarked on an extensive building campaign to enlarge Louis IX’s (r. 1226–70) hunting lodge at Fontainebleau, King François I summoned the painter Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino, and the painter and architect Francesco Primaticcio. The two artists established a type of Mannerist decor known as the first School of Fontainebleau.

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Although he built little for François I, another Italian in the king’s service, Sebastiano Serlio, contributed significantly to the development of French and European architecture (see HÔTELS, p. xxx). His eight books on architecture, six of which were published between 1537 and 1575, together with his Extraordinario Libro di Architettura (Extraordinary Book on Architecture, 1551), launched the European tradition of the illustrated architectural treatise (see Chapter 58).

In his unpublished sixth book, Delle habitationi di tutti li gradi degli homini (On the Habitations of All Classes of Men, 1541–47), Serlio presented designs for rural and urban residences in increasing order of magnificence, from the peasant’s hut to the king’s palace. He designed each model in the ‘Italian’ and the ‘French’ manner, a testimony to his adaptability to distinct cultural traditions, as demonstrated by his Château d’Ancy-le- Franc (begun 1541 to before 1574; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.35). Surprisingly, it is the Italian Serlio working for an Italian patron, Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, who codified the typology of the French hôtel with the Hôtel d’Este in Fontainebleau (1544-46, fig. 60.7).

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Already under King Louis XII, high-level royal officers had anticipated Serlio’s ‘regularization’ of noble residential architecture. In his Château de Bury (begun 1511, fig. 60.12), Florimond Robertet, principal minister of Louis XII after Georges d’Amboise, organized the traditional elements of late medieval châteaux – corner towers with conical roofs, a moat, a Gothic chapel – on a modular grid. At Bury he implemented the innovations Pierre de Rohan, maréchal de Gié had pioneered earlier

at the Château du Verger at Seiches-sur-le-Loir (begun c. 1470): a low entrance gallery in lieu of a high protective wall and the symmetrical articulation of façades. Robertet incorporated an Italian novelty absent from Le Verger: a dog-leg staircase dans-oeuvre (situated inside the building walls) in preference to external spiral staircases. Robertet’s contemporaries Thomas Bohier at the Château de Chenonceau (c. 1513–22) and Gilles Berthelot at the Château d’Azay-le-Rideau (1518–27) conceived their residences along the same lines.

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King François I adopted geometric clarity for his hunting châteaux. Unlike the irregular extensions to his royal residences at Fontainebleau (1528 onwards; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.6), Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1538–47) and Blois (1515-18), he planned Chambord (1519–50; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.33), Madrid (1527 onwards, fig. 60.13) at the Bois de Boulogne near Paris, Challuau (c. 1540) near Fontainebleau, and La Muette (1542) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye as so many permutations and multiplications of centralized geometric figures.

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RENAISSANCE ‘CLASSICISM’

Like his father, Henri II constructed his image on chivalric glory and antique valour. He materialized his dual persona upon his entry into Paris on 16 June 1549. In preparation for the event, the architect Pierre Lescot and the sculptor Jean Goujon reconfigured the French capital into a ‘New Rome’. The pair erected allegorical stations at key points along the route of the royal cortege. An illustrated publication andfragments from the Fontaine des Innocents (1547) are the only tangible remains of this festival. Lescot planned the fountain, which Goujon decorated with refined bas-reliefs on aquatic themes and a rich order

of Composite pilasters, for dignitaries to view the king’s procession. Their art was a delicate Classicism purged of extravagant Mannerist elements. Henri II also carried on his father’s project, begun in 1546, of reconstructing the medieval fortress of the Louvre (1190–1202) into a great palace fit for a Renaissance prince (Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.14).

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Philibert De l’Orme confirmed French architects’ independence from Italian models. From Rome, which he visited between 1533 and 1536, De l’Orme brought back measurements of antique fragments but no accounts of contemporary Roman architecture. He disparaged his Italian colleagues for their ignorance of the true principles of building, particularly stereotomy (the art or science of cutting solids, in particular stone) (see STEREOTOMY, p. xxx). Paradoxically, as noted by architectural historian Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, De l’Orme designed one of the most Italianate buildings of the time, the Château de Saint-Maur (1541). Saint-Maur’s flat roofs, its elevations enlivened by a complex rhythm of pilasters and niches, and even its plan, recalled the Palazzo del Te in Mantua (c. 1524–34; Key Buildings, Chapter 58, p. xxx) by Giulio Romano. At the earlier Hôtel Bullioud in Lyon (1536), the Château d’Anet (1547–53; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.15), and the Grand Staircase at the Château des Tuileries (1564–82), however, De l’Orme demonstrated with bravura the possibilities of the ingenious stone construction native to France.

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THE GRAND SIÈCLE

King Henri IV presided over the arduous reconstruction of the kingdom after the devastating Wars of Religion. Focusing on his capital, he embellished Paris as he stimulated its economy. The Place Royale, today Place des Vosges (1605–12, fig. 60.16), the Place Dauphine (1607–16), the Rue Dauphine (begun 1607), and the completion of the Pont-Neuf (1578–88 and 1599–1606) served this dual programme. He originally conceived the Place Royale as a silk factory. He planned the Place Dauphine as a centre for the manufacture and trade of precious metal goods. He finished the Pont-Neuf and its prolongation, the Rue Dauphine, to stimulate the urban development of the Left Bank. In all these interventions, the king emphasized regularity. At the Place Royale and the Place Dauphine, the architects Louis Métezeau and Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau composed façades with identical brick bays bordered by stone chaînes (stacks of rusticated masonry) in the manner of Pierre Lescot at the Château de Vallery (1548-49).

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Henri’s architectural patronage was not solely pragmatic. He worked to restore royal majesty that had been compromised by the factious politics of the civil wars. To enhance the crown’s prestige, Henri planned to expand the Louvre Palace (Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.14) by connecting it to the suburban Château des Tuileries (1564–82). The Grande Galerie on the Seine (1594–1608) was the only part of Henri’s ‘great scheme’ that his architects Louis Métezeau and

Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau completed. To imprint his hold on the royal capital, Henri envisaged to erect an equestrian self-portrait (1603–14) at the tip of the Île de la Cité, at the intersection of the Place Dauphine and the Pont-Neuf. From this vantage point, this bronze replica of the monarch presided over an open panorama that transformed the Seine into an arena for royal representation.

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The Cardinal de Richelieu, the influential minister of King Louis XIII, and his successor, Cardinal Mazarin consolidated ‘absolute’ royal rule. They wished to shape Paris to overtake Rome as the cultural capital of Europe. Taking over for an indifferent king, Richelieu piloted the most important architectural commissions of his time. He built on a royal scale. Richelieu’s favourite architect, Jacques Lemercier, designed on the cardinal’s ancestral domain in what is now Indre-et-Loire the Château de Richelieu (1631–c. 1644, fig. 60.17), the largest in France, and an adjoining new town of the same dates, both named after the cardinal. Richelieu emphasized royal munificence with the erection of a statue of Louis XIII on the Place Royale (today Place des Vosges) in 1639, and with Clément Métezeau and Jacques Lemercier’s Wing of the Pavillon de l’Horloge

at the Louvre (Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.14), built from 1624–26 and then 1638–42, which reproduced Lescot’s wing to the north of a central pavilion. The cardinal also brought to Paris typical Roman forms such as the dome on a drum, which he selected for the Chapelle Sainte-Ursule at the Sorbonne (1634–42; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.36). The Rome-educated Mazarin pursued Richelieu’s policy of cultural supremacy. He commissioned the building in Paris most influenced by the Roman Baroque, the Collège des Quatre-Nations (1662–72, fig. 60.18) that Louis Le Vau conceived as a magnificent backdrop for the king’s enjoyment while at the Louvre.

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Richelieu and Mazarin set the stage, politically and architecturally, for King Louis XIV. Following his predecessors’ lead, Louis populated the capital with sculpted portraits of himself. His architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart perfected the model of the place

royale (square with a statue of a monarch). In Paris he ornamented the façades of the Place des Victoires (1685-86) and the Place de Nos Conquêtes (1685-90), later reconfigured and renamed the Place Vendôme (1699-1702) with colossal pilasters resting on a rusticated arcade and topped by a mansard roof (combining steep and shallow slopes) with dormer windows, adapting to French taste Donato Bramante’s influential composition at the early sixteenth-century Palazzo Caprini in Rome (Key Buildings, Chapter 58, p. xxx).

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At the beginning of his personal rule (1661), after his minority, King Louis XIV focused on prestigious public projects in the capital such as the design of the east façade of the Louvre Palace, or Louvre Colonnade (1667–74, completed 1758–75; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.19). Louis Le Vau had started building his scheme when Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the king’s minister, stopped construction to consult Italian architects. In 1665 Louis XIV summoned the papal architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini

to France. The Roman architect drafted three projects for the Louvre and construction was started on the last one. A cabal of French architects and royal administrators led by Charles Perrault, however, succeeded in stopping the Italian’s scheme. Nationalist art historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have interpreted this episode as France’s architectural ‘coming of age’ vis-à-vis Italy. Bernini’s lack of interest in the subtleties of French distribution and his disregard for the achievements of French architects – his scheme would have obliterated Lescot’s façade – are more likely to have convinced the crown to abandon his project. A Petit Conseil (small counsel) composed of Louis Le Vau, François Le Vau, Charles Le Brun and the polymath Claude Perrault (most often credited alone for the design) devised the new façade, which was a milestone in the history of French architecture. Perrault justified its salient feature, the freestanding paired columns separated by a wide intercolumniation, by the French taste for dégagement (referring here to open spaces within a building’s plan, section or elevation) as found in the airy interiors of Gothic churches. Thanks to iron-reinforced stone construction, Perrault combined the lightness of medieval structure with Classical ornamentation. The Colonnade testifies to the persistence of the admixture of Gothic and Classical elements in the history of French architecture from the late fifteenth century, from the Sainte-Chapelle at Champigny-sur-Veude (1499–1545; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.20), the church of Saint Eustache (begun 1532, consecrated 1637) in Paris, the chapel at the Château d’Anet (1547–53; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.17) and the chapel in the Château de Versailles (1689–1708; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.39) to the Abbey Church of Sainte-Geneviève, or Panthéon (1755–91; altered 1791–1818; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.23).

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To Colbert’s chagrin, Louis XIV never finished the Louvre Colonnade. The king instead concentrated his energies on the reconfiguration of the Château de Versailles (1661–1770; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.1) and its outbuildings in the same years that high-ranking court officials erected their own up-to-date country retreats: René de Longueil, Président de la Cour des Aides, built his Château de Maisons at Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines (1641/42–60; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.28); Jacques Bordier, Intendant des Finances, his Château du Raincy at Le Raincy, Seine-Saint-Denis (1643-48); and Nicolas Foucquet, Surintendant des Finances, his Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte near Maincy, Seine-et- Marne (1656-61; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.38). Louis’s changing ambitions at Versailles account for his constant reworking of the château and its motley appearance.

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Meanwhile, Louis XIV had founded the Royal Academy of Architecture in 1671 at Colbert’s initiative. The main purpose of the Academy was to advise the king on his buildings. Moreover, the King’s Architects– only members of the Royal Academy could use this title after 1676 – were to codify and disseminate the principles of ‘good taste’ and solve the ‘principal difficulties’ of architecture, in the words of the Royal Academy’s first director and professor, François Blondel (see CODIFYING GOOD TASTE, p. xxx).

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT

King Henri IV presided over the arduous reconstruction of the kingdom after the devastating Wars of Religion. Focusing on his capital, he embellished Paris as he stimulated its economy. The Place Royale, today Place des Vosges (1605–12, fig. 60.16), the Place Dauphine (1607–16), the Rue Dauphine (begun 1607), and the completion of the Pont-Neuf (1578–88 and 1599–1606) served this dual programme. He originally conceived the Place Royale as a silk factory. He planned the Place Dauphine as a centre for the manufacture and trade of precious metal goods. He finished the Pont-Neuf and its prolongation, the Rue Dauphine, to stimulate the urban development of the Left Bank. In all these interventions, the king emphasized regularity. At the Place Royale and the Place Dauphine, the architects Louis Métezeau and Jacques II Androuet du Cerceau composed façades with identical brick bays bordered by stone chaînes (stacks of rusticated masonry) in the manner of Pierre Lescot at the Château de Vallery (1548-49).

architectural enterprises. Their policy intersected with the ‘Rationalist’ design strategy sketched out by Marc-Antoine Laugier in his Essai sur l’Architecture (first, anonymous edition 1753; second edition 1755) and his Observations sur l’Architecture (1765). He advocated the primitive hut that the ancient Roman author Vitruvius had used in his account of the origins of architecture (De Architectura, Book II, Chapter I, Section 3) as the model against which architects should evaluate their own work (fig. 60.25). Much like his contemporary, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Laugier believed that art must spring from unadulterated nature. His teachings inspired both Jacques-Germain Soufflot in the design of his daring structure for the Church of Sainte- Geneviève (1755–91; altered 1791–1818; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.23) and the ‘primitivists’ Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin and Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. Wishing, like Laugier, to return to fundamentals, Chalgrin built the Parisian Church of Saint Philippedu-Roule (1767–84) according to a basilican plan, with two parallel rows of freestanding columns supporting a straight entablature, recalling early Roman Christian churches. At the Capuchin Monastery in Paris (1779-82), Brongniart employed a baseless Doric order and plain wall surfaces, pushing ‘primitive’ starkness to its limits.

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Walking in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, King Louis XV sponsored several places royales, notably the Place Louis-XV, today Place de la Concorde in Paris (1748–75; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.2), along with others in France’s regional capitals: Rennes

(1731–67; by Jacques V Gabriel and Ange-Jacques Gabriel), Bordeaux (1733–43, by Jacques V Gabriel, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne and Jean-Louis Lemoyne) and Reims (1760, by Legendre and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle). The French Crown and city municipalities often took advantage of these urban improvements to add civic programmes. Such were the conditions under which were built a Stock Exchange in Bordeaux (1733–50; by Jacques V Gabriel and Ange- Jacques Gabriel) and a town hall and presidial court in Rennes (1731–67; by Jacques V Gabriel and Ange-Jacques Gabriel). In the second half of the eighteenth

century, architects beautified cities by making royal equipment monumental: the Halle au Blé (Wheat Trading Hall) (1767; by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières), the Hôtel des Monnaies (Royal Mint) (1768–75; by Jacques-Denis Antoine, fig 60.26), the École de Chirurgie (Medical School) (1769–75; by Jacques Gondouin), and the theatre of the Comédie-Française, today Théâtre de l’Odéon (1767–82; by Marie-Joseph

Peyre and Charles de Wailly), all of them in Paris, co-opted Classical forms to affirm royal munificence in the improvement of French cities. Although not located in a city, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s Royal Saltworks in Arc-et-Senans (1774-79; Key buildings, p. Xxx, fig. 60.30) resulted from the same design strategy.

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Establishment architects such as Ange-Jacques Gabriel also embraced the grand goût. Gabriel conceived the façades of the twin hôtels bordering the Place Louis-XV in Paris (1748–75; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.2) in direct reference to the Louvre Colonnade (1667–74, completed 1758–75; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.19), albeit less for its ‘enlightened rationality’, as Laugier and Soufflot would have it, than for its political associations. Skilled in the design of royal monuments, Gabriel also mastered domestic design, as is apparent in the Petit Trianon at Versailles (1762–68, fig. 60.27), a remarkable combination of elegant elevations, sophisticated distribution and refined interior decoration.

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By 1750 or thereabouts, Jacques-François Blondel, by far the most influential architecture teacher of the eighteenth century, synthesized the lessons of a French ‘national manner’ that Gabriel so deftly embraced. Blondel’s system rested on the delicate balance between convenance (appropriateness of forms to social status and customs) and caractère (character) – necessary to engage viewers. Blondel grounded these two notions, derived from ancient poetics and rhetoric, in the examination of the best achievements of French architects such as François Mansart’s Château de Maisons (1641/42–60; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.28). His pupil, William Chambers, adhered perhaps most closely to Blondel’s lessons while exploring new avenues in architectural meaning. Chambers observed conv- enance scrupulously with Somerset House in London (1776–96), built on the model of Antoine’s Hôtel des Monnaies in Paris (1768–75, fig. 60.26). Simultaneously, Chambers built several follies in Kew Gardens near London between 1756 and 1762, including the most ‘correct’ replica of a Chinese pagoda. Embracing sensationalism – a theory that placed human perception at the origin of meaning – Chambers devised these structures to trigger mental associations and emotional responses, much as rhetoric and poetics prescribed. By the end of the century, French theorists and garden designers had espoused the British landscape garden tradition that had emerged from sensationalism. Among those were artist and author Claude-Henri Watelet in his Essai sur les jardins (Essay on Gardens, 1774) and landscape architect Jean-Marie Morel in his Théorie

des jardins (Theory of Gardens, 1776). Richard Mique and Antoine Richard, assisted by the painter Hubert Robert, devised a rural hamlet (1783-86; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.29) for Queen Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon that brought together the pastoral genre and agricultural improvement.

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A changing understanding of propriety rendered obsolete Blondel’s prescriptions founded on a study

of the orders and of architectural precedents. Like Blondel, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux believed in the power of architectural forms to affect viewers. Ledoux, however, invoked opera as a model for architecture: for him, building forms could ‘speak’ directly to their spectators. He applied Aristotle’s poetic theory to architecture, maintaining that buildings, like poetry, could generate catharsis and thus ‘cleanse’ the body politic through emotion. Ledoux’s design agenda was more iconographic and didactic than Blondel’s Vitruvianism. Ledoux conveyed in his L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation (Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Customs and Legislation, 1804) – a compendium of his buildings and projects – how architects could engineer social reform by using symbolic forms that characterise human occupations

He most notably put this strategy to work at the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans (1779; Key Buildings, p. Xxx, fig. 60.30), which he later expanded – following the French Revolution, which made those architects who had served the Ancien Régime unlikely to secure further work – into the more ambitious although unbuilt project for the city of Chaux (1780–1804) that fully fleshed out his theory.

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Étienne-Louis Boullée went further than Ledoux. Bringing the lessons of the landscape garden to architecture, Boullée compiled a catalogue of forms classified according to the caractères of programmes and their correspondence with the seasons in his unpublished treatise, Architecture: Essai sur l’art (Essay on the Art of Architecture, c. 1780–93). Espousing sensationalism, Boullée believed in the power of geometric solids on human perception without the use of conventional architectural ornament or of ‘speaking’ forms in the manner of Ledoux. He conveyed his theory with grandiose schemes and dramatically rendered drawings. He devised, for instance, the famous unbuilt Cenotaph for Newton (1784; Key Buildings, p. Xxx, fig. 60.31) – a programme ideally suited to the ‘grand’ manner, he tells us – as a vast machine to produce sublime effects.

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THE REVOLUTION, THE EMPIRE AND THE RESTORATION

Although the actors of the French Revolution abolished the monarchy in 1792, their representational politics still belonged to the old political order. Revolutionary festivals such as the Fête de la Fédération (14 July 1790) and the Fête de l’Être Suprême (8 June 1794) relied on the techniques of royal pageantry. In the manner of pre-Revolutionary monarchs, Republican leaders now staged urban processions and adorned cities with symbolic decorations to project their vision of a new society. Trained at the end of the eighteenth century, the architects of the new regime implemented the lessons of the royal academic system. In their design for a ‘Temple to Equality’ submitted to the Compétition de l’An II (1794 – Year II in the French Revolutionary calendar), Jean- Nicolas-Louis Durand and Jean-Thomas Thibault used inscriptions to convey Republican meaning, much as Durand’s master, Boullée, had done in a façade project for the Royal Library in Paris (1784-88). Despite a plethora of designs, however, the French Revolution yielded few permanent monuments. The nationalization of property, however, bolstered private building enterprises such as the Rue des Colonnes (1793-97) in Paris, by Nicolas- Jacques-Antoine Vestier.

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Napoleon Bonaparte shared the chivalric and imperial longings of French kings. To satisfy their patron, the architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine – better known for their elegant, graphic Classicism – employed a thin Gothic style in their designs for the temporary structures for the emperor’s coronation at Notre-Dame de Paris in December 1804. Like his predecessors, Napoleon wanted to surpass Rome by erecting monuments inspired by those of the Roman Empire. Jacques Gondouin and Jean-Baptiste Lepère modelled the Colonne Vendôme (1806-10) after the Column of Trajan (fig. 19.4??) in Rome, while Percier and Fontaine imitated the Arch of Septimius Severus (fig. 19.13) for their Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (1806-08, fig. 60.32).

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Despite their revulsion for the French Empire, the two Restoration kings, Louis XVIII and Charles X, adopted what became known as the ‘Empire Style’ – perhaps unsurprisingly, since they employed the architects, decorators and furniture makers who had worked for Napoleon. King Louis XVIII selected Fontaine to build the Chapelle Expiatoire (1815–26) on the burial site of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Students of Charles Percier also experienced dramatic changes in the practice of architecture at the time. The career of Jacques-Ignace Hittorf is emblematic in this respect. In his early years Hittorff adhered to Percier and Fontaine’s manner: even his decoration for the coronation of Charles X in Reims in May 1825 matched closely Percier and Fontaine’s idiosyncratic design for Napoleon’s coronation. Thereafter Hittorff, like his contemporaries, needed to adapt to new nineteenth- century technological and stylistic theories. With the Gare du Nord in Paris (1861-66) he addressed the challenges of new materials and typologies unknown to his predecessors. In more conventional programmes, such as the Mairie of the First Arrondissement in Paris (1858-63), Hittorff operated within the strictures of Historicism, replacing a purported atemporal Classicism with a variety of historical styles.

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Key Buildings

Sainte-Chapelle, Château de Champigny-sur-Veude, Centre-Val de Loire (1499–1545)
The puzzling combination of a Flamboyant nave and a Renaissance porch at the Sainte-Chapelle of the Château de Champigny-sur-Veude exemplifies the interest in architectural iconography over stylistic coherence. Only descendants of Saint Louis (King Louis IX) could erect holy chapels: to stress this hereditary privilege they patterned their constructions on his model, the Sainte- Chapelle (begun early 1240s; Key Buildings, Chapter 47, p. xxx) of the Palais de la Cité in Paris. In 1499, Louis de Bourbon-Vendôme, prince of Roche-sur-Yon, obtained the pope’s authorization to build a holy chapel, probably under the supervision of the mason François Bastien.

Like the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, Champigny features a tall, narrow nave covered by a ribbed vault supported by external buttresses that emphasize the chapel’s verticality. The prince’s son Louis de Bourbon, duc de Montpensier, commissioned stained-glass windows that depict salient episodes from Saint Louis’s life.

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The antique-style porch departs from the Parisian model. In sharp contrast to the light-filled, medieval-style interior, the porch at Champigny recalls a massive triumphal arch flanked by two rectangular blocks. The porch’s starkness brings to mind the main façade of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (begun 1447) by Leon Battista Alberti (see Chapter 58). Both exhibit a similar disjunction between Classical exterior and medieval interior. A fifteenth-century illumination by the painter Jean Fouquet, Étienne Chevalier being presented to the Virgin (c. 1450s), also stresses this opposition. Fouquet depicts the Virgin Mary sitting in a Gothic porch, a reference to the Church. The donor, Étienne Chevalier, kneels in front of her against a Classical backdrop, a reference to the secular world. Similarly, the Gothic nave at Champigny recalls Saint Louis’s spiritual connection with the Church, while the triumphal arch hints to his worldly power.

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Although the Cardinal de Richelieu demolished the Château de Champigny-sur-Veude after he acquired it in 1635, he preserved the chapel, which, with its exceptional stained-glass windows, remains to this day.

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Château de Chambord, Chambord, Centre-Val de Loire (1519–50)
The Château de Chambord, today one of the key visitor attractions in France’s Loire Valley, is without doubt one of the most impressive – if puzzling – productions of the French Renaissance. Several questions remain unanswered regarding this hunting retreat built for François I beginning in 1519. Who was its author (or authors)? What did the original scheme look like? What precedents, if any, inspired this extraordinary enterprise?

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Chambord’s plan reconciles two apparently contradictory configurations. With its keep surrounded by lower building ranges and a moat, it recalls medieval fortified châteaux, a tradition carried on by Jacques Sourdeau and his workshop. Unlike those precedents, however, Chambord adopted a modular grid, possibly with Domenico da Cortona’s intervention, in the manner of the most up-to-date Italian and French country houses.

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Such attention to regularity makes the lack of symmetry in the realized plan more surprising. Twenty-first-century archaeological studies have demonstrated that the central apartments were originally laid out in the shape of a gamma cross, a plan without precedent in the history of European architecture. To some, this unusual layout points to Leonardo da Vinci’s authorship of Chambord. François I had invited Leonardo to France in the last years of the artist’s life. The Italian painter, draughtsman and scientist was famous for his studies of spiralling movements in water fluxes and in his designs for flying machines. He might have applied these innovative ideas at Chambord.

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Chambord’s double-spiral staircase reinforces the hypothesis that Leonardo would have contributed to the château’s design. In one of his manuscripts Leonardo sketched a quadruple-spiral staircase on a square plan. While spiral staircases were typical of contemporary French

domestic architecture, Chambord’s staircase is placed at the centre, not on the periphery, of the main building block, echoing Leonardo’s obsession with centralized plans.

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Château de Fontainebleau, Île-de-France (1528 onwards)  
Like all royal residences, the Château de Fontainebleau suffered from the changing demands of French monarchs. Its story began in 1528, when François I ordered the master mason, Gilles Le Breton, to repair and enlarge a fortified polygonal château dating from the early twelfth century. Le Breton added an entrance châtelet, the Porte Dorée, a composition of superimposed arched loggias pioneered at the Château de Gaillon (1498–1510). To the west of the château he built a long hall, the future Galerie François I.

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In 1531 the king embarked on more ambitious plans and decided to turn Fontainebleau into a residence for the court. Wishing to decorate with unprecedented splendour, he called on the Florentine Rosso Fiorentino and the Emilian Francesco Primaticcio, a pupil of Giulio Romano. For the Galerie François I (1528; 1532–39), Rosso developed a distinctive style that mixed high-relief sculptures, bas-relief medallions, frescoes, and bold ornaments such as strapwork (imitating curled pieces of leather). Primaticcio tempered Rosso’s exuberant Mannerism: between 1541–44 he decorated the bedroom of the Duchesse d’Étampes, François’s official mistress, with elegant stucco figures and simplified ornament.

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Upon his accession, Henri II replaced Primaticcio by Philibert De l’Orme as supervisor of works at the château. Primaticcio continued to paint: he completed frescoes for the Ballroom (completed 1556, heavily restored) and the astounding Ulysses Gallery, a 115-metre-long (377-foot) room decorated with episodes from the Odyssey (1539–70, demolished). After De l’Orme’s demise, during the reigns of François II and Charles IX, Primaticcio added the Charles IX wing (1571), a monumental entrance pavilion leading to the king’s apartment. The wing became known as the Aile de la Belle Cheminée after Henri IV commissioned a splendid sculpted mantelpiece for its large hall in 1598.

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Although the château still stands today, it is much altered. Eighteenth-century monarchs destroyed most of Renaissance Fontainebleau; demolitions and reconfigurations also took place during and after the Revolution, Empire, Restoration, and July Monarchy, as each regime shaped the building to match its own version of French history.

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Château d’Ancy-le-Franc, Ancy-le-Franc, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (1541–before 1574)
The painter, architect and author Sebastiano Serlio was a crucial mediator between Italian and French visions of Classicism. His influential series of books on architecture had a profound impact on practice. In his unpublished sixth book, Delle habitationi di tutti li gradi degli homini (On the Habitations of All Classes of Men, 1541–47), Serlio discusses residential architecture according to national styles. He contrasts alternate schemes for dwellings in the French, Venetian and Italian manners, from the simplest peasant’s hut to the grandest royal palace. Serlio directly confronted these differences in his château at Ancy-le-Franc. Antoine III de Clermont, vicomte de Tallard, commissioned the building in 1541, when Serlio arrived in France at the invitation of François I. In his first schemes for Ancy, Serlio implemented the geometric regularity and modular planning he admired in the work of Donato Bramante. His design for a turreted, centrally planned château strongly resembles the fortified Villa at Poggioreale near Naples (1487-90), built for the king of Naples by Giuliano da Maiano, which Serlio illustrated in his third book (On Antiquities, 1540). At Ancy, Serlio also echoed medieval French châteaux and developed a scheme with four identical wings on a square plan. Serlio’s scheme included Italianate features such as a mezzanine for servants, domed chapel on an octagonal plan, and studiolo (a private cabinet) – essential to any palazzo.

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The château itself, still standing, is a compromise between the architect’s and the patron’s visions. Serlio eliminated the most Italianate features of his original design. He replaced flatter Italian roofs with high-pitched roofs; he respected French commodité (commodiousness, especially in the planning of rooms) and simplified the Italian internal layout. As with his Hôtel d’Este in Fontainebleau (1544-46, fig. 60.7), Serlio gave with Ancy an Italianized version of a French building type that became a crucial model for later architects.

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Louvre Palace additions and remodellings, Paris (1546–54; 1639-42; 1667–74; 1758–75)
The history of the Louvre mirrored the monarchy’s ambiguous relationship to their capital. At the very end of his life, in 1546, François I commissioned Pierre Lescot to remodel the medieval palace (his successor, Henri II, confirmed the appointment in 1549). Lescot’s design became a veritable school for French Classicism. The architect reconfigured the fortress’s west range and added to its southwest corner the King’s Pavilion, a new rectangular tower for the king’s apartment. The façade on the courtyard side of the southwest portion of the palace was sculpted by Jean Goujon. In the west wing, Lescot pioneered architectural forms that became hallmarks of French Classical design – particularly mansard roofs, segmental-arched windows set in a blind arcade and a three-part elevation composed of a central frontispiece with two avant-corps projecting slightly from the façade plane. Clément Métezeau and Jacques Lemercier replicated Lescot’s design when they extended the footprint of the Renaissance palace to form the Cour Carrée, punctuated in its middle by the Pavillon de l’Horloge.

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The east façade became the testing ground for architectural design innovation during the Baroque era, just as Lescot’s façade had during the Renaissance. After rejecting Le Vau’s scheme for the Louvre’s completion, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the king’s minister, obtained proposals from pre-eminent Italian architects. The most famous was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who

travelled to Paris in 1665 to propose a grand design that would have obliterated the French architects’

constructions. After Bernini’s departure, a Petit Conseil composed of Louis and François Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault cast aside his design. They came up with the famed Louvre Colonnade (1667–74, completed 1758–75 by Jacques-Germain Soufflot), hailed then as now as a beacon of French Classicism. Both façades are extant, as is the palace (now the Louvre Museum), which was considerably expanded in the nineteenth century – and then gifted a glazed entrance pyramid (Key Buildings, Chapter 93, p. xxx) in the 1980s.

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Château d’Anet, Anet, Centre-Val de Loire (1547–53)
This château is a portrait of its patron, Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Henri II. In the spirit of Renaissance emblematics, its architect, Philibert De l’Orme, compounded forms and wove meanings to craft Anet as a cipher: the château functioned simultaneously as the dwelling of Artemis (Diana), goddess of the hunt, with whom Diane identified; a mausoleum for Diane’s deceased husband, the seneschal of Normandy, Louis de Brézé; an evocation of the mausoleum’s antique precedent, the Maussolleion (dedicated c. 349 BCE; Key Buildings, Chapter 17, p. xxx) built by Queen Artemisia at Halicarnassus; and a pleasure residence for Diane and her royal lover.

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De l’Orme began expanding an existing château in 1547, the year Henri II offered the estate to Diane. He constructed a new residence and erected in its centre a three-storey frontispiece akin to Pierre Lescot’s for the Louvre (1546–54; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.14). The frontispiece also served as a memorial to Brézé. De l’Orme superimposed three pairs of double columns (Doric, Ionic and Corinthian) following the canonical sequence of the Theatre of Marcellus (Key Buildings, Chapter 19, p. xxx) and Colosseum (Key Buildings, Chapter 19, p. xxx), both of which De l’Orme had studied while in Rome. At the top level, the columns framed an arch containing Brézé’s statue.

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In the entrance portico, De l’Orme played on funerary and memorial symbolism. He designed it in the manner of a triumphal arch whose opening recalls Sangallo the Younger’s portal at Rome’s Palazzo Farnese (Key Buildings, Chapter 58, p. xxx). He embedded the orders on its façade with black marble plaques and shaped the chimneystacks like sarcophagi. Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze relief of Artemis inserted into the archway’s tympanum, and the extraordinary clock with mechanical dogs and stag above, announced entry to Diane’s estate.

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For the vaults of the entrance passage and chapel, De l’Orme displayed his mastery of the art du trait (stone cutting), transposing the techniques of medieval masons to the antique forms of barrel vault and hemispherical cupola (see STEREOTOMY, p. xxx). He amazed viewers most with the trompe he designed to support, cantilevered over the garden façade, a cabinet for the king. Despite considerable destruction after the French Revolution, Anet remains the marvel that De l’Orme intended

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Chapelle Sainte-Ursule, Sorbonne College, Paris (1634–42)

As official architect to Cardinal Richelieu, France’s most powerful man during Louis XIII’s reign, Jacques Lemercier obtained exceptional commissions from a patron who prized architecture as a vehicle for political power. Benefiting from Richelieu’s influence, Lemercier secured the prestigious position of First Architect of the King in 1639. He was thereafter responsible for enlarging the Louvre (1639–42; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.14), the symbolic centre of royal power.

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In 1634, Richelieu put Lemercier in charge of the erection of a church dedicated to Saint Ursula for Paris’s Sorbonne College. Lemercier faced a complex programme – the building was to serve as the college’s chapel, a church with a strong public presence in the university quarter, and Richelieu’s mausoleum – and so proposed an unusual plan that admirably solved these requisites. The rectangular nave terminated with an apsidal choir to the east and an ornate façade overlooking a new public square to the west. The unusually placed transept intersected the nave in midst of the north and south walls: a high dome marked the crossing. While churchgoers entering the main portal would have found the customary Latin cross plan, students accessing the chapel from the college’s courtyard came upon a domed, Greek cross plan. The latter configuration was particularly appropriate for mausoleums,

which, since Roman times, were designed as centralized structures.

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Lemercier innovated at the Sorbonne. He built Paris’s first masonry dome resting on a drum, and on the church’s north side erected the first portico composed of freestanding columns topped by a pediment, in the manner of the Roman Pantheon (Key Buildings, Chapter 19, p. xxx). Although criticized as the most ‘Italianate’ of French architects, Lemercier inspired the eighteenth century’s most advanced religious architecture, as exemplified by Jacques- Germain Soufflot’s Church of Sainte-Genevieve in Paris (1755–91; altered 1791–1818; Key Buildings, p. Xxx, fig. 60.23).

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The architect Henri-Paul Nénot preserved the chapel when reconstructing the Sorbonne from 1885–1901. The chapel lost its religious function several times during the nineteenth century, and definitively by the mid-twentieth century.

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Château de Maisons, Maisons-Laffitte, Île-de-France (1641/42–60)
Eighteenth-century advocates of a return to Louis XIV’s grand goût held François Mansart’s Château de Maisons as a model for contemporary design. The influential educator Jacques-François Blondel waxed enthusiastic. Each year he visited Maisons with his students to learn from Mansart, whom Blondel called the ‘God of Architecture’.

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A comparison between Mansart’s Maisons and Louis Le Vau’s contemporary Château du Raincy (1643–48) brings to light the contrasting approaches of the two most important architects of the French Baroque to the same building programme. Both Mansart and Le Vau adopted the typology of the pavilion-type château that Salomon de Brosse had inaugurated at the Château de Blérancourt (1611–19, fig. 60.37). Both placed their buildings on platforms shaped to match the outlines of traditional château plans. Both divided them into three distinct masses: two side pavilions with high-pitched roofs flanking a taller central volume. And both laid out the entry sequence to include an open vestibule decorated with columns leading to an imposing two-storey staircase.

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Yet, despite these similarities, Maisons and Le Raincy differ vastly architecturally. Le Vau favoured eye-catching effects. He used a bold, rounded volume to mark the château’s centre – a device he also implemented at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (1656-61; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.38) – and decorated the side pavilions with colossal pilasters. Mansart selected subtler means. Eschewing Le Vau’s abrupt contrasts, Mansart arranged his volumes in a harmonious pyramidal composition, as he had done at the Château de Balleroy (c. 1626–31). He articulated the elevations with artful permutations of pilasters, columns and sculptural ornaments. Blondel marvelled at Mansart’s mastery, praising Maisons for its refined proportions, the expressive beauty of its mouldings, and the perfect union of its architecture and sculpture.

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In 1833 the banker Jacques Laffitte destroyed the stables and subdivided the château’s park to build a suburban development. The château still stands.

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Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, near Maincy, Île-de- France (1656-61)
At Vaux-le-Vicomte, the architect Louis Le Vau and his collaborators, the painter and decorator Charles Le Brun and the landscape designer André Le Nôtre, combined recent innovations in château design into a unified, theatrical composition. Le Vau conceived Vaux as a freestanding pavilion in the manner of Salomon de Brosse’s groundbreaking Château de Blérancourt (1611–19, fig. 60.37). He structured Vaux’s buildings and grounds along a single visual axis, an arrangement Jacques Lemercier had pioneered at the Château de Richelieu (1631–c. 1644, fig. 60.17). His colleague Charles Le Brun devised an elaborate Italianate interior decoration, which featured ‘Italian style’ coved ceilings enriched with stucco and quadri riportati (literally ‘transported paintings’, framed paintings in a painted ceiling) in the manner of decors created for Jules Mazarin’s gallery at his palace, the Palais Mazarin in Paris (1646-47), and in the summer apartment of Anne of Austria at the Louvre (1655-59).

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Vaux’s design team also expanded on these earlier inventions. Le Vau introduced to France the double-storey salone, what contemporaries called a pièce à l’italienne (Italian-style room). But, unlike Italian architects who placed these tall spaces centrally in their plans – as in Palladio’s Villa Capra (begun 1566; Key Buildings, Chapter 58, p. xxx) in Vicenza – Le Vau made Vaux’s salon the prominent centrepiece of the château’s garden façade.

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For Vaux’s garden, Le Nôtre masterfully manipulated the axial symmetry typical of seventeenth-century French gardens. He worked with perspective to stage surprising effects. Most striking is the deceptively foreshortened view from the château that makes the garden appear shorter than it actually is. With strategically placed terracing, Le Nôtre also masked features that visitors discovered as they strolled through the garden.

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The château remains intact, the gardens having been reconstructed in the early twentieth century.

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Château de Versailles, Île-de-France (1661–1770)
Versailles is France’s most famous but also most idiosyncratic château. The vagaries of its transformation from Louis XIII’s modest 1620s hunting lodge into France’s political focus explain its peculiarities. In 1661, Louis

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Next, Louis XIV pursued the even more ambitious plan of transforming Versailles into the permanent seat of government. On the garden front, Jules Hardouin- Mansart replaced Le Vau’s terrace with the Grande Galerie (1679–86). To the north and south he extended the château with immense wings (1665-88) for courtiers, and constructed Versailles’s spectacular chapel (1689–1708; Key Buildings, p. xxx).

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Louis XV and Louis XVI decided to rule from Versailles, despite the château’s increasing unsuitability to Enlightenment conceptions of kingship. Ange-Jacques Gabriel endowed it with an opera house (1763–70), inaugurated at the wedding of the dauphin, Louis, to the Austrian archduchess, Marie Antoinette. He also began reconfiguring the château’s city side by erasing what remained of the original hunting lodge, an endeavour that halted with Louis XV’s death. In 1783, despite growing political pressures, Louis XVI’s minister Charles- Claude d’Angiviller organized a competition for the château’s complete reconstruction. Six years later, revolutionaries forced the king to abandon Versailles for Paris. Never again did a French ruler settle in the château.

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It still stands, although the installation of the Musée de l’Histoire de France under Louis-Philippe led to the demolition of much of its interiors.

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Church of Saint-Louis (Church of the Dome), Hôtel Royal des Invalides, Paris (1677–1706) In 1670 François-Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, Louis XIV’s director of the Bâtiments du Roi,

 commissioned Libéral Bruand to design a hospice for disabled soldiers (invalides). Chapels were key components of such buildings. Dissatisfied with Bruand’s project, Le Tellier consulted an up-and-coming architect in the orbit of the court, Jules Hardouin-Mansart.

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Hardouin-Mansart soon took over completing the hôtel and designing its chapel. In a bold move, he attached a gigantic domed church to the modest soldier’s chapel. The king, never averse to monuments that emphasized his glory, received Hardouin-Mansart’s grandiose scheme enthusiastically. Richly ornamented with orders, sculpture and frescoes, Hardouin-Mansart’s church was as lavish as the soldiers’ chapel was plain.

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For his design Hardouin-Mansart closely adhered to two unbuilt schemes by his great-uncle, François Mansart: the Bourbon mausoleum at Saint-Denis Church (1664-65) and the portal of the Church of the Minimes (1657–65) near the Place Royale in Paris. From the former, Hardouin-Mansart borrowed the overall scheme: centralized plan with high dome and corner chapels linked diagonally to the main volume. From the latter, he copied the main façade: a stacked, pedimented Doric and Corinthian frontispiece.

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Hardouin-Mansart distributed royal imagery throughout the church, placed under the patronage of Saint Louis, the thirteenth-century French king with whom later monarchs eagerly dentified. Saint Louis’s iconography, the reference to François Mansart’s aborted Bourbon mausoleum, and, more generally, the church’s puzzling lack of purpose (the eighteenth-century theorist and critic Marc-Antoine Laugier observed that it was ‘perfectly useless’) have led historians to suggest that Louis XIV intended it as a dynastic tomb. Whether or not this was on the king’s mind, it eventually became a funerary monument in 1843–53, when the architect Louis Visconti placed Napoleon I’s sarcophagus at its centre, in a circular well excavated into Hardouin-Mansart’s intricate marble pavement.

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Through three restoration campaigns, in 1869, 1937 and 1983–94, architects have consolidated and returned the church to its original appearance.

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Chapel, Château de Versailles, Île-de-France (1689–1708)
As the crowning achievement of Jules Hardouin-Mansart in the service of King Louis XIV, the royal chapel at Versailles negotiated in new ways the marriage of Gothic forms, necessary to stress dynastic lineage, and Classical ornamentation.

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The fifth chapel at the Château de Versailles (1661–1770; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.1), it adheres closely to Saint Louis’s Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1241–48; Key Buildings, Chapter 47, p. xxx), itself a distant echo of Charlemagne’s celebrated Palatine Chapel (792–805; Key Buildings, Chapter 32, p. xxx) at Aachen, then called Aix-la-Chapelle. Both feature an upper level with a royal tribune leading to the king’s apartment and a lower level where members of the court attended Mass.

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After developing a domed centralized scheme, Hardouin-Mansart settled in 1687 on a two-level rectangular structure terminating in a rounded apse. He first articulated its internal elevations with arcades and pilasters in the manner of the garden façade of the palace’s north wing. In a later scheme (1689), he extended the chapel vertically so that it rose above the château’s top cornice line. He replaced the arched internal elevation with a freestanding Corinthian colonnade resting, at the chapel’s lower level, on plain arcades.

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With this extraordinary design, Hardouin-Mansart synthesized tradition as much as he anticipated the future. He combined the layout of Paris’s Sainte- Chapelle with the columnar basilican plans of early Christian churches. He also provided the model that eighteenth-century architectural reformers sought in order to replace the heavy pilastered arcades of Roman-style Baroque churches with freestanding structural columns. Hardouin-Mansart inscribed Versailles’s royal chapel as a pivotal moment in a lineage that brought together the French Rayonnant Gothic style of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the late eighteenth-century fascination with colonnaded structures – while simultaneously embracing the iconographic references to tradition essential to royal self-fashioning.

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The chapel remains as part of the state apartments of the château.

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Salon de la Princesse, Palais de Soubise, Paris (1739)
In his Livre d’architecture (1745) the architect and engineer Germain Boffrand transposed Horace’s Art of Poetry, written in 23 BCE, to architectural design. Like theorists of the visual arts since the Italian Renaissance, Boffrand relied on antique poetics to structure his prescriptions. Following Horace closely, he argued that the convex, concave and straight lines of architectural mouldings are the alphabet that architects must use to generate appropriate effects. He warned his colleagues, however, that they should refrain from inventing new ‘words’: they should instead adhere to forms sanctioned by tradition.

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With his adaption of Horace, Boffrand was reciting the tenets of the grand goût. It is the more surprising that he designed one of the most celebrated French Rococo interiors, a genre known for its formal freedom. In 1735, Hercule-Mériadec de Rohan, prince de Soubise, extended his Parisian palace with a pavilion for his young bride, Marie-Sophie de Courcillon. It contained two superimposed oval salons: one for himself on the ground floor, one for his wife on the second. Boffrand decorated the princess’s salon with a luxury of ornamentation, gilding, mirrors and paintings. He articulated the walls with a ring of tall arcades, set deeply into the wall. Charles-Joseph Natoire painted episodes of the story of Psyche in the fan-shaped tympanums. Above Natoire’s canvases, Boffrand disposed a rich plaster border with gilded medallions and putti. Radial lines of ornament link the border to a central ceiling rose. Even the doctrinaire Jacques-François Blondel could not resist its charm, which he poetically described in his article on decoration for the Encyclopédie (1754) as ‘enchanted places that Opulence designed so that the Graces and Voluptuousness could reside’.

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Since 1808 the Hôtel de Soubise has housed the Archives Nationales de France. The salon survived the destruction of most of the hôtel’s interior during the nineteenth century.

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Place Louis-XV (today Place de la Concorde), Paris (1748–75)
The Place Louis-XV (today Place de la Concorde) marked a turning point in French urban design. Henri IV had unwittingly launched the typology in 1605 at the Place Royale (now Place des Vosges). There, to bolster French industry, Henri established a silk factory and artisans housing around an open square: its failure as a commercial enterprise led the nobility to appropriate the square. Cardinal Richelieu’s installation of a statue of Louis XIII in 1639 fixed the elements of the French places royales: a simple geometric plan, bounded by uniform façades, with royal effigy at its centre.

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In the case of the Place Louis-XV, in 1748 the provostship of Paris expressed its desire to erect a square for King Louis XV’s statue commissioned from the sculptor, Edme Bouchardon. A public call for proposals followed, with architects and laymen submitting more than 100 designs, often on sites in congested areas that would benefit from improvements in circulation and public health. Embellissement and dégagement were key concepts in contemporary thinking about the city. In his Monumens érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (Monuments Erected in France to the Glory of Louis XV) of 1765, two years after Bouchardon’s statue was inaugurated, architect Pierre Patte combined the best ideas of the 1748 competition into a single plan. Although never intended as such, it looked like a blueprint for coordinated urban improvements.

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Ange-Jacques Gabriel, First Architect of the King, designed the final plan after a second call for proposals in 1753. The location of the new place, on the king’s property at Paris’s edge, between the Tuileries Gardens and the Champs-Élysées, prevented the civic improvement of earlier projects. Gabriel’s composition nonetheless confirmed new concepts in city planning. He proposed a square, bounded to the north by two identical palaces, yet open to the west on the Champs-Élysées, to the east on the Tuileries, and to the south on the Seine, in the spirit of his father Jacques V Gabriel’s Place Royale in Bordeaux (1733–43) and Jean-Antoine Giral’s Place Royale in Montpellier (1685–1789, fig. 60.40). Gabriel thus abandoned the enclosed architectonic frame of royal squares since the seventeenth century to embrace urban design as landscape scenography.

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In 1792, revolutionaries destroyed Louis XV’s statue and beheaded his grandson Louis XVI on the square in early 1793. In 1840 the architect Jacques-Ignace Hittorff added fountains and lighting, with, on the statue’s former location, one of the Egyptian obelisks dedicated to Ramesses II from the Temple of Luxor (c. 1400 BCE; see Chapter 7).

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Church of Sainte-Geneviève (Panthéon), Paris (1755–91; altered 1791–1818)
In 1754 Louis XV approved a new church for the Sainte Geneviève abbey in Paris to fulfil a vow made ten years earlier after recovering from serious illness. The director of the Bâtiments du Roi, Abel Poisson de Vandières (later the Marquis de Marigny and de Menars), used this project dedicated to Paris’s patron as propaganda (see MARQUISE DE POMPADOUR AND MARQUIS DE MARIGNY, p. xxx). He capitalized on royal artistic patronage to rehabilitate the monarchy’s tarnished image by linking the king’s newly-found piety to the ‘Gothic’ fervour of France’s early saints, and deploying the church to exemplify new religious architecture. Since the early eighteenth century, French architects and critics sought to depart from Italian Renaissance church prototypes. The lay theorists, Jean-Louis de Cordemoy and Marc- Antoine Laugier, wished to forego massive arcades decorated with pilastered orders supporting heavy barrel vaults. They looked back at the opus francigenum – the medieval name for Rayonnant Gothic – that master masons had developed around Paris in the 1230s and 1240s, using armed stone construction and external buttressing to erect piers of unprecedented height and perforate walls with large expanses of glass. Cordemoy and Laugier urged the adoption of the structural system, but not the ornamentation, of Gothic buildings.

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The Marquis de Marigny selected Jacques-Germain Soufflot for Sainte-Geneviève. Soufflot designed it as a Greek cross, a configuration borrowed from Early Christian martyriums, churches erected on a martyr’s tomb. Eschewing arcades, he separated the nave from the side aisles by rows of iron-reinforced stone columns. He constructed external buttresses akin to those of Gothic churches to reduce the thrust of the vaults. Soufflot’s collaborator Maximillien Brébion summarized the architect’s intentions: to combine ‘Greek’ forms (Classical orders) with Gothic structure.

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Besides their cry for a ‘rational’ emulation of Gothic structures, other considerations guided Cordemoy and Laugier’s obsession with dégagement. The Council of Trent mandated the Gallican Church to adapt medieval cathedrals to suit new liturgical requirements. To implement the Counter-Reformation prescription for lay participation in Mass, the French clergy opened up Medieval choirs, replaced stained glass with clear windowpanes, and removed extraneous furnishings. As theorists, Cordemoy and Laugier argued for Greco-Gothic as the ideal synthesis of architectural styles; as clergymen, they endorsed this model to elicit the visibility and transparency necessary to Tridentine liturgy.

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Completed after the Revolution, the building was immediately redesignated as a mausoleum to great Frenchmen: the Panthéon. It duly underwent various alterations up to 1818 by Émiland-Marie Gauthey and Antoine-Chrystôme Quatremère de Quincy, including blocking up its large windows.

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Grand Théâtre, Bordeaux, Nouvelle-Aquitaine (1773–80)
The theatre permeated eighteenth-century French society. Not only were new plays in constant demand,

the theatre itself was the centre of urban life. The Enlightenment thinkers, François-Marie Arouet (known as Voltaire) and Denis Diderot, even contended that, if reformed, the arts of the stage could play a vital political role by educating citizens and bring about a virtuous society.

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Architects experimented with innovative forms to reflect the theatre’s role in political thought and civic life. While auditoriums were previously architecturally undistinguished, usually annexes to palaces and hôtels, now they became ‘theatre-monuments’, freestanding buildings to improve public safety, enhance audience enjoyment of plays with horseshoe seating, and adorn cities.

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In 1773 Louis-François-Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, maréchal-duc de Richelieu, Governor of Guyenne, commissioned Victor Louis to build a theatre in Bordeaux, in emulation of Marie-Joseph Peyre and Charles De Wailly’s project for Paris’s Comédie-Française (today Théâtre de l’Odéon) (1767–82). Like Peyre and De Wailly, Louis’s design utilized features hitherto reserved for palatial architecture. The façade had a portico of colossal Corinthian columns, the order most often associated with the monarchy; he borrowed the configuration of the Staircase of the Ambassadors (1674-79) in the Château de Versailles (Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.1), also setting the theatre’s staircase within a tall volume dramatically lit from above; and he decorated the auditorium’s interior with royal insignia and profuse gilding.

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Like the Comédie-Française, Bordeaux’s Grand Théâtre was also an anchor for a property venture, thus intersecting with the desire to create a lucrative new housing market. Louis deftly mixed mercantile interests and monumentality, like he developed housing in Palais- Royal gardens in Paris (1784).

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Restoration work on the interiors in 1991 and on the façades in 2006 has brought back the theatre to its original appearance.

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Royal Saltworks, Arc-et-Senans, Bourgogne-France-Comté (1774-79)
Although sometimes called a ‘Revolutionary Architect’, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was a fervent servant of the French monarchy. He espoused the progressive vision of royal administrators who sought to modernize by improving commerce and industry. Ledoux believed architecture could play a key role in these reforms. Ironically, he implemented his vision of buildings as social catalysts most clearly in projects sponsored by the Ferme Générale, a loathed and outdated duty-collection body acting on the king’s behalf.

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For the Ferme Générale, Ledoux designed the Royal Saltworks, a salt production facility. Subsequently, in 1780–1804, he also envisaged its expansion into a new city, Chaux, though it remained an unbuilt utopian vision. He described Chaux in Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation (Architecture considered with respect to art, mores, and legislation), published in 1804. Ledoux wanted buildings to emulate the magic of opera – its poetic and rhetorical techniques – to move observers and, through catharsis, revitalize social mores.

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Ledoux devised buildings that imparted their social functions. At the Saltworks he placed the director’s residence at the centre of a panoptic plan to convey the king’s all-encompassing power. For Chaux, he imagined housing workers in villas representative of their trade: for instance, he shaped the coopers’ house and workshop as two intersecting cylinders, evoking barrels, and with concentric circles carved on their façades derived from the metal hoops that bind barrels.

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Ledoux achieved an extraordinary synthesis of poetic expression and architectural form in the entrance pavilion. He intended it to convey royal power at the service of social renewal, He shaped the pavilion’s high-pitched roof and low walls to mimic the region’s vernacular; for its Doric portico he imitated the Propylaia (Key Buildings, Chapter 16, p. xxx) gateway at the Athenian Acropolis (438–432 BCE); he carved out the entrance door from an artificial grotto alluding the origin of saltwater within the earth; he shaped the voussoirs of the door arch in the form of sunrays radiating from the king’s arms to stress royal munificence; he displayed sculpted urns from which pours congealed water, making visible the transformation of saltwater into 120 crystals. The entrance conveys architecturally the king’s demiurgic intervention as he gives shape, order and purpose to formless nature.

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The Saltworks closed in 1895. After a long decline, it is now includes a museum of Ledoux’s buildings.

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Cenotaph for Newton, unbuilt (1784)
Despite numerous hôtels for aristocratic clients, Étienne- Louis Boullée is known first and foremost for his utopian projects, colossal imaginary buildings lavishly rendered in ink wash. Boullée designed his celebrated cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton as an immense sphere set on a tiered cylindrical base ringed with cypresses, in the manner of ancient Roman mausoleums. During the day innumerable perforations in the vault would simulate the effect of a starry night. At night a giant armillary sphere would light the cavernous spherical interior. Huddled next to Newton’s funerary monument, at the bottom of the sphere, visitors would revere the scientist’s genius in describing the workings of the universe.

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Boullée designed the cenotaph, never built, as one of several projects to illustrate his unpublished treatise on architecture, Architecture: Essai sur l’art (c. 1780–93). Seeking to outshine previous authors who, he claimed, were only concerned with the ‘scientific’ part of architecture, Boullée focused instead on the expressive power of form. He elaborated a ‘theory of solids’: because of the innate human affinity for geometric solids, he claimed, architecture could generate emotional responses in spectators, congruent with the building’s purpose. In his treatise, Boullée guided the reader through different architectural programmes.

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Despite the extravagant scale of his schemes and flighty prose, Boullée’s manifesto echoed the traditional teachings of rhetoric and poetics that prescribed formal decorum (rules of appropriateness), particularly in ornamentation. In his sensory repertoire, Boullée maintained that Newton’s Cenotaph should express grandeur, even the sublime. He hence relied upon the description by the English philosopher and political scientist, Edmund Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Following Burke, Boullée summoned infinity, size, vacuity, magnificence, and contrasting light and darkness, to craft the Cenotaph as a machine to generate sensations of the sublime.

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Queen’s Hamlet, Versailles, Île-de-France (1783-86)
No project discredited Queen Marie Antoinette more than the hamlet she added to her private domain of Petit Trianon in Versailles (1762–68, fig. 60.29). Between 1783 and 1786 her architect, Richard Mique, with the help of the painter Hubert Robert, built a mock-Normand village of thatched rubble stone cottages. Her gardener Antoine Richard arranged Mique’s structures around an artificial pond, at the edge of which Mique constructed a neo-medieval tower, named the Marlborough Tower after a popular folk song. The Queen’s Hamlet outraged revolutionaries by its apparent mockery of harsh peasant life: behind its rustic façades were luxurious decoration and furniture. There, the queen and her close circle could forgo the strictures of court life, adopting the informal manners and dress of their imaginary roles as prosperous farmers in an idyllic countryside.

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The hamlet built at Chantilly by the princes of Condé (1774) featured similar theatrical conceits. There, one timber-framed cottage contained a sumptuous salon; another sheltered an artificial forest. Court architects involved in theatre often used such architectural contrasts to provoke playful surprises. Pierre-Adrien Pâris, who designed a portable theatre for Marie Antoinette in 1785, created whimsical maisons de bois (temporary wooden houses) for his patron, attaching them to the Château de Versailles (1661–1770; Key Buildings, p. xxx, fig. 60.1) as additional spaces for the queen’s balls. Each of the maisons had a different decor: Doric halls, mirrored salons and topiary gardens, much as Pâris did for the royal stage.

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The playwright and designer, Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, believed that landscape gardens should mimic operas, transporting strollers to fanciful foreign lands. Other men of letters, influenced by the physiocrats (economists who believed in agriculture as the primary source of national wealth) and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that gardens needed to improve agriculture and peasants’ living conditions. The Queen’s Hamlet oscillated between these two poles. While it took on the appearance of a rural genre painting or a stage-set, it also served as a working farm that provided dairy dairy products. Part operatic decor, part testing ground for a return to the land, the Hamlet contributed to the modern interest in idealised nature that led later architects to appropriate vernacular forms and develop garden cities.

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The Établissement Public du Château, du Musée et du Domaine National de Versailles supervises the Hameau’s ongoing renovation. It reopened the site to the public in 2006.

Further Reading

Anderson, Christy. Renaissance Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Bergdoll, Barry. European Architecture 1750–1890. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France 1500 to 1700. 5th edn. Edited by Richard Beresford. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Braham, Allan. The Architecture of the French Enlightenment. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980.

Egbert, Donald Drew. The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Lemerle, Frédérique, and Yves Pauwels. Baroque Architecture 1600–1750. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.

Middleton, Robin, and David Watkin. Neoclassical and Nineteenth-Century Architecture. 2nd edn. 2 vols. New York: Rizzoli, 1987.

Pérouse de Montclos, Jean-Marie. Histoire de l’architecture française de la Renaissance à la Révolution. Paris: Mengès and Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1989

Pérouse de Montclos, Jean-Marie. L’architecture à la française: Du milieu du xve à la fin du xviiie siècle. 3rd edn. Paris: A. et J. Picard, 2013.

Picon, Antoine. French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980.

Zerner, Henri. Renaissance Art in France: The Invention of Classicism. Paris: Flammarion, 2003.