Église Saint-Eugène-Sainte-Cécile
Église Saint-Eugène-Sainte-Cécile is a Roman Catholic church located at 6 rue Sainte-Cécile in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. In 1983 it was designated as a monument historique in its entirety. Designed in the Neo-Gothic style by Louis-Auguste Boileau and Louis-Adrien Lusson, the church was the first in France to use an entirely iron-framed construction. The first stone was laid in 1854, and the building was completed in 1855.
The parish of Saint-Eugène was created in 1854 to serve the growing population of the Faubourg Poissonnière district, at the time considered a suburb of Paris. The parish was entrusted to Abbé Coquand. The abbé helped finance the construction of the parish church on a piece of land which he owned. He specified that the style should reflect that of the 13th century, a time in the history of Christianity idealised by the 19th-century French Romantic movememt. In order to minimize the cost of construction and maximize the interior space on the relatively small site, the abbé also suggested an iron-framed construction, which had hitherto only been used for industrial buildings.
Louis-Adrien Lusson had been originally commissioned to design the building. It was subsequently entrusted to Louis-Auguste Boileau, although Lusson remained involved in the design of its interior. Boileau had previously written a treatise on monumental architecture in which he championed the use of iron construction. The church was completed in 20 months. The first stone was laid in June 1854 and the building was inaugurated at Christmas 1855. It was dedicated to Saint Eugène de Deuil-la-Barre in honour of Empress Eugènie (the wife of Napoleon III) who was present at the inauguration. The church's design and iron construction provoked a controversy which was played out on the pages of the Journal des Debats in 1856 with Viollet-le-Duc accusing Boileau of being a mechanic rather than an architect and describing the church's Neo-Gothic design as a "pastiche of bad taste".
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