Auguste de Montferrand — architect with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born at Chaillot outside Paris in January 1786 and styled Henri Louis Auguste Leger Ricard de Montferrand, though the aristocratic particle was almost certainly his parents' invention — his father was a horse trainer, and decades later he conceded in his own will that the title was disputable and that he would accept being called Ricard instead. He entered the Académie d'architecture in 1806 and trained in the atelier of Charles Percier, Napoleon's designer, before being called into the Grande Armée. He campaigned in Italy and was given the Légion d'honneur for conduct at Hanau in 1813.
After Napoleon's defeat he needed work. During the allied occupation of Paris he secured an audience with Alexander I and presented the emperor with an album of his drawings. It was enough. He went to Russia and never practised anywhere else again.
In 1818 his design was chosen for a new Saint Isaac's Cathedral, over the objections of a commission of established Russian architects who thought the four identical porticos monotonous, the proportions squat, and the existing foundations unsafe. Alexander I overruled them. Construction then ran for forty years — twenty-four on the structure, sixteen on the interior — and consumed essentially his entire adult working life. Twenty-five thousand piles were driven into the marsh to carry it; the cost reached roughly a million gold rubles. The Finnish idiom for a job that never ends still translates as "to build like Saint Isaac's church".
He worked on other things meanwhile. He repaired and completed the Kazan Cathedral, built several private mansions, and between 1829 and 1834 raised the Alexander Column on Palace Square as a memorial to his patron: a single shaft of some 600 tonnes quarried in Finnish rock nearly two hundred kilometres away, barged to the capital, and set upright without fixing, held by its own weight. Critics had predicted it would break apart on separation from the bedrock. His last commission was the monument to Nicholas I that stands in front of his cathedral.
Saint Isaac's was consecrated on 30 May 1858. Montferrand died on 10 July, six weeks later, aged seventy-two — a coincidence that produced a durable legend that he had been told he would not outlive the building. He had asked to be buried inside it. Permission was refused because he was not Orthodox. His body was sent to Paris and buried in Montmartre beside his mother; the grave was thought lost until it was identified again in 1986.
"France to Russia, 1816"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Saint Petersburg (Russia)
Two of the most recognisable structures in Saint Petersburg are the work of a Frenchman who never returned home.
French architect who spent his career in Russia. He designed Saint Isaac's Cathedral, a project that occupied four decades, and the Alexander Column on Palace Square. He died in Saint Petersburg shortly after the cathedral's consecration.
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Saint Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.