Mirabeau and Rousseau were the first entrants. The building was reconsecrated by Napoleon I, who ended the revolution’s war with the Church, then became a national necropolis again under the July Monarchy; reconsecrated by Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III; and finally de-sacralized by the Third Republic on the occasion of the state burial of Victor Hugo. The blazing white Sacré-Cœur on the top of Montmartre was built by the Church (originally with state approval) as a penitence for and sign of revival from the moral decline of France since the revolution, punished by its defeat against the Prussians and expressed in the sins of the Paris Commune, a radical insurrection in 1871, starting on Montmartre.
The clash between nation-state and Catholic Church was most frontal in Italy, part of which was directly ruled by the pope, including the city of Rome. The French army had saved papal rule from the 1849 revolution and from the unification of Italy in 1860. But in the face of defeat by the Prussians, the French troops withdrew in 1870, and Italian ones entered Rome after a short bombardment of the Pious Gate. The nation-state took over the palaces of the papal court and administration as well as a large number of the many convents and monasteries. The pope’s main palace, the Quirinale, became the Royal Palace and, after World War II, the presidential one. The national Senate and the Chamber of Deputies were (and are still) lodged in Renaissance palaces used by the papal government. New national offices were built along a new street, Via XX Settembre (20 September), the date of the armed Italian entry into papal Rome.
The pope retreated to the Vatican by the Basilica of Saint Peter, the smaller part of a now deeply divided city. ‘To their [the national] congresses and society, [we put forward] other societies and congresses’, declared the pope.43 Guelph (pro-papal) forces remained important in Rome, but the anti-clericals had the backing of the national government. In 1889, the latter scored a major symbolic triumph: a monument to Giordano Bruno was unveiled in Campo de’ Fiori, where in 1600 the Inquisition had burnt him as a heretic.44
The fact that the national parliaments of Portugal and Spain are housed in former convents and monasteries has a historical context of its own. Both monarchical states were devastated by French invasions and British interventions in the Napoleonic period, leaving the legacy of a half-century (Spain) to a full century (Portugal) of dynastic rivalries, civil wars between royal absolutists and liberal constitutionalists, military coups and counter-coups. In the mid-1830s the liberals and anti-clericals were in power in both countries. For fiscal as well as for political reasons, the national governments abolished the religious orders, freed their vast lands to the market and expropriated a large number of convents and monasteries in Lisbon and Madrid. Through all the political vicissitudes, these measures stuck. They had the most impact on Lisbon, where the dissolved religious orders provided housing not only for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies but also for army offices, law courts, the prefecture, the national conservatory, the national library, the academy of sciences and the site of the main railway station, the Santa Apolónia.45
City Politics and City Space
National capitals were much more national than municipal, but some kind of municipal self-government was part of the post-absolutist programme of the nineteenth century, and even papal Rome, since the mid-century, had a partly elected municipal government.46 As the capital of national revolutions from 1789 to 1871, the city of Paris had an eminent role, and in the beginning of revolutions its Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) was an important meeting and brokering place. But the city never became a major institutional player. Brussels belonged to the pre-national City Belt of Europe, running from Italy to the Low Countries, where territorial state centralization never coalesced.47 In its Grande Place, the Gothic city hall towers over the building of the Habsburg imperial representative at the opposite side of the square. Belgian Brussels maintained what was probably the most powerful capital-city mayoralty of nineteenth-century Europe.* The two most significant mayors, Jules Anspach and Charles Buls, have their names inscribed in the boulevards of the city’s north-south axis. The Rathaus of Vienna is one of the most impressive city halls of the era, built by a wealthy bourgeois elite. Vienna also got Europe’s first rabble-rousing or ‘populist’ mayor, for two years vetoed by the emperor: the Christian-Social Party’s Karl Lueger, still remembered in part of the Ringstrasse as Karl-Lueger-Ring.†
The spatial layout of the old European capitals changed substantially. In some cities, Vienna and Copenhagen in the late 1850s particularly, restructuring was a compound of national politics and changes of situated military technology and considerations, making city walls and the glacis, the open field of shooting range in front of them, obsolete. In Paris a similar de-fortification took place at the same time, but further out from the centre, bringing suburban villages like Belleville, Bercy, Montmartre and La Villette into the city and little directly affecting the layout of the latter.48 In Paris, the process of turning ‘bulwarks’ into ‘boulevards’ had started already in the late seventeenth century.49 However, in the 1840s, a new defence ring around Paris was built, which stayed until 1919 and was only in the 1960s turned into the Périphérique ring road. In London, the walls had been torn down by the mid-eighteenth century. In Berlin, dismantling started at about that time too, but an ‘excise wall’ began to be built for fiscal reasons.50 The wall around Rome was not regarded as a barrier to the expansion of the national capital, although it had prevented the emergence of a suburban periphery around the papal city.51
The rise of national politics of variable kinds transformed the urban space more consistently with its demands for representational spaces, the need to control unruly crowds and the need for open arteries for the circulation of commodities and people. The homo- or heterogeneity of the resulting built environment depended on the planning powers and the control of the land rent. In Europe, there have been, in modern history at least, four pertinent planning regimes. The strictest one was that of Haussmannian Paris, manifested in its boulevards of buildings of the same height and style, with long horizontal rows of wrought-iron balconies. Another one is the Berlin Bauordnung prescribing rules of height, proportions of building size and street width, but not style. The London one is a third example, of insular planning by individual (mainly aristocratic) investors of clusters of homogenous buildings around a square and for the rest a free-for-all, with some restrictions of height (until recently). Fourth, there is the thoroughly liberal Athenian pattern, largely followed in Ringstrasse Vienna, mainly depending on big individual investors, their taste and their choice of architect. National governments dominated the planning of most national capitals, with some exceptions: Brussels, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm. The active interest of the Berlin and Vienna national governments was limited.52
Ensanche (widening) was the keyword of the changes of central urban space.* Haussmann used the dramatic verb éventrer (literally meaning ‘opening up the stomach’).53 Improving the circulation of people, commodities and air was a major drive. The result was a new pattern of long, wide, tree-lined avenues, with ample sidewalks and showy buildings, and of large squares or roundabouts, usually displaying some national monument. These were not yet the motorized escape routes of twentieth-century American cities, for a while attractive also to European planners. The Balkans apart, the changes were most dramatic in Paris and in Brussels. The Vienna Ringstrasse was a landmark ring, but it left the inner city, imperial and ecclesiastical, intact. The widening of Madrid took a long time, due to political instability, but Lisbon and Budapest were soon recentred along Avenida da Liberdade and Andrássy út, respectively. Central Berlin was transformed in Prussian rather than German times by the master architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel around the Schlossplatz, with the Schlossbrücke connecting to the Unter den Linden, the Lustgarten and its museum. The Brandenburger Tor was then at the western end of the city. West of Tiergarten was another city, Charlottenburg, incorporated into Great Berlin in 1920. Already, under Bismarck, construction had started of the later main axis of West Berlin, Kurfürstendamm. Central London got its major facelift in the immediate post-Napoleonic era, with Regent Street and Trafalgar Square.
The nation-states required new, and more, public buildings, particularly in the Balkans, where few of the Ottoman edifices were deemed acceptable: parliaments, ministries, law courts, a roster of buildings for national cultural institutions, museums, theatre, opera, concert hall, library, university and, for communications, post, telegraph and telephone offices – the latter most splendidly