Monumental elephants in French public art

By November 1789 the Bastille Prison structure in Paris was largely demolished but what would take its place? On the Place de la Bastille, the very birthplace of the Revolution, Emperor Napoleon wanted a monument to the glorious past. He settled on a great elephant, a statue so monumental that visitors could climb inside through a staircase in one of its legs, and up to a tower on its back. Napoleon planned many urban regeneration projects for Paris and loved monuments to his victories. In this case, he clearly wanted to create a significant triumphal structure to demonstrate his military skills in the East.

Elephant of the Bastille, Paris

24 metres high!!

engraving in Le Magasin pittoresque, 1834.

Napoleon ordered the elephant be cast in bronze, melted down from cannons captured during his military victories. But Nap­ol­eon was impatient. Rather than waiting for this bronze to arrive, he had a full-scale model of the elephant created in plaster and placed on the site. Alas the bronze to transform the elephant into a perm­anent structure never arrived, and as Napoleon’s regime was coming to a rather pathetic end in 1814, the plaster structure was left to rot.


The creator of Moulin Rouge, Joseph Oller and his manager Charles Zidler, were canny businessmen who understood the belle epoque taste for the somewhat Low Arts. In particular Oller had noticed the com­mercial success of the very popular dances at the Élysée Montmartre and de­cided to open a rival dance hall nearby. In October 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill.

The business plan was to encourage rich Parisians to get down and get dirty in a fash­ionable district, Montmartre. The extravagant setting allowed people from all walks of life to mix comfortably. Workers, local residents, artists, the middle classes, businessmen, elegant women and lots of English men travelled to Montmartre to enjoy the entertainment together.

Moulin Rouge, Paris

1900

A decade later, the owner purchased a huge wooden and stucco elephant from the Exhibition Universelle/World’s Fair which happened to be held in Par­is, and installed it in the gardens. The workers made a spiral stair-case entrance to it inside one of the legs and, on a stage housed in its stomach, female dancers performed sensual belly dances. Only men were allowed in and only on payment of a fee (1 franc each). The photo shows mainly women at the tables; pres­umably their husbands are crawl­ing around the inside of the elephant on excited hands and knees. Another possibility was that the men were running an opium den in the elephant’s stomach. Never mind! The outdoor living was very pleasurable, at least in summer.

The elephant was situated at the back of the building, and not vis­ible from the street. But its semi-secret location didn’t save the beast from dest­ruction. Within a decade, the entire construction had been broken up and carted away.


The Ile de Nantes was a large and very busy island in the middle of the River Loire in Western France, responsible for ship building, warehouses and dockyards. But once the shipyards closed in 1987, the island started to look like a tragic ghost town.

mechanical elephant

Island in the River Loire,

Nantes

Since then, the Machines of the Isle has been created by 2 artist-inventors, resurrecting the derelict warehouses of the former shipyards. They were “visualising a travel-through-time world at the crossroads of the imaginary worlds of Jules Verne and the mechanical universe of Leonardo da Vinci”.

Three major machine-projects were planned from the beginning, two of them now completed and operational: Great Elephant in 2007 and Marine Worlds Carrousel in 2012. The final project, the Heron Tree, will not be finished until next year. But that doesn’t matter since in this post, I want to talk about elephants. Nantes’ mechan­ical elephant is amazing and huge (12 ms high). It is made from reclaimed wood and steel, and is so strong that it can carry 50 pass­en­gers for a 45-minute walk. To impress the people watching the performance, the elephant emerges trumpeting from its hangar and sprays visitors with water from its trunk. To impress the passengers on board, it is possible discover the structure of the machinery from the inside and to feel each vibration, while enjoying the impressive view of Nantes.


I am not sure if these three elephants compare well against the Eiffel Tower and Chartres Cathedral as engineering marvels of their times, but the French must have found them very appealing. As did the tourists.