Durand and Quatremère de Quincy

If the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 has long served as the dividing line between premodern and modern European history, it was in many ways a symbolic one. The event (which liberated but five prisoners and two madmen from a prison already scheduled for demolition) represents, on the one hand, the collapse of the “old regime” in France and the aristocratic and clerical privileges it protected, on the other hand, the dawning of a new era of individual rights and democratic government. The social and political implications of the French Revolution were certainly not felt in France alone. The period 1789–1815 was an exceedingly convulsive one for a still largely feudal Europe, now forced to undergo a radical reconsideration of the existing body politic. Wars and related incidents of social unrest were nearly continuous. And to these cataclysms must be added, in the more advanced states, the economic pressures of the Industrial Revolution. In the end, modern values for the first time become clearly discernible, manifesting themselves no less in architectural thought than in other cultural fields.

The political and military events neatly encapsulate the stages of progressive turmoil. The unrest in France in the summer of 1789 led to a “Declaration of the Rights of Man” (emulating the American model) and a limited or constitutional monarchy.