Note 139 — CHAPTER 6 THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL

See Chenesseau, G., Sainte-Croix d’Orléans; histoire d’une cathédrale gothique réedifiée par les Bourbons, 1599-1829, 3 vols, Paris, 1921.

The design of 1707 for the façade was by Robert de Cotte, J.-H. Mansart’s principal lieutenant. The work was carried on more actively by A.-J. Gabriel under Louis XV. With the Restoration in 1816 Louis XVIII took up the completion of the project—which Napoleon had actually ordered before Waterloo—as part of the general preoccupation of the Restoration with a strengthening of the Church, and Charles X opened the finished church in 1829. Thus the renewal of activity here in the second decade of the nineteenth century precedes the other Neo-Gothic work described below by some twenty years. But credit—or discredit—for its Rococo-Gothic character belongs to the eighteenth not to the nineteenth century.