La Madeleine
Neoclassical temple built for Napoleon's army that became a church after a seventy-eight-year identity crisis.
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About this audio guide
This guide to La Madeleine opens at Frédéric Chopin's funeral in 1849, when three thousand mourners gathered for a requiem the church almost refused to allow, because it needed female voices in a building that had never let a woman sing inside it. It follows the building's identity through eight decades of reinvention, from a planned church for Louis XV to a temple Napoleon declared to his own army's glory, before it was finally consecrated. Look up at the domes, where every bit of light falls from skylights rather than windows.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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