Photo : Alexander Hoernigk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
l'opéra Garnier
The Palais Garnier is a Paris opera house built under the Second Empire. After the Rue Le Peletier attack in 1858, Napoleon III decided to build a new lyric theatre, as part of the great works transforming the capital carried out with the prefect Haussmann. A competition was launched in December 1860 and the young architect Charles Garnier, first Grand Prix de Rome in 1848, was declared the unanimous winner in 1861.
The first stone was laid in 1862. The work was complicated by the water table, which forced Garnier to design a concrete raft, and by a diamond-shaped plot. The building was inaugurated on 5 January 1875 in the presence of President Mac-Mahon. Its eclectic architecture makes it a prototype of the Napoleon III style. The auditorium has about 1,979 seats and its ceiling was painted by Marc Chagall, inaugurated in 1964 at the request of André Malraux. The grand foyer regained its original decoration in a restoration in 2004.
