At the tender age of eight, John Gideon Millingen found himself whisked away from his comfortable London home at No. 9, Queen Square, and transplanted to revolutionary Paris, of all places. The year was 1790. John’s father, the Rotterdam-born writer and merchant Michael Van Millingen, was an earnest Friend of Liberty and an inveterate critic of the House of Bourbon, and had lately succumbed to an all-consuming revolutionary fever. When the notorious Bastille Saint-Antoine state prison fell to a crowd of rioters and mutinous troops on July 14, 1789, Van Millingen hastened to move his entire family to the roiling French capital, where they took up residence at the Hôtel de France on the Rue Vivienne, conveniently located near the business and financial district of the 2e arrondissement.
Michael Van Millingen’s sojourn in Paris would not end well. His business acumen might have been useful to the nascent French Republic, but he was soon labeled an accapareur, a monopolist or hoarder, and was fortunate to escape Paris with his head still attached to his shoulders. Still, those early days in the Ville-Lumière must have been exhilarating. The first order of business for young John, before being taken to see Racine’s Athalie at the Théâtre Rue Favart, before buying a little Blenheim Spaniel (“most noisy and destructive”), before beginning harpsichord lessons with a master by the name of Beuré, was to receive a revolutionary education, starting with a visit to the hulking ruins of what was once the Bastille.
We must imagine Michael Van Millingen walking hand-in-hand with his son eastbound down the Rue Saint-Antoine towards the Bastille. Young John, under his father’s influence, had become quite an “enthusiastic demagogue,” and invariably sported an oversized tricolored cockade. A visit to the former prison would have been quite a treat for father and son alike, just as it doubtless was for the hundreds of other sightseers and souvenir hunters who were still picking through the castle ruins, or paying homage to an ersatz revolutionary altar made from iron chains dug up from the debris.
In his Recollections of Republican France from 1790 to 1801 (1848), John Millingen would describe his examination of the “fallen fortress of tyrannical power,” where
In the ruined dungeons close to the ditch, and infested with water-rats, toads, and other reptiles, were still to be seen stones, on which had reposed the unfortunate prisoners doomed to expire in the oubliettes, forgotten by all the world, condemned to be buried alive, and the iron rings to which their chains had been fastened were still riveted in the flinty couch, which from the constant friction and pressure of the unhappy victims of despotism, bore the impression of their aching limbs.
It was all very Gothic and impressionnant, and such an ominous-looking structure was destined to become a potent symbol of Bourbon tyranny. In time, after the French Revolution had turned France into a vast, blood-steeped hecatomb, the destruction of the Bastille would remain the crowning achievement of the era. For Victor Hugo, the Bastille represented an “enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness,” a “monstrous mass” that “must be made to crumble.” Even Napoleon’s great victories paled in comparison to the storming of the Bastille, Hugo declared: “To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.”
Those of a less demagogical temperament might counter that confinement in the Bastille was far preferable to a stint in veritable hell-holes like Bicêtre or Bagne of Toulon; that the cells often included a “small bed with green serge curtains, a table, an armed chair, a basin and ewer, a large earthen pot to hold water, a brass candlestick, a chamber-pot, a nightstool, a tin goblet, a broom, and a tinder-box and matches,” as Quintin Craufurd observed in his 1790 History of the Bastille; that prisoners who could afford it were served “an excellent soup, a succulent slice of beef, a wing of a chicken, artichokes in oil, spinach, some stewed pears, fresh grapes, a bottle of old Burgundy, and excellent cup of coffee,” while those who could not could apply for fixed pensions from the King. Sinister rumors of forlorn, emaciated, and wizened prisoners languishing in rat-infested subterranean cachots turned out to be wholly unfounded, and of the mere seven inmates freed on July 14, 1789, two of them (Whyte de Malleville and Auguste-Claude Tavernier) were mental patients subsequently reincarnated in the Charenton lunatic asylum, one of them (Count Hubert de Solages) was a dangerous sexual deviant, and the rest were forgers who promptly disappeared into the Parisian criminal underworld.
Tearing down the Bastille was, of course, a major propaganda coup for the French revolutionaries, but the memoirs of John Gideon Millingen suggest another reason that the animus of the Parisian street was directed at the grim medieval fortress:
The dark and dismal pile had long been viewed with dismay. The humblest artisan passing by its moat, although his position in life did not expose him to be immured in its dungeons, shuddered with an unaccountable feeling of dread, as the superstitious peasant glides by a haunted castle when night sets in, tremblingly recollecting stories of goblins and mischievous elves. Such was the Bastille; and, in storming its formidable works, the people imagined that they had carried the stronghold of despotism.
The hideous quadrangular castle, with immensely thick walls and sinister round towers, was a looming, baleful presence on the Parisian skyline, making even the Donjon of the Château de Vincennes, another royal fortress five kilometers further to the east, look like something out of a Limbourg Brothers Book of Hours. Perhaps the Bastille’s greatest crime was aesthetic in nature. It may have been grand to win at Austerlitz, but a triumph on the battlefield, from a purely artistic perspective, was of little value, producing little more than shell craters, splintered trees, shattered caissons, broken sabres, and mounds of corpses. On the other hand, the demolition of the ugliest building in La Ville d’Art was indeed immense, leaving Paris a far prettier place. Such was the revelation that John Gideon Millingen experienced as he stood with his father in the ruins of the Bastille one memorable day in 1790.
Attempts to replace the Bastille with something more aesthetically pleasing have been undertaken ever since that fateful summer of 1789. A column celebrating Liberté was planned for the site, but never built. A Fountain of Regeneration, featuring a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis with water flowing from her breasts, was installed in 1793, but the deity was made out of papier-mâché, not stone, and gradually fell to pieces, not unlike the revolution she supposedly represented in some esoteric and not entirely convincing fashion. Napoleon, in his capacity as Emperor of the French, turned his curved nose up at anything that reeked of revolution, and commissioned something more palatable to his sensibilities: a triumphal monument in the form of an elephant cast in bronze extracted from cannon captured at the Battle of Friedland. While the elephantine scheme never came to fruition, a full-sized plaster model of the beast was constructed at the former location of the Bastille and guarded by a man named Levasseur, who lived in one of the plaster pachyderm’s legs. (The reader may recall how Gavroche, in Hugo’s Les Misérables, spends a night there as well.) This bizarre monument to the Corsican parvenue gradually disintegrated and was demolished in 1846, after residents of nearby apartments complained about the army of vermin that used it as a forward operating base.
The concavity upon which the elephant once stood was left in place, eventually supporting the Colonne de Juillet, a Corinthian column celebrating not the storming of the Bastille, but the Trois Glorieuses, the three glorious days of July 27-29, 1830, when the last of the rulers of the House of Bourbon, Charles X, was overthrown. That column, at least, has withstood the test of time, and still dominates the Place de la Bastille, its twenty-one cast-bronze drums rising to a height of 154 feet (twice as tall as the old prison), its glinting Génie de la Liberté perched atop the monument, broken fetters in one hand, and the torch of civilization in the other.
As part of the Grands Projets de François Mitterrand, which was aimed at modernizing the Parisian cityscape with structures like the hideous Grande Arche de la Défens and the unnecessary Louvre Pyramid, and in honor of the bicentennial of the original Bastille Day, the French government authorized construction of a new opera house on the Place de la Bastille, the Opéra Bastille. An international competition to select an architect for the project settled on a design by the relatively unknown Uruguayan-Canadian architect Carlos Adolfo Ott. It was a blind selection process, and it was said that the jury thought, mistakenly, that they were picking a design by the renowned American abstract artist and architect Richard Meier, designer of the iconic Getty Center, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and the High Museum in Atlanta. That was not the case — Meier would not have produced a design as terrible as that of Ott — but such is the nature of blind competitions.
That the construction of the Opéra Bastille was marred by massive cost overruns almost goes without saying. Eventually, nearly 3 billion French francs were poured into the project, nearly all of it wasted. The austere, sterile modernism of the structure was decidedly un-operatic, more in keeping with an impersonal civic or commercial building, and a far cry from the institution’s former home at the ornate Palais Garnier, once the most famous opera house in the world, now mainly home to the Paris Opera Ballet. The entrances were confusing, the hallways were disorienting, and the acoustics somewhere between unsatisfactory and terrible, depending on one’s seat. The stone slabs on the façade were of poor quality and poorly affixed to the exterior, requiring safety netting and expensive repairs. One former head of the Paris Opera, Hugues Randolph Gall, called the situation indémerdable, a tremendous (and quite vulgar) French term for “hopelessly unfixable.” And the situation has only gotten worse. Now the stage is in danger of collapsing, and the roof will have to be redone, all at a cost of somewhere between 400 and 800 million euros, excluding the inevitable overruns.
The plan is to close the Opéra Bastille in 2030, for three years, while the necessary renovations are made. We can hope, for the sake of the singers and stagehands, that the building holds up for that long, while good money is thrown after bad, and the structure continues to decompose like the Fountain of Regeneration and the Elephant of the Bastille before it. Jean-Pierre Robin of Le Figaro has at least had the guts to confront the obvious solution, asking: “Faudrait-il démolir l’Opéra Bastille, à Paris, pour cause de délabrement avancé?” — “Should the Paris Opéra Bastille in Paris be demolished due to its advanced disrepair?” To which the only response can be oui, oui, mille fois oui. For far too long have we accepted the modernist architectural premise that buildings are “machines for living in,” and then wind up being stuck with buildings that need to be maintained like machines that are constantly experiencing a stream of technical failures, to say nothing of their many aesthetic failings.
The Bastille prison was at least fit for purpose. The Fountain of Regeneration did at least possess the hydraulics necessary to shoot water out of an Egyptian goddess’s bosom. Napoleon’s Elephant did, for a while at least, perform its most basic function, which is to say it looked more or less like an elephant. The Opéra Bastille is not, and has never been, a good opera house. It has been an embarrassment ever since it was conceived, let alone built, and one can only lament that Jacques Chirac did not carry through with his threat to cancel the entire boondoggle back in 1986. Tant pis. But even if you are not an opera-goer, and do not benefit from the 123 Euro per seat subsidy that keeps the Paris Opera afloat, you may still care for the exquisite Paris skyline, and the character of the Place de la Bastille, which has been marred for 36 years now by Carlos Adolfo Ott’s putrefying urban carbuncle.
Léon Krier, the late and sorely missed Luxembourgish architect and proponent of traditionalism and New Urbanism, observed in his magnificent treatise The Architecture of Community (2011) how
It is obvious that, apart from a few exceptions, modernist buildings are as a rule not in keeping with historic city centers: the Palais-Royal, the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, the Louvre forecourt, the National Gallery East Wing in Washington D.C., were not in need of their recent additions. We may well ask ourselves what has been enhanced by what … If these costly operations had been built in the suburbs, there would be scarcely a mention of them. But millions of visitors are used as evidence of the exceptional popularity of various ostentatious modernist monuments, whereas the popularity of Port-Grimaud and Williamsburg is denounced as politically dangerous. It may be absurd to force recalcitrant architects to design traditional facades in historic centers; but surely it is even more absurd to pretend that without aggressive interventions historic centers lack vitality and dynamism.
The Opéra Bastille, like many of the costly mistakes that resulted from the Grands Projets de François Mitterrand, was a failed experiment that served only to drain the vitality and dynamism from the operas performed on its crumbling stage, and from the neighborhood forced to endure its crumbling façade.
Far be it from us to bemoan the disappearance of the Bastille from the Parisian skyline, and from its former location at 5, Rue Saint-Antoine, yet attempts to replace it have met with mixed results, to say the least. The Opéra Bastille may be the worst of the lot. “To destroy is easier than to create,” wrote Ivan Klíma in Love and Garbage, “and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?” Would the people of Paris really have said, on July 14, 1789, that they wanted to install a murderous left-wing dictatorship to replace the Bourbon kings? And would the people of Paris in 1989, or today for that matter, say that they affirmatively want a hideous opera house, with an exterior flaking off stone slabs like flesh falling from a leper’s face, and with atrocious acoustics to boot? No. So tear it down. Écrasez l’infâme. Save a billion euros or so. Move the Paris Opera back into the Palais Garnier, once the ongoing and rather more modest repairs to that august structure’s façade, stage machinery, and roof are complete. And bear the torch of civilization like the Génie de la Liberté, having broken free from the fetters of an ersatz modernity. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand, admittedly, and the Place Vendôme honors that achievement well enough, but to take down the (Opéra) Bastille, now that would truly be immense.
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