Carcassonne and Eugène Viollet le Duc

The painter and architect Eugène Viollet le Duc painted and travelled widely in the Pyrenées, displaying considerable talent and a quite modern sense of layout in his water-colours.

Carcassonne

This travel in Languedoc-Roussillon was to be the beginning of his brilliant career as an architect.

From 1844 onwards, he undertook the rebuilding and rehabilitation of the City of Carcassonne. Painstaking analysis of the ruins and the remains of the city walls helped him understand the monumental whole of the city’s past, a work combing that of an archaeologist and a historian that would take him six long years.

The first undertaking within this massive building-site was to be the restoration of the Saint Nazaire Basilica, followed by the construction of the Saint Gimer church, then renovation of the Saint Michel Cathedral, ending with the complete rehabilitation of the rest of the town by 1862.