Grand in its outlines and decorations, it stood there, august, dazzling, in a halo, the unique masterpiece of art and of reason, as the ideal form of human society.
For ten centuries this specter haunted the medieval epoch, and nowhere to such an extent as in Italy.[2338] It reappears the last time in 1800, starting up in and taking firm hold of the magnificent, benighted imagination of the great Italian,[2339] to whom the opportunity afforded the means for executing the grand Italian dream of the Middle Ages; it is according to this retrospective vision that the Diocletian of Ajaccio, the Constantine of the Concordat, the Justinian of the Civil Code, the Theodosius of the Tuileries and of St.
Cloud reconstructed France.
This does not mean that he copies--he restores; his conception is not plagiarism, but a case of atavism; it comes to him through the nature of his intellect and through racial traditions.

In the way of social and political conceptions, as in literature and in art, his spontaneous taste is ultra-classic.

We detect this in his mode of comprehending the history of France; State historians, "encouraged by the police," must make it to order; they must trace it "from the end of Louis XIV.

to the year VIII," and their object must be to show how superior the new architecture is to the old one.[2340] "The constant disturbance of the finances must be noted, the chaos of the provincial assemblies,...

the pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of energy and order in the administration, that parti-colored France with no unity of laws or of administration, being rather a union of twenty kingdoms than one single State, so that one breathes on reaching the epoch in which people enjoy the benefits of the unity of the laws, of the administration, and of the territory." In effect, he breathes; in thus passing from the former to the latter spectacle, he finds real intellectual pleasure; his eyes, offended with Gothic disorder, turn with relief and satisfaction to majestic simplicity and classic regularity; his eyes are those of a Latin architect brought up in the "Ecole de Rome." This is so true that, outside of this style, he admits of no other.
Societies of a different type seem to him absurd.