ABSTRACT
The French architects Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853) are remembered today as the official architects of Napoleon Bonaparte and the creators of the Empire style, yet little remains of the extensive projects they executed on behalf of a patron whose power at its height spanned much of the European continent. One of the few traces of the architects’ imperial commissions is the Arc du Carrousel (Plate 1). Located today at the entrance of the Tuileries Garden in Paris and built on an axis with the Arc de Triomphe at the Champs-Élysées, the arch was begun in 1806 and completed in just over one year.1 The monument was designed to celebrate the military successes of Napoleon and the Grande Armée and is partitioned on each principal side into three openings framed by four pink and green Corinthian columns placed on high pedestals and surmounted by statues, with an additional passageway piercing the transverse axis. Lavishly carved basreliefs, classical ornaments, and spolia decorate the structure, which had at one point been crowned by the Horses of Saint Mark, seized by French forces from Venice in 1797 as war spoils and claimed as national property (but returned in 1815). Although it evokes the ancient Roman monuments dedicated to the heroic conquests of Constantine and Septimius Severus that Percier and Fontaine had studied in their youth, the imperial structure found in Paris is more modest in scale. Bruno Klein writes that in evoking the ephemeral architecture of Baroque triumphal processions, Percier and Fontaine’s arch symbolized Napoleon’s attempts to bypass the French Revolution and graft the Empire’s military glory onto the achievements of France’s monarchical past.2 The architects had originally constructed the monument as the entrance to the Tuileries Palace, the dilapidated royal residence claimed by Napoleon as the urban seat of his newfound military and imperial power, a symbolic status it maintained under successive French governments until its destruction by the Paris Commune in 1871.3
The Arc du Carrousel formed only one small part of Percier and Fontaine’s ambitious plans to remake the image of Paris, from organizing streets and regularizing façades into a network of axial routes to joining the Tuileries and Louvre together in order to form a cohesive administrative and residential complex in the heart of the city. These urban planning schemes formed the counterpart to the architects’ crowning vision: the Palais du roi de Rome, a sprawling palace projected onto the Chaillot hill in an area known today as the Trocadéro. Architectural historians have traditionally viewed the unbuilt palace along with Percier and Fontaine’s plans to join the Louvre and Tuileries as the truest expressions of the triumphal sovereign architecture they had envisioned for modern imperial France.4 Intended for the future king of Rome, Napoleon’s successor born from his second wife Marie-Louise, the palace would have featured trimmed lawns, ebullient fountains, and a cascading set of stairs leading down to the Seine, surpassing in its magnificence and grandeur the villa estates
built by powerful Italian popes which the architects had carefully sketched as students (Figure I.1). On the other side of the river across from the imperial residence, Percier and Fontaine arranged a vast system of government-sponsored institutions that would have included an archive, military parade grounds, a university campus, and a city of the arts, a totalizing urban plan that would have brought the bureaucracy, the military, and the arts under the watchful and all-seeing gaze of Napoleon.
