The Hut and the Altar:

Architectural Origins and

the Public Sphere
in Eighteenth-Century France
RICHARD WITTMAN
I.

he Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio, a Roman engineer

from the reign of Augustus, contains the classical traditions 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

235

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coverings of leaves, others to dig caves under the mountains. Many
imitated the nest building of swallows and created places of mud
and twigs where they might take cover. Then, observing each others
homes and adding new ideas to their own, they created better types
of houses as the days went by.2

Vitruviuss 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 Vitruviuss 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,
Vitruviuss 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 architecturean
art, after all, that publicly articulates the relationship of communities to
placesas 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

The Hut and the Altar / 237

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 Perraults Ordonnance des cinq espces 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 Perraults 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 Gods 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 Laugiers
Essai sur lArchitecture (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 mankinds first building.7 Laugier followed Vitruvius in
positing a primitive hut as the origin of architecture; but whereas Vitruviuss

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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 dsire rien.8 Natures
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 ngligences 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, Laugiers account transformed Vitruviuss 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 Laugiers 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

The Hut and the Altar / 239

Figure 1. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur lArchitecture, 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 lArchitecture
des Anciens et celle des Modernes.10
Viels principal source and inspiration was the astounding nine-volume
Monde primitif analys et compar avec le monde moderne published
between 1773 and 1782 by the Protestant clergyman and Physiocrat Antoine
Court de Gbelin.11 Court de Gbelins 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 Gbelin, 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 Viels Lettres. But Viel moved beyond Court
de Gbelin 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 pome 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 travelers
accounts as Richard Pocockes A Description of the East (174345), 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

The Hut and the Altar / 241

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, laide de quelques hiroglyphes, pour exprimer les bienfaits du
Crateur.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
Viels account thus totally inverted Laugiers. Far from originating in an
effort to remedy the negligence of nature, architectures true origins lay in
mankinds 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 mankinds

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
Encyclopdie 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
Encyclopdie, 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. Laugiers rewriting of Vitruvius offers a
conveniently characteristic Enlightenment version of classical theory. As for
Viel de Saint-Mauxs 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 Gbelins Monde
primitif, which a recent scholar has called a Masonic encyclopedia and a
supplement to the Encyclopdie.29 Court himself was one of the highest
ranking Freemasons in France, while Viel de Saint-Maux, it emerges, was a
fellow member of Courts Masonic lodge (Les Neuf Surs).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

The Hut and the Altar / 243

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 ones 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
biensance 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 communitys 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 ones 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 individuals 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 architectures 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.
Laugiers Essai sur larchitecture 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 XIVs 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 XVs decision to rule without the aid of
a prime minister (1743), a chorus of voices had begun to assert that the quality
of a societys 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

The Hut and the Altar / 245

du Got, 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
Voltaires 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-Franois 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 crowns 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 Encyclopdie 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 conomique (founded 1751), the Anne littraire
(founded 1754), and the Journal encyclopdique (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 privilges governing the
publication of books by granting so-called tacit permissions to otherwise
unpublishable works.44 The Acadmie franaise came to be dominated by the
parti philosophique, while in 1750 the privilege of the Mercure de France
went to the abb Reynal, who was then succeeded in 1755 by Marmontel,
both of whom had progressive leanings.45 After Damienss attempt on Louis
XVs 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 lexistence dun 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
fivre dcrire, & la rage de dcider.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-tre il y a vingt
ans quil en existoit un [a public] . . . mais insensiblement il sest lev des
jurisdictions particulires qui ont usurp ses droits. Chaque socit a prtendu
tre le vrai public comme la bonne compagnie . . . Tous ces petits publics, ou
soi-disans tels, se succdent pour se contredire.48 A major cause of this was
the multitude de brochures journalires & des crits priodiques by writers
who, in inserting their often incompetent opinion into the world of the arts,
veulent donner des loix dans une Rpublique o ils nont pas mme 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 got est devenu
problmatique, la vritable croyance douteuse, & lautorit dun public

The Hut and the Altar / 247

lgitime a cess dtre une . . . les particuliers sont tout, & le public nest rien
. . . Chacun veut tre le matre, se nglige ou se dplace. Le dplacement
amne lanarchie, & lanarchie, 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 Estve, investigated the mechanics
of perception as they related to architecture, while others, like Louis Petit de
Bachaumont, or Jacques-Franois 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.
Laugiers 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, Laugiers 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 Laugiers
project was not only more palpable, but the idea that architectures 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 XVs reign, after his Chancellor, Ren-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, Viels 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
ntoient rien; o la nation toit tout; o, par consquent, tous les travaux,
toutes les dcouvertes toient absolument relatives la socit entire; o

The Hut and the Altar / 249

personne ninventoit, ne travailloit, ncrivoit sous son propre nom. All things
had been plus relatives au bonheur & lutilit de tous, qu lintrt personnel.
Il nest donc pas tonnant que la connoissance de ce premier tat des anciens
peuples, soit entirement perdue pour nous, qui, nous trouvant dans des
circonstances absolument diffrentes, admettons des principes
diamtralement 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 mans 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, societys 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 lOrme, and Serlio. For Viel, these
printed books marked the end of real, totalizing, sacred architectural meaning:
architecture was unable to withstand le cahos dopinions des Artistes divers,
and was consequently livr larbitraire par le concours des opinions
opposes.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 butchers 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 criteau de la part
de ces Architectes, qui diroit, cest ici telle chose, deviendroit aujourdhui on

250 / W I T T M A N

Figure 3. Jean Aubert, Chteau de Chantilly, Stables, 1721-35, side entrance

(Photo: author).

ne peut pas plus ncessaire 65 The muteness of architecture would then be

total, and the victory of the refractory language of words complete.
Laugiers 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 Hut and the Altar / 251

the problems of contemporary society. Viel de Saint-Mauxs account of

architectural origins instead reflects not only the loss of that faith, but also a
stronger sense of the magnitude of societys problems. Viels 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
Revolutions 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, LArchitecture considre sous le rapport de

lart, des moeurs, et de la lgislation (Paris, 1804). Plate showing the House of the
Surveyors of the Loe River (Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania).

252 / W I T T M A N

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 Vitruviuss
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 Vitruviuss tendency to view les monumens de
lantiquit 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 Viels heroes, they are equally surprising. At the end of the
introduction to Viels 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 Frart
de Chambray, a forerunner to Perrault in the application of unitary notions of
truth to the world of architectural theory. Frarts 1650 Parallle de
larchitecture antique et de la moderne had highlighted the innumerable
inconsistencies between classical architectural theorists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.71 Viels 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 Viels mythological narrative thus
mirrors the presence of etiological myth in Laugiers 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

The Hut and the Altar / 253

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 humanitys book seems drawn
from Viel as well. But in Hugos work Viels despair has been excised, and the
old optimism that characterized Laugiers 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, Hugos architectural chapters in Notre-Dame
de Paris were developed in dialogue with the great Romantic Classicist
architect Henri Labrouste, whose Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive (183950)
offered a kind of manifesto on the possible place of architecture in a world
remade by printing (fig. 5); indeed, Labroustes library explicitly sought to
appropriate aspects of printing for architecture in an effort to signal and
acknowledge architectures 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

254 / W I T T M A N

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, Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive, 183850. Detail of the

faade, 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), 345 (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 Prez-Gmez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983).
5. Claude Perrault, Ordonnance des cinq espces de colonnes selon la
mthode 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 Prez-Gmez (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History
of Art and the Humanities, 1993). On Perraults theory, see Antoine Picon, Claude
Perrault, 16131688, ou, la curiosit dun classique (Paris: Picard, 1988), and PrezGmez, Architecture, 1847 (largely reproduced in his introduction to the 1993
translation).
6. Prez-Gmez, Architecture.
7. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur larchitecture (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, 1012 [Laugier, Essay, 1112]).
On Laugier see: Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth-Century French Theory
(London: Zwemmer, 1962), esp. 3552. See also Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the
Walls (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), esp. 722; Joseph Rykwert,
On Adams House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural
History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), esp. 439.
8. Laugier, Essai, 8; Laugier, Essay, 11.
9. Laugier, Essai, 1465 (pediments: 44, pilasters: 20) (Laugier, Essay, 1238
[pediments: 28, pilasters: 16]).
10. Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres sur larchitecture des Anciens et
celle des Modernes (Paris: n.p., 1787; rpt. edn. Geneva: Minkoff, 1974). The best
account of Viel de Saint-Mauxs Lettres is contained in: Rmy 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): 257369 (esp. 31632). See also: Jean-Rmy Mantion, La solution
symbolique: Les Lettres sur larchitecture de Viel de Saint-Maux (1787), Urbi 9
(1984): 4658; Vidler, Writing, 139-46. On Viels identity: Jean-Marie Prouse de
Montclos, Charles-Franois Viel, Architecte de lHpital gnral et Jean-Louis Viel
de Saint-Maux, Architecte, peintre et avocat au Parlement de Paris, Bulletin de la
socit dhistoire de lart franais (1966): 25769. 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 thorie de Payne Knight, in
Le progrs des arts runis, 1763-1815, eds. Daniel Rabreau and Bruno Tollon
(Bordeaux: William Blake et co., 1993), 40517.
11. Court de Gbelin 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 Courts study. Viel also probably knew Court de Gbelin personally; see
below, n.30. On Court de Gbelin, see: Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre. Un Supplment
lEncyclopdie: Le Monde Primitif dAntoine Court de Gbelin (Paris:
Champion, 1999).
12. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.v; 2.8. Viels 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, 256; 7.78.
15. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.1718.
16. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.vii; 1.1617.
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, 2.89.
20. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 2.10; 4.15.
21. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 4.1921.
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, 1.1617; 2.57; 5.4.
28. Dan Edelstein, The Re-Invention of Mythology: Court de Gbelin 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, Supplment, 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 Jrgen
Habermass 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), 2037.
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. 138. 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): 15382.
34. On the early history of this process, see Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture
and Elite Culture in France 14001750, 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, Symtrie, got, caractre (Paris:
Picard, 1986), 928, 16773.
37. Chartier, Cultural Origins, 207.
38. Associated writers published thirteen new titles in the first twenty years of the
Academys 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 crowns new
commitment to actively fostering a more noble conception of architecture. Most
importantly, see the dedicatory Epitre at the start of Blondels Cours darchitecture
(Paris: P. Auboin et F. Clouzier, 16751683), Blondels notes to the third edition of
Louis Savots LArchitecture franoise des bastimens particuliers (Paris: Vve et C.
Clouzier, P. Auboin, J. Villery, 1685), Jean-Franois Flibiens Dissertation touchant
larchitecture antique et larchitecture 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 Perraults Dix livres de Vitruve (Paris:
Coignard, 1673).
39. Voltaire, Le Temple de got, 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), 25256 (esp. 1779).
40. Evrard Titon de Tillet, Description du Parnasse Franois (Paris: J.-B.
Coignard fils, 1727); idem., Essais sur les honneurs et sur les monumens accords
aux illustres savans pendant la suite des sicles (Paris: Chaubert, 1734); JeanLouis de Cordemoy, Nouveau trait de toute larchitecture (Paris: J.-B. Coignard,
1706); Germain Boffrand. Livre darchitecture (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier pre, 1745);
Jacques-Franois Blondel, De la distribution des maisons de plaisance (Paris: Jombert,
17371738), iii and xiixiv.
41. Among many anonymous and fugitive writers, two stand out: tienne 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 mmoires judiciaires et lopinion
publique la fin de lancien rgime, Annales E.S.C 42:1 (1987): 7390; David A.
Bell, Laywers and Citizens: the Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11516.
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): 1479.
45. Jean Sgard, Mercure de France (17241778). Dictionnaire des journaux,
16001789, 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 Rgime, 17501770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); David A.
Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 7891.
47. Doutes sur lexistence dun public, Mercure de France (March 1755): 35.
48. Doutes, 323.
49. Doutes, 35 and 37.
50. Doutes, 33 and 40.
51. Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Recueil de quelques pices 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 lart des lumires (Rome : cole
Franaise de Rome, 1993).
52. Bachaumont, Essai sur la peinture, la sculpture et larchitecture (n.p.,
1751; 2nd edn., n.p., 1752); Pierre de Vigny, Dissertation sur larchitecture, Journal
conomique (March 1752): 68107; Pierre Estve, LEsprit des Beaux-Arts (Paris:
C.-J.-B. Bauche, 1753), 121231 (Part 4, De larchitecture); Laugier, Essai;
Jacques-Franois Blondel, Discours sur la ncessit de ltude de larchitecture
(Paris: Jombert, 1754); Pierre Patte, Discours sur larchitecture (Paris: Quillau, Prault
jeune, 1754).
53. Laugier, Essai, xxxiiixxxvii; Laugier, Essay, 13.
54. Examen dun essai sur larchitecture (Paris: Lambert, 1753). The Examen
is usually attributed to the architect Charles-tienne 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-Yennes career, Patrick Descourtieux, remains unconvinced as to La
Fonts involvement, as do I (Patrick Descourtieux, Les thoreticiens de lart au XVIIIe
sicle: La Font de Saint-Yenne [Memoire de Matrise, Paris-Sorbonne, 1978], 88).
55. Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: a Study in the History of
Libertarianism, France, 17701774 (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, 17701775"
(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 17714 was probably unequaled in French history until
the Revolution (Maupeou Revolution, 22 and 27).
57. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, Intro.viiviii; 1.910; 2.4; 4.46; 6.610.

The Hut and the Altar / 259

58. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.201.
59. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 1.69; 7.9.
60. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 6.1318.
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, 6.1112; 7.225.
65. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 7.245.
66. For useful reflections on social multiplicity, unity, and spatiality in the eighteenthcentury public sphere, see Mah, Phantasies of the Public Sphere, 15568.
67. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 7.523.
68. Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres, 4.423.
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, 18990.
74. Neil Levine, The Book and the Building: Hugos Theory of Architecture and
Labroustes Bibliothque Ste-Genevive, in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century
French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982),
13873.