The Theater of Terror

When the French architect Grandjean de Montigny designed this building in 1819, his references were rooted several centuries earlier, in the late 1400s-1500s, during the Renaissance in Rome. Inspired by the French Revolution [1789] and its social and political transformations, Montigny and his contemporaries sought to rekindle, through the revival of Roman architectural principles—canonized as “classical”—some of its ideals of order, rationality, and morality, then considered necessary during the rise of the bourgeoisie: an anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic, and anti-monarchical class. In contrast to the opulence of palaces, halls, and churches that had dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, fueled by wealth from colonial exploitation, the neoclassicists [as they came to be known] aimed to revive the austerity of public aspiration...