Table of Contents for this Episode
Category: French History
[00:00:00]
Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, episode 596, cinq cent quatre-vingt-seize.
Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent, and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.
Today on the podcast
Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a conversation with a licensed tour guide who knows French art and architecture inside and out, my good friend Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks.
If you’ve visited Notre-Dame de Paris, Carcassonne, or Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, you’ve already seen his work, whether you knew it or not, and many, many other works.
His name was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and this episode will change how you [00:01:00] look at France’s medieval landmarks.
Podcast supporters
Annie Sargent: Before we start, this show runs on listener support.
If you want to work with me directly, I do itinerary consults, VoiceMap tours of Paris, and day trips around the southwest of France.
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Magazine segment
Annie Sargent: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll discuss the Paris catacombs that had a makeover recently and what to expect now that they’ve reopened to the public.
Meet Viollet-le-Duc
Annie Sargent: Bonjour, Elyse.
Elyse Rivin: Bonjour, Annie.
Annie Sargent: We are going to talk about Viollet-le-Duc today. And you know what? I [00:02:00] thought Viollet was his first name, and it is not.
Elyse Rivin: It’s Eugène.
Annie Sargent: Exactly. It’s Eugène is his first name. Viollet was the family name on his father’s side, and Le-Duc was the family name on his mother’s side, and so he was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. Actually, he was Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.
Elyse Rivin: Yes, he was. He was all those things.
Annie Sargent: Yes. And we see stuff of his all over France, really. He’s mentioned everywhere. It seems like he had, you know, a lot of … There were robots working for him or something. I don’t know.
Elyse Rivin: He had his finger in every pot, let’s put it that way. Yes.
Annie Sargent: Yes, yes, yes. So I’m looking forward to learning more about him because I just know him superficially, but I know you’re going to do a great job explaining.
Fame and Big Restorations
Elyse Rivin: But I know you know him in relation to Notre-Dame de Paris.
Annie Sargent: [00:03:00] I sure do.
Elyse Rivin: You sure do, right?
Annie Sargent: Yeah. And also Carcassonne and also, I mean, a lot of places really.
Elyse Rivin: My guess is that there are a good majority of the people out there who are going to listen to this podcast who have been to see either Notre-Dame de Paris or Carcassonne or both. And I’m sure that there are people that have heard stories or read a little bit about what did he do, what didn’t he do, how did he change things. He was actually a rather extraordinary personnage, a real character. I don’t know what he would’ve been like to talk to in person. But he had a very really very interesting life, and certainly one of the things that we can say about him is that he was sure of himself, and he was sure of his ideas.
Annie Sargent: This is something that happens with a lot of famous people, is that in the end, they tend to be the ones that were, that had the most self-assurance. Like, they [00:04:00] never doubted themselves all that much, you know. They just went for it.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And I think, this is a strange parallel to make because of just what you said this second, but in the world of pure painting, somebody like that was Picasso, whom you either love or hate his work, or you like some of it and not some of it. But he was someone also who was extremely talented from childhood on and who never doubted anything about his worth as an artist. And so yes, I agree with you. I think there are people like that.
And of course, one of the things that happens is that sometimes, like in the case of Viollet-le-Duc, he’s born into a world that is perfect for what he is talented in and what happens to him.
Annie Sargent: Right. And a counterexample of this would be Van Gogh because he really struggled with-
Elyse Rivin: Self-doubt.
Annie Sargent: … self-doubt. Yeah, he worked a ton, but he wasn’t so sure of [00:05:00] himself.
Elyse Rivin: And he came from a conservative family, where being an artist was not necessarily the most wonderful thing in the world, you know. So-
Annie Sargent: Anyway, the topic today is Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.
Elyse Rivin: And so Monsieur Viollet-le-Duc, who I’m from now on going to simply call Le Duc because there’s too much to his name, he was born in Paris in 1814, and he actually died in Switzerland, we’ll talk about that at the end, which is very surprising, actually it surprised me, in the city of Lausanne in 1879 at the age of 65.
And before talking a little bit about his life, I spent a lot of time online and printed out two pages of the list of the monuments and structures that he actually worked on. It is incredibly long.
So just to give an idea and just to mention a few, because obviously there are far too many to talk about, and there are some that I have never heard [00:06:00] of, he did lots of churches, he did lots of chateaus, he did private residences. He even actually had constructed five houses in his wonderful version of Neo-Gothic style in the middle of the 19th century.
But of course, the ones that most people have heard of are, first of all, Notre-Dame de Paris. He did work on the Sainte-Chapelle as well. He started by working on the Basilica of Saint-Denis. He worked on the Cathedral of Amiens. He worked on the Hospice of Beaune, the Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, which is a place that most people do not visit, but is very interesting. He did the Basilica of Vézelay, which is one of the beginnings of the route of the Compostelle, and he did Saint-Sernin in Toulouse and, of course, the most famous and the biggest of his work sites, which was Carcassonne.
Annie Sargent: Right.
What Restoration Means
Annie Sargent: So when you say he worked on them, what do you mean? He drew the plans? He was, like, the project manager?
Elyse Rivin: He was in [00:07:00] charge officially of the restoration of these structures. And as an official government, basically working for the ministry of the government that employed him, he was in charge of looking at these monuments that usually had something falling apart because most of them were from the 12th century, 13th century, 14th century, and he was the one who could decide how to restore them.
So these were never projects where he actually built from scratch, but some of them, he simply rebuilt a little bit of what was there. But in many of these cases, and the ones that are, of course, the most famous, he actually added things and changed them according to his ideas of what they should have looked like.
Notice the amount of conditional I am using in this. It’s wonderful language, because that is basically what [00:08:00] eventually made him both famous and notorious. This is a man that you either loved or hated because of his ideas.
And so let’s go back a little bit to talk about how this came to be, and how he actually wound up being the person that he was.
Palace Childhood and Talent
Elyse Rivin: So, he actually grew up living in the Palace of the Tuileries.
Annie Sargent: Oh, wow.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. I mean, you know, eh, I’m going to live in a little bit of a palace, you know, in-
Annie Sargent: Okay, this palace is not there anymore?
Elyse Rivin: No, it’s not there anymore. But it was a beautiful place, yes. If you imagine, it’s where if you go from the Louvre across the Tuileries, you have the Orangerie on one side, and this palace was on the other side. It was right there. It was this huge, enormous palace that had been built by Madam Marie de Medici.
The reason he lived there was because his father was in charge of royal residences under the reign of Louis Philippe. So we’re talking about the [00:09:00] 1830s, 1820s, 1830s, when his father became the head conservator of royal residences. And his mother had a salon. She was the daughter of artists and architects. She was extremely well-educated. She apparently was very well-known, and both his parents were considered to be rather liberal, more or less interestingly republican in the French sense of not necessarily royalist, but still were hired by and encouraged to work under Louis Philippe, who was one of those kings that was not quite a king, you know?
I mean, just a kind of interesting combination of what he was and what he wasn’t. And so that is where Viollet-le-Duc actually was born in and grew up. He had one younger brother, and it was just the two of them, and apparently, his father absolutely adored him and discovered that when he was just six years old, he was extremely gifted at drawing.
Annie Sargent: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: I mean, really gifted, I mean, in the sense of being able to reproduce anything he saw. [00:10:00] But apparently also, and this of course makes total sense when you know what he did with his life, he was fascinated by construction. I just kept thinking, what would he do with Lego sets today, you know, I mean… And how could he invent new things?
So this was really encouraged by his father, lucky him, who assumed that he would grow up to be an architect or some kind of designer, but that he would, of course, go through official channels.
And what you did if you wanted to go through official channels at that time, just like for painters and other artists, was you managed to get into the Beaux-Arts of Paris, which was the most prestigious and official school, and he certainly had the means and the connections to do so. He was sent away to school for a few years and then finished the equivalent of what we would call high school, lycée.
Rejecting Beaux-Arts
Elyse Rivin: And then to the great surprise of his parents and to everybody around him, he announced that he was not going to apply to go [00:11:00] to the Beaux-Arts de Paris for the simple reason that he decided that it would stifle his creativity.
And I find this fascinating because having spent a good part of my life training to be an artist, I really understand what he was talking about. That is, we’re talking about a time when if you wanted to be an artist, you went to school, and this was… You were told, "This is what you do. This is what you don’t do. This is how you do it. This is how you don’t do it. If you want to be accepted into the academy, if you want to have your works sold, if you want to be known," et cetera, et cetera. We’re presaging by a certain number of years what happened with Monet and the Impressionists, who, of course, were the ultimate group of rebels in relation to what would happen if you went to the academy.
Rebel Spirit and Revolution
Elyse Rivin: But before that, at the age of 16, in 1830, he participated and interestingly enough, in the July Revolution.
Annie Sargent: Oh, okay. So he was [00:12:00] politically involved as well.
Elyse Rivin: You know, I almost get the impression from all the readings I was doing that it was not so much out of political conviction as the idea of being a rebel.
Annie Sargent: Right.
Elyse Rivin: In a lot of the different articles I was reading all over the place, both in French and in English, and everybody says that he was just basically rebellious.
He had a family that loved him and backed him up, but basically, he was probably very arrogant. He had a sense of himself, even as a young man, and so he participated, and one of the things he did by participating in these strange three days in July of 1830, he was 16, is that he helped build the barricades, you know?
So you have this announcement, if you want to call it that of what is to come, you know? That he’s out there, he’s going to do what he wants to do, nobody’s going to stop him, and there you are.
So he didn’t get hurt, but apparently, the experience was something that stayed with him, the idea that [00:13:00] he could build something in relatively short amount of time, and that he could do something that was very different from what had existed before. So it’s very, very fascinating to me what happened. So there we are. We have a young man at the age of 18 who has decided and really surprised his family by refusing the enrollment that was waiting for him in the Academy of Beaux-Arts of Paris. And it was really, thanks to the fact that he had a little bit of money, and also his parents basically didn’t force him. We have to say that, otherwise I don’t know how it would’ve worked out. But I have a quote, because I think this is fascinating. This is directly what he said. This is what he said at the age of 18. He said, "If I had talent… If I have talent, I will succeed whether I go to the art school or not. And if I don’t have talent, going to the art school won’t make any difference."
Annie Sargent: He’s right, though.
Elyse Rivin: He’s absolutely right, and also, having gone to art school, [00:14:00] all I can say is he had nerve, you know? I mean, he really had this sense of who he was, or either that or he just basically did not care, right? He just didn’t care.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
France Sketching Tour
Elyse Rivin: So what happened was, between the ages of 18 and 20, he did something fascinating, and this is really how he discovered all of the old structures that wound up being what he worked on for the rest of his life. He spent the two years between the age of 18 and 20 traveling around France drawing. He drew thousands, and thousands, and thousands of little pictures. He did a lot of watercolors. I’ve seen a couple of them. They’re really beautiful. He was really very talented.
And by traveling around the country, he discovered how much there was of this heritage of old churches, old chateaux, old fortifications. They fascinated him. He was somewhere in his mind, I think, between being an architect and being an artist, or both at the same time.[00:15:00]
And so interestingly enough, even at that age, he was able to sell a lot of these drawings and watercolors and make some money, and started to actually make a name for himself by doing this. They don’t even know how many drawings and watercolors he actually did. He was that prolific. He was just… and it did help develop his ideas.
And one of the things that happened was that up until this time, we’re talking about the 1830s, there had not yet been a ministry of what we call now patrimoine. In other words, there was no official office in France that said, "This is what we do to preserve old chateaux and churches and buildings, and we take care of them." It was just the beginning of a time when people were thinking like that.
And so it was also a time when a lot of people, including people in Paris, thought that anything from the Middle Ages was very ugly, and they were willing to tear things down.
Here in Toulouse, they were… They tore down a whole bunch of medieval structures and even [00:16:00] Renaissance structures. And he brought to the attention of the world basically that there was something of value in ancient Gothic architecture, and he was fascinated particularly by what we now call Gothic architecture.
Annie Sargent: There’s always this thing about modernizing, you know, we need to modernize, we need buildings that are easier to live in, than what they built in the Middle Ages, but also we want to preserve. And that’s always a, kind of a fight between the two desires, I guess.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. Well, what’s interesting is that really up until basically the middle of the 1830s, especially starting after the Revolution, there was this disdain for all of these really ancient buildings, and there certainly were lots and lots of chateaux and churches that were starting to fall apart.
Annie Sargent: And we have a lot of them, too.
Elyse Rivin: And we have a lot of them, and we have a whole lot of them, you know? And all of the magnificent [00:17:00] cathedrals that were built 1100s, 1200s, 1300s, I mean, let’s face it, it takes a lot of time and money to try and keep all of these things from falling apart. So, it is fascinating to me that he formed himself, basically.
Gothic Theory and Nature
Elyse Rivin: And one of the things that happened, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life, was that he developed this idea, which I’m not even sure I agree with, because I really started thinking about this a lot. He also began writing. This is the other thing about him. He began writing articles and essays which have been collected. I mean, he wrote volumes of things over his lifetime.
But he developed a theory of his own, and he said that Gothic architecture was based on a unity of idea in terms of form. I’m really not sure that that’s the case, but this is, this became his mantra. I mean, this became his basic idea.
And he took that [00:18:00] as an idea that the Gothic architecture was inspired by nature. I personally am not sure that I see that, but he… This is what he wrote about. And so what he started to do was write these articles where he said that if you want to design anything, whether it’s a building, a church building, any other kind of building, or an object, because he was interested even in design of objects like furniture and everything inside and outside a structure, he said, "Look to nature for the forms."
Now, I’m not sure I see that in Gothic architecture. He insisted that that was the case. There was nobody around to argue with him.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, I mean, Gothic architecture to me looks very mineral and very rectangular. Like, nature doesn’t do that.
Elyse Rivin: You know, I think what he was looking at, first of all, you have the pointed arch in the basic, you know, Gothic structure which has that broken, pointed arch. For some reason, I think that reminded him of leaves.
Annie Sargent: Oh.[00:19:00]
Elyse Rivin: And then you have a little bit of the… with the gargoyles and with all of these little pieces that you have on the outside.
Annie Sargent: Well, that is true. It kind of… Those look like animals. They look organic.
Elyse Rivin: They look organic, you know. But what I find fascinating is that he insisted, and he started writing these articles saying that this is what you do. If you want to learn about form, look to nature.
And it turns out that it’s his writings, to my great surprise, really, it is his writings about Gothic architecture and looking and observing nature that became the basis for Art Nouveau.
Annie Sargent: Well, it makes sense because that’s what it was about. It was about, you know, all the beautiful shapes and all the elaborate curly cues and things.
Elyse Rivin: Except that when you look at a big, big, big Gothic cathedral, I mean, what you see basically is the grandeur of it with the points going up towards the sky. [00:20:00] So I find it interesting that he… this is what he saw, whatever.
Annie Sargent: Perhaps he was looking at a different scale. Perhaps he was looking at smaller details on cathedrals.
Elyse Rivin: Probably. I mean, you know, he was looking at something. I mean, this is… you know,
Annie Sargent: He was looking, we know that.
Elyse Rivin: He was looking, and he was convinced, he was absolutely convinced that this is what it was. So here’s this young man, precocious in every way, who, number one, at the age of 20 in 1834, gets married.
Annie Sargent: That’s early, even for 1834.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. I mean, she was only a year, I think, younger than him, a year or two younger, she was the sister of a friend that he met through his artistic circles.
Mérimée Patron and Teaching
Elyse Rivin: And coming back from these two years of travel, he had made friends with a man who is extremely important, and important not only in his life, but in general, and that is Prosper Mérimée.
Annie Sargent: Uh-huh.
Elyse Rivin: Now, Prosper Mérimée was, if I remember correctly, about 10 years older than him. He had met him [00:21:00] through his parents, through connections with his parents. He was a writer who was also, I didn’t realize until doing some research, an amateur archeologist, and he became… He was designated to be the first minister of culture for this new idea that was developing in France of going back and preserving the monuments that we have.
Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm.
Elyse Rivin: And he’s the one who was responsible for telling Viollet-le-Duc where to look for the things that he wanted him to preserve.
For instance, he’s the one that came eventually to Toulouse with him to look at Saint-Sernin. He’s the one that went and told him to go to Carcassonne and take a look at Carcassonne to see if that is what he could take care of. So they became very close friends, and Prosper Mérimée became his, basically his patron. And because of his position, and because he saw what Viollet-le-Duc was basically [00:22:00] doing, he appointed him. He appointed him to be a government official to help start looking at things and doing drawings, and he made him an assistant professor in what was called the Royal School of Design, which is now the National School of Decorative Arts.
Annie Sargent: Oh, okay.
Elyse Rivin: But what was funny about it is that, of course, for Viollet-le-Duc, this was not the same thing. He accepted it because decorative arts were not as rigid and fussy as the painting in the Beaux-Arts, you know.
And because the other thing is, and this, of course, follows up and is continued for over, well over 100 years in the theories of a lot of architects, he wrote and said, and this is even as 20, 21 year old, he said, "There is no such thing as just designing the outside of a building. You have to think about the inside, too. You have to think about the beauty, the lines, [00:23:00] the colors. Everything is a whole."
This was this theme that came over and over again in his work. Everything’s a whole. You don’t take just the outside, you put it together with the inside. And so he was adored by the students, even though he was their age, basically, and the reason he was adored is because he was a free thinker.
Annie Sargent: Right.
Elyse Rivin: Because he didn’t tell them, "You have to do this. You have to do that." That part of his life, I totally understand.
Annie Sargent: And he also had a fair bit of privilege. I mean, he knew a lot of these people. Like, the reason why other people need to have the degree is because they can’t just, you know, talk to their parents’ friends and get invited to do these things. There’s a lot of privilege in this story as well as talent and stubbornness.
Elyse Rivin: And stubbornness, certainly stubbornness. So apparently, his motto was, as a professor, and then of course for everything else, this is what he said. [00:24:00] He said, "Observe, copy, and learn from nature."
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: This was one of his mottos at the beginning.
Early Travels and Appointments
Elyse Rivin: In 1835, he visited Mont Saint-Michel for the first time.
Annie Sargent: Mm.
Elyse Rivin: Strangely enough, in the two years he had traveled around, he hadn’t visited. It’s interesting. And he was extremely in awe of the structure and, on this little island, you know, and the way there was multiple levels going all the way up to the top. He was fascinated by it.
And in the next year, in ’36, he traveled to Italy for approximately five, six months, and he financed that trip, fascinatingly, by the sale of one watercolor, I saw a reproduction of it online, that he sold to the king.
Annie Sargent: Oh, well, there you go.
Elyse Rivin: So talk about connections, right?
And it was in Italy that he discovered other kinds of styles of architecture and work from the Middle Ages, because it’s really not the same. The Gothic is definitely not the same in Italy as it is in France, and also Renaissance architecture, which [00:25:00] there’s far more of, of course, in Italy.
By the age of 23, he became a under inspector of buildings. I’m not sure what an over inspector of buildings does, you know. But he became under inspector of buildings, and then he became part of the Council for the Saving of Civilian Structures. All of this, as you say, is partly because of the connections that he had. But notice the age at which he’s so precociously involved in all these things, right?
Annie Sargent: But clearly he impressed a lot of people in high places who were impressed by his youth and his idea and his enthusiasm and his energy. Yeah, you need a lot of that.
Elyse Rivin: And apparently, really, he was basically a self-taught architect. He taught himself about structure, about materials, about how to do all of these things. He was fascinated by it, and he was brilliant enough that he really did learn a lot of this, the engineering [00:26:00] side of all of it. He did eventually, of course, work with a team. He had assistants, and he had a team working with him.
But he knew enough that he could really talk about what materials, the size of things, the, you know, the push of and the pull of things like that. He was not just simply this artist that looked at the aesthetics, which is really quite amazing. So he really had a very interesting brain, let’s put it that way. And then finally, the following year, thanks to Prosper Mérimée, he was given the job of becoming a restorer of old structure.
Annie Sargent: Mm-hmm.
Elyse Rivin: He begins doing this at, basically at the age of 24.
Annie Sargent: That’s amazing.
Elyse Rivin: And, it was the fact that he had started to write what turns out to be this, I think it’s three volumes. The book is three volumes on the study of Gothic architecture.
In the year 2002, I [00:27:00] was with my husband in Paris, and we went to the famous Museum of Architecture that’s on the Trocadéro.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: The House of Architecture, I think it’s actually called.
Annie Sargent: C’est la Maison de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine or something? Yeah.
Elyse Rivin: La Maison d’Architecture et du Patrimoine. And upstairs was an exhibit devoted to Viollet-le-Duc, and it had photocopies, and it had some of the books that he’d written. He wrote altogether about 100 volumes and essays. He was incredibly prolific. He never stopped, and he wrote this encyclopedia of, it’s called, it’s basically called the Encyclopedia of Gothic Architecture, and in which, it’s in, I think, three volumes, he has every single detailed little drawing, and his ideas about how they put it together and what they should do, and he starts… It is fabulous if you… it’s just beyond comprehension that he was able to [00:28:00] do this. And so, of course, this is partly what convinced them that he was the person to take care of this, and that is when he began by going around to the different places.
First Major Restorations
Elyse Rivin: One of the very first buildings that he was given a charge of to take care of was the Cathedral of Vézelay, which is, of course, not very big. It’s inBurgundy, Vézelay, I believe. It’s the beginning of one of the routes of the pilgrimage route, and it was falling apart, and he started by working on that. To be honest, I don’t even know how much he changed it from what it might have been originally. But then he worked on Amiens, the huge cathedral in Amiens.
And in Amiens, one of the things that he did was he decided, and obviously there was nobody to tell him no, which is what’s so interesting. He’s like, you know, one of the things he decided was that… you’ve been to Amiens, right?
Annie Sargent: Yeah. Yes. It’s very grand.
Elyse Rivin: Very grand, and of course, [00:29:00] never completely, totally, totally finished, but it’s one of the biggest that cathedrals ever built. He decided that it would be really nice to include a gallery with, for musicians between the two towers.
Annie Sargent: Right. And he did that a lot.
Elyse Rivin: And he did that. You know, he just, he added it. So it wasn’t just that he rebuilt, and he took liberty by adding things.
Restoration as Reinvention
Elyse Rivin: And little by little, beginning on working on all of these things, he said not only that architecture should be a total art, but that sometimes what you could add to or change would be better than the original.
Annie Sargent: Well, yeah, what’s the point of making an exact copy? I mean, you start by making exact copies if you want to learn how to paint or how to do things, but then you need to change. I mean, you need to add your own claw to it, you know? [00:30:00] You need to make it better.
Elyse Rivin: Well, this certainly was his idea. The idea was if people asked him to restore a building, he said, restoration is not just putting it back the way it was. That’s what he said. He wrote this very clearly. I mean, this is… You know, he wrote lots about it. He said, "It’s not to repair.
Reinventing Restoration
Elyse Rivin: It’s not to reproduce exactly what was there before. It’s to make it better." Basically, I think the reason why so many people objected to what he did, and he did in a lot of places, was that he basically said, "Okay, you want me to redo this Gothic building? I will, but I’m going to give you what my version is of what it should’ve been if I had been alive at that time." Basically, that’s what he did. So he reinvented. He became the reason why there was a huge, huge push and movement of what is called Neo-Gothic architecture in the middle of the [00:31:00] 19th century. So at first, I think that people were simply admiring his work, and they were certainly, interested to see what he would do.
Gothic Forms New Materials
Elyse Rivin: The other thing that makes him very interesting, and also a little bit contradictory, but not so if you think about it, is that he said, "Go back to forms inspired by Gothic architecture and nature, but use new materials."
So he was not against the idea of taking cast iron, which was just being used at first time, or eventually, of course, what people like in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright did, was use new material, which was poured concrete. The idea being, I… This is what Viollet-le-Duc said we should do, therefore we can do it. It’s, this is a new material. Why not use it instead of going back to old materials? Now, of course, there’s a big push for people to go back to what’s called noble materials, real wood, real brick, real this and that. He said, "No, no, no." He said, "You can make it whatever it is you want to make it, but there’s nothing wrong with using a [00:32:00] brand-new material that has never existed before."
Notre Dame Afterlife
Elyse Rivin: He probably would not like the renovation of Notre Dame that just happened becauseit was trying to go back to the original, as far as the paintings restoration inside, they went back to these beautiful soft hues and whatever, and they restored it the way Viollet-le-Duc had it. They didn’t do anything that…I haven’t yet been. Of course, I will be, oh, this coming Wednesday, hopefully. But, I was under the impression, and of course you’ve seen it several times since it was restored, that they brought back Viollet-le-Duc’s Notre Dame.
Annie Sargent: Yes. Yes, exactly. And inside, like, the way they used the pigments and stuff, they… I don’t know. I mean, I had never seen it when it was freshly renovated by Viollet-le-Duc, obviously.
But they brought back pigments that were more, what they felt was, like, [00:33:00] Middle Ages sort of pigments and colors and themes. But they certainly did not deviate much from Viollet-le-Duc. Like, if they had wanted to change it to what it looked like before, they wouldn’t have put the steeple back and the Gallery of Kings would be gone. There’s things like that.
Elyse Rivin: That were his.
Annie Sargent: That were his. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think what he did a lot, was just pleasant to look at.
He had his aesthetic. It works. It works. It’s pretty. That’s why we like it, I think.
Invented Icons Explained
Elyse Rivin: Well, you know, thinking about Notre Dame, so for those of you who might not know this, you know, the Gallery of Kings was his invention. The Apostles on the roof were his invention. In fact, St. Thomas is his face. He put himself on the roof as one of the apostles.
Annie Sargent: But you don’t really see it from the ground. That’s too far from the ground.
Elyse Rivin: No. No, of course not. You don’t, you don’t see it.
But being born when we are [00:34:00] born, I’ve always seen it that way. You know, in other words, this is, for us, Notre Dame, you know?
Annie Sargent: That’s what it looks like, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: That’s what it looks like, and it’s like the… I remember the first time when I found out that that’s not what it had looked like before, what, the work he did. I was like, "Oh, okay. What would it have looked like?" I mean, so you’re right. I think that it’s just because we’re so used to seeing that, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t make us feel like it’s something weird. It’s not like putting something in some sort of horrible modern style up on top of the church, you know? I mean, it’s just that he did what he thought would be an addition that would enrich what was already there, you know?
Annie Sargent: Yeah. And there were proposals to drastically change Notre Dame, following the fire, and there were, I mean, like, crazy shit, like, a glass roof. That’s the one that comes to mind. Well, that would’ve been, using new techniques and new materials, and make it [00:35:00] different. He might have approved of that.
Elyse Rivin: We don’t know. We just don’t know. For instance, would he approve of the pyramid in the middle of the courtyard of the Louvre? Who knows, you know? That is an interesting question. It would be really nice if we could talk to him and ask him.
Annie Sargent: Yes. Yes. Somebody conjure up…
Elyse Rivin: Conjure up!
Annie Sargent: … Monsieur Viollet-le-Duc. We want to know.
Elyse Rivin: It’s amazing, you know? See, he wrote a dictionary of aesthetics, and it became a reference for designers for the entire rest of the 19th century. I mean, the amounts of things he did, and at the same time, architects with diplomas constantly criticized him, insulted him, wrote articles in the newspapers saying that he was… What’s the word? He was a phony, basically. He was a phony, he had no idea what he was talking about. The interesting thing is that he inspired both architects and designers more in England, Germany, and the United States, where there was perhaps more openness to new ideas. And it is a fact that [00:36:00] some of the designers of objects, like Lalique, who worked in glass, or Gallé, were directly inspired not by his work, but by his writings, which is really fascinating.
Annie Sargent: Yes, and you know, in France, we don’t like change.
Elyse Rivin: We don’t like change.
Annie Sargent: It’s just a fact, and you can see this in every aspect of French life, like our cooking, our buildings, the way we… even, like… in France, we still have a fairly strong psychoanalysis sort of therapy that people still think is valid, even though it’s been invalidated for 50 years. You know, they know it doesn’t work.
Elyse Rivin: You might get some feedback from some listeners, but who knows, you know?
Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, but it’s only in France that we do this still, you know? We’re the only place left. Anywhere else, they’ve moved on to different types of therapy. Anyway, we just don’t want change. We want to keep [00:37:00] things the way they are, and we resist very strongly, and so when we have somebody influential enough to make changes, it’s worth listening to them, I think.
Elyse Rivin: I agree with you, but think about Guérinon, and the fact that they’re reproducing something with the original materials. I-
Annie Sargent: Guédelon, you mean.
Elyse Rivin: Guédelon. I always say it wrong. Guédelon. I think the thing about Viollet-le-Duc is I find him fascinating. I like some of what he did do, and at the same time, and we’ll just mention it a little briefly in a couple of minutes, there were times when what he did was ridiculous, you know? So you have to have a sort of sense of proportion in relation to his ideas. They were sometimes pretty ridiculous then.
Chimera And Critiques
Elyse Rivin: So Notre Dame began in ’43. It took 20 years.
Annie Sargent: 1843.
Elyse Rivin: 1843, of course. His renovation. Interestingly enough, of course, he added the gallery, he added the apostles, he added the spire, he added, I mean, the flesh on top, he added the chimera, which I love, you know?
Annie Sargent: Yeah, the chimera are beautiful.
Elyse Rivin: Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. [00:38:00] They scare the hell out of me, and they always have, and they always will, you know? I can’t imagine…
Annie Sargent: So chimera are purely decorative. They kind of look like gargoyles, but they just sit on the edges a lot of time, and they get bigger and bigger as you go up on the cathedral, and they are just… they serve no purpose. They’re just there to be pretty.
Elyse Rivin: They’re there to scare.
Annie Sargent: Well, yes, to scare the evil spirits or whatever, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: You know, that is interesting because he took an idea that is really from the Middle Ages and just expounded on it, you know, by making them, and I think that’s kind of fun, you know?
Annie Sargent: But, I mean, they serve no architectural purpose.
Elyse Rivin: None. None. They have no function.
Annie Sargent: One question. Since he wasn’t trained as an architect, and he tried to do things that were a bit daring, did any of his projects just fall apart and not work and, like, destroy the structure because he put too much weight on the [00:39:00] facade or he did this or he did that?
Elyse Rivin: Well, the project in Saint-Sernin would have probably, but it was the one that got undone.
Annie Sargent: Saint-Sernin is in Toulouse.
Elyse Rivin: But other than that, I do not know. I do not know if there is any place where what he did was actually the cause of damage. That’s an interesting question.
Annie Sargent: Yeah. It would be interesting to… I’ll look into that. We’ll see. But it’s possible that even though he was self-taught, that he didn’t really do damage.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. Well, of course, he really was self-taught, but I’m sure he also had a team of engineers and builders working with him that did, I’m sure, give him some kind of advice in terms of how to do certain things that he wanted to do. Because he didn’t simply say, "Okay, we’re going to put a gallery between the two towers in Amiens." They had to have the official people who knew how to build that could work with him on that, you know? So in any event, basically, the project of Notre Dame took 20 years.[00:40:00]
Something I didn’t know, was that in 1945, many of the things that Viollet-le-Duc added to Notre Dame were actually taken off.
Annie Sargent: Oh.
Elyse Rivin: And they were put back in the 1970s.
Annie Sargent: Okay, interesting.
Elyse Rivin: Now, that does not include the Gallery of Kings, because that was really stone mason, you know, sculpture. But some of the details, I would love to know which are the ones that were actually taken off in 1945, and why they were taken off and why they were eventually put back in the 1970s. I really do not know, you know? It’s very strange.
Saint Sernin Controversy
Elyse Rivin: But after, of course, Notre Dame, he was first given, interestingly enough, the task of coming to Toulouse with the famous Prosper Mérimée, who brought him here because the Basilica of Saint-Sernin, which is really a basilica which is quite famous all over France, had its roof falling in. And they basically, what was happening, it was, you know, 750 old, and it was [00:41:00] starting to fall apart.
And so he asked Viollet-le-Duc to consider how he could renovate it. And this became an ongoing project. By this time, by 1860, he was so busy that he would go from project to project. He was never in one place for very long. He was constantly moving around the country, supervising the work that he was doing in different places. And so when he came here, he started working on what might become the project, but he didn’t start actually the work for a number of years. And it was just that he took the drawings, you know, he made some drawings, and he started thinking about what he was going to do.
Carcassonne Mega Project
Elyse Rivin: And then he actually started working on a couple of other projects, and he was given, of course, the major project of Carcassonne, which was an enormous project to do. What’s interesting about Carcassonne, it’s one of the few of his projects where everybody seems to know, and I don’t know why, that it seems to be sort of just [00:42:00] general knowledge, that when you look at the towers of the ramparts, where some of them have slate roofs. I’ve seen this, as many times as I’ve been either with our groups or just with other people. Most everybody I know who’s French, knows that the slate towers were an invention of Viollet-le-Duc.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, it’s a very well-known fact.
Elyse Rivin: It’s a well-known fact. But what’s fascinating about the project of Carcassonne is that not only did it take forever, I mean, it was, again, like Saint-Sernin a project where he would come down and visit it for a couple of times a year and then go back and go work on other places. It was an enormous project. It was the biggest, physically the largest project he had to work on because, of course, it’s the entire old rampart city’s ancient city.
But they had to first spend years getting rid of the people who were living on, in between the ramparts. There were all these poor people that had built these little shanty towns that were inside. And then little by little, make a decision about how to [00:43:00] restore the ramparts, how to put the grooves back on the towers. And in his own defense, because apparently the criticism of his choice of materials began while he was still alive, he said, "Look, if you go into the Black Mountains," which are the mountains that are just north of Carcassonne, he said, "Yeah, there are places with slate. Don’t give me that, you know, about my choice of materials," you know?
He basically had an answer to everything, you know. It was really interesting. And so over the years, he worked on a number of these major projects and eventually became one of these people who was hopping around from project to project, working on all of them. The project in Toulouse is interesting because he actually… I correct myself. He came to Toulouse with Prosper Mérimée before 1860. The actual work began in 1860. But what he did in Toulouse became the only example in the history of all of his work of something that eventually got undone.
Annie Sargent: [00:44:00] Mm.
Elyse Rivin: And the reason why, and it did take a long time for that to happen. I mean, there are drawings. I know I was just showing you one. There are actually still photos. He was given the charge of redoing the roof and then made the decision based on his theories and his ideas about what to do, of basically changing the whole aspect of the church, which is, of course, a basilica from the very, very beginning of the 1100s. I mean, this is a very, very old church.
And so he decided to change the materials that were being used and to add elements that would really not conform to the original style, because this is just one of those churches originally built in Romanesque style and where the local population decided, in terms of funding it, to keep it in Romanesque style.
So the work he did was begun on the eastern side, and that is where he took off tile and put on top of the roofs, he put stone, which of course made it very heavy and which would eventually have made it [00:45:00] collapse. He changed the church tower. He made an additional level. He really modified the visual aspect of the church. But he was doing this while he was running around, going to all these other places. He was supervising Carcassonne and everything else.
And the city of Toulouse, maybe that’s because of this strange heritage of being, you know, rebellious a little bit from the point of view of the city. They were one of the few places that put up a huge resistance to what he was doing.
And twice, they refused to give the funds. Twice, they told him to stop the thing. It took a– This just became one of these soap operas that lasted for quite a while. And the reality is that the project itself was actually not finished completely because part of it got done, and then he died in 1879. And the second part of it that was supposed to be done never got done. And what happened was, and this is really remarkable because it must have [00:46:00] cost a fortune, was that in the 1960s, so just about a hundred years later, they undid the work that he did. And this is the only example, by the way, in France, of what happened, which was of him being, his work being removed, literally, and the church being rebuilt with the same materials that it had been from the beginning. I have no idea how much it must have cost. It must have cost a fortune. But it’s very interesting that this was one of the few examples of the refusal to accept the changes that he was going to make.
Annie Sargent: By then, he was older, so maybe his creativity… because the image you showed me, it kinda looks like he was going to slap on two towers and a row of kings on, on Saint-Sernin, like, uh-uh.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I think maybe eventually all of these brilliant, new, original ideas that were being used as inspiration by a [00:47:00] lot of builders, architects, designers, et cetera, wound up kind of getting calcified, stuck a little bit.
Annie Sargent: Yeah, they were stale. They were s- like… Yeah, yeah.
(Mid-roll ad spot)
Commune Exile Switzerland
Elyse Rivin: In 1870, this is where it is really strange, and it’s a major, of course, a change in everything. In 1870, we have the Commune of Paris, the war with the Prussians, and he was responsible for building fortifications around the city of Paris, to try to protect the city from the Prussians.
Annie Sargent: Okay.
Elyse Rivin: Okay, I actually do not know how much fortifications were built, how many. I have no idea. I mean, I don’t know physically what that involved. But, what happened was, he was originally very involved in the resistance and very involved in the Commune. Or Commune, I’m not sure how to pronounce it. And then in 1871, after, of course, France basically… Did they sign a treaty, or did they just [00:48:00] sort of give in to the Prussians? I’m not even sure.
Annie Sargent: Oh, they signed a treaty, yeah.
Elyse Rivin: They actually signed a treaty. He criticized the Commune, he criticized them. I have yet to find, I spent a day and a half trying to find what he actually said about the Commune. All I know is that because of what he said, the Commune condemned him to death.
Annie Sargent: Jeez.
Elyse Rivin: So I can’t, for the life of me, find what it is he might have said. But because of that, he was… I can’t… It must have been, for him, something like the ultimate betrayal, because literally, he upped and took his family and went and exiled himself to Switzerland.
Annie Sargent: He had enough.
Elyse Rivin: He had enough. And he lived the last eight years of his life from 1871 to 1879, when he died, in Lausanne, in French-speaking Switzerland, where he immediately went to work restoring the Cathedral of [00:49:00] Lausanne, and where he began basically doing similar work that he was doing in France.
And he did come back a couple of times. He basically came back… He wasn’t allowed… It wasn’t that he was not allowed to come back to France, because of the Commune was gone by that time. He came back to supervise a couple of things, like Saint-Sernin and Carcassonne. But he would hop in, basically hop out, and not stay in France anymore. And it’s very mysterious to me. There had to be more going on than that, because otherwise I… The fact that he just had this rupture.
Annie Sargent: Well, Lausanne is a very nice place.
Elyse Rivin: That’s very possible. I’ve never been, you know.
Annie Sargent: It is.
Elyse Rivin: So he returned to Carcassonne once a year, and basically the work was continued after his death, and the same is true at Saint-Sernin.
He just died, almost quietly, you could say, in Lausanne in 1879, and was buried there with no pomp, with no kind of official [00:50:00] ceremonies. He is buried in the cemetery in Lausanne.
Legacy Quote and Influence
Elyse Rivin: And he has left behind a legacy that involves volumes of writing, all kinds of, hundreds if not thousands of drawings and watercolors. And his real legacy, I think, is the idea of being inspired by things around you, because the people involved as designers in Art Nouveau, and even the architects, starting with his lifetime and going up into the 20th century, use him as a reference.
Le Corbusier, whose work is nothing like his, has used him as a reference. Frank Lloyd Wright used him as a reference. All these very interesting, if not necessarily beautiful, modern architects refer to Viollet-le-Duc as a source of inspiration.
And that seems to me, what his real legacy is, that he opened up the idea that you don’t learn [00:51:00] from the books. You learn from observing. You observe in nature, you observe everything around you. And just to quote, this is his final… He wrote this, it’s almost the dictum that probably should be on his tombstone, if it isn’t already, I have no idea.
It says, "To restore a structure is to reestablish it in a complete form that maybe didn’t exist at a given moment in time."
Annie Sargent: Interesting. Hmm.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. And that’s it. He went out, he started with lots of fire and energy, and just simply went out very quietly.
Annie Sargent: What… Do you know what, how he died? Was he sick? No? No.
Elyse Rivin: No. He apparently got something and… He survived cholera, interestingly enough.
Annie Sargent: Gee.
Elyse Rivin: He actually survived cholera in Paris. It sounds like he, he didn’t have a long-term chronic disease. He was 65, which was moderate, but not super old. No, I don’t know actually what he died from.
Annie Sargent: For [00:52:00] as much as we talk about him, tour guides, you know, he always comes up.
Elyse Rivin: He always comes up. Always. I mean, nobody’s saying they’re going to put him in the Pantheon or anything like that, you know.
Annie Sargent: No. He’s kind of fizzled at the end.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah. You know, it seems to me that what’s fascinating is that there is a real legacy of his ideas, a way of imagining becoming an artist or a certainly a designer or an architect.
Oh, yeah, one, one little anecdote that’s sort of the irony of it all is that right before he moved to Switzerland, they gave him the position of full professor at the Beaux-Arts of Paris, which is the irony of it all, and he lasted six months. He hated it. He took the position, he accepted it, which I find really interesting. It’s almost like his personal vengeance against the Beaux-Arts, and the students loved him, and the other professors gave him so much [00:53:00] grief and criticized him as being still, after all those years, unqualified, that he said, "I don’t need this," and he just left.
Annie Sargent: Hmm.
Yeah. We’re a stubborn bunch.
Elyse Rivin: Yeah.
Final Thoughts Farewell
Elyse Rivin: I find him utterly fascinating. I think… I’m not sure what I think about some of the things he did since I’ve never seen them before they were restored.
Annie Sargent: That’s the thing, you know? If you don’t see them before… That’s how we’ve seen the Cathédrale d’Amiens. That’s how we’ve seen it. Like when you showed me images of what he intended to do on Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, I’m like, "Eh, no, I don’t like that," but it’s probably because I haven’t been seeing it like that. If I had seen it like that for decades, perhaps I’d think, "Oh, that’s… that’s how it’s supposed to be," you know? But I think he’s an interesting guy because he brought so much novelty to renovations, and really without people like that, we might have lost some of these beautiful places.
Elyse Rivin: I think honestly, aside from his choice of [00:54:00] aesthetics, it is thanks to him that we have Carcassonne, that we have a really a beautiful, fully standing, complete Notre-Dame de Paris, that we have all of these places. So whether people criticize certain choices of his aesthetics or not, it is thanks to Viollet-le-Duc that we can see all these beautiful buildings from the Middle Ages.
Annie Sargent: Very good.
Thank you so much, Elyse. That was really, really interesting.
Elyse Rivin: I think I would like to go to Lausanne and see…
Annie Sargent: Yeah, what Lausanne is like.
Merci, Elyse. Au revoir.
Elyse Rivin: Au revoir.
Thank you Patrons
Annie Sargent: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patrons get several exclusive rewards for doing so. You can see them at patreon.com/joinus.
And a special [00:55:00] shout-out this week to my new Join Us in France Champions, Nancy Holokamp and Stan Scardino.
Would you join them too? You can do it for as little as $3 a month, but if you can afford it, I would love to have you pledge more so you can have access to more of the rewards.
And to support Elyse, go to patreon.com/elysart.
Travel Help And Tours
Annie Sargent: If you’re planning a trip to France and want expert help, I do itinerary consults, whether you have a rough plan you want to refine or you’re starting from scratch and feeling overwhelmed.
I also lead custom day trips around the southwest of France in my electric car, and I have eight self-guided VoiceMap tours of Paris.
Podcast listeners get a discount on these tours when you buy directly from my website. So for any of these services, go to joinusinfrance.com/boutique.
Catacombs Reopen And Renovation
Annie Sargent: The Paris Catacombs are really [00:56:00] popular, and they got a makeover recently.
They opened on April 8th after being closed since November for renovation work. If you’ve never been, here’s the setup. You go down 130 steps from Place Denfert-Rochereau in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, and you’re 20 meters underground, walking through about a kilometer and a half of tunnels lined with the bones of millions of Parisians who died between the 10th and the 18th centuries.
The bones were moved there starting in the 1780s. There’s a stone inscription at the entrance of the ossuary that reads, and I’m translating here, "Stop. This is the empire of death." It’s very cheerful. The renovations cost 5 million euros funded by the City of Paris.
What makes it tricky is that everything had to go in and out through shafts that are only 90 [00:57:00] centimeters wide, so it’s not a simple job.
New Features And Visiting Tips
Annie Sargent: What’s new is better lighting that now reveals carvings and symbols on the walls that were basically invisible before. There are also quotes from Lamartine, Marcus Aurelius, and Racine carved into the walls.
Who knew? And they’ve added an immersive audio guide that triggers automatically as you walk through with a theatrical narrative voice guiding you along. It’s not VoiceMap, but it’s pretty good. The visit takes about an hour, and the route has not changed. What has changed is that, that they’ve upgraded the ventilation, humidity control, and electrical systems, things that matter for preserving the site long term.
They get 600,000 visitors a year and cap it at 2,000 per day. So you absolutely need to book in advance. Do not show up [00:58:00] hoping to walk in because you will not get in.
For most people in decent shape, it’s absolutely manageable, but it’s worth knowing ahead of time that there’s no elevator on the public route.
I wouldn’t take young impressionable children, but you know your kids. But it, I mean, it is the kingdom of death okay? So …
Nearby Sights In Montparnasse
Annie Sargent: And while you’re in the area, you should also visit the Museum of the Liberation of Paris just about across the street, and also the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you’ll find the graves of Samuel Beckett, and he’s still waiting for Godot, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Ask them, "Do you still think hell is other people?" Serge Gainsbourg, not my favorite French singer by a long shot, but he had a lot of hits. And the poet, Charles Baudelaire, Là tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté. In English, that’s: "There all is [00:59:00] order and beauty, luxury, peace, and pleasure."
And you’ll also find the photographer and intellectual Susan Sontag and many, many others. I love a stroll in a beautiful cemetery. It reminds me to seize the day.
Seizing The Day In Spain
Annie Sargent: And I am at my apartment in Spain this week seizing the day indeed. I can’t believe my luck that, to have had parents who bought this place 40-plus years ago and to be able to enjoy it still.
My sister is with me this time. We went straight to the beach. The day was gorgeous. The water was calm as can be. And while she lied topless on the beach, I went walking knee-deep in the water for a couple of miles. The water is cold but so calm and so clear.
I just love it. I don’t think I’m ready to swim in that cold of water, but up to my knees, it’s fine.
She won’t be coming back this summer because she’ll be starting a new job as a city bus driver in Toulouse, so she needs to tan now. [01:00:00] She’s lying on the beach right now as I talk into this microphone.
My sister and I couldn’t possibly be more different people, but we have a good, a really good time together.
Upcoming Trips Newsletter Credits
Annie Sargent: I’ll be back in Toulouse next week for a couple of day trips with listeners, and then I’ll be off to Metz in my electric car again, stopping at different places along the way.
If you want a short recap of what came out this week in France, travel news, new episodes, what I’m paying attention to, updates, personal updates, sign up for my free weekly newsletter at joinusinfrance.com/newsletter.
And my thanks to podcast editors Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts.
Next week on the podcast
Annie Sargent: Next week on the podcast, an episode about northern France and a bit of Belgium with Craig Anderson. As we head into a hot El Niño summer season, some of you might want to consider visiting the north of France, where hopefully you’ll [01:01:00] stay a bit cooler. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together. Au revoir.
Copyright
Annie Sargent: The join us in France Travel Podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent and copyright 2026 by Addicted to France. It is released under a Creative Comments, attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.[01:02:00] [01:03:00]
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Episode PageCategory: French History