Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Place de la Bastille
- 1 ‘What's that poor creature doing here?’: the area and the fortress before the Revolution of 1789
- 2 ‘Thought blew the Bastille apart’: the fall of the fortress and the revolutionary years, 1789–1815
- 3 ‘The strategy of the generals of Africa shattered’: the Restoration, Orleanist and Second Republic Years, 1815–1851
- 4 ‘Where is the noise of the storm that I love?’: The Second Empire from Haussmann to the Commune
- 5 ‘Satan's bagpipes’: La Belle Époque's forty-three years of peace
- 6 ‘Villains, stars and everybody in between’: The First War and the entre-deux-guerres
- 7 ‘Slicked hair and splendid sideburns’: Occupation and Liberation
- 8 ‘Let's have some sun!’: post-Gaullism and the Mitterrand years
- 9 ‘A building, not a monument’: the construction of the Bastille Opéra
- 10 ‘A real earthquake’: the impact of the Opéra on the quartier.
- 11 Flânerie in the archive: the Faubourg/Bastille today
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘The strategy of the generals of Africa shattered’: the Restoration, Orleanist and Second Republic Years, 1815–1851
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Place de la Bastille
- 1 ‘What's that poor creature doing here?’: the area and the fortress before the Revolution of 1789
- 2 ‘Thought blew the Bastille apart’: the fall of the fortress and the revolutionary years, 1789–1815
- 3 ‘The strategy of the generals of Africa shattered’: the Restoration, Orleanist and Second Republic Years, 1815–1851
- 4 ‘Where is the noise of the storm that I love?’: The Second Empire from Haussmann to the Commune
- 5 ‘Satan's bagpipes’: La Belle Époque's forty-three years of peace
- 6 ‘Villains, stars and everybody in between’: The First War and the entre-deux-guerres
- 7 ‘Slicked hair and splendid sideburns’: Occupation and Liberation
- 8 ‘Let's have some sun!’: post-Gaullism and the Mitterrand years
- 9 ‘A building, not a monument’: the construction of the Bastille Opéra
- 10 ‘A real earthquake’: the impact of the Opéra on the quartier.
- 11 Flânerie in the archive: the Faubourg/Bastille today
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The July Column which now stands in the centre of the Place de la Bastille was a long time in the planning. The foundation-stone of a column, which was to sit atop a scale model of the fortress, had been laid on 14 July 1792, but the Convention abandoned the project. Jacques-Louis David, foreshadowing the Egyptophilia of Napoleon's elephant, built a large plaster fountain in 1793 in the form of the goddess Isis, but this was a transitory phenomenon. Not until Louis-Philippe had taken power, in 1830, was it decided to erect a monument not only to 1789 but also to the July Days that had brought him to power. For the revolutionary Faubourg this was a dubious tribute; to quote Jean-Paul Blais:
Marquer dans ce quartier la naissance de la monarchie parlementaire est une récupération affichée de la colère des faubourgs. N'est-ce pas une manière d'affirmer que la liberté et l'ordre appartiennent d'abord au pouvoir dominant?
To mark in this quartier the birth of parliamentary monarchy was a clear-cut recuperation of the anger of the faubourgs. Was it not a way of affirming that liberty and order belong above all to the dominant regime?
Hugo, for his part, was to describe the column as ‘le monument manqué d'une révolution avortée’/ ‘the failed monument of an abortive revolution’, all but disregarding its homage to 1789 and perceiving it, with a measure of accuracy, as a eulogy to the Orleanist monarchy. Louis-Philippe laid the foundation stone on 28 July 1831, though the monument was not to be completed for nine years. Its most striking feature is the figure of liberty that crowns it, often known as ‘Le Génie de la Bastille’, which has given its name to a contemporary association for the propagation of artistic activity in the quartier. The ‘Génie’, four metres high (the column measures just over forty-six), was the work of Auguste Dumont, and depicts a clearly male figure holding broken chains in one hand and the torch of freedom in the other. The female republican icon Marianne might have been thought a better choice, but Adolphe Thiers, doyen of conservative republicanism for many years and Prime Minister at the time the monument was being planned, was determined to avoid so potentially incendiary a symbol.
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- The Place de la BastilleThe Story of a Quartier, pp. 44 - 63Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011