Frederick the Great dreamed of attending the French king at his toilette. Friedrich Wilhelm IV preferred dreams of Italy and Siam to the imperial crown. But in 1871, after a great victory over France, their successor, Wilhelm I, was crowned kaiser of all Germany in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.
His grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, caught the imperial bug at that glittering occasion and had little desire to be sans souci. When in Potsdam he stayed in the Neues Palais—that fanfaronade, as his ancestor Fédéric had called it. He arrived with electric light and all the most modern plumbing appliances. He even built a tunnel between the kitchens and the dining room of the palace, which were several hundred feet apart.
For Wilhelm II, fanfaronade was a way of life. Living amid bombastic splendor, he began to believe his own propaganda. Like some pharaonic inscription, he said of himself: “Deep into the most distant jungles of other parts of the world, everyone should know the voice of the German Kaiser. Nothing should occur on this earth without having first heard him. His word must have its weight placed on every scale . . . Also domestically the word of the Kaiser should be everything.” Just to make sure it was, he led his empire into war with his own cousins, the king of England and the czar of Russia, and, of course, with the old enemy France; and the rest is mud, and shells, and poisoned gas, and ruins of the most unromantic kind. They are still digging up the bodies from the fields today, nearly a century later.
The fanfaronade of Wilhelm II turned out to be just that, nothing more. Faced with utter defeat, he refused to abdicate, and it took his chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, to do it for him. The kaiser made sure he was safe in Holland before the announcement was made; but he sent a train to the royal station at the Neues Palais, and it returned with fifty-six carriages full of treasures. There was his vast collection of snuffboxes, hundreds of military uniforms, pieces of furniture designed for his ancestors by Schinkel and Persius, and of course portraits of Frederick the Great. Forced into peaceful country retreat at the modest Huis van Doorn, the former kaiser of Germany was far from sans souci. He remained convinced that a call would come to return him to his rightful station, but it never did, and the old man spent his time venting his frustrations on the wooded garden around his house. In his exile he cut down some six hundred trees, leaving the landscape resembling nothing so much as the fields of Flanders.
Back in Berlin, on 9 November 1919, a socialist republic was declared from the balcony of his vacated palace, and the terrible history of modern Germany was set into motion. Stalin, Churchill, and Truman agreed: Hitler’s Gotterdämmerung was the lineal descendant of the aristocratic vanity of Frederick the Great, the repressive conservatism of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and the crass megalomania of Kaiser Wilhelm II. There was something in the Prussian spirit, wasn’t there, that made them like this, something crude, and aggressive, and dangerous. The Germans needed to be cured of their obsession with ruins and follies, or else they’d do it all over again.
It was a convincing story, and it was a very convincing pretext. The Big Three had turned Germany into a landscape of ruins. Whole towns and cities had disappeared in the firestorms of an afternoon, and the palaces of the erstwhile rulers of Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich, and Berlin were wrecked shells. Even as the Big Three chatted away on the terrace of the Cecilienhof, their minions were carting away the paintings, the sculpture, the furniture, and all the other treasures they could find.
It was on the way to the Cecilienhof that Harry Truman, the president of the United States, made his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and it was on the terrace of that pretty cottage that he persuaded his allies to issue an ultimatum to the Japanese: surrender or suffer the consequences. Suffer the consequences they did. The clocks stopped at the moment of detonation in Hiroshima, and the making of ruins was never the same again.
IF THE BIG Three had had the leisure to wander outside the halftimbered farmyard of the Cecilienhof, they would soon have come to Potsdam and the royal park of Sans Souci. The British foreign minister Anthony Eden jotted down: “Devastation of Potsdam terrible and all this I am told in one raid of fifty minutes. What an hour of hell it must have been.” Frederick the Great’s elaborate baroque Stadtschloss, Schinkel’s noble Nikolaikirche, and the streets of the town now recalled the shattered remains of Rome. Here and there a column or a gesturing statue protruded from piles of smoking rubble, while women dressed in rags scrabbled for food among the remnants of their beautiful town. Even Winston Churchill, who had engineered their humiliation, was moved: “My hate had died with their surrender and I was much moved by their demonstrations, and also by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.”
Within Sans Souci, however, it seemed that the magical kingdom had only become more like itself. The gardens, which had not been tended in the last years of the war, were pleasingly overgrown, the setting for a melancholic fête champêtre. The palaces, whose paintings and furniture had been removed to distant bunkers for protection, had the desolate air of summer retreats shut up for the winter. The ruins that Frederick the Great had built to entertain his guests were only a little more ruined, the Norman tower having been damaged by a stray missile. A belvedere, similarly shelled, made a pleasing picture at the end of a long allée of trees. Only the western gate of the Neues Palais set a mournful, if picturesque, note: the great triumphal arch was pitted with bullet holes, and the Corinthian columns of the great hemicycle around it had been shattered and lay in pieces in the long grass. They are still there.
And in Siam, the vines clambered over the pergola made of stolen antique columns, and water still dribbled into a broken sarcophagus from the mouth of a bronze fish. The windows of the farmhouse were shuttered, and the Roman baths were dry and dusty. The Grecian temple was as elegant as it had always been; the garden shrine made by the prince of Siam was a little overgrown, nothing more; and the tall poplars were quietly reflected in the dark waters of the lake. Nothing had happened at all.
Notre Dame de Paris
In Which the Temple of Reason Is Restored
A NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Frontispiece of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, engraved
by Auguste François Garnier, 1844.
RESTORATION
The great buildings arrayed in The Architect’s Dream date from many times and places, but in Thomas Cole’s painted rapture each one of them has been made new and perfect, just as its makers intended. In 1834, Leo von Klenze stood before the Parthenon surrounded by men and women dressed as ancient Athenians, and he likewise vowed to undo centuries of history—to restore the temple to its original virginity. Over the next century interpolations were excised and excisions reversed, and in the process many Byzantine and Ottoman remains were destroyed forever. Klenze’s restoration was a selective affair, in which the temple of Athene took precedence over every other incarnation of the Parthenon.
Restoration was, in the words of its greatest exponent, the French architect Viollet-le-Duc, a modern idea and practice. While Renaissance architects studied ancient buildings as exemplars, and Enlightenment historians meditated on them as lessons, the architects of the nineteenth century were anxious to return them to their original states.
Their anxiety may perhaps be explained by the age in which they lived, which was a time of unprecedented change. The French Revolution brought the ancien régime to an end and established an entirely new world from Year One. The industrial revolution gave that world new form and altered the relationship between people and things forever. At such a time, buildings raised by previous eras must have seemed like precious relics of a way of life that was rapidly disappearing from view.
The Parthenon was only ever restored to a ruined state, but Notre Dame de Paris, another shrine to a virgin—and also, albeit briefly, a temple of Reason and Wisdom—is the example par excellence of nineteenth-century restoration carried to completion. While Klenze stripped the Parthenon of barbarian excrescences, Viollet-le-Duc attempted to restore to Notre Da
me the magnificence of which more recent barbarians had stripped it.
But Notre Dame was no Parthenon. Constructed over centuries, her design a moving target, the cathedral had never been a perfect virgin. The restored Notre Dame was an arbitrary fiction, a combination of romance and science that would have baffled the masons who had built it in the first place. Like The Architect’s Dream, it characterizes less the grand sweep of history than the moment of time in which it was made.
IN 1962, THE WOULD-BE REVOLUTIONARY writer Guy Debord recalled a small but telling historical footnote. Writing on the Commune of 1871 in a pamphlet titled Into the Dustbin of History, he commented:
The story of the arsonists who during the final days of the Commune went to destroy Notre-Dame, only to find it defended by an armed battalion of Commune artists, is a richly provocative example of direct democracy . . . Were those artists right to defend a cathedral in the name of eternal aesthetic values—and, in the final analysis, in the name of museum culture—while other people wanted to express themselves then and there by making this destruction symbolize their absolute defiance of a society that, in its moment of triumph, was about to consign their entire lives to silence and oblivion?
It was only a scrap of a story, and no one really knows what happened. There are rumors that the Communards broke into the cathedral, piled up all the chairs in the nave, and set fire to them; but the building is still there, while the Commune is long gone. It’s easy to see, though, why the Communards might have attacked Notre Dame: if ever they required a symbol for all the things that stood in the way of liberty, equality, fraternity—in the way of reason and progress and all the rest of it—they only had to look around them.
NOTRE DAME LOWERED over the Paris of the Commune as it had done for many centuries. The west front of the cathedral was a tottering city of building piled upon building, a vertical labyrinth infested with all the creatures of the medieval imagination. Each of the three doors of the west front was thronged with angels—choirs and choirs of them—and saints, martyrs, and personifications of the virtues and the seven deadly sins. Above the doors sat Saint Anne and her daughter Our Lady herself, with Christ presiding over the Last Judgment in the center. Above these portals were arrayed all the kings of Israel, and above the Gallery of the Kings stood the Queen of Heaven flanked by two guardian angels. Behind her, like a halo, there was a rose window. Higher still, above the rose window, another gallery ran across the west front: a delicate forest of colonnettes and pointed arches, the eyrie of brooding gargoyles, misshapen, ugly, and hauntingly sad. Above this stone menagerie rose two towers, pierced by tall lancet windows so that the bells that hung within them could sound out over all of Paris; as if in response to the music, tendrils, leaves, and strange beasts seemed to sprout from the architecture. On top of everything else, a spire dissolved into Parisian skies as gray as stone and lead.
The chief characteristic of the interior of Notre Dame was gloom. Against an architecture rendered almost inky black by contrast, tall stained-glass windows lined the nave of the church like colorful banners hung out for a procession. Beneath them opened two rows of aisles and countless chapels—richly painted, elaborately furnished stalls dedicated to the worship of multitudinous saints and cults. Halfway to the altar, the processional way of the nave was interrupted by a crossing. The south transept ended in a large rose window, a kaleidoscope of colored glass and stone; the glowing colors of this miraculous wall told the stories of the New Testament, radiating in chapter and verse from the figure of Christ at the center. The northern transept was also illuminated by a rose window, in the middle of which sat the Virgin in majesty with the Christ child on her knee. In concentric circles around this image of the new dispensation were arranged the representatives of the old: the prophets, kings, and high priests of Israel.
After the transepts, the nave terminated in a semicircular apse, and here was placed the high altar dedicated to Our Lady of Paris. Behind the altar rose high windows that glowed in the light of the morning sun. The apse was the head of the church, and the whole building took the form of Our Lord with his arms spread out on the Cross: the stone ribs of the vault made his skeleton, and the painted walls and colored glass stretched between them his living body.
This divine body contained within it images of all the things that could be known in Christendom. To the east, the rising sun shed its rays on the altar of the Resurrection. To the west, the setting sun cast its dying glow on visions of the Last Judgment. The prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament were relegated to the gloomy north, while the apostles and saints of the New were bathed in southern light. The improving lessons of scripture were depicted close to the ground, where pilgrims might study them closely; while outside, perched atop the crags and bluffs of the building, were all the monsters of ancient lore, with their billy goat horns and beards, their bats’ wings, and their faces on their arses. No wonder the Communards wanted to destroy it.
THE CATHEDRAL MIGHT have seemed medieval, but this incarnation of Notre Dame de Paris had in fact been completed only seven years before, in 1864. The architects, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, had been appointed to restore the existing cathedral by the Ministry of Justice and Religion in 1843, and they had taken great pains to ensure that their work would appear as authentically medieval as possible. In his report to the ministry regarding the project, Viollet-le-Duc explained, “The artist must efface himself entirely, must forget his own tastes and instincts in order to study his subject, to recover and follow the thoughts that guided the construction of the work which he wishes to restore.” His approach was based not on imagination but on the analysis of historical evidence. He continued:
It was necessary to perform this minute analysis in order to explain, complete, and often correct opinions resulting solely from textual sources, for all too often a text can lend itself to diverse interpretations, or be in itself unintelligible. Archaeological evidence, on the other hand, written on the stones of the building itself, despite the difficulty of dating, remains incontrovertible, and provides us with detailed information.
Viollet’s restoration involved, at root, two operations: the removal of the encrustations of ages, and the replacement of things that had been removed from the building over time. The former was an archaeological challenge in itself, but scientifically replacing those things that had been taken away was more difficult. All the sculptures of the west front had been made by hands that had withered to dust centuries before, from stone hacked out of quarries long since exhausted or buried under new suburbs. All the stained-glass windows that had once lined the nave had contained images of which there now was no record. Not only had the contents of this encyclopedic library of the medieval mind been lost, but also the very materials of which it had been made and the very skills that had made it.
Viollet deplored those who sought to replace what had been taken away with ornaments of their own devising, made in modern materials that did not match the original. “It is impossible to conserve the form of something made in one material by making it in another,” he wrote; “concrete cannot reproduce the appearance of stone any more than wood can pretend to be iron.” Accordingly, his restored Notre Dame was constructed using materials and techniques that matched as closely as possible those that he supposed to be authentic. As to the form of the sculptures and other pieces that had been removed, he wrote:
We think therefore that the replacement of all the statues that adorned the great doors, the gallery of the kings, and the buttresses can only be carried out by carefully copying surviving sculptures on analogous monuments of the same era. Models exist at Chartres, Rheims, Amiens and in the many other churches that cover the Île de France. These same cathedrals also offer us models for the stained glass which needs to be replaced at Notre Dame: models which it is impossible to imitate, but wiser to copy.
The Notre Dame that was completed in 1864 was a work of painstaking research; and to the Communards who came
to destroy it seven years later, it resembled absolutely the medieval cathedral whose phantom it was.
THE RESTORED NOTRE Dame was a masterly work of historical science, but the impulse for this operation had been something quite different: a romance. Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, which he began writing in 1829, was set in 1482, and its hero had lived in the cathedral since he had been found on its steps as a baby. For Quasimodo, Notre Dame was the whole world, and he scarcely ever left it.
The only espaliers he could conceive were the stained glass windows, which were always in flower, the only shade that of the stone foliage blossoming in clumps, laden with birds, on the Saxon capitals, the only mountains the colossal towers of the church, the only ocean the Paris that surged at their feet.
And, indeed, Quasimodo resembled Notre Dame of Victor Hugo’s day, for he “looked like a giant, broken and badly reassembled.” The heroine of the novel was a dancing gypsy girl named Esmeralda; she too resembled Notre Dame—or at least Notre Dame as Hugo imagined it had been in 1482—for she had a strange and exotic beauty that captivated all who saw her. But the real heroine of the story was Notre Dame de Paris herself, and Hugo knew how his novel would end: in the wreckage of the hopes of hunchback, gypsy girl, and cathedral.
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Page 19