VI PREFACE 



and of Anderson's " Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy," 

 with an account of the main trend of architectural thought and 

 practice in France during the period defined, and of the principal 

 facts connected with important buildings and architects, set 

 forth in their relation to political, social, and literary history. 

 The execution of the task has been greatly facilitated by the late 

 Baron Heinrich von Geymuller's "Baukunst der Renaissance 

 in Frankreich." Although forming part of a so-called " Hand- 

 buch," this somewhat unreadable and confusingly arranged work 

 would be better described as a collection of materials for a 

 history interspersed with essays on special topics. It is, how- 

 ever, a monument of minute and painstaking research, my 

 indebtedness to which it would be difficult to exaggerate ; and 

 I avail myself of this opportunity to pay a tribute of admiration 

 to the erudition and usually sound judgment of the author, who, 

 unfortunately, did not live to complete the concluding volume. 



Even Geymiiller does not profess to carry his narrative 

 beyond 1755, and therefore stops short of some very interesting 

 phenomena still in the direct line of Renaissance descent. While 

 this somewhat arbitrary selection of a date is particularly unfor- 

 tunate, it is obvious that no year can be pointed to as coinciding 

 with a complete solution of continuity in the process of develop- 

 ment, and it is only after much hesitation that I have fixed 

 upon the year 1830 as the terminus ad quern of this history. An 

 unbroken, if varied, sequence of styles, each in turn paramount 

 throughout the greater part of France, came to an end with that 

 of the Empire, whose existence, feebly prolonged in the midst 

 of new and disturbing influences, may be said to have died out 

 about the time of the fall of the elder Bourbons. On the other 

 hand the work resulting from these influences in the succeeding 

 period is too eclectic to possess the recognisable characteristics 

 of a style, and at the same time perhaps too near our own day 

 to be seen as yet in its true perspective. 



Any conceivable subdivision of the subject is open to some 

 serious objection, and I am fully conscious that the system 

 adopted in the following pages, of a classification by reigns, is 

 by no means an exception. Its inevitable drawbacks will, how- 

 ever, be reduced to a minimum, if it be remembered that each 

 chapter deals, not so much with the architecture produced during 

 the actual reign of the sovereign named, as with a stylistic 

 development culminating in that reign, and extending between 



