How to take the bastilles 

Abstract

If we want to give flesh and blood to the history of places of power, and not just map their symbolic relationships in the abstract, we need to focus on describing, in situ, the behaviors they architect. First and foremost, the behavior of the princes : Cola di Rienzo in Rome, like Filippo Maria Visconti in Milan, adopted attitudes, gestures and ways of living that made the accusation of tyranny credible. In this way, the façade of a palace can be seen as the authoritarian or threatening face of a political enemy. This engages a dynamic of qualification, dequalification and requalification of spaces - and it's by following the uncertain future of the term forum from Renaissance Italy to Napoleon's regeneration of its prestigious structures that we gain a better grasp of the way in which the social construction of their architectural efficacy is constructed through the naming of places. For example, from the XV^thcentury onwards, certain fortresses could be seen as bastilles. In this case, as in the case of the Bastille in Paris on July 14 1789, it is their dismantling that establishes them as places of memory.

Contents

• Giving flesh to history
• Against monumental necrosis, " des espèces de niche " (Francis Ponge, " Notes pour un coquillage ", in Le Parti-pris des choses, 1942)
• Secretum, or the art of secreting one's place of power
• L'arco della pace and the Napoleonic order of a Milan decongested by the destruction of the " bastions of ancient tyranny "
• Giovanni Antonio Antolini's foro Bonaparte, ceremonial space and Jacobin utopia (Romain Buclon, " Du Foro Bonaparte de Milan au Quartier du roi de Rome de Paris. Continuités et divergences d'une utopie républicaine à une vision impériale ", Mélanges de l'École française de Rome - Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 125-2, 2013)
• " A whole and perfect body, which could not be left lifeless " (Giovanni Antonio Antolini, Descrizione del Foro Bonaparte, Milan, 1806)
• In 1493, from the impossibleforum of Milan to that of Vigevano (Patrick Boucheron, " Hof, Stadt und öffentlicher Raum. Krieg der Zeichen und Streit um die Orte im Mailand des 15. Jahrhunderts ", in Werner Paravicini and Jörg Wettlaufer eds, Der Hof und die Stadt. Konfrontation, Koexistenz und Integration im Verhältnis von Hof und Stadt in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Halle an der Saale, 2004)
• Castello, Corte, platea : the topographical tenacity of the names of places of power
• Reconstructing the hold of the quartiero visconteo : the archaeological paradox (Edoardo Rossetti, " In "contrata de Vicecomitibus". Il problema dei palazzi viscontei nel Trecento tra esercizio del potere e occupazione dello spazio urbano ", in Pier Nicola Pagliaea and Serena Romano, Modernamente antichi. Modelli, identità, tradizione nella Lombardia del Tre et Quattrocento ( Rome: Viella, 2014)
• Les complexes palatiaux des hôtels princiers à Paris (Hélène Noizet, Boris Bove, Laurent Costa (dir.), Paris de parcelles en pixels, Presses universitaires de Vincennes - comité d'histoire de la Ville de Paris, Saint-Denis, Paris, 2013)
• The 1420s in Milan, or a shattered equilibrium
• Filippo Maria Visconti, the feared prince
• Pier Candido Decembrio and the writing of tyranny (Gary Ianziti, " The Life of the Last Visconti: A Study in Tyranny? ", Renaissance Quarterly, 75-3, 2022)
• In Segovia too, a king architected by fear (François Foronda, " Le prince, le palais et la ville : Ségovie ou le visage du tyran dans la Castille du XV^thsiècle ", Revue historique, 627-3, 2003)
• Cola di Rienzo and the pathologies of power in Anonymous Roman chronicles
• Flesh is sad : consider the tyrant looking at the facade of his palace
• In 1447 in Milan : the ritualized dismantling of the Castello di Porta Giovia as a destruction of public utility (Patrick Boucheron, Le Pouvoir de bâtir. Urbanisme et politique édilitaire à Milan (XIV^th -XV^thsiècles), Rome, 1998, republished in Points, 2023)
• Other bastilles, notably in Ancona (Philippe Jansen, " Bastilles médiévales : les communes à l'assaut des forteresses princières ", in Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (eds.), Religion et société urbaine au Moyen Âge. Études offertes à Jean-Louis Biget par ses anciens élèves(Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000)
• Inventing a place of memory by destroying it : citizen Pierre-François Palloy and the destruction of the Bastille (Héloïse Bocher, Démolir la Bastille. L'édification d'un lieu de mémoire, Paris, Vendémiaire, 2012)
• Hubert Robert, July 15 1789 : the day after
• The destruction of the Bastille in Un peuple et son roi (Pierre Schoeller, 2018) : when perspectives open up
• " Tout était creux, puissance et statue " (Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableaux de Paris, quoted by Bertrand Tillier, " La mort des statues. Imaginaires archaïques et usages politiques de l'iconoclasme ", in Emmanuel Fureix (ed.), Iconoclasme et révolutions, XVIII^th -XXI^stsiècles, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2014).