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Dorota Babilas
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governmental and civic functions. The emergent dominant social class, the
prosperous bourgeoisie, preferred their new constructions to look familiar. The
reproduction of historical styles in modern edifices was rather superficial, usually
limited only to the outward elements, seldom using the original materials or spatial
organisation. The various available ‘revival’ styles allowed for the choice of new
buildings’ architectural form, which was greatly dependant on a particular edifice’s
function. Writers and designers, like John Ruskin, Augustus Pugin, and Victor
Hugo, theorised about ‘the battle of the styles’ and ascribed moral significance to
the aesthetic qualities of the Classicist and Gothic styles. By mid-century these
dilemmas had been partially resolved by the growing popularity of the eclectic
mode, attempting to mingle and recombine familiar stylistic elements.
Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, constructed between 1861 and 1875, has been
perceived as one of the most recognisable and important buildings of the age,
sometimes even the very example to illustrate the architecture of the century as
1
a whole. Its eclectic style – boastfully called by the architect ‘the Napoleon III
style’ – epitomised the Second Empire’s attitudes towards architectural history.
Garnier’s opera house was designed as a deliberately intertextual concoction,
promoting an ideology of historical continuity through numerous allusions to the
periods of France’s glory – the sixteenth century and the times of Louis XIV. The
palace-like façade resembled the colonnade of the New Louvre, side rysalites
were in the form of triumphal arches. The project combined classic symmetry
and monumental division of piled-up masses with Neo-Baroque ornamentation in
2
richly coloured marbles. Inside, the grand staircase, the foyer, and the auditorium
dripped with gold and a profusion of detail ‘of curious spikiness and lumpiness,
alluding perhaps to the tastes that produced High Victorian Gothic in England in
3
the 1850s.’
Most of all, however, the Palais Garnier represented what Christopher Mead
4
calls ‘architectural empathy,’ that is the dominance of function over form.

1
Carlos Reyero, Klucze do sztuki: od Romantyzmu do Impresjonizmu, trans. W.
Szymaniak (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1993), 3.
2 Gerard Fontaine, Charles Garnier’s Opera. Architecture and Exterior Décor
(Paris: Editions de Patrimonie, 2000), 58.
3
Henry-Russel Hitchcock, The Pelican History of Art. Architecture of the
nineteenth century. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 198. See also Gerard
Fontaine, Charles Garnier’s Opera. Architecture and Interior Décor (Paris:
Editions de Patrimonie, 2004).
4
Christopher Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera. Architectural Empathy and
the Renaissance of French Classicism (New York and London: The MIT Press,
1991), 5.