More than in other countries in this period, the major virtues of French architecture lay in the placid continuance of well-established lines. Traditions were being slowly eroded, but there was very little of that urgent desire to overturn the immediate past which coloured so significantly much English production of the thirties and forties. Nor was there the German capacity in this period for carrying over into medievalizing modes the basic discipline of established Romantic Classicism. Not surprisingly, French leadership in architecture, established under Louis XIV and renewed under Napoleon, was largely lost; it came back, however, with the Second Empire (see Chapters 8 and 9). All the same, architectural controversy flourished at home in these decades. Quite naturally, French influence still remained largely dominant in contiguous Belgium and much of Switzerland. If Studer’s work in Berne falls under the German rubric of _Rundbogenstil_, in French-speaking Lausanne and Neuchâtel important commissions went to Frenchmen. An Asylum for the former city was designed by Henri Labrouste in 1837-8; another in the latter town, built a few years later, is by P.-F.-N. Philippon (1784-1866), a pupil of J.-J. Ramée who had also worked with Brongniart. Both are characteristically respectable examples of _Louis Philippe_ work. Labrouste also designed a prison for Alessandria in Italy in 1840. In Belgium, under Dutch rule from the fall of Napoleon down to 1830, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, begun in 1819 by the French architect L.-E.-A. Damesme (1757-1822), who had once worked on the Paris _barrières_ with Ledoux, and completed by E.-J. Bonnevie (1783-1835), is a large but typical example of the theatres built in the French provinces by architects of the previous generation. It was not improved by an enlargement and remodelling of 1856, but the original temple portico is noble in scale and handsomely detailed. Characteristically, Damesme also built the Brussels prison. When a new generation of Belgian architects appeared led by Joseph Poelaert (1817-79), who had studied with Huyot, more international influences were evident. For example, Poelaert’s fine early school of 1852 in the Rue de Schaerbeek in Brussels shows little of Huyot but a good deal of Schinkel in its rationalistic handling of Grecian forms. Poelaert’s boldness here, which even suggests that of Alexander Thomson in his Glasgow work of this decade and the next, prepares one a little for his later Palace of Justice designed in the sixties (see Chapter 8).