Temples built after the Revolution
After the Edict of Tolerance in 1787, the Protestants resumed building temples while Napoleon Bonaparte’s Organic Articles of 1802 organised the lives of the Churches and their worship.
Temples can be classified into three style groups:
The neoclassical style
After the first very simply designed temple was rebuilt in Orthez in 1791, then almost all of the other 80 temples built in the first half of the nineteenth century were inspired by the neoclassical style. They can be identified by the taste for colonnades in churches of the late 18th century, of which the Pantheon in Paris is a model. Two reasons can be proposed: the first is that Antoine de Quincy, the perpetual secretary to the Academy of Fine Arts, imposed that style for every official commissions and thus entailed subsidies; the second is that the Protestants after the 100-year ban rather enjoyed showing their new status by resembling official buildings. The South of France -Midi- mostly benefitted from these buildings, namely Marseille (1823), Saumur (1843), Bordeaux (temple des Chartrons, 1835) and, in the Gard, Anduze (1823), Quissac (1832) and Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort (1822).
The neo-medieval style
The trend changed in the second half of the 19th century and the Protestants then wished to blend in: thus they followed the Middle-age trend after the long despised Romanesque or Gothic buildings were rediscovered Though Catholics obviously preferred the neo-Gothic style, the Protestants preferred the neo-Roman or neo-Bysantine styles mostly restricting them to the façades, as in Paris (Luxembourg, 1857), Lyon (les Terreaux, 1852), Sancerre (1894), Montpellier (1870) or Saint-Maixent-l’École (about 1876); on the contrary the Étoile in Paris (1874) was built in the neo- Gothic style generally found in territories annexed into Germany after the 1870 war as in Metz (new temple, 1901) or Strasbourg (Saint-Paul Church, 1892).
A wide variety of styles in the 20th century
Construction notably slowed down in the 20th century and community centres, or rectories and meeting rooms were adjoined to the temple. Among the buildings of architectural interest one can name Port-Grimaud (1873) with stained glass by Vasarely, the ecumenical centre in Jacou (Hérault, early 1990s), Massy (1963) and Rueil (architect: Pierre-Édouard Verret, 1968), Ermont-Taverny (architect: Marc Rolinet, 2007) and the chapel of the deaconesses in Versailles (Rolinet, 2007).
From the 1970s onwards Evangelical Churches appeared and were characterised by their very simple architecture as in the Evangelical Protestant Church in Fresnes (1972); Villard-de-Lans (in the early 2000s); the Evangelical Protestant Church in Nice (1993); Aix-en-Provence (1990).
