Architecture and the Historical Imagination

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879

Martin Bressani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

Hailed as one of the key theoreticians of modernism, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was also the most renowned restoration architect of his age, a celebrated medieval archaeologist and a fervent champion of Gothic revivalism. He published some of the most influential texts in the history of modern architecture such as the Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle and Entretiens sur l'architecture, but also studies on warfare, geology and racial history. Martin Bressani expertly traces Viollet-le-Duc's complex intellectual development, mapping the attitudes he adopted toward the past, showing how restoration, in all its layered meaning, shaped his outlook. Through his life journey, we follow the route by which the technological subject was born out of nineteenth-century historicism.

PART I

RESTORATION AND LOSS

1

Mourning

At Notre-Dame

Sparing as a rule of intimate confidences, Viollet-le-Duc related in surprising detail a childhood memory of Notre-Dame in the first of his Entretiens sur l’architecture, an anecdote too elaborate and unusual to be entirely rhetorical:

I remember an extremely vivid emotion of my childhood that is still fresh in my mind, though the incident in question must have occurred at an age which generally leaves none but the vaguest recollections. I was often entrusted to the care of an old servant, who took me wherever his fancy happened to lead him. One day we entered the church of Notre-Dame; and he carried me in his arms, for the crowd was great. The cathedral was hung with black. My gaze rested on the painted glass of the southern rose-window, through which the rays of the sun were streaming, colored with the most brilliant hues. I still see the place where our progress was interrupted by the crowd. All at once the roll of the great organ was heard; but for me, the sound was the singing of the rose window before me. In vain did my old guide attempt to deter me; the impression became more and more vivid, until my imagination led me to believe that such or such panes of glass emitted grave and solemn sounds, while others produced shriller and more piercing tones, so that at last my terror became so intense that he was obliged to take me out.¹

In the “Premier Entretien,” Viollet-le-Duc used the anecdote to support his argument about the unity of the arts. By relating his experience of the transference of one sense into another, a case of colored-hearing synesthesia relatively common in young children,² he wished to demonstrate the original wholeness and extension among all arts: “Art is unique, art is but one, though it assumes diverse forms in order to act on the human mind,” Viollet-le-Duc explained, “and when those diverse forms are brought into harmony in one place and at the same time, … it is then that they produce the most vivid and lasting impression which has been given to experience to the thinking being.”³ Underscoring art’s power to seize the imagination, Viollet-le-Duc suggested that art could bend habitual perceptions of reality. It is an important statement within his theoretical work, because it shifts the focus from the historical and constructive to the psychological, and even physiological experience of perception. In the same “Entretien,” he related another anecdote, the story of a young boy who refused to spend money to buy a dish for his dog, arguing that the ones offered for sale were decorated with flowers and would thus distract the animal, preventing him from eating.⁴ In all his naiveté, claimed Viollet-le-Duc, the boy understood art’s essential power. The primal form of the artistic impulse was the thrust to seize the imagination.⁵

One of the core theses of this book is that architecture, for Viollet-le-Duc, was predicated upon loss, destruction followed by restoration being its most primordial configuration. The Notre-Dame episode is indeed not simply the case of a temporary diversion from the habitual, but of an extraordinary vision that totally shattered any stable sense of the real. The hallucination experienced by the young Viollet-le-Duc was not simply the enjoyment of an artistic illusion; it was an involuntary, irrepressible, and frightening experience of architectural animation. Far from a Romantic reverie, it brings to mind Rainer Maria Rilke’s tactile confrontation with the “great rose window” that “gripped a heart and pulled it deep into God”⁶—a fulguration that Rilke likened to being subjected, face to face, to the unsettling wildness of the eyes of a large feline.

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was born in January 1814, as Napoléon was achieving his last military victories, and a few months before the first Restoration in April. He gives no date to his Notre-Dame experience, but we can infer from his brief description that it occurred in his earliest childhood during a funeral ceremony, the metropolitan church being crowded and fully “draped with black.” The early years of the Restoration were marked by a particularly high incidence of such mournful events, starting with the ceremonies for the royal victims of the Revolution held at Notre-Dame in May 1814 (Viollet-le-Duc was barely five months old) and the exhumation of Louis XVI’s ashes and their translation to Saint-Denis on January 21, 1815, anniversary of the king’s beheading. These two funeral memorials, together with the entrées into Paris of Louis XVIII in May 1814, were the inaugural events of the newly restored Bourbon regime. Similar celebrations were staged throughout the Restoration, including yearly commemorations on the solemn date of January 21. Particularly important were a series of funerary services held at Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame in January 1817 for “the translation of the mortal remains of the kings, queens, princes and princesses of the royal household,”⁷ and, on May 26, 1818, the spectacular pompe funèbre for the Prince of Condé held at Saint-Denis, with lesser ceremonies conducted at Notre-Dame and other churches of the capital.⁸ If we take as a model the first of these funerary services in May 1814, the key element of the decoration was blackness. Following Françoise Waquet’s description, “the church [of Notre-Dame], draped in black up to the vault, was completely darkened, the entire architecture disappearing under these funereal draperies. Upon this new edifice of cloth, the insigniae of mourning were laid.”⁹

It is of course neither possible nor very important to identify the precise ceremony that formed the cadre of Viollet-le-Duc’s Notre-Dame episode, but we can safely assume that it was one of these numerous royal memorials. The royal ceremonies of the Restoration were an early manifestation of a more general cult of the past that would develop with ever-increasing intensity during the Restoration and the July Monarchy. To solemnly renew with the ancien régime was the overt purpose of these official acts of commemoration.¹⁰ The traditional ceremonial was fully reinstated, governed by the old department of the Menus Plaisirs. Effigies of the kings of France were often prominently presented,¹¹ the figure of Henri IV dominating as both founder of the Bourbon dynasty and agent of the unification of a divided nation following the Wars of Religion.¹² Forging new ties with the French monarchic tradition was, however, fraught with the more recent memory of the royal family’s martyrdom.

During his Notre-Dame panic the young Viollet-le-Duc obviously had no awareness of these attempts at historical recuperation, though, presumably, his family would later have related to him the context of his memorable misapprehension. Yet he unknowingly shared with the crowd surrounding him that day the presence of a disruptive violence. One should remember that for early nineteenth-century Frenchmen who had lived through the Revolution, the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, chaos was always lurking. In 1816, Viollet-le-Duc’s hypersensitive mother Eugénie foresaw the coming of “the end of the world”.¹³ Many hoped that the reinstatement of the Bourbons to the throne of France would mark the end of that turbulent period, bringing back tradition and religion. But as the Restoration evoked an idealized monarchic past, the anger and fear left by the great Revolution was not dissolved. Far from obliterating the memory of revolutionary “crimes,” the Restoration positively cultivated them in state funerary commemorations. Many, including the architect Pierre Fontaine who was close to the Viollet-le-Duc family, would protest against the ostentatious and obsessive evocation of the grisly events.¹⁴ François-René de Chateaubriand remarked that “en voulant perpétuer la douleur, on en fait souvent perpétuer l’exemple [by wishing to perpetuate the pain, we often end up perpetuating the example].”¹⁵ But beyond its instrumental purpose, the remembrance of revolutionary crimes could be conceived as exorcism. The yearly celebration of the beheading of Louis XVI was a vivid occasion for collective expiation. The service of the mass thus had a dark undertow, restoring the nation’s unity through the ritualistic re-enactment of violence. These ceremonies can be seen as modern instances of sacrificial appeasement as described by French critic and social philosopher René Girard for pre-Christian societies: as a surrogate form of violence, the rite is an operation of collective transfer that bears upon the internal tensions, grudges, and rivalries at play within the community.¹⁶ It projects onto the (royal) victim the seeds of dissension that is in danger of spreading, uncontrolled, within society. In this sense, the church transformed with black draperies during the Restoration not only represented the conventional décor for mourning, but also signified latent internecine violence. It conveyed, under controlled, ritualistic conditions, the breaking apart of the social world. As in Viollet-le-Duc’s anecdote, the ritual liberated the forces of chaos, but kept them securely within the confines of the church.

The point could be extended from the political to the larger epistemological issues embedded in Romanticism’s engagement with history. Haunting the past to recover one’s bearing did not ensure the recovery of a stable, objectified history ready to hand. As Stephen Bann recently remarked, the “desire for history” in the nineteenth century is “the relentless appropriation, by text, figure, and scenographic representation, of what is already irretrievably lost. It is an effect of camouflage, or perhaps, in Freud’s sense, a work of mourning.”¹⁷ The nineteenth century’s rescue of a disseminated history became a process of internalization and identification and thus prompted a journey into the subjective and the imaginary. Viollet-le-Duc’s synesthesia at Notre-Dame was precisely such an experience, albeit uncontrolled and extreme. Liberated from any trace of quotidian life, the eye of the rose window, eerily glittering in the middle of the blackened cathedral, drove the subject into its spiral orbit. The historical monument was transformed into a frightening scene from which any new world might emerge. Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire related similarly vivid synesthetic correspondences between sound and color.¹⁸ In both cases, the experience was drug-induced. Yet, as Baudelaire argued, “any poetical brain, in its normal and healthy state, easily conceives these [sense] analogies.”¹⁹ The imagination—specifically the nineteenth-century “historical” imagination—was the “normal” faculty capable of transcending the distorting screen of habit. Marshall McLuhan once remarked that “synesthesia” was indeed the “sin of the nineteenth century,” stemming from a desire to create environments in which “extra-sensory perception” is possible.²⁰

First fears often strike deepest, shaping forever the landscape of one’s imagination. Whether real or constructed to act as a screen memory, as Freud describes all vivid early-childhood recollections, or even if completely invented, which would make it no less revealing a document, the Notre-Dame episode is a primal event, key to understanding the origin of Viollet-le-Duc’s life-long engagement with architecture. It reappears in various forms throughout his life as he tried simultaneously to retrieve the intensity and repress the fear of this first momentous architectural experience. At once attracted and repelled by unsettling chaos, he paradoxically both sought and repressed it: not only ratcheting into rationality the unbridled cathedral of his childhood, but also measuring the immeasurable Mont Blanc and ferreting out the logic of the deadly battles of war. He even dismantled the very rose window that led to his panic attack, reconstructing it in a way that led greater visual stability to the gigantic scintillating oculus.

Viollet-le-Duc never forgot his encounter with Notre-Dame. At Chartres in 1835, rapt with admiration for the beauty of the cathedral, he wrote to his father that “all my childhood dreams appear to be realized, the stones speaking to me to the very depth of my soul.”²¹ In the early 1840s, on the first of his tours for the Commission des monuments historiques, the French government agency in charge of the survey and listing of historical monuments, his enchanted intercourse with old French monuments grew into an even greater intimacy: pillars, walls, and cornices “whispered to him” as he sought “their illnesses, their sufferings.”²² During these introspective journeys through France he felt great solace, forging a bond with the stone monuments and the vast historical field they embodied. Viollet-le-Duc had progressively tamed the terror generated by the monstrous building into a deep experience of empathic communication. No longer imposing its “life” on the beholder, the cathedral was now the willing object of Viollet-le-Duc’s own subjective projections.

Evocations of the Notre-Dame episode will recur throughout this book, as they did during Viollet-le-Duc’s lifetime. If we consider his early work, one project already provides a first echo of the experience and a model for all of his subsequent work: the resto...