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Mitterrand's Great Projects
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16746 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,147 Words |
| Author
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Kenneth Powell
Kenneth Powell is an architecture writer for the London Daily
Telegraph. |
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
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