French Baroque architecture

Notable examples of the style include the Grand Trianon of the Palace of Versailles, and the dome of Les Invalides in Paris.

The Luxembourg Palace established a new pattern for royal residences, with pavilions on the corners, lateral wings, and a grand central entrance surmounted by a cupola.

The walls feature colossal orders of columns with triangular pediments, indicating the classical inspiration behind the French movement.

Its façade featured stylized monumental columns, wings combined with mansard roofs and a prominent dome, in the Baroque style.

The interior was lavishly decorated with murals by Charles Le Brun and it was placed in the center of enormous formal gardens designed by André Le Notre, laid out in geometric patterns paths, flower beds, fountains and reflecting pools, which seemed to extend the architecture of the house in every direction.

After seeing the lavishness of the building, the King dismissed and imprisoned Fouquet, took possession of the house for the crown, and soon put Le Vau to work to create his own palace in Versailles.

[3] The same three artists scaled this concept to monumental proportions in the royal hunting lodge and later main Palace of Versailles (1661–1690).

In 1665, the chief minister of Louis XIV, Jean Colbert, invited the most famous architect and sculptor of the Italian Baroque, Gian Lorenzo Bernini to Paris, to propose a design for the new east wing of the Louvre, located on the eastern side of the Cour Carrée (Square Courtyard).

[5] It featured the giant order, that is, a long row of double columns two stories high, resting on top of a massive lower level[6] with tall, segmental-arched windows, modeled on those used for the Renaissance-style Lescot Wing.

The façade, like the new Louvre wing, featured colossal order columns, while the roof was flat with a terrance, decorated with balustrades, pilasters, balconies, statues, and trophies.

The new Palace was open to almost any visitor, and became an immense theatre, where the King carried out his ceremonies, with meticulous protocol, in public view.

The gardens created by André Le Nôtre were designed to complement the architecture of the palace and to express, by it geometric alleys, pools, rows of the trees, flower beds and fountains, the mastery of the King over nature.

[10] The final piece of the Palace was the Chapel, begun in 1689 to the designs of Hardouin-Mansart and completed by Robert de Cotte in 1708–1710.

Inspired by the Church of the Gesù in Rome, it featured a façade with the three orders of columns, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, arranged in stages one above the other.

[15] The interiors of new parish churches, such as Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Louis-en-l'Île and Saint-Roch largely followed the traditional gothic floor-plan of Notre-Dame, though they did add façades and certain other decorative features from the Italian Baroque.

The first Parisian church to have a dome was the chapel of the whose façade is now found in the courtyard of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts on rue Bonaparte in Paris.

This design featured a hemispherical dome on a tall octagonal drum, the first of its type in France, with four small cupolas in the angles of the Greek cross above the Corinthian order columns on the façade.

A much larger and higher dome on the Italian Baroque model was begun by François Mansart, then Jacques Lemercier and completed by Pierre Le Muet for the chapel of the royal hospital and abbey of Val-de-Grace (1645–1665).

The Chapel of the Collège des Quatre-Nations, (now the Institut de France by Louis Le Vau and François d'Orbay (1662–1668) was built with a bequest from Cardinal Mazarin across the Seine from Louvre, and contains his tomb.

[18] The residential building style known as the hôtel particulier reached its maturity during the Baroque era, particularly in Paris, where members of the nobility built their town houses.

"[19] The early hôtels particuliers in Paris were influenced partly by Italian architecture and the model of the Luxembourg Palace, on a smaller scale.

A smaller square, Place Dauphine, originally with thirty-two houses, was built on the Île de la Cité next to the Pont Neuf between 1607 and 1610.

The old brick and stone of the Henry IV squares was replaced by the Grand Style of monumental columns, which usually were part of the façade itself, rather than standing separately.

Following the example of the earlier squares, it featured an equestrian statue of Louis XV, which was pulled down during the French Revolution.

Louis XV built other monumental squares following the same architectural model in the centers of Rennes and Bordeaux.

Another notable square, Place Stanislas, was built in the city of Nancy, in Lorraine, shortly before that duchy was formally attached to France.