STORMING THE
BASTILLE

To stage a contemporary art exhibition inside the July Column at Place de la Bastille is bold. To fill it with a handcrafted reef of scarlet and bone white linen thread is visionary. With Coraux de la Liberté, textile sculptor Aude Franjou and the nomadic gallery maison parisienne offer a profound and poetic gesture that reimagines the legacy of the French Revolution not through bronze or banners, but through tension, fiber, and slow, deliberate craft.

Unveiled during Paris Design Week 2025 and curated by Florence Guillier Bernard, founder of maison parisienne, this unprecedented installation transforms the historic rotunda—once intended by Napoleon as a monument to liberty—into a vertical ecosystem of memory and rebirth. From floor to ceiling, Franjou’s coral like forms rise in meditative gradation, their color shifting from the purity of white to the blood deep hues of revolution. In a city layered with symbols, this one speaks softly but unequivocally.

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Franjou is not a textile artist in a decorative sense. A graduate of the Duperré School of Applied Arts with a degree in art history, she has spent over two decades exploring the sculptural and almost architectural properties of linen thread, a medium she molds entirely by hand. Through repeated gestures of wrapping, knotting, and entwining, she builds tension into every tendril, every branch. Her material may be ancient, but her execution is definitely contemporary: equal parts organic form and conceptual charge.

Founded in 2008, maison parisienne is no ordinary gallery. It is a roving institution dedicated to the champions of material mastery—the woodworkers, glassblowers, textile visionaries, ceramicists, and feather artisans who uphold the endangered values of savoir faire. With over 70 exhibitions staged across Paris, London, Geneva, Brussels, and Monaco, maison parisienne is not about white walls and market trends, but about re-enchanting the objects that surround us. Their artists, including Simone Pheulpin, Pierre Renart, and Gérald Vatrin, appear in major museum collections around the world. With Coraux de la Liberté, maison parisienne deepens its mission by placing fiber at the very heart of France’s most symbolically loaded public monument.

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The significance of this setting cannot be overstated. The July Column, rising from the site of the original Bastille prison, is a pillar of French republican identity. It is cared for by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN), France’s foremost cultural heritage body. Founded in 1914, the CMN oversees over 100 historic sites, including Mont Saint Michel and the Arc de Triomphe. By hosting Franjou’s installation, the CMN demonstrates its commitment not only to preservation, but to reinvention, to keeping history alive through living art.

This immersive reef is more than an aesthetic triumph. It is a meditation on the tension between fragility and resilience, the silence of dormant freedoms, and the slow, stubborn reawakening of voice and form. “Life, sometimes lying dormant in silence, longs to reclaim its place,” Franjou says. Coraux de la Liberté is that longing, rendered in fiber.

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