| Summary: | The Hôtel-Dieu at Lyons was closed as a hospital in 2010 and given statutory historic monument protection in 2011. Today, a hundred years after the earliest plans to close this hospital, there is a new debate confronting the ‘antis’ and the ‘pros’. Throughout the twentieth century, the critical fortune of this architectural ensemble has seen considerable change. At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decade of the twentieth, when the decision was taken to build the Grange-Blanche hospital (today’s Édouard Herriot hospital), the conservation of the central part of the Soufflot wing overlooking the river Rhone (and re-baptised the Quai palace or the Soufflot palace) was unanimously welcomed. But there was less enthusiasm for other buildings dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even though, only fifteen years earlier, several million francs had been invested in the hospital’s latest construction campaign. The debates were lively. Those in favour of keeping the buildings assembled arguments that included the well-being of the hospital’s patients, the place of the hospital in the history of medicine, and the artistic value of the buildings. The partisans of the demolition of the buildings and of better hygiene at any price only saw picturesque values in the old buildings, values that were of no weight when set against medical progress. The article offers an overview of how the notion of heritage evolved as it underpinned the lively exchanges of the early twentieth century. It also looks at the successive stages of the historic monument protection of the building, one of the most emblematic in Lyons.
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