Paris Opera House History

This building exists because somebody threw a bomb. Everything after that — the competition, the unknown architect, the water under the site, the war, the fire — follows from one evening in January 1858. Opera Garnier Paris tours tell the story on site; this page tells it in order.

The bomb that built an opera house — 14 January 1858

Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie were arriving at the opera house on the rue Le Peletier when Felice Orsini's bombs went off in the street outside. The imperial couple were unhurt. A great many people around them were not.

The lesson the Emperor took was architectural. The rue Le Peletier house had been built as a temporary measure in 1821 and had no secure way in; a head of state arriving at it stood in a public street. Paris needed an opera house with a private entrance, and it needed one in a district Baron Haussmann was already rebuilding.

The competition of 1860, and the 171 drawings

The competition was announced in 1860 and open to anyone. 171 projects were submitted. The Empress had a favourite and it was not the one that won, which produced the exchange the building has been telling on itself ever since: asked what style it was in, since it was neither Greek nor Roman nor Louis anything, the architect is said to have replied that it was in the style of Napoleon III.

Charles Garnier, 35, and unknown

Charles Garnier had won the Prix de Rome and built almost nothing. He was 35 years old and the jury selected him unanimously in the second round, on 30 May 1861. He then spent the next fifteen years on this one building, and it took his name rather than the Emperor's.

The water under the site, and the five months it took to drain

Work started in 1862 and immediately hit groundwater. Eight steam pumps ran for five months and the water kept returning. Garnier's answer was to stop trying to remove it: he built a double foundation with a sealed tank between the layers, reaching 10.13 metres below ground, so the water table had a place to sit and the building had a stable base and a fire reserve at the same time.

That tank is the origin of every underground-lake story attached to this address, and the rooms page explains what is actually down there.

Fifteen years, one war and a fire

Construction ran through the Second Empire and outlived it. The franco-prussian war of 1870 stopped the site; the Commune followed; the imperial pavilion Napoleon III had asked for was finished for an emperor who was gone. Work restarted under the Third Republic without much enthusiasm.

What forced it through was an accident. In 1873 the old house on the rue Le Peletier burned down, and Paris was suddenly a capital with a national opera company and nowhere to put it. The unfinished building on the boulevard became urgent.

5 January 1875 — the opening

The Palais Garnier was inaugurated on 5 January 1875, a year ahead of the schedule then in force, under President Mac Mahon and in front of an audience drawn from across Europe. Parts of it were not finished: the Emperor's pavilion, a gallery and the Salon du Glacier were all still to come. The total came to just over 35 million gold francs.

20 May 1896 — the counterweight

Twenty-one years after the opening, one of the counterweights holding the seven tonnes chandelier broke loose and came through the ceiling into the auditorium. A woman in the audience was killed. The story reached Gaston Leroux, who put a version of it into a novel in 1910 and gave this building a second career as a haunted one.

1964 — Chagall over the original

André Malraux, then France's culture minister, commissioned Marc Chagall to paint a new ceiling for the auditorium. It went up in 1964, on a frame above the nineteenth-century ceiling rather than in place of it, so both still exist. It was argued about at the time and it is argued about now, which is roughly what a good commission does.

Two houses, since 13 July 1989

The company opened a second theatre at the Bastille on 13 July 1989, 2,745 seats by Carlos Ott, and most large-scale opera moved there. The Palais Garnier kept the ballet and a share of the repertoire, and became the house people visit as well as the house people attend. The company page sets out what is staged where.

Timeline

Paris Opera House Tours lists every departure with its meeting point and its refund window, and the facts page has the dates and the measurements in one place.