ABSTRACT

I have until now left aside Viollet-le-Duc’s design work from the 1860s. Yet the period was definitely his most creative, including his famous series of iron projects published in the second volume of the Entretiens sur l’architecture. In terms of built work, excluding Notre-Dame, which was completed in 1864, his most important and extraordinary accomplishments were the restoration of the walled city of Carcassonne, carried out for the most part between 1862 and 1870 (Fig. 12.1), and the restoration of the Château de Pierrefonds in Oise (Picardy), a project begun in 1858, interrupted during the war of 1870-1871, and resumed at a much slower pace right up to his death in 1879 (Fig. 12.2). These two enterprises mark a high point in Viollet-le-Duc’s engagement with the Middle Ages. Pierrefonds is certainly the most impressive. The colossal ruin of the fortified twelfth-century castle, rebuilt in the last years of the fourteenth and first years of the fifteenth centuries, ruined at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and rebuilt over a period of 20 years under Violletle-Duc’s direction, was meant to provide a full-scale archaeological lesson in defensive military architecture. That lesson extended to the surrounding park, where an historical sampling of various techniques used to construct masonry battlements was cleverly laid out by Viollet-le-Duc for the great pleasure of his patron, Napoleon III.2 The didactic historical program extended even beyond, as Pierrefonds was one among a series of historical sites in the Forest of Compiègne subject to archaeological investigations initiated by the emperor and under Viollet-le-Duc’s direction. Most notable among these were the Gallo-Roman remains at Champlieu and one of the so-called Caesar’s camps at Saint-Pierre-en-Chastres. Pierrefonds was of course the most significant and scenic site, eventually intended to become a museum of the Middle Ages, counterpart of the Gallo-Roman museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.3