It seeks to foreground the spatial qualities of this tumultuous episode, with riots breaking out in December 1571, using the writing of Jacques Derrida on Bernard Tschumi’s project for the Parc de la Villette. The monument is read in this light as an inherently unstable semantic object, as opposed to the fixed edifice it was claimed to be upon its construction in 1569. In this way, the case is made for interpreting the Cross and the surrounding upheaval as an independently rich moment in Paris’ urban history, and not simply as a forewarning of the much-discussed St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.
The article emphasises that Paris, in the midst of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), was a contested city: its late medieval image as a well-ordered bonne ville was challenged by the spread of both the learned, Humanist culture of the late Renaissance, which sought to classicize the city, and the militiant Catholicism of the Counter Reformation, which sought to cleanse it of religious heterodoxy. All three of these categories were the product of urban performance, enacted via theatrical statements of identity in the public arena. Employing Derrida’s description of a deconstructed architecture as one whose meaning is predicated on immediate, embodied interaction, it is shown how the Cross’ meaning was tied up with this performative theme.