Keywords

• Historically &ndash
• chronologically
• ideologically &ndash
• the theoretical approach of French art in the first three decades of the nineteenth century
• corresponding to the Directory
• Consulate
• Empire and Restoration and its immediate offshoots
• remains too fragmented
• as if each political system
• withdrawn into itself
• sufficed to explain the symbolic and aesthetic orientation of the architects of the time. Yet the lives of artists transcend the periodization of political regimes
• especially when it comes to periods that are too short (with four political upheavals between 1795 and 1830) to have known the beginning of the development of their destiny - and whatever
• the perennial reforms or institutional creations that the Directory and the Empire bequeathed to posterity.
• It is
• moreover
• the consideration of this fate that motivates most of the studies of art history in which
• starting from posterity
• we adopt a retrospective judgment
• too often simplified
• of the traditionalist
• academic
• modernist or forward-looking aspirations of the architect «in his time».
• The argument presented here about the role of the (French and Italian) Renaissance in the stylistic inspiration of the architects active from the end of the Ancien Régime down to the Restoration rejects any idea of a rupture between the eighteenth century and the three first decades of the nineteenth. Whatever the aesthetic and symbolic attitudes of refusal
• rejection or
• by contrast
• of actualisation
• we need to understand the developments that inflected individual careers and to raise issues related to certain paradoxes that will distance us from any idea of ??a stylistic consensus. The first question is Palladianism &ndash
• partly eluding the renascent Historicism &ndash
• which in France made a great international movement idiomatic
• observed over some two centuries. The second is the sentiment expressed for a national «taste» in art
• long before the spirit of the nationalisms that animated the development of the European nineteenth century. It justified the anti-Vitruvianism of revolutionary architecture under the Ancien Régime
• before fostering the neomedieval inspiration of the rebels of the July Monarchy. Finally
• we have to explore the nascent historicist attitude
• which was obsessed with the reference to different schools and periods of the Renaissance
• to discover in it the triumphant Eclecticism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts &ndash
• but only after the period considered here!