Alexandre Lenoir
Marie Alexandre Lenoir was a French archaeologist. Self-taught and devoted to saving France's historic monuments and tombs from the ravages of the French Revolution, notably those of Saint-Denis and Sainte-Geneviève; the ravages of the Revolution caused the birth of the Musée des monuments français. Thanks to support from Jean Sylvain Bailly, Alexandre Lenoir demanded that all art objects from state properties be gathered together in this museum; these objects were confiscated at different religious houses and stored in a single place to avoid their dispersal and destruction. Mandated by the National Constituent Assembly in 1791, he brought together the various objects he sought to conserve in the Couvent des Petits Augustins, a building, converted to become the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. On 1 August 1793, the National Convention decreed that the tombs of "former kings" should be destroyed. Alexandre Lenoir witnessed the destruction of the royal tombs, with the bones thrown into a ditch.
He struggled against revolutionary vandalism and managed to save statues and loot which he stored at the couvent des Petits-Augustins. In 1795, he opened the Musée des monuments français to the public — he was its administrator for 30 years. In October 1796, Lenoir was among a number of artists who signed a petition supporting plans to seize works of art from Rome, in response to an early artists' petition orchestrated by Quatremère de Quincy that remonstrated against these plans. In 1816, under the Bourbon Restoration, he had to return the majority of his collections to their former public and private owners, his wife, Adélaïde Binart, exhibited at the Salons under the name Adélaïde Lenoir. Lenoir is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. By Marie-Geneviève Bouliard, exhibited at the 1796 salon, bought by the musée Carnavalet in 1899 By Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, dated 1799, given by Alexandre's grandson Alfred Lenoir to the musée national du château de Versailles By Jacques-Louis David - begun in France and completed in 1817 in Brussels, acquired in 1921 by the Louvre Bresc-Bautier, Geneviève.
Un musée révolutionaire: le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir. Paris: Louvre éditions. ISBN 978-2-75410-937-6. Louis Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, son journal et le Musée des monuments français, H. Champion, Paris, 3 vol. 1878–1887 Froissart, Jean-Luc, Albert et Angéline Lenoir: Une dynastie en A majeur, Paris: J.-L. Froissart, ISBN 978-2-9522836-3-2 Stara, Alexandra; the Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816: "Killing art to make history". Farnham: Ashgate. ISBN 978-1-4094-3799-4. Biography on insecula.com The Musée des monuments français on the Réunion des musées français site Jean Tulard, Jean-François Fayard and Alfred Fierro, Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution française. 1789-1799, Robert Laffont, Bouquins collection, Paris, 1987
Prefect (France)
A prefect in France is the State's representative in a department or region. Sub-prefects are responsible for the subdivisions of arrondissements; the office of a prefect is known as that of a sub-prefect as a subprefecture. Prefects are appointed by a decree of the President of the Republic in the Council of Ministers, following the proposal of the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior, they can be replaced at any meeting of the Council. From 1982 to 1988 prefects were called commissaires de la République and the sub-prefects commissaires adjoints de la République; the main role of the prefects are defined in article 72 of the Constitution of France: In the local governments of the Republic, the representative of the State, representing each member of the Government, is in charge of national interests, of administrative checks, the respect of Law. The exact role and attributions are defined in decrees, most notably decrees of 1964, 1982, 2004, each replacing the preceding one; the prefect of the département containing the chef-lieu de région is the préfet de région, or the prefect of the région.
Prefects operate under the Minister of the Interior. Their main missions include. Representing the state to local governments. Prefects may issue administrative orders in areas falling within the competency of the national government, including general safety. For instance, they may prohibit the use of certain roads without special tyres in times of snow; the prohibition on smoking or leaving the motor running while filling the fuel tank of a motor vehicle is another example of a matter decided by a prefectoral administrative order. On official occasions, prefects wear uniforms. Prefects had extensive powers of supervision and control over departmental affairs; this was true during the First and Second Empires, when the most trivial local matter had to be referred to the prefect. Since 1982, local government has been progressively decentralized, the prefect's role has been limited to preventing local policies from conflicting with national policy. In New Caledonia and French Polynesia, the prefect's roles, with certain differences in status, are fulfilled by a high commissioner.
The French Southern and Antarctic Lands used to be run by a superior administrator, but since 2004 are run by a prefect. The prefect, however, is not in Réunion. Paris, both a city and a department, is an exception. While it has a prefect, prefect of the Île-de-France region, another prefect handles law enforcement in Paris and some surrounding areas, as well many other administrative duties: the Prefect of Police of Paris. In Paris, the law enforcement powers exercised in other French cities and towns by the mayor belong to the Prefect of Police. In 2012, a Prefecture of Police of the Bouches-du-Rhône was created, seated at Marseille, with similar powers; the authority of the state over the sea is exercised by the Maritime Prefect of the relevant region. In Québec, a prefect is an unelected administrator of a Municipalité régionale de comté. There is no equivalent of French arrondissements, instead, the word "arrondissement" always refers to a submunicipal division with an elected leader. Decree of March 14, 1964, regarding the powers of prefects Decree of May 10, 1982, regarding the powers of prefects Decree of April 29, 2004, regarding the powers of prefects Prefect Prefectures in France
Ministry of Culture (France)
The Ministry of Culture is the ministry of the Government of France in charge of national museums and the monuments historiques. Its goal is to maintain the French identity through the promotion and protection of the arts on national soil and abroad, its budget is dedicated to the management of the Archives Nationales and the regional Maisons de la culture. Its main office is in the Palais-Royal in the 1st arrondissement of Paris on the Rue de Valois, it is headed by the Minister of a cabinet member. The current position holder is Franck Riester, since 16 October 2018. Deriving from the Italian and Burgundian courts of the Renaissance, the notion that the state had a key role to play in the sponsoring of artistic production and that the arts were linked to national prestige was found in France from at least the 16th century on. During the pre-revolutionary period, these ideas are apparent in such things as the creation of the Académie française, the Académie de peinture et de sculpture and other state-sponsored institutions of artistic production, through the cultural policies of Louis XIV's minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The modern post of Minister of Culture was created by Charles de Gaulle in 1959 and the first Minister was the writer André Malraux. Malraux was responsible for realizing the goals of the droit à la culture, an idea, incorporated in the Constitution of France and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by democratising access to culture, while achieving the Gaullist aim of elevating the "grandeur" of post-war France. To this end, he created numerous regional cultural centres throughout France and sponsored the arts. Malraux's artistic tastes included the modern arts and the avant-garde, but on the whole he remained conservative. Under president François Mitterrand the Minister of Culture was Jack Lang who showed himself to be far more open to popular cultural production, including jazz and roll, rap music, graffiti art, comic books and food, his famous phrase "économie et culture, même combat" is representative of his commitment to cultural democracy and to active national sponsorship and participation in cultural production.
In addition to the creation of the Fête de la Musique and overseeing the French Revolution bicentennial, he was in charge of the massive architectural program of the François Mitterrand years that gave permission for the building of the Bibliothèque nationale, the new Louvre, the Arab World Institute, the Musée d'Orsay, the Opéra-Bastille, the "Grande Arche" of La Défense, the new seat of the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance, the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre, the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie and Cité de la Musique, both in the Parc de la Villette. The Ministry of Jacques Toubon was notable for a number of laws enacted for the preservation of the French language, both in advertisements and on the radio, ostensibly in reaction to the presence of English; the following people were appointed as Minister of Culture of France: Since the French constitution does not identify specific ministers, each government may label each ministry as they wish, or have a broader ministry in charge of several governmental sectors.
Hence, the ministry has gone through a number of different names: The Ministry of Culture is made up of a variety of internal divisions, including: Direction de l'administration générale Direction de l'architecture et du patrimoine - in charge of national monuments and heritage Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel - maintains extensive databases of historical sites and objects. See Base Mérimée, Base Palissy and Monument historique. Direction des archives de France - in charge of the National Archives Direction du livre et de la lecture - in charge of French literature and the book trade Direction de la musique, de la danse, du théâtre et des spectacles - in charge of music and theater Direction des Musées de France - in charge of the National museumsThe Ministry has access to one inter-ministerial division: Direction du développement des médias in charge of developing and expanding the French media The Ministry runs three "delegations": Délégation aux arts plastiques - in charge of the visual and sculptural arts Délégation au développement et aux affaires internationales - in charge of international affairs and French art Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France - in charge of the French language and languages of FranceFinally, the Ministry shares in the management of the National Centre of Cinema, a public institution.
The Alliance française is run by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. For more on the organization of the Ministry, see Ministry of Culture. On the national level, the Ministry runs: Regional Cultural Affairs Departmental Architecture and Monuments Departmental Archives under the direction of the depart
Labyrinth of the Reims Cathedral
The Labyrinth of the Reims Cathedral was a church labyrinth installed on the floor of the nave of the Reims Cathedral. The labyrinth was the shape of a complex square with cut sides of 10.36 metres. The paths were 27.94 centimetres wide, separated by lines of dark blue stone from Ardennes of a width of 11.43 centimetres. The labyrinth was made of soft stone; this stone was of the same kind as Pierre Libergier's tombstone, now exhibit in the cathedral. A distinctive aspect of the labyrinth was the inclusion within it of depictions of the master masons of the cathedral. In other churches and cathedrals, they are anonymous. Indeed, the identities of these master masons are known, because a survey of the labyrinth was drawn in 1640 by Canon Cocquault and in 1779, just before its destruction, by Robin and Havé; these surveys contained dates and descriptions of the masons' works. The person most responsible for construction is identified as Aubry de Humbert, Archbishop of Reims, who decided in 1211 to build a new cathedral in the place of the one destroyed by fire in 1210.
The people in the corners of the labyrinth are successive master masons of the cathedral:: Jean Orbais made the plans of the cathedral and began the apse.: Jean-le-Loup began the northern portals.: Gaucher de Reims began the arches and portals on the western façade.: Bernard de Soissons made five vaults of the nave and the great rosace. Bernard de Soissons was in charge during the inauguration of the labyrinth. There is no trace of the fifth contractor, Robert de Coucy, in charge from 1290 to 1311 and who oversaw the carpentry and the roof; the masons are represented hard with their tools in hand. For example, Jean d'Orbais appears to draw a map on the floor. There were two other silhouettes on each side of the entrance of the labyrinth; the church labyrinths were polychrome pavements symbolizing the rise of Christ at Calvary. Christian people followed them on their knees as a symbolic pilgrimage or to win indulgences The labyrinth was inaugurated at the coronation of Philippe le Bel on 6 January 1286.
It covered the central part of the nave at the fourth spans. The labyrinth was destroyed in 1779 by the Canons, who were disturbed by children playing on the labyrinth during ceremonies. A plan to rebuild the labyrinth ran into administrative difficulties. Instead, a choice was made to undertake a nondamaging reconstruction; this took the form of a light projection on the ground that plays only in the evening, during cultural events. It was inaugurated on 19 September 2009; the labyrinth has been chosen as the national logo for French historical monuments. This logo depicts the labyrinth without people, rotated by 45°, in a dark red color. Naert, Dominique. Le labyrinthe de la cathédrale de Reims. 29 rue Gay- Lussac, 94120 Fontenay -sous -Bois: SIDES. P. 96. ISBN 978-2-86861-073-7
Alphonse de Lamartine
Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine, Knight of Pratz was a French writer and politician, instrumental in the foundation of the Second Republic and the continuation of the Tricolore as the flag of France. Lamartine was born in Mâcon, Burgundy, on 21 October 1790, his family were members of the French provincial nobility, he spent his youth at the family estate. Lamartine is famous for his autobiographical poem, "Le lac", which describes in retrospect the fervent love shared by a couple from the point of view of the bereaved man. Lamartine was masterly in his use of French poetic forms. Raised a devout Catholic, Lamartine became a pantheist, writing La Chute d'un ange, he wrote Histoire des Girondins in 1847 in praise of the Girondists. Lamartine made his entrance into the field of poetry with a masterpiece, Les Méditations Poétiques, awoke to find himself famous, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1825. He worked for the French embassy in Italy from 1825 to 1828. In 1829, he was elected a member of the Académie française.
He was elected a deputy in 1833. In 1835 he published the "Voyage en Orient", a brilliant and bold account of the journey he had just made, in royal luxury, to the countries of the Orient, in the course of which he had lost his only daughter. From on he confined himself to prose. Around 1830, Lamartine's opinions shifted in the direction of liberalism; when elected in 1833 to the National Assembly, he founded his own "Social Party" with some influence from Saint-Simonian ideas and established himself as a prominent critic of the July Monarchy, becoming more and more of a republican in the monarchy's last years. He was in charge of the government during the turbulence of 1848, he was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 24 February 1848 to 11 May 1848. Due to his great age, Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure, Chairman of the Provisional Government delegated many of his duties to Lamartine, he was a member of the Executive Commission, the political body which served as France's joint Head of State. Lamartine was instrumental in the founding of the Second Republic of France, having met with Republican Deputies and journalists in the Hôtel de Ville to agree on the makeup of its provisional government.
Lamartine himself was chosen to declare the Republic in traditional form in the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, ensured the continuation of the Tricouleur as the flag of the nation. On 25 February 1848 Lamartine said about the Tricolored Flag: "I spoke as a citizen earlier, well! Now listen to me, your Foreign Minister. If I remove the tricolor, know it, you will remove me half the external force of France! Because Europe knows the flag of his defeats and of our victories in the flag of the Republic and of the Empire. By seeing the red flag, they'll see the flag of a party! This is the flag of France, it is the flag of our victorious armies, it is the flag of our triumphs that must be addressed before Europe. France and the tricolor is the same thought, the same prestige terror, if necessary, for our enemies! Consider how much blood you would have to make for another flag fame! Citizens, for me, the red flag, I am not adopting it, I'll tell you why I'm against with all the strength of my patriotism.
It's that the tricolor has toured the world with the Republic and the Empire with your freedoms and your glory, the red flag was that around the Champ-de-Mars, dragged into the people's blood."During his term as a politician in the Second Republic, he led efforts that culminated in the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, as well as the enshrinement of the right to work and the short-lived national workshop programs. A political idealist who supported democracy and pacifism, his moderate stance on most issues caused many of his followers to desert him, he was an unsuccessful candidate in the presidential election of 10 December 1848, receiving fewer than 19,000 votes. He subsequently dedicated himself to literature, he published volumes on the most varied subjects during the Empire, having retired to private life and having become the prey of his creditors, he condemned himself to what he calls "literary hard-labor in order to exist and pay his debts". Lamartine ended his life in poverty, publishing monthly installments of the Cours familier de littérature to support himself.
He died in Paris in 1869. Nobel prize winner Frédéric Mistral's fame was in part due to the praise of Alphonse de Lamartine in the fortieth edition of his periodical Cours familier de littérature, following the publication of Mistral's long poem Mirèio. Mistral is the most revered writer in modern Occitan literature. Lamartine is considered to be the first French romantic poet, was acknowledged by Paul Verlaine and the Symbolists as an important influence. Alphonse de Lamartine was an Orientalist with a particular interest in Lebanon and the Middle East, he travelled to Lebanon and the Holy Land in 1832–33. During that trip, while he was in Beirut, on 7 December 1832, he lost his only remaining child, Julia. During his trip to Lebanon he had met prince Bashir Shihab II and prince Simon Karam, who were enthusiasts of poetry. A valley in Lebanon is still called the Valley of Lamartine as a commemoration of that visit, the Lebanon cedar forest still harbors the "Lamartine Cedar", said to be the cedar under which Lamartine had sat 200 years ago.
Lamartine was so influenced by his trip that he staged his 1838 epic poem La Chute d'un ange in L
Missions Héliographiques
Missions Héliographiques was a 19th-century project to photograph landmarks and monuments around France so that they could be restored. The project was established by Prosper Mérimée, France's Inspector General of Historical Monuments and author of Carmen, in 1851; the intent was to supplement Monument historique, a program Mérimée started in 1837 to classify and restore French landmarks. Mérimée hired Edouard Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq and Auguste Mestral to carry out the photography, with the aim that architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc could restore them. Although the daguerrotype originated in France, Mérimée preferred the calotype, which offered more detailed textures. Mestral and Le Gray photographed areas southwest from Paris, Le Secq the east. Bayard, who chose to work with glass negatives instead of paper, went west to Normandy. Baldus covered the east, including the Palace of Fontainebleau. While several of the images are classic examples of early photography, the overall results did not meet requirements portraying the decaying buildings artistically and obscuring their need for restoration.
Notes
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne's repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are characteristic and recognizable, he used planes of small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects. Cézanne is said to have formed the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Both Matisse and Picasso are said to have remarked that Cézanne "is the father of us all." The Cézannes came from the commune of Saint-Sauveur. Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence. On 22 February, he was baptized in the Église de la Madeleine, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents, became a devout Catholic in life, his father, Louis Auguste Cézanne, a native of Saint-Zacharie, was the co-founder of a banking firm that prospered throughout the artist's life, affording him financial security, unavailable to most of his contemporaries and resulting in a large inheritance.
His mother, Anne Elisabeth Honorine Aubert, was "vivacious and romantic, but quick to take offence". It was from her that Cézanne got his vision of life, he had two younger sisters and Rose, with whom he went to a primary school every day. At the age of ten Cézanne entered the Saint Joseph school in Aix. In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon in Aix, where he became friends with Émile Zola, in a less advanced class, as well as Baptistin Baille—three friends who came to be known as "les trois inséparables", he stayed there for six years. In 1857, he began attending the Free Municipal School of Drawing in Aix, where he studied drawing under Joseph Gibert, a Spanish monk. From 1858 to 1861, complying with his father's wishes, Cézanne attended the law school of the University of Aix, while receiving drawing lessons. Going against the objections of his banker father, he committed himself to pursuing his artistic development and left Aix for Paris in 1861, he was encouraged to make this decision by Zola, living in the capital at the time.
His father reconciled with Cézanne and supported his choice of career. Cézanne received an inheritance of 400,000 francs from his father, which rid him of all financial worries. In Paris, Cézanne met the Impressionist Camille Pissarro; the friendship formed in the mid-1860s between Pissarro and Cézanne was that of master and disciple, in which Pissarro exerted a formative influence on the younger artist. Over the course of the following decade their landscape painting excursions together, in Louveciennes and Pontoise, led to a collaborative working relationship between equals. Cézanne's early work is concerned with the figure in the landscape and includes many paintings of groups of large, heavy figures in the landscape, imaginatively painted. In his career, he became more interested in working from direct observation and developed a light, airy painting style. In Cézanne's mature work there is the development of a solidified architectural style of painting. Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find.
To this end, he structurally ordered. His statement "I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting like the art in the museums", his contention that he was recreating Poussin "after nature" underscored his desire to unite observation of nature with the permanence of classical composition. Cézanne was interested in the simplification of occurring forms to their geometric essentials: he wanted to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone". Additionally, Cézanne's desire to capture the truth of perception led him to explore binocular vision graphically, rendering different, yet simultaneous visual perceptions of the same phenomena to provide the viewer with an aesthetic experience of depth different from those of earlier ideals of perspective, in particular single-point perspective, his interest in new ways of modelling space and volume derived from the stereoscopy obsession of his era and from reading Hippolyte Taine’s Berkelean theory of spatial perception. Cézanne's innovations have prompted critics to suggest such varied explanations as sick retinas, pure vision, the influence of the steam railway.
Cézanne's paintings were shown in the first exhibition of the Salon des Refusés in 1863, which displayed works not accepted by the jury of the official Paris Salon. The Salon rejected Cézanne's submissions every year from 1864 to 1869, he continued to submit works to the Salon until 1882. In that year, through the intervention of fellow artist Antoine Guillemet, he exhibited Portrait de M. L. A. Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne, The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement", 1866, his first and last successful submission to the Salon. Before 1895 Cézanne exhibited twice with the Impressionists. In years a few individual paintings were shown at various venues, unti
