Yet the character of French leadership in the arts had changed since the 1780s. The architects at the end of the _ancien régime_ had been truly revolutionary in their aesthetic and their social ideals. Napoleon’s designers, almost like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s in our century, were flatterers and time-servers. Emulation of their work abroad was chiefly a matter of following well-publicized fashion; creative French influence still flowed, however, from men of the older generation now so largely forgotten at home. Thus it was at this point that Ledoux’s projects became generally available to others, thanks to his book published in 1804 and dedicated to Napoleon’s Russian ally of the moment, Alexander I. Extensive building activity in Paris under Napoleon’s aegis began only in 1806, but once it started there came a positive flood of projects in conscious emulation of Louis XIV’s architectural campaigns. There was also the expectation that this activity would absorb unemployment in the building trades. But Napoleon, like later dictators who have initiated vast building projects, actually bit off a great deal more than he could chew. He was, however, more fortunate than Mussolini and Hitler in that the regimes which succeeded his in the decades between the First Empire and the Second were surprisingly willing to carry his unfinished monuments to completion. Still later, his nephew Napoleon III emulated him in an even more concerted programme of urbanism and monumental construction carried out over nearly two decades in a very different style—indeed in several (see Chapter 8). The Colonne de la Grande Armée, replacing the statue of Louis XV at the centre of the Place Vendôme, is a properly symbolic monument of its epoch—first to be designed of the many giant columns that would arise all across the Western world from Baltimore to Petersburg within the next quarter century. Wilkins’s Nelson Pillar in Dublin, actually completed before the Paris example, has already been mentioned. The column in Paris is Trajanesque not Grecian, however, and was entirely executed with the bronze of captured guns. It well represents the Imperial Roman megalomania already evident in many projected memorials of the 1790s. Gondoin, its architect, with whom was associated J.-B. Lepère (1761-1844), provides a real link with the past, since his already-mentioned École de Médecine was one of the earliest major edifices in which Romantic Classical ideals were carried beyond the transitional stage of Soufflot’s Panthéon.