Nineteenth Century
The church, with the exception of the tower, was demolished in 1793; preservation of the tower was a condition of the contract by which the church was bought for the value of its building materials. In 1824 it was being used as a shot tower to make small shot. It was repurchased by the City of Paris in 1836 and declared a Monument Historique in 1862. A statue of the saint was installed on the top of the tower during the 19th century.
During the Second Empire, the architect Théodore Ballu restored the tower, placing it on a pedestal and designing a small city park around it. This coincided with the construction of the rue de Rivoli and the avenue Victoria nearby, requiring huge quantities of earth to be removed to ensure the rue de Rivoli a smooth flat path. The pedestal allowed the tower to retain its original elevation: nowadays, the change in ground level can best be appreciated in rue St-Bon, just northeast of the tower, where a staircase leads up to the original street level at rue de la Verrerie.
A statue of Blaise Pascal is located at the base of the tower, commemorating the experiments on atmospheric pressure, though it is debated whether they were performed here or at the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. A meteorological laboratory is also installed at the top of the tower.
The tower inspired Alexandre Dumas to write the play La tour Saint-Jacques-de-la-boucherie in 1856.
Nicolas Flamel, a patron of the church, was buried under its floor.
Read more about this topic: Saint-Jacques Tower
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“Posterity—the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism—grows ever harder to conceive.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake ... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.”
—Leon Edel (b. 1907)
“The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)