Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in

The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France RICHARD WITTMAN I.

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he Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio, a Roman engineer from the reign of Augustus, contains the classical tradition’s most famous and influential account of the origins of architecture.1 Vitruvius wrote that in the earliest times men lived like wild beasts, dwelling in woods, caves, and groves. One day a dense group of trees, agitated by winds and storms, caught fire. The nearby inhabitants initially ran from the terrifying flame, but once it subsided a bit they drew near and discovered to their delight that its warmth gave them great comfort. They began trying to keep the fire alive. Soon they were bringing other people up to it and making gestures to show how much comfort it gave them. In the process of trying to share and maintain the fire together, the sounds that people made with their voices began to fix themselves into articulate words. Society and its corollary, language, thus both came into being. And as people kept arriving in ever greater numbers at this place, something else was soon invented: Having, beyond all the other animals, this gift of nature: that they walked, not prone, but upright, they therefore could look upon the magnificence of the universe and the stars. For the same reason they were able to manipulate whatever object they wished, using their hands and other limbs. Some in the group began to make

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Vitruvius’s account thus relates architecture to the most fundamental aspects of human existence. Building emerges out of the formation of language; out of the precarious position of human beings between the terrors and comforts of nature; from their special intelligence and skill in making things with their hands; and from their propensity for philosophical or religious speculation, represented here through the act of gazing at the heavens. The story thereby establishes architecture as a practice with a profound scope for meaning, one that satisfies contingent needs even as it draws inspiration from, and aspires to do justice to, thoughts of eternity. For centuries, the ideal evoked in Vitruvius’s story oriented Western architecture. The perception of architecture as a bridge between the mutable world and the deeper order of the cosmos underpinned the dedication of immense intellectual and material resources to the arts of building.3 But in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this ancient paradigm finally unraveled, gradually to be replaced with the new modes of architectural thought, practice, and experience we know as modern. In the course of this shift, Vitruvius’s account of the origins of architecture was inevitably subjected to radical challenges and revisions. The present essay examines two very different eighteenth-century attempts to reimagine the origins of architecture, one from mid-century and one published on the eve of the Revolution. Such texts have traditionally been studied and interpreted with reference to the history of ideas (philosophy, historiography, aesthetics), but the focus here will instead be on how the aspirations and anxieties embedded in these two narratives relate to contemporary changes in the structure of the French public sphere. This discussion seeks not only to illuminate hitherto neglected factors in the genesis of these specific texts, but also to use discourse on architecture—an art, after all, that publicly articulates the relationship of communities to places—as a lens through which to look afresh at how the French public sphere was changing during the eighteenth century. In this connection, I shall be highlighting a crucial, if understudied, legacy of that transformation, namely, the demotion of space from its primordial role as the principal ground for social existence. On the basis of this analysis, I shall argue that the two profoundly different origins stories examined here, one essentially rationalistic, the other mythological, both sprang from related apprehensions about contemporary social change. This paradoxical commonality invites us

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to see the rationalistic and the mythological not as opposed, as Enlightenment texts would have it, but as intertwined features of an eighteenth-century culture seeking to come to terms with profound upheavals in the structure of contemporary life. II. The intellectual roots of the stories to be examined here lie in the late seventeenth century, when architectural thought was transformed by the new epistemology of the material sciences.4 A foundational text in this shift was Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (1683), a work that infused scientific notions of verifiable truth deep into the traditionally poetic realm of architectural theory. 5 The result was a radical and unprecedented distinction (one that was clearly hierarchical, even if the hierarchy was not explicitly signaled) between what Perrault termed “positive beauty” (solidity, good workmanship, fine materials) and “arbitrary beauty” (style, proportions, symmetry). A central claim of Perrault’s argument was that the beauties of the classical orders, which since time immemorial had been assigned an absolute and, in a sense, sacred validity, were in fact arbitrary, which is to say that they were culturally determined. Perrault himself never actually questioned the primacy of the classical orders, but his claim was nonetheless recognized as revolutionary. And though his ideas were slow in gaining overt acceptance, they marked the beginning of a dramatic turn in architectural thought. On the one hand, architects and theorists began looking more and more to the idea of nature in an attempt to establish a new rationale for the universal validity of the classical system. On the other hand, theory itself came to be understood more and more as a functional enterprise concerned less with ultimate meanings than with practical mastery over problems of logic, control, and efficiency.6 As a consequence, the mythological and symbolic claims that had traditionally grounded the meaning of architectural practice lost much of their currency. Most theorists stopped taking seriously, for instance, the idea that the column was a representation of the human form, which was itself a macrocosm of God’s creation; or that architectural proportions pleased the eye only to the extent that the numerical ratios embedded in them reflected the deeper cosmic order. By the mid-eighteenth century, it had become possible to reconceive of the origins of architecture in radically different terms. Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture (1753) was one of the most influential architectural books of its era, in no small measure because of the striking manner in which it rewrote the story of mankind’s first building.7 Laugier followed Vitruvius in positing a primitive hut as the origin of architecture; but whereas Vitruvius’s

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ancient humans had lived like beasts at the mercy of nature, Laugier instead envisioned a golden age in which men lived in close contact with a gentle, idyllic nature. He depicted his solitary primitive man sprawled on a sparkling carpet of grass beside a tranquil stream, thinking of nothing else but peacefully enjoying the gifts of nature: “rien ne lui manque, il ne désire rien.”8 Nature’s fearsome power surfaces only when he lies out in the sun for too long and becomes uncomfortably hot. This prompts him to move off in search of shelter. He goes first into the forest, which shelters him satisfactorily until bad vapors and then rain begin to upset him. Next he locates a cave and initially feels well pleased, until he decides the air there is no good and that it is too dark. Finally he resolves to remedy with his own industry what Laugier calls the “inattentions” and “négligences” of nature. He finds some fallen branches, erects them in a square, lays others horizontally across them, and builds a leafy pitched roof over those. With this little hut, architecture is invented. Laugier wrote that he wanted the image of this hut to lodge firmly in the minds of both architects and spectators as a standard by which to judge all buildings. This aim was illustrated in the famous engraved frontispiece to the second edition of the book, which showed a reclining personification of architecture directing a flame-headed genie of inspiration towards the hut (fig.1). From this primal hut Laugier abstracted three categories of architectural elements, ranked on a scale from essential to unnecessary. Essential were columns, lintels, and pediments, all of which had a structural function. Next were those elements that were structurally unnecessary but still served a need, such as walls, windows, and doors. These he termed “licenses.” In the third category Laugier included everything else in architecture, all of which he claimed was added by caprice and should be characterized as “faults.” The rest of his first chapter explained how to apply this schema in the design of modern buildings. The common practice of placing miniature decorative pediments over windows was to be banned, since the only true and proper function of a pediment was to support a pitched roof; pilasters were also outlawed, for they mimicked the form of columns without in fact having any support function.9 In sum, Laugier’s account transformed Vitruvius’s poetic mimesis into a literal, rationalistic mode of imitation intended to exert direct control over everyday practice. A few decades later, in the 1780s, another account of architectural origins appeared that seemed profoundly at odds with the century-long rationalizing tendency exemplified by Laugier’s parable. This new account sought not only to recuperate that gazing upon the starry firmament that Laugier had so mercilessly excised, but to situate it even more centrally in the constitution of architectural meaning than even Vitruvius had done. The texts which announced this turn were a series of seven “letters” by the Parisian architect


Figure 1. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1755), frontispiece (Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania).

and theorist Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux, published individually over the course of the 1780s and then collected in 1787 as the Lettres sur l’Architecture des Anciens et celle des Modernes.10 Viel’s principal source and inspiration was the astounding nine-volume Monde primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne published between 1773 and 1782 by the Protestant clergyman and Physiocrat Antoine Court de Gébelin.11 Court de Gébelin’s opus drew on an array of travelers’ accounts and early anthropological and archaeological investigations in

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constructing a radical new account of early human society, religion, and language. According to Court de Gébelin, primitive peoples around the world had lived in harmonious agricultural communities that viewed the world entirely as allegory and symbol. These societies had worshipped nature as their supreme divinity in the guise of the Sun and Moon. This basic conception of the ancient past formed the framework for Viel’s Lettres. But Viel moved beyond Court de Gébelin by claiming that architecture had been the communal language of this idyllic world, the public repository of its collective memory, and the “book” by which its communities perpetuated knowledge.12 The subject matter of these books of stone, he claimed, was the fecundity of nature, which is to say the divinity that the ancients had worshipped.13 The ancients had enjoyed a thoroughly integrated world view, in which the interrelatedness of all things physical and metaphysical was fully acknowledged; this awareness, in turn, led them to a profoundly symbolic or allegorical view of the world.14 As a result, their multi-tiered collective knowledge could be united and inscribed on monuments via a dense vocabulary of symbols and emblems.15 Their architecture had thus constituted an allegorical language, a “poëme parlant,” wherein the ancients instructed themselves not only in the origins and nature of their gods, but in the origins and meaning of the cosmos itself.16 Viel dismissed out of hand the idea that architecture could have originated in the creation of a human dwelling, arguing that something as minor as that would not even have been considered architecture by the ancients.17 Instead, the origins of architecture lay entirely in the sacred. The first building had been an altar, not a hut, and it had been built to worship the sun, not to shelter from it.18 His account of architectural origins therefore began with the first freestanding stone altars. Using information drawn from such traveler’s accounts as Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East (1743–45), he described how these altars stood at some distance from one another in numbers that typically related to the planets, months, or days (fig. 2). Their only function was as votive altars upon which offerings of fruit and vegetables, never blood, were made to the solar deity who nourished the earth.19 Viel argued that the forms of classical architecture were all traceable back to these monuments, which had been of a similar sort all over the world. Monolithic menhirs, for instance, had been the origin of columns, which had served as freestanding pedestals for cult images long before they took on a structural function in building.20 The name for capitals, he argued, derived from the Latin word for head because ancient freestanding columns often had animal or divinity heads placed upon them.21 Pediments originally had nothing to do with sloping roofs, but rather were triangular emblems of divinity.22 Viel also claimed that these earliest monuments had spoken in purely formal terms to the eyes of the ancients, and yet had done so with perfect clarity: the


Figure 2. Richard Pococke, A description of the East and some other countries, vol. 2. (London, 1745). Detail of Plate 30 showing sepulchral monuments near the island of Arwad off the Syrian coast. (Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California).

setting of a building, its overall appearance, its individual elements, and its elevation had all adequately communicated complex matters of the utmost importance.23 Divinity and its attributes had been represented by nothing more than uncut stones, which is to say, without sculpture: “une forme de colonne suffisoit, à l’aide de quelques hiéroglyphes, pour exprimer les bienfaits du Créateur.”24 (Viel even asserted that architectural language preceded, and was the origin of, verbal language, for it was from these early hieroglyphs that language, as well as painting, had evolved.)25 The classicism of the Greeks and the Romans, he maintained, had also been a legible symbolic language of this type: classical column bases were not decorative but rather “hieroglyphic,” and “peignoient, par leurs divers contours, les objets de la nature, & leurs rapports symboliques.”26 Indeed, the moderns had never properly understood classical architecture. Where a modern eye typically saw a base or capital of a certain style or dimension, an ancient spectator would have been reading about his gods.27 Viel’s account thus totally inverted Laugier’s. Far from originating in an effort to remedy the negligence of nature, architecture’s true origins lay in mankind’s worshipful quest to relate his life to that of the cosmos. Nor was it any longer a mimetic art. But most radically of all, architecture was now far more than simply one of the arts, more even than the first or the most useful of the arts. Architecture lay rather at the very origin of human civilization,

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where it was a materialized logos, the original emblem of mankind’s reconciliation with the world. So much more than just a single branch of the tree of human knowledge (as the famous genealogical chart at the head of the Encyclopédie represented it), architecture for the ancients had been the encyclopedia itself.

* The passage from Laugier to Viel de Saint-Maux conforms to our expectations regarding the arc of eighteenth-century intellectual life. The canonical voices of the Enlightenment, from Bayle to Voltaire to the Encyclopédie, had of course typically regarded symbolism and mythology as childish fables, while championing a unitary notion of reason as a new basis for a harmonious social order. Laugier’s rewriting of Vitruvius offers a conveniently characteristic Enlightenment version of classical theory. As for Viel de Saint-Maux’s project, it was historically connected with that latecentury rekindling of interest in myth, the occult, and the sacred which manifested itself in such phenomena as Mesmerism, Illuminism, and a renewed fascination with ancient religions. Yet it has remained something of a historiographical problem to reconcile these two phases of eighteenth-century thought and culture. How did a serious, committed interest in myths and the occult emerge from a critical Enlightenment in which myth was derided as the opposite of reason? The turn towards mythography has been linked to Freemasonry, and in particular to the efforts of its most erudite followers to establish that Masonry derived from ancient forms of religion that were separate from and antecedent to Catholicism.28 Certainly this was the case with Court de Gébelin’s Monde primitif, which a recent scholar has called “a Masonic encyclopedia” and a “supplement to the Encyclopédie.”29 Court himself was one of the highest ranking Freemasons in France, while Viel de Saint-Maux, it emerges, was a fellow member of Court’s Masonic lodge (Les Neuf Sœurs).30 More broadly, it has been suggested that the late-century extension of systematic attention into areas heretofore considered beyond the limits of rational human knowledge constituted a kind of “super-Enlightenment” that aimed to resolve or transcend the conflicts and contradictions within the Enlightenment project.31 An analysis of the larger context framing the theoretical interventions of Laugier and Viel suggests that this is a valid way of framing the question, provided we understand “Enlightenment project” in a large sense, not as a purely philosophical development but rather as a contribution and response to changes in society, technology, politics, and culture. For despite their profound differences in content, the theories of Laugier and Viel were actually


both reactions to the same troubling apprehension: namely, that the traditional public vocation of architecture had in recent times become seriously threatened, and that this had something to do with changes in the nature of the public that architecture addressed. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted recently to exploring how, and with what effect, a far-reaching structural transformation of the public sphere occurred in seventeenth- and especially eighteenth-century France.32 One aspect of this transformation that has received rather less attention than many others involves the changing relationship of social groups to physical space.33 This long process of transformation gradually amalgamated the heterogeneous array of fragmented, particularistic, local cultures that for centuries had characterized French territory.34 The idea of a comparatively homogeneous national culture started to make its presence felt, and began to offer informed persons a new and, eventually, normative point of reference for social identity. These new frameworks for social belonging transcended the bonds of spatial specificity that hitherto had circumscribed the social identities of the vast majority of people. A reading public, a political public, or even a national community was normally experienced as anonymous and disembodied; it did not dwell in any discrete place, as communities traditionally had done, and did not depend upon direct contact in time and space between its members. Instead it assembled in the abstract, most importantly via the circulation of printed discourse.35 Architecture, as a spatial practice that aspired to have communal meaning, was inevitably affected by such a shift. The primary level for architectural experience is spatio-temporal; it occurs in real time through the physical presence of one’s body at a building. And for most of Western history, the meanings of architecture were understood to emerge from such experience only through the mediation of the larger community of reception of which one was a part. Thus classical architectural theory used categories like bienséance or convenance to refer to the notion of decorum, whereby architecture derived its signifying power within a discrete community (its ability to represent the gradations of the social hierarchy, for instance) from that community’s core of authoritative notions about the nature of the good.36 Yet part of the ethos of the emerging civic public sphere was that it was socially impersonal; it offered a theoretically equal community of discursive exchange, precisely because the opinions carried in periodicals and books and pamphlets were disembodied, and could therefore (in theory) be judged irrespective of social coercions, in the privacy of one’s own mind, and solely on the basis of the rationality of the arguments advanced.37 Architecture was absorbed into this new paradigm, for the book-reading public at any rate, via the emergence of a lively public architectural discourse in pamphlets and the periodical press.

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As this new paradigm established itself, the individual’s experience of the lived space in which architecture stands, and of the community to which architectural meanings referred, were both irretrievably transformed. Obviously neither Laugier nor Viel could have understood the changes they were living through in these terms. But in what follows I will argue, first, that this refoundation of architecture’s relationship to its public underlay a sense of anxiety that not only gripped these two authors, but that was widespread in eighteenth-century French architectural discourse; and that the writings of Laugier and Viel can both be plausibly understood as responses to that anxiety. III. Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture appeared in 1753, at a key moment in the ongoing transformation not only of architectural discourse but of the eighteenth-century French public sphere. The full dimensions of his theoretical project must be understood with reference to this context of dramatic change. The publication of commentaries on architecture had simmered at a low level in France ever since the end of the seventeenth century, when members of Louis XIV’s newly founded Royal Academy of Architecture had launched a publication campaign intended to reform French architectural taste and practice.38 But such discussions rarely reached more than a small elite of education and wealth before the mid-1740s, at which point the volume of architectural publication begin to expand dramatically in the cheaper, more rapidly produced form of pamphlets and articles in the periodical press. The reasons for this increase are complex, but the essential factor was a growing politicization of architectural writing. During the long interval between the death of Louis XIV (1715) and Louis XV’s decision to rule without the aid of a prime minister (1743), a chorus of voices had begun to assert that the quality of a society’s architecture and urban environments offered a barometer of its civic health and strength as a civilization; and that, if Paris could be taken as representative of the whole, France was plunging into decline. Little in the way of government sponsored construction had been undertaken since 1715. Critics lamented that the crown had left Paris to rot following the royal move to Versailles in the 1660s. Major buildings, including most famously the east wing of the Louvre palace, stood abandoned, unroofed, and crumbling. In the eyes of more than a few indignant contemporaries, what building there had been seemed mainly to have taken the form of opulent rococo mansions erected by a loathed coterie of nouveau riche financiers. The connection between public architecture and civic health was itself not new, but it was new to turn that connection around and to use it publicly as a way to criticize contemporary society. This, for instance, is what Voltaire did in his “Temple


du Goût,” in which he suggested that the dilapidated state of Paris and the poor quality of its recent architecture was evidence of a national decline.39 Voltaire’s suggestions here and elsewhere that a renewal of public building would carry with it a return to the glory of the Sun King and, even better, of ancient Rome, drew upon and were subsequently echoed by other, less well known writers: Evrard Titon de Tillet, Jean-Louis de Cordemoy, Germain Boffrand, Jacques-François Blondel, and others.40 The increasing currency of this view set the stage for a rapid increase in architectural discourse starting in 1747. This occurred just as the disasterous War of Austrian Succession was winding down, and as the expansion of political debate, particularly the battle between the crown, the Parlements, and political Jansenism, first began seriously threatening the closed system of absolutist politics. A few politicized architectural commentators seized the moment to start using debates about individual buildings and sites in Paris as a way to raise more controversial questions about contemporary society and politics.41 For this purpose they developed the highly effective strategy of infusing their commentaries with inflammatory language drawn straight from the crown-Parlement struggle. This proved useful for bringing out the political stakes of the architectural environment in a manner that was legible to the alert reader, yet oblique enough to be difficult for the crown to censor. Architecture and town planning proved well suited for this type of commentary: to write about architecture and the city was, after all, to comment on the visible, material face of a common public sphere that was controlled by the governmental and ecclesiastical elites yet inhabited by the larger populace. Fuelled by these new political concerns, nearly as many books, pamphlets, and periodical articles on architecture were published between 1747 and 1753 (over three hundred) as had appeared over the whole of the previous halfcentury. More generally, these same years marked a threshold in the crown’s gradual loss of control over the public sphere, and in the expanded visibility of debate and contestation within that arena. Insurgent barristers in the Paris Parlement began fortifying their longstanding practice of circulating uncensored legal remonstrances with still more direct forms of political writing, such as pamphlets and books.42 The first volumes of the Encyclopédie began appearing in 1751, garnering praise from some and angry reviews from others. Several new journals appeared with identifiable ideological perspectives, for instance the Physiocratic Journal œconomique (founded 1751), the Année littéraire (founded 1754), and the Journal encyclopédique (founded 1756). Official obstacles to the expansion of public discourse were also progressively undercut as the state entrusted more and more key public institutions to men who accepted the progressive ideals of the philosophes or, more covertly, of

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Freemasonry.43 Malesherbes took over as head of the bureau de la librarie in 1750 and began undermining the whole system of privilèges governing the publication of books by granting so-called “tacit permissions” to otherwise unpublishable works.44 The Académie française came to be dominated by the parti philosophique, while in 1750 the privilege of the Mercure de France went to the abbé Reynal, who was then succeeded in 1755 by Marmontel, both of whom had progressive leanings.45 After Damiens’s attempt on Louis XV’s life in 1757, followed by the start of the Seven Years’ War the following year, popular interest in public affairs reached new heights.46 Ordinary people were now informed, appealed to, lied to, and manipulated on all sides in ways that would have been unthinkable even a decade earlier. This cacophony of information and opinion gave new relevance to the old problem of understanding what the public was and what defined its proper role in the commonwealth. Most theories of the public before the middle of the eighteenth century had naturally enough extrapolated paradigms of social behavior observed in the hierarchical worlds of household, confraternity, guild, and so forth. But in the dispersion and anonymity of the growing reading public, the constraints of social hierarchy were comparatively absent. This relatively open discursive sphere encouraged the airing of opinions that would once have remained invisible, in the process highlighting the dizzying variety of available perspectives. As a result, the real social heterogeneity lying behind the reassuring notion of an ordered society grew more evident. For many commentators around mid-century, this was experienced as the chaotic splintering of a once unified social order. Consider a remarkable article entitled “Doutes sur l’existence d’un public,” which appeared in the Mercure de France in 1755. The anonymous author wrote that recent decades had been characterized by the “fureur de juger . . . la fièvre d’écrire, & la rage de décider.”47 Everybody thinks he is a critic and a competent judge, and no one hesitates to say so. The consequence of this onslaught was that the public had simply ceased to exist: “Peut-être il y a vingt ans qu’il en existoit un [a public] . . . mais insensiblement il s’est élevé des jurisdictions particulières qui ont usurpé ses droits. Chaque société a prétendu être le vrai public comme la bonne compagnie . . . Tous ces petits publics, ou soi-disans tels, se succèdent pour se contredire.”48 A major cause of this was the “multitude de brochures journalières & des écrits périodiques” by writers who, in inserting their often incompetent opinion into the world of the arts, “veulent donner des loix dans une République où ils n’ont pas même acquis le droit de bourgeoisie.”49 One could no longer speak of the public because by definition the public was the unitary and ultimate tribunal at the pinnacle of a socially inflected hierarchy of taste. Whereas now, “le bon goût est devenu problématique, la véritable croyance douteuse, & l’autorité d’un public


légitime a cessé d’être une . . . les particuliers sont tout, & le public n’est rien . . . Chacun veut être le maître, se néglige ou se déplace. Le déplacement amène l’anarchie, & l’anarchie, la destruction.” All that was left was “petits publics, ou soi-disans tels.”50 For those concerned with architecture, it became impossible to ignore the contrast between fractious contemporary debates and what seemed like the self-assured, authoritative glories of ancient Rome or the age of Louis XIV. All at once, several architectural professionals and theorists, Laugier among them, came to the conclusion that French architecture was in trouble, for it was no longer fulfilling its great vocation of offering society a proud and authoritative public reflection of itself and its beliefs. Efforts to understand and address this crisis pointed in many different directions. Conservative writers like the government art theorist Charles-Nicolas Cochin placed the blame on changes in the public, recognizing that much of the problem stemmed from the influx of so many new voices that, in his estimation, were inappropriate and unqualified to hold opinions on art.51 But others, like Laugier, came to believe that the problem was instead that architecture had simply gotten by for too long on studying and imitating previous buildings, and that the time had come to determine what the irrefutable first principles of the art really were. For it was only by placing architectural practice and judgment on some kind of a more systematic basis, one that cut through the vagaries of taste and knowledge, that the chaos of contemporary opinions would be quieted. Only then would architecture regain the ability to fulfill its traditional public vocation with authority, and be met with consensus. The result was the appearance, between 1751 and 1754, of a flurry of “Dissertations,” “Essais,” and “Discours” on architecture, each of which aimed, in whole or in part, to formulate new bases for non-specialist experience and judgment.52 Some writers, such as Pierre Estève, investigated the mechanics of perception as they related to architecture, while others, like Louis Petit de Bachaumont, or Jacques-François Blondel and his student Pierre Patte, sought both to educate the public as architectural spectators while also systematizing the means of architectural expression. Laugier, however, pursued a different avenue. He sensed that the venerable but often obscure Vitruvian tradition required a kind of erudition that, as recent debates suggested, was unattainable and in any case irrelevant to most of the growing architectural public. He therefore set out to establish firm, true, and agreed upon first principles rooted in some “natural” faculty common to all men.53 He settled, not surprisingly, on reason. Only through a disciplined submission to reason, which he took to be primary and accessible to all, could communal legibility be returned to architecture. This led him to elaborate his notion of structural legibility, a property whose “naturalness” could be judged more or less rationally. This

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vision of a taste-steered-by-reason, he hoped, would democratize and unify taste, and offer a basis for defensible architectural judgments capable of withstanding public scrutiny. This was what lay behind his impassioned advocacy of the primitive hut: it was to be a mnemonic device, anchoring the rational public consensus with which he hoped to replace the existing clash of opinions. Laugier’s Essai generated a lot of discussion. English and German translations appeared within two years, and there were numerous lengthy reviews in the periodical press. Some were complimentary and others were not. Laugier himself published various responses to his critics. There was even an entire book devoted to the Essai in 1754, which so incensed Laugier that the following year he published a new edition of his own book containing several new passages specifically refuting its claims.54 In other words, Laugier’s book failed to achieve its deepest goals. Though it did exert a major influence, inspiring a design trend towards more spatially open, structurally legible buildings, his theory accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of bringing about a new public consensus on architecture: the chaos of opinions and theories continued to expand unabated. By the 1780s, when Viel de Saint-Maux was writing, the sense of crisis that had motivated Laugier’s project was not only more palpable, but the idea that architecture’s problems stemmed from a deeper social crisis was also gaining currency. Partly, of course, this sentiment reflected the ongoing intensification of political contestation. The central role of printing in fomenting this raucous new brand of politics had also become much clearer both to opponents and defenders of royal policies. This was particularly so in the wake of the crisis that dominated the final three years of Louis XV’s reign, after his Chancellor, René-CharlesAugustin de Maupeou, dissolved and replaced the old Parlements.55 This “absolutistic coup” sparked the most spectacularly public political battle France had ever seen. First the ousted magistrates and their supporters launched a blistering publicity campaign to present the event as an act of pure despotism; the crown was then forced to respond with a counterpropaganda campaign of its own. More than 150 political pamphlets were published just between 1771 and 1774, in runs of up to 5,000 copies each.56 Though they are ostensibly about architecture, Viel’s Lettres betray a deep sense of despair about the fragmentation and disunity of the contemporary world. His point of departure here was the utter failure of the modern world to comprehend the architecture and civilization of antiquity, a failure he returned to again and again.57 The cause of this failure, he claimed, was a radical, fundamental disconnect between the two civilizations. Ancient civilization was totally integrated, totally unified; it was a time when “les particuliers n’ètoient rien; où la nation étoit tout; où, par conséquent, tous les travaux, toutes les découvertes étoient absolument relatives à la société entière; où


personne n’inventoit, ne travailloit, n’écrivoit sous son propre nom.” All things had been “plus relatives au bonheur & à l’utilité de tous, qu’à l’intérêt personnel. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que la connoissance de ce premier état des anciens peuples, soit entièrement perdue pour nous, qui, nous trouvant dans des circonstances absolument différentes, admettons des principes diamétralement contraires.”58 The modern world, according to Viel, was totally fragmented, epistemologically and socially. There was no common center between the arts and sciences anymore. In losing the unity that had characterized the ancient world, all man’s knowledge had become isolated and subdivided, and people had been left unable to grasp the deepest truth of anything. Modern humanity thus had a tendency to become lost in the materiality of things. In architecture the moderns had become absurdly obsessed with the physical aspects of building (proportions, measurements, and so forth) without recognizing that these things were meaningless unless tied to deeper realities.59 Architectural theory for the last few centuries had thus been a travesty.60 Even the limited symbolism still admitted into architectural discourse, such as the idea that the column was based on the human body, was understood in purely formal terms as a matter of literal imitation; and consequently it too was meaningless.61 The turning point between the ancient and modern world occurred in the Renaissance, according to Viel, and the agent of that revolution was the printing press. The printing press had robbed humans of their ability of distinguish between the symbolic and the literal.62 Once this happened, people became imprisoned in the literal meaning of things, society’s “centre commun” was finally shattered, and pernicious individualism took over. In architecture, competing systems of proportion began to be published by such authors as Vignola, Palladio, Scamozzi, Philibert de l’Orme, and Serlio. For Viel, these printed books marked the end of real, totalizing, sacred architectural meaning: architecture was unable to withstand “le cahos d’opinions des Artistes divers,” and was consequently “livré à l’arbitraire par le concours des opinions opposées.”63 A basic opposition emerges in his text between printing and architecture: printing becomes the very emblem of modern fragmentation, while architecture becomes the emblem of antique integration and unity. The situation of architecture in the eighteenth century was, for Viel, an illustration of what happened when a civilization tried to speak a language it no longer understood. For modern buildings were entirely mute: columns were now used willy-nilly, on butcher’s shops as on cathedrals. Buildings all looked alike.64 Viel marveled that recent architects, in a pathetic admission of impotence, had actually resorted to placing sculpted horses above the doors to stables so as to identify their function (fig. 3). “Enfin, un écriteau de la part de ces Architectes, qui diroit, c’est ici telle chose, deviendroit aujourd’hui on

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Figure 3. Jean Aubert, Château de Chantilly, Stables, 1721-35, side entrance (Photo: author).

ne peut pas plus nécessaire “65 The muteness of architecture would then be total, and the victory of the refractory language of words complete. Laugier’s appeal to the rational origins of architecture bespoke a faith, characteristic of his age, that reason offered a valid basis upon which to solve


the problems of contemporary society. Viel de Saint-Maux’s account of architectural origins instead reflects not only the loss of that faith, but also a stronger sense of the magnitude of society’s problems. Viel’s critique of the modern world is predicated on the conviction that the prize of meaningful architecture is simply unavailable to a contumacious public of anonymous, atomized individuals; not only were there too many independent, subjective judgments to be accommodated in such a public, but printing had also so completely exploded its spatial scale that any collective experience of a stationary, inarticulate object, in real time and space, had become impossible for it. Viel was not alone in reaching a version of this conclusion: the famous utopian projects for the ideal city of Chaux drawn up by the architect ClaudeNicolas Ledoux similarly bypassed the question of inventing a new architecture for the world that exists, and delved instead into imagining what kind of architecture a reordered, reunified world would possess (fig. 4). One could say much the same about the French Revolution itself, in the course of which numerous attempts were made to imagine a new architecture that could project comprehensibility into the physical public domain and thereby vouch for the Revolution’s success. The dream of meaningful architecture here too reflects an inability to conceive of social unity in the abstract forms required of a spatially exploded public; that is, in forms other than those of a communal gathering in real space and time.66 In this perspective, Revolutionary architecture may be considered to have a nostalgic, or perhaps atavistic, aspect.

Figure 4. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs, et de la législation (Paris, 1804). Plate showing the House of the Surveyors of the Loüe River (Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania).

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And yet, to return to Viel, it is illuminating to note that in spite of his towering animus towards the modern world, his attempt to imagine the utopia of primitive times drew less upon antiquity than it did upon the intellectual and cultural tools offered by his own age. This becomes clear when we inspect the lines of personal allegiance and enmity he marks out in his text, which are not drawn as we might expect them to be. Vitruvius, for instance, would be one of the villains of his tale were it not for the fact that Viel could not even bring himself to believe that the Ten Books was authentically antique: instead he declared it to be a fourteenth-century fabrication.67 Viel regarded Vitruvius’s various stories about the mythical origins of the different classical elements as ridiculous fairy tales, and suggested that they represented half-digested allegories dimly remembered from true antique sources.68 But what really upset Viel was what he took as Vitruvius’s tendency to view “les monumens de l’antiquité que par les rapports de leurs dimensions.”69 Declaring that the Ten Books would have made the Romans laugh, he sputtered that there could have been no written treatise on architecture in antiquity anyway, since architecture had then still been instinctively comprehensible to all. All modern errors in architecture could be traced back to this audacious forgery, for “Vitruvius” had given people from the Renaissance onward the reassuring illusion that the ancients thought about architecture in exactly the same manner as they were inclined to do, that is, materially and formally. As for Viel’s heroes, they are equally surprising. At the end of the introduction to Viel’s text, the reader learns that all profits from the Lettres are to go towards the construction of a monument to Claude Perrault!70 In addition to praising Perrault here and there, Viel also praises Roland Fréart de Chambray, a forerunner to Perrault in the application of unitary notions of truth to the world of architectural theory. Fréart’s 1650 Parallèle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne had highlighted the innumerable inconsistencies between classical architectural theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.71 Viel’s critique of the architectural thought of modern times, in other words, considered itself to be rationalistic and enlightened, and to hinge on the unmasking of inconsistency. The same was true of his vision of antiquity, which was so pure and internally consistent that it could take on board only the mute testimony of ancient stones: if he were to have admitted the evidence of Vitruvius, his vision of a totally integrated, symbolic, consistent antique world would have collapsed. The presence of this rationalistic orientation at the heart of Viel’s mythological narrative thus mirrors the presence of etiological myth in Laugier’s rationalistic theory. This invites us to reflect upon whether the late-century Super-Enlightenment interest in myth and the occult was really so radically opposed to Enlightenment rationalism after all; perhaps what distinguishes them most is the different


manner in which they understood and used myth to cope with a common presentiment, namely, that rational authority on its own can provide a structure but never an ultimate basis for human laws or morality. What neither Viel nor Laugier could have recognized, though Viel gestured in this direction, was that recent changes in the structure of the public sphere were in a real sense taking the ground out from under architecture. Architecture was still expected to fulfill its emblematic function despite the fact that, as society was reconfigured as disembodied, spatially exploded, and held together principally by the circulation of printed discourse, physical space was losing its essential role as the ground of communal existence. Prestigious architecture, in all its spatially situated materiality, could no longer function as the greatest of the public arts in such a society; but this was not an insight available to the eighteenth century. The first advances on that conclusion had to wait until the nineteenth century, with the work of Victor Hugo. In the chapter “This Will Kill That” of his Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Hugo described a revolution that led from the age of architecture to the age of printing, in the course of which architecture itself had been killed. Thus Renaissance architecture was for him “this setting sun which we take to be a dawn . . . [for this was] the moment architecture became merely one art among others, once it was no longer the total, the sovereign, the tyrannical art.”72 Hugo certainly seems to have read Viel de Saint-Maux: his descriptions of the origins of architecture earlier in the same chapter are a clear paraphrase of Viel, and his claim that before printing architecture was humanity’s “book” seems drawn from Viel as well. But in Hugo’s work Viel’s despair has been excised, and the old optimism that characterized Laugier’s work returns in a new form: architecture now becomes a necessary and acceptable casualty of progress, and its death at the hands of the printed book just another stage in the emancipation of humanity.73 As Neil Levine has shown, Hugo’s architectural chapters in Notre-Dame de Paris were developed in dialogue with the great Romantic Classicist architect Henri Labrouste, whose Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1839–50) offered a kind of manifesto on the possible place of architecture in a world remade by printing (fig. 5); indeed, Labrouste’s library explicitly sought to appropriate aspects of printing for architecture in an effort to signal and acknowledge architecture’s subordination within a new paradigm.74 Such an acknowledgment reflected the new historicist outlook of the postRevolutionary period, in which preoccupation with the essence of origins was replaced by an ultimately teleological concern with the relativity of change and process. Nothing could offer a surer sign that architecture, which for so many centuries had aspired to reflect timeless truths, had entered a radically different phase of its long history. Aspiring no longer to stand in one place

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with an eye fixed on the remote and starry firmament, the architect had already reconciled himself to practicing an art of space in a world where situatedness in space, for the first time in human history, no longer formed the primary condition of social existence.

Figure 5. Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1838–50. Detail of the façade, showing the print-like columns of authors’ names decorating the exterior of the reading room wall (Photo: author).

NOTES I would like to thank Professor Dan Edelstein of Stanford University for his thoughtful comments on this paper, a first version of which was presented in his panel, “The SuperEnlightenment: Pushing the Limits of Human Knowledge,” at the 2005 ASECS meeting in Las Vegas. 1. Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–5 (Book 2, chapter 1).

The Hut and the Altar / 255 2. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 34. 3. Otto Georg Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 3rd ed. (London: Alec Tirani Ltd., 1962). 4. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983). 5. Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1683). Translated as Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns After the Method of the Ancients, trans. Indra Kagis McEwen, intro. by Alberto Pérez-Gómez (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993). On Perrault’s theory, see Antoine Picon, Claude Perrault, 1613–1688, ou, la curiosité d’un classique (Paris: Picard, 1988), and PérezGómez, Architecture, 18–47 (largely reproduced in his introduction to the 1993 translation). 6. Pérez-Gómez, Architecture. 7. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Duchesne, 1753; 2nd ed., 1755). Translated as An Essay on Architecture, trans. Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc., 1977). The account of the primitive hut occurs in the opening pages of Chapter 1 (Laugier, Essai, 10–12 [Laugier, Essay, 11–12]). On Laugier see: Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth-Century French Theory (London: Zwemmer, 1962), esp. 35–52. See also Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), esp. 7–22; Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), esp. 43–9. 8. Laugier, Essai, 8; Laugier, Essay, 11. 9. Laugier, Essai, 14–65 (pediments: 44, pilasters: 20) (Laugier, Essay, 12–38 [pediments: 28, pilasters: 16]). 10. Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres sur l’architecture des Anciens et celle des Modernes (Paris: n.p., 1787; rpt. edn. Geneva: Minkoff, 1974). The best account of Viel de Saint-Maux’s Lettres is contained in: Rémy G. Saisselin, “Painting, Writing and Primitive Purity: From Expression to Sign in Eighteenth-Century French Painting and Architecture,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 217 (1983): 257–369 (esp. 316–32). See also: Jean-Rémy Mantion, “La solution symbolique: Les Lettres sur l’architecture de Viel de Saint-Maux (1787),” Urbi 9 (1984): 46–58; Vidler, Writing, 139-46. On Viel’s identity: Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, “Charles-François Viel, Architecte de l’Hôpital général et Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux, Architecte, peintre et avocat au Parlement de Paris,” Bulletin de la société d’histoire de l’art français (1966): 257–69. A related account of architectural origins was elaborated during these same years by the Englishman Richard Payne Knight; see Alessandra Ponte, “Phallocentrisme et architecture: la théorie de Payne Knight,” in Le progrès des arts réunis, 1763-1815, eds. Daniel Rabreau and Bruno Tollon (Bordeaux: William Blake et co., 1993), 405–17. 11. Court de Gébelin is footnoted four or five times in the Lettres, while the name “M. Viel, architecte” appears in a list of subscribers printed in the back of one of the

256 / W I T T M A N volumes of Court’s study. Viel also probably knew Court de Gébelin personally; see below, n.30. On Court de Gébelin, see: Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre. Un Supplément à l’”Encyclopédie”: Le “Monde Primitif” d’Antoine Court de Gébelin (Paris: Champion, 1999). 12. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.v; 2.8. Viel’s book contains an introduction and seven “letters,” each of which is paginated separately. 13. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.vii, x; 1.16; 2.10. 14. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.6, 25–6; 7.7–8. 15. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.17–18. 16. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.vii; 1.16–17. 17. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 2.18 n.1; 6.4. 18. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.5, 8. 19. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 2.8–9. 20. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 2.10; 4.15. 21. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 4.19–21. 22. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 4.27. 23. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.17; 2.11. 24. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 2.11. 25. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.ix. 26. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 4.19. 27. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.16–17; 2.5–7; 5.4. 28. Dan Edelstein, “The Re-Invention of Mythology: Court de Gébelin and the Masonic Code,” unpublished paper, first presented at the Modern Languages Association Conference, December 27, 2003, in San Diego, CA. I am grateful to Prof. Edelstein for providing me with a copy of this illuminating paper. 29. Mercier-Faivre, Supplément, 102. 30. Vidler, Writing, 142. 31. “The Super-Enlightenment: Pushing the Limits of Human Knowledge,” panel organized by Professor Dan Edelstein of Stanford University at the 2005 ASECS meeting in Las Vegas. 32. This literature is far too large to summarize here. In addition to Jürgen Habermas’s seminal essay (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989]), two useful starting points are: Keith Michael Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Colhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 181– 211; and Roger Chartier, “The Public Sphere and Public Opinion,” in The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1991), 20–37. 33. A more detailed presentation of the following claims appears in my forthcoming book, Architecture, the Press, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). For an account of how conceptions of space had already changed in the seventeenth century, see Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 1–38. For a suggestive analysis of the

The Hut and the Altar / 257 problematic tendency among contemporary historians to spatialize the eighteenth-century public sphere, see Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians.” The Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 153–82. 34. On the early history of this process, see Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France 1400–1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 35. Though his focus is on a slightly later period, Benedict Anderson offers a suggestive way of thinking about these questions in: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. and extended ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 36. On these terms, see Werner Szambien, Symétrie, goût, caractère (Paris: Picard, 1986), 92–8, 167–73. 37. Chartier, Cultural Origins, 20–7. 38. Associated writers published thirteen new titles in the first twenty years of the Academy’s existence, covering everything from construction to decoration to architectural history. These works attacked the ignoble character of most recent building, decried the power of the guilds and masons’ corporations, and announced the crown’s new commitment to actively fostering a more noble conception of architecture. Most importantly, see the dedicatory “Epitre” at the start of Blondel’s Cours d’architecture (Paris: P. Auboin et F. Clouzier, 1675–1683), Blondel’s notes to the third edition of Louis Savot’s L’Architecture françoise des bastimens particuliers (Paris: Vve et C. Clouzier, P. Auboüin, J. Villery, 1685), Jean-François Félibien’s “Dissertation touchant l’architecture antique et l’architecture gothique” (in Les plans et les descriptions de deux des plus belles maisons de campagne de Pline le Consul [Paris: Florentin et P. Delaulne, 1699]), and the royal dedication to Perrault’s Dix livres de Vitruve (Paris: Coignard, 1673). 39. Voltaire, “Le Temple de goût,” ed. O. R. Taylor, in Les oeuvres completes de Voltaire/The Complete Works of Voltaire, eds. Theodore Besterman and Haydn Mason (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), 25–256 (esp. 177–9). 40. Evrard Titon de Tillet, Description du Parnasse François (Paris: J.-B. Coignard fils, 1727); idem., Essais sur les honneurs et sur les monumens accordés aux illustres sçavans pendant la suite des siècles (Paris: Chaubert, 1734); JeanLouis de Cordemoy, Nouveau traité de toute l’architecture (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1706); Germain Boffrand. Livre d’architecture (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier père, 1745); Jacques-François Blondel, De la distribution des maisons de plaisance (Paris: Jombert, 1737–1738), iii and xii–xiv. 41. Among many anonymous and fugitive writers, two stand out: Étienne de La Font de Saint-Yenne, and Louis Petit de Bachaumont. A full account of their extensive activities, including the attribution of previously unknown texts, appears in my forthcoming Architecture, the Press, and the Public Sphere. 42. Sarah Maza, “Le tribunal de la nation: les mémoires judiciaires et l’opinion publique à la fin de l’ancien régime,” Annales E.S.C 42:1 (1987): 73–90; David A. Bell, Laywers and Citizens: the Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 115–16. 43. See Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics

258 / W I T T M A N in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 44. Raymond Birn, “The Profit of Ideas.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4:2 (1970– 1971): 147–9. 45. Jean Sgard, “Mercure de France (1724–1778).” Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789, ed. Jean Sgard et al., (Paris: Universitas, 1991), 855. 46. Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Rosemary Morris (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 166; Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 78–91. 47. “Doutes sur l’existence d’un public,” Mercure de France (March 1755): 35. 48. “Doutes,” 32–3. 49. “Doutes,” 35 and 37. 50. “Doutes,” 33 and 40. 51. Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Recueil de quelques pièces concernant les arts, extraites de plusieurs Mercures de France, (Paris: Jombert, 1757). This collection contains articles Cochin had published over the previous three years. On Cochin, see Christian Michel, Charles-Nicolas Cochin et l’art des lumières (Rome : École Française de Rome, 1993). 52. Bachaumont, Essai sur la peinture, la sculpture et l’architecture (n.p., 1751; 2nd edn., n.p., 1752); Pierre de Vigny, “Dissertation sur l’architecture,” Journal œconomique (March 1752): 68–107; Pierre Estève, L’Esprit des Beaux-Arts (Paris: C.-J.-B. Bauche, 1753), 121–231 (Part 4, “De l’architecture”); Laugier, Essai; Jacques-François Blondel, Discours sur la nécessité de l’étude de l’architecture (Paris: Jombert, 1754); Pierre Patte, Discours sur l’architecture (Paris: Quillau, Prault jeune, 1754). 53. Laugier, Essai, xxxiii–xxxvii; Laugier, Essay, 1–3. 54. Examen d’un essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Lambert, 1753). The Examen is usually attributed to the architect Charles-Étienne Briseux and the critic La Font de Saint-Yenne on the basis of eighteenth-century references. This double attribution has been accepted by most modern scholars, although the most eminent recent historian of La Font de Saint-Yenne’s career, Patrick Descourtieux, remains unconvinced as to La Font’s involvement, as do I (Patrick Descourtieux, “Les théoreticiens de l’art au XVIIIe siècle: La Font de Saint-Yenne“ [Memoire de Maîtrise, Paris-Sorbonne, 1978], 88). 55. Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: a Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); Shanti Singham, “‘A Conspiracy of Twenty Million Frenchmen’: Public Opinion, Patriotism, and the Assault on Absolutism during the Maupeou Years, 1770–1775" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1991). 56 . Echeverria concludes that the crisis “set the French thinking about fundamental political questions with markedly increased seriousness and concern.” He also claims that the “propaganda war” of 1771–4 was “probably unequaled in French history until the Revolution” (Maupeou Revolution, 22 and 27). 57. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.vii–viii; 1.9–10; 2.4; 4.4–6; 6.6–10.

The Hut and the Altar / 259 58. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.20–1. 59. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.6–9; 7.9. 60. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 6.13–18. 61. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 2.20. 62. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.ix, 2.4. 63. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 6.8. 64. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 6.11–12; 7.22–5. 65. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 7.24–5. 66. For useful reflections on social multiplicity, unity, and spatiality in the eighteenthcentury public sphere, see Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere,” 155–68. 67. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 7.52–3. 68. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 4.42–3. 69. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 6.9. 70. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.xi. 71. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 6.10. 72. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 197. 73. Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris, 189–90. 74. Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève,” in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 138–73.