Roman Republicans, fasces and festivals: the French occupation of Rome, 1798-99, from the archives of the Museo Napoleonico

Apollo, Jan, 2004 by Eleanor Tollfree

The French Revolution had a profound effect on architecture in late eighteenth-century France. (1) Even before the Revolution, the Academie Royale d'Architecture in Paris had been a scene of dissent. The choice of the Grand Prix winner at the Academie d'Architecture and the bureaucracy surrounding the system had frequently caused dissatisfaction amongst the students. (2) In April 1790, the students' requests for changes in the regulations were ignored, with the result that many of them refused to complete the Grand Prix and resigned. Under the aegis of the painter David, the Commune des Arts was created, and by August 1793, the Convention had secured the suppression of all the Academies, including the Academie de France a Rome. (3) Despite these bureaucratic upheavals, architectural training in Paris remained fairly consistent, owing to the teaching offered at the school of the Academie d'Architecture run by Julien-David Leroy, who enlisted as his associate Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer, while Percier and Fontaine served on a committee judging the students' work. (4) The success of Leroy's school probably influenced the decision taken in October 1795 by the Convention, just before it was replaced by the Directory, to set up a new architectural school and re-establish the Prix de Rome and the Academie de France a Rome.

Perhaps the most important way in which the Revolution affected architecture in France, however, was through the decline in commissions for practising architects. The position and resources of the aristocracy and the church, which had provided important patronage for the artistic community, had been undermined, with the result that there was little money available for building projects. Many architects suffered unemployment, while others travelled abroad for work or turned their hand to writing architectural treatises as an alternative source of income. (5) The Convention wanted to resume the building projects of the ancien regime, but little came of its report proposing the construction of hundreds of new streets, the creation of more squares, the improvement of the old quartiers and the decoration of the city more generally. (6) Yet the Revolution did provide some new opportunities for architects to employ their skills. Architects were needed to transform buildings made redundant by the Revolution, such as churches, into buildings serving new public needs. (7) The conversion of Ste Genevieve into a national Pantheon under the aegis of Quatremere de Quincy is the most famous example. (8) In many ways, the Revolution was itself matched by a revolution in architecture in the sense that the types of building required and whole purpose of building after the Revolution had significantly altered. (9) Temporary structures had formerly been erected for festivals and employed in theatre sets, (10) but the last decade of the eighteenth century witnessed the development of a radically new kind of temporary monument, and one which was uniquely suited to the circumstances of the Revolution. Monuments were designed to commemorate the Revolution in Paris and throughout France. Not all of these monuments were constructed, but the Roman character of the structures and of their iconography is apparent from their designs.

It is clear from many of the designs for monuments reproduced in a recent study (11) that the Revolutionaries in Paris consistently regarded themselves as ancient Romans in terms of their building plans for the city. They set up temporary monuments to commemorate their heroes, often in the form of sepulchral pyramids reminiscent of the monument to Gaius Cestius, which had been inspiring Academie students such as Nicolas-Henri Jardin since the 1740s (Fig. 1). (12) The programmes for competitions among students at the Academie Royale d'Architecture also influenced the amphitheatres, hippodromes and circuses which were designed to accommodate huge crowds at Revolutionary spectacles. (13) The design for the Festival of the Federation (Fig. 2), held on the Champ de Mars on 14 July 1790, involved the construction of an immense triumphal arch. This served as a magnificent entrance to the area over looked by the Ecole Militaire, and at the same time as a means of guiding the procession of people to and from the site. (14) The Revolutionaries were keen to erect permanent structures to commemorate their achievements, and planned to regenerate the city of Paris as a whole. The rapid changes in government, however, meant that the plethora of columns and temples which were designed during the Revolution in most cases remained on the drawing board. Yet temporary monuments and festival structures continued to be built, and enabled the Revolutionaries, in some respects, to create their 'new Rome' in Paris. (15) With the erection of festival monuments, such as the Egyptian fountain, triumphal arch, figures of Liberty and Hercules and the monumental column, constructed as five of the processional 'stations' for the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility on 10 August 1793 (Fig. 3), the Revolutionaries appropriated important sites in the city and transformed the urban space of the city into Republican, rather than royalist space. (16)