Mont Cenis: Napoleon's pyramids

It's a stunning piece of architecture. At an altitude of 2,100 metres, the Mont Cenis pyramid stands out against the military fortifications and the turquoise waters of the lake. A pyramid in the heart of the mountain pastures?

The idea may seem improbable, but this building, which houses a museum and chapel, is the distant heir to an architectural competition launched by... Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon passed through Mont Cenis several times. In 1805, for example, he found himself snowbound above Lanslebourg. He had to spend several days at the former Mont Cenis hospice, then run by Don Gabet, to regain his strength.

It was against this backdrop that he decided to considerably improve this strategic route for his troops. He had the present road from Val Cenis to Susa built and the hospice enlarged. The modest building was completely transformed and could accommodate up to 2,000 soldiers and 250 horses! Napoleon even had the ambition of building an entire town and settling 5,000 inhabitants on this high-altitude plateau.

At a time when Europe is a vast battlefield, organizing such a competition for a monument at Mont-Cenis may seem incongruous. But the project was also conceived as a stimulus in Napoleon's very difficult political context: propaganda architecture in the service of the empire.

Despite extremely tight deadlines, the projects piled up. French, Italian and Dutch architects worked on Mont-Cenis, proposing monuments as varied as they were extravagant.

The Napoleonic era was marked by a craze for monumental architecture. Many architects in the competition were inspired by Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, and proposed gigantic pyramids for Mont Cenis.

• Louis Combes, winner of the Prix d'Architecture de Rome in 1781, wanted to build a stepped pyramid a hundred meters high, topped by a 20-meter-high statue of Napoleon ! The edifice would be built using material recovered from excavating the mountain. It's not such a crazy technique, since it's how the huge dam now visible on Mont Cenis was built.
• Giannantonio Selva, from the Bologna Academy, proposes a pyramid adorned with porticos inspired by the Parthenon in Athens, and an interior reminiscent of the Pantheon in Paris.
• Dutch architect Abraham Van der Hart designed several projects, including an imposing pyramid surrounded by antique columns and topped by a huge dome, or, more simply, a military barracks with a statue of the Emperor at its center.
• Italy's Pasquale Belli proposes a classical classical palace topped by a cupola.
• As for Luigi Cagnola, he imagined a huge building inspired by antiquity.

These pyramid and antique architecture projects are reminiscent of other Napoleonic initiatives, such as the planned pyramid at Montmartre or the one dedicated to the Grande Armée in Paris.

While some projects are totally unfeasible, others are more pragmatic. Several architects are proposing hospices, schools and military buildings to integrate Mont-Cenis into a long-term development perspective.

Italy's Giuseppe Pistocchi, for example, wanted to build a military academy for 14,500 people in a 6-storey circular building.

As for Gastaud from Maurienne, "garde magasin des vivres de la guerre de Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne", well aware of the difficulties of crossing Mont-Cenis in snowy conditions, he wanted to take advantage of the 25 million to build a 5.5 km-long covered tunnel with 2 lanes of traffic between La Ramasse and the Saint-Nicolas plain. A practical and useful tunnel, part of which would be built a few decades later to house the Fell railroad, even though its construction with gunpowder and crowbars was likely to take a few years.