Félix Duban's Didactic Restoration of the Château de Blois: A History of France in Stone
Félix Duban's restoration of the Château de Blois (1843-1870), one of the most ambitious and celebrated of the nineteenth century in France, has been neglected by historians more concerned with the restoration of medieval monuments and with the activity and influence of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. This study interprets some of Duban's archaeologically unjustified alterations to this complex monument in the light of the historicist architectural theory associated with Duban and the other Romantic architects Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer. The château is an accretion of buildings from several centuries in a variety of styles, and Duban's restoration of the medieval segment, the Salle des États-Généraux, is shown to be particularly crucial. It emerges from this study that Duban was concerned to highlight specific, politically meaningful aspects of the long and rich history of the monument, and to illustrate the Romantics' views about the dependence of architectural style on the evolution of human society. Duban's restoration presents a sharp counterpoint to the idealist theories of restoration associated with Viollet-le-Duc, and shows that restoration could be a powerful polemical weapon. The reading presented here places the restored château in the thick of the theoretical conflicts that characterized contemporary architectural debate.