1750 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the son of a watchmaker of Geneva, vagabond, copyist and lackey in turn, had published his curse upon science, in hatred of the philosophism of the lettered caste; then followed a curse upon inequality, called out by his detestation of the degenerate nobility. This effective, levelling dissolution was carried on with torrential force in the ‘ Lettres de la Nouvelle Héloise. ’ Naturalism was proclaimed in ‘ Emile ’; deism, in the ‘ Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard. ’ Finally, in the Contrat Social appeared the three fateful words of the Revolution, traced with a hand of fire. ”
It must not, however, be supposed that the writings of Rousseau alone could have brought about the Revolution. The Revolution, in fact, embraces two distinct revolutions which, owing to the precipitation of events after 1789, are too readily confounded: one was. the bourgeois, parliamentary struggle against the monarchy, the precursory signs of which were already apparent in the attitude of the parliaments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which includes the period from 1789 to the fall of the Girondists; this might have terminated, as did the revolution in England, in the establishment of a liberal, constitutional monarchy, a monarchy freed from its abuses; the other was wholly a democratic, republican struggle, in which the lowest strata of the populace came to the surface. Viewed from our present standpoint, it is still older than the first, for the social explosion accompanied the violent reappearance of a race determined, once for all, to overcome all obstacles to that rule which its superiority in numbers assured to it.
This popular movement, in its violence and its brutality, was blind and inconscient; it was doomed to the most extraordinary vicissitudes, but arrest was impossible; it required no bold prophet to predict that the people would stand at last sole masters amid the ruined institutions which they had overthrown, with the task before them of building up, in their turn, a new edifice.
We are now on the eve of terrible and grandiose events; the arts must, for a time, be eclipsed by far more pressing interests. During the reign of Louis XVI there was a brief halt at the summit of the slope down which everything was about to be summarily hurled. “ For this old society it was an era of happiness and ingenuous emotion; it wept, admired itself in its tears, and thought its youth had been renewed. The fashionable genre was the idyl; first came the vapidness of Florian, the innocence of Gessner, then the immortal eclogue of Paul and Virginia. The queen had a hamlet and a dairy at the Trianon. Philosophers held the plough... in writing; ‘ Choiseul is a husbandman and Voltaire a farmer. ’ Everybody was interested in the people, loved the people, wrote for the people; benevolence constituted a part of good breeding, small alms and grand fetes were the fashion. ”
But the people had far other needs and ambitions. Nevertheless, a little spot of blue could be discerned in the black, storm-laden sky. There was a groping after a new ideal. Would it be taken from the feudal past, before the early beginnings of French nationality? A certain aristocratic school did, in fact, attempt this; they sang the praises of chivalry and the beauties of the Middle Ages, for the dawn of the Romantic movement dates much farther back than is generally supposed. It began in France, as well as in England, in the eighteenth century; it sent out a vivid gleam on the appearance of Chateaubriand, long before the school of 1830 rose, but at no time did it become popular.
The movement which won the favor of the people was directed toward the revival of the standards of Roman antiquity; in literature, in art, on the stage, as afterward in popular song, and on the battlefield, we believed that we were resurrecting the mighty past of the Republic or of the Empire of Cæsar and Augustus; we adopted Roman names, pronounced Roman harangues, copied Roman manners and Roman costumes; we boasted of our descent from the heroes of antiquity. In all this we oftentimes put ourselves before the world in a most ridiculous light, and yet we were not wholly in the wrong: the past of modern France is deeply rooted in Latin and Roman soil.
It was in this way that the Classical school, which finally succumbed under its own weight, was founded. It was not as preposterous at first as it has seemed since, or as writers have tried to make it appear; it had its raison d’etre: the French are Latin to a great extent, and Latin they will long remain, whatever may be said to the contrary. At all events, this Classic dawn was full of charming grace; architecture, following the general movement of ideas and manners, and stimu
lated by the recent discoveries at Pompeii, abandoned forever the capriciousness and license of the Louis Quinze style. Returning to its remote sources, it was once more inspired with the feeling and taste for simplicity, tranquil harmony and happy proportions, which, with a few quiet decorations, form the chief beauty of an edifice. Rectangular shapes were adopted, the straight line became dominant again; rectilinear channellings and a few simple interlaced patterns of antique design furnished the ornamental element.
At a later period, the tragic events of our history, our strictly military customs, as well as the decay of intelligence, led to coldness and soreness in our art. We will go no farther, for we have reached the threshold of modern art, when every architectural style is about to disappear —- when it may even be said that there will be no more architecture for a time.
Religious society had had its architecture; monarchial society had found the gratification and expression of its peculiar needs in a new art. At the beginning of this century, these two great powers, which had alternately swayed the world, were, if not completely dethroned, at least greatly weakened, and their creative faculty had departed. An industrial power had, it is true, sprung up to supplant them. This is gradually absorbing the great forces of the country; but this power has little need of an architecture; it possesses few qualifications for the creation of an art. The bourgeoisie passed through their heroic and military age during the Revolution; they then settled down to the accumulation of wealth. What are their artistic needs? Having arrived at fortune by means of economy, they can scarcely comprehend any but economical luxury, and that never engenders art.
Religious architecture is, then, to-day merely an official formula, made up from decent survivals; royal, princely or seigneurial architecture went down with the court and the great aristocracy; the bourgeoisie, under bourgeois rule, despite their many estimable qualities, have long showed themselves incapable of originating anything in the realm of the arts bearing upon architecture.
Notwithstanding the tireless piling up of wealth, toward the close of a period of pettiness and sterility, broader traditions are beginning to take shape and on more modest proportions than in the past we see, meanwhile, the advent of a private architecture, which is at the same time attractive, comfortable and elegant. True sumptuousness, that which is in accordance with taste, is appearing again, and it may be predicted that this art will return to the traditions of the past and perpetuate them, on a smaller scale.
It is not true, however, that the great innovation is to come, the transformation requisite to a veritable renaissance. Where will it appear? This is demanding in what quarter a new and mighty power is to arise. It is possible that it may be looked for from the recent accession of the masses to the throne; the power of the people is already making itself felt in politics, literature and in some of the arts. Its advent is the great characteristic fact of the eighteenth century. In architecture, what manifestation is it making? A few important public edifices — town-halls and theatres, the palaces of our democracies — have already been erected for its service. But the only work which it may be said to have originated, the only work purely its own and which has no prototype in the past, is the modern Exhibition building; these colossal structures are built for the accommodation of vast throngs who know nothing of tradition, who want nothing of copies from a past in which they had no part and who care not a fig for imitations which do not benefit themselves.
A careful study of the subject would doubtless show that the artist always creates to satisfy an immediate, pressing want, which dictates the law to him; that an art is always formed and developed as much by the desires, the inclinations, and even the demands of the patron, protector or employer as by the artist’s initiative; the mission of the artist consists mainly in discovering what the world is waiting for, what it needs; hence the universal welcome accorded to each new solution, hence the eagerness with which it is adopted and amplified, hence, too, that unity which appears in every one of the great styles of former times, whose forms were at once accepted, consecrated and forced into use by the popular taste.
For three centuries it has been out of the question that a complete removal or radical transformation of architecture should come about, as in the grand historic epochs, through the appearance of a new race; but we may expect what has already occurred several times during this interval, namely, partial
It must not, however, be supposed that the writings of Rousseau alone could have brought about the Revolution. The Revolution, in fact, embraces two distinct revolutions which, owing to the precipitation of events after 1789, are too readily confounded: one was. the bourgeois, parliamentary struggle against the monarchy, the precursory signs of which were already apparent in the attitude of the parliaments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which includes the period from 1789 to the fall of the Girondists; this might have terminated, as did the revolution in England, in the establishment of a liberal, constitutional monarchy, a monarchy freed from its abuses; the other was wholly a democratic, republican struggle, in which the lowest strata of the populace came to the surface. Viewed from our present standpoint, it is still older than the first, for the social explosion accompanied the violent reappearance of a race determined, once for all, to overcome all obstacles to that rule which its superiority in numbers assured to it.
This popular movement, in its violence and its brutality, was blind and inconscient; it was doomed to the most extraordinary vicissitudes, but arrest was impossible; it required no bold prophet to predict that the people would stand at last sole masters amid the ruined institutions which they had overthrown, with the task before them of building up, in their turn, a new edifice.
We are now on the eve of terrible and grandiose events; the arts must, for a time, be eclipsed by far more pressing interests. During the reign of Louis XVI there was a brief halt at the summit of the slope down which everything was about to be summarily hurled. “ For this old society it was an era of happiness and ingenuous emotion; it wept, admired itself in its tears, and thought its youth had been renewed. The fashionable genre was the idyl; first came the vapidness of Florian, the innocence of Gessner, then the immortal eclogue of Paul and Virginia. The queen had a hamlet and a dairy at the Trianon. Philosophers held the plough... in writing; ‘ Choiseul is a husbandman and Voltaire a farmer. ’ Everybody was interested in the people, loved the people, wrote for the people; benevolence constituted a part of good breeding, small alms and grand fetes were the fashion. ”
But the people had far other needs and ambitions. Nevertheless, a little spot of blue could be discerned in the black, storm-laden sky. There was a groping after a new ideal. Would it be taken from the feudal past, before the early beginnings of French nationality? A certain aristocratic school did, in fact, attempt this; they sang the praises of chivalry and the beauties of the Middle Ages, for the dawn of the Romantic movement dates much farther back than is generally supposed. It began in France, as well as in England, in the eighteenth century; it sent out a vivid gleam on the appearance of Chateaubriand, long before the school of 1830 rose, but at no time did it become popular.
The movement which won the favor of the people was directed toward the revival of the standards of Roman antiquity; in literature, in art, on the stage, as afterward in popular song, and on the battlefield, we believed that we were resurrecting the mighty past of the Republic or of the Empire of Cæsar and Augustus; we adopted Roman names, pronounced Roman harangues, copied Roman manners and Roman costumes; we boasted of our descent from the heroes of antiquity. In all this we oftentimes put ourselves before the world in a most ridiculous light, and yet we were not wholly in the wrong: the past of modern France is deeply rooted in Latin and Roman soil.
It was in this way that the Classical school, which finally succumbed under its own weight, was founded. It was not as preposterous at first as it has seemed since, or as writers have tried to make it appear; it had its raison d’etre: the French are Latin to a great extent, and Latin they will long remain, whatever may be said to the contrary. At all events, this Classic dawn was full of charming grace; architecture, following the general movement of ideas and manners, and stimu
lated by the recent discoveries at Pompeii, abandoned forever the capriciousness and license of the Louis Quinze style. Returning to its remote sources, it was once more inspired with the feeling and taste for simplicity, tranquil harmony and happy proportions, which, with a few quiet decorations, form the chief beauty of an edifice. Rectangular shapes were adopted, the straight line became dominant again; rectilinear channellings and a few simple interlaced patterns of antique design furnished the ornamental element.
At a later period, the tragic events of our history, our strictly military customs, as well as the decay of intelligence, led to coldness and soreness in our art. We will go no farther, for we have reached the threshold of modern art, when every architectural style is about to disappear —- when it may even be said that there will be no more architecture for a time.
Religious society had had its architecture; monarchial society had found the gratification and expression of its peculiar needs in a new art. At the beginning of this century, these two great powers, which had alternately swayed the world, were, if not completely dethroned, at least greatly weakened, and their creative faculty had departed. An industrial power had, it is true, sprung up to supplant them. This is gradually absorbing the great forces of the country; but this power has little need of an architecture; it possesses few qualifications for the creation of an art. The bourgeoisie passed through their heroic and military age during the Revolution; they then settled down to the accumulation of wealth. What are their artistic needs? Having arrived at fortune by means of economy, they can scarcely comprehend any but economical luxury, and that never engenders art.
Religious architecture is, then, to-day merely an official formula, made up from decent survivals; royal, princely or seigneurial architecture went down with the court and the great aristocracy; the bourgeoisie, under bourgeois rule, despite their many estimable qualities, have long showed themselves incapable of originating anything in the realm of the arts bearing upon architecture.
Notwithstanding the tireless piling up of wealth, toward the close of a period of pettiness and sterility, broader traditions are beginning to take shape and on more modest proportions than in the past we see, meanwhile, the advent of a private architecture, which is at the same time attractive, comfortable and elegant. True sumptuousness, that which is in accordance with taste, is appearing again, and it may be predicted that this art will return to the traditions of the past and perpetuate them, on a smaller scale.
It is not true, however, that the great innovation is to come, the transformation requisite to a veritable renaissance. Where will it appear? This is demanding in what quarter a new and mighty power is to arise. It is possible that it may be looked for from the recent accession of the masses to the throne; the power of the people is already making itself felt in politics, literature and in some of the arts. Its advent is the great characteristic fact of the eighteenth century. In architecture, what manifestation is it making? A few important public edifices — town-halls and theatres, the palaces of our democracies — have already been erected for its service. But the only work which it may be said to have originated, the only work purely its own and which has no prototype in the past, is the modern Exhibition building; these colossal structures are built for the accommodation of vast throngs who know nothing of tradition, who want nothing of copies from a past in which they had no part and who care not a fig for imitations which do not benefit themselves.
A careful study of the subject would doubtless show that the artist always creates to satisfy an immediate, pressing want, which dictates the law to him; that an art is always formed and developed as much by the desires, the inclinations, and even the demands of the patron, protector or employer as by the artist’s initiative; the mission of the artist consists mainly in discovering what the world is waiting for, what it needs; hence the universal welcome accorded to each new solution, hence the eagerness with which it is adopted and amplified, hence, too, that unity which appears in every one of the great styles of former times, whose forms were at once accepted, consecrated and forced into use by the popular taste.
For three centuries it has been out of the question that a complete removal or radical transformation of architecture should come about, as in the grand historic epochs, through the appearance of a new race; but we may expect what has already occurred several times during this interval, namely, partial