The long lines of people, snaking around the great Cour Napoleon of the Louvre and steadily disappearing beneath I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, provide a striking testimony to the crowd-pulling power of modern architecture. Since the pyramid and the impressive new galleries beneath it were opened earlier this summer, the crowds have not abated. Not so long ago, it was the Musee d'Orsay that drew them. There seems no end to the wonders of modern Paris, nor to the ambitions of French politicians to add to them.
Paris--or at least the Paris of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--is a city of grand gestures. Under the Emperor Napoleon III, Georges-Eugene Haussmann, Prefet of the Seine, was able to carve boulevards ruthlessly through the fabric of the ancient city. The Opera--designed by Charles Garnier and built in 1862-75 as "the cathedral of the bourgeoisie"--symbolized the alliance of imperial pretensions with solid capitalist enterprise. The recent presidents of France seem to have been seized by quasi-imperial ambitions to recast the city yet again--and it has fallen on Francois Mitterrand, socialist, paternalist, and the most surprising success story in the recent political history of Europe, to set the seal on the aggrandizement of the French capital.
Mitterrand's "Grands Projets" have to be seen in the context both of domestic French politics and of French ambitions--which transcend party lines--to see Paris confirmed as the true center of Europe. The cultural vitality of the continent has challenged the traditional dominance of Paris--Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, and Genoa are now cultural capitals in their own right. Only London competes with New York and Tokyo in the international world of business, but London is in a difficult phase of development, finding adjustment to an era of slashed public spending difficult. Paris has much to gain from a raised profile on the world scene.
Great Cultural Center
For the origins of the so-called Grands Projets we need to look back to 1974, when Valery Giscard d'Estaing was elected the president of France. Giscard reacted strongly against the wholesale redevelopment plans of the 1960s (which had resulted, for example, in the destruction of the historic Les Halles markets). An evident skeptic about the benefits of modern architecture, Giscard, in one of his first acts in office, attempted to kill the project for a great cultural center planned for the Beaubourg district as a monument to his deceased predecessor, Georges Pompidou, who had initiated the scheme in 1969. The attempt failed--though it was a worrying time for the building's architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers--largely because the project was too advanced.
By the time of Beaubourg's opening, Jacques Chirac had been elected mayor of Paris. Chirac succeeded in defeating Giscard's plans for the site of Les Halles. The president, driven from the historic heart of the city, retaliated by promoting three major building projects, one on the Left Bank--the conversion of the Gare d'Orsay into a "museum of the nineteenth century"--and two further afield--at the office city of La Defense and on the site of the disused La Villette markets, northeast of the city center.
For La Defense, Giscard favored a project designed by J. Willerval. La Villette was to be the site for a huge public garden, landscaped in
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