The French Restoration style was predominantly Neoclassicism, though it also showed the beginnings of Romanticism in music and literature. The term describes the arts, architecture, and decorative arts of the Bourbon Restoration period (1814–1830), during the reign of Louis XVIII and Charles X from the fall of Napoleon to the July Revolution of 1830 and the beginning of the reign of Louis-Philippe.
Architecture and design
Public buildings and monuments
To commemorate the memory of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and to expiate the crime of their execution, King Louis XVIII built the Chapelle expiatoire by Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine on the site of the small cemetery of the Madeleine, where their remains (now in the Basilica of Saint-Denis) had been hastily buried following their execution. It was completed and dedicated in 1826.
The royal government restored the symbols of the old regime, but continued the construction of most of the monuments and urban projects begun by Napoleon. The church of La Madeleine, begun under Louis XVI, had been turned by Napoleon into the Temple of Glory (1807). It was now turned back to its original purpose, as the Royal Church of La Madeleine. All of the public buildings and churches of the Restoration were built in a relentlessly neoclassical style. Work resumed, slowly, on the unfinished Arc de Triomphe, begun by Napoleon. At the end of the reign of Louis XVIII, the government decided to transform it from a monument to the victories of Napoleon into a monument celebrating the victory of the Duke of Angôuleme over the Spanish revolutionaries who had overthrown their Bourbon king. A new inscription was planned: "To the Army of the Pyrenees" but the inscription had not been carved and the work was still not finished when the regime was toppled in 1830.
The Canal Saint-Martin was finished in 1822, and the building of the Bourse de Paris, or stock market, designed and begun by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart from 1808 to 1813, was modified and completed by Éloi Labarre in 1826. New storehouses for grain near the Arsenal, new slaughterhouses, and new markets were finished. Three new suspension bridges were built over the Seine; the Pont de l'Archevêché, the Pont des Invalides and footbridge of the Grève. All three were rebuilt later in the century.
Religious architecture
Several new churches were begun during the Restoration to replace those destroyed during the Revolution. A battle took place between architects who wanted a neo-Gothic style, modeled after Notre-Dame, or the Neoclassical style, modeled after the basilicas of ancient Rome. The battle was won by a majority of neoclassicists on the Commission of Public Buildings, who dominated until 1850. Jean-François Chalgrin had designed Église Saint-Philippe-du-Roule before the Revolution in a neoclassical style; it was completed (1823–30) by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde. Godde also completed Chalgrin's project for Saint-Pierre-du-Gros-Caillou {1822–29), and built the neoclassic basilicas of Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle ((1823–30) and Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement (1826–35). Other notable neoclassical architects of the Restoration included Louis-Hippolyte Lebas, who built Notre-Dame-de-Lorette (1823–36); (1823–30); and Jacques Ignace Hittorff, who built the church of Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (1824–44). Hittorff went on to along a brilliant career in the reigns of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, designing the new plan of the Place de la Concorde and constructing the Gare du Nord railway station (1861–66).
Commercial architecture - the shopping gallery
A new form of commercial architecture had appeared at the end of the 18th century; the passage, or shopping gallery, a row of shops along a narrow street covered by a glass roof. They were made possible by improved technologies of glass and cast iron, and were popular since few Paris streets had sidewalks and pedestrians had to compete with wagons, carts, animals and crowds of people. The first indoor shopping gallery in Paris had opened at the Palais-Royal in 1786; rows of shops, along with cafes and the first restaurants, were located under the arcade around the garden. It was followed by the passage Feydau in 1790–91, the passage du Caire in 1799, and the Passage des Panoramas in 1800. In 1834 the architect Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine carried the idea a step further, covering an entire courtyard of the Palais-Royal, the Galerie d'Orleans, with a glass skylight. The gallery remained covered until 1935. It was the ancestor of the glass skylights of the Paris department stores of the later 19th century.
Residential architecture
During the Restoration, and particularly after the coronation of Charles X in 1825. New residential neighborhoods were built on the Right Bank in Paris, as the city grew to the north and west. Between 1824 and 1826, a time of economic prosperity, the quarters of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Europe, Beaugrenelle and Passy were all laid out and construction began. The width of lots grew larger; from six to eight meters wide for a single house to between twelve and twenty meters for a residential building. The typical new residential building was four to five stories high, with an attic roof sloping forty-five degrees, broken by five to seven windows. The decoration was largely adapted from that of the Rue de Rivoli; horizontal rather than vertical orders, and simpler decoration. The windows were larger and occupied a larger portion of the façades. Decoration was provided by ornamental iron shutters and then wrought-iron balconies. Variations of this model were the standard on Paris boulevards until the Second Empire.
The hôtel particular, or large private house of the Restoration, usually was built in a neoclassical style, based on Greek architecture or the style of Palladio, particularly in the new residential quarters of Nouvelle Athenes and the Square d'Orleans on Rue Taibout (9th arrondissement), a private residential square (1829–35) in the English neoclassical style designed by Edward Cresy. Residents of the square included George Sand and Frédéric Chopin. Some of the houses in the new quarters in the 8th arrondissement, particularly the quarter of François I, begun in 1822, were made in a more picturesque style, a combination of the Renaissance and classical style, called the Troubadour style. This marked the beginning of the movement away from uniform neoclassicism toward eclectic residential architecture.
Interior Design and Furniture
The decorative style of the French Restoration borrowed from both the geometry of the neoclassical style era, and the overload of decoration of the Louis XIV style, along with the color of Renaissance. One of the best examples is the Charles X museum within the Louvre, a suite of rooms that was created for, among other purposes, the Salon of artists that was held there annually. The ceilings were divided into compartments filled with paintings and lavishly decorated with cornices, columns and pilasters. The neo-Gothic also began to appear in interior decoration during the 1820, particularly in the design of galleries and salons with arches and arched windows and rose windows modeled after those in gothic cathedrals. Another feature of the French restoration was polychromy, the use of bright colors in the decorations, either with colored stone, glass, or paintings. Ceilings were particularly lavish, with hemicycles, cupolas, pendants, and vaults, often filled with decorative paintings.
Another good example of the French Restoration style of design is the interior of the Chapelle expiatoire. While the layout of the building and architecture is sober and perfectly Greco-Roman neoclassicism, the inside of the dome is decorated with rosettes, and there is an abundance of high-relief sculpted decoration in bands below the cornices and between the columns supporting the dome, including stylized Maltese crosses, fleur-de-lis and roses. The floor also has elaborate polychrome decoration in stone with the same motifs.
With the downfall of Napoleon, those aristocrats who had fled France during the Revolution began to return; they found their furniture had largely been confiscated and sold during the Revolution, and they had little money to buy lavish new furniture. The new King, Louis XVIII, liked the Empire style, so that style remained in place, with slightly rounded lines, and the removal of the Napoleonic symbols and ornaments,Renault and Lazé, Les Styles de l'architecture et du mobilier, pg. 96-97 After the death of Louis XVIII in 1824, the new King, his brother Charles X, allotted an indemnity to aristocrats whose belongings had been confiscated during the Revolution, and the luxury furniture industry began to revive. Interest began to develop in older styles, particularly Gothic and Renaissance, especially after the creation of a museum of French monuments during the Revolution, but the gothic revival movement did not become really strong until after the publication in 1831 of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo (1831).Renault and Lazé, Les Styles de l'architecture et du mobilier, pg. 96-97
Ornament of gilded bronze became rarer; most ornament was marquetry inlay, either light wood into dark, or dark wood into light; often in form of very elaborate floral designs, under the influence of the Duchess of Berry. Under Charles X, the á la Cathédral or Cathedral chair became popular, with a back resembling the form of a Gothic stained glass window.Renault and Lazé, (2006) pg. 98 The Gothic rose also became a popular decoration on furniture, along with stylized palmettes and other floral designs. Comfort was another consideration in the design of new chairs. The Voltaire armchair, with sabre-curved front legs, a high curving padded back and padded armrests, became popular.Renault and Lazé, (2006) pg. 98 It took its name from a popular illustration of portrait of Voltaire, made about 1820, which showed him seated in s similar armchair.Storck, Justin, Le Dictionnaire pratique de menuiserie, ébénisterie, charpente,
Painting
The Restoration saw the beginning of the long battle between neoclassicism and romanticism in painting and other domains of art. Jacques-Louis David, the dominant neoclassical painter during the reign of Napoleon, went into exile in Belgium; however, other prominent students of David remained in Paris, and continued the style, simply changing the subject matter. They included François Gérard, who painted the coronation of King Charles X in 1827, following almost exactly the composition used by David in his coronation painting of the Emperor Napoleon.Toman, Neoclassicism et Romanticism (2007), page 377 Other former pupils of David included Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), and the most prominent of all, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, (1780-1867), who painted his famous Grand Odalisque in the year that Napoleon first went into exile.Toman, Neoclassicism et Romanticism (2007), page 377