THE STYLE OF THE EMPIRE. 471 



survived, like Belanger, Chalgrin, Brongniart, and Ledoux, were mostly 

 men inclined to the new individual reading of antiquity ; and archi- 

 tectural education was reorganised, as already mentioned, under the 

 auspices of a classical archaeologist. These facts would have been 

 enough to account for a change in the character of architecture. But 

 changes in the clientele were almost equally influential. The ruling 

 class under the Republic and Empire was in the main composed of 

 parvenus, who, after their kind, liked pretentious display, and were not 

 restrained, as the old aristocracy had been, by hereditary culture and 

 a mode of life which amounted to a continual training in elegance 

 and good taste. The result was a coarsening in the tone of the 

 work carried out for them. 



Another disturbing factor tending to upset traditional methods was 

 the introduction of iron as a building material. The dome of the 

 Corn Exchange was rebuilt in wrought iron (1802) (see p. 448), and 

 the arches of the Pont des Arts (1803) and the Pont d'Austerlitz 

 (finished 1807) were constructed in cast iron. 



POPULARITY OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY. One cause which contri- 

 buted to keep design in classical channels for a time was the spread of 

 an interest in antiquity from art and literature to the political and social 

 world. A somewhat ill-founded belief prevailed that the ancient 

 republics enjoyed a regime of pure democracy and individual liberty, 

 and that their citizens were models of all the austere and simple virtues. 

 Plutarch's heroes and his Stoic philosophy were in all men's mouths, 

 and everything was expressed in a pedantic phraseology compounded 

 of classical allusions, generally misapplied, and Rousseauesque send 

 mentalities. Nor was there any great change when Napoleon assumed 

 the imperial crown. Aristides and Cincinnatus were merely replaced in 

 men's imaginations by the Caesars, and republican virtues by the glories 

 of imperial Rome. David painted his " Sabine Women " and his 

 " Brutus." People of fashion lived in windowless temples and were lit 

 by Pompeian candelabra. They had Etruscan vases on their chimney- 

 pieces, and breakfasted at tripods, seated on curule chairs. Cadets 

 were arrayed in the chlamys, and the Elders of the Council of Five 

 Hundred in the toga. These classical fashions were sometimes a little 

 more than the ordinary public could swallow. Madame Hamelin was 

 hooted when she appeared in the Champs Elysees in the diaphanous 

 and more than decollete garb assumed by the modistes of the day to 

 have been the ordinary attire of a Roman matron ; and the statue of 

 a contemporary general had to be removed from the Place des Victoires 

 because his classical nudity was thought excessively realistic. The 

 Graeco-Roman fashion was, it is true, disturbed, even during this period, 

 by an outbreak of sphinxes and pylons, a consequence of the Egyptian 

 campaign (1798-1801); but these importations from the Nile could 



