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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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/990965 . Accessed: 22/02/2014 12:04

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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 Gamier 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 III

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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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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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-

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 141

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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 transformation

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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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

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 143

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PgI

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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

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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

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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

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 145

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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

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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

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FIG. 10: Hector Horeau, "Etude d'un projet d'Opera d6finitif pour la ville de

Paris," May 1845, detail of site plan.

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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,

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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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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

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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.

PROJET D'L VOIE IMPE RIALE et

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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 ;;; ; ;-;;;--:-;;

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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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aheUle do 0.004 pour 100 mtre.

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,

N)1

ot de s s(:l I;1

!1 q

A . . .. ......

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,

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 155

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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

4011"

!•

Al

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

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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,

..........

i-i

i-I-AI -;

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

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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

1, ll i i? l .- s .i it- A, '0 )(, I*.~as.~L~. %.J-rlIBill: ~f(lrt I~WIY~~rli C x; g~ ~1~~ Ibl~~ji~LJ CL-~?~ ~.llROY,.j~

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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poli 0W

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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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? ?'?i...

--f ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ i

;--? 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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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

MEAD: URBAN CONTINGENCY 169

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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-

170 JSAH / 54:2, JUNE 1995

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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

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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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