Chapter 11: )

Vaudremer’s work may have had some influence, around 1870, on the American Richardson, who was still a student in Paris when Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge was begun (see Chapter 13). However, no significant line of development led forward in France from his sort of church design. In a smaller and later Parisian church, Notre-Dame in the Rue d’Auteuil of 1876-83, Vaudremer himself showed no further development of his personal style, though the interior here is not unimpressive in its scale and proportions.

The vast and prominent church of the Sacré-Cœur on Montmartre in Paris was begun by Paul Abadie[195] (1812-84), a pupil of Leclerc, well after the Second Empire was over in 1874, and largely finished before the end of the century by the younger Magne (Lucien, 1849-1916). This is Romanesque in inspiration, too, but painfully archaeological—’painfully’, because its architect, in carrying out the restoration of his principal medieval exemplar, Saint-Front at Périgueux, seems to have sought to provide ‘precedent’ for several of the features that he introduced here! Yet the bold exploitation of the remarkable site of this church, dominating Paris from the heights of Montmartre, and the bubble-like silhouette of its cluster of domes when seen from a distance give the Sacré-Cœur positive qualities lacking in most other French ecclesiastical work of the later nineteenth century except Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge.

Architecture in France had been a highly centralized profession ever since the late seventeenth century. Under Louis XV a few provincial cities showed some capacity for independent activity, but this subsided during the unproductive years that followed the Revolution. Except to a certain extent in Lyons and Marseilles, local activity did not revive very notably in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the Second Empire most French cities still remained content to follow the lead of Paris. There is hardly a large provincial town which did not—to stress first the positive side of the picture—lay out broad boulevards or straight avenues and line them with more or less successful versions of the _maisons de rapport_ of Paris; on the negative side, the public buildings and churches were usually derived from, and too often very inferior to, prominent Parisian models.

In the centres of the biggest cities one can well believe that one has not left Paris. Occasionally, however, there are urbanistic entities which have more vitality than the rigidly controlled and tastefully restrained new squares and streets of the capital. The fairly modest square in front of the cathedral at Nantes, with its ranges of high-mansarded blocks, is a case in point. Better known is the rising slope of the Cannebière, continued in the Rue de Noailles and the Allées de Meilhan at Marseilles, with the columnar dignity of the Chamber of Commerce on the left near the Vieux Port at the bottom and the paired Gothic towers of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul closing the vista at the top. Public buildings in smaller cities sometimes have a rather illiterate sort of gusto in their boldly plastic massing and exuberantly coarse detailing closer to Second Empire work abroad than to that of Paris; to some eyes these have a theatrical charm not unlike the period flavour of Offenbach’s operas. They often date from well after 1870.

Espérandieu’s Neo-Baroque Palais Longchamps at Marseilles has been mentioned (Plate 70A). Also at Marseilles is the enormous Romanesco-Byzantine cathedral of 1852-93, which was designed by the younger Vaudoyer (Léon, 1803-72), a pupil of his father and also of Lebas. Espérandieu became _inspecteur_ on the job in 1858 and carried on the work after Vaudoyer’s death. This is hardly superior to Ballu’s Paris churches, much less to Vaudremer’s or even Abadie’s, but it is more striking plastically in its rather redundant combination of domed west towers, crossing dome, and transeptal domes; it is also exceptionally colouristic for France. There is an almost High Victorian Gothic brashness in the treatment of the exterior walls with bands of alternately white and green stone. Here the aggressive assurance of the period speaks with an even louder voice than at the New Louvre and the Paris Opéra; this assurance is echoed, moreover, near by in Espérandieu’s own high-placed church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde of 1854-64, a scenic accent of the most brazen Second Empire vulgarity.

The Marseilles Exchange, however, dominating its own tree-lined square, is rather similar to the Chamber of Commerce in the Cannebière as it rises among ranges of houses that are more Provençal than Parisian in the modesty of their painted stucco fronts. Originally begun in 1842 by Penchaud, the Exchange was largely built in 1852-60 by his pupil Coste, but its style remains _Louis Philippe_ rather than Second Empire.

The great elaboration and consequent expensiveness of Second Empire modes of design, as generally executed in France in fine freestone, restricted their full exploitation to the capital and the largest provincial cities. There is a sort of economic striation, from the immense sums the Emperor and, after him, the authorities of the Third Republic—even though relatively impoverished—were willing to put into representational public construction at the top, through the level represented by what Parisian investors spent on blocks of flats or rich provincial cities on their principal monuments, down finally to the niggardly building budgets of small towns and villages. This striation provides a sort of analogue to the breakdown of that earlier stylistic unity which had been so marked and happy a characteristic of French architecture for at least a century and a half. That this breakdown was still relative in France is apparent when one turns to other countries where eclectic taste in this period was bolder and where the variation in expenditure on different sorts of buildings was at least as great.

French architectural prestige revived internationally in the fifties to remain surprisingly high for another two generations.[196] However, the Second Empire mode was gradually succeeded internationally by another Parisian mode to which it is convenient to apply the name ‘Beaux-Arts’, from the École des Beaux-Arts out of whose instruction it stemmed. More and more foreigners went to Paris to study as the second half of the century wore on, until Paris became almost what Rome had been in the eighteenth century. In architectural education the influence of the École was especially strong in the New World; the training of English and most Continental architects was much less affected. The first two architectural schools to be founded in the United States, both by William Robert Ware (1832-1915)—himself, curiously enough, a practitioner of a fairly aggressive sort of Victorian Gothic (see