ARCHITECTE INDÉTERMINÉ, 1806

Project for the erection of a Temple of Glory on the site of the Madeleine. Ink and wash on paper, captioned in ink "Élévation d'un Temple de la Gloire sur l'emplacement de la Madeleine. Project according to the Program submitted to the competition on December 20, 1806. One of the conditions of the Program was to use work already completed. This condition (although imperative) had no effect on the prizes that were awarded". Two modifications of the project pasted on the back. 32 x 53.4 cm (on view). On December 2, 1806, at the Pozna? camp in Poland, Emperor Napoleon I signed a decree for the erection of a temple to the glory of the French Armies in place of the former Madeleine church, the reconstruction of which had since 1757 given rise to numerous projects, including administrative buildings and auditoriums, which had never come to fruition. According to the explanatory memorandum: "The Monument whose design the Emperor calls on you to draw up today will be the most august, the most imposing of all those that his vast imagination has conceived and that his prodigious activity knows how to execute. It is the reward that the conqueror of Kings and Peoples, the founder of empires, bestows on his army, victorious under his orders and by his genius. Posterity will say: he made heroes and knew how to reward heroism. [Inside the monument, the names of all the combatants of Ulm, Austerlitz and Jéna will be inscribed on marble tables, the names of the dead on solid gold tables, and the names of the départements with the number of their contingent on silver tables". A competition was launched, in which eighty artists took part. The project by architect Pierre-Alexandre Vignon was chosen by the Emperor himself, against the advice of the Imperial Academy: a peripteral temple, a return to antiquity, inspired by Greco-Roman architecture. In terms of exterior appearance, the Madeleine is virtually a recreation of the Olympiaion in Athens, the Madeleine's columns being slightly taller (20 m vs. 17.25 m, compare with a very similar building, the U.S. Supreme Court). Shortly afterwards, everything that had previously been built was demolished. Work progressed rapidly until 1811, when it had to be halted for lack of funds. After the Russian campaign of 1812, Napoleon gave up on the Temple de la Gloire, and returned to the original plan for a church: "What will we do with the Temple de la Gloire? he said to Montalivet. Our great ideas about all this are quite changed... . Our temples should be given to priests to look after: they are better at performing ceremonies and maintaining a cult than we are. Let the Temple of Glory henceforth be a Church: this is the way to complete and preserve this monument. The church was not consecrated until October 9, 1845 by Mgr Affre, Archbishop of Paris, after a series of twists and turns linked to Vignon's death and political upheavals.