On the top floor of the Grande Arche is the headquarters of the Fondation l’Arche de la Fraternité, the ‘Foundation of the Arch of the Brotherhood’, which includes Claude Cheysson, a former minister of foreign affairs, as a past president. The foundation dates from the 1970s when it was established as a human rights organisation headed by Edgar Faure, formerly president of France in the 1950s. When in the early 1980s President Mitterrand began to make it known that he wanted the Grande Arche monument to be a symbol of ‘Fraternity and Liberty’, Edgar Faure proposed to him that the foundation's headquarters in Paris should be moved to the Grande Arche building at La Défense.129
Mysteries of the axis
The Grande Arche project was completed on time for the bicentennial of the Revolution and was inaugurated with much fanfare by President Mitterrand on 14 July 1989. The final result is stunning. The Grande Arche can be seen from miles away, and, after the Eiffel Tower, it is unquestionably the most imposing landmark of Paris. Jean-Claude Garcias, who wrote the text for the official guidebook of the Grande Arche, described it as the monument of the 1980s that inspires the collective mind with the ‘instinct of immortality’.130 Moreover Garcias saw the Grande Arche not as a project that came out fully formed ‘from the brain of its architect’, but rather as ‘the end product to a long and sinuous urban axis which was begun in the 17th century and which’, he says, ‘can be schematised as follows’: Born in the open court of the Louvre, but deviated six degrees towards the north during the run through the Tuilleries, the great east-west axis of Paris has its origins in the avenue of trees planted by Le Nôtre at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV, who opened the perspective towards the setting sun … It was followed by the development of the present Place de la Concorde under Louis XV, then the levelling of the slope on which today stands the Arc de Triomphe and the avenue of the Champs-Élysées. At the end of the Old Regime the engineer Perronet built the first stone bridge at Neuilly, taking the axis all the way to the hill of Chantecoq, our present area of La Défense …131
The Grande Arche, therefore, much appears to be the culmination an ongoing chain of ideas, an occult plan one might even venture to say, which began with the Sun King Louis XIV and ended with President François Mitterrand – who was jokingly referred to by the French as Le Roi Soleil because of the ambition of his Grands Projets scheme. Let us note in passing here that Mitterrand had also one more Grand Projet in store for La Défense: a skyscraper 400 meters tall called La Tour Sans Fin. This monster of a building was designed by the architect Jean Nouvel,132 and, unlike most skyscrapers, was to feature varying levels of transparency acting as ‘sky filters’, such that at the top it would become fully transparent and disappear into the clouds.133 What was intended, here, was an allusion to the biblical ‘Tower of Babel’, a universal talisman of the first magnitude that is also a popular Freemasonic pictogram often held to be a symbol for the origins of the Craft.134 The Tour Sans Fin, however, was eventually scrapped due to lack of funds and the immense impracticality of the idea.135
Unquestionably, the Grande Arche occupies the place of honour on the western extremity of the axis of Paris. It is the final ‘sunset’ of a great plan whose ‘sunrise’, as we have seen, was the ‘miraculous birth’ of the Sun King Louis XIV at the Louvre – but whose first sunrise, we suggest, took place long ago and far away in ancient Egypt. The Grande Arche thus becomes an integral part of a monumental array of talismans strung out along the axis of Paris, notably the Arc de Triomphe at the Place de l’Étoile and the Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde. The axis then enters the precinct of the Tuileries Garden to make it way to the Louvre. When the axis is traced eastwards towards the Louvre, the reader will recall from Chapter Seventeen that it passes first through the bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV represented as ‘Alexander the Great’, placed to the south of Pei's glass Pyramid. East again and we find that the axis transects the south wing of the Louvre and then enters the private apartments of Anne of Austria, Louis XIV’s mother – the very place where the ‘Capetian miracle’ of Louis XIV’s conception took place in December 1637.
Interestingly, the full effect of the ensemble of these ‘Masonic’ and ‘Egyptian’ monuments and, more specifically, of their alignments, was not to be unveiled on the bicentennial day of 14 July 1989, but exactly a year later when the French composer Jean Michel Jarre was commissioned to organise a special concert at the Place de la Grande Arche de la Défense for 14 July 1990. Why and how Jarre was chosen for this event is not clear, but it was to prove an amazing extravaganza of sound, light and fireworks the likes of which Paris had never seen before, not even during the Revolution when Jean-Jacques David and Robespierre had inaugurated the era of the Supreme Being near the Louvre.
Beginning at dusk on 14 July 1990, an estimated two million people filled the Champs-Élysées as if coming to attend some weird Hermetic Mass. On that strange night all the relevant monuments on the Historical Axis – Grande Arche, the Arc de Triomphe, the Luxor Obelisk and, of course, the Louvre Pyramid – were lit up as if to reveal a magical landscape for Paris.
The orchestra of Jean Michel Jarre, with the chorus wearing long, flowing white robes giving them a surreal appearance, were positioned at the foot of the Grande Arche inside a huge, makeshift metal-framed pyramid that was lit up with laser lights.
The lasers projected images onto the façades of adjacent skyscrapers. Many of these images were reminiscent of Hermetic-Masonic symbols, especially a set of large eyes projected on the sides of the Pyramid.
Eight years later, in May 1998, Jarre would be commissioned to perform a similar show, this time involving the Great Pyramid of Giza itself. While the show took place at Giza, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and other officials of his government attended a special ceremony at the Place de la Concorde in Paris at which a golden capstone was placed on top of the Luxor Obelisk.136 During this ceremony Egypt's minister of culture, Dr. Farouk Hosni, announced that a golden capstone would also be placed on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza at midnight on 31 December 1999 as a symbol for the new millennium. Weeks later Jarre was officially commissioned to organise that event.
Robert Bauval's Eureka afternoon (1)
On an afternoon in the early spring of 1992, Robert Bauval happened to be at the Louvre Museum bookshop and bought a copy of an archaeological journal containing a major pictorial on the city of Luxor. The journal was Dossiers: Histoire et Archéologie,137 and the article in question was the work of a number of different authorities including Dr. Mohamad El-Saghir, director of antiquities at the Luxor Museum, and William J. Murnane and Lany D. Bell of the University of Chicago Epigraphic Survey.
Earlier that same day Bauval had also visited the Grande Arche at La Défense, and there, on the top floor, was an exhibition room featuring a superb aerial photograph of the city of Paris showing the whole length of the Historical Axis from the Bastille in the east all the way to the district of La Défense in the west. The photograph was several feet long, and showed every detail clearly: the distinctive crab-shaped layout of the Louvre, the Tuilleries Garden (even individual trees were visible), the Place de la Concorde and the Luxor Obelisk, the Arc de Triomphe, all the skyscrapers at La Défense and, of course, the Grande Arche. A security officer was standing nearby, and with his permission Bauval videoed the impressive aerial view, then took section shots of it with his still camera. A scale model of the axis of Paris, showing the main monuments and buildings, was also part of the exhibition so Bauval photographed and filmed this as well.
Bauval then left the La Defence area and travelled underground by Metro directly to the Louvre. All the way he pondered on the aerial photograph and scale model of the axis of Paris, refreshing his memory of the details by reviewing the footage he had shot with his video camera. Seeing the city as a whole from the air in this way, and scaled down in a three-dimensional model, gave a very special perspective – a high vantage point from which the metropolis seemed to reveal itself like s
ome giant jigsaw puzzle that had been put together over the centuries.
Though one could be forgiven for not noticing it at all at ground level, what particularly stood out in the aerial view was the curious way that the axis of Paris slightly changed direction as it emerged from the Louvre and headed west. It seemed, on face value, that this had been done to have the Tuilleries Garden parallel to the course of the River Seine. But even so, it was clear that the axis could have been set true again as it emerged from the Tuilleries Garden into the Place de la Concorde. Here the Seine actually took a slight turn to the south, whereas the axis was turned slightly in the opposite direction towards the north.
This curious anomaly bothered the structural engineer in Robert Bauval. He wanted to think that the deviation of the axis of Paris had been due to a practical problem, but somehow this explanation did not quite suffice in so ambitious a scheme where careful, coordinated deliberation was the obvious keynote throughout. One could see that deliberation, for example in the distances between the principal symbolic monuments placed along the axis and in the relative sizes of the three ‘arches’. As the guide books like to point out: Curiously the distance between them doubles each time: 1 km from the Carrousel triumphal arch to the Concorde's Obelisk, 2 km from the Obelisk to the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Élysées, and 4 km from there to the Grand Arche. Even more curiously, the size of the arches also doubles at each stage.138
So since everything else seemed to have been planned to produce a special symbolic effect wasn't it likely that the deviation of the axis was also part of the symbolic scheme?
Robert Bauval's Eureka afternoon (2)
As Bauval stepped out of the Metro station at the Louvre he decided on impulse to take a stroll along the nearby parts of the axis of Paris before visiting the museum. The aerial view of the axis, and the problems that it raised, were still vivid in his mind.
He first walked to the Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde, and there, placing himself with his back to the west face of the Luxor Obelisk, looked directly up the Champs-Élysées and along the axis of Paris. It shot straight as an arrow westward, past the Arc de Triomphe and all the way to Grande Arche six kilometers away.
He next placed himself on the east side of the Luxor Obelisk and looked back eastwards towards the Louvre. The axis shot straight along the centerline of the Tuilleries Garden and all the way to the Arc du Carrousel outside the Louvre's open court. But it was at this point that the troubling ‘deviation’ occurred for the eastwards extension of the axis did not merge, as one would have expected, with the central axis of the Louvre but instead crossed it and carried on along the Louvre's south wing.
Bauval now walked to the Arc du Carrousel, found the exact spot where the axis changed direction, and looked again east towards the Louvre. As he had thought, the axis of Paris did not extend through the glass Pyramid and the centerline of the Louvre, but instead ran to the right (south) of the Pyramid and neatly through the imposing bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the style of Alexander the Great. Beyond the statue Bauval could see that the axis intersected with the Louvre at the second window of the façade of the Pavillon Sully. The window, by luck, was open. So Bauval decided to go there, figuring that he would be able to get a good shot with his camera of the whole axis of Paris looking west.
To reach the window, Bauval had to go to the first floor of the Pavillon Sully and pass through a series of rooms in which where displayed works from the Louvre's extensive Greek and Egyptian collections. On the ceiling of one of these rooms – number 30 on the guide map – was the mysterious painting by Picot that we described in Chapter One. Bauval had seen this painting before, of course, and remembered the curious scene of the Hermeslike ‘Genie of Paris’ witnessing the ‘unveiling of Isis’ to reveal an obelisk and pyramids in the distance. Now, with the Luxor Obelisk and Louvre Pyramid fresh in his memory, he could not help noticing how the obelisk and the pyramids in Picot's painting also appeared to be aligned in a perspective towards the distant horizon, just like those on the axis of Paris.
Realising that he was standing not far from where the axis of Paris crossed the Louvre, Bauval was startled by this strange coincidence but shrugged off the thought and made his way to the open window. From there, as he had hoped, he had a spectacular view westward along the axis of Paris, past the Luxor Obelisk, past the Arc de Triomphe and all the way to the distant Grande Arche. Now that he was attuned to it, the deviation of the axis was also quite unmissable. Bauval snapped a few photographs then made his way to the bookshop in the lower floor of the museum where, as noted earlier, he purchased an archaeological journal containing a detailed pictorial of the city of Luxor in Upper Egypt.
Robert Bauval's Eureka afternoon (3)
After browsing in the bookshop Bauval left the Louvre by the exit under the glass Pyramid. Outside in the courtyard, in bright sunshine, he found a seat and began to leaf through the pages of the journal he had just bought, Dossiers: Histoire et Archéologie. One of its double-page spreads featured a superb colour photograph of the Luxor temple from the air. The photograph was taken looking west towards the Nile with the temple sprawling from left to right (i.e. from south to north), and thus parallel to the course of the Nile. A single obelisk stood conspicuously in front of the temple's entrance on the north side. Next to it Bauval could clearly make out the empty plinth where once had stood the second obelisk that was now in Paris – and, weirdly, within his sight from where he now sat! How strange to think that these two distant points on the earth's surface, one in front of the Luxor temple in Thebes and the other in front of the Louvre Palace in Paris, had been brought together, as it were, by this ancient pair of solar talismans.
Bauval looked more closely at the photograph. Seen from this high altitude, it was funny how the crab-shaped outline of the Luxor temple and the way it was positioned along the River Nile, could easily be mistaken for the Louvre's same crab-like shape and the way that it, too, was positioned along the River Seine. With a mounting sense of excitement Bauval turned the pages of the journal and quickly found what he hoped it would contain – a second aerial photograph taken from much higher up that showed the whole layout of the city of Luxor, from the Temple of Luxor in the south to the Temple of Karnak in the north.
Now this was really strange!
Although he knew that he was looking at an aerial photograph of Karnak-Luxor, Bauval was overtaken by a powerful sense of visual déjà vue. He had seen the very same ‘image’ with the very same features just a short while before, but not in a photograph of Luxor. He played back the video film he had just taken at the Grande Arche – the video film of the aerial-view of Paris. Looking at it, and then again at the aerial photograph of Luxor in the archaeological journal, it was obvious that there were remarkable similarities between the layout of Paris from the Louvre to La Défense and the layout of the sacred Egyptian city from the Luxor Temple to Karnak!
The positioning and provenance of the obelisks were part of the puzzle. But even more stunning was the way that the axis of Paris and the axis of Luxor both changed direction at roughly the same place as they headed one towards La Défense, and the other towards Karnak. Bauval knew, however, that in Egypt, the Nile ran from south-north and that the Luxor temple faced north; whereas in Paris the Seine was directed east to west and the Louvre ‘temple’ faced west. Champollion and Lebas would have been acutely aware of these orientations. If they had really been participants in some mysterious game of symbolism, therefore, then surely they would have taken them into account?
An observation by the historian Jean Vidal in a Paris guidebook helpfully settled the matter: Let us note … that in the position that it occupies at the Place de la Concorde, the four sides of the obelisk have changed orientation: the north side at Luxor is today turned to the west and directed towards the Champs-Élysées.139
Gazing back and forth from the aerial view of Paris to the aerial view of Luxor, it was as if both images had a will
of their own, wanting to merge with one another. Bauval looked up and towards the distant Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Concorde. It was as though a veil was slowly being lifted from the city of Paris just like the veil so tantalisingly lifted in Picot's painting …
Architecture fulfilling prophecy
Remember how the Hermetic philosopher Tommaso Campanella predicted in 1638 that Paris would become an ‘Egyptian’ City of the Sun? Now Bauval had found what looked like an unmistakable architectural correlation between Paris and a ‘City of the Sun’ in Egypt – i.e. Thebes-Luxor. It was all very weird and yet at the same time strangely logical.
He imagined himself like the genie in Picot's painting, hovering over the Place de la Bastille to witness the unveiling of an Egyptian landscape. It was a secret landscape that had been slowly prepared and hidden in plain view in the streets of Paris. This had called for a purposeful multi-generational building and city-planning project that began when Le Nôtre first deviated the axis of the Tuileries Garden to 26° north-of-west in 1665 and was only completed in 1989 more than 300 years later.
Was it a conspiracy, or just a conspiracy theory? Were the similarities of the axis of Paris and the axis of Luxor just coincidences or something else?