The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France

Iris Moon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315316260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'architecture

As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine's desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.

1 Visionary friendship at the end of the ancien régime

On July 14, 2015, I spent a hot afternoon at Père Lachaise Cemetery on the quixotic quest to find the triple grave of the architects Charles Percier, Claude-Louis Bernier, and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine. Bernier, the quiet and forgotten third partner in this passionate architectural triangle, was the first to go in 1830. Six months after his death and two months before the start of the July Revolution, Fontaine had completed the monument that would mark his friend’s final resting place, one that would become Percier’s in 1838 and ultimately his own in 1853: “Two small vaults prepared below, one for me, the other for my friend Percier, will receive one day, when our hour will come, our ashes which must be united with his, as we had always desired.”¹ Pictured in Fontaine’s journal and found online, the vertical grave marker is an elegant, but rather unassuming thing (Figure 1.1). Composed of a piece of Vergelet stone faceted into eight planes, the dolefully worn column is crowned by a funerary vase with carved flames licking out of the top. Each facet incorporates the architectural tools of the compass and plumb bob along the base. At the top of each plane is the repeating motif of sheaves of wheat bundled by a piece of ribbon with the engraved words ex utile decus, “out of usefulness comes decoration,” a Latin device that neatly captures the kind of work in the interior for which Percier and Fontaine gained fame. Upon his own death, Fontaine requested that his children add another inscription: Hi tres in unum (“they are three in one”). Found elsewhere, the motto could have easily been interpreted as a profession of Christian piety or perhaps revolutionary fervor. Here on the column, this compressed expression captures the terminus of a lasting but earthly friendship.

Figure 1.1 Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, tomb of Charles Percier, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, and Claude-Louis Bernier, 1830. Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.

Source: © Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, licensed under Creative Commons.

I did not find the architects’ triple grave at Père Lachaise, despite the visions dancing in my head of miraculously unearthing the final resting place of this book’s protagonists on Bastille Day. Yet walking past the once imperious funerary chapels devoted to France’s most ancient families, accidentally stepping on barely perceptible marble slabs marked with last names overgrown by weeds, and scornfully passing by Jim Morrison’s recessed tomb filled with plastic flowers and youthful hippies, what did emerge was the singularly strange and moving vision of executing a terminal monument to oneself and two devoted friends. Fontaine demands that we remember him through the friendship he built with Percier and Bernier. So let us honor his wishes in departing from their final resting place six feet under the elegiac piece of stone hidden somewhere in the hilly terrain of Père Lachaise, and turn to the architects’ youthful origins in the waning years of the ancien régime.

The work of friendship forged between Percier and Fontaine in late eighteenth-century France is the primary focus of this chapter (Bernier will make occasional appearances as well). As a prelude to their work in revolutionary Paris, the chapter considers how they met first as students in 1779 at the private school of Antoine-François Peyre, entered the Académie royale d’architecture independently, and undertook the transformative journey to Rome where they came to study the ancient monuments together in order to create their modern vision of architecture. The changing pedagogical context of the academy will play a key role in visualizing their early formation and the processes through which they became architects. However, I want to draw equal attention to the skills that allowed them to achieve success during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. These were not to be found at school in Paris, but within the intense and liberated atmosphere of the Académie de France in Rome, where friendships reigned supreme and in many ways determined the direction of one’s artistic output. It is for this reason that the construction of Percier and Fontaine’s friendship, characterized above all by an internal and fundamental difference, is critical to understanding the broader model of their architectural partnership. Together, they formed a horizontal mode of architectural practice that developed out of the collaborative and competitive spirit of learning and making art together that prevailed in Rome. Certainly, the relationship that Percier and Fontaine cultivated in the ancient city was part of a longer lineage of an artistic education shared among peers that had characterized the academy since its establishment in the seventeenth century. As Marianne Roland Michel has indicated, students often studied objects side by side, comparing, correcting, and copying each other’s sketches, transforming authored studies into exchanged librum amicorum.² However, the circumstances of Percier and Fontaine’s return to Paris distinguished their friendship from the ones that had preceded it. For within the charged atmosphere of revolutionary France, the architects depended upon an informal network of artistic friends and collaborators rather than connected mentors or rich patrons in order to find work and establish their reputations. At the same time, the Revolution’s political culture and its emphasis on equality and fraternity allowed them to publicly cultivate a unique working relationship.

Among the most challenging aspects of exploring Percier and Fontaine’s partnership is the difficulty of ascertaining precisely on what terms it operated, and to what degree their relations were intimate or sexual, confraternal or transactional.³ In lieu of offering a definitive answer, I want to suggest that it was precisely the openness of their friendship that enabled them to succeed as architects. As their grave at Père Lachaise indicates, Percier and Fontaine were always more than two individuals. There was a host of other artistic cohorts who wove in and out of their union, especially Bernier, who contributed in unacknowledged ways to the partnership, whether it was engraving plates for their collective publications or sharing his living quarters with Percier at the Louvre until his death. In this chapter, I want to take seriously the open structure of their friendship in order to challenge traditional approaches to the architects of this period, which tend to profess a monographic devotion to a single genius or to personify institutions. The partnership of Percier and Fontaine had two heads (and a shadowy third one in Bernier), and what makes these two individuals so compelling is the various artistic, political, and artisanal networks of people and practices that they brought together. Such hard-to-define partnerships became vital during the Revolution, when working in teams became an optimal way of creating projects that answered the multivalent demands of the new government and its people.

What is the work of friendship? It is a strange thing. Some friendships are defined by elective affinities of a private nature while others are made for the sake of convenience. Like marriages, amity can end in bitter enmity. And certainly, not all friendships are alike. They can be magnetic, drawing together opposite personalities into an intense bond of mutual interests, like Maximilien de Robespierre’s political friendship with Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, the latter seeking to found a revolutionary political community upon a cult of amitié, a form of friendship publicly enforced and consummated in death, its enemies forever exiled:

All men of twenty-one years must declare who his friends are in the temple. This declaration must be renewed, every year, during the month of Ventôse … Those who have remained united all of their lives are enclosed within the same tomb … Those who say they do not believe in friendship, or who do not have any friends, are banished.⁴

The strong difference of personality that they actively cultivated and consummated within a professional architectural union of opposite approaches marked Percier and Fontaine out from other types of artistic collaboration. While Percier honed his talents as a meticulous draftsman and designer specializing in ornament and decoration, Fontaine cultivated a gift for writing, record-keeping, and managing large-scale projects, alongside creating moody and picturesque drawings informed by a liquid aesthetic. Even Bernier’s quiet and placating spirit played a role within the economy of friendship, out of which the three developed their professional identities.

Rather than see it as opportunism alone, even Fontaine’s belabored attempts to describe himself in relation to Percier played a critical role in shaping their public image. It is primarily the textual, oft-repeated narrative of their friendship, mentioned in Fontaine’s journal countless times and pronounced in eulogies and biographies afterward, which separates them from earlier but equally fruitful architectural partnerships. Jacques-Guillaume Legrand and Jacques Molinos may have shared a library, but they did not textually commemorate their partnership to the same degree as Percier and Fontaine.⁵

In thinking about the narrative of their friendship as it was continually mediated and edited on the page, my aim here is not to reduce the architects’ lives to Fontaine’s controlling narrative. Instead, the goal is to draw attention to the ways in which their complex affiliations were produced alongside other equally important forms of architectural practice on the space of the page. As Fontaine himself is aware in describing his journal, paper is a lieu de mémoire: “I recognized the utility of a work that was for me nothing more than simple relaxation, having for its sole objective the need to relieve my memory and to entrust [confier] paper with things that [my memory] would otherwise not retain.”⁶ Compressed from bits of rag, marked, torn up and reused, paper in its multiplicities retains traces of psychic economies, the investments and divestments of those who mark and claim it as a site for creation. Relationships too are a form of paperwork. So to the countless plans, sections, elevations, doodles, and words that Percier and Fontaine will put on paper in order to become architects, I want to add the difficult labor of making a friendship last beyond the tender age of youth.

Clean sheets and water magic

How much do our future professions depend on the prior work of our parents? In ancien régime France, it was largely expected that if you were born into a family with a specific trade, you would presumably carry on that model of work as your inheritance and your professional identity.⁷ This typical familial background makes Percier and Fontaine’s friendship doubly unique. For rather than ties of kinship, it is friendship that figures so prominently as the source of their identities, its creation serving as their origin myth. So let us start with one version written at the end of Fontaine’s life, where it is Percier, not his father or mother, who comes to his old and increasingly foggy mind.

Just ten months before his death, Fontaine turned to his earliest memories as a student of architecture. The 90-year-old architect had ceased keeping daily records of official activities in his journal. Instead, his entries became more reflective, blending commentary on the tumultuous political events that had recently brought Napoleon III to power with reminiscences of his youth. On January 30, 1853, Fontaine recalled the first pact of friendship he had made with Percier. In 1779, they met in the studio of the architect and academician Antoine-François Peyre (le jeune). Their first encounter could have been the start of a bitter rivalry. Instead, Fontaine writes that upon seeing Percier, he immediately decided to forge an alliance.

Monsieur Peyre’s school was crowded. I did not delay in recognizing, among so many students of different countries and ages, he who Providence had created in order to share in the fortune and the luck of a long life that was given to us. I immediately made the first sincere pact of friendship with him that endured for more than fifty years, and which only his death, too premature, could bring to an end.⁸

In his text, Fontaine conjures a sense of destiny in this early encounter. There is the recognition of a superior artist, a better half. As Fontaine wrote, “I viewed him much less as my rival than as my master, for I recognized in him a superiority of talents more extensive and more admired than mine were.”⁹ It might mark what Aristotle termed a “first friendship,” first in chronology, but also in terms of rank, the exemplary union that defines all others. However, we need to slightly amend Fontaine’s account of this early encounter, since all other evidence points to the fact that the architects did not begin wor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Finding revolutionary architecture in the decorative arts
• 1. Visionary friendship at the end of the ancien régime
• 2. Propulsion and residue: Constructing the revolutionary interior
• 3. The Recueil de décorations intérieures: Furnishing a new order
• 4. The platinum cabinet: Luxury in times of uncertainty
• 5. Tent and throne: Architecture in a state of emergency
• Coda: Revolutionary atonement
• Selected bibliography
• Index