Louis Philippe style

In literature and music, France had a golden age, as the home of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and other major poets and artists.

Unlike his Bourbon predecessors, he wore business dress, not formal robes, he lived in Paris, and he shunned ceremonies; he carried his own umbrella, and imposed no official styles.

Louis Philippe furniture had the same types and forms as the earlier French Restoration style, but with less decoration; comfort was the primary consideration.

The style of public buildings under Louis-Philippe was determined by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, or Academy of Fine Arts, whose Perpetual Secretary from 1816 to 1839 was Quatremère de Quincy, a confirmed neoclassicist.

The architectural style of public buildings and monuments was intended to associate Paris with the virtues and glories of ancient Greece and Rome, as it had been under Louis XIV, Napoleon and the Restoration.

Following the return to Paris of the ashes of Napoleon from Saint Helena in 1840, they were placed with great ceremony in a tomb designed by Louis Visconti beneath the church of Les Invalides.

Much of the work was directed by the architect and historian Viollet-le-Duc, who sometimes, as he admitted, was guided by his own scholarship of the "spirit" of Medieval architecture, rather strict historical accuracy.

The other major restoration projects were Sainte-Chapelle and the Hôtel de Ville, dating to the 17th century; the old buildings which pressed up against the back of the Hôtel de Ville were cleared away; two new wings were added, the interiors were lavishly redecorated, and the ceilings and walls of the large ceremonial salons were painted with murals by Eugène Delacroix.

They instituted teaching about a variety of architectural styles at the École des Beaux-Arts, and installed fragments of Renaissance and Medieval buildings in the courtyard of the school so students could draw and copy them.

[3] Finely-crafted inlaid furniture in the traditional fashion continued to be made in Paris by craftsmen such as Georges-Alphonse Jacob-Desmalter (1799–1870), the grandson of Georges Jacob, the royal cabinet maker for Louis XVI.

[4] The most prominent sculptor of the Louis Philippe style was the Swiss-born James Pradier, who made one of the most important monumental works of the period, a group of statues of The Victories that surround the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Other sculptors with more enduring fame were François Rude, who made his celebrated La Marseillaise sculpture (formally known as The departure of the volunteers), a ten-meter high bas-relief for the Arc de Triomphe (1833–36), a project begun by Napoleon and completed by Louis Philippe.

[5] The two most important painters of the Louis Philippe period, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres were completely opposite in style, philosophy and temperament; Delacroix, the champion of romanticism, painted his celebrated Liberty Leading the People in 1830, shortly after the 1830 revolution that brought Louis Philippe to power, personifying the figure of Liberté as a bare-breasted classical goddess in the baroque style.

[6] Another notable painter of the period was Thomas Couture (1815-1879), a student of Antoine-Jean Gros, a muralist in the style called "Theatrical Romanticism".

The finished painting borrowed from the old masters, the classicists, and the romantics, crowding dozens of figures into a single canvas depicting Roman decadence.

[7] The reign of Louis Philippe was a golden age for French literature; many of France's most famous writers published major works.

François-René de Chateaubriand refused to swear allegiance to Louis-Philippe, and instead secluded himself in his apartment at 120 Rue du Bac and wrote his most famous work, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, which was not published until after his death.

He died in Paris on 4 July 1848, during the French Revolution of 1848. in 1832 Honoré de Balzac conceived the idea of a series of books that would paint a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society;" eventually called La Comédie Humaine.

The famed tenor Adolphe Nourrit, who had starred in the operas of Rossini, went onto the stages of Paris and emotionally sang the Marseillaise, which had been forbidden during the First Empire and the Restoration.

The most famous musical exile in Paris was Frédéric Chopin, who arrived in September 1831 at the age of twenty-one, and did not return to Congress Poland because of the crushing of the Polish uprising against Russian rule in November 1831.

He earned his living from commissions given by wealthy patrons, including the wife of James Mayer de Rothschild, from publishing his compositions and giving private lessons.

He had come to Paris from Grenoble in 1821 to study medicine, which he abandoned for music in 1824, attending the Conservatory in 1826, and won the Prix de Rome for his compositions in 1830.

[11] Three Paris theaters were permitted to produce operas under Louis Philippe: The Royal Academy of Music at the Salle Le Peletier; the Opéra-Comique; and the Théâtre-Italien, nicknamed "Les Bouffes".

In February, the government handed over management of the theater to a gifted entrepreneur, Doctor Louis-Désiré Véron, who had become wealthy selling medicinal ointments.

[12] The Opéra-Comique also enjoyed great success, largely due to the talents of the scenarist Eugène Scribe, who wrote ninety works for the theater, put to music by forty different composers, including Daniel Auber, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy (La Juive (1835)), Cherubini, Donizetti, Gounod and Verdi (for whom he wrote Les vêpres siciliennes).

Scribe left behind the grand mythological themes of earlier French opera, and wrote stories from a variety of historical periods which, with a mixture of strong emotion, humor and romanticism, exactly suited the taste of Parisian audiences.

The Concert Society of the Paris Conservatory was founded in 1828, especially to play the symphonies of Beethoven – one at each performance, along with works by Mozart, Hayden and Handel.

A new style, Romantic ballet, was born on March 12, 1832, with the premiere of La Sylphide at the Salle Le Peletier, with choreography by Filippo Taglioni and music by Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer.

The Café Turc opened a garden with a series of concert-promenades in the spring of 1833, which alternated symphonic music with quadrilles and airs for dancing.

In June 1848 the musical clubs were banned from meeting, as the government tried, without success, to stop the political unrest, which finally exploded into the 1848 French Revolution.