Posts Tagged ‘family jewels’
The battle rages. What will happen to the Hotel de la Marine, when staff leave the premises in 2014? State property, it can not be sold, but could be assigned to a long lease to a private operator as the group Allard, one of the potential buyers.
NO Pierre Nora of the French Academy
It was enough of a match-one of six prominent intellectual appeal to the President of the Republic that opinion is inflamed and suspended the allocation of the Hotel de la Marine in an international private. A yellow line had been crossed: that between the monuments of the most emblematic monuments of the state and nation.
One can understand the need to develop the heritage and obligation to use private funds to save and enhance a number of disused public buildings. It should even approve the form of a leasehold law permits since July 23, 2010. But it is different from monuments such as the Hotel de la Marine. This masterpiece of Gabriel has always belonged to the Crown and the State since the eighteenth century.
Marked by the Old Regime, it is even more so by the Revolution since it is here that popular uprisings began, July 13, 1789, there has been signed the execution of Louis XVI, to this place plane where the memory of the guillotine. Department of Marine and Colonies until 1893, the entire history of France overseas remains enrolled in these walls.
And it was here that was signed in 1848, the abolition of slavery. The alienation of the Hotel de la Marine is a precedent. From that moment, any further drop would be possible, Mont-Saint-Michel and the chateaux of the Loire. The opinion was understood. She felt, in the operation which was preparing in silence, a double issue that the excess: a submission to the law of commodification, and the unfortunate tendency of the Republic today to get rid of the family jewels. And she has come to a halt.