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Construction
Construction of Palais Bourbon
Seat of the National Assembly in Paris, France
- 1722
- Europe
Construction
Seat of the National Assembly in Paris, France
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
The Palais Bourbon (pronounced [palɛ buʁbɔ̃]) is the meeting place of the National Assembly, the lower legislative chamber of the French Parliament. It is in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, on the Rive Gauche of the Seine across from the Place de la Concorde. The official address is on the Rue de l'Université, facing the Place du Palais-Bourbon.
The original palace was built beginning in 1722 for Louise Françoise de Bourbon, Duchess of Bourbon, the legitimised daughter of Louis XIV and the Marquise de Montespan. Four successive architects – Lorenzo Giardini, Pierre Cailleteau, Jean Aubert and Ange-Jacques Gabriel – completed the palace in 1728. It was then confiscated from Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, during the French Revolution and nationalised. From 1795 to 1799, during the Directory, it was the meeting place of the Council of Five Hundred, which chose the government leaders. Beginning in 1806, during Napoleon Bonaparte's First French Empire, Bernard Poyet's Neoclassical façade was added to mirror that of the Église de la Madeleine, facing it across the Seine beyond the Place de la Concorde.
The palace complex today has a floor area of 124,000 m2 (1,330,000 sq ft), with over 9,500 rooms, in which 3,000 people work. The complex includes the Hôtel de Lassay on the west side of the Palais Bourbon, the official residence of the president of the National Assembly.
The palace was built for Louise Françoise de Bourbon, Duchess of Bourbon (1673–1743), the legitimised daughter of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan. Begun in 1722 and finished in 1728, it was located in what was then a largely rural quarter at the edge of Paris, which was about to become a very fashionable residential neighbourhood, the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Until that time, the area, called the Pré-au-Clercs, was a wooded area popular for fighting duels. After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, following the example of the Regent, the aristocracy began to move their residences from Versailles back to Paris. As building-space land was scarce in the traditional residential area of the nobility and the densely populated Marais, the aristocracy of the Régence looked for land with space for gardens at the edges of the city, either near the Champs-Élysées, on the right bank, or on the left bank.
The Duchess of Bourbon had been known for frivolity at the court in Versailles, but by the 1720s, she had had seven children and was widowed. The reputed lover of the Duchess, Armand de Madaillan de Lesparre, Comte de Lassay, proposed the site of the palace to her; he had purchased land next door along the Seine, and the two buildings were constructed at the same time. The parcel of land for the new palace was large, extending from the Seine to the Rue de l'Université.
The original plan called for a country residence surrounded by gardens, modelled after the Grand Trianon at Versailles, designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the chief architect of Louis XIV. The Italian architect Lorenzo Giardini made the first plan, but he died in 1722, having made only first sketches. The project was taken over by Pierre Cailleteau, also known as Lassurance, who had been an assistant to Hardouin-Mansart. Cailleteau had worked on the Palace of Versailles and Les Invalides, and he knew the royal style very well, but he died in 1724. He was replaced by Jean Aubert, also a former assistant of Hardouin-Mansart. Aubert had built one of the grandest projects of the time, the stables of the royal residence at Chantilly. In the meantime, the construction of the neighbouring Hôtel de Lassay had begun, following a plan by another noted architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, the designer of the buildings around the now-Place de la Concorde. Both buildings were finished in 1728.
Both the Palais Bourbon and the Hôtel de Lassay were in the Italian style, with roofs hidden by balustrades and invisible from street level. The Palais Bourbon was in a U-shape. The main building was parallel to the Seine, with two wings enclosing a courtyard. The entrance to the courtyard and building was on the Rue de l'Université. The entrance to the courtyard had an ornate archway, flanked by two pavilions. The Hôtel de Lassay was rectangular and more modest in size. The two buildings had identical façades facing the Seine, and featured alternating columns and windows, and decoration on the themes of the seasons, the elements, and, fitting for the daughter of the Sun King, about Apollo. The space between the buildings, and between the buildings and the Seine, was filled with gardens. In addition to the large reception rooms, the interior of the house had many small salons which could be arranged for a variety of purposes. It also had a novelty for buildings of the period; corridors, so one could pass through the building without walking through the rooms. None of the original apartments of the Duchess survive; as they were destroyed in the subsequent remodellings. The Duchesse de Bourbon died in 1743, and de Lassay died in 1750. The palace was purchased by Louis XV, who seems to have wished to include it in the plan of the new Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) which he was building on the other side of the river. But in 1756 he sold it to grandson of the Duchess, Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, who had been a military hero in the just-concluded Seven Years' War. The Prince decided to largely rebuild it, turning it from a country house into a monumental palace, in the new Neoclassical style. With this in mind, in 1768 he purchased the neighbouring Hôtel de Lassay, and planned to make the two buildings into one. A new plan was drawn by Marie-Joseph Peyre, whose style was based on archeological studies of ancient Rome and Greece. Peyre's other neoclassical works included the Odéon Theatre. Several different architects were engaged in the project, including Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Bellisard and Charpentier.
For the Neoclassical palace of the Prince, the entrance on the Rue de l'Université was replaced by a larger and more impressive gate, framed by a gallery of columns. The two wings of the building were extended, and a pavilion was created with apartments for one of his sons. An abundance of military decoration, including stucco sculptures of shields and weapons, was added to the vestibule, and are still visible today. The palace was only finished at the end of the 1780s, at the same time that the French Revolution began. The Prince went into exile following the storming of the Bastille, thus becoming an émigré in the eyes of Revolutionaries, and the two residences were confiscated by the Revolutionary government in 1791.
The first French National Assembly gathered without royal authorisation on 20 June 1789 in the tennis court of the Palace of Versailles. the first step of the French Revolution, and in May 1793 moved to the empty theatre of the Tuileries Palace in Paris. Most of the aristocracy had fled France for its safety, and the Palais Bourbon and Hôtel de Lassay, like the Luxembourg Palace, Élysée Palace, Hôtel Matignon, and countless other estates were nationalised and used for government functions. The stables of the palace became the headquarters of the administration of military transport, while the Palais Bourbon became, in 1794, the Central School of Public Works, which later became, under Napoleon Bonaparte, the École Polytechnique, the famous military engineering school.
In 1793 and 1794 the Revolution reached its peak of fury and disorder, under the Convention led by Robespierre and Saint-Just. The two leaders of the Terror were arrested and executed on 28 July 1794, and a new government, the Directory, took power. On 23 September 1795 a new constitution was adopted, which called for a parliament with two Chambers, the Council of Five Hundred, the future National Assembly, and the Council of the Ancients. The Council of Five Hundred was given the Palais Bourbon as its future meeting place. The new government commissioned the architects Jacques-Pierre Gisors and Emmanuel-Cherubin Leconte to turn the apartments of the palace along the Seine into a meeting Chamber. The Chamber they designed was in the shape of a hemicycle, similar to a Roman theatre, and was covered with a cupola modelled after that of the amphitheatre of the Academy of Surgery, located not far away in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which had been built between 1769 and 1774. A few other changes were made to the palace; a vestibule and rotunda was added in the courtyard, and a wooden gallery was constructed to connect the palace with the Hôtel de Lassay.
Two features of the original Chamber can still be found in the current Chamber; the desk and armchair of the president of the National Assembly, made of wood and gilded bronze, designed in a classical Roman style by Jacques-Louis David and the bas-relief behind the tribune, made of carved white marble framed in dark polychrome marble. It features two female figures representing allegorical figures of History and Fame. Fame is announcing the laws with a long trumpet, while History is inscribing them on a tablet. In the center is a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic, wearing a medallion of the Roman god Janus, whose two faces illustrate the motto that the experience of the past predicts the future. The construction of the Chamber drastically modified the building, as the roof had to be raised well above the old façade. It was also out of alignment with the long axis composed of the Église de la Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde, and the Pont de la Concorde; the view of the Palais Bourbon from the Place de la Concorde was blocked by the decoration of the bridge.
The Council of Five Hundred began meeting on 21 January 1798, a date chosen because it was the anniversary of the murder of the 'last tyrant', King Louis XVI. The members arrived dressed in Roman togas and caps, in the Neoclassical fashion. They quickly found out that the new Chamber had little ventilation, was feebly heated in winter, and the acoustics were poor, making it hard to hear the speakers. On 8 November 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte organized a coup d'état and seized power from the Council of Five Hundred, then meeting at the château de Saint-Cloud. Napoleon formed a new legislature, the Corps législatif, whose only duty was to listen to an annual speech by him, now First Consul, and to adopt the laws proposed by the Council of State, debated by another new body, the Tribunat.
In 1806 the bureau of the Corps législatif proposed the construction of a new façade facing the Seine, which would be aligned with and would match that of the Temple of Glory (which would later be restored to being the Église de la Madeleine) which Napoleon was building at the end of Rue Royale, to the north of the Place de la Concorde. The new Neoclassical façade, designed by architect Bernard Poyet, had twelve corinthian columns in an entirely different style from the Italianate 18th century palace behind it, but it was high enough to be visible from the Place de la Concorde and was correctly aligned to be visible from the Madeleine. The original fronton of the façade featured bas-reliefs by sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, showed scenes from the opening of the Corps législatif in 1806; it showed Napoleon on horseback, offering to the members of the Legislature the flags which had been captured from the Austrians at the Battle of Austerlitz, and the inscription, 'To Napoleon I the Great – the Corps législatif'. In 1810, statues of the goddess Themis, holding a scale in her left hand, and Athena, the symbol of wisdom, were placed in front of the façade on the Seine, along with statues of famous royal ministers, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and Henri François d'Aguesseau, Poyet made two important modifications to the interior; he added two salons, the Salle des Gardes and the Salon de l'Empereur, which was intended for the use of Napoleon during his rare visits to the building. Both these rooms retain much of their original decor, trompe-l'oeil paintings by Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, the son of the famous court painter of Louis XIV.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Palais Bourbon”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.