Funeral in Honor of Simoneau, Mayor of Etampes, on June 3, 1792
Originally, during the reign of Louis XV, the Madeleine Church was supposed to be the mirror image, on the right bank, of the Sainte-Geneviève church (currently the Panthéon) located on the left bank: an immense church in the Antique style. However, in 1789, when the Revolution broke out, it was not yet completed. Construction stopped. There were many ideas on how it could be made useful: the Madeleine was almost an assembly hall, a temple dedicated to the Revolution, the Bank of France, a library, a stock exchange and even an opera! None of these projects would see the light of day, however. In 1806, Napoleon dreamed of turning it into a temple to the glory of the Great Army. In 1815, Louis XVIII imagined making it into a temple dedicated to the victims of the Revolution, before building the Expiatory chapel, next door. Construction finally started back up. The Madeleine Church was finally inaugurated in 1842.
When the Madeleine Church almost became a stock exchange!
Blueprint for a Stock Exchange, a Bank of France, a Commercial Court and an Amortization Fund on the Grounds of the Madeleine Church
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Emperor Napoleon asked the architect Alphonse-Théodore Brongniart to build a large imperial stock exchange. Well positioned in the heart of Paris’s financial district, and not yet completed, the Madeleine construction site was first imagined. Ultimately, the Stock Exchange was built not far from there, on the land of a former convent: this would be known as the “Brongniart Palace.”
