François Blondel

Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution

Anthony Gerbino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135694876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

First director of the Académie royale d'architecture, François Blondel established a lasting model for architectural education that helped transform a still largely medieval profession into the one we recognize today.

Most well known for his 1676 urban plan of Paris, Blondel is also celebrated as a mathematician, scientist, and scholar. Few figures are more representative of the close affinity between architecture and the "new science" of the seventeenth century.

The first full-length study in English to appear on this polymath, this book adds to the scholarship on early modern architectural history and particularly on French classicism under Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. It studies early modern science and technology, Baroque court culture, andthe development of the discipline of architecture.

1

Mathematician, engineer, courtier

Between six and seven o'clock in the evening, the troops of Belle-font and Mondejus advance toward the enemy and enter the breach. The captains hold the spot below at the mercy of ceaseless musket fire. The men follow and begin to work. Our canons fire continually from every battery, but without stopping the enemy from raining down a thick hail of bullets. Bombs roll down the breach, grenades explode on every side, and stones fly everywhere. Flaming oil, burning bales, and every other artifice fill the breach with flames. There is no cover to be found, danger is everywhere. Some are killed by musket rounds, others torn apart by grenades, all are wounded. There is no rescue. Two captains are killed there and many soldiers.

Antoine de Ville (1639)¹

M. Blondel does not content himself with these historical remarks. He further examines this matter philosophically, reasoning deeply on the principles of geometry and physics, which are the basis for the rules of the art of launching bombs. The majority of engineers are content with experience, but it is certain that those who go back to the causes and who examine the arts in their principles are the most proper to conduct them to perfection. It is thus very wrong to believe that the speculations of physicians and geometers offer nothing to civil society.

Pierre Bayle (1684)²

These universal minds . . . have the advantage of transforming themselves without difficulty. Like Prometheus, they can become jurists among lawyers, theologians among the learned, captains and engineers among men of war, such that they seem born for all the professions of civil society. These minds are rare, nor can they be valued highly enough.

Jacques de Caillières (1658)³

François Blondel does not make a simple subject for a biographical study. His life encompassed an unusually diverse range of experiences that do not easily fit into a unified conceptual or disciplinary framework. Indeed, some of the transitions in his career are so stark as to resist straightforward narrative explanation. This is especially true of the sudden string of commissions and court appointments that he obtained after 1669, including his promotion to the directorship of the Académie Royale d'Architecture. It was from this period, too—essentially the last thirteen years of his life—that Blondel published the vast majority of his written oeuvre. The historian concerned primarily with his intellectual culture is therefore doubly challenged to show how his earlier experiences informed the authorial or scholarly persona that has come down to us. Yet this late body of work, arguably Blondel's greatest claim to historical importance, is integral to the larger tissue of his life.

Implicit in the whole of Blondel's writing is the continuing struggle to live up to the old humanist ideal of balancing a life of action and contemplation. In this sense, his image as an author might be characterized as a combination of two lifelong pursuits. The first was as a soldier, engineer, and statesman devoted to royal service, a vocation he exercised as the trusted agent of three consecutive high ministers, from Richelieu to Mazarin to Colbert. The second was as a theorist, scholar, and scientist fully engaged in the intellectual world of his time. This aspect of his work blossomed under the patronage of Colbert, who found in Blondel the makings of a valuable author-client, a living advertisement for the minister's new program of cultural patronage. Few scholars of the period could better demonstrate the worldly advantages of the “new science” joined to the service of the crown and state. As Colbert recognized, architecture was perfectly suited to Blondel's dual strengths. Elevated by both antiquarian and scientific study, it would become a potent instrument for projecting royal power.

The two halves of Blondel's career were tied together by mathematics, the discipline with which he identified most closely. His introduction to the subject was both theoretical and practical. As a young military engineer, he would have learned the basic geometrical operations involved in surveying, instrument making, masonry construction, gunnery, and navigation. Unlike most engineers, however, Blondel also sought to investigate the foundations of his craft in light of both the speculative tradition of ancient Greek geometry and more recent advances in physical-mathematical science. He was inspired, in particular, by Galileo, becoming one of the Italian philosopher's early French supporters, whose number also included Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and Gilles Personne de Roberval. Blondel's patron, the minister Henri-Auguste de Loménie de Brienne, appears to have introduced him to this group in the 1640s. By the time Blondel was elected to the newly formed Académie Royale des Sciences in 1669, he had maintained a decades-long association with Parisian learned and mathematical circles. Even in this rarified atmosphere, Blondel continued to integrate practical mathematics with the theoretical—that is, to reform and improve the techniques of the engineer via the methods of the new science.

This chapter provides an epitome of Blondel's life. It aims to reintroduce him to both the specialist and non-specialist reader and to update and rectify the sometimes confused accounts of his earlier biographers. Most importantly, the chapter integrates what we know of his background with his intellectual development and seeks to show how both sides of his career form part of the same patronage trajectory. These two histories were particularly entwined under Colbert, who finally provided Blondel with the means to craft a public identity as an author and to implement it in a new context—as a courtier.

Early sources and family background

In 1654 and 1659, the minister Loménie de Brienne helped Blondel's father to register a claim of noble title with the Cour des Aides. To support the petition, Brienne composed a series of royal letters patent, outlining Blondel's family history, his record of military and royal service, and the careers of his three younger brothers. The letters were discovered by Blondel's biographers, Mauclaire and Vigoureux, who supplemented their contents with additional details.⁴ These documents remain the most important and detailed sources for Blondel's social milieu and early career.

The Blondels were a prominent Picard family, whose members had occupied financial and municipal posts in Laon for many generations. The architect's great-grandfather, identified by Mauclaire and Vigoureux as Jean Blondel, was a governor there in 1565 and 1568. Blondel's paternal grandfather held offices in the diocese and élection of the same city, where he also served as commissaire aux armées. Blondel's father, François-Guillaume, studied law at Toulouse and, after receiving his degree in 1624, bought the office of avocat du roi in Ribemont, where the architect was born around 10 June 1618. François-Guillaume became mayor of the town several times in the 1630s and 1640s. The architect's mother was Marie de Louen, whose parents, Méry de Louen and Luce de la Fons, belonged to the local, provincial nobility. They are described in the documents as “of noble extraction and from renowned families [in] Picardy.” Although François-Guillaume was not a nobleman himself, he was able to buy or inherit through his wife's relations two nearby seigneuries, acquiring Gaillardon in 1620 and Les Croisettes, some time before 1635.⁵

Blondel's circumstances and upbringing were thus very different from those of most seventeenth-century architects. His family had no ties to the building trades and he himself apprenticed in none of the guild corporations associated with them. Like other self-taught amateurs of the period, Blondel came to architecture from another route. His choice was both more suitable for the first-born son of a prominent family and more likely to lead to a career in royal service.

Trial by fire: Richelieu

The reputation that Blondel earned as a young soldier was one that he carried well into his later years, and his contemporaries often noted it. Fontenelle referred to him as both “homme de letters et homme d'épée.”⁶ According to his former student, Louis-Henri de Loménie, “he knew war, having gained much experience and reputation in it and having brought back many honorable scars, which he carried well.” Although Blondel held a professorship of mathematics, it was an office, Loménie noted, “that he did not believe unworthy of the arms he had carried since boyhood and by which he had acquired much honor and received numerous wounds in all the parts of his body, sure marks of his uncommon courage.”⁷ Philibert de La Mare, the Dijon lawyer, alluded to Blondel's past with a detail of his own: “Mr. Blondel, the Dauphin's preceptor of mathematics, had an ear blown off by a musket round at the siege of Orbetello.”⁸ The biographical sources that remain of Blondel's early career reveal him to have been an unlikely scholar, but rather a man of action, a soldier steeped in the military culture of his time.

Blondel joined the regiment of Charles de Longueval, seigneur de Thenelles, at age seventeen in 1635, the same year France declared war on Spain. He devoted himself to fortification and received the brevet d'ingénieur in 1637. From 1637 to 1639, he took part in Richelieu's campaigns in Picardy and Artois, rising quickly to the rank of captain. Under the command of Louis de Nogaret, cardinal de La Valette, and later, that of Charles de La Porte, Duc de La Meilleraye, Blondel's regiment participated in the sieges of Maubeuge, Landrecies, Damvillers, La Capelle, Le Câtelet, Chimay, Hesdin, “et plusieurs autres.” In 1639, he came to the attention of Richelieu, who assigned him to a series of secret missions in Italy and Spain, probably to scout fortifications there.⁹ As recompense, he was made under-lieutenant of the galley La Cardinale, and for the next twelve years fought in several naval battles and maritime sieges off the coasts of Catalonia and Italy. By 1652, he had attained the rank of maréchal de bataille and commissaire général de la marine.¹⁰

Blondel, whose military career coincided with France's entry into the Thirty Years War, assisted in many of the same sieges that brought to prominence a generation of legendary French engineers. He fought, for example, alongside Antoine de Ville and Blaise-François de Pagan at Hesdin in 1639 and Pierre de Conty, seigneur de la Mothe d'Argencourt at Tarragone and Rosas in 1644 and 1645. He also served with the engineer-diplomat Bernard Du Plessis-Besançon at Landrecies and La Capelle in 1637, at Roses in 1645, and in Italy between 1646 and 1648.¹¹ Vauban's own initiation as an engineer in the years before the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 would not have been very different from Blondel's. Far less an indoctrination through books and secondhand reports, it was literally a trial by fire.

Blondel followed a classic pattern. He began his career, like many ambitious young men, in an era when military service offered the best—and often only— path to fortune. He joined the regiment of the local seigneur, Longueval, to whom he was distantly related. His company was also captained by a kinsman from his mother's side, a “sieur de Louan,” probably one of Longueval's clients.¹² As Blondel rose through the ranks, his exploits were noticed by the royal administration, indeed, by Richelieu himself, who secured Blondel for his own service: “He acquired so much esteem that . . . the Cardinal . . . placed him next to his person.”¹³ Blondel was assigned briefly to the secretary of war, François Sublet de Noyers, and then transferred to a post in the Mediterranean fleet, where his abilities would be more effectively used and where he could gain experience in the care of Richelieu's own men. Years after the cardinal's death, Blondel still carried letters of recommendation from his commanding naval officers, all of them former members of Richelieu's Provençal clientele: Jean-Armand de Maillé-Brézé, Duc de Richelieu; the chevalier de Garnier; Philandre de Vincheguerre; and the Maréchale Philippe de la Mothe-Houdancourt. Richelieu furnished his young client with credit well after his own death.¹⁴

Although we know very little about Blondel's education, what we can guess about it might be informed by this early experience. According to Mauclaire and Vigoureux, Blondel underwent no formal schooling but was instead educated by his father, particularly in modern and ancient languages. The authors, however, offer no evidence for this claim and, since the existing sources are entirely silent on the question, it is hard to build on this assertion.¹⁵ The documents do insist, however, on ...