What it is
In 1644 the city council decided that a city of Lyon's standing needed a town hall to match; until then it had met in a modest house. The result, built between 1646 and 1672 under the architect Simon Maupin, is one of the most imposing historic buildings in the city.
It has two faces: the grand front on the Place des Terreaux, and a rear front on the Place de la Comédie, facing the opera house.
Seeing it
It is still the working town hall, where the city council meets. The façade, the square and the courtyards glimpsed through the gates are the point for most visitors; the state rooms open only on particular occasions.
Twenty-six years to build
Before the town hall existed, the city's governing council, the Consulat, met in the Hôtel de la Couronne at 13 Rue de la Poulaillerie, now the printing museum. It was too small and too plain for a city like Lyon, so in 1646 it was sold at auction to help pay for a new building. The plans were entrusted to Simon Maupin on March 8, 1646. He went to Paris to consult the royal architect Jacques Lemercier and the mathematician Girard Desargues, whose ingenuity shows in the two staircases attributed to him. The first stone was laid on September 5, 1646, the birthday of the young Louis XIV.
Work stalled at the end of the 1640s and Maupin's plans were not fully followed. The aldermen held their first meeting in the building's chapel on November 14, 1652, and the main structure was nearly complete by 1654, but decoration went on for years. The painter Thomas Blanchet, newly arrived from Rome, painted the great hall, completed in 1668, the grand staircase in 1661 and two salons. When the work ended in 1672, after 26 years, it was considered the largest and most lavish town hall in France, and the visiting architect Nicodemus Tessin called its decoration among the most prestigious in Europe.
Fire and rebuilding
Just two years after completion, on September 13, 1674, fire destroyed the great hall and the chapel and damaged the belfry, roof, grand staircase, archives and Henri IV salon. The city was too deep in debt to repair it quickly, and the building kept deteriorating until restoration was finally decided on October 3, 1699. The work, carried out from 1701 to 1703, followed plans by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, architect of Versailles, and his brother-in-law Robert de Cotte.
Around 1730 the town hall's gardens, hemmed in by tall buildings, were removed to make room for the first Italian-style theater in France, designed by Soufflot and finished in 1756, with a square between the two buildings: the origin of today's Place de la Comédie and the opera house facing the rear of the town hall. In 1764 Étienne Gaillard completed the east front.
The king on the facade
In 1793, during the Revolution, the building was bombarded by the troops of the Convention, and the relief of Louis XIV on horseback at the center of the main facade was removed. The one you see now shows Henri IV in the same pose, carved by Jean-François Legendre-Héral in 1829. After another fire on July 14, 1803, a full restoration was carried out from 1854 to 1866 under the city architect Tony Desjardins, with the sculptors Guillaume Bonnet and Joseph-Hugues Fabisch.
The building was made of stone from four sources: Villebois stone from the Ain for the base, and stone from Seyssel, Cleyssy and Saint-Cyr above.
By 1910 the stone used in the 1854 repairs had badly decayed, and at the initiative of Mayor Édouard Herriot work on the east front began in an emergency in 1911 under the architect Charles Meysson. The balustrade, the statues of Minerva and Hercules and the top of the belfry were rebuilt, and when the work ended in 1914 a carillon was installed. Through the entrance on the Terreaux, a lower courtyard and a raised main courtyard step up toward the belfry; the upper one holds a fountain of Amphitrite surrounded by statues of Neptune, Galatea and Polyphemus.
Where the Republic was proclaimed
During the Lyon Commune, demonstrators stormed the town hall, and a Committee of Public Safety proclaimed the Republic from its balcony, a few hours before Paris, to the cheers of the crowd packed into the Place des Terreaux. The Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, who was there, called Lyon the capital of socialism.
At the Liberation, on September 14, 1944, General de Gaulle came out on the same balcony and spoke to the crowd in the square, calling Lyon the Gaulish capital that became the capital of the French Resistance, a great city covered in wounds, shining in its honor and carried by its hope.
The town hall has been a classified historic monument since July 12, 1886, and the city council still meets here ten times a year. Its official address is 1 Place de la Comédie, on the opera side.
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