French Restoration style
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.
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.
[1] 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.
Jean Chalgrin had designed Église Saint-Philippe-du-Roule before the Revolution in a neoclassical style; it was completed (1823–30) by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde.
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).
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.
[4] 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.
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 typical new residential building was four to five stories high, with an attic roof sloping forty-five degrees, broken by five to seven windows.
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 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,[9] 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.
Under Charles X, the á la Cathédral or Cathedral chair became popular, with a back resembling the form of a Gothic stained glass window.
[14] 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.
[15] The new generation of neoclassicists, led by Ingres and Gérard, largely ignored the idea of a classicism based on Ancient Roman and Greek values, and concentrated instead on the perfection of the depiction of human body, by its lines, composition and color.
[16] During the Restoration, Ingres was commissioned to paint a mural for the ceiling of the Salle Clarac of the Louvre, called The Apotheosis of Homer.
Here Ingres' style foreshadowed the drama of Gustave Moreau Other painters who often followed the more delicate and sensual version of neoclassicism included Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1821), and the portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
In 1822–23, Gericault painted The Woman with a Gambling Mania, a portrait of a madwoman in a Paris asylum with a distant, hopeless stare.
In the fall of 1830, shortly after the July Revolution, which toppled King Charles X, he painted Liberty Leading the People, which was presented at the 1831 Salon, and became one of the icons of French art.
During the Empire of Napoleon, he sculpted some of the plaques on the column in Place Vendôme, and made numerous portrait busts of the Emperor's family.
Bosio was also commissioned to replace the equestrian statue of Louis XIV which had been the centerpiece of Place des Victoires, which had been destroyed during the Revolution.
Then, between 1811 and 1816 he studied at the French Academy in Rome, where he became familiar with the works of Canova, the great Italian master of romanticism.
He made busts or statues of many notable statesmen, including the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson and Goethe.
[20] Another notable sculptor who began his career during the Restoration was François Rude, (1784–1847), He moved to Paris from Dijon in 1805 to study with Pierre Cartellier.
In 1811 he won the Prix de Rome, but he was a confirmed Bonapartist, and after the downfall of Napoleon, he went into exile in Belgium, where he had success as a portrait sculptor.
He began the Restoration as a committed defender of the Catholic faith and royalist, but gradually moved into the liberal opposition and became a fervent supporter of freedom of speech.
[24] To satisfy the demands of Paris opera-goers for truly grand opera, Rossini was commissioned to write the Le siège de Corinthe and then William Tell.
They usually met once a week, often in the back room of a cabaret, where they would enthusiastically sing popular, comic, and sentimental songs.
The poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger became famous for his songs ridiculing the aristocracy, the established church and the ultra-conservative parliament.
The celebrated Paris police chief Eugène François Vidocq sent his men to infiltrate the goguettes and arrest those who sang songs ridiculing the monarch.
