Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/315

 PARIS 293 doubled its extent by the accession of the great monasteries, the faubourgs of St Germain and St Marceau, the Jardin des Plantes, and the whole of Mont Ste Genevieve. The line of the new enceinte is still marked by a circuit of boulevards passing from the Champs de Mars at Pont d Austerlitz by Place de 1 Enfer and Place d ltalie. Similar enlargements, also marked out by a series of boulevards, incorporated with the town on the right side the faubourgs of St Antoine and Poissonniere and the quarters of La Chaussee d Antin and Chaillot. In 1784 was begun, instead of a line of fortifications, a simple customs-wall, with sixty propylcea or pavilions in a heavy but characteristic style, of which the finest are adorned with columns or pilasters like those of Psestum. In front of the Place du Trone (now Place de la Nation), which formed as it were a facade for Paris on the east side, there were erected two lofty rostral columns bearing the statues of Philip Augustus and St Louis. Towards the vv r est, the city front was Place Louis XV. (Place de la Concorde), preceded by the magni ficent avenue of the Champs l^lysees. Between the barriers of La Villette and Pantin, where the highways for Flanders and Germany terminated, was built a monumental rotunda fianked on the ground floor by four peristyles arranged as a Greek cross, and in the second story lighted by low arcades supported by columns of the Pyestum type. None of these works were completed till the time of the empire. It was also in the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV., and under the first republic, that the quarter of La Chaussee d Antin was built. It does not enter into the plan of the present sketch to narrate the history of Paris during the Revolutionary period ; that is the history rather of France, and to a certain extent of the whole world (see FRANCE). During the consulate hardly anything of note took place at Paris except the explosion of the infernal machine directed against Bonaparte on December 24, 1800. The coronation of Napoleon by Pope Pius VII. Avas celebrated in Notre Dame on December 2, 1804. Eight years later, during the Russian campaign, the conspiracy of General Malet, happily suppressed, was on the point of letting loose on all France a dreadful civil war. The empire, however, was then on the wane, and Paris was witness of its fall when, after an heroic resistance of two days, the city was obliged to surrender to the allies on March 30, 1814. After the return of the Bourbons, Paris had to submit to a treaty more humiliating than the capitulation. Already in 1763 Louis XV. had signed in his capital the treaty with England known as the shameful (Ilonteuse), by which he surrendered a great part of the American and Indian colonies, and notably Canada. That of May 30, 1814, was more truly disastrous, since it dismembered the mother- country, cancelled almost all the conquests of the republic and the empire, and lessened the military strength of France by robbing it of half its fleet. And worse even than this was the treaty of 28th November 1815, which not only suppressed the slight accessions of territory re cognized by the treaty of 1814, and doomed to. demolition the fortifications of Huningue, but exacted a war indemnity of 700 million francs (28,000,000), and demanded the maintenance in seven departments of 150,000 soldiers of the allied army until the payment of the entire sum. Under Louis XVIII. the only event of note that occurred in Paris was the assassination of the duke of Berry by Louvel, February 13, 1820. Ten years later the revolution of 1830, splendidly commemorated by the Column of July in Place de la Bastille, put Charles X. to flight and inaugur ated the reign of Louis Philippe, a troublous period which was closed by the revolution of 1848 and a new republic. It was this reign, however, that surrounded Paris with bastioned fortifications with ditches and detached forts. The republic of 1848 brought no greater quiet to the city than did the reign of Louis Philippe. The most terrible insurrection was that of June 23 to 26, 1848, distinguished by the devotion and heroic death of the Archbishop Affre. It was quelled by General Cavaignac, who then for some months held the executive power. Prince Louis Napoleon next became president of the republic, and after dissolving the chamber of deputies on December 2, 1851, caused himself to be proclaimed emperor just a year later. The second empire completed that material transforma tion of Paris which had already been begun at the fall of the ancient monarchy. First came numerous cases of destruction and demolition caused by the suppression of the old monasteries and of many parish churches. A number of mediaeval buildings, civil or military, were cleared away for the sake of regularity of plan and improvements in the public streets, or to satisfy the taste of the owners, who thought more of their comfort or profit than of the historic interest of their old mansions or houses. Destructions of this kind, in some instances of advantage, in other cases without excuse, still continue with more or less frequency. It was under the first empire that the new series of improvements were inaugurated which have made Paris a modern city. Napoleon began the Rue de Rivoli, built along this street the wing intended to connect the Tuileries with the Louvre, erected in front of the court of the Tuileries the triumphal arch of the Carrousel, in imitation of that of Septimius Severus at Rome. In the middle of the Place Vendome was reared, on the model of Trajan s column, the column of the grand army, surmounted by the statue of the emperor. To immortalize this same grand army he ordered from the architect Pierre Vignon a Temple of Victory, which without changing the form of its Corinthian peristyle has become the church of the Madeleine ; the entrance to the avenue of the Champs Elysees was spanned by the vast triumphal arch De 1 Etoile (of the star), which owes its celebrity not only to its colossal dimensions and its magnifi cent situation, but also to one of the four subjects sculp tured upon its faces the Chant du Depart or Marseillaise, one of the masterpieces of Rude and of modern sculpture. Another masterpiece was executed by David of Angers, the pediment of the Pantheon, not less famous than Soufflot s dome. The museum of the Louvre, founded by decree of the Convention on July 27, 1793, was organized and con siderably enlarged ; that of the Luxembourg was created in 1805,. but was not appropriated exclusively to modern artists till under the Restoration. The Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, due to the Convention, received also con siderable additions in the old priory or abbey of St Martin des Champs, where the council of the Five Hundred had installed it in 1798. Under the Restoration and under the government of July many new buildings were erected; but, with the exception of the Bourse, constructed by the architects Brongniart and Labarre, and the colonnade of the chamber of deputies, these are of interest not so much for their size as for the new artistic tendencies affected in their architecture. People had grown weary of the eternal Grajco-Roman compilations rendered fashionable by the Renaissance, and reduced under the empire to mere imitations, in producing which all inspiration was repressed. The necessity of being rational in architecture, and of taking full account of practical wants, was recognized ; and more suggestive and plastic models were sought in the past. These were to be I found, it was believed, in Greece ; and in consequence the government under Louis Philippe saw itself obliged to found the French school at Athens, i:i order to allow young artists to study their favourite types on the spot. In the case of churches it was deemed judicious to revive the