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H nn nd H nn t n : Th L f r
P r

David P. Jordan

French Historical Studies, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2004, pp.
87-113 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Haussmann and Haussmannisation:
The Legacy for Paris

David P. Jordan

When Georges-Eugène Haussmann died ( 10 January 1891) he had been
so long absent from public life that there was no recent picture to ac-
company his obituary. L’illustration doctored an old photograph, deep-
ening the lines around eyes and mouth, taking some flesh off his cheeks,
removing most of his hair, and changing his coat and cravat. The now
melancholy, tired countenance of a vanished supremacy gazes sadly out
at us.1

He had fallen from power more than twenty years earlier, reluc-
tantly sacrificed by Napoléon III, who no more understood the finan-
cial legerdemain that brought his prefect down than did most of those
closing in for the kill. Few regretted the departure of this harsh, arro-
gant, humorless, and utterly efficient administrator. His reputation was
soon completely ruined by the debacle of Sedan, which engulfed the
Second Empire in vituperation. But of all the significant figures of the
age Haussmann created work that endured longer, even aged grace-
fully, and entered into the consciousness of the French in ways impos-
sible to measure. The plan and to some extent the vision of Paris that
all who live there or have spent time in residence there carry in their
minds is the city he made. There is a nice irony in the fact that the

David P. Jordan is LAS Distinguished Professor of French History at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. He is the author of several books including Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of
Baron Haussmann (Chicago, 1995). He is presently working on a study of Napoléon and the French
Revolution.

1 David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York,
1995), reproduces this portrait, between pages 328 and 329. The French historical tradition, so
rich in invention, philosophical acumen, and erudition, has not much cultivated the biographical
form, so highly evolved in the Anglophone world. There are two recent biographies of Hauss-
mann in French: Michel Carmona, Haussmann (Paris, 2000), and Georges Valance, Haussmann le
grand (Paris, 2001). Neither breaks new ground, and both may be read for the details of his life
and an account of his work. Nicolas Chaudun, Haussmann au crible (Paris, 2000), is biographical
in approach, although less detailed than Carmona and Valance.

French Historical Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Winter 2004)
Copyright © 2004 by the Society for French Historical Studies

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88 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

Boulevard Haussmann—there was a rancorous debate in the Chamber
of Deputies about thus honoring him—was the only major street cut,
or rather completed, between 1920 and 1940.2 The city’s debt for his
massive urban renewal was retired only in 1929.

Urban patterns persist, sometimes through centuries, and bind
future generations. Witness the Louvre-Tuileries palace. From the six-
teenth to the twentieth centuries, from François I to François Mitter-
rand, successive regimes could not resist laying hands on the buildings,
which became the largest palace in the world. No other structure in
Paris has so successfully survived so many royal (or imperial) masters
and their architects. Haussmann’s work on Paris, I here argue, is similar.
He fixed the shape, the itineraries, the architecture, and in part the cul-
ture of Paris in ways that have shown surprising vitality for more than a
century. His successors have added onto his work without obliterating
it. Even those who loathe Haussmann’s urban ideas and influence have
found themselves enmeshed in his net. The Third Republic embraced
and continued his work, despite official denials. The most radical pro-
posals for transforming Paris anew, those of Le Corbusier, were in fact
haussmannisme raised to another level. Throughout the twentieth cen-
tury small but significant efforts were made to escape his conceptual-
ization of the city, culminating in the De Gaulle and Pompidou years,
when a new Paris lifted skyward. At ground level Haussmann’s streets
endured, and so too did public attachment to his city under attack. Mit-
terrand erected enormous new urban monuments, yet paradoxically
they were in the manner dictated by Haussmann’s work.

Although the template of modern Paris, particularly the itineraries
above and below ground, remains Haussmann’s, the city is no longer
his. At what moment, it is worth asking, would the powerful préfet de la
Seine have ceased to recognize the city whose transformation he had
supervised for seventeen years? 3 Not, I think, until the 1960s, a long
life for an organism so gigantic and complex as Paris.

Haussmannisation during the Second Empire

Those who detested the man and his work coined the term hauss-
manniser in 1892 to define urban renewal by demolition. His parti-

2 The first decree for the new boulevard was issued in 1857. The two distinct sections of work
were completed in 1863. Two prolongations were completed in 1865 and 1868. The boulevard was
finished only in 1927, after a decree of 1913.

3 Haussmann’s transformations can be quantified—he greatly enjoyed making careful enu-
merations in his Mémoires of meters of sewer pipe and roadway and of chestnut trees planted, for he
was always comfortable with the arithmetical component of administration—but just how much
he accomplished may be seen most clearly in a simple bilan of the major streets cut when he was
prefect. I count fifty-three, which includes every major artery in Paris save the Champs-Elysées.

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HAUSSMANN AND HAUSSMANNISATION 89

sans take a more analytical view. It was, writes Pierre Pinon, ‘‘a precise
response to a specific problem: opening up [dégagement] the historic
center of Paris by cutting new streets.’’ 4 Haussmann’s preeminent con-
cerns were ‘‘to cut [streets], align, embellish, and monumentalize the
city by regularizing all the façades.’’5 No section of Paris was untouched
by these transformations, although much of the Left Bank was rela-
tively unaffected, and some neighborhoods, notably the Marais, were
cut adrift from the city and continued their slide into decay. Yet ‘‘most
of the projects from the end of the [nineteenth] century until World
War I completed projects either launched or planned by Haussmann.’’6

The uniform look of the new city was created as much by the build-
ings lining the new, obsessively straight streets as by the streets them-
selves. The striking regularity of the typical Haussmann building—in
the Beaux-Arts manner, its height fixed by decree depending on the
width of the street, with balconies (their depth regulated) and orna-
mental ironwork—was achieved with surprisingly vague general regu-
lations. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, for example, ‘‘owners and
their neighbors should arrange between themselves to have, in each
construction îlot, the same height for each floor in order to continue
the principal lines of the façades and to make the entire îlot a single
architectural ensemble.’’7 The architects of the day shared a common
vocabulary and needed no additional coercion to produce a homoge-
neous cityscape.

Haussmann underlined the severe rectilinearity of the transformed
city by planting rows of chestnut trees and, in the center of Paris, where
the urban fabric was closely woven and he had little room to maneu-
ver, by improvising, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes clumsily, to keep
his neoclassical aesthetics intact. He created optical illusions by moving
monuments (or building new ones) and occasionally erected an eccen-
tric new building or monument to fill an irregular urban space or to
complete a geometric pattern. His most successful illusion is the Boule-

4 Pierre Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale (Paris, 1999), 279. Himself an architect by train-
ing, Pinon is particularly good on the role of architects in the history of Paris. This is the best recent
book on the history of Paris, although, like virtually all work by French scholars, it is indifferent
to that of non-Francophone scholars. For instance, David Van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural
Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, 1994), the best study
of how buildings got built in the capital, is not mentioned, nor is some recent work on Haussmann.

5 Louis Bergeron, ‘‘Paysages de Paris,’’ in Paris: Genèse d’un paysage, ed. Louis Bergeron
(Paris, 1989), 268.

6 Bernard Rouleau, Paris: Histoire d’un espace (Paris, 1997), 364.
7 Quoted in Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 218–19. He gives an excellent description

of ‘‘le paysage haussmannien’’ (216–17). François Loyer, Paris XIXe siècle: L’immeuble et la rue (Paris,
1987), has a superb set of photographs, mostly his own, showing simultaneously the fundamen-
tal uniformity of Haussmann’s Paris and the degree of ornamental variation possible; see, among
many examples, 165, 178–79, 202–6, 242–43.

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90 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

vard Henri IV. At one end it is perfectly bisected by the July Column
in the Place de la Bastille, at the other by Soufflot’s great dome of the
Panthéon. To create the appearance of geometric regularity he had to
make the Pont Sully, which carries the Boulevard Henri IV to the Left
Bank, the only bridge over the Seine not parallel with the others. The
visual illusion is exposed as soon as one tries to walk from the Place de
la Bastille to the Panthéon. The old, twisting streets up the Montagne
Sainte-Geneviève are the only routes.

To create the new Place du Châtelet, originally envisioned as the
center for the new Paris,8 Haussmann moved Pierre Fontaine’s 1808
palm fountain to the center of the Place, built the two theaters (Théâtre
de la Ville and Théâtre Musical de Paris) to anchor the Place, and then,
on the Ile de la Cité, built the Cour de Commerce with its off-center
dome, which makes no sense until one notices (standing in the middle
of the Boulevard Réaumur-Sébastopol and looking south) that it visu-
ally bisects that thoroughfare. On a map one can see that the dome
of the Cour de Commerce is in turn balanced by the Gare de l’Est at
the northern edge of this cityscape. Across the Seine Haussmann built
the fountain at the Place Saint-Michel to close the perspective from the
Cour de Commerce on the Left Bank, visually ignoring the bend in the
boulevards when the Boulevard du Palais bisects the Ile de la Cité.

His aesthetic rigidity gave Paris the general uniformity of appear-
ance it still has, which is fundamental to the city’s character and beauty.
But even the indefatigable administrator, anxious to impose order
everywhere, could not master the accumulated diversity of the histori-
cal city. Where he was able to build on unurbanized land, in north-
western Paris, haussmannisation (this is a coinage from 1926) succeeded.
Emile Zola likened the process to radical surgery accomplished by
saber, since cutting streets is fundamental. In the older sections his
efforts were often thwarted. Turn off any number of his new streets and
you will find old Paris: the Avenue de l’Opéra or the Boulevard Saint-
Germain are good examples. Such juxtapositions, for many, contribute
to the city’s charm.

Haussmann’s percées imposed an enduring template on Paris and on
an urban logic worked out in the quarter century after his fall. Paris was
seen as the quintessential modern city at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury not because its buildings were technically advanced (mostly they
were not), or because new patterns of urbanization had been devel-
oped (Haussmann’s ideas were traditional, neoclassical), or because
Haussmann brought new levels of comfort to urban living (quite the

8 This is the argument in Van Zanten, Building Paris.

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contrary). His most unconventional and innovative ideas—moving the
cemeteries out of the city, for example—were rejected. It was the new
streets, especially the boulevards, that were universally admired. Hauss-
mann’s shortcomings as a city maker were perpetuated by virtually
all the successive governments through the Third and Fourth Repub-
lics, indeed well into the 1960s. The scope of his transformations was
enormous.9

Haussmann built streets for several purposes. The Rue du Havre
began the series of streets for access from the train stations to the cen-
ter of Paris. It was followed by the Boulevard de Strasbourg, the south-
ern part of the Rue de Rennes, and the Rue de Rouen (today the Rue
Auber). A subcategory of these streets comprised those that set off
monuments. The Rues Scribe, Meyerbeer, Glück, and Halévy created
the island on which Garnier’s Opéra eventually sat. The Avenue Vic-
toria (named in honor of the English queen when she visited Paris in
1855 for the Universal Exposition) presented the Hôtel de Ville, while
the Rue des Ecoles was originally intended to give access to the Sor-
bonne and the Collège de France. The taste for monuments as a species
of urban sculpture, which Haussmann had inherited, continued well
into the twentieth century. One aspect of this sculptural predisposition,
little heeded at the time, was the destruction of the historical context
of buildings and monuments. Haussmann was responsible for the huge
parvis of Notre-Dame that isolates that great church from the city, but
Parisians had long clamored for the church to be freed of the barnacles
that had clung to it for centuries, and they welcomed the work.

The Grande Croisée (the Sébastopol-Rivoli axis) needed the Bou-
levards Saint-Michel and Saint-Antoine as extensions and was designed
to open the center of the city. Those streets linking monuments or places
both opened the city and created urban itineraries that remain funda-
mental. The Avenue de l’Opéra linked the Théâtre-Française and the
opera; the Avenue Bosquet linked the Ecole Militaire and the Pont de
l’Alma.10 The Rues Beaubourg and Réaumur and the Boulevard Ras-
pail, indistinguishable from so many Second Empire streets, were cut
by the Third Republic and perpetuated Haussmann’s ideas of urbani-
zation. The Avenue de l’Opéra, considered by many the model of the
paysage haussmannien, with an unbroken series of elegant buildings in
the same style, leading like a magnificent carpet to the throne, Garnier’s

9 The water supply, the sewers, parks, churches, the mobilier urbain, housing, schools, and
the significant changes in all of these aspects over more than a century are not treated in any detail
in this essay. The same is true of immigration patterns, the deindustrialization of Paris, and urban
finances—to mention only the most important topics.

10 I follow Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 216–17.

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opera house, was not completed until 1875.11 The Boulevard Saint-
Germain, another unmistakable Haussmann street, was completed only
in 1878. Pierre Lavedan points out that 126,000 new buildings, many
along Haussmann’s new streets and all in Second Empire style, were
erected between 1879 and 1888. Even today these neo-haussmannien
buildings make up a substantial part not only of the look of Paris but
of the city’s housing stock.12 The ‘‘type haussmannien d’immeuble,’’ as
well as the streets on which those buildings are constructed, lived into
the twentieth century. Without looking at the carved name of the archi-
tect and the year of construction set into hundreds of Paris apartment
houses, even the knowledgeable flaneur often cannot distinguish a Sec-
ond Empire building from one built twenty years later.

There were attempts to break the mold, many originating with
young architects who felt muzzled by the inherited conventions. But the
building codes and regulations, although precise and restrictive about
ornamentation, were not crippling, and there was no widespread call
for change until nearly the end of the century. Clients, always the bane
of architects, were content. The building style developed in the 1850s
and 1860s, fixed in city regulations and given the imprimatur of the
Beaux-Arts curriculum and atelier system associated with good taste,
modernity, and wealth, became the style of choice for those able to
invest in the new city. Familiar façades, building materials, and predict-
able ornamentation proclaimed the social standing of the occupants.
The ‘‘type haussmannien d’immeuble’’ had become the very essence of
a public building. Baltard’s sheds at Les Halles were clearly innovative;
Garnier’s opera was dazzling. But Baltard’s subsequent work in Paris
was conventional and historicist (the odd Saint-Augustin church built
at the intersections of the Boulevards Malesherbes and Haussmann
is resplendent with Renaissance motifs and vocabulary), and Garnier
built only one other building in Paris (a minor structure off the Boule-
vard Saint-Germain). Neither architect changed the taste of the age.

Haussmann’s Legacy during the Third Republic

Old patterns dominated, but Paris acquired in these years, from Hauss-
mann’s fall to World War I, some of its most picturesque and unchar-
acteristic buildings and monuments; the Sacré Coeur, the Eiffel Tower,
the Moulin Rouge, and the Grand Palais.13 The Palais de Chaillot and

11 Rouleau, Paris: Histoire d’un espace, 365.
12 Ibid., 379.
13 David Harvey, ‘‘Monument and Myth: The Building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart,’’

in The Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, Md.,

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the Cinéma Rex came a bit later, as did the brick buildings that sprang
up around the city and formed an architectural necklace made of new
materials where the fortifications of the ‘‘zone’’ had recently stood. Each
of these structures is, arguably, outside the aesthetic tolerance of hauss-
mannisme. Yet the façades of the Gares Saint-Lazare, d’Orsay, and Lyon,
built during the same period, along with the Métro (both underground
and elevated), which spread throughout the city the iron structures
hitherto isolated at Les Halles and the railroad stations, are within the
canon. The grands lycées of Paris mostly date from these years, as do the
buildings of the Sorbonne, although their deliberate historical refer-
ences belie the fact. There were also new commercial buildings, notably
the grands magasins, which proved that Paris architecture was not con-
demned to endless repetition. Gustave Eiffel and Louis Charles Boi-
leau were involved in the design of the Bon Marché (1876), and Paul
Sédille designed the new Printemps (1881). The new capitalist enter-
prises adopted the introduction of art nouveau, which found dramatic
expression in the Galeries Lafayette building (1898) and Frantz Jour-
dain’s Samaritaine (1905).14 The point is that individual buildings did
not change Haussmann’s city any more than had Garnier’s or Baltard’s
exquisite structures. Despite all this innovation, Paris remained solidly
haussmannien.15 The bulk of the building that went on in these years was
familiar, traditional, and conservative. New and important forms, the
brilliant buildings that catch our eye, appeared in the Paris cityscape
as sui generis. So they remain: unique gems (or magma) set among row
upon row of type haussmannien structures.

To change the overall look of Paris, innovation was needed on a
scale that could compete with Haussmann’s transformations. On the
eve of World War I there was a clamor for variety and beauty, but it
resulted only in a few unique and striking buildings. Imperial Paris
remained largely unchanged. The very titles of books published in these
years are eloquent: La beauté de Paris by Paul Léon (1909), Des moyens
juridiques de sauvegarder les aspects esthétiques de la ville de Paris by Charles
Magny (1911), La beauté de Paris et la loi by Charles Lortsch (1913).16

1989), is a splendid essay on the politics involved in building the church. Joseph Harriss, The Tallest
Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (New York, 1975), although popular in approach, is a useful survey
of the tower.

14 See Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven, Conn., 1979),
141–47, for a discussion (and photographs). This remains, to my mind, the best book on the sub-
ject, yet it is largely ignored by French authorities.

15 See Louis Bergeron and Marcel Roncayolo, ‘‘D’Haussmann à nos jours,’’ in Bergeron,
Paris: Genèse d’un paysage, 231.

16 The list comes from Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 259, and my discussion fol-
lows his.

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94 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

These lovers of the city, who were born and came of age during Hauss-
mann’s original transformations or in the long twilight of his influence,
imagined another Paris: less uniform, less imitative, less staid, and less
controlled by administrative fiat. None of these critics suggested replac-
ing Haussmann’s city, but there was a growing concern to preserve those
parts of Paris that antedated the Second Empire. Cutting streets and
erecting similar and harmonious ranks of apartment houses had far less
appeal in the new century than a generation earlier when it was obvious
to all that the old Paris was buckling under the weight of its population.
A new sensibility about the city was emerging.

The first changes legislated were aesthetic. No one was willing to
abandon or radically alter Haussmann’s work; no one suggested de-
stroying the uniform urban paysage. Either his critics wanted some relax-
ation of the restrictions on innovation of the façade, or they called
for even more streets to be cut and lined with uniform buildings. The
former group of critics was more successful: no significant new streets
would be cut, except on paper.

New regulations concerning façade design were enacted in 1882.
These made no radical changes in the old restrictions and pleased
few besides Haussmann’s devoted successors and protégés. Encorbelle-
ment remained prohibited; balcony dimensions were unchanged. Pre-
cise measurements were fixed for ‘‘every decorative element, including
columns and pilasters, friezes, cornices, consoles, and capitals.’’ 17 The
decree of 13 August 1902, however, was different (although the govern-
ment habit of announcing change and bad news in August, then as now,
is familiar). The décret was a response to the strict enforcement of regula-
tions about façade decoration which, said critics, was turning Paris into
a ‘‘ville-caserne.’’ 18 It was explicitly crafted ‘‘to encourage an inclina-
tion toward the picturesque long constrained by a regime of obligatory
regularization, [and] to let the most unexpected and picturesque effects

17 Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 149.
18 It is worth noting that the criticism was first made during the Second Empire. Then, as

at the end of the century, it was an aesthetic judgment and had nothing to do with the misleading
cliché, still much repeated, that Haussmann’s transformations were made for strategic reasons,
to prevent or destroy urban insurrection. Haussmann himself spoke of the Boulevard Richard
Lenoir as deliberately strategic, providing military access to the neighborhood around the Place
de la Bastille that had held up General Cavaignac’s troops for a week in 1848. See Mémoires du
Baron Haussmann, 3 vols. (Paris 1890), 2:318. The cliché that the underlying purpose of Hauss-
mann’s boulevards was to create clear fields for artillery fire and room for cavalry charges has
been perennially argued, most brilliantly by Walter Benjamin. In fact, the prefect’s motives were
aesthetic, bureaucratic, and economic. See Gaillard, Paris, la ville, 67ff., for the careful distinc-
tions made between rich, less rich, and poor neighborhoods. The only other project with a strong
strategic component—the system of streets on the Left Bank that surrounded the Panthéon neigh-
borhood—was the Third Réseau, the last of Haussmann’s transformations, and its purpose was to
quarantine a potentially dangerous neighborhood rather than to attack the insurgents.

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HAUSSMANN AND HAUSSMANNISATION 95

emerge.’’19 For the first time façades were to be regulated not by mea-
suring specific elements of design, but in reference to an overall spatial
envelope, or gabarit. ‘‘Within this gabarit, the architect was to have a new
freedom in composing the façade, with the permissible degree of over-
hang related to the width of the street.’’ 20 Here was a deliberate, but
only partial, rejection of the type haussmannien.

Loosening the restrictions on façades let the genie out of the
bottle. When the extension of the Rue Réaumur was opened (1897),
the Municipal Council of Paris sponsored a competition with prizes
for the best façades, hoping to give the street distinction and architec-
tural prestige. The following year the competition was extended to all of
Paris, and six prizes were awarded annually from 1898 until 1914.21 Paul
Léon and his friends, who had sounded the call for urban beauty and
some relaxation of restrictions, were soon lamenting the excesses. They
found the buildings on the new Rue Etienne-Marcel, for example, com-
pletely disproportionate to the Place des Victoires, the last place built by
the monarchy before the Revolution. Now was heard the first sneering
invocation of other cities as the antithesis of Paris (and beauty). ‘‘We
would hope,’’ Lavedan elaborated and embellished in 1975, ‘‘that the
natural look of Paris remain Parisian, that it not become a replica of
Moscow or New York.’’22

A far more serious threat to the look and fabric of Paris entailed
Haussmann’s other urban obsession: transportation. Eugène Hénard,
the son of a Paris architect who had studied in his father’s atelier,
held an appointment in the Travaux de Paris, the office that directed
public works, where he remained in relative obscurity until his retire-
ment in 1913. In his official capacity he worked on the expositions of
1889 and 1900. He is remembered, however, for the eight studies or
fasicules he published between 1903 and 1909 on the planning problems
of Paris. These established his reputation as an urbanist,23 particularly
as an expert on traffic circulation. There is no need here to explicate
and analyze Hénard’s ideas and proposals in detail, since none of them
was realized. The transportation problems Haussmann had been unable

19 Quoted in Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 228.
20 See Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 149, esp. n. 38, where she gives the specific details

of the new restrictions.
21 See Les concours de façades de la ville de Paris, 1898–1905 (Paris, 1905) and subsequent years.
22 Quoted in Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 259.
23 The word does not come into English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, until

1930. Le Robert gives 1910 as the date for the earliest French usage: ‘‘Spécialiste de l’aménagement
des espaces urbains.’’ Prior to the need for a new coinage, urbaniste had the exceptionally special-
ized and long obsolete meaning of an adherent of Pope Urban VI, the first pope elected after the
Babylonian captivity. Urbaniser came a bit earlier (1873), urbanisation later (1919).

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or unwilling to solve remained (and still exist) to plague the city. He
has been castigated for not having anticipated the automobile, and the
most radical urbanists and architects, from Hénard to the present, have
sought to remedy this myopia. Ultimately, getting from here to there
in historical Paris was and is enormously difficult. Some thoroughfares
could be cut through Paris; others could not (except in Hénard’s, and
later Le Corbusier’s, imagination).

Hénard may here serve as a representative figure. He was the first
to propose comprehensive solutions to the perennial problem of Paris
transportation. Haussmann’s ideas on getting about in the city were,
even for the mid–nineteenth century, primitive, limited as they were
to walking and the private carriage. He had little or no sense of the
importance of public transportation within the city, although he could
be imaginative about trains to, from, and around Paris. The car may be
strangling the streets of Paris a bit more than those of American cities—
although the degree of choking escapes precise quantification—and
many since Hénard have tried to fix the mess. The Left Bank highway
along the quai proposed during Pompidou’s presidency, which would
mirror one across the river, was blocked only at the last minute by popu-
lar and political pressure. The current low-lying barriers erected on
some thoroughfares to maintain a single fast lane for buses and taxis is
the most recent attempt to get traffic moving in Paris. The squat cement
barriers everywhere in Paris are there to keep motorists from parking
on the walkways.

Haussmann had been defeated by historical Paris. The chief instru-
ment of haussmannisation, the street, was trumped by old architecture.
Fortunately for those who love the city as a historical monster, so too
would be all those impatient or angry transformers who followed the
great prefect. The unmovable monuments he yielded to still thwart
those who would cross the city, especially from south to north. Two of
the most prestigious structures in Paris make it impossible to connect
the banks of the Seine in the middle of the city: Le Vau’s Institut de
France on the Left Bank and the Louvre-Tuileries across the river. No
major Left Bank street connects to the Ponts Neuf, Carrousel, Royal,
and Solférino. Haussmann had wanted to carry the Rue de Rennes from
the Gare du Maine and the Gare Montparnasse across the Seine, repeat-
ing the pattern, which he had used for all the railroad stations, of con-
necting the terminals with major arteries into the center of the city.
Extending the Rue de Rennes would have meant destroying the Institut.
Haussmann demurred. Across the river the massive Louvre-Tuileries
and its gardens effectively blocks a huge chunk of the Right Bank. The

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Right Bank roadway along the quai, both at and below street level, is
a twentieth-century attempt to get around the Louvre-Tuileries block-
ade. Moreover, the Boulevard Saint-Germain, which runs like a slack
rope from the Pont Sully to the Pont de la Concorde, essentially turns
its back on the river, because there is no convenient crossing, and con-
tinues the orientation of the Left Bank to the south rather than the
north. Even the Left Bank road proposed in the 1960s, which would
have straightened out the Boulevard Saint-Germain, contained no pro-
visions for linking the two banks of the Seine.

Hénard had wanted more haussmannisation. He was virtually alone
in the early twentieth century in his praise of the prefect’s work until
Le Corbusier, in 1925, added the prestige of his name: ‘‘Haussmann did
nothing more than replace sordid six-story buildings with sumptuous
six-story buildings, wretched neighborhoods with magnificent neigh-
borhoods.’’24 Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (1925) proposed cutting broad
highways across Paris and lining them with massive skyscrapers to solve
the transportation and housing problems simultaneously.

These paper proposals would have transformed Haussmann’s Paris
by carrying his ideas to a radical conclusion. Instead the city has lived
with the problems the prefect could not solve. Virtually every new
urban project, whether building, monument, or street, harks back to
Haussmann’s work, and his name became a banner both for those who
would build more and those who would preserve. The preservationists
dominated the first half of the twentieth century. It seemed that hauss-
mannisation had run its course. From 1914 until well after World War II,
transformations of Paris, at least in the old core city, were minimal.
The disastrous political history of the twentieth century overwhelmed
France. If there was the will to change the capital significantly, which
is doubtful, there was no money. The city remained ‘‘perfectly identifi-
able’’ in the vast urban agglomeration on the Seine. It remained Hauss-
mann’s city. What changes there have been, some of them significant,
have not burst the old urban envelope. Paris kept (and still keeps) the
city limits created by Haussmann in 1859. With the exceptions of the
Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, which were absorbed,
there were no further annexations. Haussmann’s proposed ‘‘green belt’’
around the city became the périphérique highway of the 1970s and served
not only to contain Paris but also to perpetuate its medieval form as a
walled city. Around 1940 Jules Romains, an exceptional observer of the
city, wrote: ‘‘Paris is a fortress which has changed its carapace several

24 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, 2d ed. (Paris, 1966), 255.

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98 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

times because the energy generated inside the fortress exploded the
old carapace. But the broad outline [of the city] remains the same.’’ 25
The city had been walled by Philippe Auguste and Charles V. Louis XIV
took down their walls and created the grands boulevards. These boule-
vards, by circumvallating the core city, effectively kept Paris a walled
town. The 1785 wall of the Fermiers-Généraux reprised (this time in
wood) the wall Louis had razed. The French Revolution tore it down.
Then Adolphe Thiers’s wall of the 1840s, which created an uninhab-
ited ‘‘zone’’ between the old walls and his new defenses, again fixed the
physical limits of Paris. When this wall came down, the outer boule-
vards, the so-called Maréchaux, named for Napoléon’s marshals, were
built. The highway now ringing Paris is the modern version of the medi-
eval wall: Paris inside the road, non-Paris beyond.26

Just as its physical form and problems persist, so too do the poli-
tics and mechanisms of urban change. With Haussmann the political
power of the state was incessantly focused on Paris, not for a project or
two but for every project during a seventeen-year period. Behind his
authority and the massive urban renewal was the emperor. Someone
once quipped there have been many Haussmanns (or would-be Hauss-
manns) but only one Napoléon III. The state has remained central to all
Paris projects. ‘‘From the Hundred Years War to the Commune, includ-
ing along the way the Revolution of 1789, the people of Paris have found
themselves enmeshed in national politics, and often in a brutal way.’’27
In mechanical terms, the system of lotissements that created units of land
for development, both new (in the case of vast stretches of western and
southern Paris hitherto undeveloped) and renewed (usually acquired
in the name of public utility), was the necessary instrument and unit
of state intervention. The size and shape of lots determined the form
of urbanization by controlling what could be built on the newly avail-
able land.

Lotissements originally date from the thirteenth century and were
the means by which rural land was divided into lots and urbanized.28
The fundamental differences between the building up of the Right and
Left Banks can be traced back to the earliest lotissements, when Paris
spread to the south of the Seine, seeking open land. The develop-
ment of the Faubourg Saint-Germain repeated the pattern a few cen-

25 Jules Romains, Lecture, ‘‘Paris, Londres, New-York,’’ several editions in the 1940s; quoted
in Roncayolo and Bergeron, ‘‘D’Haussmann à nos jours,’’ 218.

26 The suggestion is familiar. Louis Bergeron, ‘‘Paysages de Paris,’’ in Bergeron, Paris: Genèse
d’un paysage, 270, has most recently reiterated it.

27 Jean-Paul Lacaze, Urbanisme d’Etat et destin d’une ville (Paris, 1994), 33.
28 See Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 15.

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turies later, when land was divided into lots fit for the gorgeous town
houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The confiscations
of the French Revolution were often severed into smaller lots and auc-
tioned off, as were the pieces of available land created by Napoléon I’s
demolition of ecclesiastical buildings. By the Second Empire the most
important stretch of hitherto undeveloped land was in western Paris,
on the Right Bank, where the emperor’s uncle had built his Arc de
Triomphe. Much of this was owned by the Péreire brothers. This land
was now also broken into lots, following Haussmann’s new boulevards,
on which apartment buildings would be built, with a few lots border-
ing the Parc Monceau and lying along the boulevards designed for the
urban palaces of the imperial elite.

Haussmann inherited the tradition of urban planning by lotisse-
ments. He had begun his transformations by condemning more land
than he needed for a particular project. He then sold what the city did
not use as lotissements, reaping the profits of enhanced property values
because of the new streets he had cut. Those who acquired these new
lots were compelled to develop them in harmony with Haussmann’s
plans. Not only did he finance future work, but he also assured the
uniformity of the new neighborhoods. The Paris landowners soon put
the city out of the real estate business by limiting all legal condem-
nations strictly to what was necessary. The city was permitted only to
condemn enough property to build a street, lay sewer and water pipes,
and install gas lines. The landlords themselves would now profit from
the new urban land market.29 By the twentieth century all the state
programs that reurbanized, renewed, developed, or cleared Paris land
worked on the system of lotissements.

Beyond Haussmannisation in the Parisian Banlieue

Haussmann’s original reasons for incorporation and annexation (the
twelfth, fifteenth, and sixteenth arrondissements were added in 1859,
along with the communes surrounding the city), which doubled the
physical size of Paris and made possible the monster city of many mil-
lions, are not perfectly clear. Jeanne Gaillard argues that his motives for
incorporating the banlieue included the desire to have a single unit to
police, close a tax loophole to gain revenue for his insatiable needs, and

29 It was not until 1955 that the state was once again able to expropriate and resell land
(Lacaze, Urbanisme d’Etat, 77), and then only under the regulations of the ZAC (Zone d’Aménage-
ment Concerté), codified by a 1966 law. Once again the state could regularly recoup, directly and
rapidly, the added land values created by urban improvement undertaken at public expense.

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extend his personal authority.30 The northeastern suburbs had supplied
the insurrectionists of 1848, especially around the Saint-Martin Canal
(the last barricades captured by the army), with men and matériel that
passed easily in and out of the city. This particular annexation was one
of the few strategic aspects of his transformations. Gaillard is persua-
sive, but Haussmann also had a sense of the need and capacity of Paris
to grow. The Second Empire was the first government not to try to check
the size of the capital.31

A substantial part of the story of Paris after Haussmann con-
cerns the banlieue. From 1859 until the early twentieth century this was
largely unurbanized land. It had no infrastructure to speak of, lagged
far behind the original city in development, and became a dumping
ground for the poor driven out of Paris by Haussmann’s demolitions
and his disinterest in building affordable housing. By 1920 the central
city seemed frozen. There were no more neighborhoods in the old city
to cannibalize. At exactly this time several of the most characteristic fea-
tures of the annexed land that created greater Paris were being built.
On the periphery of the core city urbanism was alive and well, and this
new phase of development shared only superficial characteristics with
Haussmann’s work, at least above ground. Paris was about to become a
city Haussmann could not claim.

He had extended the sewers and water supply to the banlieue, and
what little building he did there was uniform and aligned along the
streets, which were in turn lined with chestnut trees. Building eleva-
tions were determined by the size of the new boulevards. Beyond this,
there were few similarities of design or intent with the core city. The new
apartment houses were built of different materials than Haussmann
had used in central Paris; they had little or no ornamentation, were
less imposing than he thought acceptable, and, although less expen-
sive, were far more comfortable. The new housing was not designed for
families with servants and the incorporated services and conveniences
Haussmann thought should be provided by the city (and none too gen-
erously) rather than attached to housing.

Free land was and remains the problem for Paris. World War I

30 Paris, la ville (1852–1870), first published as Gaillard’s thèse d’Etat by the Université de
Lille III in 1976 and distributed by Honoré Champion, became a classic. In 1997 L’Harmattan
reissued the book, hitherto available only as a bound typewritten thèse, with a nice appreciation of
the author by the editors, Florence Bourillon and Jean-Luc Pinol.

31 Napoléon I envisioned a monster capital for his empire, in which Rome was to be the
second city. This vision contributed to Haussmann’s, or rather Napoléon III’s, decision. The uncle
imagined the new city but did little about it except on paper. The nephew built it.

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caused the liberation of a vast band of land—four hundred meters deep
and stretching around the city for thirty-three kilometers—hitherto
occupied by the fortifications erected by the July Monarchy under the
inspiration of Adolphe Thiers. After 1914, despite the first Battle of the
Marne, there no longer seemed any need to maintain the city’s defen-
sive walls. The ‘‘zone’’ was acquired in 1919 in a deal between Paris and
the state. The original plan was to surround Paris with a green belt.
The housing crisis, the absence of clear political will, and the endless
deals that at times gave opportunism a bad name destroyed this vision.
World War I made the pressures for affordable housing irresistible, and
the city government, unable to satisfy an expanding appetite for living
space, gradually sold off pieces of this newly acquired property to pri-
vate developers and lost control over substantial parts of the project.
Never again would the central government dictate the shape of Paris
to the degree Haussmann had. There were streets to be cut through
the ‘‘zone,’’ mostly for access to the new buildings, and the Maréchaux
boulevards that followed the line of the old fortifications were doubled
in width, but urbanization no longer depended on new streets as in
Haussmann’s day.

The Office des Habitations à Bon Marché de la Seine (HBM)
was in charge of most of the work. There were, to be sure, elaborate
regulations, and three distinct varieties of building were constructed.
For those already living in appalling slum conditions in the ‘‘zone,’’
modest, indeed austere, housing, with outside stairwells and white-
washed interior cement walls, was built. The more familiar HBM struc-
tures, made of brick, with gas, electricity, water, and some amenities
in every apartment—no small achievement in the 1920s, when many
buildings in Paris lacked these conveniences—were the most exten-
sively built. There were more comfortable apartments for those with
more resources (immeubles à loyers moyens [ILM]). These had central
heating, separate toilets that could be readily improved into what we
would call powder rooms, and carpeted elevators. What set the build-
ings apart from most of central Paris was that they were conceived as
self-contained, with adjoining medical facilities, social and sports areas,
playgrounds, libraries, and laundry facilities. Not only did the build-
ings look different and serve needs that Haussmann had deliberately
ignored, but the homogeneity of the city, so important to his urban
ideas, had been rejected. There is a sameness about the new apartments
along the Maréchaux, but the buildings are not harmonized with each
other into some overarching pattern. The development of the banlieue
and its eventual emergence as a political ceinture rouge, a bastion of Com-

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munism and the working class,32 made it clear that a new kind of urbani-
zation would control the future of Paris. It has no name, for it has yet
to run its course. There is no uniform plan or controlling intelligence
at work.

The urban projects Haussmann had proposed and overseen, which
gave precision to the emperor’s vague visions, social enthusiasms, and
architectural tastes, were driven by increases in the population and by
enormous internal migrations from the countryside to Paris. So too
were the projects after about 1950.33 But if the phenomenon continued,
its content veered sharply from what Haussmann knew. He imagined
that the immigration patterns he had observed would continue. Impov-
erished provincials, mostly of rural origin, have given way since World
War II to provincials who are often better off than many already living
in Paris. And this wave of internal migration pales in the face of foreign
immigration.34 Recent population figures are revealing. In 1975, the
Ile-de-France had 9,877,000 inhabitants, or 18.76 percent of the total
French population (52,655,000); in 1982, 10,073,000, or 18.54 percent
of the total (54,335,000); and in 1990, 10,661,000, or 18.83 percent of
the total (56,614,000).35 Nearly one in five French men and women lives
in greater Paris, and the nature of this enormous urban growth is dif-
ferent from that of the nineteenth century.36 Not surprisingly, there
are shortages in housing and office space, municipal services and infra-
structure are stretched beyond their limits, and traffic is a nightmare.
There is no relief in sight.

Even by the end of World War II, Haussmann’s city was reeling
under the pressure exerted by a growing population on aging buildings.

32 Annie Fourcaut, Bobigny, banlieue rouge (Paris, 1986), 13, sees the banlieue rouge as a myth
born after the municipal elections of 1924–25. Myth or no, John Merriman, The Margins of City Life:
Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815–1851 (New York, 1991), 226, finds a tenacious margin-
alized existence in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements of the northeast,
which ‘‘like St. Denis and some of the old red belt remain plebian strongholds, peripheral centers
of life, for example, for many migrants from northern and black Africa.’’ See also Marie-Hélène
Bacqué and Sylvie Fol, Le devenir des banlieues rouges (Paris, 1997) for a history, along with J. Bastié,
La croissance de la banlieue (Paris, 1965).

33 Bernard Marchand, Paris: Histoire d’une ville, XIXe–XXe siècle (Paris, 1993), emphasizes the
demographic basis for the history of the city.

34 The population of Paris is a vast topic. A good place to start is Louis Chevalier’s classic La
formation de la population parisienne au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1950), which in a sense placed the subject
on a modern basis. His later, more impressionistic Les Parisiens (Paris, 1985) forms a nice con-
trast. Guy Pourcher’s Le peuplement de Paris: Origine régionale, composition sociale, attitudes et motivations
. . . (Paris, 1964) studies the changing internal migration patterns. Gérard Jacquemet, Belleville
au XIXème siècle: Du faubourg à la ville (Paris, 1984), provides the background on a neighborhood
subsequently transformed by foreign immigration.

35 The figures are from Lacaze, Urbanisme d’Etat, 52–53.
36 See Jean-Claude Chamboredon, Michel Coste, and Marcel Roncayolo, ‘‘Populations et

pratiques urbaines,’’ in Histoire de la France urbaine: La ville aujourd’hui, vol. 5, ed. Marcel Roncayolo
(Paris, 1985), esp. 441–72.

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About 30 percent of the housing stock dated from 1851–80, another
33 percent from 1880–1914. Barely 10 percent had been built between
1915 and 1942.37 Massive efforts were needed, but how, where? Money,
land, and political will were essential for the next phase of urbaniza-
tion, as they had always been. The three components came together in
the 1950s. The ‘‘time of uncertainty and amalgamations,’’ as Roncayolo
and Bergeron call the period from 1870 to 1950, was about to end,
and with it Haussmann’s Paris would itself be transformed. Important,
innovative, and often idiosyncratic projects were accomplished in these
years, but they remained isolated: Paris was weighed down by enor-
mous conservatism. It might be argued that the long doldrums and the
city’s good fortune not to have been bombed in World War II saved
enough of Haussmann’s work (and the urban heritage he himself had
preserved) that nineteenth-century Paris began the Trente Glorieuses
relatively intact.38 Old Paris would survive the projects between 1950
and 1990, but deeply wounded. ‘‘Cupidity and stupidity, now allied, had
at their command unprecedented mechanical muscle.’’ The remarkable
economic recovery and prosperity of postwar France would prove ‘‘one
of the most stunning periods of French vandalism.’’39

The Trente Glorieuses

In 1977 Louis Chevalier, the doyen of historians of Paris, published
L’assassinat de Paris, his most passionate, polemical, and personal book.40
This history of Paris from about 1955 to 1968 is a funeral oration, its
long lamentation culminating in the decision taken in 1962 to move
Les Halles out of Paris, tear down Baltard’s wonderful iron and glass
sheds, and build high-rise office buildings on the site. The story has a
bittersweet end, recounted below.

Others have told the melancholy story, although perhaps not so

37 The figures are from Bergeron, ‘‘Paysages de Paris,’’ 268.
38 There is an ironic pun involved in this expression. The Trois Glorieuses refer to the three

days of the Revolution of 1830 that drove the Bourbons, in the person of Charles X, from the
throne and inaugurated the July Monarchy. The Revolution, memorably celebrated by Eugène
Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People, is usually remembered as the last time a united Paris
expressed its will in insurrection. The Trente Glorieuses were the years of economic prosperity France
enjoyed from about 1945 to 1975, and they were punctuated by political and social unrest as well
as by considerable controversy about urban transformation.

39 Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme: Les monuments détruits de l’art français (Paris: Bouquins,
1994), 928. ‘‘The state,’’ continue Michel Fleury and Guy-Michel Leproux, the editors who brought
Réau up to the 1990s, ‘‘renouncing its role as protector, became entwined in building by way of
the nationalized organizations which were often peopled with its technocrats, the local organisms
that [might have] created bottlenecks, and political parties that had to finance increasingly costly
electoral campaigns.’’

40 Translated into English by David P. Jordan as The Assassination of Paris (Chicago, 1994).
Alas, Chevalier died on 3 August 2001. He was in his ninety-first year.

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well. What only Chevalier has done and could have done is to won-
der and mourn that Pompidou, his friend of many years, a lover of
Baudelaire’s poetry (and presumably of Baudelaire’s Paris), and a col-
league at the Collège de France, became the most important political
figure in the ‘‘assassination’’ of the city. Chevalier lived most of his life in
Paris, beginning with his student days at the Lycée Henri IV. For many
years he had an apartment on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, with a
splendid view northward of Paris. Smack in the middle of his view was
the Beaubourg, which more than any other building is identified with
Pompidou, carries his name, and was, for Chevalier, one of the horreurs
inflicted on his beloved city.41 ‘‘Look at that,’’ he once said to a visitor,
pointing out his windows to the Beaubourg. ‘‘Paris is blue, and Paris is
gray,’’ not red and blue.

What Chevalier thought and loathed was that the urbanization
of the Trente Glorieuses was different from what had come before. He
thought that Haussmann, on balance, had been a friend to Paris and
had given the city new life and beauty. But in the late 1950s Chevalier
despaired for the city he loved. He saw no overall plan, passionately
distrusted the technocrats whose manipulative intelligence admitted
no historical or aesthetic considerations, and despised the develop-
ers whom he characterized as ‘‘cowboys.’’ He considered the political
leaders who were responsible for the destruction either spineless or
(like Pompidou) motivated by some perverse conviction concerning
what they thought necessary.42

The perpetual dilemma for Paris has been the desire of its inhabi-
tants to live and work in the central city. The urban sprawl so famil-
iar in America—made possible by the availability of space—has not
developed so extensively in France. Paris is closely confined and dense.
The only place to build is up. Despite the vast Manhattanization at
La Défense, just beyond the city limits, there was extensive high-rise
construction in the old city. The new apartment houses soared over
the height limits that dated back to Haussmann’s time. A legendary
figure in French life and culture, André Malraux, was responsible for

41 See Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris
(Cambridge, 1994). The Beaubourg plain had been cleared in the 1930s, having been declared
an îlot insalubre. It served as a parking lot for trucks making deliveries to Les Halles until the new
museum was built. For Chevalier’s description of the horreurs of Paris, see ‘‘Twenty Years Later,’’
the epilogue he wrote to The Assassination of Paris, 260–74.

42 Réau, Histoire du vandalisme, 828–29, bitterly quotes one of Frantz Jourdain’s jeremiads:
‘‘With troglodytes as with the members of the Commission du Vieux Paris, there is nothing to be
done. It’s not even worth trying. Let’s ignore their whining. Tear up the prehistoric regulations
about streets. Give builders the freedom to erect buildings that respond to the aspirations of the
twentieth century.’’ Jourdain goes on to suggest that pick and shovel are not efficient enough:
‘‘Let’s use dynamite or bombs!’’

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removing the old restrictions. The municipal checks on state inter-
ference were bypassed. Paul Delouvrier, a politically important and
forceful personage with direct connections to the Elysée Palace, was
appointed to head the Paris District in 1961. The next year came the
decision to transfer Les Halles. The ‘‘vertical urbanization’’ (the expres-
sion is Pinon’s) began at the same time, with the Croulebarbe and Keller
towers in the thirteenth arrondissement. The so-called Orgue des Flan-
dres project in the nineteenth arrondissement was begun in 1963. The
Maine-Montparnasse tower, the tallest of all at fifty-six stories (and the
only skyscraper in the old core city), had first been proposed in 1958.
Work was begun in 1969. It became the symbol of a new urbanism out
of scale and style with Haussmann’s Paris.

By 1960 all the components of the new urbanism were in place:
an efficient and ruthlessly determined administration, an influx of new
capital, land made available by demolition, and individual projects
unrelated to the immediate neighborhood or its esprit de quartier, to
Paris’s past, or to any overall plan. The juggernaut was driven by a
national and unsentimental political will expressed in a strident and
aggressive rhetoric of necessary change and progress. It was adopted by
some of the most important men in France, who were actively hostile
to pleas for prudence or preservation.

Demolishing the old Maine and Montparnasse railroad stations
had long been contemplated as an urban renewal project. The reno-
vated site included apartment buildings but had as its centerpiece the
Maine-Montparnasse tower. The 690-foot skyscraper (and skyscrapers
in general) had distinguished, unexpected, and eloquent defenders,
most significantly Malraux and Pompidou. ‘‘The irrational French, es-
pecially Parisian, prejudice against towers,’’ said Pompidou, ‘‘is, in my
view, completely retrograde. Everything depends on the particular
tower: that is to say, where it is, its relationship with the environment, its
proportions, its architectural form, and its materials of construction are
essential. . . . Would I dare say the towers of Notre-Dame are too low? . . .
They say the Maine-Montparnasse tower will dwarf the Ecole Militaire.
Is it not dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower?’’ 43 The president thought the
place, purpose, and proportions of the Maine-Montparnasse tower per-
fectly harmonized. High-rise buildings were planned throughout the
city, though none so imposing. Despite the outcry against the Maine-
Montparnasse skyscraper, denounced as some un-French, alien import
from America, there was no widespread outrage over clearing the eight

43 From an interview in Le monde, quoted in M. Tilmont and J. C. Croizé, Les I.G.H. dans la
ville (1978), in Roncayolo, ‘‘D’Haussmann à nos jours,’’ 251.

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acres on which it stood. Most of the projects in these years stirred little
public protest. They were concentrated in parts of the city where the
architectural heritage had little prestige and where the politically per-
suasive did not live. The historical patrimony of the city, commonly
considered to be buildings dating from before 1789, was left virtually
untouched.

The attack on Paris neighborhoods without important monuments
or historically significant architecture had been going on for some time.
The renewed assault against the îlots insalubres in the 1930s identified
only three decrepit, even rotting îlots in the better sections of the city.
All the other health hazards scheduled for demolition were scattered
in the quartiers populaires.44 Even those few in the core city—around
the Marais and, most famously, the Beaubourg plain—were not much
lamented. The doomed areas had long been abandoned to wretched-
ness, and both public and expert sensibility fixed on buildings, not envi-
ronments. Individual buildings were worth fighting for, but not neigh-
borhoods with uninteresting or mediocre structures. Only a change in
thinking, partly borrowed from concern over the natural environment,
would change how Parisians viewed their city.

In addition to the clearance of slums for health reasons, other
parcels also outside the historical core were liberated. The abattoirs
built by Napoléon I were closed at La Villette, although it took decades
to find a new use for the land. Railroad stations yielded the most
useful and extensive plots. Not only Maine-Montparnasse but the Gares
Gobelins, Charonne, and Reuilly were also razed. The Petite Ceinture
rail line was shut down, and significant pieces of industrial Paris were
built upon, most particularly the site of the Citroën plant in the fif-
teenth arrondissement and the warehouse facilities at Bercy in eastern
Paris. The city was being deindustrialized, a policy Haussmann himself
had pursued.

If the decrepit neighborhoods were unlamented, what replaced
the old buildings, rail yards, and terminals did raise an outcry. Around
the Place d’Italie, most notoriously the Rue Nationale, an entire neigh-
borhood was razed. Not only did insalubrious buildings disappear, but
the very life of the quartier was attacked and destroyed.45 Once again,
as in Haussmann’s day, the poor fled the city—but this time to escape
life in the new apartment houses built on streets where their shops and
cafés had been.

It was not its ruthlessness that distinguished the destruction of the

44 See the map in Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 214, and her discussion, 213–16.
45 See Norma Evenson, ‘‘The Passing of the Rue Nationale,’’ in Paris: A Century of Change,

255–64.

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Rue Nationale from many of Haussmann’s depredations. It was the bull-
dozer mentality at work. Only Haussmann’s assault on the Ile de la
Cité was comparable. Here he transformed a densely populated slum
in the very heart of historical Paris into an odd island of freestanding
government buildings.46 Haussmann’s demolitions habitually cut streets
through the heart of the old city. Zola’s striking image of saber cuts
across the fabric of the city is apt. Haussmann left standing most of
what he did not need for thoroughfares. The Marais is a good example.
He did not demolish the once fashionable neighborhood. The majority
of the elegant hôtels are still standing, most of them now rehabilitated.
Haussmann’s new streets did not ruin the Marais. What condemned the
neighborhood to uninterrupted decline and degradation was that he
set it adrift in the new city. The Boulevards Sébastopol, Saint-Denis–
Saint-Martin, Temple–Filles du Calvaire, and Beaumarchais and the
Rue de Rivoli–Saint-Antoine isolate the Marais. Until very recently any-
one who could live west of the Boulevard Sébastopol did so. The long
downhill slide of the Marais, which began before the Revolution and
accelerated in 1789 with the destruction of the Parlement of Paris and
the parlementaire culture that had made the quartier a center of wealth
and elegance, continued headlong. In contrast, the twentieth-century
attack on the Rue Nationale left nothing at all standing. The presump-
tion was that there was nothing worth preserving: the new high-rise
apartment buildings were thought infinitely preferable. Haussmann,
for all his arrogance, was never so presumptuous.

The French language, ever able to provide the right combination
of description and judgment, has yielded the formula l’urbanisme de
dalles—slab urbanism. A dalle funéraire is a tombstone: an unmistakable
death knell is sounded.47 The Front de Seine (fifteenth arrondissement)
as well as the Rue de Flandre and the Rue de Belleville (nineteenth and
twentieth arrondissements, respectively) suffered a similar urbanisme.
‘‘The recent evolution of the Rue de Flandre, the Rue Belleville, and the
Rue Nationale,’’ writes Bernard Rouleau, ‘‘is . . . significant and disquiet-
ing. In all three cases the destruction of an entire urban environment
built along the old streets, under the pretext of renewal . . . destroyed
the very pedestrian paths for so long inscribed in the city, and at the
same time made everything that rendered these places alive completely
disappear.’’ 48 It was, however, the assault on Les Halles in the very heart

46 See Jordan, Transforming Paris, 198–200, 201–3, for the psychological motivations of
Haussmann’s destruction of the Ile de la Cité.

47 Pinon uses the phrase. I do not know if he coined it.
48 Quoted in Roncayolo, ‘‘Paris en mouvement, 1950–1985,’’ in Bergeron, Paris: Genèse d’un

paysage, 294.

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of Paris that stirred souls. There had been markets there since the reign
of Philippe Auguste. Now they were destroyed. The putative reasons
were insalubrity and inconvenience, hygiene and traffic flow.

So fundamental were the markets to Paris that there was no
thought of moving them until the twentieth century.49 Haussmann had
given Les Halles new life. His decision to rebuild the markets was one of
his very few concessions to the medieval city. Zola thought Baltard’s ten
iron and glass sheds the only original architecture produced by the Sec-
ond Empire. When they were built, Paris had a population of around
one million. By the eve of World War I the population had already
outgrown Les Halles. In 1913 the Commission d’Extension of the pre-
fecture of the Seine issued a report that suggested moving Les Halles
out of the center of Paris. ‘‘What a park it will be possible to create
in front of the nave of Saint-Eustache,’’ the report exclaimed.50 Noth-
ing came of the proposal until Les Halles was caught up in the renewal
frenzy of the 1960s.

The technical reason given for razing the markets was the need to
connect the Métro and the new suburban RER train lines underground.
Baltard’s sheds had extensive underground storage that would have to
be destroyed. There were also legitimate questions about the efficiency
and capacity of the old markets. Greater Paris (i.e., much of the Ile-de-
France) now had a population of seven million, more than triple what
the markets had been planned to handle. But the public controversy
centered mostly on aesthetic and sentimental questions.

Incredibly, the city had not thought about what would be built on
the site. Only in 1967, five years after the decision to raze Les Halles,
did the municipal council ask six different architectural firms to submit
proposals. They were instructed to consider building heights up to a
maximum of thirty meters. Some found this restriction intolerable. Not
only was a Paris landmark and cultural phenomenon to disappear, but
it would be replaced by towers! Public protest could not save Baltard’s
pavilions, but it did keep even more skyscrapers out of the core city.51
When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became president in 1974, he prohib-

49 There is an extensive literature on the destruction of Les Halles. I follow Chevalier, For-
mation de la population parisienne, 210–16, which is remarkable for its energy and passion, along
with Rouleau, Paris: Histoire d’un espace; Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change; and Marchand, Paris:
Histoire d’une ville, for details.

50 Quoted in Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 301.
51 One pavilion was saved, number 8, which had originally been reserved for the sale of eggs

and poultry. It was moved to the town of Nogent-sur-Marne and declared a classified historical
monument. Some of the original ironwork that had surrounded the pavilion was also preserved.
Soon afterward, when the Gaumont-Palace movie house was demolished, its organ was moved into
the Pavillon, which has now become a cultural center for concerts and exhibitions.

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ited construction of any high-rise buildings on the emptied site of Les
Halles, which had become le grand trou, one of the most visited, albeit
unintentional attractions in Paris. In his public pronouncements Gis-
card d’Estaing spoke of concern for the ‘‘quality of life,’’ and by 1976,
at his instigation, a new plan was produced. Few were pleased with it,
but a substantial chunk of what had been the old market was eventually
made green. A new shopping center, the Forum des Halles, was buried
underground.

The struggle to save Les Halles ended in defeat, but it launched a
new sense of historical preservation. Since Haussmann, there had been
no overall urban plan. The history of Paris after him was a story of
piecemeal, improvised, opportunistic development, sometimes public,
sometimes private, and always uncoordinated. Slowly but inexorably,
the planners and developers chiseled away at the city. By the 1960s,
having witnessed the attack on Les Halles, those who cared about Paris
saw their city threatened in a more organic way. It was not a particular
historical building that was endangered, but an environment. A spir-
ited defense of the neighborhood around Les Halles now began, not
because it contained buildings of architectural distinction, for it did
not, but because the charm of the market quartier was said to depend
on ‘‘an ancient urban fabric which determined the prevailing land allot-
ment, street patterns which conform to the historical way of the capital,
sequences of facades filled with fantasy and harmony, forming a refined
and elegant urban décor.’’ 52 It should be saved because it was a neigh-
borhood, tout court. The new sensibility that Paris was a city of historical
neighborhoods that, taken together, constituted urban beauty and were
the essence of the city would spare even the îlots insalubres. Any demoli-
tion subtracted from the city an irreplaceable part of its material past.
Filth and wretchedness could be ameliorated. Destruction could not be
reversed. This view too marks an end to haussmannisation.

When the fate of Les Halles was being passionately debated at the
national level, the Communists on the Paris Municipal Council pro-
posed that Baltard’s pavilions, or at least a few of them, be made into a
retail market. Thus would the historical integrity of the district be pre-
served. Chevalier, who loathed the Communists, made the same pro-
posal. New alliances were emerging to combat the modern urbanization
of the Trente Glorieuses. From the 1960s to our day the desire to preserve
the fabric of Paris—the idea of protecting the city—has been under-

52 ‘‘Les Halles: Les études de restauration-réhabilitation,’’ Paris projet, no. 1, July 1969;
quoted in Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 305. Michel Fleury, in Réau, Histoire du vandalisme,
954, says that 132 buildings in the Halles neighborhood were destroyed between 1970 and 1980.

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stood in terms of neighborhoods: the unit of preservation has become
larger, the imagery more organic. The danger to Paris is now seen as
its steady transformation into a vast mosaic of isolated projects. The
homogeneity imposed on Paris by Haussmann is being lost, and there
is a new appreciation of his urban ideas.53 It is worth noting that the
neighborhoods now in the greatest peril are those that were built in the
nineteenth century: the Opéra quartier, for example.

For so many years the struggle to save Paris’s pre-Haussmann heri-
tage absorbed the attention of those who cared. The familiar build-
ings of the Second Empire and Third Republic were not considered
national treasures. They were the cancer that had destroyed old Paris.
Few viewed them with affection; even fewer appreciated the inheritance
of their grandparents’ generation. Virtually no one made an aesthetic
argument on behalf of the buildings of imperial Paris. In our own day,
when much of the earlier patrimony seems safe from the wreckers,
Haussmann’s work is under serious threat, and there is an awakening of
public interest in it. The ninth arrondissement, a neighborhood created
during the transformation of Paris, is now old, expensive to rehabili-
tate, yet increasingly desirable. Transportation is good, and the more
sinister aspects of old Montmartre, so colorfully chronicled by Cheva-
lier,54 are increasingly confined to a few blocks. Some luxurious hôtels
particuliers have become offices for insurance companies, and even a
few of the more extravagant bordellos have been saved as unique pri-
vate dwellings, but some of this housing stock is already or potentially
among endangered urban species.

The Presidential Projects

Lavedan, the historian of Paris urbanization, believes in the persis-
tence of urban patterns.55 Paris remains a walled city. The migration of
the medieval university to the Left Bank, where the available land was
urbanized differently from that of the Right Bank (a pattern continued

53 François Loyer makes the argument for a new assessment of Haussmann’s homogeneous
city and shows, with his wonderful photographs, just how much variety there was. See, for example,
294–99 for a discussion of relative scale in Haussmann’s buildings, and the photographs on 179
and 243 (the Place Saint-Michel) and 235 (variations within the règlement of 1859).

54 Louis Chevalier, Montmartre du plaisir et du crime (Paris, 1980), is an erudite and vivid his-
tory of the infamous neighborhood from the beginning of the nineteenth century until World
War II. I often stay in Paris at an apartment on the Rue Pigalle. Chevalier once telephoned me,
quite concerned about my safety. He warned me not to walk around that neighborhood late at
night. He had in mind the Montmartre of his youth and his studies.

55 He has written extensively on Paris and was, in the last generation, a conservative yet very
audible voice defending Paris against its destroyers. Nouvelle Histoire de Paris: Histoire de l’urbanisme
à Paris (Paris, 1975) is perhaps his best-known work.

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in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Saint-Germain
quartier was built), long ago laid down a template that continues to dis-
tinguish the two banks of the river. The unique relationship between
the rulers of France and their capital has also persisted. François I’s
decision to build the new Louvre and Napoléon III’s urban visions are
but two among dozens of fateful decisions imposed on the city from
above. The most recent frenzy of monumental building in Paris, driven
by Mitterrand’s passions, tastes, and needs, is another such imposition.
The state’s power manifested by the president’s will is irresistible.

The ironies of the Mitterrand projects are many—the politics of
planning, propaganda, and construction are convoluted. There has
been, I think, far too little treatment of the history of Paris following
the example of François Chaslin, who has written with much wit about
these important urban works.56 The presidential projects—the Bastille
opera, the Louvre-Tuileries pyramid, the new Bibliothèque Nationale,
the Grande Arche, and the Ministry of Finance—are the most impor-
tant transformations to Paris at the end of the century. They will be the
last for a very long time. The jury is still out on Mitterrand’s architec-
tural endowment of Paris. These are matters of taste, and the contro-
versies will reverberate for generations.

What we can say is that all these projects, with the possible excep-
tion of the Grande Arche, which is set amid a completely new and uni-
formly modern quartier, are the antithesis of Haussmann’s urban ideas.
They continue and complete the work begun in the 1960s: more hor-
reurs, to use Chevalier’s language. The new buildings give Paris undeni-
able variety in terms of both how urban space is constructed and
the paysage of the city. But the buildings stick out in what remains a
nineteenth-century city. The idea of a mosaic has replaced Haussmann’s
preoccupation with an urban ensemble.57 No attempt was made to inte-
grate the new buildings into their built environment. True, they are all

56 See Les Paris de Mitterrand (Paris, 1986), which I follow here. Chaslin is a journalist, and
his sometimes gossipy book lacks historical perspective and depends overmuch on the evidence
and assumptions of petite histoire, but he has nicely related politics and Paris in a way that is usually
neglected by historians. In the same vein, although impeccably scholarly, are Harvey’s fine essay
on the building of Sacré-Coeur and Chevalier’s work, earlier noted. Perhaps because focusing
sharply on a building illuminates the shadows of skullduggery and political compromise, and raises
questions about where the money comes from and how much is needed, books on the history
of individual buildings integrate the political life of Paris and its built environment. Silver’s The
Making of Beaubourg is a recent attempt that, I think, fails to carry off the synthesis. He is predomi-
nantly interested in the architectural problems encountered and solved in erecting a technically
innovative building. For the most part, however, the political history of Paris is sharply separated
from urbanization. See, for example, Philippe Nivet and Yvan Combeau, Histoire politique de Paris
au XXe siècle (Paris, 2000), which does not connect municipal government or politics with the
transformations of the city.

57 Rouleau, Paris: Histoire d’un espace, 443.

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112 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

very large (except I. M. Pei’s pyramid, which is still large for the con-
fined space it occupies) and not easily blended, but the idea of harmo-
nizing the structures with their surroundings was not part of the new
aesthetic. From the Beaubourg museum onward the new, often highly
technical buildings were planted in the Paris paysage where they stand
out as different in style, size, materials, detail, and color. The Grande
Bibliothèque particularly declares its isolation. One enters the building
by mounting dozens of stairs, eventually reaching a self-contained, vast
expanse that is not a conventional street or neighborhood: it is a part of
the building, not a part of the city. Similarly, the presidential projects
continue the 1960s’ indifference to neighborhoods that contained no
important buildings or monuments. The new urban preservationist aes-
thetic was as powerless against a determined state in the 1990s as it had
been 30 (or 130) years earlier.

The last possible great Paris projects built on land vacated by the
SNCF (the national railroad) or by industry have been launched or
completed. Without significant demolitions—and who can be sure they
won’t occur—Paris intra-muros will not again see the kind of major
development programs that transformed the capital between 1960 and
1990. The city will return, as it did after Haussmann’s major work was
finished, to a conservative and relatively quiet mode of parcel-by-parcel,
building-by-building renovation, with new construction on a shrunken
scale. There are some disquieting aspects to this, most particularly
façadisme: gutting a building and completely rebuilding its interior. Only
the original façade remains. In the name of retaining some of Hauss-
mann’s urban uniformity by leaving Second Empire buildings stand-
ing, the architectural patrimony and integrity of the nineteenth cen-
tury are being attacked from within. Ostensibly being safeguarded,
the buildings are essentially being destroyed. Not only is their archi-
tectural integrity violated when they are gutted, but, more often than
not, important features on the outside are destroyed: old windows are
replaced, a garage door is added where originally there were shops, the
passage from street to courtyard is sealed.58 The skeleton, with some of
the bones missing, is all that remains to testify to the past.

A New Paris?

Whither Paris? Physically, Haussmann’s city endures and is clearly iden-
tifiable. Its itineraries, reinforced by the Métro, are engraved on the
minds of citizens and visitors. But his city, once almost universally ad-

58 Pinon, Paris: Biographie d’une capitale, 300–301 (and his notes), deplores the phenomenon
and loathes the architects who make a living doing this work.

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HAUSSMANN AND HAUSSMANNISATION 113

mired and imitated, and for so long a place of secular pilgrimage, has
lost much. The boulevards, the most characteristic aspect of haussman-
nisation, are little loved today, and visitors now seek out the few remain-
ing pockets of pre-Haussmann Paris. For those nostalgic for the old city,
it is worth remembering that the Beaubourg, and especially the large
esplanade that sets it off—arguably anti-Haussmann in conception—is
the most visited tourist attraction in Paris.

Now the imperial capital seems doomed to suffer the same fate as
the medieval and classical cities did at Haussmann’s hands. It is the fate
of cities, if they are not made into museums, to be transformed by every
generation of inhabitants, developers, architects, entrepreneurs, immi-
grants, and property owners. In the case of Paris, there is an added com-
plication: the state has always played a central role in urban transforma-
tion. In the two periods of massive urban destruction and rebuilding,
the Second Empire and the Trente Glorieuses, the state was the principal
force at work. Those who would save the old city were outsiders—indi-
viduals or groups usually unable to do more than momentarily embar-
rass and delay the powerful.

For centuries, despite the vandalism and barbarism inflicted on it,
Paris rolled with the punches. Because it was so rich in architectural
treasures and set on such a remarkable natural site, the city rebounded.
Its vibrant urban culture proved resilient. Haussmann’s boulevards had
been designed to order and control the unruly city, partly by quaran-
tining popular street life. Paradoxically, his percées attracted even more
activity outdoors. The bourgeoisie now took to the streets. Strolling,
window-shopping, and roosting in the sidewalk cafés became touch-
stones of modern city life. The gentrification of quartiers populaires has
recently decentralized these urban activities, which Haussmann sought
to regulate and concentrate. The Rue Francs-Bourgeois in the now
revitalized Marais is an excellent example. Once a sleepy route through
the neighborhood, it now teems with shoppers, strollers, and tourists
enjoying the chic shops and restored architecture.

Transcending or transforming the urban forms imposed in the last
half century seems less and less possible today except here and there,
as in the Marais or the now desirable twelfth arrondissement. The pres-
sures of population (and its changing patterns), automobiles, and pub-
lic transportation, coupled with demands for an improved quality of
life, often seem insurmountable. Paris has run out of land to build on.
The problems Haussmann thought he had solved have reappeared, and
in forms that this time may defy solution.

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Society for French Historical Studies

Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration: Domesticating the Halles in Second-Empire Paris
Author(s): Victoria E. Thompson
Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 87-109
Published by: Duke University Press
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Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration:
Domesticating the Halles in Second-Empire Paris

Victoria E. Thompson

During the Second Empire, Emperor Napoleon III and prefect of the
Seine Haussmann attempted to create a more splendid, more hygienic,
and more secure Paris. In the 1850s and 1860s, old neighborhoods were
demolished and replaced by broad thoroughfares, luxury housing,
parks and open squares, and new centers for leisure and commerce.1 In
his 1874 study of Parisian social life, customs, and institutions, writer
and journalist Maxime DuCamp reflected on the changes in the capital
during these years. According to DuCamp, one of the most dramatic
transformations had been the renovation of the central food market,
the halles:

The change [in the halles] has been profound and so radical that
nothing has been left of … the past. The pillars, those famous pil-
lars of the Halles of which so much has heretofore been said, have
disappeared; the criss-cross passages, dirty, unhealthy, by which one
arrived with difficulty on the square, have given way to large pas-
sageways, airy and commodious; those cabarets which, at midnight,

Victoria E. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Xavier University in Ohio. She is
the author of “Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in France,
1830-1870,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan (New York,
1996), and is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Modernity and the Marketplace:
Women’s Work and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-Century Paris.”

The author thanks Lynn Hunt for an incisive reading of an early draft of this article; Gillian
Ahlgren, John Fairfield, Marie Giblin, Deborah Hamilton, and Carol Winkelmann for their com-
ments; and the anonymous readers for French Historical Studies, whose remarks were immensely
helpful. Research for the article was made possible by a French Government Chateaubriand Fel-
lowship and a Xavier University Summer Research Stipend.

1 On the renovation of Paris during the Second Empire, see David Jordan, Transforming
Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York, 1995); Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la ville,
1852-1870: L’Urbanisme parisien d l’heure d’Haussman[n] (Paris and Lille, 1976); Howard Saalman,
Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York, 1971); David Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of
Paris (Princeton, N.J., 1958). For a long-range perspective, see Andre Morizet, Du Vieux Paris au
Paris moderne: Haussmann et ses pridicesseurs (Paris, 1932). For a comparative view, see Donald J.
Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, Conn., 1986).

French Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter 1997)
Copyright ? 1997 by the Society for French Historical Studies

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88 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

opened their doors to the entire vagabond population of the big
city. . . have been uprooted and moved outside the limits of Paris;
in modifying this area, in stripping it, it has been moralized.2

The halles had long been considered in need of renovation.3 In
1811, Napoleon had expressed his desire to build a larger and more im-
pressive central market. Continued population growth during the first
half of the century, the popular insurrections of the early 1830s, and
the first bout of cholera in 1832 lent urgency to the project of renova-
tion. By the early 1830s, the market was identified as both a center of
popular revolt and a breeding ground for disease. By 1840 the project
was a top priority. According to a member of the municipal council,
“The halles quarter, .. . unhealthy, badly built and crowded, is of a re-
pulsive appearance…. No other point of Paris requires improvement
with such urgency, under the triple goal of improving public health,
beautification, and public security.” 4

In 1842 the municipal council established the commission des halles
to study the question of renovation. Whereas Napoleon had envisioned
the halles as the “People’s Louvre,” some members of the commission
expressed concern over the continued presence of the popular classes
in the center of the capital, arguing that maintaining the halles in its tra-
ditional location would encourage the movement of luxury commerce
to the fashionable and growing western part of the city, leaving the
center of Paris to the poor.5 Others argued that moving the market to
the outskirts of the capital would cause undue hardship for the work-
ing men and women who depended on the halles for their provisions.
After much deliberation, the prefect of the Seine, in conjunction with
the commission des halles and the prefect of police, decided to leave the
market in the center of Paris, but to make it more orderly, hygienic,
and safe, changes that would render the market less offensive to bour-
geois sensibilities. This solution would, it was hoped, address the prob-
lem of the halles without offending traditional interests and practices.

2 Maxime DuCamp, Paris, ses organes, sesfonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitie du XIXe siele
(Paris, 1874), 2:153; all translations are mine.

3 On the renovation of the halles, see Bertrand Lemoine, Les Halles de Paris: L’Histoire d’un
lieu, les peripeties d’une reconstruction, la succession des projets, I’architecture d’un monument, I’enjeu d’une
“cite” (Paris, 1980); Pierre Lavendan, La Question du dtplacement de Paris et du transfert des Halles au
Conseil Municipal sous la Monarchie dejuillet (Paris, 1969); Jeanne Hugueney, “Les Halles centrales
de Paris au XIXe siecle,” La Vie urbaine: Urbanisme-Habitation: Amenagement du territoire 2 (Apr.-
June 1968): 81-130.

4 Archives de la Prefecture de Police (hereafter APP), DA 379, Lanquetin, “Question du d&
placement de Paris,” Prefecture de la Seine, Commission de Halles, Documents a etudier, no. 4
(Apr. 1840), 13.

5 APP, DA 379, Commission des halles, Documents a etudier, no. 3 (July 1842); no. 4 (Apr.
1840); no. 6 (Mar. 1841).

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 89

Expropriation of property around the old market began in 1848 and
construction of the definitive new market commenced in 1854.6 With
six pavilions completed by 1867, the halles designed by Baltard became
the prototype for covered markets throughout France.7 In Paris, in
1863, the market for used clothing and household goods, the Temple,
was renovated along the lines of the halles and much resembled it in
appearance.8

According to historian Philip Nord, renovation in the center of
the city put the capital into the hands of the bourgeoisie: “The heart
of the old city became commercialized, shed much of its working-class
population, and underwent a definite embourgeoisement.” 9 The deci-
sion to maintain the halles in the center of Paris has been considered
by some historians incongruous with the overall goal of renovation,
since the market was closely identified with the people. Under the Old
Regime, the dames de la halle, a contingent of female merchants, had
acted as the representatives of the people of Paris to the monarch and
the aristocracy.10 Identification of the market as a site of urban rebel-
lion in the 1830s cast the “popular” nature of the market in a more
negative light. Retaining the traditional location of the halles has thus
been seen as paradoxically preserving, as DavidJordan has argued, “an
enclave of the old popular culture in the very heart of the new city.”11

However, renovating the halles was more than a matter of estab-
lishing new structures and facilities for a market whose character would
remain the same. Contemporaries believed that one of the primary
benefits of renovation would be the moralization of merchants, as a
new physical environment would, it was thought, encourage adherence
to a new moral code. Donald J. Olsen has argued that the renovated
European capitals of the nineteenth century were “deliberate artistic
creations intended not merely to give pleasure, but to contain ideas, in-
culcate values, and serve as tangible expressions of systems of thought
and morality.” 12 Olsen maintains that it was only in the “ornamental and

6 The first pavilion, built in 1851, was immediately demolished after critics complained that
it looked like a fortress designed to control the people. Baltard, the original architect, came up
with new plans inspired by the gare de l’Est and with the help of Haussmann had them approved
by the emperor in 1853. Hugueney, “Les Halles centrales,” 111-22.

7 Lemoine, Les Halles de Paris, 190.
8 Philippe Perrot, “Splendeur et declin du marche du Temple,” L’Histoire 33 (Apr. 1981): 15.
9 Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, NJ., 1986), 100.
10 On the merchants of the halles during the Old Regime see Rene S. Marion, “Les Dames

de la Halle: Women and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Proceedings of the Annual
Meeting of the Western Society for French History 17 (1990): 140-48; Jehanne d’Orliac, Les Dames de la
Halle, 1181-1939 (Paris, 1946).

lijordan, Transforming Paris, 363. See also Bernard Marchand, Paris: Histoire dune ville,
XJXe-X~e sicle (Paris, 1993), 99.

12 Olsen, The City as a Work of Art, 4.

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90 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

superfluous” that the moral and ideological importance of renovation
revealed itself, yet the renovation of the halles demonstrates that even
the most utilitarian structures were expected to reflect and reinforce
certain values.13 The architecture and layout of the new market aimed
to transform what had been perceived as a disorderly and confused
space into one in which clarity and order reigned.14 The renovated
market buildings were fully covered, enclosed, and clearly demarcated
from surrounding streets and residences. Within the market, stalls were
also clearly demarcated and separated one from another. Thus reno-
vated, the halles would be no less an anomaly in the bourgeois capital
than the extra servant quarters included in the new luxury apartment
buildings of northwestern Paris.”5

In addition to transforming the structure of the market, authori-
ties also sought to transform the behavior of the merchants within it.
If, as one planner stated, the market was “to the city what the kitchen is
to a bourgeois house,” then the challenge facing authorities was to make
the merchants, like domestic servants, compliant and dependent aux-
iliaries of the bourgeois home.16 This was done largely through regu-
lations concerning the functioning of the market. As with the physical
renovation of the halles, ideological concerns shaped the regulatory
project as well. In particular, widely held assumptions regarding the sex
of the merchants played a pivotal role in influencing decisions made
concerning the organization of the renovated market.

Despite the fact that there were male merchants in the halles,
largely, although not exclusively, in fresh meats and baked goods, as
well as male workers (the burlyforts de la hallewho carried heavy loads of
merchandise), the halles was identified by contemporaries as a female
space. Cadastral records indicate that the majority of merchants in the
halles were women, but this identification of the market as “female”
was also due to the influence of traditional depictions of popular com-
merce as primarily a female domain. Thus in popular literature from
this time, the most frequent and colorful types used to represent popu-
lar commerce (including not only the halles, but the Temple market
for used clothing and street merchants as well) were female. The bold
and opinionated fishwife, the alluring young flower-seller, the mischie-

13 Ibid., 5.
14 On the spatial reorganization of the halles and the control of merchants see Victoria

Thompson, “Gender, Class, and the Marketplace: Women’s Work and the Transformation of the
Public Sphere in Paris, 1825-1870,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993, chap. 3.

15 Jordan, Transforming Paris, 357.
16 APP, DA 378, M. Senard, “Halles centrales a 6lever a Paris. Reponse a deux memoires

publiees par les Interesses au projet de 1845 par M. Senard. Suivi d’une lettre de M. Belanger,
Ingenieur a M. Hector HOREAU, Architecte, sur la Question du Nivellement,” Dec. 1850, 23.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 91

vous merchant of fruits and vegetables, the shrewd merchant of used
women’s clothing-these were the stereotypes that peopled popular
literature and popular consciousness. Moreover, the halles, because of
the political importance of the dames de la halle under the Old Regime,
was identified as a site of female power. The perception that the mar-
ket was peopled by opinionated, meddling, and troublesome women
was continually reinforced during renovation, as it was overwhelmingly
the female merchants who made their complaints and requests known
to the police and departmental authorities, and even to the emperor
himself.17

Imagining the market as “female” provided a framework for think-
ing about renovation, as it made the choices for renovators seem clear:
uncontrolled, the market was the harbinger of death and disorder, the
fearful side of female nature; controlled, the market could serve as a
site of virtue and harmony, the laudable side of female nature. Cre-
ating a female space that could function as a site of virtue, decorum,
and order meant, in the mid-nineteenth century, creating a female
space that was regulated by the norms of “domesticity.” 18 In nineteenth-
century France, as elsewhere in the West, domesticity served as an optic
through which to view social and political organization. Yet the mostly
female merchants of Paris seemed to contradict the domestic ideal
in two important ways: their family relationships were not organized
along the lines of the nuclear family unit, and they, not their husbands
or fathers, often functioned as the sole economic support for their
families. Authorities did not explicitly set out to impose the norms of
domesticity upon the mostly female merchant population. However,
their belief that the tenets of domesticity were necessary to order and
stability influenced the choices they made in regulating the new mar-
ket. The result was a conflict between merchant practices and police
and departmental regulations, a conflict that on the surface appeared
to concern the organization of the market, but that also touched on a
larger debate over the role of women in public.19 Archival sources from

l7Jurisdiction over the halles was shared by the Paris police and the Department of the
Seine. The prefect of police, the prefect of the Seine, and the emperor were the three persons
most directly involved in the renovation and regulation of the market.

18 On domestic ideology in France see Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bour-
geoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981); Barbara Corrado Pope, “The
Influence of Rousseau’s Ideology of Domesticity,” in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World,
1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York, 1987): 136-45; Jean-
Paul Aron, ed., Miserable et glorieuse: La Femme au XIXe sicle (Paris, 1980); Yvonne Knibiehler and
Catherine Fouquet, L’Histoire des meres du Moyen Age d nosjours (Paris, 1977).

19 On women and the public sphere in France see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the
French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), especially chap. 4; Suzanne Desan, “Constitutional Ama-
zons: Jacobin Women’s Clubs in the French Revolution,” in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary

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92 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

police and departmental authorities provide information about these
conflicts, while depictions of female merchants in popular literature
help situate them within a broader cultural context.

Work and Family in the Halles

During the July Monarchy, the halles expanded to meet the needs of
a rapidly growing population. The extension of the market into sur-
rounding areas alarmed observers, who saw it as a sign of the great
confusion that they believed characterized market life. In his 1842 re-
port on the state of public health in the (former) fourth arrondisse-
ment, public hygienist Henri Bayard decried the lack of differentiation
between public and private life in the area around the halles, complain-
ing that “all the houses in this neighborhood are so many permanent
markets.”20 In the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, the perceived
need to impose order on the market became more pressing. Accord-
ing to another observer, writing in 1850, “everything is overflowing
from all directions…. The public thoroughfare, streets, alleys, pas-
sages between houses, windows, doors, everything is invaded.” 21 Such
confusion not only posed obstacles to the smooth flow of traffic in the
area but also made surveillance of the market and its population ex-
tremely difficult. The eventual design of the new market responded to
repeated demands for the imposition of clear boundaries in the neigh-
borhood of the halles by separating the market from the surrounding
area through the use of enclosed buildings and wide thoroughfares.

Within the renovated market as well, every aspect of market life,
from standards for weights and measures to the status of paid assistants,
was clarified, controlled, and categorized. Authorities were particularly
troubled by merchant networks that seemed to blur the boundary be-
tween work and family. For merchants, however, extended family net-
works that were strongly integrated into their work environment were
important as economic support systems, social networks, and sources
of political legitimacy and solidarity.22

France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan, Jr., and Elizabeth A. Williams (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992): 11-35;
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).

20 Henri Bayard, “Memoire sur la topographic medicale du IVe arrondissement et de la
ville de Paris,” Annales d’hygine publique et de medicine lMgale 28 (July 1842): 262.

21 APP, DA 379, Senard, “Halles Centrales de Paris. De l’etat actuel des Halles; Des divers
Plans proposes, et specialement du Projet Horeau; De la convenance et de lajustice du concours
demande a l’Etat” (1850), 4.

22 On these networks in the eighteenth century see Marion, “Les Dames de la Halle.” On
women’s networks in general in France see the recent forum, “Women, Social Relations, and
Urban Life,” with contributions by Roderick Phillips, Georg’ann Cattelona, Leslie Page Moch,
Rachel G. Fuchs, and Elinor Accampo, French Historical Studies 18 (1993): 1-64.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 93

Merchants combined work and family in a variety of ways. Re-
quests for places in the market reveal that it was common for members
of the same family to work together. Stands were sometimes run by a
husband and wife, and in many cases they would later be passed on to
their children.23 A market stall, often the sole means of support for an
entire family, seems to have been considered part of a family’s “patri-
mony,” and attempts were made to keep this valuable resource within
the family when the official stall holder died. Requests by children or
spouses for the stall of a deceased mother or wife were therefore com-
mon, even when those requesting the stall had not previously worked
in the market.24

For merchants, the right of a family member to the place held by
a relative seems to have been not only accepted, but actively protected.
For example, in 1864, a young flower merchant of the halles died,
leaving behind two small children. Usually in such cases the stall of
the deceased would be made available to the other merchants by order
of seniority. However, at the request of the young woman’s mother,
who also seems to have been a merchant, the other merchants agreed
to allow the grandmother to manage the stall until her seven-year-old
granddaughter would be old enough to run it herself.25 In acting in
such a manner, they put the maintenance of a family of the market
above their own individual interests.

Merchants cooperated to protect family ties within the market
and did not limit their definition of family to blood relations. The
relationship between a merchant and her hired assistant could, after
many years, be considered a “family” tie as well. Thus, for example, the
seventy-six-year-old Widow Herbin requested that her place in pavil-
ion seven be given to her assistant of twelve years, Madame Barbiere.
The Widow Herbin stressed that her assistant had also been a surro-
gate daughter to her and that the two women lived together along
with Madame Barbiere’s three children, whom they both worked to
support.26 The Widow Herbin no doubt feared that upon her death
Madame Barbiere and her children would be left without any income.

The practice of merchants living with their assistants seems to have
been relatively common, not only among the merchants of the halles,
but in general among female merchants in Paris. In an 1841 police re-
port concerning the merchants who held stalls selling toiletries and

23 Archives de Paris et du Departement de la Seine (hereafter APDS), D 1 P4 529, Registres
de cadastre, 1862, Halles centrales, pavilion 7.

24 APDS, V 2 F2, article 3, Marchands au petit-tas, questions de place.
25 Ibid., 1864.
26 Ibid., 26 Oct. 1868.

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94 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

other items in the arcades of the Palais Royal, the police discovered
that several of the merchants lived with their assistants.27 This may have
been part of an apprenticeship arrangement, by which the merchant
offered her assistant room and board. It is also possible, however, that
this was part of a more general tendency of merchants who worked
together to live together as well. Of the female merchants at the Palais
Royal under investigation, three lived on the nearby rue Jeamisson,
while another three lived not only on the same street, but in the same
building, at 145 rue Saint-Honore.28 Cadastral records for the halles
show that the majority of merchants also lived close to the market and
tended to congregate in certain streets. For example, among fish mer-
chants alone, twelve lived on the rue Rambuteau in 1876; furthermore,
four lived in the same building, at number 22, while another lived
across the street.29

Biological and surrogate family ties often overlapped, reinforcing
one another and structuring merchant networks. Biological relation-
ships between merchants could strengthen bonds between employers
and employees and could encourage the perception that all merchants,
related or not, were part of a “family.” Thus the Widow Herbin, men-
tioned above, emphasized her “familial” relationship with Madame
Barbiere by telling authorities that the latter’s mother had been a mer-
chant in the halles for forty years.30 Madame Barbiere was thus “family”
for the Widow Herbin, not only because the two women lived and
worked together but also because she was the daughter of another
long-established merchant. For the Widow Herbin, Madame Barbiere’s
family relationships were not limited to herself and her mother, but
extended to the market itself. She was, as the Widow Herbin stated,
truly a “child of the halles.” 31

The merchants of Paris therefore experienced such a strong inte-
gration of their public and private lives that work and family often
seemed indistinguishable. Family relations, both biological and surro-
gate, structured the market space and the lives of merchants. These
dense networks of aid, support, and companionship, in which ties of
neighborhood, profession, and family reinforced one another, belong
to a long tradition of popular practices in Paris and were considered
necessary by the merchants for the efficient and equitable function-

27 APP, DA 222, Service des moeurs: Prostitution, “Rapport de la delegation envoye pour ar-
reter les marchands,” 5 Aug. 1841.

28 Ibid., “Rapport du police municipal, service dispensaire,” 5 Aug. 1841.
29 APDS, DI P4 529, Registres de cadastre, 1876, Halles centrales, pavilion 9.
30 APDS, V2 F4, article 3, 26 Oct. 1868.
31 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 95

ing of the market. Yet for authorities and middle-class observers, such
networks of extended family and community solidarity in the heart
of the newly renovated, central marketplace of the city appeared an
anomaly to both the liberal principle of freedom of commerce and the
bourgeois ideal of the nuclear, male-dominated family. Administrative
authorities and casual observers were faced with two choices: redefine
merchants as individual competitors in a market open to all comers,
without preference based on family ties, or refashion the nature of
family ties within the market to make them adhere to the model of the
nuclear, rather than the extended, family. Assumptions concerning
the sex of the merchants favored the adoption of the second option. In
the reorganized market, regulations favored the nuclear family over the
extended family and placed merchants, presumed to be female, clearly
under the dominance, not of a husband or father, but of the state.

Instituting the Nuclear Family

The growing popularity in mid-nineteenth-century France of the ide-
ology of domesticity, with its emphasis on a separation of work and
home, rendered women workers suspect in the eyes of the middle class.
According to Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Far from
the domus, the woman worker deserts in fact the familial space that she
rules, and that, above all, rules her…. This domestic absence had
to be controlled.”32 The fear that female merchants were a source of
disorder because they combined work and family life and carried out
both in public view permeates early nineteenth-century depictions of
market women. The construction of fully enclosed pavilions resolved,
to a certain extent, the problem of female “publicity.” At the same
time, new regulations sought to create a boundary between work and
family believed to be missing in the halles. In particular, authorities in-
creased the importance of the mother-daughter relationship among
merchants, while reducing the status of assistants to paid employees of
the market. New regulations thus tended to target both surrogate and
extended family relationships, while preserving those family relation-
ships that fit the model of the nuclear family. Authorities charged with
regulating the market and journalists writing for a primarily middle-
class audience used stereotypes of female disorder, referring both to
the “feudal” power of women under the Old Regime and to the eco-
nomic power of the prostitute under the new, to justify and explain
these changes in market regulations.

32 Arlette Farge and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Introduction,” Madame ou mademoiselle?
Itineraires de la solitudefiminine, XVIIIe-XXe sicle (Paris, 1984), 12.

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96 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

In 1868, prefect of the Seine Haussmann issued a decree forbid-
ding extended family members from inheriting a relative’s stall.33 This
reversal of an 1829 police ordinance stipulated that henceforth only
daughters could be named as successors.34 The pro-government news-
paper, the Moniteur universel, justified the regulation by denouncing
the extended family networks that structured the market as holdovers
from the Old Regime. The traditional method of choosing successors,
according to the Moniteur, operated on the basis of privilege and re-
sulted in an “infeudation of places .. . for the profit of certain families,
to the exclusion of all others, with rights of transmission from woman
to woman, not only in the direct line, . . . but also in collateral lines.” 35
Such language doubly condemned the organization of the market as
archaic: with access based on extended family relationships and deter-
mined by women, the market stood in direct opposition to the merit-
based and male-dominated social hierarchy put in place after 1789.
The Moniteur thus depicted the 1868 regulation as an agent of progress
and modernization: “For these sorts of fiefs, the municipal adminis-
tration has substituted simple inheritance rights, transmittable from
mother to daughter, by order of primogeniture.” 36

By preserving the daughter’s right to succession, the administra-
tion stopped short of creating a market compatible with the principles
of a merit-based, free-market society. The Moniteur itself recognized the
apparent paradox of the incomplete modernization of market relation-
ships and was astonished by liberal critics of the administration who
decried it “not for having been timid in its reform, but for not having
upheld the old usages in all of their enormity.”37 The unwillingness
of both critics and supporters of the regime to eliminate completely
family relationships in determining succession attests to the force of
cultural assumptions concerning women’s roles. In the mid-nineteenth
century, women could not, it seems, be considered as individuals com-
peting in a free-market, merit-based society. Extended family networks,
targeted as archaic remnants of the Old Regime, were thus replaced
by the bourgeois nuclear family. Indeed, according to the Moniteur, re-
inforcing nuclear family ties was one of the primary goals of the 1868

33 APP, DA 380, Decree issued by prefect of the Seine, 2 July 1868. In 1868 the concession
of places in the market was transferred from police to departmental authorities. While the two
sectors of administration did come into conflict over some aspects of market life, on topics dis-
cussed in this article -limiting succession to daughters, the place of assistants, and the behavior
of merchants-there does not seem to have been any disagreement.

34 Police ordinance, 11 June 1829.
35 Moniteur universel, 17 Nov. 1868.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 97

regulation. It argued that the regulation actually restored the right of
daughters to succeed their mothers, a right that it claimed had been
lost under the earlier decree.38 The importance of the nuclear family
was further strengthened by the new rules concerning hired assistants.

Merchants considered their assistants not simply as hired help, but
as apprentices. As such, they were part of the “household,” or family,
of the merchant, and therefore were believed to possess the right to
succession, as the request of the Widow Herbin revealed. By working
with the older, more experienced woman, the younger woman learned
a trade that could support her and her eventual family. In a petition
from stall holders of the Temple market to the prefect of police pro-
testing an earlier (and unsuccessful) attempt to regulate the use of
assistants, merchants described this system in unambiguous terms: “In
our commerce, either to help us sell, or to act as guardians . . . over
merchandise continually exposed for sale in a market that is not closed,
we employ young people for wages, who are fed by us, … who will be-
come later on Marchandes themselves, [and] who will sell one day for
themselves in the Market.” 39

The use of hired assistants was part of a practice of mutual aid
that governed market relationships. Merchants of the Temple market
expressed this sentiment most eloquently in 1843, in response to at-
tempts by market inspectors to forbid merchants from watching over
one another’s stalls, when they argued that they had “all and at every
instant need for each other in their commerce.” 40 This ethic of mutual
aid permitted merchants to leave their stalls to run errands, make
purchases, attend to other duties, or simply take a break during the
workday. Assistants allowed merchants some freedom and flexibility;
in exchange, they learned a trade.

The 1868 decree targeted these practices by stipulating that mer-
chants would no longer be able to use hired assistants in their stalls
as substitutes. Merchants could still hire assistants, but these assistants
were no longer permitted to run the stall in the absence of the mer-
chant; only immediate family members (a spouse or child) would be
allowed to serve as substitutes and then only for a limited time. Ac-
cording to opposition journalist J.-A. Barral, this ruling was part of an
effort by the city to increase its revenues by forbidding ill or elderly

38 Ibid. In fact, the 1829 ordinance limited succession to only the daughter or the niece of
the merchant. The wording of this article and the tendency of merchants to request the right to
succession based on a much wider group of family relationships, as demonstrated above, seem to
suggest that in practice more distant relatives were also granted the right to succession.

39 APP, DA 723, petition of stall holders at Temple to prefect of police, 12 Mar. 1842.
40 APP, DA 723, petition of chiffon merchants to prefect of police, 7 Apr. 1843.

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98 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

merchants to sublet their stalls. Barral used images of female weakness
and dependency to evoke sympathy in his readers: ‘And one forgets
that it is to women, who because of the fragility of human nature are
subject to periodic indispositions . . ., that this barbarous regime [of
not allowing substitutes] is applied in the Halles centrales of Paris.”’41
Barral raised the powerful specter of female poverty, arguing that for
ill or elderly merchants unable to work, the revenue gained through
subletting their stalls was often the only income they possessed. The
regulation forbidding substitution by paid assistants was clearly de-
signed in part to increase the control of the administration over the
merchants and to maximize revenues. Yet while critics such as Barral
opposed the regulation and the heavy hand of the administration, by
defending the supposedly ill or elderly merchants, those more favor-
able to the regulatory project focused on the younger assistants as a
source of danger. In neither case was the real function of assistants as
apprentices and aids recognized.

For authorities, looking at the market through the optic of do-
mesticity, the only acceptable relationship between women was that of
mother and daughter. At a time when prostitution was still believed to
be primarily the domain of women (the male procurer or “pimp” was
not yet believed to dominate the business of prostitution), other types
of relationships between women were increasingly considered suspect.
The relationship between the older merchant and the younger assis-
tant therefore appeared dangerously similar to that between procuress
and fille publique. This fear appears in written reports beginning in the
1840s and is part of a growing tendency to associate all forms of female
commerce with prostitution. Thus, for example, in an 1842 note to the
prefect of police, the adjunct Inspector-General of the Temple Market
wrote that agents of disorder in the market were “not the merchants
themselves … but rather the salesgirls who are paid according to their
greater or lesser degree of prettiness, of . .. shamelessness.”42 Fear of
prostitution among assistants manifested itself as concern regarding
the sales technique of racolage, literally “solicitation.” Solicitation con-
sisted of merchants calling out to or approaching passersby with flat-
tering comments in order to attract customers. Repeated regulations,
from the 1840s on, forbade the use of solicitation. The younger and,
in the eyes of observers, more seductive assistants employed by mer-
chants were those believed most likely to engage in solicitation and
therefore most worrisome and in need of policing.

By targeting hired assistants, market authorities struck a blow at

41J.-A. Barral, “Les Halles de Paris,” Opinion national, 13 Nov. 1868.
42 APP, DA 723, note to prefect of police, 28 Mar. 1842.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 99

both the traditional system of apprenticeship and merchant networks.
It is likely that the use of hired assistants became less attractive to
merchants when they could no longer be used as substitutes and less
appealing to assistants once the prospect of eventually possessing a
stall in the market was no longer guaranteed. Assistants, like any out-
sider to the market, would henceforth be required to apply for per-
mission to run a stall. In the meantime, the 1868 regulation required
that merchants give market authorities the livret of all hired assistants,
transforming these assistants from apprentices and “family” members
to employees under direct control of market authorities.

Merchants also underwent a process of redefinition. The mainte-
nance of preferential treatment for daughters in the 1868 regulation
indicates that the market conceived as a female space was not destined
to become an arena governed by the principles of freedom of com-
merce and open competition. Privileging the nuclear family, and in
particular the relationship between mother and daughter, restructured
market relationships so as to make them more compatible with the
norms of bourgeois domesticity. The 1868 regulation sought to sever
the association of the market with the Old Regime, without, however,
applying free-market principles to its assumed female population. The
same assumptions resulted in a second aspect of the “renovation” of
the merchants of the halles: the denial, on the part of authorities, of
the possibility of a female breadwinner. Operating within the context
of a culture that increasingly attacked women who successfully sup-
ported themselves, market authorities and observers transformed the
identity of the merchants of the halles from “female breadwinners” to
recipients of charity.

The Challenge of the Female Breadwinner

The overlapping of work and family that characterized market life and
troubled authorities was consistently invoked by merchants, who regu-
larly justified work-related demands by referring to family obligations.
The Femme Las, a toiletries merchant at the Temple market, supported
her request for a better situated stall by informing the police that she
was the sole support of her family because her husband was “suffering
from infirmities and old age.”43 Another petitioner, asking for a better
place in the halles, wrote of the “heavy obligations that my young and
numerous family imposes on me.”44

Such requests were motivated by immediate economic need. How-

43 APP, DA 723, Reconstruction du marchg du Temple, Femme Las to the prefect of police,
8Jan. 1859.

44 APDS, V2 F4 article 3, 30 Mar. 1869.

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100 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

ever, the status of family provider also functioned for merchants as a
source of individual and collective identity and could be used to justify
a wide range of demands. Thus, for example, in an 1858 petition ad-
dressed to the prefect of police regarding the new arrangements of the
renovated halles, sixty-six merchants of wholesale vegetables reasoned,
“if they add that they are all mothers of families and that having sold for
many years in the halles they have no other means of existence, perhaps
their position will be considered worthy of attracting your attention.” 45
Merchants justified requests by invoking their status as family provider
even when the request had little immediate relation to the commercial
side of market life. In an 1857 letter to the priest of the Saint-Eustache
parish, asking him to bless the recently completed pavilion for the sale
of seafood, the fish merchants of the halles explained their request by
referring to themselves as “mothers of families” and stating, “We have
great need that God would want in his paternal Bounty to bless Our
work.”46 Merchants used their status of family providers to lend au-
thority to their voices.

The tactical nature of referring to one’s status as family provider
occasionally led merchants to misrepresent their actual family situa-
tion to add weight to their demands. The Widow Ramon, for example,
justified her request to deliver milk to her clients who worked in the
Temple market by arguing, “In this way I will increase my meager daily
profits by ten or twelve sous, which are sorely needed, as I am a widow
with two children and responsible for my mother in her eighty-eighth
year.”47 Her request was denied when a police inquiry revealed that
her two children were grown and married.

In mid-nineteenth-century France, invoking one’s family obliga-
tions was a standard way of legitimizing requests made to authori-
ties, even when those requests were not directly economic in nature.
Working-class men, for example, developed a rhetorical strategy in
the 1840s by which political and economic demands were justified by
referring to their role in the family.48 According to the terms of this
argument, often called the “family-wage” or “male-breadwinner” argu-
ment, working-class men argued for higher wages, independence in

45 APP, DA 380, petition of vegetable and greenery merchants to prefect of police, Nov.
1858.

46 APP, DA 380, petition of fish merchants to the priest of Saint-Eustache, 1 Dec. 1857.
47 APP, DA 723, letter of the Widow Ramon to the prefect of police.
48 For studies of the construction and use of this argument in nineteenth-century France

that give gender a central place, see Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York,
1988); Louis Devance, “Femme, famille, travail et morale sexuelle dans l’ideologie de 1848,”
Romantisme 13-14 (1976): 79-103; Michelle Perrot, “L’Eloge a la menagere dans le discours des
ouvriers fran~cais au XIXe siecle,” Romantisme 13-14 (1976): 105-121.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 101

the workplace, and the vote, on the basis that they were responsible for
a wife and children. Contrasting independence and dependency, pub-
lic and private, male and female, the “male-breadwinner” argument,
while not completely replicating bourgeois models of domesticity, had
resonance with members of the middle class who had made gendered
divisions an integral component of bourgeois life.

Female merchants, unable to reproduce the same gendered divi-
sions in their rhetoric or their lives, found themselves in a situation
in which their status as breadwinners was discounted, not only as im-
possible, but as a direct cause of disorder and immorality. The strict
separation between work and family in bourgeois life and ideology
was meant to create a private space protected from the self-interest
and competition that was believed to characterize the public world,
“a place,” according to Joan Scott, “of complete human fulfillment, in
opposition to the alienation of capitalist society.” 49 The “female” world
of the family was thus meant to ensure that virtues such as selflessness
and love could be preserved in a free-market society. Since economic
power was identified with masculinity, a woman’s place in the family
denied her the possibility of earning a living. What Catherine Hall has
argued for England was true for France as well: a man’s “manliness was
based on his ability to provide for his dependents; the femininity of his
wife and daughters rested on their capacity to be dependent.”50 The
ideology of domesticity held, therefore, that a woman could not suc-
cessfully support a family on her own. Admitting the contrary would
confuse lines between public and private, between male and female,
and thereby threaten both order and virtue.

Concern regarding women who were economically independent
appeared in popular literature with growing frequency beginning in
the 1840s and constituted a prominent theme of such literature during
the Second Empire. This concern was often expressed by conflating
economic independence with prostitution. For example, one of the
most common female stereotypes of the time, the lorette, was a cour-
tesan who used her income from prostitution to support herself and
her family. In one description, a lorette employed her entire family by
tying them to her commerce: her father was also her doorman, her
aunt worked as an usher in a theater she attended regularly, her sis-
ter was her maid, and her cousin was her domestic.51 In addition to

49 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 108.
50 Catherine Hall, “The Sweet Delights of Home,” in From the Fires of Revolution to the Great

War, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 of A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 74.

51 [Taxile Delord, Arnould Fremy, and Edmond Texier], Paris-Lorette (Paris, 1854), 19.

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102 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

presenting an image of confused boundaries between work and family,
such depictions of prostitutes as primary wage earners subverted the
model of the male-dominated family, in this case by the absence of
a male breadwinner. The relationship between the prostitute and her
male lover (not her client) was commonly characterized as operating
according to a reversal of gender roles, since he lived off her wages.
According to Alexandre Dumas, for example, the male “souteneur [sup-
porter],” as he was called by police, really merited the title of “homme
entretenu [kept man] .” 52 The economic power of the prostitute, insofar
as it made possible a reversal of what was believed to be the correct
power relationship between the sexes, came to symbolize, by the late
1840s, her immorality and lack of respect for the social hierarchy.

During the 1850s, popular literature increasingly cited the eco-
nomic independence of female merchants as a source of danger. In the
1854 Paris anecdote, for example, Alexandre Privat dAnglemont, jour-
nalist for Le Siecle, argued that families of merchants and other female
“breadwinners were organized along a reversal of middle-class gen-
dered lines: “Most men married to merchants or to steady workers do
nothing, or almost nothing. They barely help their wives in their tasks;
they spend their days in the bar.”53 While this statement was clearly
meant as an indictment of men of the popular classes, challenging their
claims to responsibility and respectability, d’Anglemont also targeted,
through ridicule, the pretensions of women who claimed to be the sole
supporters of their families. For this attack he chose, significantly, a
merchant of the halles, “Mother Brichard,” who, at forty-five, was “fat,
round, short, a sort of laboring cow, a workhorse. She is active, turbu-
lent, always moving; she comes, goes, cries, denies, speaks, sings, works,
all at once.” 54 Remarking that his readers might be “astonished that a
woman alone could earn a living,” d’Anglemont clearly, by his descrip-
tion of “Mother Brichard,” indicated that a truly “feminine” woman
could not earn a living, at least not honestly.55 The subtext of this pas-
sage was reinforced by d’Anglemont’s decision to end with a descrip-
tion of prostitution around the halles. This time, he located disorder
not in working-class men who shirked their rightful responsibilities,
but in the women who did not fit the norms of bourgeois sensibility:

The honest worker on his way to work greets her [the prostitute]
with jokes when passing by. The men are ashamed of these remarks;

52 Alexandre Dumas, Filles, lorettes et courtesans (Paris, 1843), 36.
53 Alexandre Privat dAnglemont, Paris anecdote: Les Industries inconnues, la childebert, les

oiseaux de nuit, la vile des chi#onniers (Paris, 1854), 16.
54 Ibid., 25.
55 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 103

they are vaguely horrified by what they have done. But the women,
on the contrary, seem proud of their abjection; they face scorn with
head held high, and return joke for joke. The instinct for morality
is completely destroyed in them. Of all beings in creation, woman
is always the worst when she isn’t the best.56

Presenting female merchants as the sole support of families which in-
cluded lazy or violent men thus reinforced links between female com-
merce and prostitution and served to discredit as immoral and unnatu-
ral the status of the female breadwinner.

Such characterizations reflect a growing tendency during the Sec-
ond Empire to consider work and family incompatible for women.
Another means by which popular literature revealed its discomfort with
the propensity of women -especially merchant women, who were per-
haps most visible to bourgeois observers -to combine work and family
life was to question the authenticity of motherhood among female
merchants. Authors played on longstanding fears that fraudulent com-
mercial practices were widespread in the capital to imply that female
merchants posed as mothers to increase their business. In an 1854 bro-
chure on the “petits metiers” of Paris, for example, the merchant of toy
windmills was described as “dragging with her the child, rented or bor-
rowed, who is supposed to elicit the charity of passersby.” 57 Any woman
of the popular classes active in public spaces of the city and claiming
to be a mother became suspect. In her 1868 work, Les Femmes a Paris
et en province, the countess Dash warned readers against any woman in
the streets of Paris who appeared to be a loving mother; she will almost
always, the countess stated, reveal her successful farce with mocking
laughter and insults directed toward the gullible “bourgeois.”58

Discrediting the female breadwinner image as false or immoral
was part of an attempt to reconcile bourgeois beliefs, shaped by the
ideology of domesticity, with what middle-class observers actually saw
in the streets of Paris. Denying that those who earned money through
commerce carried out in public were truly mothers was one way of
doing this. Another approach was to redefine the work that women
of the popular classes did in public as mendicity. Edmond Texier in
his 1867 article for Paris-Guide wrote of “trades that are no more than
varieties of mendicity covered over with a mask of industry [such as]
[t]he merchant of bouquets at a sou, who has two children in her arms
and who pursues the passer-by with her strangled cry: ‘No bread in the

56 Ibid., 213.
57 Paris-Gagne-Petit (Paris, 1854), 30.
58 La Comtesse Dash, Les Femmes d Paris et a province (Paris, 1868), 92.

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104 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

house.'”59 In such descriptions, merchant women were portrayed as
unable to support themselves, let alone their families, and thus fit the
domestic model.

Similar concerns regarding the economic independence of mer-
chants influenced regulations in the renovated halles. To create female
dependency, authorities redefined the status of merchants, identifying
them as recipients of charity under the authority of the police and the
city, rather than as independent businesswomen. One way of doing
this, as discussed above, was to take control over hired help away from
merchants and place it in the hands of market authorities. The 1868
regulation made it clear that merchants could not sublet their stalls or
employ substitutes since these stalls were not personal property (and
the merchants by extension not independent entrepreneurs), but were
rather provisionally granted in order to provide a means of support.

Increasingly, granting a stall came to be considered an act of
charity, and the stall holders came to be seen as weak and needy. While
requests for stalls in the market based on extended or created family
relationships were rejected by authorities after 1868, those who framed
their demand in terms of charity were more favorably received. In
her 1869 request, a sixty-one-year-old widow emphasized her physical
weakness, “affected by weakened vision and neurological pains in the
lower part of the body,” and her economic dependency, “without re-
sources and able to depend only on the help of her twenty-five-year-old
daughter.”60 Invoking the equation of market activity with charity-
“she dares to hope that she will find favor in your eyes and that, always
good and charitable, you will deign, Monsieur le Prefet, to grant her
this only means of existence” -this widow was convened by market au-
thorities and told to make a formal request for a stall in one of the
pavilions.6′

Equating commerce with charity was especially common in de-
scriptions of those women who worked in the open-air fruit and vege-
table market. Adjacent to the newly constructed pavilions of the halles,
which served to hide the majority of merchants from public view, was
the outdoor market, where merchants sold small quantities of fruits
and vegetables. Merchants working in public were especially troubling
to observers, and it is among the merchants of the outdoor market, as
well as among ambulatory street merchants, that the strongest iden-
tification of commerce with charity, mendicity, and female weakness

59 Edmond Texier, “Les Petites Industries,” in Paris-Guide: Par les principaux &crivains et
artistes de la France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1867), 2:971.

60 APDS, V2 F4, article 3, 7July 1869.
61 Ibid.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 105

was made. According to one inspector, reporting on the open-air mar-
ket in 1866, at least half the merchants were inscribed at the bureau de
bienfaisance; another inspector wrote, “the [female] merchants who are
elderly and without a husband, are very unhappy, many are registered
with charity bureaus, many also sleep by the night in furnished rooms
[les garnis] .” 62 The use of the word garni in this comment reveals that
despite attempts to redefine merchants as recipients of charity, those
who worked outside the new pavilions of the halles still appeared to be
dangerously close to the world of prostitution.63 Thus while merchants
inside the pavilions could be controlled through various measures and,
perhaps most important, hidden from view, those in public constituted
a special threat. The open-air fruit and vegetable market was thus tar-
geted for gradual suppression by an order of the prefect of the Seine
issued on 22 November 1867.64

Authorities and observers alike used a double-edged discourse
concerning women and money to redefine the status of female mer-
chants in the capital. Whether by portraying merchants as weak and
dependent recipients of charity or as economically independent pros-
titutes, this discourse denied the viability of a virtuous female bread-
winner. Women who claimed to support their families through hard
work were depicted as either immoral or dishonest. While such con-
flicting representations make it extremely difficult, if not impossible,
to determine the actual economic situation of the market women of
Paris, they do reveal the intense anxiety felt by middle-class observers
faced with evidence that women could support themselves and their
families by working at a trade. This anxiety influenced the content of
regulations concerning the newly renovated market, where every effort
was made to render market life compatible with the norms of domestic
ideology. In addition to reorganizing merchant networks and encour-
aging dependency among merchants, authorities attempted to impose
“respectable” behavior inside the pavilions.65 No longer, in markets

62 APDS, V2 F4, article 3, 4 Oct. 1866; 21 Oct. 1866.
63 In the mid-nineteenth century, the world of furnished hotels, or garnis, was identified

as a world of criminals and prostitutes, under frequent police surveillance.
64 APDS, V2 F4, article 3. The administration also wished to eliminate all ambulatory mer-

chants in the capital; however, given the insufficient number of neighborhood markets through-
out the city, this was impossible. Police authorities were thus directed to reduce the number of
street merchants whenever possible and to grant permissions only to the most needy applicants
(APP, DB 257, Embarras de la voie publique [autre que travaux]).

65 Police ordinances were issued with the opening of each new pavilion of the halles and
with the opening of new neighborhood markets. In addition, a global ordonnance concerning
public markets was issued in 1865. Not all articles were included in each and every ordinance;
it is significant in this respect that the most extensive of these ordinances, which served as the
basis for the 1865 ordonnance, wa’s issued in 1857 on the occasion of the opening of pavilion 7,
dedicated to the sale of seafood.

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106 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

such as the halles, would fishwives be allowed to cry out to passersby,
nor would seductive salesgirls be left to pursue, with double enten-
dres, prospective clients. By the terms of the many decrees issued in
the 1850s and 1860s, merchants were prohibited from calling clients
to their stalls, from announcing the nature and price of merchandise,
from calling out to passersby with comments on behavior or appear-
ance, and from engaging in “brawls, quarrels, rows, cries, songs or
games of any sort.”66 Such regulations redefined the market space ac-
cording to the norms of bourgeois domestic ideology; rather than a
site of popular disorder, the markets of Paris were henceforth to be
extensions of the bourgeois home.

Conclusion: Silencing Merchants’ Voices

The renovation of the halles reveals the extent to which ideology con-
cerning family structure and gender roles affected decisions regarding
the reorganization of the market, and, by extension, urban renovation.
Ridding the market of merchants who worked in public view, limit-
ing succession of stalls to daughters, and encouraging dependency on
market authorities all served to create a market compatible with the
norms of bourgeois domestic ideology, rather than the principles of
freedom of commerce and open competition. The attempted restruc-
turing of family life within Paris markets during the Second Empire, a
restructuring that entailed a redefinition of the activities and behavior
of merchants, as well as a reconfiguration of relationships both among
merchants and between merchants and market authorities, was com-
patible with the larger goals of urban renovation undertaken during
this time: to create a visually pleasing and orderly “bourgeois” city. Im-
plicitly linking the structure of the family and the structure of society,
and in accordance with the general political trend toward conservatism
following the June Days of 1848, renovators attempted to create, in the
halles, order out of what they perceived as disorder.67

The “civilizing mission” undertaken by the city in regard to the
halles was generally agreed to have been a success.68 For contempo-
raries, there was no doubt that renovation had brought about a change

66 APP, DB 371, ordinance concerning the policing of public markets, article 58, 30 Dec.
1865.

67 Two recent studies that examine the connections between debates over family structure
and social organization in France are Hunt, TheFamily Romance, and Caroline Ford, “Private Lives
and Public Order in Restoration France: The Seduction of Emily Loveday,” American Historical
Review 99 (Feb. 1994): 21-43.

68 Hector Horeau, Assainissment, embellissements de Paris: Ediliti urbaine mise d la portge de tout
le monde (Paris, 1868), 44.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 107

in the character and population of the neighborhood, giving it a much
more “bourgeois” tone. Louis Lazare, editor of the Revue municipale,
wrote in 1858 that the opening of the newly renovated pavilions of the
halles had been accompanied by a shift in the neighborhood’s popula-
tion, from primarily working-class to “commercial and well-off.” 69 And
even critics of the empire, such as Emile Zola, identified the market as
a “bourgeois” rather than a popular space; in his 1873 novel Le Ventre
de Paris, the market was meant to symbolize not popular insurrection
and disease, but “the fattening of the bourgeois who humbled himself
before the coup d’etat and who amply profited.” 70

The “embourgeoisement” of the halles was also reflected in de-
scriptions of female merchants. Paul de Musset noted in his 1856 article
on “Parisiens et Parisiennes” what he considered to be an improve-
ment in the behavior of the merchant: “one can remark . .. a notable
improvement in her language. She no longer speaks the fishwife’s cate-
chism, and dirty words no longer leave her mouth on all occasions.97′
The agents of this change, he continued, were the mothers of Paris,
and bourgeois mothers in particular: “Among the young, courageous
mothers who run to do their errands while their children sleep, there is
more than one woman who is educated, well brought-up, musical, the
childhood friend of a marquise. It is she who has civilized the marchande
de la halle.”72 Complaints that the market was already too small-that
merchandise and merchants had begun once again to block circulation
by occupying the surrounding streets -began to reappear during the
early Third Republic and continued until the market was finally moved
outside the city in 1969. The image of the merchants held by contem-
poraries, however, seems to have been definitively altered. Observers
seem to have unanimously agreed that in renovating the market, “the
dames de la halle themselves have been transformed into calm retailers,
serious shopkeepers.”73

Yet how accurate was this perception? Did merchants passively ac-
cept changes in their commerce? Did they mold themselves to the new
models of femininity that were being held out to them? The evidence
suggests that they did not. Proudly identifying themselves as “Les
Dames Marchandes de la halle,” they petitioned the prefect of police,

69 Revue municipale et gazette reunies 267 (10 Aug. 1858): 309.
70 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS n.a.f. 10338, Emile Zola, “Note Preparatoires. Le

Ventre de Paris,” 58.
71 Paul de Musset, “Parisiens et parisiennes,” in Alexandre Dumas, et al., Paris et les pari-

siens au XIXe sikle: Moeurs, arts et monuments (Paris, 1856), 440.
72 Ibid., 440-41.
73 “Une visite aux halles centrales,” Magasin pittoresque, 30 (Jan. 1862), 27.

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108 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES

the prefect of the Seine, and the emperor himself regarding changes
in “their” market.74 Adapting a traditional role to new circumstances,
delegations of female merchants repeatedly marched to the Tuileries
and presented the emperor with their complaints and suggestions re-
garding the renovation of the market.75 And although they framed their
demands in formulations of the utmost respect, merchants clearly be-
lieved that they were the experts when it came to the organization of
market life: “We pray your Majesty to excuse the liberty we have taken
in submitting to him our ideas, convinced that his sound and honest
judgment will say that in this matter, we are the competent judges.” 76

By their persistence and certainty in their own expertise, mer-
chants did affect the renovation of the halles, but only by delaying,
through their repeated protests, its completion.77 Petitions submitted
by merchants were filed by police, yet largely ignored. While merchants
believed they had a right to give their opinion concerning various
aspects of renovation, authorities increasingly found such actions as-
tonishing and incomprehensible.78 This growing lack of understanding
between merchants and authorities reveals the extent to which the pro-
cess of “domesticating” the merchants of the halles occurred primarily
in the minds of authorities and observers, for whom the renovated mar-
ket appeared more compatible with the norms of bourgeois ideology.

However, although the domestic ideal does not seem to have been
embraced by female merchants or imposed upon them with complete
success, changes wrought in the organization of the market had a nega-
tive effect on their lives and commerce. Whereas the pre-renovation
market had been drafty, open to all types of weather, dirtier, and per-
haps less comfortable, it had also been a lively center for gossip and
games, a site of commerce, but also of family and friendship. Renova-
tion could not completely destroy that aspect of the market, but, in
bringing about changes that would weaken merchant networks and en-
courage greater dependency on market authorities, it could diminish
both the communal solidarity and independence vis-a-vis authorities
that were integral components of merchant identity. And although the
administration framed its argument for regulatory changes in terms of

74 APP, DA 380, petition of greenery merchants to the prefect of police, n.d.
75 APP, DA 380, report of general inspector of the market to the prefect of police, 24 Nov.

1853; petition of 14 May 1856; reclamation of the marchandes of potatoes concerning the places
in the halles, 15 May 1856; report of inspector of Marchg des Innocents, 13 Mar. 1857; petition of
Marchandes des Innocents, 9 Jan. 1858.

76 APP, DA 380, petition of poultry merchants, 14 May 1856.
77 Du Camp, Paris, ses organes, sesfonctions et sa vie, 2:152.
78 APP, DA 380, report of the general inspector of markets to the prefect of police, 24 Nov.

1853; note of director of provisioning, 9 Mar. 1857.

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URBAN RENOVATION, MORAL REGENERATION 109

tradition versus modernization, the characterization of the merchant
population as female justified the interventionist stance taken by au-
thorities in regulating market life, a stance which otherwise seemed to
violate the principle of freedom of commerce. In this sense, the reorga-
nization of the halles may have provided a precedent for intervention
in other areas that were not specifically identified as female.79

At the same time as their influence and independence diminished
within the market, merchants also lost their traditional role as spokes-
women for the “people,” a role henceforth assumed by working-class
men.80 The frustration of merchants faced with this situation can be
heard in their numerous petitions, as they insisted, “that which you
have done for our good, can not cause our ruin; we can not be un-
happy in our Louvre.”8′ Such complaints, however, hearkening back
to an earlier era when the opinions of the dames de la halle merited at-
tention, fell, during the Second Empire, on deaf ears.

79 For example, many of the articles of the 1865 ordonnance were later applied to an obvi-
ously masculine space, the livestock market of La Villette, which was also built on the model of
the halles. See the ordinance concerning the policing of La Villette, 12 Oct. 1867. David Pinkney
notes the architectural similarity, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 79.

80 D’Orliac, Les Dames de la Halle, 163-64.
81 APP, DA 380, copy of petition taken to the Tuileries by female merchants of the MarchU

des Innocents, 9Jan. 1858.

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• Article Contents

p. [87]
p. 88
p. 89
p. 90
p. 91
p. 92
p. 93
p. 94
p. 95
p. 96
p. 97
p. 98
p. 99
p. 100
p. 101
p. 102
p. 103
p. 104
p. 105
p. 106
p. 107
p. 108
p. 109

• Issue Table of Contents

French Historical Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 1-126
Front Matter
Forum: Women and Work
Female Masters in the Ribbonmaking Guild of Eighteenth-Century Rouen [pp. 1-14]
Gender, Guilds, and Work Identity: Perspectives from Sixteenth-Century Paris [pp. 15-30]
The Public Nature of Women’s Work: Definitions and Debates during the Revolution of 1848 [pp. 31-47]
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Women’s Work: Comment on Loats, Hafter, and DeGroat [pp. 49-54]
The Household Service of Early Modern French Noblewomen [pp. 55-85]
Urban Renovation, Moral Regeneration: Domesticating the Halles in Second-Empire Paris [pp. 87-109]
News [p. 111]
Recent Articles on French History [pp. 113-124]
Abstracts [pp. 125-126]
Back Matter

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and College Art Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Art Bulletin.

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Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
College Art Association

The “Citoyenne” Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture

during the French Revolution

Author(s):

Amy Freund

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 325-344
Published by: College Art Association
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The Citoyenne Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture

during the French Revolution
Amy Freund

Revolutionary Paris was awash in portraits. Portraits domi

nated the Salon, filled the print shops, decorated political

clubs, and were paraded through the streets in festivals and

funerals. Commissioners eager to redefine themselves in Rev

olutionary terms flocked to portraitists’ studios at a time

when patronage for other genres of art production was dry

ing up. The statistics from the official Salon exhibitions testify

to the growing visibility of portraiture. Between 1789 and

1791, the number of portraits exhibited at the Salon more

than doubled, and the totals continued to rise steadily over

the Revolutionary period.1 The complaint of a critic at the

1796 Salon confirms the increasing public presence of the

genre and snidely lays the blame for the epidemic of portraits

at the feet of the Revolution: “Portraits, portraits, and more

portraits. Since we have all become brothers, the Salon has

been made into a gallery of family portraits.”2 Indeed, liberty,

equality, and fraternity seem to have served as tonics for the

portrait market. The dismantlement of the nobility and the

emigration of many members of the pre-Revolutionary elite

may have affected demand for portraiture at the highest end

of the price scale (and this is far from certain), but the

popularity of portraiture touched all socioeconomic levels.

The cheapest available portraits, such as the silhouettes and

mechanically produced physionotraces made by artists work

ing on the streets of Paris, could be purchased for as little as

three livres, at a moment when a ticket for the standing

places at the Opera cost a little more than two livres.3 Por

traits were affordable and much in demand by the newly

constituted French people.

Portraiture was central to post-1789 visual culture because

it proposed solutions to the fundamental challenge of the

Revolution: how to make subjects into citizens. Revolutionary

legislators confronted the problem of regenerating the na

tion from the top down, legislating sweeping changes in the

nation’s political, social, and cultural structures. The citizens

of the new France used portraits to effect regeneration from

the bottom up. Both portraiture and Revolutionary political

morality were predicated on the assumption that the face and

body communicated essential truths about the sitter to the

viewer. Transparency between citizens was the watchword of

the new regime. Now that political sovereignty rested with the

people, it was particularly important that the people
be vir

tuous, and that their shared virtue be clearly manifested to

each other and in the governance of the state.4 Maximilien

Robespierre expressed this desire for constant and
unim

peded communion between the individual
and the polity in

1794 when, speaking on the floor of the legislature, he

looked forward to a new political order, “where all souls are

magnified by the continual communication of Republican

sentiments and by the need to merit the esteem
of a great

people. . . ,”5 Robespierre posits a self
that is always demon

strating its republicanism and is constantly mindful
of the

critical gaze of its fellow citizens. The continual communica

tion of Republican sentiments, a goal difficult to realize in

the flesh, could be attained by a portrait, the permanent

image of the soul or, at least, of the body.

Revolutionary portraits reveal the ways in which French

citizens reformulated the basic elements of selfhood at a

moment when traditional political and social hierarchies

were being dismantled. In the wake of the collapse of the

ancien regime and of the Royal Academy of Painting and

Sculpture and its aesthetic strictures, sitters and artists

adapted the old conventions of portraiture to new social

realities. Some hierarchies, nonetheless, remained largely

unchallenged by the successive Revolutionary governments.

Citizenship was a male prerogative. Women had neither vot

ing rights nor legal access to military or civil posts. But

portraiture was not a male prerogative. Its centrality to Rev

olutionary visual culture made it a particularly effective

means by which women could claim political agency. The

visual vocabulary for making that claim, however, was limited.

Revolutionary allegories employed female faces and bodies to

visualize liberty, reason, nature, or the Republic, but actual

women were discouraged from representing themselves as

political actors. The efforts of those women who seized on the

Revolution’s promise of universal liberty and equality, such as

the participants in the women’s political clubs that were

founded after 1789 or activists like Olympe de Gouges, were

quickly suppressed. The only officially acceptable model for

Revolutionary femininity, promoted in speeches, in print,

and in visual representation, was that of the Republican wife

and mother, inspiring patriotism in her husband and raising

citizens for the nation.

A few women succeeded in carving out political identities

for themselves over the course of the Revolution. Not many

of them commissioned portraits. The case of Theresia Cabar

rus, better known as Mme Tallien, is exceptional. Socially

prominent, politically active, and profoundly convinced of

her ability to shape her own destiny, Cabarrus posed for a

portrait that not only proposed a novel form of female sub

jectivity but also inserted its sitter into the national drama of

the Terror (Fig. 1). Cabarrus’s portrait, painted byJean-Louis

Laneuville and exhibited at the Salon of 1796, depicts, as the

title in the Salon catalog informs us, “The Citizen [Citoyenne]

Tallien in a prison cell at La Force, holding her hair which

has just been cut.”6 The portrait represents Cabarrus’s im

prisonment two years earlier by the radical Jacobin govern

ment. Cabarrus’s prison correspondence with her then lover,

Jean-Lambert Tallien, reportedly prompted Tallien
to stage a

coup d’etat against Robespierre, thus bringing
the Terror to

an end and liberating Cabarrus. In this complex life-size

composition, Cabarrus and her portraitist manipulated
the

conventions of female portraiture in order to produce a self

that was both reassuringly feminine and capable of interven

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326 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

1 Jean-Louis Laneuville, The

Citoyenne Tallien in the Prison of La

Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just
Been Cut, exhibited at the Salon of

1796, oil on canvas, 63% X 50% in.

(162 X 129 cm). Collection of the

princes of Chimay (artwork in the

public domain)

4$

ing in the course of national history—a citoymne in the full

sense of the term. That her attempt to create a feminine

version of political agency through portraiture was by and

large a failure provides us with an insight into the unfulfilled

promises of Revolutionary citizenship.
The case of Cabarrus’s portrait also demonstrates the value

of understanding portraiture as a collaborative process. A

portrait is the product of the ambitions of both the sitter and

the artist. Recent work on portraiture in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries has privileged the artist’s claims over

the sitter’s, an approach that obscures the complex power

dynamics of the portrait process as well the unique nature of

portraiture’s intervention in cultural and social debates.7

Rethinking portraiture as a collaboration yields a more vivid,

and more historically responsible, understanding of what is at

stake—personally, aesthetically, and culturally—for artists,

sitters, and viewers. This approach to portraiture is particu

larly crucial for our understanding of the Revolutionary mo

ment. As both historians and art historians have noted, the

Revolution provoked a wave of what historian Jan Goldstein

refers to as “self-talk”: intense debate over the constituent

elements of individual identity.8 Paintings like Laneuville’s

portrait of Cabarrus thus did political as well as biographical
and aesthetic work.

The ambitious format of Cabarrus’s portrait, moreover,

points to the ways in which portraiture was becoming the

most important artistic means of investigating pressing phil

osophical and moral questions. Portraiture at this time took

on many of the responsibilities of history painting, making
moral exemplarity and historical agency something that or

dinary people could claim for themselves. The Revolution

marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness

of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formula

tion of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary
individuals—both men and (uneasily, as the case of Cabar

rus’s portrait shows) women. This shift had major conse

quences for the course of art production in the modern era:

the undermining of academic genre hierarchies, the fore

grounding of the individual subject as the focus of ambitious

painting, and, eventually, the rise of a modernist painting
concerned with the contemporary and the contingent.

Cabarrus’s portrait not only participated in these cultural

changes but also made an argument for the centrality of

women to the Revolutionary polity. In order to understand

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 327

2 Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Louise Pastoret, 1791-92, oil

on canvas, 51 Vs X 38 in. (129.8 X 96.6 cm). The Art Institute

of Chicago, Clyde M. Carr Fund and Major Acquisitions
Endowment, 1967.228 (artwork in the public domain;

photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago)

3 Portrait of a Woman with Revolutionary Emblems, ca. 1790-93,
oil on canvas, 23 X 19V4 in. (58.5 X 49 cm). Musee Lambinet,
Versailles (artwork in the public domain)

the stakes involved in this high-profile attempt to represent
female political engagement, we need to consider both the

specific circumstances of the commission and the relation

ship of women to the polity during the Revolution. On the

one hand, we can understand the Cabarrus portrait in bio

graphical terms: as an unorthodox expression of an unorth

odox life. On the other hand, the portrait embodies the

contradictions and tensions surrounding the notion of fe

male citizenship in the new regime. Cabarrus had extraordi

nary access to political power, as well as to the means of

self-representation, but the challenges she faced in fabricat

ing a public face were common to all women.

These challenges are evident in the few female portraits of

the Revolutionary era that suggest a relation between female

identity and political commitment. Even women whose por
traits hinted at their engagement with national affairs were

almost always defined by their roles as wives and mothers.

Jacques-Louis David’s 1791-92 portrait of Louise Pastoret, a

member of the liberal nobility and well-known supporter of

the Revolution, makes no explicit reference to the sitter’s

political sympathies (Fig. 2).9 Instead, the portrait turns Re

publican motherhood into Pastoret’s main attribute. Seated

by her infant son’s cradle, she labors decorously at a piece of

needlework, her partially bared maternal breast testifying to

her role as nurturer of citizens. A less sophisticated but more

forthright approach to the representation of female civic

identity is evident in a portrait of an unidentified woman by
an equally unidentified artist (Fig. 3). The sitter’s entire

outfit is rendered in patriotic red, white, and blue, from the

Revolutionary cockade and artificial flowers on her bonnet to

her blue bodice and white sleeves decorated with red roses.

Around her neck she wears a miniature portrait of a man with

a mustache, a liberty bonnet, and an open-necked shirt, the

markers of the sans-culotte, the stereotypical radical working
class citizen (or of the middle-class activist who adopted this

politically expedient persona). The letter she holds reads,

“My friends, I’m counting on seeing us in a Republic.”10

Letters and miniatures appear frequently in contemporary

genre paintings as tokens of love. This particular missive is

most likely meant to be interpreted as the words of the man

whose portrait the sitter wears; her Revolutionary political

engagement is thus articulated by the male voice. In the

David portrait, the presence of a man is implicit in the

representation of motherhood. The anonymous portrait is

more explicit about the relationship between women and

citizenship; it pictures a female patriot by hanging a male

patriot around her neck.

In each of these portraits, a woman’s political engagement

is mediated by her relationship with a man. None of the

sitters inserts herself into a national narrative. Instead, all

support men and raise children in indeterminate interior

spaces. The difficulty of picturing active and independent
female citizenship speaks to the constraints that the Revolu

tion imposed on the political activity of women despite (or

because of) its promises of universal liberty and equality. As

the historian Carla Hesse has shown, the primary argument

against women’s political rights was that they were incapable

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328 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

of reason and independent judgment. Women were limited

by their supposed lack of a self-created subject position—the

same objection that was raised to the enfranchisement of

domestic servants and actors.11 Portraiture had the potential

to construct that subject position, but the social and artistic

conventions that governed women’s self-representation

proved far more rigid than those that applied to men.

Cabarrus’s portrait, working from within those conven

tions, challenges Revolutionary assumptions about the fe

male self. Laneuville certainly does not hesitate to advertise

his sitter’s personal attractions, and, indeed, Cabarrus had

been an object of public admiration since she arrived in Paris

as an adolescent in the 1780s. The portraitist pictured his

sitter as a luminous beauty in a dark prison cell, surrounded

by the emblems of her imprisonment: the chain in the fore

ground, the miserable rations behind her, and the long locks

of her hair, which had been cut in anticipation of her trip to

the guillotine. Cabarrus is depicted at three-quarters length,

with her face and body turned toward the viewer. The calm of

her perfectly symmetrical face is animated by a slight but

perceptible smile. Her eyes meet ours. Her body leans for

ward toward the viewer and the light falling from the upper
left. That light draws our attention to her face and her chest,

and makes her white dress, red sash, and pale skin glow

against the dark grays, blues, and browns of her surround

ings. Her arms are modestly crossed in her lap, and the long
locks of curly dark hair that signal her impending doom

tumble down her body into the darker edges of the picture

plane, almost an afterthought in a composition that stresses

the elegance and beauty of its subject.
But those severed curls remind the viewer that this is not a

society portrait or an image of a woman captured in the

happy dishabille of domesticity, as in David’s portrait of

Louise Pastoret. The locks of hair return our gaze to the head

from which they were cut; Cabarrus’s cropped hair is not

powdered, curled, or dressed for a portrait sitting but rather

is parted carelessly in the center and hangs loose on her

shoulders. One anomaly leads us to another. The sash

around Cabarrus’s waist is improvised from a knotted hand

kerchief. The skirt of her dress is overlapped on the right by

pieces of straw and on the left by a chain, objects that em

phasize the conditions of her captivity. Cabarrus’s body is

framed by a pillar supporting an archway on the left and the

edges of a craggy stone wall on the right, adding a note of

Gothic atmosphere. Behind the sitter to the left, the light

picks out the broken rim and handle of an earthenware jug
and a coarse loaf of bread.

On the stone wall behind Cabarrus is a portrait within a

portrait: a profile of a classically handsome man with a high

forehead, straight nose, tender lips, strong chin, and loose

dark hair falling over his neck. The portrait is bisected by a

vertical line of the masonry, and the blocks of stone around

it are cracked and chipped. All these cut and crumbling

objects remind the viewer of the dangers surrounding Cabar

rus, whose unearthly calm suggests the fortitude of a Chris

tian martyr or a heroine of ancient Rome. They also serve as

clues to a narrative that seems to be still unfolding. Who is

she and why was she imprisoned? Who is the man whose

portrait floats behind her head, and how did it materialize on

her cell wall? When will she be led off to the guillotine? The

melodramatic mise-en-scene of the portrait throws into relief

the stasis of Cabarrus’s pose and the neutrality of her expres

sion. She is at once a society beauty and an actor in the

national drama of the Terror.

This arresting amalgam of elite female portraiture and

prison narrative disturbed many of its viewers in 1796, at a

moment when France was struggling to suppress the memo

ries of the Jacobin Republic and to forge a new state out of its

legacy of civil unrest and foreign wars. Cabarrus’s portrait

commission was a gamble. In 1796, she was famous both as a

political actor and as a fashion icon of questionable virtue.

Laneuville, the artist she chose, was best known for his por

traits of radical Republican politicians. The imagery they

devised treads the line between traditional portrait conven

tions for elite women and the visual vocabulary of Revolu

tionary political culture. The painting acknowledges and

works around the objections to female political engagement,

playing up the sitter’s passivity and sentimental attachments

while at the same time proposing her as an exemplar of active

citizenship. Cabarrus’s portrait argues—by intimation, by

analogy, and by invocation of the Revolutionary portrait pro

cess itself—for her creative intervention in the course of

national politics.

Theresia Cabarrus was born in Spain in 1773 to a French

banker and his Spanish wife.1″ Her father, Francois Cabarrus,

was an important financial adviser to the king and founder of

the national bank; although bourgeois in origin and by pro

fession, the Cabarrus family had acquired patents of nobility

in France in 1786. Theresia was sent to Paris to be educated

and to make an advantageous marriage. Her family’s wealth,

their recent ennoblement, and her own beauty weighed in

her favor, and in February 1788, at the age of fourteen, she

married Jean-Jacques Devin, marquis de Fontenay, a member

of a recently ennobled family with a fortune of 800,000 livres.

The new Mme de Fontenay and her husband plunged into

the world of reforming financiers and liberal nobility, social

izing with the Lameths, the Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeaus,
and many other early supporters of the Revolution. Indeed,

one memoirist alleged that the Fontenays’ son, Theodore,

born in May 1789, was in fact fathered by Felix Le Peletier de

Saint-Fargeau, brother of the future subject of David’s first

martyr portrait. Whether or not her entanglement with pro

gressive politics took so carnal a form, Cabarrus was certainly
immersed in the pre-Revolutionary reform movement; she

was, for instance, initiated in a Masonic lodge, one of the

most important nongovernmental institutions of civil society

during the ancien regime and a cradle of Revolutionary
sentiment. After 1789, Cabarrus was publicly associated with

the most radical factions of the new government. Sometime

in the summer of 1791, soon after the arrest of the royal

family on their flight to Varennes, Cabarrus was the subject of

a satiric attack in the aptly named journal La Chronique Scan

daleuse. An imaginary dialogue between “Mme de Font. . .”

and her friend “Don … Pic … , femme Lam . . .” (Anne

Marie Picot, the wife of Charles Lameth) portrayed Cabarrus

as both a libertine and a political radical. Cabarrus tells her

friend that she was so happy about the arrest of the king and

its probable hastening of the declaration of the Republic that

she walked all the way from her suburban estate to Paris,

spent the night with Robespierre, dined with Danton, and

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 329

then attended Picot’s ball thrown in celebration of the happy
event. Picot says admiringly:

It’s your way of thinking that’s so dear to me, it’s your

patriotism, and that elevation of mind that made you rise

immediately to the heights of the revolution, that makes

me so crazy about your charming nature; and then, my

dear, what I adore in you is the courage to have had

Mirabeau.

The fictional Cabarrus replies by justifying her adventure

with the notoriously ugly comte de Mirabeau—”How could I

resist that manly eloquence?”—and then turns the tables on

her friend by accusing her husband and brother-in-law, the

Lameth brothers, of not being committed enough to the

antimonarchical cause.13 This sexually charged slander was

an utterly formulaic means of attacking women who were

perceived to be too involved in political affairs; Marie-Antoi

nette was the target of similar but far more scurrilous accu

sations. Cabarrus may have been neither a radical Republican

nor a sexual adventuress, but her sympathies and her con

nections were common knowledge, and she had become one

of the public faces of

the Revolution.

No matter the actual nature of Cabarrus’s involvement with

the events of the early Revolution, she certainly took advan

tage of one of the few legislative reforms favorable to women:

the legalization of divorce. In 1793, Cabarrus initiated di

vorce proceedings against her husband and left Paris. She

originally intended to rejoin her family in Spain, but in fact

she settled in Bordeaux, where she also had relatives. Cabar

rus rented an apartment in the center of the city and estab

lished a household for herself. This itself was remarkable: a

nineteen-year-old Spanish-born noblewoman with pro-Revo

lutionary sentiments, living alone with her young son in the

midst of the Terror, at a moment when being a foreigner and

a member of the former aristocracy was more than enough
evidence to send someone to the guillotine.

Soon after her arrival in Bordeaux, Cabarrus met Tallien, a

deputy to the National Convention who had been sent on a

mission to the city to bring it in line with the policies of the

Jacobins. Tallien’s origins were far humbler than Cabarrus’s;

his was the classic trajectory of the ambitious lower-middle

class man to whom the Revolution afforded a path to power.

He was the son of the majordomo of a noble family and was

employed as a secretary to the same family before becoming

ajournalist and eventually the secretary of the Parisian public

prosecutor. In this capacity Tallien was involved in the Sep
tember 1792 mob attacks on counterrevolutionary suspects in

the Parisian prisons; although Tallien actually attempted to

control the violence, he would later be blamed for inciting
and abetting the mob.14 Soon after the massacres, Tallien was

elected a deputy to the National Convention, and a year later,

he was sent to Bordeaux.15 Immediately after his arrival,

Tallien and Cabarrus began a very public affair. Cabarrus

used her influence with Tallien to save many people from

persecution, serving as a power broker and Lady Bountiful

for countless petitioners.16 Her efforts did not go unnoticed.

A denunciation from November 1793 accused her of protect

ing aristocrats and corrupting Tallien, but it apparently had

little effect on her behavior.1′

4 Godefroy Engelmann, after Theresia Cabarrus, Portrait of
Three of Theresia Cabarrus’s Children, 1816, lithograph. Biblio

theque Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public
domain)

One of the people who approached Cabarrus for help was

Jean-Philippe-Guy Le Gentil, comte de Paroy, an ardent roy
alist who was also a professional artist. Le Gentil described

her apartment and its contents in his memoirs:

… an easel with a painting begun, a box of oil paints,
brushes on a sort of stepstool, a drawing table supporting
a small stand with a miniature, an English box, an ivory

palette and brushes, a desk open and filled with papers,
memorandums and petitions, a bookcase with books in

disorder, as if they were frequently used. . . ,18

Many elite women took drawing lessons as part of a genteel

education, but Paroy’s account testifies to Cabarrus’s ambi

tions as an oil painter and a miniaturist. There is some

evidence to suggest that she studied with Jean-Baptiste Isabey,
the best-known miniaturist of the Revolutionary era. Later in

life she produced a credible portrait of her children, which

was reproduced in one of the first French lithographs

(Fig. 4).19

Paroy mentioned Cabarrus’s painting equipment and her

memorandums and petitions in the same breath, and, in

deed, her activities in Bordeaux went far beyond the usual

genteel female occupations or even the dispensing of patron

age, another traditional perquisite of elite women. Two sur

viving political tracts written by Cabarrus in Bordeaux pro
vide a window onto her political ideology. The first essay, on

Revolutionary education, was read out loud by a member of

the National Convention, mostly likely Tallien, at the Temple
of Reason in Bordeaux in December 1793.20 Her call for

public education is a smoothly written compendium of En

lightenment and Revolutionary values: the natural virtue of

children, the advantages of physical exercise, the importance
of sensibility to personal character, the simplicity and frank

ness necessary to Republican morals, and the role that the

citizen-soldier plays in the defense of France. Cabarrus is

equally at ease citing John Locke and invoking the heroes of

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330 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 3

antiquity; virtue and regeneration are her watchwords. The

speech was printed up, and Cabarrus sent copies to the

Committee of Public Safety in Paris.

The second essay, written in April 1794, took the form of

an address to the National Convention. It examined the place

of women in the public sphere and called for them to be

allowed to work as teachers and nurses in order to reinforce

their commitment to the Republic. Cabarrus begins by reas

suring her listeners and readers that she has no intention of

claiming equal political rights for women or encouraging in

them “the absurd ambition to free themselves of their duties

by appropriating those of men.” However, she continues,

women desire, and deserve, a place in the civic order:

. . . wouldn’t it also be a misfortune if, deprived in the

name of nature of the exercise of political rights, from

which are born strong resolutions and social connections,

they believe themselves justified in considering themselves

strangers to that which should insure the preservation of

those rights, and even from that which could lay the

groundwork for their existence? Ah! in a Republic, all

must doubtless be republican, and no being endowed with

reason can without shame deliberately exile him- or her

self from the honorable work of serving the father

land! . . ,21

In some ways, this argument reinforces the Revolutionary

trope of women as wives and mothers who encourage their

husbands’ patriotism and raise children for the nation.

Cabarrus falls short of demanding political rights for women,

instead merely suggesting that they play a role in establishing
and preserving them. But the sentence about women being

deprived of those rights in the name of nature reads like a

backhanded swipe against women’s exclusion from politics.

Women, she implies, are barred from full citizenship not by
nature itself (always the highest authority in Revolutionary

rhetoric) but by those who speak in the name of nature—a

construction that leaves room for doubt about the wisdom of

those who make these claims. Cabarrus immediately points
out that such an exclusion runs the risk of alienating women

from the Republic. She then issues a stirring call to all beings
“endowed with reason,” a category in which she includes

women. In Cabarrus’s interpretation of Revolutionary ideol

ogy, political virtue is not the exclusive possession of men.

The Republic’s survival depends on the active participation
of both sexes.

Cabarrus proposes that women work in public institutions

as teachers and nurses. Such service, she contends, should be

mandatory for unmarried girls, as it would prepare them for

their domestic roles as wives and mothers. Her plan for

women’s civic service was based on widely shared essentialist

notions of women’s sensibility and morality, but it also as

sumes that women have a right and a duty to participate in

public institutions. She concludes by exhorting the legislators
to recognize the fact that women were part of the polity:

Custom, so often the precursor of your decrees, has

awarded women the beautiful title of citoyennes. Let this no

longer be a vain name with which they adorn themselves;

and let them be able to display with pride, or rather with

confidence, the true titles of their civic duty!22

Cabarrus holds up the speech patterns of the people—an

authority only slightly less hallowed than nature—as proof

that women were in fact already citizens. Giving them an

official role in education and nursing would allow them to

fully merit this title.

Writing and publishing a proposal about female citizen

ship was a bold move on the part of a woman who had already

been denounced at least once for interfering in political

matters. Cabarrus was by no means the only woman to have

publicized her objections to an exclusively masculine defini

tion of citizenship. Etta Palm d’Aelders published Call to

French Women for the Regeneration of Morals and the Necessity of the

Influence of Women in a Free Governmentm 1791, the same year

that Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and

Citizen appeared in print.23 These authors are merely the best

known among the hundreds of women who published polit

ical tracts during the Revolutionary era.24 It is the timing of

Cabarrus’s publication that makes her intervention seem par

ticularly aggressive—indeed, foolhardy. Over the course of

1793, the government had banned women’s political organi

zations, forbidden women to speak in front of the legislature,

and explicitly excluded women from citizenship. Moreover,

by the time Cabarrus published this address and sent it to the

National Convention in April 1794, her lover had been re

called to Paris to account for his management of the situation

in Bordeaux. Cabarrus, meanwhile, had remained engaged
in local politics and had also started a factory producing

saltpeter, a key ingredient of gunpowder and a major part of

the Revolution’s war machine.25

Was Cabarrus oblivious to the dangers she ran by publiciz

ing herself and her ideas, both in Bordeaux and in Paris, in

a period when the Terror was accelerating? She was no fool,

as her writings attest, and her relationship with Tallien must

have given her considerable insight into the workings of the

government. It is more likely that her efforts to publicize her

political engagements were intended as a form of preemptive
self justification, a defense against accusations that she had

corrupted Tallien and used her influence to save aristocrats

from the guillotine. As a good Republican, Cabarrus may
have decided that transparency was the best policy. All her

political and economic support for the Revolution, however,

could not change the fact that she was both foreign-born and

a member of the nobility. Two days after her address was read

in Bordeaux, the National Convention expelled all foreigners
and former nobles from port and frontier towns. A few weeks

later, Cabarrus obtained a passport to leave Bordeaux, a

document that described her as “height five feet two inches,

white and pretty face, black hair, well-made forehead, light

eyebrows, brown eyes, well-made nose, small mouth, round

chin.”
6

Despite the obvious dangers, she traveled to Paris

and was promptly arrested.

The story of Cabarrus’s arrest and imprisonment quickly
became part of the romantic legend of the Revolution, due in

large part to Tallien’s and her own repetitions and embroi

deries. The earliest detailed account that survives is that of

the Geneva-born traveler Charles de Constant (cousin of

writer and politician Benjamin Constant). In letters sent to

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 33]

his family during a trip to Paris in 1796, he records his

impressions of Cabarrus, whom he met at a luncheon in the

company of lier friend Rose de la Pagerie, better known as

Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife.

After devoting many lines to Cabarrus’s beautiful person and

stylish dress, he transcribes her description of the ordeal.27

Arriving at the prison of La Force in the middle of the night,

Cabarrus says, she was stripped of her clothes in front of eight

men. Reclothed in only her chemise and a rough canvas

dress, she was held in isolation in a windowless and filthy cell

for twenty-five days. During that time, she resisted all attempts

to bribe her into denouncing Tallien and his political allies.

Finally, her jailors took pity on her and allowed her to spend

an hour a day in a better-lit and ventilated cell. There she

drew a self-portrait on the wall. Her jailors noticed her talent

and asked her to draw their portraits. Soon thereafter, a

mysterious benefactor smuggled paper and pen to her dis

guised in a head of lettuce. She used these supplies to write

letters to Tallien, first in her own blood and then in pigments

given to her by her jailors in exchange for her services as a

portraitist. Cabarrus warned her lover that she was to be sent

to the guillotine in a matter of days and related a dream in

which Tallien had overthrown Robespierre. Tallien replied

that he would either obtain her release or go to the guillotine

with her; the next day, he led a successful coup against the

Jacobin regime.

Cabarrus’s romantic account of her imprisonment and

escape, in which love and politics are inextricably inter

twined, was no doubt largely invented to sugarcoat the cou

ple’s previous and subsequent actions. However, the Revolu

tionary public was clearly ready to believe, or at least be

charmed by, Cabarrus’s story. She left prison a celebrity,

hailed as “Our Lady of Thermidor,” the motivating force

behind the overthrow of Robespierre. As Cabarrus put it

herself later in life, “it’s a bit by my little hand that the

guillotine was toppled.”28

Now that she had moved from Bordeaux to Paris, the

center of government, she became a major force on the social

and political circuits. She claimed credit for taking the keys to

the Jacobin Club, the radical political party that drove the

Terror, effectively shutting it down. In the aftermath of

the coup, she employed her diplomatic skills to reconcile
the

factions wrestling for power. Her political leverage was in

creased by her position as the most visible of the female

leaders of fashion known in contemporary commentary as

the merveilleuses. In the post-Revolutionary social hierarchy,

the women of the court had been replaced as fashion leaders

and power brokers by newcomers distinguished not by their

birth but by their wealth, their connections to military and

legislative leaders, and their spectacular taste in clothing and

interior decoration.29 Cabarrus cemented her membership

in this group by marrying Tallien in December 1794;
five

months later, she gave birth to a daughter named Thermidor

Rose, after the momentous event that made her parents into

political celebrities and Cabarrus’s best friend,
Rose de la

Pagerie.

With celebrity came renewed attacks in the press. The new

Mme Tallien’s taste for semitransparent muslin dresses and

her determination to play a central role in Parisian society

attracted the ire of commentators who connected her popu

larity with the corruption of already fragile post-Thermidor
ean Republican virtue. Less than a month after her marriage,
a Parisian journal complained that Cabarrus was distracting
the public from the real challenges facing the Republic:

Enormous luxury, concerts, the singer Garat and the beau

tiful citoyenne Cabarus, wife of Tallien, that’s what occupies

people here, far more than subsistence and our fourteen

armies. … Is she arriving? People applaud enthusiasti

cally, as if having a Roman or Spanish face, superb skin,

beautiful eyes, noble bearing, a smile in which amiability

tempers influence, a Grecian dress and naked arms was to

save the republic. .. . Several journals have multiplied the

literal copies of the same portrait of Theresia Cabarus,

portrait in several columns, where we see successively Or

pheus, Eurydice, Duhem, Cambon, the new Antoinette of

some, the goddess of others. . . . What taste! How much wit!

And what republican morals!30

Cabarrus is accused of distracting the people from the real

political issues at hand—food shortages and the war—with

her beauty, her radical fashions, and, by implication, her

immorality. The commentator not only enumerates her phys

ical charms but also strategically alludes to her Spanish birth

and her reputation as a protector of the victims of the Terror,

two circumstances that supplied fodder for attacks on Cabar

rus from the surviving political left. The writer also refers to

the written portraits of her published in various journals. For

some, her story evokes the classical narrative of Orpheus and

Eurydice, in which a man (almost) frees his beloved from

death. For others, she is an ally of the moderate deputies

Pierre-Joseph Duhem and Joseph Cambon, who collaborated

with Tallien to establish a post-Thermidorean government.

But some descriptions of Cabarrus, the author notes coyly,

paint her as a new Marie-Antoinette, partying while the peo

ple starved and the Republic’s armies struggled to defend

France against a coalition of hostile European forces.31 It is

unclear if the concluding ironic reference to “republican

morals” is directed toward Cabarrus, those who allow them

selves to be fascinated by her, or her detractors in print, but

there is no mistaking the author’s disapproval of her behav

ior.

These criticisms, although steeped in the micropolitics of

1795 and 1796, in essence reiterated condemnations of wom

en’s influence on politics dating from the ancien regime. As

Cabarrus had discovered at the beginning of the Revolution,

a woman in the public sphere could not help but be caught

in an endless loop in which political participation was

equated with sexual immorality and the subversion of the

notionally serious and pure masculine political order. This

criticism extended to her husband, who discovered that the

aureole surrounding the hero of Thermidor did not protect

him from condemnation for his own role in the Terror or,

from the other end of the political spectrum, suspicions of

royalist plotting. Soon after the coup, he was accused
in the

Jacobin Club of counterrevolutionary tendencies.
His liaison

with Cabarrus, “the wife of an emigre and the daughter of the

treasurer of the king of Spain,” constituted the primary evi

dence against him. Tallien defended himself by characteriz

ing Cabarrus as an innocent victim who had
been willing to

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332 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

5 Laneuville, Portrait ofBertrand Barere de Vieuzac, 1793-94, oil

on canvas, 51Vs X 38% in. (130 X 98 cm). Kunsthalle Bremen

(artwork in the public domain; photograph © Kunsthalle

Bremen—Der Kunstverein in Bremen)

sacrifice herself rather than sign a false accusation against

him.32 Tallien’s enemies in the legislature also attacked him

through his connection to Cabarrus, compelling him to an

nounce his marriage in a session of the National Convention

in an attempt to defend himself and his new wife from

accusations of royalism.33 In the same month, January 1795,

a newspaper article reporting on the Tallien controversy

provided a much-pruned biographical sketch of Cabarrus. It

emphasized her early commitment to the Revolution and her

courage during the Terror while minimizing her wealth and

downplaying her Spanish connections, turning her father the

royal minister into an uncle.34

The attacks on Cabarrus and Tallien from both the left and

the right mirrored public resistance to the post-Thermidor

ean government. Over the course of 1795, the legislators

suppressed Jacobin-inspired popular violence in Paris in sup

port of “Bread and the Constitution of 1793,” beat back a

counterrevolutionary invasion of Brittany led by emigre no

bility, and deputized rising military star Napoleon Bonaparte
to put down a royalist uprising in Paris. In the winter and

spring of 1796, a new constitution was written, a government
headed by five executive directors was sworn in, and another

serious leftist conspiracy, led by Gracchus Babeuf, was ex

posed and dismantled. While her husband struggled to find

a place in the new government, Cabarrus continued to oc

cupy the public eye and to forge alliances with ascendant

political figures like Napoleon Bonaparte (her friend Rose’s

new husband) and Paul Barras, one of the new directors and

the organizer of the recent suppression of the royalist

uprising.
Sometime in 1796, Cabarrus decided to commission a

portrait from Laneuville. Litde is known about the artist

beyond the bare outlines of his biography. He was born in

1748 and studied at least briefly with David. He exhibited in

the open-air Salon de lajeunesse in Paris between 1783 and

1789 and began sending pictures to the official Salon as soon

as it opened to those who were not members of the Royal

Academy in 1791. Laneuville seems to have particularly

sought out the patronage of political figures. In 1793, for

instance, eight of the twelve portraits he sent to the Salon

were of politicians, as were four of his six portraits in the

Salon of 1795. All of the sitters who are identifiable were on

the political left. Laneuville must have specifically targeted

this clientele, either because of his personal sympathies or

because he sensed an untapped market; at least four of the

deputy portraits were still in his studio at his death in 1826,

suggesting that he painted them on his own initiative in order

to drum up more business.35

All of Laneuville’s known portraits from the Revolutionary

era adhere to a strict formula: single figures, strongly delin

eated against a neutral background; the meticulous detailing
of physiognomy and material goods; a polished paint appli

cation that effaces the hand of the artist; reduction of color to

a contrast of strong tones; and, almost invariably, intense,

level, and sober eye contact between the sitter and the viewer.

The 1793-94 portrait of the radical deputy and journalist

Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac is typical of Laneuville’s style

(Fig. 5). The determined regard of Barere, who leans on

papers referring to his role in the trial and execution of Louis

XVI, summons the viewer to share in his seriousness and to

join him in the fraternity of popular sovereignty. Laneuville

inherited this formula from his master, and he followed it so

faithfully that his best portraits have invariably been misat

tributed to David. The illusion of immediacy and transpar

ency fostered by these visual strategies suited Revolutionary

notions of the politically engaged self.

Laneuville’s display of Republican portraiture at the Salon

of 1793 must have attracted Jean-Lambert Tallien’s atten

tion—or perhaps Tallien’s celebrity attracted Laneuville,

who had already demonstrated his eagerness to build his

business. In the first Salon after Thermidor, in 1795, a por
trait of the newly married Tallien was included in Laneuville’s

entry, along with images of three other deputies, an ex

minister, a military officer, and an artist.36 Cabarrus was

evidently pleased enough with Laneuville’s efforts on behalf

of her husband to award the artist the commission of her own

portrait.57 But Laneuville was still an odd choice of portraitist

for a woman and for a leader of the reborn Parisian elite. If

money was no object, she could have addressed herself to

David—although the memory of his friendship with Robespi
erre and his martyr portraits may have held unwelcome asso

ciations for the wife of a former Terrorist. Joseph Ducreux,

another veteran of the pre-Revolutionary portrait market,

had sent a portrait of Cabarrus’s friend Rose de la Pagerie to

the 1795 Salon. Rising stars like Francois Gerard or Robert

Lefevre would also have been fashionable (and economical)

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 333

choices. All of these artists were producing sophisticated and

elegant portraits of women in 1795, while Laneuville was

working almost exclusively for men. Cabarrus’s previous por
trait commissions are poorly documented, but the only two

early portraits identified with her are by female artists: a bust

portrait attributed to Rosalie Filleul, a contemporary and

friend of the young Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, and a half-length

image attributed to Marie-Genevieve Bouliar.38 If these com

missions are indicative of Cabarrus’s taste and her commit

ment to female artists, she could certainly have chosen one of

the thirteen female portraitists who showed work in the Salon

of 1795.

Instead, Cabarrus gave the commission to Laneuville, a

painter who specialized in intense, confrontational portraits

of male politicians in which physical and psychological im

mediacy stood in for Republican virtues. These strategies

were difficult to apply to a female sitter, especially an ambi

tious, politically engaged woman who had frequently come

under public attack for her opinions and also for her per

ceived or real sexual adventures. Cabarrus, by embracing this

masculine aesthetic and inserting herself into a politically

charged narrative, deliberately appropriated conventions

that had been eagerly adopted by male commissioners during

the Revolution.

Coming up with an effective visual vocabulary for female

political engagement in 1796, then, posed a real challenge.

Cabarrus put her finger on the problem in her 1794 address:

the Revolutionary promise of universal liberty and equality

did not extend to women, who were excluded from the

“exercise of political rights” on the grounds of natural differ

ence. Cabarrus advocated a partial extension of the rights

and responsibilities of citizenship to women without chal

lenging assumptions about their essentially nurturing and

domestic nature. In the first years of the Revolution, many

other women took the Revolution at its word, forming polit

ical clubs and leading popular demonstrations. Feminists of

both sexes argued for the necessity of awarding political

rights to women. The government’s hostile response to fem

inist demands demonstrated the general unwillingness to

extend the promise of liberty and equality to women.

The acceptable model for Revolutionary women was

summed up by the deputy Andre Amar in 1793:

They can illuminate their husbands, communicate to

them precious reflections, fruit of the calm of a sedentary

life, use all the empire that private love gives them to

fortify in them [their husbands] the love of the fatherland;

and the man, illuminated by informal and peaceful dis

cussions in the midst of his household, will bring back to

society the useful ideas that an honest woman gives him.39

Amar acknowledges women’s capacity for sound political

reflection but insists that the only proper arena for those

reflections is the home, and the only conduit for them an

attentive husband. This was a relatively generous assessment

of women’s role in the Republic. Many other theorists felt

that the female contribution to the public sphere began and

ended with raising children for the nation. The visual
vocab

ulary of Revolutionary femininity was likewise
dominated by

images of Republican wives and mothers.40
A 1794 print of a

family at the Festival of the Supreme Being neatly summarizes

the roles available to women: wife guided by her husband,

mother educating her children, daughter following her

mother’s lead, or limp allegorical personification of Nature

or the Republic (Fig. 6). Portraiture for the most part re

flected the limited range of imagery popularized by prints, as

the examples of David’s Portrait of Louise Pastoret or the anon

ymous woman with the sans-culotte miniature testify.
Cabarrus commissioned a different kind of portrait. By

hiring Laneuville, she allied herself with the kind of male

political portraiture he practiced and the kind of active citi

zenship he pictured. Their collaboration resulted in an im

age that combined the safely passive imagery of Revolution

ary femininity with conventions usually associated with men.

This approach suited Cabarrus’s unorthodox public persona.

She had never been particularly concerned with following

the rules governing eighteenth-century women, whether they

concerned sexual propriety, financial dependence, or main

taining silence on political matters. A twenty-year-old divor

cee and proprietor of an ammunitions factory who did not

hesitate to publish a pamphlet calling for greater civic in

volvement for women in 1794, long after women’s political

clubs had been banned, was the ideal client for a portrait that

broke down barriers between male and female modes of

representation.

In many ways, Laneuville’s depiction of Cabarrus pays lip

service to the conventions of female portraiture of the early

1790s. David’s 1790 portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise Thelusson,

comtesse de Sorcy, established the post-Revolutionary gram

mar of this mode of portraiture, which was recombined with

more or less fluency by younger artists such as Charles-Paul

Landon (Figs. 7, 8). Laneuville’s portrait borrows liberally

from these models: Cabarrus’s seated three-quarter-length

pose, her calm face and level gaze turned outward toward the

viewer, the simple white dress brightly lit against a sober

neutral background, and the position of her arms and hands

are all characteristic of the work of David and his many

students and imitators. Like David and Landon, Laneuville

invested considerable energy in the meticulous re-creation of

the details of costume and accessories, and effaced most if

not all traces of brushwork. The result is an illusion of literal

and figurative transparency between the sitter and the viewer.

The proximity of the sitters to the picture plane and the

steady eye contact they maintain with the viewer reinforce the

feeling of intimacy.

This visual strategy was employed for both men and women

in the early 1790s, as Laneuville’s portraits of politicians

attest. Its roots extended back to Vigee-Lebrun’s portraits of

the 1780s, which themselves represented the culmination of

a visual culture of Enlightenment selfhood that celebrated

emotional honesty and communion with others. This mode

of portraiture held different connotations for men and

women, however. For men like Laneuville’s sitters, it served

to emphasize their civic engagement, a message reinforced by

their upright postures, their level gazes, and their firm grasp

on their documents or pens. It evoked the communion of the

body politic, in which male citizens confronted each other
on

an equal footing. For female sitters, immediacy and commu

nion were generally played as domestic intimacy or
a tame

kind of desirability rather than as civic engagement. The

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334 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

FETE CELEBREE EN LHO XN’KIII I) E LET RE SUPREME
Lc 20 Prairiale lan 2″* do la Hep

fie Pf’rilttAlePre/r*

la Praterntte c/ Jurer At /nor/ i/es ‘/’trans

6 Festival Celebrated in Honor of the

Supreme Being, 1794, engraving.

Bibliotheque Nationale de France,
Paris (artwork in the public domain)

canny manipulation of pose and accessories tempered any
risk of assertiveness, political or sexual. David’s women of the

1790s, for instance, clutch flowers, children, or implements
of handicraft or keep their hands demurely clasped. Female

sitters were often posed leaning slightly forward or backward,

their bodies and clothing tracing curved lines in contrast to

the male uprights. Landon scores a hat trick in his portrait of

an unidentified sitter: she is depicted reclining, clasping her

hands, and sandwiched between a vase of flowers, an un

opened book, and a basket of yarn.

Laneuville’s portrait of Cabarrus follows the rules for fe

male portraits but subtly manipulates them to accommodate

strategies generally reserved for male sitters. Cabarrus is

seated not on the standard wooden or upholstered chair, an

accessory that served as a sign of luxury consumption, but on

a stone ledge covered in straw. Mottled gray masonry walls

replace the richly draped Neoclassical interior of the Landon

portrait and serve as a kind of gallows-humor retort to David’s

elegandy neutral backdrops. Cabarrus’s costume also differs

in subtle but meaningful ways from the fashionable dress of

other female sitters of the 1790s. Given the rapid pace of

sartorial change during the Revolution, and particularly the

promotion of radically pared-down dresses a la grecque (in

spired by Classical antiquity) by Cabarrus and other leaders

of post-Thermidorean society, it is significant that Cabarrus

chose a relatively conservative costume for her 1796 portrait.

By eschewing the transparent muslins and entirely bare arms

seen in many contemporaneous portraits, Cabarrus warded

off the accusations of immorality and extravagance that had

already been leveled at her in the press. Laneuville and

Cabarrus further undermined the modishness of the dress by

substituting a roughly knotted checked scarf for the standard

satin sash or cashmere shawl. The knotted scarf turns the

dress from an expensive commodity into the improvised
costume of a prisoner deprived of all creature comforts—

more like the shift that Cabarrus claimed was her only cloth

ing in prison. Her hair is similarly like but unlike that of other

female sitters. Undressed, unadorned by ribbons, and falling

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 335

limply onto her shoulders, the undisciplined tendrils curling

against her white shoulders and neck call attention to what is

missing: the severed locks that spill out of Cabarrus’s hand

and fill her lap. The cut hair is Cabarrus’s attribute in this

portrait, occupying the hand that in other female portraits
lies idle or holds a needle, a book, or a child’s hand.

The cut hair is more than a personal attribute. It is the

catalyst for a narrative, referring viewers to a moment in time

just before the prisoner’s transportation to the guillotine and

to political events outside the portrait’s frame. This is, more

over, a national as well as a personal narrative. Cabarrus’s

portrait inserts her into French history, recalling to viewers in

1796 the events of the Terror and the pivotal roles that she

and her husband played. Laneuville gives his sitter a type of

agency reserved, both legally and visually, for men. Like male

commissioners, Cabarrus uses visual representation to claim a

stake in the Revolution. She belongs to the Revolution, and

the Revolution belongs to her; she is a citoyenne, as the title of

the portrait insists.

But Cabarrus knew better than most women (having pub

lished on the topic) that female citizenship was inherently

contradictory. To claim too much political agency was to run

the risk of drawing criticism as a “new Antoinette,” a manip

ulator of men whose ambitions were inseparable from her

greed and sexual aggression. Cabarrus and her portraitist

hedged their bets, promoting her role in Revolutionary his

tory while at the same time stressing her beauty, her capacity

for sentiment, and her physical passivity. The pose and cos

tume borrowed from standard female portraiture help to

reassure viewers that the sitter is a woman first and a political

actor second. Cabarrus and Laneuville also temper the por

trait’s claims by emphasizing Cabarrus’s status as a victim. She

changed the course of the Revolution, the portrait implies, by

7 David, Portrait of Anne-Marie-Louise ThHusson, Comtesse de

Sorcy, 1790, oil on canvas, 503A X 38!/« in. (129 X 97 cm).
Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesamm

lungen (artwork in the public domain; photograph by
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, provided by Art Resource,

NY)

8 Charles-Paul Landon, Portrait of a

Woman, 1793, oil on canvas, 25% X

31% in. (65 X 81 cm). Musee de

Grenoble (artwork in the public
domain; photograph © Musee de

Grenoble)

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336 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

9 H. Dupont, after Joseph-Benoit Suvee, Portrait of Andre

Chenier, 1838, etching, 4 X 3% in. (10 X 8.5 cm). Bibliotheque
Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain)

inspiring her lover to take action. This was the kind of female

civic engagement that was endorsed by Amar in 1793; Cabar

rus used the private empire that love gave her over Tallien to

strengthen his resolve and inspire him to action in the public

sphere.

Laneuville borrowed from prison and victim imagery, both

ancient and contemporary, in order to dignify (and sugar

coat) Cabarrus’s ambitions. The fortitude of prisoners was a

stock subject of pre-Revolutionary history painting; Laneu

ville would have been intimately familiar with David’s Death of
Socrates (1787), and scenes of imprisonment and sacrifice

such as Jean-Francois-Pierre Peyron’s Funeral of Miltiades

(1780) or Francois-Andre Vincent’s Arria and Poetus (1784)

would also have formed part of his and his viewers’ visual

vocabulary. The prison theme was revived and updated after

Thermidor as a means of engaging with the Terror and its

aftermath. Numerous prison-themed portraits and genre

scenes were produced during the Terror, or retrospectively

after the fall of Robespierre. At least ten of these images
could be seen at the Salons of 1795 and 1796. Some of the

portrait sittings had taken place in prison, as was the case with

Joseph-Benoit Suvee’s portrait of the famous poet and poli
tician Andre Chenier, who was imprisoned with the artist and

who sat for his portrait just before his execution (Fig. 9).

Suvee exhibited Chenier’s portrait in the Salon of 1795,

along with images of three other doomed prisoners.41 Other

images, such as the scenes of everyday prison life that Hubert

Robert painted during his incarceration or David’s profile

drawings of his fellow Jacobins made while they all faced

judgment for their roles in the Terror, circulated privately.
These images provided commissioners, artists, and viewers

with a means of putting human faces on the Terror and

making sense of its place in the already bewildering historical

narrative of the Revolution. Many had strong political moti

vations; Suvee and his sitters were all anti-Jacobin, and Da

vid’s portraits, as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has argued, attempted

to reinsert their disgraced subjects into a heroic Republican

lineage that began with portrait prints of National Assembly

deputies in the first years of the Revolution.42 Prison portraits

explicitly associated their sitters with the greatest drama of

the Revolution and (with the exception of David’s Jacobin

portraits) communicated a political position as a victim of

Robespierre—an enemy who united monarchists and mod

erates alike in 1794 and 1795.

Prison portraits, especially those actually produced in jail,
were meant to evoke a kind of deathbed sincerity, function

ing as their sitters’ last testament. Even sitters like Cabarrus

who commissioned these portraits retrospectively, as records

of their escape from political oppression, used the solemnity

of the depicted moment and place to lend their self-repre
sentation a fixed, memorial quality. In this way, prison por

traiture served much the same purpose as the written politi

cal self-justifications required of many prisoners, or the

letters that the condemned wrote to their loved ones. A

selection of these “last letters,” intercepted by the Revolution

ary tribunal, have been collected in a volume by Olivier

Blanc.43 Despite the disparate concerns and political posi
tions of their authors, some common themes emerge: pro

testations of innocence, exhortations that the recipients re

member them, messages of love for spouses and children,

and insistence that their friends and family refrain from

taking vengeance on their persecutors. A surprising number

of prisoners employ Revolutionary rhetoric or swear their

allegiance to the Republic. Prison portraits like Cabarrus’s

touch on the same themes: innocence, love, and memorial

ization. Cabarrus’s saintly demeanor, her level gaze, and the

commemorative profile portrait on the wall behind her im

press on the viewer her fortitude and her confidence that her

hands, at least, are clean.

Most prison images, like the letters of condemned prison

ers, play on themes of resignation and tolerance. The latter

virtue became particularly important after the fall of Robes

pierre, as France tried to suppress the culture of denuncia

tion and reconstitute the government and civil society. A pair
of prison-themed portraits by Pierre-Nicolas Legrand de Le

rant from 1794-95 exemplifies this spirit of national recon

ciliation. The two paintings were commissioned to commem

orate the generosity of a prison guard named Joseph Cange.

Discovering that the family of a prisoner under his watch was

in desperate financial straits, Cange gave the prisoner the

money he needed, claiming that it came from the prisoner’s
wife. When the wife visited her imprisoned husband, Cange

gave her money, too, in the name of the prisoner. When the

prisoner was released, the jailor’s charity was discovered, and

the grateful recipients commissioned both a bust portrait of

their benefactor and a more elaborate image that made the

jailor, the released prisoner, and their families into the main

characters of a Greuzian scene of gratitude (Fig. 10).44 The

latter painting reveals the eagerness of portrait commission

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 337

10 Pierre-Nicolas Legrand de Lerant,
A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten, 1794-95,
011 on canvas, 24% X 31V4 in. (62.8 X

80 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, Founda

tion for the Arts Collection, Mrs. John
B. O’Hara Fund (artwork in the

public domain)

ers to insert themselves into the Revolutionary narrative; the

tricolor cockades and liberty bonnets, the obviously institu

tional setting, and the public notices about nationalized

property point toward the political context of these seem

ingly private emotions. It also demonstrates how the theme of

the compassionate jailor and the virtuous prisoner was used

to heal the wounds of the Terror. The charitable act of

Cange, the good sans-culotte, testifies to the essential virtue of

le peuple, the implication being that the bloodthirsty sans

culotte was an aberration, led astray by a small group of

perfidious Jacobin leaders who had already paid with their

lives for their sins. The gratitude of the bourgeois family in

turn provides viewers with a model of class-blind fraternity.

The prisoner/commissioner, wronged by the Jacobins, puts

aside his legitimate grievances and embraces his worthy

jailor. Everyone, it appears, is a good person, and all French

citizens are members of the same family.

Cabarrus’s 1796 portrait capitalizes on the emotions

evoked by the prison imagery of the immediate post-Terror

period. Indeed, its belatedness points to the sitter’s will to

return to a moment in her life, and the nation’s, when the

line between political virtue and vice seemed clearer. Her

choice of this mode of portraiture served to refute the accu

sations of immorality, foreignness, and royalism leveled at her

in the press and to recall the heady days immediately after

her release from prison, when she was hailed as “Our Lady of

Thermidor,” the savior of the nation. By casting herself as a

prisoner, Cabarrus reminded viewers of her righteous refusal

to inculpate her lover, as well as her suffering in prison. But

she does so without any overt reference to politics besides a

vague and uncontroversial anti-Robespierrism—a wise ap

proach for a woman who had incurred ire from both the left

and the right. Instead, she and her portraitist trade in the

universal language of youth and beauty.

Even this kind of pathos had become politicized after the

fall of Robespierre. Immediately after Thermidor, one of

Andre Chenier’s last poems was published in the Decade

Philosophique, a leading journal. Chenier had become some

thing of an emblem of the excesses of the Terror, as Suvee’s

exhibition of his portrait in the Salon of 1795 attests. The

poem, entitled “La jeune captive,” was an ode to a beautiful

young female prisoner, written in the woman’s voice. The

prisoner’s naive refusal of death penetrates the narrator’s

despair and inspires him to continue writing:

“Oh death! You can wait, go, go away
Go console the hearts devoured by shame, fear, and

pale despair.

For me Pales still has green havens,

Cupid has kisses, the Muses concerts.

I don’t want to die yet.”45

“La jeune captive” was chosen for publication from among
Chenier’s far angrier and more explicitly political prison

poems; its sentimentalism cloaked the poet’s politics in a

more neutral language of love and femininity. Laneuville’s

portrait of Cabarrus does much the same work; the sitter’s

claim to political agency is softened by the lyricism of her

likeness. In Cabarrus’s case, however, no displacement is

needed. She is both the symbol of youth and innocence and

the intellectual who uses that symbol as a means of comment

ing on national events.

The painting, nonetheless, remains a portrait, no matter

how poetic, and its primary concern is the depiction of a

unique and intact self, caught in a situation designed to

erode and eventually destroy that self. Laneuville’s portrait is

ultimately about the integrity and the independence of the

subject under the worst possible circumstances. The implicit

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338 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

11 Francois Vincent, Portrait of Marie de Broutin, Baronne de

Chalvet-Souville, 1793, oil on canvas, 42% X 36V4 in. (109 X

92 cm). Musee du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain;

photograph by Gerard Blot, provided by Reunion des Musees

Nationaux/Art Resource, NY)

claim about the integrity of the self—and particularly of the

female self—was inherently political, given that women’s sup

posed lack of autonomy was used as grounds to deny their

political rights. One of the most pointed signs of femininity

in the portrait is also the most potent marker of self-deter

mination: Cabarrus’s hair. Cabarrus was famous for her long
black hair; it functions in the portrait as one of her personal

attributes. But hair was also a central element of the prison

narratives of the Terror and a powerful symbol of the intact

self. It was standard practice to cut prisoners’ hair just before

they were sent to the guillotine, ostensibly to clear the path
for the falling blade.46 Hair in the eighteenth century was the

ultimate pledge of intimacy and devotion; the hair of friends

and family was incorporated into jewelry and plaited into

initials or decorative patterns on the reverse of portrait min

iatures. The cutting of their hair was experienced by prison

ers as a gross violation of their persons. Many prisoners

included locks of hair in their last letters, along with the

assurance that they had cut it themselves. “I hope that they

will give you my hair which has not been touched by the

executioner,” wrote a twenty-two-year-old woman to her

brother on the day of her death.47

Cabarrus’s shorn locks occupy the place in the portrait

usually reserved for symbols of the sitter’s identity—pens or

scrolls for men, flowers or novels for women. In Cabarrus’s

portrait, the hair not only symbolizes femininity and her

particular beauty but also defiance of Robespierre’s authority
and imminent death. Cabarrus, the portrait argues, retained

her self-possession in the face of the destruction of that self.

Her body, composed as if for a society portrait, glows white

against the massive stones of the tenebrous prison, and her

steady gaze meets that of the viewer. The cut hair warns of

other cuts to come, but it remains within Cabarrus’s grasp.
She has preserved at least this much of her self, and her

self-determination.

The profile portrait drawn on the wall behind Cabarrus’s

head is another sign of self-determination, one that functions

on many levels. Taken literally, it is a mark of female accom

plishment of the kind that often made its appearance in

portraiture. A 1793 portrait of a young noblewoman by the

distinguished history painter and portraitist Vincent, a paint

ing that falls squarely into the category of elegant Revolution

ary society portrait, similarly foregrounds its sitter’s skills as a

portraitist (Fig. 11). We know from contemporary accounts

and from surviving works that Cabarrus was a competent

portraitist who worked in pen and ink, watercolor, and oil.

Her skills as a draftsman appear here in part as testimony to

her gentility. In Laneuville’s portrait, though, drawing is

elevated from a token of feminine accomplishment to some

thing far more serious. Cabarrus’s draftsmanship becomes a

symbol of her initiative and her resourcefulness. Because she

was a portraitist, she was able to win over her jailors and

obtain the materials she needed to engineer her escape.

Drawing is the key to her contribution to Revolutionary his

tory. By filling up this normally hollow attribute, Laneuville

and Cabarrus manipulated the conventions of female portrai

ture in order to signal both her femininity and the ways she

exceeded the limitations of that category.
As the Vincent painting demonstrates, a portrait within a

portrait was also a sign of womanly emotion. Vincent’s sitter

has drawn a male head, presumably a husband or relative,

and the portrait on the wall behind Cabarrus could have

been (and perhaps was meant to be) read by contemporary

viewers as an image of Tallien. To sketch one’s lover’s profile

was a pleasantly sentimental occupation for a woman, remi

niscent of the novels of sensibility popular in late eighteenth

century France. It also recalls the story of Dibutades, the

Corinthian girl said to have invented the art of drawing by

tracing the silhouette of her lover on a wall. This was a

favorite theme of artists in the last decades of the eighteenth

century; it provided the visual arts with a graceful origin

myth. Suvee, one of the elder statesmen of French history

painting and enthusiastic producer of prison portraits, had

exhibited an austerely designed Dibutades painting at the

Salon of 1793, which would have been fresh in the minds of

Laneuville and his viewers (Fig. 12). Suvee’s version of the

story, with its stripped-down interior, massive masonry walls,

and sober palette, was a Dibutades for the Terror, solemnly

recalling art’s memorial function in the face of absence or

death. The anguished face of the lover and his tight grip on

his beloved/portraitist’s waist heighten the impression of

impending loss. Cabarrus, in her simple white dress d, la

grecque, makes a convincing Dibutades, and the pathetic ref

erence to a departed lover would have resonated with the

“Jeune captive” strain of post-Thermidor depoliticized prison

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 339

narratives. The associations of cut hair with lovers’ exchanges

of locks and with portrait miniatures would only have

strengthened the mythological and sentimental import of the

profile portrait.

The formal treatment of the portrait within the portrait,

however, wrenches it out of the decorous realm of myth and

poetry and brings the viewer back to the unpleasant contin

gencies of 1794. The portrait is traversed by one of the

verticals of the masonry blocks on which it is drawn. That

edge, which effectively severs a third of the head, is itself

terminated by jagged gouges, as if a previous prisoner had

attempted to chip away at the mortar. This vertical leads the

eye downward to other broken edges in the masonry and to

the missing shard in the rim of the pitcher that presumably

contains the prisoner’s water ration. All these cuts and lacu

nae reinforce the message of the cut hair: Cabarrus is bound

for the guillotine. The disembodied and sectioned profile

portrait hovers behind the cropped head of the prisoner like

a vision of the near future.

If the portrait within the portrait was read by contemporary

viewers as an image of Tallien, it would have served as one of

Cabarrus’s attributes, an indication both of her talents and of

her womanly attachments. But if the profile portrait is under

stood as an image of Cabarrus’s jailor, as suggested by her

own account of her imprisonment, it becomes the key both to

a narrative unfolding over time and to a particular political

interpretation of the Terror. Cabarrus claimed that her skills

as a portraitist enabled her to win over her jailors and obtain

the necessary material to communicate with Tallien. Her

draftsmanship, in other words, ended the Terror. The profile

on the wall gives Cabarrus’s portrait the narrative structure of

a history painting; it implies past actions on the part of the

heroine and points to the future results of her initiative. A

portrait of an accommodating jailor also connects Cabarrus

to the spirit of post-Thermidorean reconciliation represented

by Legrand de Lerant’s images of Cange and his grateful

beneficiaries. Cabarrus styled herself an agent of political

harmony after the fall of Robespierre, and advertising her

ability to forge a connection even with her jailors would have

advanced her cause. Moreover, a former aristocrat married to

a parvenu and erstwhile Terrorist had particular reason to

argue that the common humanity invoked by portrait making

superseded any factionalism or class difference.

The emphatic use of the honorific “citoyenne” in the title

of Cabarrus’s portrait drives home the political ramifications

of the image. Many Revolutionary portraits went to the Salons

with “citoyen” or “citoyenne” in their titles, and the feminine

version of the term did not necessarily indicate any particular

political convictions on the part of the sitter, besides perhaps

a general sympathy for Revolutionary cultural reforms. None

theless, the term “citoyenne,” as the historian William Sewell

points out, was inherently provocative. Its popularization in

everyday language was by no means initiated or endorsed by
the Revolutionary government (as Cabarrus’s essay points

out), and its application to a category of person legally de

nied political rights and responsibilities made obvious the

exclusions built into the supposedly universal rights of man.

The title “citoyenne” gave women the dangerous impression

that they, too, were included in the body politic.48

Cabarrus had already claimed the title of “citoyenne” in

“A
■Jam

12 Suvee, The Invention of Drawing, exhibited at the Salon of

1793, oil on canvas, 105 X 52 in. (267 X 131.5 cm). Bruges

Groeningemuseum (artwork in the public domain;

photograph © Lukas—Art in Flanders VZW, www.lukasweb.be)

writing; in 1796, she did so in paint. Her portrait works from

within the conventions of female portraiture and Republican

femininity to make an argument about the kinds of political

agency that a woman could wield. The authority that Cabar

rus appropriates is in part traditionally feminine and thus

passive: the power of beauty to inspire great deeds, the moral

suasion of conjugal (or soon-to-be conjugal) love, the plight
of innocence wrongly accused. This passivity is echoed visu

ally in her static pose, white drapery, and mild gaze. At the

same time, Cabarrus also exploits the narrative possibilities of

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340 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 3

Revolutionary portraiture to position herself as a political

actor. Indeed, she appropriates the cultural and political

power that portraiture had itself wrested from history paint

ing. Her portrait declares her to be a portraitist. She has

created another self even as she maintains her own bodily

and subjective integrity under the most debilitating of cir

cumstances. Cabarrus the portraitist, who used the empathy

between sitter and artist to make her jailors into her allies, is

an emissary of reconciliation after a fratricidal conflict that

called into question the very unity of the French nation.

Laneuville’s portrait of Cabarrus manages to picture her

both as an innocent victim and as a political actor. But the

balance struck by sitter and artist is a delicate one. The

recycling of older conventions and the indirection of using

artistic creation as a metaphor for Revolutionary virtues tes

tify to the difficulties of depicting female citizenship. By

promoting the image of a beautiful prisoner whose influence

over a powerful man changed the political course of the

nation, Laneuville and Cabarrus ran the risk of invoking any

number of unflattering comparisons: to Marie-Antoinette,

vilified as a foreigner, a sexual predator, and the power

behind the throne; to the princesse de Lamballe, the queen’s

alleged partner in crime, who had famously been decapitated

during the September 1792 prison massacres; and to Char

lotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, who had be

come a counterrevolutionary folk hero for her beauty and

her sangfroid in prison. The supposedly salutatory effect of

wives’ influence over their husbands promoted by the ideal of

Republican womanhood could not outweigh in the public

imagination these recent images of women imprisoned for

their crimes against nature and the Revolution. Given that

Cabarrus had already, by 1796, been condemned in the press
as a new Marie-Antoinette, she and her portraitist should

have anticipated the dangers of telling a story involving a

woman who pressured her lover into overthrowing the gov
ernment.

Laneuville and Cabarrus must have hoped that the portrait
would make a splash at the Salon of 1796. It was the kind of

portrait that usually attracted public and critical attention:

the canvas was large, the composition told a story as well as

providing a likeness, the political references were sensational

and (relatively) up-to-date, and the sitter was both famous

and beautiful. The portrait’s reception, however, was under

whelming. Indeed, according to one of the few references to

the painting in the Salon criticism of that year, in the Critique
du Salon, ou les tableaux en vaudevilles, it was removed from

public view soon after it was hung. The portrait apparently
recalled too vividly the political passions of the Terror: “This

picture, which only stayed on view for a few days, recalled the

awful time when France was composed of nothing but exe

cutioners and victims, and made those sensitive souls who

dared fix their gazes on this painting recoil in horror.”49 The

innocence and beauty of the sitter apparently did not miti

gate the portrait’s evocation of the guillotine. Moreover, this

critic willfully misread Cabarrus’s image as a piece of Jacobin

propaganda, interpreting the prison theme in light of her

husband’s alleged role in the September 1792 massacres. He

or she described the portrait (in verse, since the review was

peppered with vaudeville-style song lyrics) as a record of

these earlier Jacobin crimes:

The scene was in the prison

of the unhappy Lamballe;

and Cabarus, whose intentions

Are not to embolden crime (1)

Held, it was said, in her hands

The hair of that victim.50

By turning Cabarrus’s hair, the symbol of both her beauty

and her threatened bodily integrity, into a relic of the prin

cesse de Lamballe, a woman firmly associated both with the

royal family and with Tallien’s supposedly radical past, the

critic undermined Cabarrus’s efforts at self-creation and ef

fectively dismantled the portrait’s central strategy. The incon

gruous number in the middle of the “song” sent the reader to

a footnote, which explained that the author did not hold

Cabarrus personally responsible for the horrors imputed to

her husband. In this account, Cabarrus was neither the im

portant historical figure nor the independent political actor

she styled herself. She was just an accessory to crimes com

mitted by others.

The handful of other reviewers who mentioned the por

trait merely damned it with faint praise. The anonymous

author of the pamphlet Les etrivieres de Juvenal, ou Satire sur les

tableaux exposes au Louvre I’an Voffhandedly noted the picture

of “la citoyenne Tallien” and concluded “elle est bien” (she’s

good)—a characterization perhaps prompted less by the

quality of the portrait or the sitter’s reputation for beauty and

benevolence than by the fact that “bien” rhymes nicely with

“Tallien.”51 L’Ami des Arts noted cryptically that the portrait
had “reappeared” and that “the changes that have been made

have introduced more harmony, but the work is too notice

able.”52 It is unclear what these changes consisted of, or what

problem they sought to correct, besides a generalized lack of

harmony. The evidence of the Salon criticism suggests that

the painting arrived, was criticized (at least in antijacobin

circles) for its theme, was removed, revised, and rehung, all

without making any significant impact on the critics or, for

that matter, on the public at large.
‘3

Cabarrus’s portrait missed its mark because it recalled the

Terror and the disunity of France at a moment when the

nation was at war against external enemies and wrestling with

internal unrest and political dissension. If Cabarrus had com

missioned the portrait in time for the Salon of 1795 (which

opened three months after the fall of Robespierre, an almost

impossibly short turnaround for a portrait this elaborate),

she and Laneuville might have met with a more sympathetic
reaction. The disapprobation, however, was not entirely due

to political contingencies, just as the condemnation of Cabar

rus in the press involved more than her or Tallien’s putative

royalism or Jacobinism. Her portrait was disturbing because it

depicted a woman who had seized the slim personal and

political opportunities offered to her sex by the Revolution

and made the most of them. Its forthrightness about Cabar

rus’s centrality to contemporary politics provided an easy

target for the generalized anxiety surrounding the increased

visibility of women in post-Thermidorean social life and visual

representation. Cabarrus’s person, clothing, and political
connections were a matter of public discussion; her portrait

may have been designed to mitigate criticism, but instead it

awoke the specter of Marie-Antoinette, accused of bringing

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 34]

the nation to the brink of ruin through her sexual impulses

and political ambitions.

By the fall of 1796, when the Laneuville portrait went on

view, almost any political statement, no matter how ambigu

ous, was likely to make enemies. The Directory government
had attempted to maintain a stable executive power and rise

above factionalism, at the price of lashing out both at the left

and the right. A government defined largely by a shifting

parade of enemies could have no stable relation with its

pre-Thermidorean past or with the former hero of Thermi

dor. It was likewise difficult to sum up clearly and effectively

Cabarrus’s own complicated political career for a public bat

tered by the seesawing of its government. The Tallien-Cabar

rus household, moreover, had its own share of troubles.

Tallien’s career was in eclipse. He had been elected to the

new lower chamber of deputies, the Conseil de Cinq-Cents,

but had never recovered the influence he briefly enjoyed

after Thermidor. Cabarrus’s affections were wandering as

well, a fact that had not escaped public notice. An article in

the royalist journal Rapsodies du Jour in 1796 recounted an

anecdote about “la citoyenne T . . .” who, attending a ball in

her “Roman costume,” discovered that someone had affixed

to her dress a note reading “Respect for National Proper

ty”—a dig both at the Republican nationalization of church

and private property and at Cabarrus’s alleged sexual profli

gacy.54 The gossip had some basis in fact; Cabarrus began an

affair with Paul Barras, one of the five directors, just months

before the Salon of 1796 opened, making any narrative of

innocence and fidelity to Tallien difficult to sustain.

For Theresia Cabarrus, the Laneuville portrait was just one

element of her ongoing and very public efforts to consolidate

her fame and influence. Its failure did little to check her

momentum. After her affair with Barras ended, she entered

into another relationship, with Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, a

wealthy financier, and bore him four children over the

course of five years. In 1802, she obtained a divorce from

Tallien, who had completely squandered his political capital
and ended up discredited and destitute, dependent on his

ex-wife’s financial support. In 1805, Cabarrus made an im

probably good marriage to Francois-Joseph de Caraman, a

member of an ancient Belgian family who soon thereafter

inherited the title of prince de Chimay. It seems to have been

a love match, at least initially, and Cabarrus bore her husband

three children. Shortly after her marriage, Cabarrus com

memorated this new phase in her life with another spectac

ular portrait (Fig. 13). This time she chose as her portraitist

Francois Gerard, one of David’s most successful students and

the most sought-after society portraitist in France. Gerard’s

likeness of the thirty-one-year-old Cabarrus transforms her

into an almost impossibly majestic Junoesque figure. The

painting is a standard example of Gerard’s full-length por

traiture, interchangeable with his other images of the mem

bers of Napoleon’s extended family or the wives of his gen
erals. The only hint of Cabarrus’s unconventional past is her

partially bared left breast, which could be interpreted vari

ously as a sign of her charitable nature, her fecundity, or her

reputation as a leader of fashion during the wild Directory

years of semitransparent dresses.

The Gerard portrait was commissioned at a time when

Cabarrus was more interested in repairing her social credi

13 Francois Gerard, Portrait of Theresia Cabarrus, Princesse de

Chimay, ca. 1805, oil on canvas, 8314 X 50 in. (212 X 127 cm).
Musee Carnavalet, Paris (artwork in the public domain;

photograph © The Image Works)

bility than in staking claims to political agency. In 1805, the

fluctuating social and political structures that had allowed

women more latitude in their self-representation had, under

the firm hand of Napoleon, succumbed to a new (but retro

grade) social and legal hierarchy. Napoleon knew Cabarrus

well; after she divorced Tallien, he forbade his wife Josephine

any contact with her former best friend. Napoleon’s condem

nation was echoed by the court of the United Kingdom of the

Netherlands. The prince de Chimay was a prominent fixture

there, but his wife was not received by the royal family, and

she spent the last years of her life becalmed in the tiny town

of Chimay.

Laneuville, her portraitist, fared somewhat better under

Napoleon. He received both private and official portrait com

missions under the Empire, exhibiting work in the Salon

until 1817. He also pursued a career as an expert art ap

praiser and possibly also as a dealer; the catalog of the artist’s

posthumous sale reveals that he had amassed a vast collection

of old master and contemporary French art.55 His post-Rev

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342 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

olutionary output as a portraitist remains almost completely

unknown, so it is unclear whether or not he ever attempted

another female portrait as ambitious and unconventional as

that of Cabarrus.

The 1796 portrait was, in any case, a product of its complex

and contradictory moment, conceived by a sitter and an artist

who were both deeply engaged with politics. Each had taken

advantage of the freedoms offered by the Revolution to cre

ate new selves and new career paths. Cabarrus, looking back

in 1796 at the short and eventful course of her adult life from

the vantage point of “Our Lady of Thermidor,” may be

excused for thinking that in a society in flux, a gifted and

determined woman could claim a position of social and

political autonomy. The Revolution was committed to rein

venting politics and everyday life; indeed, it insisted that the

two were one and the same. This theory of regeneration, in

terms of visual imagery, placed portraiture at the center of

cultural and civic life—and portraiture was a tool that both

men and women could use. Cabarrus and Laneuville capital

ized on portraiture’s symbolic resonance, presenting the por

trait process itself as a metaphor for active citizenship. The

portraitist Cabarrus fixes us with a steady gaze; the profile

portrait on the wall takes the place of the easel of the tradi

tional artist’s self-portrait. The viewer becomes the self that

Cabarrus re-creates on the wall of her prison cell; we are

drawn into her vision of herself, seduced and reinvented by

her political and artistic skills. In this transaction, the viewer

and the self created is, of course, male: in the end, Cabarrus

can imagine herself politically only as a woman among men.

Cabarrus’s portrait inserts her into the narrative of na

tional events in the only way possible for a woman: by indi

rection and subversion, with ample reference to older models

of femininity and their representational conventions temper

ing Cabarrus’s claims to political power. It was a difficult

argument to make, as was any argument for female partici

pation in the polity during the Revolution. The portrait

offended its contemporary viewers because it recalled the

Terror and the disunity of France. But the portrait was also

disturbing because it depicted a woman who took the Revo

lution’s promises of liberty and equality seriously and acted

on them. Even in portraiture, which provided artists and

sitters a means of exploring the novel forms of personhood
on offer after 1789, female citizenship ran up against unyield

ing conceptual barriers.

Cabarrus’s portrait may not have been a resounding suc

cess at the Salon, but like most portraits, it had a second life

in the sitter’s home, which, given her political and social

status, served as a public space. Its long life, its ideological

complexity, and its use of the portrait process as a cipher for

political agency demonstrate the ways in which portraiture
functioned as a privileged site for the elaboration of new

models of selfhood for a new nation. The genre’s innovative

approach to the problem of individual identity in a represen
tative regime (amply demonstrated in the Cabarrus portrait)
both performed crucial ideological functions and established

new and long-lasting aesthetic priorities. Cabarrus’s likeness

is a limit case of the power of Revolutionary portraiture.
Laneuville and his sitter took extraordinary risks, and the

result of their collaboration exceeded the accepted bound

aries of citizenship. The freedoms the portrait took—both

literally and figuratively—point not only to the possibilities

and limitations of female agency in Revolutionary portraiture

and politics but also to the ways in which portraiture after

1789 shouldered the burdens formerly borne by history

painting. The fact that these artistic and political liberties

were visualized in a prison portrait makes the painting’s

arguments that much more vivid and haunting.

Amy Freund is an assistant professor of art history at Texas Christian

University. She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled

“Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France, 1189-1804

Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies and In

terior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789—

1914 (Ashgate, 2011) [School of Art, Texas Christian University,

TCU Box 298000, Fort Worth, Tex., 76129, a.freund@tcu.edu].

Notes

Funding for research for this essay was provided by Texas Christian Univer

sity’s Research and Creative Activities Fund and an Andrew W. Mellon Post
doctoral Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at
the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Thanks are due to Charles

Hatfield, Nina Dubin, Jessica May, Heather MacDonald, Eric Stryker, Amy
Buono, Sally-Anne Huxtable, and The Art Bulletin’s anonymous readers for
their careful readings and helpful comments, and to Mary Sheriff and the
members of the research seminar on eighteenth-century European art at the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for their valuable feedback on a
talk based on this material. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my
own.

1. At the Salon of 1789, 38 artists exhibited 110 portraits. In 1791, 103
artists exhibited 252 portraits. Statistics are based on my analysis of the
official Salon catalogs.

2. La Gazette Frangaise, Papier-Nouvelles de Tous les Jours et de Tous les Pays,
23 vendemiaire year V [October 14, 1796], 3: “Des portraits, des por
traits, et puis encore des portraits. Depuis que nous sommes devenus
tous freres, on a fait du sallon une galerie de tableaux de famille.”

3. Etat actuel de Paris, ou le provincial h Paris; ouvrage indispensable (l ceux qui
veulent connoitre & parcourir Paris, sans faire aucune question, 4 vols. (Par
is: Chez Watin fils, 1789), vol. 1, 125-27. Physionotrace portraits were
small-scale engravings produced using a silhouette apparatus and a

pantograph. The price for an opera ticket (48 sols, at 20 sols per livre)
is noted in Heinrich August Ottokar Reichard, Guide des voyageurs en
Europe, 2 vols. (Weimar: Bureau d’Industrie, 1793), vol. 1, 120.

4. For an overview of the importance of transparency in Revolutionary
political culture, see Antoine De Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal
Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 209-46.

5. Maximilien Robespierre, Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui
doivent guider la Convention Nationale dans Vadministration interieure de la

Republique, fait par Robespierre au nom du Comite de Salut Public ([Paris]:
Convention Nationale, 17 pluviose year II [February 5, 1794]), 539-67,
at 541: “ou toutes les ames s’agrandissent par la communication con
tinuelle des sentiments republicains et par le besoin de meriter
l’estime d’un grand peuple. ..

6. Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravures, dessins,
modules, etc exposes dans le grand Salon du Musee Central des Arts (Paris:
Imprimerie des Sciences et Arts, year V [1796]), 49-50: “Portrait de la

citoyenne Tallien dans un cachot a la Force, ayant dans les mains ses
cheveux qui viennent d’etre coupes.”

7. Tony Halliday, in his book Facing the Public: Portraiture in the Aftermath of
the French Revolution (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press,
1999), approaches the problem of portrait production and use primar
ily from the point of view of the artist, tracing the ways in which artists
constructed their own identities as practitioners of a liberal art. His
work convincingly places portraiture at the center of Revolutionary aes
thetic discourses but provides only a partial view of the culture of por
traiture during the Revolution. Philippe Bordes’s Portraiture in Paris
around 1800: Cooper Penrose by Jacques-Louis David (San Diego: Timken
Museum of Art, 2003) offers a wider understanding of portrait practice
in Paris through the careful analysis of a single portrait. The most re
cent scholarly study of French portraiture, Tamar Garb’s The Painted
Face: Portraits of Women in France, 1814-1914 (New Haven: Yale Univer

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WOMEN AND PORTRAITURE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 343

sity Press, 2007), like Halliday’s work, is primarily invested in the art
ist’s ambitions and motivations.

8. Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France,
1750-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2. Ewa

Lajer-Burcharth gives a compelling account of cultural and artistic
manifestations of post-Revolutionary anxiety about the self in Necklines:
The Art of facques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1999).

9. Pastoret was married to Emmanuel de Pastoret. Husband and wife
were early supporters of the liberal Revolution, and Emmanuel held
several positions in the government between 1789 and 1792. Louise
herself was described by a disdainful contemporary as a “gossipmonger
of the Revolution [mattresse commere de la Revolution].” Ferdinande Bas
san, Politique et haute society a Vepoque romantique: La famille Pastoret

d’apr&s sa correspondance (1788 a 1856) (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1969),
24.

10. “Mez amis, je suis bien comptant de nous voir en Republique.”

11. Carla Hesse examines the objections to female citizenship and the ways
that women used writing as a means of self-constitution in The Other

Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2001). Hesse’s work builds on that of Genevieve
Fraisse in Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans.

Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

12. The myths that have grown up around Cabarrus’s life story—some of
which originated with Cabarrus herself—make it difficult to separate
fact from fiction; indeed, many of her biographies are more or less fic
tionalized. The most credible studies of her life are Maurice Ferrus,
Madame Tallien a Bordeaux pendant la Terreur: Etude historique et critique
(Bordeaux: Delmas, 1933); and Marie-Helene Bourquin, Monsieur et
Madame Tallien (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1987). Frangoise
Kermina’s biography Madame Tallien 1773-1835 (Paris: Perrin, 2006),

although slightly novelized, also draws heavily on primary sources.

13. La Chronique Scandaleuse 14 (n.d. [1791]): 2: “c’est votre fagon de

penser qui m’est chere, c’est votre patriotisme, et cette elevation d’ame

qui vous a tout de suite portee a la hauteur de la revolution, qui me
font raffoler de votre charmant naturel; et puis, ma chere, ce que
j’adore en vous, c’est le courage d’avoir eu Mirabeau.” An earlier num
ber of the same journal (6) featured another dialogue between “Made
moiselle Gaba .. . femme Fonte . ..” and a friend, in which Theresia is
accused of covering up an indiscretion by telling her husband she was

attending a session of the National Assembly.

14. Bourquin, Monsieur et Madame Tallien, 102-14.

15. For Tallien’s early biography, see ibid., 17-35, 80-114.

16. For an account of the Terror in Bordeaux, and Cabarrus’s and Tal
lien’s influence on its conduct, see Ferrus, Madame Tallien d, Bordeaux,
225-74.

17. Ibid., 165-66. There is some evidence that Cabarrus was imprisoned
because of this denunciation, but if that was the case, she was quickly
liberated and continued her advocacy.

18. Jean-Philippe-Guy Le Gentil, Memoires du Comte de Paroy, souvenirs dun

defenseur de la famille royale pendant la Revolution (1789-1797), ed.
Etienne Charavay (Paris: E. Plon, 1895), 381-82: “un chevalet avec un
tableau commence, la boite de couleurs a l’huile, des pinceaux sur une

espece d’escabeau, une table a dessins, portant un petit pupitre avec
une miniature, une boite anglaise, une palette d’ivoire et des pinceaux,
un secretaire ouvert rempli de papiers, de memoires et de petitions,
une bibliotheque dont les livres paraissaient en desordre, comme si on

y touchait souvent. . .

19. Arsene Houssaye advanced the claim that Cabarrus studied with Isabey
and reproduces the miniature of her children in Notre-Dame de Thermi
dor: Histoire de Madame Tallien (Paris: H. Plon, 1866), 468. He does not
document this claim, but his biography was based on her letters and

on conversations with her children. Cabarrus also lent her artistic skills
and her influence with the government to Godefroy Engelmann, the

pioneer of lithography in France. Cabarrus sent samples of Engel
mann’s early efforts, including a print after her own work, to a high

ranking official in a successful effort to promote the new technology.
See Leon Lang, Godefroy Engelmann, imprimeur lithographe: Les incunables

1814-1817 (Colmar: Editions Alsatia, 1977), 51.

20. Theresia Cabarrus-Fontenay, Discours sur Veducation, par la Citoyenne
Theresia Cabarrus-Fontenay, Lu dans la seance tenue au Temple de la Raison

de Bordeaux, le ler Decadi du mois de Nivose, jour de la Fete nationale, celebree

a Voccasion de la reprise de Toulon par les armes de la Republique, imprime

d’apr&s la demande des Citoyens reunis dans ce Temple (N.p., n.d. [1793]). A

letter by Cabarrus confirms the circumstances of its delivery in Bor

deaux; see Ferrus, Madame Tallien d. Bordeaux, 194.

21. Theresia Cabarrus-Fontenay, Adresse d, la Convention Nationale (Bor
deaux: Pinard fils, year II [1794]), reprinted in Ferrus, Madame Tallien

a Bordeaux, 363-70: Tabsurde ambition de s’approprier ceux des hom

mes, et perdroient ainsi les vertus de leur sexe, sans acquerir celle du
votre. Mais ne seroit-ce pas aussi un malheur, si, privees au nom de la
nature de l’exercice des droits politiques, d’ou naissent et les resolu
tions fortes, et les combinaisons sociales, elles se croyoient en droit de
se regarder comme etrangeres a ce qui doit en assurer le maintien, et
meme a ce qui peut en preparer l’existence. Ah! dans une Republique,
tout sans doute doit etre republicain, et nul etre doue de la raison ne

peut sans honte s’exiler par son voeu de l’honorable emploi de servir
la patrie! . . (ellipses in the original). See also the Gazette National’e ou
Le Moniteur Universel, 7 floreal year II [April 26, 1794], reprinted in

Reimpression de VAncien Moniteur, vol. 20 (Paris: Bureau Central, 1841),
306-7.

22. Cabarrus-Fontenay, Adresse d, la Convention Nationale, 368: “L’usage, si
souvent precurseur de vos decrets, a decerne aux femmes le beau nom
de citoyennes. Que ce ne soit plus desormais un vain nom dont elles se

parent; et qu’elles aussi puissent presenter avec orgueil, ou plutot avec
confiance, les titres veritables de leur civisme!”

23. Joan Wallach Scott’s essay on Gouges,
” ‘A Woman Who Has Only Par

adoxes to Offer’: Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights for Women,” in the
collection Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E.
Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
102-20, provides an incisive overview not only of Gouges’s argument
but also of the problem of female citizenship during the Revolution. A
version of this essay was incorporated into a larger argument about
feminism and “natural” difference in Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer:
French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni

versity Press, 1996).

24. Hesse, in The Other Enlightenment (53), supplies a tally of female writers
who published between 1789 and 1800; 251 publications by women

during this period were political in nature.

25. Ferrus, Madame Tallien a Bordeaux (350-51), furnishes archival evi
dence of Cabarrus’s saltpeter enterprise.

26. Archives Departementales de la Gironde, Registre L. 2170, no. 629, 15
floreal year 2: “taille 5 pieds 2 pouces, visage blanc et joli, cheveux

noirs, front bien fait, sourcils clairs, yeux bruns, nez bien faits, bouche

petite, menton rond.” For this and other documentation on Cabarrus’s

flight from Bordeaux, see Ferrus, Madame Tallien a Bordeaux, 374-76.

27. Charles de Constant’s letters were published in the Nouvelle Revue

Retrospective 1 (1895): 49-96, 145-91, the relevant passages are found
on 81-87, 175-76.

28. Cabarrus describes her role post-Thermidor in later letters, from 1824
and 1826, cited in Houssaye, Notre-Dame de Thermidor, 8-11, and quoted
on 13: “c’est un peu par ma petite main que la guillotine a ete renver
see.”

29. The public visibility of the merueilleuses and their influence on politics
and aesthetics are discussed in Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s “Nudity d, la

grecque’m 1799,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (June 1998): 311-35; Lajer-Bur
charth, Necklines, particularly chap. 4, on David’s portrait of Julie Re

camier; and Au temps des merueilleuses: La societe parisienne sous le Directoire
et le Consulat, exh. cat. (Paris: Musee Carnavalet, 2005). Aileen Ribeiro
discusses the innovations in dress introduced by Cabarrus and her

peers in Fashion in the French Revolution (New York: Holmes and Meier,

1988), 124-35.

30. LAbreuiateur Universel 109 (19 nivose year 3 [January 8, 1795]): 434:
“Un luxe enorme, les concerts, le chanteur Garat 8c la belle citoyenne
Cabarus, femme Tallien, voila ce qui occupe ici, beaucoup plus que les
subsistances & nos quatorze armees. .. . Arrive-t-elle? on applaudit avec

transport, comme si c’etoit sauver la republique frangaise que d’avoir
une figure a la romaine, ou a l’espagnole, une superbe peau, de beaux

yeux, une demarche noble, un sourire ou l’amabilite tempere la pro
tection, un costume a la grecque & les bras nuds. Quelques journaux
ont multiplie les copies litterales du meme portrait de Theresia Caba

rus, portrait en plusieurs colonnes, ou l’on voit successivement Or

phee, Eurydice, Duhem, Cambon, la nouvelle Antoinette des uns, la diesse
des autres. . . . Quel gout! Que d’esprit! 8c quelles moeurs republi
caines!”

31. Among the early attackers of Cabarrus from the left was Gracchus Ba

beuf, who in 1794 referred to her and other women in her circle as

new manifestations of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry, both

mistresses of Louis XV, and Marie-Antoinette, who had become “lady

legislators [legislatrices]”; cited in Kermina, Madame Tallien, 161-62.

32. The proceedings of the meeting were reported in Le Messager du Soir,
Gazette Generale de lEurope 747 (19 fructidor year 2 [September 5,

1794]): 2-3; and 748 (20 fructidor year 2 [September 6, 1794]): 2-3.

This gave the first published account of Cabarrus’s captivity.

33. Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universel (13 nivose year III [January 2,

1795]), reprinted in Reimpression de VAncien Moniteur, vol. 23 (1842),
101-2.

34. Vedette ou Gazette du Jour, 13 nivose year 3 (January 2, 1795], 2-3.

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344 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3

35. Catalogue de tableaux anciens et modernes du cabinet de feu M. Laneuville

(Paris: A. Coniam, 1826), 34. Laneuville’s career still awaits serious

study; my account here, slender as it is, offers the most detailed and

up-to-date consideration of his work.

36. Laneuville’s Salon entry included a portrait of Louis Legendre, a dep
uty who participated in the Thermidorean coup (location unknown);

according to the Salon livret (exhibition catalog), he was depicted in
the act of presiding over the trial of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a notorious

Jacobin who had carried out a massacre of suspected counterrevolu
tionaries in Nantes that came to symbolize the excesses of the Terror.
The two other politicians whose portraits were exhibited in 1795 were

anti-Robespierre: Jules-Francois Pare (Musee Carnavalet, Paris), a for
mer minister of the interior and a supporter of Georges Danton; and

Jean Pelet, known as Pelet de la Lozere (location unknown), who like
Tallien had participated in the Thermidor coup. The location of Tal
lien’s portrait is also unknown.

37. While there is no direct documentary evidence surrounding the com

mission, the fact that the portrait remains in the sitter’s family to this

day indicates that it was indeed a paid commission. Portraitists some
times volunteered to paint famous sitters at their own expense, but
those portraits remained in the artists’ studios as advertisements for
their skills. This was the case with a number of Laneuville’s other por
traits, and they are clearly indicated in the catalog of his posthumous
sale, Catalogue de tableaux. . . de feu M. Laneuville.

38. Both portraits were last documented in private collections. The work

by Filleul was published in the catalog Exposition retrospective de portraits
de femme sous les trois republiques (Paris: Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts,
1909); and a detail of the Bouliar can be found in Emmanuel Berl, Le
9 Thermidor (Paris: Hachette, 1965), 107.

39. Andre Amar, in Archives parlementaires de 1787 d, 1860: Recueil complet des
debats legislatifs et politiques des Chambres frangaises (Paris: P. Dupont,
1867-1990), vol. 78, 50, quoted in William H. Sewell Jr., “Le Citoyen/la
Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizen

ship,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture,
vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Ox
ford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 105-23, at 118: “elles peuvent eclairer
leurs epoux, leur communiquer des reflexions precieuses, fruit du
calme d’une vie sedentaire, employer a fortifier en eux l’amour de la

patrie par tout ce que l’amour prive leur donne d’empire; et l’homme,
eclaire par des discussions familieres et paisibles au milieu de son me

nage, rapportera dans la societe les idees utiles qui lui aura donnees
une femme honnete.”

40. Both female political participation and its condemnation are reflected
in visual representation; studies devoted to this material include Made

lyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in
the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1992); Lynn Hunt, “The Imagery of Radicalism,” in Politics, Cul
ture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), 87-119; and Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender,
Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2001).

41. La Revolution franfaise et lEurope, vol. 2, L’evenement revolutionnaire (Par
is: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1989), 616-18, provides a brief dis
cussion and some examples of prison-related works, including a rare
color illustration of Suvee’s portrait of Chenier, now in a private collec
tion. Suvee’s other sitters were the Trudaine brothers, Charles-Louis

and Charles-Michel (commissioner of David’s 1786 Death of Socrates),
and Charles-Louis’s brother-in-law. In the livret entry, each of Suvee’s

portraits is accompanied by an affecting description of the sitter’s last

moments, evidently aimed at eliciting viewers’ empathy. Explication des

ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravures, dessins, modules, etc,

exposes dans le Grand Sallon du Museum au Louvre (Paris: Herissant, year
4 [1795]), 57-58.

42. Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 88-118. I discuss the deputy portraits of the

early Revolution in Amy Freund, “The Legislative Body: Print Portraits
of the National Assembly, 1789-1791,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no.

3 (Spring 2008): 337-58.

43. Olivier Blanc, La derniere lettre: Prisons et condamnes de la Revolution

1793-1794 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984).

44. The pendant painting, a bust portrait of Cange, is in the collection of
the Musee de la Revolution Frangaise, Vizille.

45. Andre Chenier, “La jeune captive,” Decade Philosophique, 20 nivose year
III, reprinted in Chenier, Oeuvres completes, ed. Gerard Walter (Paris:
Gallimard, 1950), 185-86:

”
‘O mort! Tu peux attendre; eloigne,

eloigne-toi; / Va consoler les coeurs que la honte, l’effroi, / Le pale
desespoir devore. / Pour moi Pales encore a des asiles verts, / Les
Amours des baisers, les Muses des concerts. / Je ne veux point mourir
encore.’ ”

46. David’s hastily sketched portrait of Marie-Antoinette on the way to the

guillotine (Musee du Louvre, Paris) records the humiliation that this

practice visited on prisoners, particularly women.

47. Blanc, La dernifrre lettre, 156.

48. See Sewell, “Le Citoyen/la Citoyenne,” 115.

49. [Villiers and Capell], Critique du Salon, ou les tableaux en vaudevilles 2

(N.p., n.d.), in Collection de pieces sur les beaux-arts (1673-1808) (Paris: A.

Picard, 1881), known as the Collection Deloynes, Bibliotheque Natio
nale de France, Paris, no. 488: “Ce tableau, qui n’a reste que peu de

jours en exposition, rappelait ce tems affreux ou la France n’etait com

posee que de bourreaux et de victimes, et fesait reculer d’horreur les
ames sensibles dont les regards osaient se fixer sur cette peinture.”

50. Ibid.: “La scene etait dans la prison / De la malheureuse Lamballe’, / Et
Cabarus [sec], dont les desseins / Ne sont pas d’enhardir le crime, / Te

nait, disait-on, dans ses mains / Les cheveux de cette victime.” In the

original, a footnote appears at the end of the fourth line.

51. L es etrivifrres de Juvenal, ou Satire sur les tableaux exposes au Louvre Van V

(Paris, 1796), 11, Collection Deloynes, no. 490.

52. LAmi des Arts: Journal de la Societe Philotechnique, 26 brumaire [Novem
ber 15, 1796], 443.

53. The painting has never undergone technical examination, and any
changes made by Laneuville after it was hung in the Salon are not ap
parent to the naked eye. I have found no trace of any contemporary
accounts of the portrait outside the Salon criticism. The only other
mention of the painting beyond the three cited occurs in the Feuille du

Jour, no. 184 (27 vendemiaire [October 18, 1796]): 2—3, which merely
mentions the beauty of the sitter and her “beneficence [bienfaisance].”

54. Rapsodies du Jour, no. 13 (n.d. [1796]), quoted in Bourquin, Monsieur et
Madame Tallien, 310, who dates this issue to July 24, 1796.

55. Catalogue de tableaux. . . de feu M. Laneuville.

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• Article Contents

p. [325]
p. 326
p. 327
p. 328
p. 329
p. 330
p. 331
p. 332
p. 333
p. 334
p. 335
p. 336
p. 337
p. 338
p. 339
p. 340
p. 341
p. 342
p. 343
p. 344

• Issue Table of Contents

The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2011) pp. 287-386
Front Matter
Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion [pp. 287-303]
Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of Art [pp. 304-324]
The “Citoyenne” Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Revolution [pp. 325-344]
John Sloan: Figuring the Painter in the Crowd [pp. 345-368]
Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 369-370]
Review: untitled [pp. 370-374]
Review: untitled [pp. 374-379]
Review: untitled [pp. 379-383]
Reviews Online (January—March 2011) [pp. 384-385]
Back Matter

Urban Contingency and the Problem of Representation in Second Empire Paris
Author(s): Christopher Mead
Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp.
138-174
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians
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Urban Contingency and the
Problem of Representation in

Second Empire Paris

CHRISTOPHER MEAD, University ofNew Mexico

T he Paris Opera, designed and built by Charles Gamie

r

from 1861 to 1875, serves to focus an entire quarter of

the modem capital of Second Empire France planned from
1853 to 1870 by the prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-

Eugene Haussmann.’ As the journalist Ernest Chesneau

claimed in 1875, Haussmann’s modernization of the city
necessitated Garnier’s grandiose monument: “For the en-

larged, aerated, sanitized Paris, transformed with the clear-
est foresight of social needs and at the same time with

magnificence by the imperial government.. .one needed
an opera house that was worthy of the grandeur, the luxury,
and the arts of the new Paris.”2 Against the rhythmic
backdrop of the five-and-six-story Parisian immeuble, axial
streets and nodal squares converge in one continuously
unfolding scenographic experience on the pilastered build-

ings around the Place de l’Opera to culminate with the

palatial fapade of the Opera itself [Figure 1]

.

Since 1875, it has been assumed that this beautifully coher-

ent expression of the nineteenth-century city could only have
been the consequence of synchronically precise actions–like
the moves of Saussure’s chess game.3 The apparently autocratic
and inevitable result is summarized by the few relevant facts
that Haussmann’s preparatory planning of 1858-60 resulted,
on 29 September 1860, in Napoleon III’s decree to build a new

opera house on the site identified by his prefect of the Seine;
and this led directly to the two Opera competitions, the first
announced on 30 December 1860, which concluded when
Charles Garnier was appointed architect of the Nouvel Opera
on 6 June 1861.4 It matters little to the synchronic argument
that the Opera, inaugurated in 1875, and the Avenue de

l’Opera, inaugurated in 1877, were completed under the Third

Republic, since the monument and the street were both
conceived during the Second Empire as reciprocal expressions
of Napoleon III’s reign. Nor does it matter that Haussmann’s
Paris and Gamier’s Opera–reflecting the split identity of Paris
as both municipality and capital-were administratively dis-
tinct creations.5 Haussmann directed the city’s Service du Plan
de la Ville de Paris, and Gamier answered to the state’s Service

des B~itiments Civils, but both worked for the emperor, their
titular client. Whereas Gamier claimed somewhat vaguely

that

the style of his design was “du Napoleon III,” Haussmann

specifically acknowledged that his replanning of Paris began
with the plan colorin that the emperor gave to him soon after his

appointment as Prefect of the Seine on 23June 1853.6 Though
this plan perished in the burning of the H6tel de Ville in 1871,
its substance is supposedly preserved in a plan annotated by the
exiled emperor, which includes the Avenue de l’Opera leading
to the Opera on its polygonal island [Figure 2].7 Conceptually,
the complicated process of rebuilding Paris reduced to the

imperial strokes of a pencil.
For all of its effectiveness, however, Second Empire Paris was

not some abstract creation on a tabula rasa: in modernizing
Paris, Napoleon III’s representatives were responding to an
extant city with a long history. The regime of Napoleon I

II

provided the financial and administrative means to realize

projects like the Opera and its quarter of Paris,just as it proved
to be remarkably successful in identifying individuals of brilliant

capability to carry them out. But if the execution of Second

Empire Paris is properly credited to the government of Napo-

leon III, its conception was the result of a much more pro-
tracted urban evolution whose roots were in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.

Most immediately, Haussmann built on the work of the

preceding prefects of the Seine, especially Gilbert-Joseph-
Gaspard Chabrol (1812-30) and Claude-Philipe-Berthelot de
Rambuteau (1833-48), who successively represented the Bour-
bon Restoration and the July Monarchy.8 It is a cliche that

Haussmann’s efforts were distinguished from those of his

predecessors by being based on a general plan, as the architec-
tural publicist Cesar Daly asserted in 1862:

The period of great public works that will soon have completely

transformed Paris dates to the start of the reign of Napoleon III. It is not

that the previous governments, and above all the government of

Louis-Philippe, did not carry out some civic works…. But these works

were conducted timidly, slowly, and without any overview, the administra-

tion at this time not having studied.. .a general project of rectification of

the circulation routes of Paris.9

138 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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FIG. I: Avenue de I’Opera, Paris, with the Opera by Charles Garnier (1861 -75) at the end.

This cliche neatly yet misleadingly simplifies the planning of

nineteenth-century Paris. Even though Rambuteau admitted in

his Mimoires that neither he nor Chabrol had a plan d’ensemble,

they nonetheless had programs for the development of

Paris.

Instead of Haussmann’s comprehensive plan de percement that

cut new streets through the city, Chabrol’s and Rambuteau’s

incremental plans d’alignement straightened, widened, and ex-

tended streets over time.10 Conversely, because Haussmann’s

plan for Paris itself underwent a continuous process of develop-
ment whose starting point was the city he inherited from

Chabrol, Rambuteau, and the other prefects, his supposedly
absolute plan d’ensemble turns out in many respects to have been

as historically contingent as were the more modest planning

programs of his predecessors. What Frangois Loyer terms

l’Haussmannisme existed before Haussmann took over the

modernization of Paris.

”

Gamier’s Op6ra fagade [Figure 3], appropriating its paradig-
matic composition of arcaded base, colonnaded loggia, and

pedimented end bays from Claude Perrault’s east fagade of the

Louvre of 1667-74 [see Figure 28] and Jacques-Ange Gabriel’s

Garde Meuble on the Place de la Concorde of 1753-75 [see

Figure 29], admits its historical debts more readily.’2 Yet this

citing of Gamier’s sources is in its own way as misleading as the

assumption that Haussmann’s Paris was a self-generated phe-

nomenon. Reducing the Opera facade
to a metahistorical

synthesis of French classicism fails to explain why Gamier

necessarily used this model at a time when, as Theophile
Gautier noted on the occasion of the first Op6ra competition in

1861, there did not exist “a settled form for theaters as there is

for temples, palaces, and triumphal arches.”‘3 Classicism, even

in such a distinctively French form as the Louvre and Garde

Meuble, cannot alone explain Gamier’s choice of model,

especially since it was functionally less expressive than the

model of the amphitheater favored by rationalists. In giving to

the Opera the facade
of a palace, Gamier (like Haussmann in

his similar treatment of the flanking buildings on the Place de

l’Op6ra) was thinking less of classicism than he was recognizing
that the Louvre and Garde Meuble models had by the mid-

nineteenth century evolved into a characteristically Parisian

type that was equally applicable to public and private struc-

tures. Suitably inflected to distinguish itself as a public monu-

ment, the Opera fagade nonetheless asserts its common urban

identity with the surrounding immeubles.

This return to a subject already treated at length in my

monograph on Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera involves more,

however, than a methodological shift from the circumstances of

one building’s architectural production in the light of contem-

porary architectural theory, to the larger and more diffuse

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 139

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*;tv

rr

~~;;;;

a4

ot~x

AI ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ P FIII

FIG. 2: Plan of Second Empire Paris as annotated by Napoleon III, 1852-70, detail including the Avenue de I’Op6ra in the center (quadrant 8), from Charles Merruau, Souvenirs

de I’hdotel de ville de Paris, 1848- 1852 (Paris, 1875).

processes that shape a city and its monuments. Ultimately at

issue is a problem of architectural representation that I suggest
reached a crisis in the nineteenth-century city.

Informing this crisis are the categories of public and private

space studied byJiirgen Habermas in The Structural Transforma-
tion of the Public Sphere.14 Pointing out, despite the book’s title,
the impossibility of deducing a synchronically coherent explana-
tion, Habermas nonetheless attempts to explain the categories

ofpublic and private as they apply to modem bourgeois society.
Rooted in Greek political philosophy, the concept of”a public

sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the

private sphere” was revived during the Renaissance in conjunc-
tion with the birth of early capitalist economies.15 From the

sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this public sphere desig-
nated the state, which was literally represented by, and thus

literally embodied in, the (typically absolute) monarch; the

private sphere included everything excluded from that public

sphere: the bourgeois world of private individuals, businesses,

houses, etc. By the eighteenth century, however, the public

sphere had been abstracted from the person of the ruler, as the

state increasingly came to be represented by its bureaucratic

and military institutions. Paralleled by the emergence of the

modem bourgeoisie-the middle class of urban professionals
and businessmen that was distinct from the artisans and

shopkeepers of the original burghers-the abstraction of the

state also corresponded to the emergence of a civil society

designed to serve the largely private (social and economic)
interests of the bourgeoisie. According to Habermas, this

conflation of the previously distinct public and the private

spheres in the modem bureaucratic state meant that, by the

nineteenth century, “the bourgeois public sphere may be

conceived above all as the sphere of private people coming

together as a public.”16
This social transformation both informed the urban develop-

ment of Paris and produced the “demise of representative

publicness” that Habermas dates to the start of the nineteenth

century: when the aristocratic conception of the nobleman as a

public person displaying his status was replaced by the “bour-

geois idea of the freely self-actualizing personality,” this meant

that “the bourgeoisie.. .by its very nature could no longer
create for itself a representative publicness.”‘7 The shift from a

state embodied in its ruler to one operated by the bureaucracy
of a bourgeois civil society thus produced a crisis of representa-
tion that inevitably and necessarily had its effect on the state’s

140 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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ii i:: i:::: __ _1: ;
:: :

::

—
-?: —

:-‘ ::: _

i i:::
– – :

i

“- – :–:–
i _

– :—

r

FIG. 3: Charles Garnier, Paris Op6ra, facade.

institutions and its monuments. To claim that Haussmann and

Gamier set the civic stage on which bourgeois Paris could act

out its rituals of public display along the boulevards, in the

quarter’s elegant hotels, caf6s, and shops, and at the Opera,
thus raises the question of what, in fact, the city and the

monument actually represented.’8
In the case of the Paris Opera, this problem of representa-

tion is connected with the institution’s own history. On 28 June
1669, Louis XIV conferred on Pierre Perrin the priviklge of

establishing an opera company in France; in March 1672, after

Perrin had ceded his privilege to Lulli, the king officially
established the Academie Royale de Musique. Directly respon-
sible to the king from 1669 until 1712, it also represented the

king, who used the Opera as a political occasion to display
himself to his subjects and receive their homage. But the Opera
lost this institutional clarity during the course of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.

Part of the reason was administrative. In 1713 the Opera was

transferred from the king’s immediate patronage to the bureau-

cratic supervision of the Ministere de la Maison du Roi; this

ministry partly transferred control to the city of Paris from 1749

until 1757, when supervision reverted to the Ministetre de la

Maison du Roi for the remainder of the Ancien Regime. The

Revolution in 1790 again turned the Opera over to the city,
until Napoleon I in 1806 restored its original privileges as a

state theater, now under the Ministere de la Maison de

I’Empereur. Apart from changes in the actual ministry to which

the Opera answered, the emperor’s decision remained in effect

through the Second Empire. Even so, during the course of the

first half of the nineteenth century, the (variously royal, impe-
rial, and national) Academie de Musique increasingly lost the

singular ability it had enjoyed under Louis XIV to represent the

ruler. Not only had its role as a state institution been confused

with its civic location in Paris, but its relationship to the current

ruler had become in equal measures abstract and transitory.
Gamier’s Opera, begun under and for the Second Empire,
could be completed and claimed by the Third Republic be-

cause, in effect, it represented neither regime (or both).

Complicating the Opera’s ambiguous status was the fact

that, as Jane Fulcher explains in The Nation’s Image, it operated
in an “elusive intermediate realm” between an institution of

state-patronized art and a private enterprise: despite its status

as an official theater that received generous subsidies, it was

also (if never successfully) expected to be financially profit-
able.19 In this sense, the Academie de Musique answered to the

same concerns and pressures experienced by the city’s “pri-

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vate” theaters, especially since those private theaters as much as

the official theaters (including the Opera) were subject to state

supervision and censorship. Fulcher documents the conse-

quences of those pressures in her study of the Opera’s reper-
toire. Noting that, already in the eighteenth century, this

repertoire had shifted its focus from the king himself to the

abstract monarchical state, she then traces its transformati

on

into nineteenth-century grand opera under the democratic

influences of both the staging conventions and the melodramas

of the city’s popular vaudeville theaters. Though Fulcher

dismisses the influence of the bourgeoisie on what she defines

as a narrowly political struggle, her evidence accords with

Habermas’s category of the bourgeois public sphere.20 Emile

VWron, an Opera director during the July Monarchy, attributed

the institution’s nineteenth-century successes at least in part “to
the advent of the bourgeoisie.. .the elite public who paid for
their seats and boxes, unlike the former aristocratic clientele of

the Opera who occupied them for free.”21 Charles Gamier

recognized this bourgeois public in his design of the Nouvel

Opera’s spaces.22

Tracing the typically overlapping yet shifting functions of

state and city bureaucracies, as well as the frequent collusions of

public and private interests, the following studies of Hauss-

mann’s design of the Opera quarter and of Gamier’s answering
design in the Opera fagade will argue that both resulted

pragmatically from the same historical process that trans-
formed Paris from the representational realm of an absolute

monarch into the far more ambiguous setting for a newly
ascendent bourgeoisie. Suggesting that the prefect and the

architect were less the authors of absolute decisions than they
were skilled arbiters whose genius lay in their ability to resolve,
at least momentarily, the consequences of often-uncoordinated

prior decisions, their actions will be reinterpreted in light of the

often-circumstantial events that shaped the rapidly developing
city of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Paris.

The site

In the century between 1760 and 1860, the Opera provisionally
occupied four different sites before it was definitively located at

the juncture of the Boulevards des Capucines and des Italiens.

Answering to the exigencies of a developing city as well as to the

overlapping jurisdictions of the city and the state, the Op6ra
reflected in its peregrinations a split in public opinion between

those who favored a more central and aristocratic placement at

the Palais Royal and those who favored a more peripheral and

democratic placement along the Grands Boulevards. Inform-

ing and ultimately resolving this split were changing defini-

tions, both of the boundaries to the city’s center and its

periphery, and of the Opera’s institutional place within the

changing social structure of Paris.23
In a very real sense, the one justified by subsequent history,

the Grands Boulevards were the more logical choice. The
eleven boulevards that ring the Right Bank of Paris from the
Bastille to La Madeleine originally formed part of the city’s
defenses: the term, boulevard, derives from the German, bohl-

werk, which designated the tree-planted platforms atop the
earth-and-stone ramparts of a city’s fortifications. InJuly 1676,

formalizing a decision dating back to 1670, Louis XIV issued

patent letters authorizing the transformation of these ramparts
into the Nouveau Cours according to the plan of Pierre Bullet.
Realized between 1685 and 1705 [Figure 4], the boulevards

quickly became popular places for promenading, and they

began to be lined with fashionable residences, caf6s, and

theaters; the H6tel Marin-Delahaye, constructed on the Boule-
vard de la Madeleine in 1779-81 by the architect Andre Aubert

[Figure 5], is a surviving example of the boulevards’ eighteenth-

century domestication, as is an edict (arrRtd) of 10 April 1772
that ordered the paving of the boulevards. Concurrently,
during the 1760s and 1770s, the Boulevard du Temple devel-

oped from what had been the site of impromptu street

spectacles, pantomimes, and marionette performances into
what became the city’s most lively theater district lined with
vaudeville houses.24

Yet the boulevards’ equally parvenu and popular character,
as much as their remote location at the city’s edge, militated

against their being chosen as the site for the opera house. The
Palais Royal, offering a more central and aristocratic context,
had been the favored location since 1673, when the newly
founded Academie Royale de Musique occupied the salle des

fites installed by the architect Jacques Lemercier in 1637 in the

right wing of Cardinal Richelieu’s palace. Following the destruc-
tion by fire of this salle in 1763, the architect Pierre-Louis
Moreau Desproux was commissioned to build the city’s first
true opera house, the Seconde Salle du Palais Royal (1763-70).
Moreau, like Lemercier, located his theater in the east wing of
the Palais Royal but now facing directly onto the Rue Saint-

Honore [Figure 6]. Only the Opera’s scenery warehouse was
built in 1767 on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, next to the
Boulevard du Temple.25

When the Seconde Salle du Palais Royal was itself destroyed
by fire in 1781, the architect Samson-Nicolas Lenoir le Romain

built a new opera house, the Salle de la Porte Saint-Martin, on

the site of the Boulevard Saint-Martin warehouse [Figure 7].
This manifestly temporary structure, erected in a record eighty-
six days on an expediently available piece of ground, was not

meant to solve the problem of the Opera’s location. Implicitly,
however, it recognized the boulevards’ increasing integration
into the city, while also suggesting by its location a previously
unimaginable commonality of purpose with the nearby vaude-
ville houses. To raise monies against its constantly growing
debts, this salle promoted its own kind of spectacle by inaugurat-
ing apris soupers, or musical f&tes.

142 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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NI

?;{ ?:?;-I 7;,
•: ,( s. ……

>. ?y,<,,

~ iO N–7

ILj

\,,

Xv- 4I, 4 1;/

;l\
,\ …

xi•sju::+ HiFRO-,
………… I

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FIG. 4: Bernard Jaillot, Nouveau plan de la ville et fauxbourgs de Paris, 1713, plan showing the Right Bank of Paris and the Grands Boulevards to the left of the Seine.

In the same year, 1781, the duc de Chartres charged the
architect Victor Louis with planning the commercial develop-
ment of the Palais Royal with the addition of an arcaded bazaar
of restaurants, shops, and caf6s around a tree-lined garden
(1781-85); in 1786, to replace the lost opera house, the duke
commissioned Louis to build the Theiatre du Palais Royal
(1786-90).26 Driven by the duke’s speculative attempts to

generate income, this transformation of an aristocratic resi-
dence into a popular gathering place effectively duplicated the

conjunction of restaurants, caf6s, theaters, and tree-lined allMes
along the boulevards.” The previously separate histories of the
Grands Boulevards and the Palais Royal had now directly, and

competitively, intersected.
The Academie Royale de Musique, taken over by the Ville

de Paris in 1790 and rebaptised the Opera National in 1792,
was moved in 1794 by order of the Committee of Public Safety
from Lenoir’s theater to the Theatre des Arts. Constructed by
Victor Louis in 1791-93 as a speculative venture for Mademoi-
selle de Montansier, the Theitre des Arts stood midway
between the Grands Boulevards and the Palais Royal on the

Rue de Richelieu across from the Bibliothbque Nationale [see
Figure 41]. Its appropriation, however, had more to do with

practical need than with any urban vision of the proper location
of the Paris Op6ra: by 1794, the Salle de la Porte Saint-Martin
risked collapse, while the more commodious and solidly built

Theatre des Arts was conveniently available as a result of the

summary expulsion and imprisonment of Mlle. de Montansier
on the trumped-up charge of having endangered the Biblio-

thbque Nationale with the construction of a supposedly fire-

prone theater.28
Returned institutionally to state control by Napoleon I, the

Opera returned physically to the Grands Boulevards under the
Bourbon Restoration. In the wake of the assassination of the
duc de Berry at the entrance to the Theatre des Arts on 13

February 1820, this politically damned theater was demolished
and replaced with the present Square Louvois. The architect

Francois
Debret was charged with erecting a new opera house

that fronted on the Rue Lepelletier just off the Boulevard des
Italiens in the gardens of the former HOtel de Choiseul; the

hotel, facing the opposite direction onto the Rue Grange

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PgI

~~low-

~~ – Amod-L .6

FIG. 5: Andr6 Aubert, H6tel Marin-Delahaye, Paris, 1779-81, fagade of h6tel

particulier built on the corner of the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the Rue

Caumrnartin.

BateliZere, was converted to the Opera’s administrative use

[Figure 8]. Built quickly between August 1820 and August 1821
on a limited budget, with materials from the Thbietre des Arts,
the Salle Lepelletier was yet another provisional solution in a

history of provisional solutions to the problem of an opera
house for Paris.29

The availability of the H6tel de Choiseul may have dictated

the Rue Lepelletier location, but the real criterion was the

structure’s proximity to the Grands Boulevards, across the

Boulevard des Italiens from the Salle Favart (Op6ra Comique)
in a rapidly developing part of Paris. The implications of this

move to the boulevards were equally social and economic. On
the one hand, the move coincided exactly with a program by
the state to modernize the Opera’s repertoire in order, as

Fulcher explains, to prove that it was “not a fossilized institution

alienated from the modern state.” This program culminated

with the inauguration in February 1828 of Auber and Scribe’s

opera, La Muette de Portici, in a performance marked by the

influence of the boulevard theaters both in the historical

realism of its melodramatic subject, and in the answering
realism of its staging and costumes.30 Reinforcing the social

implications of this institutional renewal were clear economic

concerns, since the Opera’s move also coincided with a boule-
vard building boom: under the prefect of the Seine, Chabrol,
290 new buildings were raised along the boulevards between
1818 and 1829.31

The Salle Lepelletier’s effective orientation to the axis of

social and economic activity on the boulevards was quickly
confirmed by the royal ordinances of 31 July 1822 and 16 April
1823 authorizing the opening of a double passage de l’Opera.
Divided into the parallel Galerie de l’Horloge and Galerie du

Baromitre, this characteristically Parisian shop-lined pair of
interior streets covered with iron-and-glass roofs cut across the

remaining gardens of the H6tel de Choiseul to join the opera
house to the Boulevard des Italiens. Proposed and financed by
the vicomte Morel de Vinde, who owned the property, it was

built with state approval to the designs of the Opera’s architect,
Debret.32

Such collusions of public and private interests, typical of the
Bourbon Restoration, were instrumental in Chabrol’s contem-

porary planning of Paris. Indeed, the prefect’s objective for this

part of Paris was to foster the private development of residential

~ffff ‘n I/a

….. ….
7 N 7

*::

…
ii!: •

= ~ ~ … …;;. ,l,’.!t/,n,,

FIG. 6: Pierre-Louis Moreau Desproux, Seconde Salle du Palais Royal, Paris,

1763-70, detail of site plan, plate 13 from Alexis Donnet, Architectonographie des

tha6tres (Paris, [1 837]).

144 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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levaation

Plaza au uiveau de. premi rct los

SA-
w . _

-w-

FIG. 7: Samson-Nicolas Lenoir le Romain, Salle de la Porte Saint-Martin, Paris,

178 1, detail of faqade elevation and site plan, plate 8 from Donnet, Architectonogra-

phie des tha6tres ([1837])

quarters along the Grands Boulevards: the quartier de la Chaussde

d’Antin, adjoining the Boulevards des Capucines and des

Italiens in the area of Garnier’s future Op6ra, grew from 32

buildings in 1760 to 600 in 1830, ofwhich 482 were built under

Chabrol.33 Controlled by a review process that required a royal
ordinance for work to proceed, the activities of private develop-
ers were often coordinated as well with speculatively sited public

projects. Thus the state-funded construction of the Salle Lepel-
letier immediately preceded the royal ordinance of 21 April
1824 that authorized the private Compagnie Saint-Georges/
Soci6t6 des Terrains de Ruggiero et Saint-Georges to develop
the neighboring quartier Saint-Georges. To anchor this new

quarter, the city built the new parish church of Notre-Dame de

Lorette (1822-36); by 1830, the Salle Lepelletier found itself in

a developed and fashionable area of Paris that had definitively
extended the city across its historic border of the boulevards.34

Implicitly made a subject of urban planning by Chabrol, the

Opera was then explicitly defined in urban terms during
Rambuteau’s tenure as prefect of the Seine under the July

Monarchy. The immediate cause was a fire in 1841 that

damaged the Salle Lepelletier and reminded everyone that this

theater was meant only to be temporary. This fire also coin-

cided with a general public debate about the urban growth and

future development of Paris, which inextricably involved the

Opera. Called the “displacement of Paris,” the debate was

provoked by a perceived migration of both people and wealth

from the center of Paris along the Seine to its periphery-

especially the periphery of the Right Bank along the Grands

Boulevards that had so successfully been developed in the

1820s under Chabrol.35

The municipal councilor Jacques-Sdraphin Lanquetin inau-

gurated the”debate on 1 August 1839 when he reported to the
Conseil Municipal de la Ville de Paris on the need for a plan
d’ensemble of the city’s projected public works in order to

understand and address the “displacement of the population of

Paris.” The municipal council concurred and, after the Conseil

Gendral du D6partement de la Seine also urged the prefect of

the Seine and the minister of the interior to study this displace-
ment, the minister, Duchatel, named a commission of inquiry
on 20 November. Including Rambuteau and Lanquetin among
its fourteen members, the commission first met on 11 May
1840. Lanquetin presented a report, Question du deplacement de

Paris, and the new minister of the interior, the comte de

R6musat, divided the commission’s work into three issues:

1) verifying the reality of this displacement, 2) identifying
its causes and the means to stop it, and 3) studying the ways
and means of executing the proposed remedies. A sous-

commission including Lanquetin was charged with studying the

first issue.36

As a bureaucratic process, this inquiry was destined to fail:

while Lanquetin seized every opportunity to proclaim the city’s

catastrophic displacement toward the boulevards, Rambuteau

wrote in November 1840 to Duchaitel (once again minister of

the interior) that “Paris is not displacing herself, Paris is

growing. … all the quarters of this great city are contributing,
in their proper proportion, to her prosperity.””7 If anything,
Rambuteau had been exacerbating the displacement that so

worried Lanquetin, since he proceeded systematically during
the late 1830s and early 1840s to lower, grade, pave, plant with

trees, and otherwise improve the Grands Boulevards from “the

Bastille to La Madeleine.”38 With the prefect and the councilor

arguing such contrary positions, it is hardly surprising that the

commission disbanded in 1841 without reaching any definitive

conclusions or achieving any concrete results.

The debate was continued in the press through publications
whose authors offered no more consensus on the displacement

of Paris than the commission of inquiry, except to agree that

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TlwFIIJtre
.de

h’ ACAI)
MI

ROYALh K
)D MUIQtUK (Opera)6

lilii ~i•………
.

i ‘
,

U -t 01

IT1414

low:

A1I11tIII1′

Tk Y. —– —–

4tI

‘XI

41 kIf/ f AIreaot ?Aeo-4eZI*%

i rl

FIG. 8: Franqois Debret, Salle Lepelletier, Paris, 1820-21, site plan, interior perspective and plans, plate 20 from Donnet, Architectonographie des the6tres ([1837])

the city’s explosively chaotic growth needed to be regulated by a

plan d’ensemble.39 In spite of itself, the inquiry succeeded in

making the public think of Paris as an urban system subject to

positive control through the coordinated planning of buildings
and circulation networks. Resulting ultimately in Haussmann’s

plan for Paris, it led more immediately to the planning

program of fifty million francs presented by Rambuteau to the

Conseil Municipal on 26 February 1847.40

Approved by a law of 1 August 1847 that authorized the

city to borrow twenty-five million francs and scheduled for

completion in 1853, little was actually executed before the

fall of the July Monarchy in 1848. But the comprehensive

program summarized in Rambuteau’s Mimoires even included

a provision for the Opera: though properly the state’s responsi-

bility, Rambuteau proposed a city subsidy of four million

francs.41 While he continued to deny any displacement of

Paris,42 the prefect intended to locate the new Opera on the

Place du Palais Royal, on the site of Robert de Cotte’s Chateau

d’Eau (1719) between the Rue Saint-Honor& and the Rue de

Rivoli:

This plan…would have provided a vital impetus and a magnet to the

center of Paris, which foreigners were starting to abandon for the

boulevards. I said to the king on this subject: “If Your Majesty isn’t

careful, in twenty years old clothes from the [Marche du] Temple will be

sold in the galleries of the Palais Royal!”43

146 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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Obviously, Rambuteau’s choice of site was motivated by the

political consideration that His Majesty, Louis Philippe, was the

current owner of the Palais Royal. But in taking such contradic-

tory stands on the displacement of Paris-further developing
the Grands Boulevards while seeking to protect the Palais Royal

against the effects of that development-the prefect was at the

same time reflecting the ambiguity of the Opera’s institutional

status.

Operated, during the July Monarchy, by a private directeur-

entrepreneur who contracted with the state, the Opera had also

been transferred from the control of the Maison du Roi to the

Ministere de l’Interieur: this ministry had traditionally super-
vised the private theaters of Paris. According to Fulcher, the

reasoning behind this administrative transfer was that if the

Op6ra “was to relate artistically to the boulevard theaters, then

it should be placed under the same controls.”44 Continuing a

program dating to the Bourbon Restoration of fostering for the

Opera a more democratic reputation (and repertoire), this also

perpetuated the contradictory images of an institution uncer-

tainly suspended between the official interests of the state, and

the private interests of the bourgeoisie.
Rambuteau’s proposed siting of the Opera next to the Palais

Royal, for all of its ambiguities, temporarily concluded the

debate over its location. Paralleling the larger debate over the

displacement of Paris, this debate had been anticipated with a

project of 1838 by Edme-Jean-Louis Grillon, an architect as

well as a municipal councilor (who would serve with Lanquetin
on the commission of inquiry); after the Opera fire and the

displacement controversy had given fresh relevance to the

subject, he developed a second project of 1841 in collaboration

with the Opera’s official architect, Debret.45 Grillon accepted
the Salle Lepelletier’s general location, but turned the theater

away from the Rue Lepelletier to face along the axis of the Rue

Grange Batelibre onto the intersection of the Boulevards

Montmartre and des Italiens [Figure 9]. Replacing Debret’s

passage de l’Opera with a public street and square to connect the

theater more directly and monumentally with the Grands

Boulevards, Grillon’s project recognized what had always been

the Salle Lepelletier’s implicit orientation. With small modifica-

tions, his scheme was repeated by Hippolyte Meynadier in a

project of 1844, and by the architect Hector Horeau in a

project of 1843-47 [Figure 10].46
Horeau accompanied his project, one version of which he

presented to the Conseil Municipal in 1844, with a detailed

analysis of its urban criteria.47 Eschewing any segregation
between the aristocratic art of opera and the democratic art of

vaudeville, he not only asserted the social as much as economic

appropriateness of siting the Opera on “the natural thorough-
fare of theaters,” but also claimed the civic appropriateness of

placing this “public building in a private quarter.”48 The

municipal council rejected Horeau’s project, arguing that it

jw TINN -,- ..

FIG. 9: Edme-Jean-Louis Grillon, “Projet d’Opera, rue Grange Bateliire,” 14 May

1838, site plan.

encouraged the “displacement of the wealthy population to-

wards the luxurious and already too-advantaged quarters of the

Chauss6e d’Antin.”49 Indeed, the council was on record as

having accepted in 1841 counter-project proposing “that a

monumental auditorium be definitively erected for the

Opera on the site of the Chateau d’Eau, Place du Palais

Royal.”50
This proposal was attributed in the press to the architect

Pierre Fontaine (and Charles Percier), whose projects of

1804-48 to connect the Louvre and Tuileries palaces had

typically included an Opera that protruded from the Louvre

onto the Place du Palais Royal.5′ Conveniently, this proposal
both coincided with the council’s bias for the center of Paris,
and coordinated the construction of a new Opera with several

of Fontaine’s longstanding projects.52 Amd&ee Couder further

publicized the possibilities of this site in a project of 1845-47

that anticipated Rambuteau’s program of 1847 by proposing to

erect the Opera alongside the Place du Palais Royal on the site

of Cotte’s Chateau d’Eau [Figure 11 ].53 Fontaine’s and Couder’s

conservative yet carefully reasoned responses to the propo-

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nents of an opera house on the Grand Boulevards used the

Op6ra to revitalize the center of Paris while linking the Palais

Royal and the Louvre across the Rue de Rivoli.54
The range of possible locations for a new opera house was

summarized in December of 1846 when Charles Rohault de

Fleury, having that year succeeded Debret as the Op6ra’s
official architect, drew up nine site plans.55 The intended

recipient of those plans is not recorded, but may have been

Rambuteau, who was then in the process of formulating his

planning program for Paris. One project returned to the Place

Louvois, while two projects each considered variations of 1) the

Palais Royal/Louvre site and 2) the Salle Lepelletier site but

realigned with the Rue Grange Batelibre. The remaining four

chose the periphery of the Grands Boulevards.56

Despite Rambuteau’s politic preference for the Palais Royal,
the majority (six out of nine) of Rohault de Fleury’s plans

recognized the city’s growth along the Grands Boulevards.

Among those plans, the Boulevard des Capucines site was

st
—

. … …

rA :i:

Ao r :

All-i–
?iart

FIG. 10: Hector Horeau, “Etude d’un projet d’Opera d6finitif pour la ville de

Paris,” May 1845, detail of site plan.

i

::::

::

*rce: —

; .6L

FIG. I 1: Amedee Couder, “Projet d’Opera,” 1847, site plan, column 157 from

Revue gn6drale de I’architecture et des travaux publics 7 (1847-48).

especially prescient [Figure 12]: placing the Opfra just off the

boulevard, on the parallel but lower Rue Basse du Rempart

(that is, at the base of the original fortifications), this site is

identical to the one chosen definitively by Haussmann in 1860.

In the text accompanying this plan, Rohault de Fleury summa-

rized its practical and economic advantages: ‘”There exists in

the center of the Chaussee d’Antin [quarter], on the boulevard

facing the Rue de la Paix, vast plots of ground, of considerable

value it is true, but infinitely less than most locations that could

contain the Opera. On these plots there are almost no build-

ings.
…

.”57 In placing the Opera across the boulevard from the

Rue de la Paix, Rohault de Fleury tied the site back into the city
center.

By the 1840s, the Chaussee d’Antin had become one of the

city’s most fashionable quarters as a result of its development

starting in the 1820s under Chabrol. But, as Edmond Texier

explained in his Tableau de Paris of 1852, it also represented a

social shift in Paris:

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A center to the activity, to the curiosity, to the leisure, to thefldnerie of the

Parisians had always been needed…. Have we not seen under the

[Bourbon] Restoration this terrible duel between the Faubourg Saint-

Germain and the Chauss&e d’Antin, between the escutcheoned h6tel on

the Rue de Varennes and the stylish house on the Rue Saint-Georges,

between the grand lord and the parvenu? This struggle has ended to the

profit of the quartier d’Antin.58

Rohault de Fleury’s conclusion that the Boulevard des Capu-
cines site boasted the same urban advantages that Horeau had

credited to the placement of his project on the Boulevard des

Italiens, while also offering the economic advantage of being
less built up, thus contained two assumptions. Accepting as

inevitable the city’s displacement toward the boulevards, he

also accepted the parallel displacement of the aristocracy by the

bourgeoisie as the city’s determinant social class. In effect, the

Opera had a new audience.

Rohault de Fleury’s site was only momentarily less built up,

:::K .. ii-~
— :_:::$::::_: _ : __

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FIG. 12: Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Acad6mie Royale de Musique. Projet No. 6:

Boulevard des Capucines,” December 1846, site plan.

since the nearby construction of the city’s first train station, the

Gare Saint-Lazare, guaranteed the area’s imminent and profit-
able development. Funded by the brothers and financiers

Jacob-Emile and Isaac Pereire, the Gare Saint-Lazare was built
in 1839-43 on the Rue Saint-Lazare by the architect Alfred
Armand and the engineer Eugene Flachat.59 Isolated at the

edge of Paris beyond the boulevards and their residential

quarters, yet serving growing numbers of departing and arriv-

ing passengers, the Gare Saint-Lazare required convenient

access from the city [Figure 13]. A royal ordinance of 3

September 1843 took the first step by authorizing the opening
of the Rue du Havre from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Rue
Saint-Nicholas d’Antin (Rue de Provence). Completed in

1845, the Rue du Havre provisionally linked the station
with the Boulevard de la Madeleine via the Rue Tronchet.60
But its more logical extension was to the Boulevard des

Capucines, toward the very plot of ground chosen by Rohault
de Fleury in 1846 as a possible site for the Opera. Though this
extension would not be realized until 1858, its inevitability
meant that Rohault de Fleury had placed the Opera at the

potential confluence of several busy streets. As if confirm-

ing the architect’s shrewd insight, the Pereires would spend the
1850s buying up property in the quarter before commissioning
Alfred Armand in 1862 to build the Grand HOtel de la Paix on
the west side of what had by then become the Place de

l’Opera.61
The July Monarchy ended without any action being taken

on the construction of a new opera house for Paris, and
attention was then diverted to other subjects through the
Second Republic and into the early years of the Second Empire.
Yet decisions continued to be made that would bear directly

upon the Opera’s future. Even before he had sketched his plan

colorie, with its premise of monumental arteries coursing through
the city’s tissue, Louis-Napol0on had signed into law while still

president of the Second Republic a decree of 26 March 1852
that authorized the state to expropriate entire properties in the

rebuilding of Paris and its streets. The rebuilding of Paris would

very much remain a collaborative venture between public and

private interests, but this decree gave to the government a right
of eminent domain that vastly increased its authority and

effectiveness vis-a-vis the private sector when carrying out its

program of urban renewal.

The first phase of Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris, the

Premier Riseau of 1854-58, would quarter the city with the

Grande Croisle of an extended Rue de Rivoli intersecting with

the new Boulevards du Centre (Sabastopol) and Saint-Michel.

Significantly, the “complementary plan of the Rue de Rivoli in

the area of the Louvre and the Tuileries Palaces” drawn up by
the prefect’s Service du Plan in 1853 [Figure 14] dealt not only
with the Rue de Rivoli, but also a projected, still-unnamed
avenue 22 meters wide that would run from the future Place du

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FIG. 13: Plan of Paris, detail of plate 2 from Karl

Baedecker, Paris (Leipzig, 1909). The Gare Saint-

Lazare is at the top left edge of the plan; the Rue

du Havre descends from this train station across

the Rue Saint-Lazare toward both the Rue

Tronchet and La Madeleine, and the Rue Auber

and the Opera; the Opera faces across the

Boulevard des Capucines toward the Avenue de

I’Opera, which connects the Grands Boulevards

with the Palais Royal and the Louvre.

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Th6atre Frangais, across the slum of the Butte des Moulins,
toward the Boulevard des Capucines.62 Soon named the Ave-

nue Napol6on, and renamed the Avenue de l’Op6ra in 1873,
this projected street leads directly to the site on which Garnier’s

Op6ra would be built.

After the “complementary plan” was approved by the

Conseil Municipal on 13 January 1854, and reviewed by the

Conseil Gen6ral des Batiments Civils in meetings of 20 and

23 February 1854, its execution was ordered by an imperial
decree of 3 May 1854. Construction of the Avenue Napolkon,
however, was delayed by the process of expropriating the

necessary properties. Ten years would pass before a decree of

24 August 1864 ordered the opening of the avenue, now 30

meters wide, from the Place du Th6atre Frangais to the Rue de

l’Echelle and from the Rue Louis-le-Grand to the Place de

l’Op6ra; these two sections were completed in 1867. Nine more

years would pass before another decree of 27 June 1876

ordered the opening of the avenue’s middle section, from the

Rue de 1’Echelle to the Rue Louis-le-Grand. By the time that

President MacMahon finally inaugurated the Avenue de l’Op6ra
on 19 September 1877, the public assumed that its purpose
had always been to provide a monumental approach to the

Op6ra.63

Despite the precedent of Rohault de Fleury’s 1846 Boule-

vard des Capucines plan, probably no one in 1853-54 con-

nected the new street with an opera house. In fact, even though
the sole project to be published during these years-a proposal
of 1853 for an opera house on the Boulevards des Capucines by
the architects Max Berthelin and Louis Viguet [Figure 15]-

incorporated the Avenue Napoleon, it perversely avoided the

avenue’s monumental axis by siting the monument on the

same side of the Boulevard des Capucines, facing the Rue de la

Chauss6e d’Antin between the Avenue Napoleon and a pro-

jected extension of the Rue R6aumur from the Bourse.64 Any

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more direct association between the Avenue Napoleon and the

Opera had yet to enter the public mind.

Nor was the avenue meant solely to introduce a measure of

urban order and renewal into the labyrinthine and insalubrious

quarter of the Butte des Moulins-though obviously this was

one of its intended consequences. Rather, as explained in the

report on the Rue de Rivoli plan that Inspecteur General Fdlix
Duban presented to the Conseil General des Batiments Civils

on 20 February 1854, the purpose of this street was to reach the

Gare Saint-Lazare: “There is even the intention to extend this

street all the way to the comer of the Rue de la Paix on the

Boulevard [des Capucines], from where, with only a slight break

in axis, reaching the Rue [Basse] du Rempart, it would run into

the Rue du Havre (and an important railroad station).”65
Haussmann’s Deuxitme Reseau, the second phase of his rebuild-

ing of Paris, confirmed this purpose in 1858 by adding to the

Avenue Napoleon its necessary extension [see Figure 13]. As

agreed between the city and the state in a covenant of 3 May
1858, and approved for funding in the amount of one hundred

eighty million francs by the law of 28 May, Haussmann

committed the city of Paris to execute ten projects within ten

years that included the Rue de Rouen (now Auber), “22 meters

in width, between the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue du

Havre.”66

Since Napoleon III was a proponent of industry in general

and of railroads in particular, it is not surprising that his

projected Avenue Napoleon might be conceived to serve a train

station. But he and Haussmann also had telling urban reasons

for considering such stations in their plan of Paris. The law of 11

June 1842, called the “Charter of the French Railroads,” had

plotted a radial network of rail lines across France, all begin-

ning and ending at Paris, which was to be circled by a necklace

of terminals. The four stations built under the July Monarchy
and Second Republic on the periphery of the city’s Right Bank

confirmed the city’s continuous outward displacement, and

threatened to decentralize Paris still further even as it centered

the nation on its capital.67 Napoleon III’s plan for Paris

addressed the resulting need to link the encircling stations

more directly with the city. Like the Boulevards de Strasbourg
and Sebastopol of 1852-58 that departed from the Gare de

l’Est to reach the Place de ChAtelet after crossing the Rue de

Rivoli, the Avenue Napoleon and its extensions would lead

from the Gare Saint-Lazare across the same connecting axis of

the Rue de Rivoli to end at the Louvre.

By 1858, however, the Avenue Napolkon was evolving
toward its ultimate purpose of serving the Opera. The impetus
for this evolution was the revived campaign for a new opera
house provoked by the attempted assassination of Napoleon III

at the entrance to the Salle Lepelletier on 14 January 1858.

Once again, the question of the Op6ra’s proper location

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FIG. 14: Service du Plan de la Ville de Paris, “Plan compl6mentaire de la rue de Rivoli aux abords du Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries,” 1853, site plan for the expropriation of

properties. Note the projected but still-unnamed Avenue de I’Op6ra at the upper left.

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: •,,•i: •,:•:

,- 27

d•!ii•• i …… •!No w, ?

FIG. I 5: Max Berthelin, “Aspect de I’emplacement propose pour le nouvel Opera,” 1853, aerial perspective.

preoccupied the public.68 Projects proliferated, although with

predictably little consensus beyond a common preference for

the circumference of the Right Bank boulevards. Fresh atten-

tion was drawn to a project by the architect H. Bamrnout [Figure
16], dating to 1856-57, which returned to Horeau’s site on the

Boulevard des Italiens, but now connected to the Place du

The itre Frangais and the Louvre by a “Rue Imperiale” that

mimicked the Avenue Napoleon.69 Another project adopted
Rohault de Fleury’s now-outdated Boulevard des Capucines

plan of 1846, without the Rue de Rouen or the Avenue

Napoleon, while three projects turned to the Place de la

Concorde.70

While the public squabbled, the prefect of the Seine worked

with the state at creating a site: decisions concerning the

Op6ra’s siting were a closely coordinated venture between the

city and the state in part because the emperor had in 1854

ended the institution’s status, dating to the July Monarchy, as

an entreprise prive and had placed it directly under the control of

his Ministre d’Etat et de la Maison de l’Empereur, Achille

Fould. Following deliberations by the Municipal Council on 16

July 1858, an imperial decree of 14 November 1858 opened 1)
the Rue de Rouen between the Boulevard des Capucines and

the Rue du Havre, 2) a corresponding diagonal street (the Rue

Halevy) between the boulevard and the Chauss6e d’Antin, and

3) a square (the Place de l’Opera) at theirjuncture in place of, 4)
the suppressed Rue Basse du Rempart [see Figure 13].

A few members of the architectural community grasped the

potential of these actions. The architect Theodore Char-

pentier, in a project that incorporated the relevant substance of

Haussmann’s May 1858 formulation of the Deuxieme Riseau,

placed the Op6ra on the Boulevard des Capucines, facing a

semicircular square at the end of the Avenue Napol6on (which
he called the Rue de l’Imp6ratrice), while the Rue de Rouen

angled off from the Op6ra’s left to the Rue du Havre and the

Gare Saint-Lazare [Figure 17].71 Even better informed and

more current was the project by Rohault de Fleury. On 28-29

July 1858, anticipating the November decree but clearly aware

of the Conseil Municipal’s deliberations of two weeks earlier,
the architect completed an exhaustive project, delineated on

fourteen sheets and accompanied by a fourteen-page explana-

tory memoire, for the “Construction of an Opera and Opening of

the Boulevart [sic] de Rouen” [Figure 18].72 Perhaps repeating a

tactic employed in 1846, when he might have submitted his

nine site plans to Rambuteau, Rohault de Fleury dedicated this

project to Haussmann instead of to Fould, to whom he

answered as the Opera’s official architect.

The architect again sited the Op6ra on the Boulevard des

Capucines, now fronting a Place de l’Op6ra in place of the Rue

Basse du Rempart and standing on an irregular polygonal
instead of rectangular site, bounded to the left by the projected
Rue de Rouen (labeled the Rue du Chemin de Fer de l’Ouest),
and to the right by the balancing diagonal of a hypothetical
“Rue de l’Op6ra.” To justify the polygonal site with its eccentric

voids to either side of a rectangular Op6ra, he proposed

wrapping the monument with residential buildings. Complet-

ing the scheme is the undelineated Avenue Napol6on: “The

middle of the fagade of the Opera corresponds to the axis of the

great street that, starting at the Rue de Rohan [that is, the Place

152 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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du Theatre Fran;ais], ends at the boulevards near the Rue de la

Paix.”73

What Charpentier recognized generally, and Rohault de

Fleury understood quite specifically, was that Haussmann’s

implicit conjunction of the Avenue Napoleon with the Opera

placed on the Boulevard des Capucines simultaneously ad-

dressed several problems of urban planning. By refocusing the

Avenue Napoleon on the Opera, Haussmann did not so much

neglect the avenue’s originally intended function ofjoining the

Gare Saint-Lazare to the city’s center as he made urban sense of

its otherwise awkward juncture with the Rue de Rouen at the

Boulevard des Capucines: the Avenue Napoleon now led

axially to the Opera, which acted as an urban hinge between the

city center and the peripheral train station. Because the

Boulevard des Capucines site accepted the city’s incontrovert-

ible expansion outward, while the Avenue Napoleon immedi-

ately connected that site with the city center and the Palais

Royal, this scheme reconciled competing claims in the debate

over the Opera’s proper location in Paris.

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FIG. 16: H. Barnout, “Projet d’une voie imperiale et d’un emplacement pour I’Opera,”

1860, site plan. This is the final version of a project first proposed in 1856-57.

……….

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FIG. 17: Theodore Charpentier, “Op6ration pour obtenir un emplacement destine

e I’Opkra,” 1858, site plan.

If Haussmann waited until 1860 to publicize this decision of

1858, it may have been because the interim was spent replan-

ning the theaters of Paris. The pretext was the opening of the

Boulevard du Prince Eugene (Voltaire) between the Place du

Chateau d’Eau (de la RWpublique) and the Place du Tr6ne (de
la Nation). Decreed to be of public utility on 29 August 1857,
included in the Deuxinme Riseau of 1858, and completed in

1862, the Boulevard du Prince Eugane cut past the Boulevard

du Temple, demolishing the boulevard’s theaters as it went. By
1858, the Boulevard du Temple-the “Boulevard du Crime”-

had become run down and, in the eyes of the government, both

dangerous and disreputable; in the words of Cesar Daly, it was

time to replace with a new theater district this “forgotten

comer.. .of an already venerable Paris…cut through from

every direction by new streets.. ..”74 Significantly, in another

collapse of private into public interests, the originally private
theaters were to be rebuilt by the city.

To anchor the new district, the city architect Gabriel Davi-

oud built the The6itre du Chatelet (replacing the The6tre du

Cirque) and a new Theitre Lyrique in 1859-62 on either side

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iiiiiiii iijiiiiiiiii ;;; ; ;-;;;–:-;;

;-iiiii:i–

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FIG. 18: Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Projet d’Opera. Boulevart [sic] des

Capucines,” 29 July 1858, site plan.

of the Place du Chatelet at the end of the Boulevard de

Sebastopol.75 In 1861-62, the architect Cusin built a new

Th•itre de la Gait6 on the Square des Arts et Metiers alongside
the Boulevard de Sebastopol; finally, in 1867-69, the architect

Auguste Magne would build a new TheAtre du Vaudeville at the

corner of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Rue de la

Chaussee d’Antin.76 Daly’s sketch plan of the resulting theater

district as it had evolved by 1862 [Figure 19] reveals that, while

the Grand Boulevards remained the “natural thoroughfare of

theaters,” this arc was now tied back into the city center by built

and projected theaters spread along the cross-axis of the

Boulevards de S6bastopol and Saint-Michel.

Not shown by Daly, yet completing Haussmann’s scheme, is

the parallel cross-axis of the Avenue Napol6on that would be

anchored at one end by the Theatre Fran<;ais and at the other

end by the Opera (passing, midway and just off the avenue,

Jean-Jacques-Marie Huv9’s Salle Ventadour of 1827-31). This

linkage of the Op6ra with the city’s other theaters was institu-

tional as well as topographical, since not only had the previ-

ously disreputable boulevard theaters been transformed by
Haussmann into “official” theaters, but the new Theitre Lyrique
was specifically conceived as the city’s counterpart to the

state’s Op6ra: artists could start their careers and new operas
could be premiered at the The6itre Lyrique before moving on
to the more august confines of the Academie Imperial de

Musique.”
Having coordinated the Opera’s prospective location with

the replanning of the city’s theaters, the time had come to

codify the decision of 1858. On 16 March 1860, Rohault de

Fleury sent to Fould three variously rectangular and polygonal
site plans for an opera house on the Boulevard des Capu-
cines.78 On 11 April, the director of the Bitiments Civils, the
comte de Cardaillac, forwarded these plans to Haussmann

along with instructions to submit the Opera’s proposed site to

public scrutiny.79 On 14 April, the prefect presented to the

mairie of the ninth arrondissement of Paris a “plan of the

projected site and its surroundings” [Figure 20].8o Surprisingly,
the plan submitted was rectangular. Exhibited at the mairne
from 15 April to 5 May to solicit public comment, this plan was
then reviewed by a commission of inquiry composed of seven

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FIG. 19: Cesar Daly, “Plan-squelette de la partie de Paris ofi se trouve les nouveaux

theitres,” Les the6tres de la place du Chatelet (Paris, [1878]) site plan showing

location of city theaters as of 1862.

154 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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N I I ?1 1
1,

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FIG. 20: Service du Plan de la Ville de Paris,

“Construction d’une nouvelle salle d’Opera sur

le boulevart [sic] des Capucines. Plan de

r’Emplacement proj6t6 et des abords,” 14 April

1860, site plan.

municipal councilors.8s In its report of 8 June, the commission

first dismissed eight counter-projects for the Place Vend6me,
the Butte des Moulins, the Place de la Concorde, and the Salle

Lepelletier sites.82 It then turned to the official plan: “…the

project placing the Opera in the center of Paris, in the richest

and liveliest quarter, and near the Boulevard [des Capucines],

presents in this regard the best conditions.”83

What distinguishes this judgement is not the commission’s

approval of the official site. This was a foregone conclusion for a

group of municipal councilors answering to Haussmann: the

councilors had lost the independence manifested during the

tenure of Rambuteau after the law of 21 March 1831 instituting
an elected Conseil Municipal was superseded by the law of 5

May 1855 that authorized the emperor to appoint its members.

Rather, it is the commission’s assertion as a self-evident fact that

this project placed the Opera “in the center of Paris,” as if

historically the very problem with this site had not been its

location outside the city’s center. Yet the boundary of that center,

already affected by the successive development of residential

quarters and train stations beyond the Grands Boulevards, had

changed definitively as a result of the law of 16 June 1859 that

annexed the suburbs of Paris and doubled the city’s arrondisse-

ments from ten to twenty. Effectively, the commission concluded

the debate inaugurated in 1839 by declaring the issue of the

city’s displacement to the Grands Boulevards to be moot since,

by 1860, those boulevards had become part of the center of

Paris.

Having approved the Opera’s proposed location, the com-

mission then offered a predictable critique of the site’s cramped
and narrow rectangular plan. To remedy this and other faults,
it recommended: 1) that the opera house be flanked with

curved buildings whose courtyards could serve as imperial and

public carriage entrances, 2) that the Avenue Napoleon be

widened from its currently projected 22 meters, and 3) that the

comer buildings (facing the Opera across the square at the

juncture of the Avenue Napoleon with the Rue de la Paix and

an extended Rue Reaumur) be curved.84

On 18 June, Haussmann informed Fould of the commis-

sion’s report, concluding that its recommendations required
the replanning of the streets bounding the Opera’s site.85 This

was confirmed by the Conseil General des Baitiments Civils

when it reviewed the commission’s findings in its meeting of 30

June.86 The result, which Haussmann must have expected, was

a return to the unpublished polygonal site plan developed in

1858. Rohault de Fleury immediately publicized this result by

issuing a sketch that outlined the complete network of streets

(including the Avenue Napoleon) needed to shape a more

symmetrically polygonal island for the monument.87 Redrawn

by Haussmann’s Service du Plan over a plat of the site from

1858 [Figure 21], with an accompanying table itemizing the

properties to be expropriated, this plan was approved by the

Municipal Council in its deliberations of 4 August and was then

published as the official project in Le Monde Illustrd on 14

October.88 On 29 September, Napoleon III decreed to be “of

public utility the construction of a new opera house.. .on a site

located between the Boulevard des Capucines, the Rue de la

Chaussee d’Antin, the Rue Neuve des Mathurins, and the

passage Sandrie.”89
If Haussmann complicated matters by substituting a rectan-

gular for the polygonal plan he always meant to use, he also

skillfully orchestrated the process of scrutiny in order to make it

appear that the public, as represented by the various commit-
tees and councils consulted, had actually selected and designed
the Opera’s site.90 As the prefect makes clear in his Mimoires,

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FIG. 21: Service du Plan de la Ville de Paris,

“Ouverture de la rue de Rouen et formation de

I’emplacement du Nouvel Opera et de ses

abords. Plan parcellaire,” 1860, site plan for the

expropriation of properties.

‘fa

Ps, \

the creation of Second Empire Paris depended upon such

political skills. But questions of who manipulated whom miss

the larger historical point: in the end, the prefect, as much as

his immediate public, was responding to the unforseen if

fortuitous coincidence of political, bureaucratic, economic,

demographic, social, and topographical circumstances that led

in the urban history of Paris up to the decision of 1860 to build a

new opera house on the Boulevard des Capucines. Haussmann

was only one, admittedly prominent, actor among the many
actors in the protracted drama of the Opera’s siting; if this

prefect deserves any particular credit it is because he had the

presence of mind to claim the credit for executing the will of a

consensus that he did not originate. The paradox is that such a

coherent urban fabric as Second Empire Paris could result from

such a pragmatic and contingent historical process–only after

the fact does the Opera’s siting come to seem inevitable. No

more the consequence of some synchronically abstract pattern
of urban growth than it was the predicted result of Napoleon
III’s plan coloride, Second Empire Paris reveals in its history the

degree to which any living city remains in a constant and

indeterminate state of becoming.

The facade
When Haussmann submitted the Opera’s site to public scrutiny
in April 1860, he presented to the mairie of the ninth arrondisse-

ment not only a site plan but also a “specimen of the obligatory

fagades that will surround the theater” [Figure 22].91 Like the

site plan, the elevation was probably based on a design by
Rohault de Fleury, though a letter of complaint from this

architect to Achille Fould makes it clear that the final “speci-
men” had been redesigned by someone in Haussmann’s Ser-

vice du Plan: in accordance with the decree of 27 July 1859

regulating fagade heights in Paris, the elevation shown had

been increased from 17.55 meters to 20 meters in height. The

result, in Rohault de Fleury’s words, was that “the principal
edifice [the Opera] would be dominated by private houses.”92

After he became the Opera’s architect, Charles Gamier would

repeat this complaint, adding the further lament that “since the

theater depended on the Minister of State while the immeubles

depended on the City, there was no chance that the two

administrations might agree.”93

Garnier’s iteration of the familiar systemic struggle between

the state and the city for control of Paris might be accepted at its

face value, except that it is flatly contradicted by the typological

agreement that relates the Opera’s fagade to those of the

surrounding immeubles. To scale the six-story immeuble delin-

eated in Haussmann’s obligatory fagade-commercial ground
floor, office mezzanine, residential floors one-through-four

(plus the servants’ garret)-its elevation was schematically

organized into an arcuated base (the first two floors), the

pilastered fagade of a giant order (the two principal floors), and

an attic (the top two floors). This classically tripartite scheme

became the obligatory model for all the immeubles around the

Opera [Figure 23].94 The scheme, however, was not restricted in

its application to these buildings since it reappears, now framed

by pedimented end bays, in the Opera’s elevation of arcaded

base, colonnaded loggia, and attic. In a gesture that belies the

supposed schism between the state and city administrations,
the fagade of Garnier’s Opera both mirrors and concentrates in

a monumental public type the corresponding private type of

the Haussmannian immeuble.95

Two histories explain this confluence of architectural types.
The first history, informed by the transformation of Paris from

a city of the king into a city of the bourgeoisie (with its

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consequent confusion of the public and private spheres), traces

the evolution of the specifically royal pilastered facade
of the

seventeenth century into the merely urban pilastered immeuble

of the mid-nineteenth century.96 The second history, informed

by the ambiguous status of the Academie de Musique as both a

state institution and a private enterprise, attributes the colon-

naded
facade

of Gamier’s building to a debate that, starting in

the eighteenth century, posited opposing monumental and
residential images for the Opera.

To the degree that Napoleon III intended through his

prefect of the Seine to reestablish his capital as a royal city,
Second Empire Paris continues a tradition of urban planning
begun in the sixteenth century. The tradition started modestly

enough during the reigns of Francois
I and Henri II, when two

speculative municipal developments integrated rows of houses

into regularly fenestrated fagades with ground-story arcades for

shops: flanking the Pont Notre Dame in ca. 1508-12 and on

the south side of the Ile de la Cite in 1552-54.97 These

experiments lead to the more ambitious Paris of Henri IV.

Working with his voyer Sully, the functionary charged with

regulating the city’s streets and buildings, the king codified the

use of housing terraces to shape a public space at the Place

Royale, now the Place des Vosges (1605-12), and at the Place

Dauphine (ca. 1607-9) [Figure 24]. Segregating exterior public

image from interior private use, only the fagades on each

square were regulated; the structure and organization of the

separate lots behind that facade
were left to the discretion of the

individual builders. While the stone-trimmed brick
facades

on

an arcaded base fronting shops were specifically conceived at

the Place Royale for mixed commercial use and middle-class

housing, this square was completed as an aristocratic enclave of

hotelsparticuliers after 1607.98
These squares in turn influenced Percier and Fontaine’s Rue

de Rivoli of ca. 1801, which exposes the Italianate sources of its

Renaissance models by translating into more simply detailed

and monochromatic limestone elevations the rhythm of a

ground-story arcade surmounted by regularly fenestrated up-

per floors [Figure 25].99 Beyond the elevation’s formal effective-

ness, its implicitly bourgeois image served to distinguish these

private fagades from the public and royal fagades of the

Tuileries and Louvre across the street. Given the dynastic
connection, Napoleon III through his prefect of the Seine

could easily have adopted his uncle’s street as the model for his

own modernization of Paris. But Haussmann copied the scheme

only once: when completing the extension of the Rue de Rivoli

to the Place du Louvre in 1846-56. Instead, his typical use of a

pilastered giant order, as on the buildings around the Opera,
turned to the more explicitly royal model of Jules Hardouin

Mansart’s two masterpieces of Parisian urbanism, the Place
des Victoires and the Place Louis-le-Grand, now the Place

Vend6me.

The Place des Victoires [Figure 26], designed in 1685 and

authorized by a royal edict signed by Colbert on 19 December

1685, was conceived and executed as a royal square celebrating
the victories of Louis XIV: centered on a statue of the king, it
was framed by aristocratic h6tels united in a single elevation of

giant Ionic pilasters on an arcaded base and surmounted by a

mansard roof. The history of the Place Louis-le-Grand [Figure
27] is more complicated. According to Rochelle Ziskin, this

square was originally conceived in 1685 as the Place de Nos

Conquetes to represent to “Frenchmen and foreigners alike”
the cultural conquests of a triumphant Louis XIV. Placed at the

western edge of Paris and focused on a colossal equestrian
bronze of the king, the U-shaped square was to conclude a royal
ceremonial axis that began at the city’s eastern edge with the

Place Royale and passed through the Place des Victoires.
Behind fagades similar to those around the Place des Victoires
were to be installed the royal academies, library, and mint of

France, as well as a residence for visiting ambassadors. In 1691
Mansart replaced the domestic mansard roofs of his original

design with flat balustrades in order to distinguish the purely

FIG. 22: Service du Plan de la Ville de Paris, “Annexe au plan d’enquate. Specimen

des
facades

obligatoires,” 14 April 1860,
facade

elevation.

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 157

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Or I

Vo

I. . …….. .

LL:

ORONACS ELAPAC OAL auh) TDEL LAEDAPINA AI

FIG. 23 (Top): Place de I’Opera, Paris, with the Grand H6tel de la Paix by Alfred

Armand, 1862-63, on the left, and the Paris Opera on the right.

FIG. 24 (Bottom): Place Royale (Place des Vosges), Paris, 1605- 12, and Place

Dauphine, Paris, ca. 1607-9, faqade elevations, plate 40 from Georges Gromort,

Histoire abr g6e de I’architecture de la renaissance en France (Paris, 1930).

public and institutional identity of the Place des Nos Conquates
from the actually private and residential function of the

Place des Victoires. But in 1699, following the humiliating
outcome for France of the War of the League of Augsburg,

FIG. 25: Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, Rue de Rivoli, Paris, designed

1801-10, built 1803-35, extended under Baron Haussmann 1849-56, view of

extension.

158 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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aii-: L

0 i

fl-1-Ai 4

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FIG. 26 (Top): Jules Hardouin Mansart, Place des Victoires, Paris, ca. 1685, partial view.

FIG. 27 (Bottom): Jules Hardouin Mansart, Place Louis-le-Grand (Place Vend6me), Paris, ca. 1685- 1699, partial view.

the unfinished and no longer appropriate “square of our

conquests” was demolished. Ceded to the city and renamed

the Place Louis-le-Grand, it was then rebuilt as a private
residential development to a revised design by Mansart,

who restored the mansard roofs, replaced Ionic with Corin-

thian pilasters, and canted the corners of the now-closed

square. 00

As built, the Place des Victoires and the Place Louis-le-

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 159

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FIG. 28: Claude Perrault, east fagade of the Louvre, Paris, 1667-74.

Grand dealt with the problem already addressed by the earlier

royal squares of unifying multiple private residences into a

continuous facade wrapped around a public space. But where

the Renaissance squares adopted a bourgeois architectural

type, Mansart presented his two Baroque squares in the royal

image of Perrault’s east facade of the Louvre (1667-74) [Figure
28] as well as the garden facade of Versailles (redesigned by
Mansart in the 1670s and 1680s). In appropriating these

elevations, Mansart did more than update the architectural

language of Parisian urbanism from the Renaissance of Henry
IV to the Baroque of Louis XIV. The giant order, integrating

multiple stories into what could now be read classically as a

single elevation, brought to French public architecture a new

monumentality of scale. The typically Renaissance articulation

of each story with its own order, as employed by Pierre Lescot

on the Louvre’s courtyard fagade of 1546-78, or even Jacques
Androuet Ducerceau’s more exceptional use in 1603 of a giant
order on the western half of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie,
lacked the architectural breadth and grandeur found in the

conjunction of arcaded base, giant order, and continuous

entablature. It was this new monumentality that Mansart boldly
transferred from the palace of a king to the houses of that king’s
citizens.

At issue is the representational slippage that occurred,

particularly when the Place de Nos Conquetes became the

Place Louis-le-Grand, but which took place at the Place des

Victoires as well. Though the aristocratic inhabitants of the

Place des Victoires and the Place Louis-le-Grand obscured or at

least tempered the gesture, Mansart in effect democratized for

general urban use what had been conceived specifically to

represent the monarch. In this (potential rather than intended)
confusion of typologies, Mansart’s two squares were prefigured
by the Place Royale: despite the distinction generally main-
tained in Renaissance Paris between bourgeois house and royal
palace (or noble h6tel), the original plan for the Place Royale
had proposed to separate private and bourgeois interior spaces
from a fagade fronting a public and royal exterior space. This

segregation of the representational image from any literally
embodied content (or status) paradoxically explains the func-
tional elision between the intended bourgeois and the actual

aristocratic inhabitants of the Place Royale, since it reveals the

degree to which the meaning of urban types could shift

according to their location and use.

Mansart’s desire to distinguish the residential Place des
Victoires from the institutional Place de Nos Conquetes sug-

gests that he was himself aware of this problem, though he

could not in the end avoid it. Folding traditionally distinct h6tels

particuliers behind a single fagade like some bourgeois housing
terrace, Mansart depended on the royal imagery of that fagade
to represent the nobility both of the occupants and of the royal

square. Yet this image proved to be no more fixed than it was at

the Place Royale, since it depended on the public willingness to

accept a conventional rather than embodied meaning-which
would explain why every regime from the Revolution through
the Paris Commune sought to redefine and thus claim the

renamed Place Vend6me as its own political space. By the

mid-nineteenth century, when the Place des Victoires had

become a center of the cloth trade in Paris, and its former h6tels
were given over to textile stores and the occasional bourgeois

apartment, its equestrian statue of Louis XIV (erected by the
Bourbon Restoration to replace the one destroyed during the

Revolution) seemed oddly out of place.
In the eighteenth century, the urban possibilities of Per-

rault’s Louvre facade and Mansart’s two squares were explored

by Jacques-Ange Gabriel in the monumental pair of facades

flanking the Rue Royale on the north side of the Place Louis

XV, later the Place de la Concorde. Designed in 1753-55 and

authorized along with the square in royal patent letters signed

by Louis XV on 21 June 1757, the northeastern building was

completed by the state in 1774 as a royal furniture warehouse,
the Garde Meuble [Figure 29]; the companion northwestern

building, ceded to the city for private development in 1765

after the state abandoned plans to use it first for the Mint and
second for a barracks, was realized in 1775. The Garde Meuble

employed a variant of the Louvre facade to turn a warehouse

into a monumental backdrop to a royal square marking the

king’s point of entry into Paris from the direction of Versailles.

Like Mansart, Gabriel recognized the type’s urban potential,

applied that type to buildings regardless of their internal

160 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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organization, and intended an architectural image whose pur-

pose was to represent the institution of French kingship. J.-D.
Antoine’s reductive quotation of the Louvre facade on the

frontispiece of the Mint (1771-77), displaced from the Place

Louis XV to a site across the Seine, functioned the same way.10′
A more modest version of the type, closer to Ducerceau’s

west wing of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie than to Perrault’s east

facade, was used by Victor Louis for the arcaded bazaar added

to the Palais Royal in 1781-85 [Figure 30]. Keeping the key
elements of arcaded base and giant order, but dropping that

order to the ground story where it overlaps with the arcade,

……….

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FIG. 29 (Top): Jacques-Ange Gabriel, Garde Meuble, Place Louis XV (Place de la

Concorde), Paris, 1753-74.

FIG. 30 (Bottom): Victor Louis, Palais Royal bazaar, Paris, 1781 -85, partial view.

Louis associated his design with the Perrault, Mansart, and

Gabriel facades yet deferred to them by literally placing his

giant order on a lower level. But the Palais Royal bazaar also

introduced a new semiotic ambiguity into the type since,

despite the titular royal context, the pilastered elevations were

used for what was in fact a private commercial space.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the impetus
behind the urbanization of Paris shifted toward the speculative

development of private housing. With the notable though

appropriate exception of Percier and Fontaine’s Galerie Nord

du Louvre (1816), which echoed the facing elevation of Ducer-

ceau’s Grande Galerie, the giant order largely disappeared
from use during this period. Yet Percier and Fontaine’s Rue de

Rivoli, for all its properly bourgeois urbanity, had little effect on

the immeubles being built independently by speculators. By the

July Monarchy, when the immeuble reached maturity as a

five-story mixed-use structure, the emphasis was on individual-

izing each building through differences of sculptural and

architectural detailing. While the Second Empire introduced

numerous improvements into its construction, and Hauss-

mann’s decree of 1859 regulating fagade heights increased the

immeuble to six stories on major streets and squares, his

administration neither invented nor substantively changed its

functional typology. But his administration did address the

formal problem inherited from Rambuteau’s Paris of regulat-

ing the immeuble architecturally in order to give it a coherent

urban form. Effectively, this was the same problem already
confronted in the royal squares of seventeenth- and eighteenth-

century Paris, and like those squares the solution depended

upon the separation of interior use from exterior image.102
Haussmann’s understanding of the immeuble only gradually

took shape during the 1850s: the Boulevard de Sebastopol, for

example, remains an agglomeration of architecturally distinct

fagades in spite of the regularity of its floor and cornice heights.
But several buildings from this same period anticipated the

solution delineated in 1860 for the immeubles around the

Opera. In their common use of a giant pilaster order over an

arcuated base, these buildings document the rediscovery by

mid-nineteenth-century Paris of Mansart’s Place des Victoires

and Place Vend6me. With that rediscovery came a growing
awareness that these squares had, two centuries earlier, shown

how a city’s private buildings and public spaces could be

integrated along a coherent urban surface.

The type returned with the Caserne Napoleon, a barracks

built by the state in 1852-54 to the design of a military

engineer, Guillemaut [see Figure 33].103 Rising on the Rue

Lobau behind the H6tel de Ville, the barracks’ Baroque
elevation suggested in its contrast to the Renaissance elevations

of E.-H. Godde andJ.-B. Lesuer’s city hall of 1832-46 [Figure
31] a parallel comparison between state and municipal author-

ity.1’04 Victor Baltard’s two municipal annexes of 1855-58

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 161

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FIG. 31: E.-H. Godde and J.-B. Lesuer, H6tel de Ville, Paris, 1832-46, destroyed

1871, anonymous photograph.

[Figure 32] across from the H6tel de Ville seem to confirm this

reading in their equivalent use of a generically Renaissance

fagade. Significantly, a newspaper article of 1858 commented

that Baltard’s two buildings mediated stylistically between “the

character proper to residences and that which is appropriate to

public constructions,” as if the Renaissance idiom represented
the municipality by expressing its responsibility to address the

private needs of citizens.105 Cesar Daly noted in 1862 that the

two fagades were treated identically despite their differences of

plan and function, almost as if they were indeed immeubles.106
The possibility that state and municipal architectures might

be represented by contrasting Baroque and Renaissance archi-

tectural schemes that could distinguish official and public from

FIG. 33: Guillemaut, Caserne Municipal, Paris, ca. 1858, based on the design of the

adjacent Caserne Napoleon, 1852-54.

civic and private realms of authority was, however, immediately

compromised by the construction of a smaller but otherwise

identical twin to the Caseme Napoleon at the other end of the

Rue Lobau [Figure 33]: intended in 1854 to house a detach-

ment of engineers and artillery, this building had been rede-

fined as a municipal barracks by the time it was approved for

construction in 1856.107 The language of state architecture had

collapsed into that of municipal architecture.’08
This semiotic confusion was paralleled by the contemporary

development of the immeuble. Jacques-Ignace Hittorff led the

way with his project of 1853 for the completion of the Place de

l’Etoile. To frame that vast space and its Arc de Triomphe,
Hittorff ringed it with houses standing on arcaded bases and

faced on their upper stories by a giant order of Corinthian

pilasters; revised in 1854 in response to criticisms from Hauss-

mann, and approved for execution by Napoleon III in a decree

FIG. 32: Victor Baltard, Bitiments-Annexes de I’H6tel de Ville, Paris, 1855-58.

162 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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of 13 August 1854, the houses were built privately as h6tels

particuliers for the haute bourgeoisie [Figure 34]. (Significantly,
the first houses were built speculatively by Hittorff in collabora-

tion with Charles Rohault de Fleury, the architect who in 1860

probably designed the preliminary elevations of the Place de

l’Opera fagades.) Modeled on the Places Vend6me and des

Victoires, and similarly meant to represent the state in the

context of a royal space with its triumphant monument,
Hittorffs houses recovered as well the urban effectiveness of

Mansart’s elevational scheme.109

The fa;ades on the Place de l’Etoile are the immediate

precedent to what Haussmann would soon make canonic on

the Parisian immeuble. Four years after the approval of Hittorff s

design and two years after the completion of the first houses,
the type reappeared on the buildings erected around the new

Place Saint-Michel. Created to receive the Boulevard de Sebas-
topol as it thrust its way across the Ile de la Cit6 to the city’s Left

Bank, the Place Saint-Michel was designed under Haussmann’s

supervision between 1856 and 1858 by the city architect,
Gabriel Davioud; on 10 May 1858, Davioud produced the

definitive design for the obligatory fagades of the immeubles

[Figure 35] to be constructed privately as framing elements to

either side of the square and its axially placed fountain. With

their arcaded ground story and two principal stories ordered by

giant engaged Corinthian pilasters (beneath fenestrated attics

and mansard roofs), these immeubles share with Hittorffs houses

the same Baroque model of Mansart’s squares.1″0
It was a short step from Haussmann’s acceptance of the type

FIG. 34: Jacques-Ignace Hittorff, h6tel particulier, Place de I’Etoile, Paris, ca.

1853-54.

FIG. 35: Gabriel Davioud, “Place
Sebastopol

[Place Saint-Michel].
Facades

obligatoires des maisons de la place,” 10 May 1858, fagade elevation and section,

from Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil.

at the Place Saint-Michel in 1858 to his refinement of the type
at the Place de l’Opera in 1860. Once established, it quickly

proliferated: to cite only one example, the speculative builder

and architect Henri Blondel used it in 1867 for the immeubles on

the Place du Theatre Frangais, at one end of the still-

unexecuted Avenue Napoleon [Figure 36].11″ When, despite
the political rhetoric, the Third Republic devoted itself to

completing Haussmann’s Second Empire Paris, it continued to

employ the type-including Blondel’s Societe de Dep6ts et de

Comptes Courants [Figure 37] to round the corner of the Place

de l’Opera onto the Avenue de l’Opera, whose immeubles would

soon receive the same treatment.

Along the way, however, the type had lost its remaining

representational coherence. The confusion of public and pri-
vate realms, implicit to Hittorffs Place de l’Etoile as it had been

to Mansart’s two Baroque squares, became explicit in the case

of the Place Saint-Michel. As David Van Zanten explains in

Building Paris, this square had been planned in the wake of the

Crimean War to boast an imperial Fountain of Peace; by the

time the square was completed in 1860, however, “another war

had been fought-with Austria in Italy-and the administra-

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 163

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FIG. 36: Henri Blondel, immeuble, Place du Th6itre Franpais, Paris, 1867.

tion chose to erase the immediate political meaning, elaborat-

ing instead the innocuous theme of the old Place Saint-

Michel.””‘2 What had been intended in 1858 as

programmatically public fagades on an overtly royal square had

become by 1860 the rather grand but symbolically aimless

fagades ofimmeubles on a merely civic square.
This vagueness necessarily carried over to the Place de

l’Opera and the Avenue Napoleon, even if once again these

were intended to be a royal square and street. The virulently

anti-imperial Third Republic could so easily and nonchalantly
continue and complete these spaces precisely because they
failed to convey any clear, or fixed, political meaning. Nor did

the elevations have any specific connection with the immeubles

they faced: the pilastered fagade, run indiscriminately from

building to building, concealed rather than revealed increas-

ingly complex interiors that served variously commercial, pro-
fessional, and residential functions. Instead, the pilastered

fagade served for the Third Republic the same purely formal

function that had justified its revival during the Second Empire:
the giant order brought the proper urban scale and the correct

note of urban luxury to the towering immeubles facing on great

squares and grand boulevards. This was the real heritage, and

lesson, of Mansart’s urbanism.

In 1857, Cesar Daly wrote that “over the last three or four

years, private architecture in Paris has made notable progress:
the house now seems necessarily to share, in some way, the

qualities of the public edifice.”‘” Daly cannot have been

thinking of the mature Haussmanian immeuble, which was not

codified until 1858-60, yet his observation remains relevant.

He recognized an urban tradition that received its first self-

consciously bourgeois expressions in the Place Royale and

Place Dauphine of Henri IV. With Mansart’s two squares for

Louis XIV, this tradition appropriated for itself the colonnaded

language of state architecture, and this tradition was finally

generalized under Napoleon III with the immeuble of Second

Empire Paris.

The evolution of the type by 1860 into the exemplar of Paris

and its bourgeois identity explains why Charles Gamier adopted
it as the fagade of the Paris Opera: when private buildings could

so thoroughly assume a public guise, then public buildings

simply became extensions of the city’s fabric. The paradox is

that Gamier’s Opera remained exceptional during the Second

Empire in its use of the Louvre paradigm. Preceded only by the

Casernes Napoleon and Municipal, the Opera had no clear

successors until the Third Republic witnessed a flurry of

imitations (including Paul-Henri Nenot’s Nouvelle Sorbonne of

1885-1901). That none of the many other public buildings
realized in Second Empire Paris turned to this model might

point to a reluctance to compromise, as did Garnier, the

distinctly public identity of these monuments: it is possible that,

FIG. 37: Henri Blondel, Soci6te de D6p6ts et de Comptes Courants, Paris, 1873,

perspective elevation, plate 47 from Revue general de I’architecture et des travaux

publics 30 (1873).

164 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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I F

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FIG. 38: Charles de Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre, “Nouvelle salle de Com6die

Frangaise [Od6on],” Paris, 1778-82, section and
facade

elevation.

once the Louvre and Garde Meuble had been absorbed into

the immeuble, they lost their ability to represent state or even

municipal institutions. More certainly, Gamier’s embrace of the

type was prompted by the history of opera houses in Paris,
which in many respects paralleled the evolution of the immeuble.

Shaping this history was a debate dating to the eighteenth

century over the proper image of the Paris Opera. The

problem was two-fold. On the one hand, there was the problem
of how properly to represent the Opera’s status as a royal
institution. On the other hand, there was the problem of how to

acknowledge the Op6ra’s competing (and, by the late eigh-
teenth century, increasingly significant) identity as a private

enterprise. Necessarily, this institutional ambiguity resulted in

an equivalent ambiguity of architectural type.

Jacques-Frangois Blondel inaugurated the debate when he

argued in L’Architecture franfoise of 1752 that a theater should

not only indicate its purpose on the exterior but should also

express “the magnificence and the opulence of the Capitol in

which it is erected.””4 Blondel wanted a representational
monument, of the sort that Victor Louis would produce for
Bordeaux in his Grand Theiitre of 1773-80, or that Charles de

Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre proposed for the Odeon in
Paris [Figure 38], which they designed from 1769 to 1778 and

finally built in 1779-82.15 Yet the first true opera house in

Paris, Moreau’s Seconde Salle du Palais Royale of 1763-70

[Figure 39], offered only a modest, quasi-residential fagade with

an arcaded ground story and a fenestrated upper floor. Grace-

fully subordinating itself to the colonnaded Palais Royal, this

salle read as an extension of that palace. Since the result is

reminiscent of Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Grand Th6itre in

Lyons (1753-56), whose generic model was the aristocratic

h6tel, it is possible that Moreau in fact thought of his theater as

an h6tel.”116 Open to the public through its arcade while

suggesting the intimacy within of the salle with its boxes, this

opera house mediated public and private images within a still

clearly aristocratic context.

The “Projet d’un theatre moderne” by Roubo fils of 1777

[Figure 40], proposed in place of de Wailly and Peyre’s Od6on,
suggested a more direct way of publicizing the Opera’s institu-

tional status by paraphrasing Gabriel’s Garde Meuble. Yet this

solution found no takers until Gamier recovered it nearly a

century later-perhaps because the image was too literal for an

institution that was, by the late-eighteenth century, only ab-

stractly associated with the monarch. Instead, Lenoir’s Salle de

la Porte Saint-Martin of 1781 [see Figure 7] less conclusively

acknowledged Blondel’s demands by echoing the Od6on in its

general silhouette of a cubic mass capped by a pyramidal roof

and by claiming the ennobling use of ground-story caryatids
and a main-story Ionic order. Unlike the freestanding colon-

nades of both the Od6on and the Bordeaux theater, however,
these engaged caryatids and columns were subordinated to the

rhythms and proportions of a fenestrated fagade. The implied

image was that of a palace, although the similarity of Lenoir’s

theater to the boulevard theaters (particularly the Ambigu

Comique, rebuilt in 1787 to the design of Cellerier) betrays how

easily its meaning could slip from royal to commercial house.

Victor Louis’s’ Th6atre des Arts of 1791 [Figure 41] emphati-

cally-and properly, given its intended function as a private

FIG. 39: Pierre-Louis Moreau Desproux, Seconde Salle du Palais Royal, Paris,

1763-70, fapade elevation.

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 165

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PROVITD’U THATR Mow iIy f

I its E 5 sll . … .

A. i:i- .

FIG. 40 (Top) : Andre-Jacques Roubo fils, “Projet d’un theitre moderne,” 1777,

facade
elevation, from AndrB-Jacques Roubo fils, Trait6 de la construction des

the6tres et des machines thdatrales (Paris, 1777).

FIG. 41 (Bottom): Victor Louis, ThBitre des Arts, Paris, 1791-93, facade
elevation,

section and plans, plate 14 from Donnet, Architectonographie ([1837]).

commercial theater–employed the bourgeois urban type of

the arcaded ground story with simply fenestrated upper stories.

When Debret rebuilt this theater as the Salle Lepelletier in
1820-21 [Figure 42], he monumentalized it with a fagade based

on Palladio’s Basilica in Vicenza (1549). As a member of the

School of Percier, Debret followed Percier and Fontaine in their

emulation of Italian Renaissance architecture, yet even so his

choice of model is curious, since beyond its identity as a public

building, Palladio’s Basilica has no functional relevance to a

theater. 117 While Debret may have intended the Basilica as an

indirect reference to Palladio’s role in the revival of ancient

theater design, it may also have served in his mind to resolve

the continuing tension between the arcuated and the colon-

naded theater types. More to the point, the substitution of the

civic model of a basilica for the royal model of a palace

corresponded better to the Opera’s institutional status during
the July Monarchy as a private enterprise answering, not to the

Maison du Roi, but to the Ministere de l’Int&rieur, as did the

city’s other theaters. J.-J.-M. Huvee Romanized this basilican

model when he borrowed it for the Salle Ventadour (1827-31),
as did Debret himself when he revised the Salle Lepelletier in

his projects of 1841 and 1845.

Hector Horeau rationalized the tradition by turning (as had

Emile Gilbert in his 1822 Prix de Rome for an opera, and

Gottfried Semper in his Dresden Hoftheater of 1838-41)

directly to the example of Roman theaters in his project of

1843-47 [Figure 43]. Expressing the interior auditorium

through its curved and typologically appropriate exterior,
Horeau’s scheme appealed to architects and, starting with

Berthelin and Viguet’s project of 1853-54 (see Figure 15],
would be frequently imitated. But if this functionally rational

solution also expressed the Opera’s identity as a state institu-

tion, it did so at the expense of the peculiarly Parisian meanings
that had attached themselves to the Opera’s architecture since

the mid-eighteenth century. Amede& Couder’s contemporary

project of 1845-47 for an opera house on the Place du Palais

Royal [Figure 44], though architecturally and urbanistically
conservative, more successfully expressed these meanings in a

fa.ade
that evoked both the Palais Royal and the Louvre.

Rohault de Fleury seems to have encountered similar difficul-

ties in resolving the theater’s competing public and private
identities in a specifically Parisian form. First in his project of

July 1858 and then in his definitive project of November 1860,

~i
i

a I

A 0 A

FIG. 42: Franqois Debret, Salle Lepelletier, Paris, 1820-21, Paris, faqade elevation

and section, plate 19 from Donnet, Architectonographie ([1837])

166 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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• • •iii~i•i!•iiii•!!i•!•i!!i~ii~i~i~ i!•i• i.•i• • o• • • • • •: • :• • ! • • 7•’•

?
?’?i…

–f ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
i

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i .s•i?i •i:sii ~ ~ ~ i B??-??-•c?I???i?.?- ~ :i :.:? ?c.1.-: ?ii??.’ ~i ??: : • /I !7!••iii•i7 ii• :

FIG. 43 (Top): Hector Horeau, “Etude d’un projet d’Opera d6finitif pour la ville de

Paris,” May 1845, detail of exterior perspective.

FIG. 44 (Bottom): Amedee Couder, “Academie Royale de Musique,” 1845,

exterior perspective, from Amed&e Couder, Projets d’Acad6mie Royale de Musique

et de reunion du Louvre au Tuileries (Paris, 1845).

the architect framed his opera house within curved wings for

mixed commercial and residential uses [Figure 45].”18 He

justified this scheme by asking rhetorically:

Should the Opera be a building isolated on all sides and wrapped by

porticoes as at the Odeon? In the interest of one of the richest quarters of

Panris we have answered the question in the negative … We have

therefore not hesitated to surround the Opera with private houses,

animated on the ground floor by commerce and the light that it diffuses

naturally into the public thoroughfares, which it widens even more in the

evening by so to speak putting the shops in the street.119

In plan, the two curved wings are reminiscent of the galleries
with shops below and apartments above that Victor Louis

added to the Palais Royal in 1781-85. But this reminder that

the Opera originated at the Palais Royal was probably inciden-

tal, since Rohault de Fleury clothed both the wings and the

Op6ra facade in a Palladian dress inspired by the Salle Lepel-
letier. If the result was coherent and even, by virtue of the

precedent of Debret’s appropriation of Palladio, pragmatically

appropriate, it nonetheless remained stylistically foreign as

much to Parisian architecture as to its urban context. Rohault

de Fleury seems to have recognized this in his elevation sketch,
which presents the Opera in a placeless and vaguely sylvan void.

The issue was at the same time being stated in municipal
terms by Haussmann, who required that Davioud’s two Chat-

elet theaters of 1859-62 include immeubles: “It was decided that
the new theaters would be enclosed by private constructions,
true rental properties, whose ground floors would be occupied

by shops and whose upper floors would be divided into

apartments rented to individuals.”’20 With lateral
facades

that

carry the canonic arcaded base and two principal floors or-

dered by giant Corinthian pilasters beneath a pilastered attic

story, the two theaters face onto the Place du Chatelet through
Italianate arcaded loggias [Figure 46]. The result is less a

coherent building in the conventional sense than a fascinating

hybrid that places the theater, like a quoted fragment, between

framing immeubles.

The Conseil General des Bitiments Civils was disconcerted

when it reviewed Davioud’s design on 16 December 1859.

Expecting the “veritable monuments” promised by Hauss-

mann,121 the council objected “that the elevations do not have

the character appropriate to their purpose,” and “that it is

important to give to buildings of this type, especially when they
are built by the municipal administration, a cachet more in

harmony with their proper genre.”’22 As the arbiter of state

architecture, the council was ill-prepared to comprehend the

urban conflation of building types proposed by Haussmann

and Davioud. No matter how awkwardly in fact pilastered
immeuble collides with theater loggia, Davioud’s design recog-
nized the convergence of Parisian architecture on a single
urban type. The Chatelet theaters were sufficiently successful–

perhaps because their very awkwardness preserved at least a

vestigial distinction between house and theater-to be copied
on the fagade of Cusin’s Theitre de la Gaite of 1861-62, but

this distinction had collapsed by the time that Auguste Magne
built the Theitre du Vaudeville in 1867-69 [Figure 47]. Hark-

ing back to such eighteenth-century precedents as Aubert’s

H6tel Marin-Delahaye [see Figure 5] while prefiguring Blondel’s

Societe de Dep6ts [see Figure 37], Magne’s theater disappears
behind a corner pavilion that continues the elevation of the

flanking immeubles.

Between the theaters by Davioud and Magne came Garni-

er’s design of the Op6ra. From its front fagade based on
Perrault’s Louvre and Gabriel’s Garde Meuble, to the lateral

fagades with their pavilions evoking corner h6tels, to the rear

elevation mimicking the h6tel particulier with its forecourt, the

Op6ra speaks the same urban language that was producing the

surrounding immeubles. The Op6ra’s historically competing
identities as state institution and private theater were thus

reconciled by Gamier in a design that simply–if brilliantly-
made those distinctions irrelevant. Working for the state, and

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 167

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:i ii??–;:- ; – ;; ; -;;-i:j—;-i;-~:-i-_;;;-i-~i- ?: -;_:?-;;?;;;:;;:-i,;I-::ii;ii;;;iiiiiii -.iiiii?ii . :- ?I-ii:ii;iiiii – – : -:i–l:’-iiii- -.._… :: :

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17 – :::I

.

Mob:

WOOL’

FIG. 45 (Top): Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Projet d’Op6ra,” November 1860,

fagade elevation.

FIG. 46 (Bottom): Gabriel Davioud, Th65tre du Chitelet, Paris, 1859-62.

responsible to the Conseil General des Batiments Civils, Gar-

nier necessarily produced a design that satisfied concerns

dating back to Blondel: unlike Davioud’s theaters, Gamier’s

Op6ra was a freestanding monument, worthy of the capital in

which it was erected; more clearly than Davioud’s theaters, the

Opera declared its function as a theater through the volumetric

expression of an auditorium dome and stage flytower that rise

above the entrance fagade. These remained, however, rational-

izations for a building whose real identity was shaped by the

history of Paris and its boulevards. Unhampered by the literal-

ism that led Rohault de Fleury and Davioud actually to combine

houses and theaters in one building, Gamier penetrated to the

metaphorical core of the nineteenth-century city. Like the

immeuble, which layered multiple uses from commercial to

residential behind one externally coherent facade, the Opera
condensed its complex interior spaces into a single image of

urban luxury.

The problem of representation
Gamier’s Op6ra looks like Armand’s Grand H6tel [see Figure
23] because it answered to the same city, whose citizens were
less concerned with the rational typologies that might distin-

guish a theater from a hotel than they were interested in their

continuity of experience as they went from one to another
across a common public square. Th6ophile Gautier recorded
this urban continuity in his novella, Spirite (1866), which traces a
love affair between the material Guy de Malivert and the

incorporeal Spirite against a backdrop of boulevards, h6tels

particuliers, and evenings at the Opera: invested with equal
measures of domestic intimacy and theatrical self-conscious-

ness, the sidewalk caf6s, private salons, and boxes at the Op6ra
act almost equivalently, and interchangeably, in the life of

Gautier’s protagonist. When, in the words of Habermas, the
state is “private people coming together as a public,” it
becomes pointless to insist on the difference between the public
space of the Op6ra and the private space of the Grand H6tel.
Monuments are understood to express in generically civic
terms the particulars of their neighborhoods; public building
and private building are more alike than different in their
common function of serving, institutionally or commercially, a

city’s citizens.

Despite the polemics both of politics and of rationalism, the

tendency was toward a pragmatic blurring of architectural types
into a single urban type that represented Paris in its generalized

entirety. Garnier’s recovery of Roubo’s “modern theater” was

therefore ingeniously deceptive, because even as he claimed

the appropriateness of a royal palace for the Op6ra, he

recognized that the type had by 1860 effectively lost its

intended representational function; what he really was imitat-

ing in his citation of the Louvre and Garde Meuble were the

bourgeois immeubles that those royal fagades had become in

Second Empire Paris. Dismissing politics, Gamier characteristi-

cally presented the Op6ra’s architecture in domestic rather
than institutional terms-as when he identified the Foyer des
Abonn s (for the wealthy season-ticket holders) as a boudoir, or

when he justified the fagade’s screen of colonnettes as great

168 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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P A i::: T;?????:

.4r
io

I I
j:i

-i

FIG. 47: Auguste Magne, Thbitre du Vaudeville, Paris, 1867-69, facade
elevation,

from volume 3 of Narjoux, Monuments.

curtains furnishing the void of its giant order.1’2 Gamier

wanted his audience to feel at home at the Opera even as they

engaged in the theater’s public spectacle.
If the Opera, like the flanking immeubles, represented its

bourgeois audience, the question remains as to how it could

have done so. Given the bourgeoisie’s lack of a “representative

publicness,” what actually was being represented? When the

colonnaded (or pilastered) fagade had lost it ability to embody a

fixed status, could it signify anything beyond the conventional

meaning claimed by passing political regimes? The typical

fagade of Second Empire Paris did not so much represent the

bourgeoisie, as it mirrored this class in a sufficiently vague and

diffused way as to confirm each individual’s experience of the

city. Beyond the continued effectiveness of its formal coherence

and grandeur, the type carried no particular meaning. The

giant order had become the perfect sign of the bourgeois city,
because like the city itself this sign was pragmatically evolving
and inflecting itself with each new circumstance–engaged

pilaster here, freestanding column there-that could ennoble

urban life.

Notes
This article seeks to revise and expand my earlier interpretation of the subject

in Christopher Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the
Renaissance of French Classicism (New York, 1991), by looking beyond that book’s

monographic focus on the Opera to consider its urban context and significance.
A preliminary version of this article was presented as a paper in a symposium on

“Hittorff and the Monumental Form of Paris,” which was organized in January
1991 by David Van Zanten of Northwestern University in conjunction with the

Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. Additional research for this article was conducted
while I was on a sabbatical from the University of New Mexico in 1991. I am

grateful to David Van Zanten for his advice at various stages in the article’s

genesis, and to Frank Paul Bowman, Karen Bowie, and David Craven for their
careful readings of the final draft. The anonymous reader for theJSAH provided
valuable advice needed to transform my manuscript into a publishable article.
All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

‘ On Charles Gamier and the Paris Opera, see Charles Gamier, Le Nouvel

Opira de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1878-81); Monika Steinhauser, Die Architektur der
Pariser Oper (Munich, 1969); Mead, Paris Opdra. On Baron Haussmann and his

planning of Paris, see Georges-Eugene Haussmann, Mimoires, 2 vols. (orig. pub.
in 3 vols., 1890-93; repr., Paris, 1979); David Pinkney, Napoldon III and the

Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, 1958); Howard Saalman, Haussmann: Paris

Transformed (New York, 1971); Jean des Cars, Haussmann: La gloire du Second

Empire (Paris, 1978); Jean des Cars and Pierre Pinon, Paris Haussmann (Paris,
1991).

2 Emest Chesneau, “Pourquoi, par qui et comment le nouvel Opera,” Paris

Journal, 14 Jan. 1875: “Au Paris agrandi, aere, assaini, transform- avec la plus
claire prevoyance des besoins sociaux et en meme temps avec magnificence par
le gouvernement imperial.. .il fallait une salle d’op~ra digne de la grandeur, du
luxe et des arts du Paris nouveau.”

SFerdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New
York, 1959), 89: “In a game of chess any particular position has the unique
characteristic of being freed from all antecedent positions; the route used in

arriving there makes absolutely no difference; one who has followed the entire
match [i.e., the diachronic observer] has no advantage over the curious party
who comes up at a critical moment [i.e., the synchronic observer] to inspect the
state of the game; to describe this arrangement, it is perfectly useless to recall
what had just happened ten seconds previously. All this is equally applicable to

language and sharpens the radical distinction between diachrony and syn-
chrony.” It will be argued here that Saussure’s synchronic chess game does not

apply to the necessarily diachronic history of cities.
4 Mead, Paris Opfra, 44-98.

SOn the municipal administration of Paris during the nineteenth century, see

Felix Lazare and Louis Lazare, Dictionnaire administratif et historique des rues et
monuments de Paris (Paris, 1844; 2d ed., Paris, 1855); Maurice Block and Henri
de Pontich, Administration de la ville de Paris et du dipartement de la Seine (Paris,
1884); Alfred de Cilleuls, Histoire de Iadministration parisienne au XIXe sikcle, 3 vols.

(Paris, 1900-10); Maurice Felix, Le rngime administratifdu ddpartement de la Seine et
de la ville de Paris, 2 vols. (3d ed., Paris, 1946). On the state administration to
which Gamier answered as architect of the Opera, see Charles Gourlier and

Charles-Auguste Questel, Notice historique sur le seroice des travaux des bdtiments
civils a’ Paris et dans les d•partements depuis la creation de ces services en l’an IV(1796)
jusqu’en 1886 (Paris, 1886); see also Mead, Paris Opera, 135-98. The institutional
nature and administration of the practice of architecture in nineteenth-century
France is the subject of a recent book by David Van Zanten, Building Paris:
Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830-1870

(Cambridge, 1994).
6 Charles Garnier, as quoted in Louise Gamier, “Charles Garnier,”

L’Architecture 38 (1925): 382; Haussmann, Mimoires, 1:47.

7 The plan, annotated at the request of Charles Merruau, secretary general of
the Prefecture de la Seine under Haussmann, is discussed and reproduced in

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Charles Merruau, Souvenirs de l’h6tel de ville de Paris, 1848-1852 (Paris, 1875),
363-74.

8
The complete list of prefects of the Seine who served from 1812 to 1870 is

much longer: Chabrol (1812-30); Alexandre de Laborde (July-August 1830);
Odilon Barrot (August 1830-February 1831); Pierre-Marie Taillepied de Bondy
(February 1831-June 1833); Rambuteau (June 1833-February 1848); Gamier-

Pages and Armand-Marrast, the two mayors of Paris who successively replaced
the temporarily abolished position of prefect of the Seine following the February
Revolution (February-May and May-July 1848); Ariste Trouv&-Chauvel (July
-October 1848); Adrien Bamabe Athanase Recurt (October-December 1848);
Jean-Jacques Berger (December 1848-June 1853); Haussmann (June 1853-

January 1870). I focus on Chabrol, Rambuteau, and Haussmann because these
were the three prefects of the Seine with the longest tenures and thus the most
extensive documentation, but I do not mean to imply that they alone were
relevant to the urban history of nineteenth-century Paris; it is to be hoped that
future research into the careers of the other prefects will further document the
bureaucratic continuity of that office that I suggest was at least as important as
the individuals who filled the position.

9 Cesar Daly, “Panorama du mouvement architectural du monde accompli
dans ces demieres ann~es. Travaux de Paris,” Revue gMndrale de Iarchitecture et des
travaux publics 20 (1862): 178-79: “.. . la periode des grands travaux d’utilite

publique qui, dans un temps peu loigne, auront complktement transform
Paris, date du commencement du re’gne de Napoleon …. Ce n’est pas que les

gouvemements anterieurs, et le gouvemement de Louis-Philippe surtout,
n’aient fait executer quelques travaux d’6dilit ….Mais ces travaux 6taient
menes timidement, lentement et sans vue d’ensemble, l’administration a cette
epoque n’ayant pas fait 6tudier. .. un projet general de la rectification des voies
de circulation de Paris.”

10 Claude de Rambuteau, Mimoires du comte de Rambuteau, publids par son

petit-fils (Paris, 1905), 372-73.
11

Frangois Loyer, Paris XIXe suicle: L’immeuble et la rue (Paris, 1987). Unlike
the majority of scholars, who argue that Haussmann’s monumental urban
schemes radically transformed a city that until his tenure had developed more

organically, Loyer treats nineteenth-century Paris as a continuously evolving
process shaped by its streets and private buildings; this article is indebted to his

perspective.
12 The architect’s familiarity with the type dates at least back to the 1840s,

when he used it in a school project for a palace, while contemporary critics

recognized that his translation of this palace type into a theater had been

anticipated by the “Projet d’un thiatre modeme” published in 1777 by the
cabinetmaker and would-be architect, Andre-Jacques Roubo fils [see Figure 40].
I illustrate and discuss Gamier’s school project in Mead, Paris Opera, 12-13,
82-83. Theodore de Grasset, “La future salle d’Opera,” La Presse, July 1861,

clipping in Archives Nationales, serie AJ 13 531, was the first to note in print the

precedent of Roubo’s project. Andre-Jacques Roubo fits published his project in
his book, Trait de la construction des t~hdtres et des machines thidtrales (Paris, 1777).

13 Theophile Gautier, “Concours pour le nouvel Opera,” Le Moniteur Univer-
sel, 11 Feb. 1861: “…forme arret&e pour ce genre d’6difice comme pour les
temples, les palais, les arcs de triomphe.” Indeed, the competition projects
varied widely in their choices of models, from temples to amphitheaters,
basilicas, and palaces, any one of which might serve to represent the classical
tradition; see Mead, Paris Opmra, 60-76.

14Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category ofBourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger from the German ed.
of 1962 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

1Ibid., 7.
6 Ibid., 27.

7Ibid., 12-13.

‘8 See Joanna Richardson, La Vie Parisienne, 1852-1870 (New York, 1971);
Louis Girard, Nouvelle histoire de Paris: La Deuxidme Rtpublique et le Second Empire,
1848-1870 (Paris, 1981); Herv6 Maneglier, Paris imprial: La vie quotidienne sous
le Second Empire (Paris, 1990).

i9Jane Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
PoliticizedArt (Cambridge, 1987), 4.

20 Ibid., 164 and passim. Fulcher rejects the conventional perspective that, by
the nineteenth century, the Opera came to answer to a bourgeois audience,
insisting instead that it continued to function as an elite “realm of political
representation.” But she also argues that the state’s attempts to control the

content of the Opera’s repertoire invariably failed precisely because the political
meanings of that repertoire proved to be so intractably ambiguous and subject
to multiple, contradictory interpretations by the public. In reacting against a
narrow equation of bourgeois with commercial interests, she overlooks, I think,
the more nuanced as well as broader, social and political definition of the

bourgeoisie provided by Habermas.
21 M. L. [Emile] VWron, Paris en 1860. Les Thidtres de Paris depuis 1806jusqu’en

1860 (Paris, 1860), 128: “…l’avbnement de la bourgeoisie.. .public d’6lite, qui
payait ses stalles et ses loges, tandis que l’ancienne clientdle aristocratique de
l’Opera les occupait pour rien.”

22 See Mead, Paris Opera, 128-34.
23 In reconstructing the following urban history, I consulted several general

sources that document the edicts, ordinances, decrees, and laws that regulated
the planning of Paris and the creation of its streets and squares: Lazare and
Lazare, Dictionnaire (see n. 5), especially the 2d ed.; A. Alphand, Ville de Paris:

Recueil de lettres patentes, ordonnances royales, decrets et arrntes prefectoraux concernant
les voies publiques (Paris, 1886, with supplements of 1889, 1902); and the

not-always-reliable work of Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de
Paris, 2 vols., 8th ed. (Paris, 1985).

24 Mus’e Camavalet [Bernard de Montgolfier et al.], Les Grands Boulevards

(Paris, 1985).
25 For histories of the city’s successive opera houses, see Albert de Lasalle, Les

treizes salles de l’opgra de Paris (Paris, 1865); Charles Nuitter, “Histoire,” in
Gamier, Nouvel Opira (see n. 1), 1:254-71; Andre Lejeune and Stephane Wolff,
Les quinzes salles de l’opra (Paris, 1955); Alain Duault, L’Opira de Paris (Paris,
1989). See also the standard compendia of the theaters of Paris: Alexis Donnet,

Architectonographie des thidtres, ou Parallle historique et critique de ces idifices,
considrds sous le rapport de l’architecture et de la decoration: Premiere serie: Thidtres de
Paris construits jusqu’en 1820 (Paris, [1837]); and Jacques-Auguste Kaufmann,
Architectonographie des thidtres, ou Parallle historique et critique de ces idifices,

consicdrs sous le rapport de l’architecture et de la dkcoration: Seconde serie: Thidtres
construits depuis 1820 (Paris, 1840).

26 See Allan Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment (Berkeley,
1980), 154-57; Jean-Hughes Peittre, “PMlerinages en architectures disparues:
L’Opera du Palais Royal,” in Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Victor
Louis et le thidtre: Scdnographie, mise en scene et architecture thidtrale aux XVIIIe et
XIXe sitcles: Actes du colloque (Paris, 1982), 55-64. The Theatre du Palais Royal
was redesignated the Th6’tre Frangais in 1799.

27 See Lazare and Lazare, Dictionnaire, 611-15; Johann Friedrich Geist,
Arcades: The History of a Building Type, trans. J. Newman and J. Smith (Cam-

bridge, 1983), 59-62; Philippe Gresset, “La Legon du Palais Royal,” in Les

Traversdes de Paris: Deux sitcles de rivolutions dans la ville, ed. Pierre Pinon (Paris,
1989), 68-72.

28 Montansier’s real crime was the financial success of her venture; conve-

niently ignored was the question of why the national library would be any less
threatened by fire when that theater was occupied by the Opera, with its history
of fires.

29 Perhaps predictably, this “temporary” theater remained in use as the

Opera until its destruction by fire on the night of 18-19 October 1873.
30 Fulcher, The Nation’s Image (see n. 19), 18-46.

3′ Lazare and Lazare, Dictionnaire, 87. After control of the “plan d’alignement
de Paris” was transferred in 1822 from the state’s Service des Batiments Civils to
the city’s Prefecture de la Seine, royal ordinances of 17 August 1825 and 4 May
1826 ordered the alignments of the contiguous Boulevards Poissonnitre and
Montmartre (abutting the Boulevard des Italiens) as well as the Boulevard du
Temple.

32See Bertrand Lemoine, Les passages couvertes en France (Paris, 1990),
131-38.

33 Lazare and Lazare, Dictionnaire, 87.

34 Royal ordinances of
3January

and 23 October 1822 acquired the necessary
property for Notre-Dame de Lorette and a third royal ordinance of 4 December

approved its site plan; the competition of 1823 to design the church was won by
the architect Hippolyte Lebas, the cornerstone was laid by Chabrol on 25 August
of that year, and the church was completed in 1836; the facing Rue du Comte
Artois (renamed the Rue Lafitte in 1830), which paralleled the Rue Lepelletier,
was extended by royal ordinances of 30July 1823 and 21 July 1824 from the Rue
de Provence down to the Boulevard des Italiens. On the development of this
part of Paris, see Jeanne Pronteau, “Construction et am~nagement des nouve-

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aux quartiers de Paris, 1820-1826,” Histoire des entreprises 2 (1958): 8-32; Ville
de Paris [Dominique Morel et al.], La NouvelleAthInes: Le quartier de Saint-Georges
de Louis XVi Napoldon III (Paris, 1984).

35The principal summaries of the debate are: L.-J.-M. Daubanton, Du

doplacement de la population de Paris (Paris, 1843); Pierre Lavedan, La question du

diplacement de Paris et du transfert des halles au conseil municipal sous la Monarchie de

Juillet (Paris, 1969).

36Jacques-Seraphin Lanquetin produced three published reports, preserved
in the Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris: Question du deplacement de

Paris: Opinion d’un membre de la Commission ministirielle chargie d’examiner cette

question (Paris, 30 April 1840); Observations sur un travail de l’administration
municipale de Paris, intituld Etudes sur les Halles (Paris, 20 March 1841); Question du

d&placement de la population: Etat des &tudes sur cette question: A mes coll?gues du
Conseil municipal (Paris, 15 April 1842). Lanquetin’s initial report of 1 August
1839 was never published and has not been found, but it is cited along with a

history of the commission’s deliberations in his final report, Question du

d&placement (1842). Two further commission reports are preserved in the Fonds
Baltard at the Archives Nationales, serie 332 AP 6: Jacques-Edouard Gatteaux,

[“Deplacement de Paris”] (May 1840); Perignon, [“Rapport de la sous-
commission sur le Deplacement de Paris”] (1840).

37 Rambuteau, as quoted in Daubanton, Diplacement (see n. 35), 2: “Paris ne
se deplace pas, Paris s’agrandit … tous les quartiers qui composent cette grande
cite participent, dans les proportions qui leur sont propres, a sa prosperit&.”

38Rambuteau, MWmoires (see n. 10), 377: “Paris se souviendra. . .de ce quej’ai
fait pour ses boulevards, abaisses, niveles, repares, de la Bastille a la Madele-
ine .. .” This work on the Grands Boulevards started with royal ordinances of 24

August 1833, 8 June 1834, and 6 May 1836 that ordered alignments of the
Boulevards de la Madeleine, des Capucines, de Beaumarchais, des Filles du

Calvaire, and Saint-Denis; it was reported on in the Revue gendrale de larchitecture
etdes travauxpublics 1 (1840): 248; 2 (1841): 592; 3 (1842): 471-75.

39These authors were: the Saint-Simonien, A. Perreymond, “Etudes sur la
ville de Paris, Revue gndrale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 3 (1842): 540-54,
570-79; and 4 (1843): 25-37, 79-88, 413-29, 449-64, 517-28; a former

Inspecteur G6neral de la Grande Voirie under Chabrol, L.-J.-M. Daubanton,

Diplacement (see n. 35); a bureau chief of theaters during the Bourbon

Restoration, Hippolyte Meynadier, Paris sous le point de vue pittoresque et

monumental, ou ildments d’un plan gndral d’ensemble de ses travaux d’art et d’utilitm
publique (Paris, 1843); the Fourieriste and municipal councilor, Victor Consider-

ant, “Note sur les inter&ts g’neraux de la ville de Paris, et sp&cialement du
dixieme arrondissement,” Revue gindrale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 4

(1844): 22-29; and the municipal councilor, Horace Say, Etudes sur l’administration
de la ville de Paris et du cdpartement de la Seine (Paris, 1846).

40 Merruau, Souvenirs (see n. 7) 108-10; Pierre Lavedan, Nouvelle Histoire de
Paris: Histoire de l’urbanisme d Paris (Paris, 1975),, 388.

4′ Rambuteau, Memoires, 292-93.
42 Claude de Rambuteau, [“Discours de M. le Prefet de la Seine, prononce a la

Chambre de Commerce, d&cembre 1846″], Revue gendrale de larchitecture et des

travauxpublics 6 (1845-46): 522-25, esp. 523.

43Rambuteau, Mimoires, 387-88: “Ce plan. ..efit donne un principe de vie et
d’attrait au centre de Paris que les &trangers commengait a abandonner pour les
boulevards. Je disais au Roi ia ce sujet: ‘Si Votre Majeste n’y prend garde, dans
vingt ans on vendra les vieux habits du Temple sous les galeries du Palais

Royal!”‘
44 Fulcher, The Nations’s Image (see n. 19), 54-56.

45Edme-Jean-Louis Grillon, “Projet d’Opera, rue Grange Batelibre” (14 May
1838), Archives Nationales, versement de l’architecture: Bofte IX; E.-J.-L.
Grillon and Frangois Debret “Salle d’Op~ra propose sur l’emplacement de
l’Entrep6t de la Douane et de la Mairie du 2itme arrondissement, rue Grange
Batelibre” (1841), Archives Nationales, s~rie F 21 3563: No. 2. Debret alone
subsequently produced a third project: “Projet d’une salle definitive destin&e i

l’Acad~mie Royale de Musique” (14 Feb. 1845), Archives Nationales,
s•rie

F 21
3563: No. 3.

46Hippolyte Meynadier, “L’Op&ra, etudes th6oriques et pratiques d’un
th(itre pour

l’Acad•mie Royale
de Musique,” Revue gmndrale de larchitecture et des

travaux publics 5 (1844): 453-80, 495-512; “Etude d’une salle d’Op~ra,” Revue

gindrale de I’architecture et des travaux publics 7 (1847-48): 426-28. Hector
Horeau, “Projet d’Op&ra definitif pour la ville de Paris” (1843), Archives
Nationales, versement de l’architecture: Boite IX; “Projet d’Op~ra pour la ville

de Paris” (30 Jan. 1844), Bibliotheque de l’Opera de Paris, “Projets du nouvel

Opera,” Carton 151; “Etude d’un projet d’Opera definitifpour la ville de Paris”

(May 1845), Archives Nationales, versement de l’architecture: Boite IX; “Projet
de M. H. Horeau,” Revue g&ndrale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 7

(1847-48):161-65 and pl. 10. See also Centre d’Etudes et des Recherches
Architecturales [F. Boudon and F. Loyer] Hector Horeau, (Paris, [ 1978]), 34-37,
which reproduces the 1843 and 1845 projects though both are dated to 1843.

Only the architect Adrien-Louis Lusson missed the point in his project of
1846-47, which kept the siting of Debret’s theater, though now facing onto the
Rue Grange Bateliere instead of the Rue Lepelletier. Adrien-Louis Lusson,

Projet d’un thddtre d’Opgra difinitif pour la ville de Paris en remplacement de l’Opira
provisoire et recherches sur le lieu propre ia son erection et les causes du diplacement actuel
de la population (Paris, 1846); “Projet de M. A.-L. Lusson,” Revue ginerale de

l’architecture et des travaux publics 7 (1847-48): 165-72 and pl. 11.
7 Lavedan, Histoire de Paris, 399.

48 Horeau, “Etude d’un projet d’Ope’ra”: “De mettre l’Opera dans de bonnes
conditions de prosperite, en le plagant sur le boulevard qui est la voie naturelle
des th6itres … D’elever un edifice public dans un quartier qui en est prive….

49As quoted in Lavedan, Histoire de Paris, 399: “Le deplacement de la

population riche vers les quartiers luxueux et deji trop favorises de la Chausse
d’Antin.”

50 Cesar Daly, “Nouvelles et faits divers,” Revue gindrale de l’architecture et des
travaux publics 2 (1841): 284: “Le Conseil municipal avait emis le voeu qu’une
salle monumentale ffit definitivement dlev&e pour l’Opera sur l’emplacement du

Chiteau-d’Eau, place du Palais-Royal.”
5′ Ibid, 284. See Jean-Claude Daufresne, Louvre et Tuileries: Architectures de

papier (Paris, 1987), 157-68.
52 The proposal to site the Opera at the Palais Royal coincided with three of

Fontaine’s projects that were then enjoying renewed support: by refurbishing
the Place du Palais Royal, it would complete the restoration of the Palais Royal
undertaken by Fontaine for Louis Philippe between 1816 and 1829; it would
contribute to the projected extension of Percier and Fontaine’s original Rue de

Rivoli (1801-35) from the Rue de Rohan past the Place du Palais Royal to the
Place de l’Oratoire (included in Rambuteau’s 1847 planning program and

approved by an initial decree of 24 March 1848, this extension was not begun
until 1849); and it would parallel Percier and Fontaine’s project to connect the
Louvre and Tuileries palaces that, only partly realized in 1816, had been revived

by Louis Philippe. Cesar Daly, reviewing the competing arguments for the
Grands Boulevards and Palais Royal sites for the Opera, noted these advantages
without citing Fontaine, “Le nouvel Opera de Paris: Examen des projets
proposes,” Revue gindrale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 7 (1847-48):
155-56. On the Rue de Rivoli, see Werner Szambien, De la Rue de Colonnes a la
Rue de Rivoli (Paris, 1992).

53Amid&e Couder, Projets d’Acadimie Royale de Musique et de rdunion du Louvre
au Tuileries (Paris, 1845); “Projet de M. A. Couder,” Revue gindrale de l’architecture
et des travauxpublics 7 (1847-48): 155-60 and pl. 9.

54The architect Jean Marchebeus missed this nuance in his project of 1847,
Plan de la Bibliothtque et de l’Opira sur la Place du Carrousel (Paris, 1847), which
resurrected a series of now-outdated eighteenth-century projects to build the

Opera within the Louvre on the Place du Carrousel. On this project as well as the

eighteenth-century projects by Etienne-Louis Boull&e (1781-82), Frangois-
Joseph Belanger (1781), Nicolas Lenoir (circa 1790), and others, see Daufresne,
Louvre et Tuileries (see n. 51), passim.

Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Acad~mie Royale de Musique: Projets” (Dec.
1846), Archives Nationales, versement de l’architecture: Boite IX. Copies of
these projects are in Archives Nationales, s~rie F 21 3563: No. 2.

56 The specific sites were: at the H6tel des Menus-Plaisirs on the Rue Richer
above the Boulevard Poissonnitre; at the Bains Chinois on the Boulevard des

Italiens; facing on the Boulevard des Capucines in the Chauss&e d’Antin quarter;
and at the Ministare des Affaires Etrangbres on the Rue des Capucinesjust off
the Boulevard de la Madeleine.

57 Rohault de Fleury, Acad~mie Royale de Musique,” Projet No. 6: Boulevard
des Capucines: “II existe au centre de la chauss&e d’Antin, sur le boulevard en
face de la rue de la Paix de vastes terrains, d’une valeur considerable il est vrai,
mais infiniment moindre que dans la plupart des localit&s qui pourraient
contenir l’Op~ra. Sur ces terrains il n’y a presque pas de constructions..

5s Edmond Texier, Tableau de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1852-53), 1:29-30: “Il
fallait, de tout temps, un centre I l’activit6, i la curiositY, aux loisirs, i la flinerie

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des Parisiens
…

N’avons-nous pas vu sous la Restauration ce duel terrible entre
le faubourg Saint-Germain et la Chauss6e-d’Antin, entre l’h6tel &cussone de la
rue de Varennes et la maison coquette de la rue Saint-Georges, entre le grand
seigneur et le parvenu? Cette lutte s’est termin&e au profit du quartier d’Antin.”

“5 The station’s history dates back to 1835 when the Pereires obtained the
concession for a short, Paris to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, rail line. After a law of 9

July 1836 authorized two private Paris-to-Versailles railroads, one on the city’s
Right Bank and one on its Left Bank, the Pereires obtained the Right Bank

concession, which they merged with their Saint-Germain-en-Laye line. Trains

initially departed from an embarcadere, or temporary platform, inaugurated at
the Place de l’Europe on 26 August 1837. The Gare Saint-Lazare was built after

neighborhood opposition forced Emile Pereire to abandon his plan for a

permanent station behind La Madeleine at the intersection of the Rue Tronchet
with the Rue Neuve des Mathurins. The line was extended to Rouen in 1842 and
to Le Havre in 1847. See Karen Bowie, ed., Les grandes gares parisiennes du XIXe

sidcle (Paris, n.d.), 54-68.

6o Qn the creation of the Rue du Havre and its purpose, see Cesar Daly,
“Chronique,” Revue gMn~rale de larchitecture et des travaux publics 5 (1844):
141-42; Merruau, Souvenirs (see n. 7), 345.

61 Van Zanten, Building Paris (see n. 5), 6-45, offers a parallel account of the

development of the Opera quarter, which pays particular attention to the

speculative activities of the Pereire brothers.
62 The “Plan complkmentaire de la rue de Rivoli aux abords du Palais du

Louvre et des Tuileries,” Archives Nationales, N III Seine 1221, was approved by
Haussmann on 16 September 1853, and annexed to the decree of 15 November

authorizing the expropriation of the necessary properties. David Van Zanten
drew my attention to a proposal submitted in August 1854 by one C6me

Capitaine to carry out the expropriations for the Place du Th6atre Frangais that

shows how quickly this public project was picked up by the private sector:

“Complement de la rue de Rivoli aux abords du Palais Royal et du Th’atre

Frangais: Plan releve par l’ingenieur soussigne, C6me Capitaine,” Archives

Nationales, F 2(11) Seine 32.

63 See Pierre Pinon, “L’Avenue de l’Opera avant et apres l’Opera,” in Cars
and Pinon, Paris Haussmann (see n. 1), 196-202, for a parallel account, despite a
few differences of fact. Pinon dates the inauguration of the Avenue de l’Opera to

21 September 1877, but this is contradicted by Paul Roche, “L’Avenue de

l’Op&ra,” Le Gaulois, 21 Sept. 1877, which dates the inauguration to 19

September.
64 Louis Viguet and Max Berthelin, Projet d’un thidtre imp’rialpour l’Opira avec

salle de concerts offert i S.M. l’Empereur des Franrais (Paris, 1853).
65 Conseil G,6nral des Bitiments Civils, “Proces verbal de la seance du 20

fevrier 1854: Projet presente pour les abords du Louvre et des Tuileries,”
Archives Nationales, serie F 21 2542/18: “On a l’intention meme de prolonger
cette ruejusqu’au coin de la rue de la Paix sur le boulevard, d’oui, avec un faible

flechissemement, en franchissant la rue [Basse] du Rempart, elle irait aboutir a la
rue du Havre (tote importante de chemin de fer).” This was confirmed in the
next meeting of the Conseil G6neral des Bitiments Civils, “Proces verbal de la
seance du 23 fivrier 1854: Projet des abords du Louvre et des Tuileries,”
Archives Nationales, serie F 21 2542/18: “Pour la place devant le Theitre
Frangais, place dont il [Fdlix Duban] a proclame la necessite & la convenance, il
insiste encore plus sur sa creation, depuis qu’il a entendu de la bouche de Mr.
Trimisot que la rue qui se dirige vers la butte de Moulins doit aboutir ‘i
l’embarcadbre du chemin de fer de Rouen.”

66Alphand, Villede Paris: Receuil (seen. 23), 304-5, esp. 304: “Rue de Rouen,
de vingt-deux mbtres de largeur, entre le boulevard des Capucines et la rue du
Havre ..

”

67 The four stations were: the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Gare de l’Est (1844-49),
the Gare du Nord (1845-46), and the Gare de Lyon (1847-52). See Bowie, Les

grande gares (see n. 59).
68 See Joseph de Filippi, “La nouvelle salle de l’Op6ra,” Revue et gazette des

thidtres, 7, 11, and 18 Feb. 1858.

69Joseph de Filippi, “Projet de d6placement de l’Op~ra,” Revue municipale,
20 Dec. 1858; Lavedan, Histoire de Paris (see n. 40), 438. H. Barnout subse-

quently published his project as a broadsheet, Projet d’une voie impriale et d’un
emplacement pour l’Opira (Paris, [1860]).

70 Albert Cavos, an Italian architect working in Russia who was apparently
unaware of recent planning developments in Paris, adopted Rohault de Fleury’s
1846 Boulevard des Capucines site. Albert Cavos, “Projet d’une grande salle

d’Opera pour la ville de Paris” (1858), Bibliothbque de l’Opera de Paris, reserve
2235. Perhaps inspired by J.-I. Hittorffs refurbishing of the Place de la
Concorde in 1853-54, three projects by Jules Frey, the architect F61ix Martin,
and a former director of the Opera, Duponchel (1835-40), each proposed siting
an opera house on that monumental square. Jules Frey, Une salle pour l’Opera
(Paris, 1858), which was also published in the Courrier de Paris, 29 Oct. 1858;

F61ix Martin, “Plan de la place de la Concorde et de la partie des Champs-

Elys6es oI l’on propose de construire l’Opera” ([1858]), Archives Nationales,

s6rie F 21 3563, and “Projet de construire l’Opera i la place de Concorde:
Extrait d’une note sur le programme d’une salle d’Opera remise a Son. Exc. Mr.
Achille Fould” (Nov. 1858), Bibliothbque de l’Opera de Paris, reserve 1049: No.

3.; Duponchel’s project of 25 May 1858 was published in the Courrierde Paris, 29
Oct. 1858, and France Musicale, 31 Oct. 1858. At this time, the architect

Jacques-Martin T6taz also produced a project for an undesignated site, “Es-

quisse d’un projet de theatre pour l’Academie Imperiale de Musique” (May
1858), which he reproduced with the same title (Paris, 1 Aug. 1858), Archives

Nationales, serie F 21 3563.

71 Theodore Charpentier, “Operation pour obtenir un emplacement destine
i l’Op~ra en face de la rue de la Paix et celles projet~es de l’Imperatrice et de la
Bourse” ([1858]), Archives Nationales, versement de l’architecture: Boite IX.

72 Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Projet d’Opera: Boulevart [sic] des Capucines”
(29 July 1858), Bibliothe’que de l’Opera de Paris, reserve D341, which was
submitted with an explanatory text, “Construction d’un Opera et ouverture du
boulevart [sic] de Rouen” (28July 1858), Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830.

7 Rohault de Fleury, “Construction d’un Opera,” 4: “Le milieu de la fagade
de l’Opera correspond a l’axe de la grande rue qui, partant de la rue de Rohan,
aboutit sur les boulevards, pre’s de la rue de la Paix.”

74 Cesar Daly and Gabriel Davioud, Les thidtres de la place du Chdtelet (Paris,

[1874]), 3: “Coin perdu…d’un Paris dj~i ancien….Troue de toutes parts par
les nouvelles percees. .. ”

75 See Ibid.; Felix Narjoux, Paris: Monuments dlevees par la ville, 1850-1880, 4
vols. (Paris, 1883), 3:4-11; Claudine de Vaulchier, “Les theatres de la place du

Chatelet,” in Ville de Paris [Daniel Rabreau et. al.], Gabriel Davioud, architecte

(1824-1881) (Paris, 1981), 55-75.
76 See C. Detain, “Theitre municipal du vaudeville, Paris. M. Magne,

architecte,” Revue gindrale de larchitecture et des travaux publics, 27 (1869):
273-76; Narjoux, Paris: Monuments, 3:12-17.

77 Fulcher, The Nation’s Image (see n. 19), 171-72.
78 Charles Rohault de Fleury, letters of 16 March and 17 April 1860 to Achille

Fould, Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830.

79Jacques-Etienne-Marie de Cardaillac, letter of 11 April 1860 to Georges-
Euge’ne Haussmann, Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830.

80 Service du Plan de la Ville de Paris “Construction d’une nouvelle salle

d’Opera sur le boulevart [sic] des Capucines: Plan de l’emplacement projete et
des abords” (14 April 1860), Archives Nationales, versement de l’architecture:
Boite IX.

81 Charles Chaix d’Est Ange et al., “Projet d’une Nouvelle Salle d’Opera:
Avis de la Commission d’Enquete” (8June 1860), Archives Nationales, serie

AJ 53 531, and Bibliothbque de l’Opera de Paris, archives Opera 19e sikcle:

Pikce 201. The members were: Charles Chaix d’Est-Ange, commission

president and a lawyer; Augustin-Nicolas Caristie, architect; Le6n Cornu-

det, government official; Guillaume Denitre, manufacturer of bronzes;

Eugene Scribe, librettist; Louis-Achille Varin, merchant; and Louis-Emile

VWron, publicist and former director of the Opera. On the membership of
the Conseil municipal, see Ville de Paris, Commission des travaux histo-

riques [Jeanne Pronteau], Notes biographiques sur les membres des assemblies

municipales parisiennes et des conseils gindraux de la Seine de 1800 i nos jours.
Premidre partie: 1800-1871 (Paris, [1958]).

82 These counter-projects were: a vastly ambitious project by the architects
Charles Gamier and Alphonse Calip6 that occupied the entire Butte des

Moulins; three projects by Jules Frey, Fdlix Martin, and the architect Sidoine-
Maurice Storez for the Place de la Concorde (Storez placed his opera house
behind Gabriel’s Garde Meuble fagade); and three projects, including H.

Barnout’s proposal of 1856-57, that returned to the Salle Lepelletier site. The
counter projects are discussed anonymously but three can be attributed to Jules
Frey, Fdlix Martin, and H. Barnout (see n. 69 and n. 70) on the basis of
similarities between their projects and the commission’s descriptions of those

projects. The attribution of a project to Charles Gamier and Alphonse Calip6 is

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documented by two letters of Nov. 1867 from Calipe to Gamier and one letter of
28 Nov. 1867 from Gamier to Calipe which discuss their “plans d’Opera ai la
Butte des Moulins,” Bibliothbque de l’Opera de Paris, Fonds Gamier: Pikces 151
and 102. Lavedan, Histoire de Paris (see n. 40), 438, citing the Revue Municipale,
20 Feb. 1860, identifies Sidoine-Maurice Storez as the author of the third Place
de la Concorde project.

83Chaix d’Est Ange, “Avis de la Commission d’Enquete,” 20: “Le projet
playant l’Opera au centre de Paris, dans le quartier le plus riche, le plus vivant, et

prbs du boulevard, pr6sente sous ce rapport les meilleurs conditions.”
84 Ibid., 2026.

85Georges-Eugene Haussmann, letter of 18 June 1860 to Achille Fould,
Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830.

86 Conseil GC6nral des BAtiments Civils, “Seance du 30 juin 1860: Rapport
fait au Conseil par M. Duban, Inspecteur general: Choix d’emplacement de

l’Opera imperial,” Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830.

87Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Nouvelle Salle d’opera, projet approuve par la
Commission d’enquete” (1860), Archives Nationales, serie AJ 13 531. See Mead,
Paris Opera, 58.

88 “Ouverture de la rue de Rouen et formation de l’emplacement du Nouvel

Opera et de ses abords: Plan parcellaire: Tableau indicatif des proprints’ s’
exproprier,” Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830. Georges-Eugene Haussmann,
letter of 4 Aug. 1860 to Achille Fould, Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830,
records the Conseil Municipal meeting of 4 August. The 1858 date of the plat
and its accompanying table led me erroneously, in Mead, Paris Opera, 55, to date
also to 1858 the Opera site plan drawn over this plat; the interpretation offered
here accords better with the evolution of the site design as documented by the

securely dated evidence from 1858-1860.

89Alphand, Ville de Paris: Recueil (see n. 23), 322: “D’utilit6 publique la
construction d’une nouvelle salle d’opera…sur un emplacement sis entre le
boulevard des Capucines, la rue de la Chauss’e d’Antin, la rue Neuve des
Mathurins et le passage Sandri6.”

9o The evolution of the polygonal site plan from 1858 to 1860 needs to be

emphasized because, in 1860, Sidoine-Maurice Storez produced another counter-

project, published in Alfred d’Aunay, “La reconstruction de l’Opera,” Revue des

beaux-arts 2 (1860): 284-88, that sited a rectangular Opera on a polygonally
shaped Boulevard des Capucines site; while both Lavedan, Histoire de Paris(see
no. 40), 441, and Cars and Pinon, Paris Haussmann (see no. 1), 200, credit Storez
with thus giving to Haussmann the idea for a polygonal site that he then

approved in that same year, the evidence suggests that the reverse happened,
and that Storez was using a polygonal site plan that Haussmann had already
developed, even though he withheld it during the public inquest.

91 Service du Plan de la Ville de Paris “Annexe au plan d’enquete: Specimen
des fagades obligatoires” (14 April 1860), Archives Nationales, versement de
I’architecture: Boite IX.

92Charles Rohault de Fleury, letter of [?] April 1860 to Achille Fould,
Archives Nationales, serie F 21 830: “L”difice principal serait domino par des
maisons particulieres. .. .”

93 Gamier, Nouvel Opira (see n. 1), 1:30: “Comme le thfitre dependait du
ministre d’Etat et que les grosses maisons d6pendaient de la Ville, il n’y avait pas
de chance pour que les deux administrations s’entendissent.”

94 See M.-L. Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil d’actes administratifs et des conventions

relatifs aux servitudes spiciales d’architecture, aux servitudes non-aedificandi et autres

grevant les immeubles riverains de certaines places ou voies publiques (Paris, 1905),
26-27.

9 Loyer, Paris XIXe sicle (see n. 11), 351-61; Maneglier, Paris impdrial
(see n.

18), 122-123; and Van Zanten, Building Paris (see n. 5), 26-28, all comment on
the application of this classical ordering system to the Haussmannian immeuble,
and Loyer specifically notes its correspondence with Garnier’s Opera, yet none
of them investigates either the reasons for the adoption of this scheme or its
significance in Second Empire Paris.

96 Michael Dennis, Court and Garden: From the French Hrtel to the City ofModern
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass, 1986), offers a usefully enlightening interpreta-
tion of this history, which parallels the one offered here.

97 See David Thomson, Renaissance Paris: Architecture and Growth 1475-1600

(Berkeley, 1984), 73-75.

98 See Hillary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (New
York, 1991), 57-165.

99″ See Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil, 13-15, and note 52.

100 Rochelle Ziskin, “The Place de Nos Conqu&tes and the Unraveling of the

Myth of Louis XIV,”Art Bulletin 76 (March 1994): 147-62. See also Taxil, Ville de
Paris: Recueil, 3-7; Lavedan, Histoire de Paris, 215-27; Ville de Paris [Yvan Christ
et al.], La place des Victoires et ses abords (Paris, 1983).

101 See Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil, 8-11; Lavedan, Histoire de Paris, 243-51;
Mus’e Carnavalet [Bernard de Montgolfier et al.], De la place Louis XV d la place
de la Concorde (Paris, 1982).

102 See Loyer, Paris XIXe siecle, 129-34 and passim.
103 Cisar Daly, “Nouvelles de Paris: Caserne de la rue de Rivoli,” Revue

generale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 10 (1852): 423-24; Lazare and
Lazare, Dictionnaire, 577.

104 On this H6tel de Ville, destroyed by fire in 1871, see Victor Calliat and Le
Roux de Lincy, H6tel de Ville de Paris (Paris, 1844).

105 “Faits divers,” Le Moniteur universel, 17Jan. 1858: “Ces edifices, d’un style
simple mais qui n’exclut pas l”legance, et qui est, en quelque sorte, la transition
entre le caractbre propre des maisons d’habitation et celui qui convient a des
constructions publiques. . .”

106 Daly, “Panorama du mouvement” (see n. 9), 226: “On a exig.. ..que les

fagades des deux edifices fussent le mrme identiquement, en depit de la grande
diversite de leur destinations. .. .”

107 Conseil G6neral des Batiments Civils, “Proces verbal de la seance du 2
octobre 1856: Construction d’une caserne municipale derribre l’h6tel de ville,”
Archives Nationales, serie F 21 2542/20.

10s An equivalent confusion of languages can be found in the maries built for
the various arrondissements of Paris: thus, for example, Antoine Bailly’s Mairie of
the fourth arrondissement (1862-67) assumes a Renaissance vocabulary like that
of the nearby H6tel de Ville, while Gancel’s Mairie of the eleventh arrondisse-
ment of 1862-65 offers a schematically Baroque reiteration of the Louvre/
Garde Meuble paradigm with its arcaded base, columniated main story, and

framing end bays.
109 See Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil, 21-22; Donald Schneider, The Works and

Doctrine ofJacques Ignace Hittorff 1792-1867 (New York, 1977), 515-522; Mus&e

Carnavalet [Karl Hammer et al.], Hittorff (1792-1867) un architecte du XIXieme
sidcle (Paris, 1986), 206-11.

I10 See Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil, 23-24; Ville de Paris, Davioud (see n. 75),
43-7.

11′ See Taxil, Ville de Paris: Recueil, 29-30.

i12 Van Zanten, Building Paris, 246.
“13 Cesar Daly, “Maisons de Paris,” Revue g#ndrale de l’architecture et des travaux

publics 15 (1857): 277: “Depuis trois ou quatre annies, larchitecture priv&e de
Paris accuse un progrbs notable: la maison actuelle semble devoir participer, en

quelque sorte, aux qualites de l’6difice public.” See Cesar Daly, LArchitecture
privie au XIXinme sikcle sous Napohlon 11I, 6 vols. (Paris, 1864-77).

”
Jacques-Fran;ois

Blondel, L’Architecture franfaise: Rdimpression… exzcutie
… sous le contr6le de MM.. Guadet et Pascal, 4 vols. (Paris, n.d.), 2:14-34, esp. 34:

“. . .la magnificence et I’opulence de la Capitale oii il est dlev&.” The typology of

eighteenth-century French theaters is studied by Daniel Rabreau, “Le theatre et

l’embellissement des villes en France au XVIIIe sibcle” (These de Doctorat
d’Etat, Universit6 de Paris IV, 1977).

” See Victor Louis, Salle de spectacle de Bordeaux (Paris, 1782); Caisse
Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites [Monique Mosser and Daniel

Rabreau], Charles de Wailly, peintre architecte dans 1’Europe des lumitres (Paris,
[1979]), 49-51, 64-72; Braham, Architecture of the French Enlightenment (see n.
26), 96-103, 148-53; Daniel Rabreau, “Le Grand Thitre de Victor Louis: Des

verit(s, des impressions,” in Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique,
Victor Louis (see n. 26), 21-41.

“6 See Gabriel-Martin Dumont, Parallle des plans des plus belles salles de
spectacle d’Italie et de France (Paris, n.d).

“‘ 7Victor Baltard, Institut de France: Acadnimie des Beaux-Arts: L’Ecole de Percier
(Paris, 1873).

18 See note 72; Charles Rohault de Fleury, “Projet d’Op~ra” (Nov. 1860),
Bibliothbque de l’Op(ra de Paris, archives, which was submitted with an

explanatory text, “ThCitre Imperial de l’Op~ra: Reconstruction du theatre” (12
Dec. 1860), Archives Nationales, s~rie F 21 830.

“9 Rohault de Fleury, “Construction d’un Opera” (see n. 72), 4-5: “Fera-t-on
de l’Op~ra un edifice isold de toutes parts et environnC de portiques comme A
I’Od6on? Dans l’int~r2t d’un des quartiers les plus riches de Paris nous avons
r(solu la question par la negative… Nous n’avons done pas hbsit6 i entourer

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 173

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l’Opera des maisons particulibres, anim&es au rez-de-chauss&e par le commerce
et les lumieres qu’il repand naturellement dans les voies publiques, qu’il elargit
encore le soir en mettant pour ainsi dire les magasins dans la rue.” The same

arguments were repeated in Rohault de Fleury, ‘Thbftre Imperial de l’Opera,” 20.
120 Daly and Davioud, Thditres de la place du Chluitelet (see n. 74), 6: “Il fut

decide ques les nouveaux theAtres seraient entoures de constructions privees,
veritables maisons de rapport, dont les rez-de-chauss&e seraient occupes par des

boutiques et dont les etages superieures seraient divises en appartements louts -a
des particuliers.”

121 Ibid., 6.
’22 Conseil Gr6nral des BAtiments Civils, “Proces verbal de la seance du 16

dec. 1859,” Archives Nationales, serie F 21 1843: “.. .que les elevations n’ont pas
le caractbre appropri’ ‘a leur destination… qu’il importe d’imprimer ‘a un
edifice de ce genre, surtout lorsqu’ils sont construites par l’administration

municipale, un cachet plus en harmonie avec le genre qui leur est propre.”
123 Mead, Paris Opera, 5, 118, and 232.

Photo Credits

Figs. 1, 3, 5, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 44, 46. Author
Figs. 2, 35. Bibliothbque Historique de la Ville de Paris

Fig. 4. Mus&e Carnavalet: Musees de la Ville de Paris: ? 1995 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/Spadem, Paris

Figs. 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 47. ? cliche

Bibliothbque Nationale de France, Paris

Figs. 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 20, 21, 22, 43. ? cliche Archives Nationales de France,
Paris/CARAN

174 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 136-265
Front Matter
Editorial
The NEH (And Vincent Scully) [pp. 136-137]
Urban Contingency and the Problem of Representation in Second Empire Paris [pp. 138-174]
From Episcopal to Communal Palaces: Places and Power in Northern Italy (1000-1250) [pp. 175-185]
“Our Fine Gothic Magnificence”: The Nineteenth-Century Chapel at Costessey Hall (Norfolk) and Its Medieval Glazing [pp. 186-207]
Urban Interchange in the Southern Cone: Le Corbusier (1929) and Werner Hegemann (1931) in Argentina [pp. 208-227]
Exhibition
Review: untitled [pp. 228-232]
Books
North American Issues
Review: untitled [pp. 233-235]
Review: untitled [pp. 235-236]
Review: untitled [pp. 236-239]
Review: untitled [pp. 239-240]
Review: untitled [pp. 241-242]
Review: untitled [pp. 242-244]
Twentieth Century
Review: untitled [pp. 244-246]
Review: untitled [pp. 246-248]
Review: untitled [pp. 248-251]
Review: untitled [pp. 251-253]
Russia
Review: untitled [pp. 253-255]
Review: untitled [pp. 255-256]
The Classical World
Review: untitled [pp. 256-257]
Review: untitled [pp. 258-259]
Shorter Notices
Review: untitled [p. 259]
Review: untitled [p. 260]
Review: untitled [pp. 261-262]

Abstracts [pp. 263-264]
Letters [p. 265]
Review: Correction: The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV [p. 265]
Back Matter