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If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. http:// thresholds.mit.edu/ issue/ 41a.html https://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Brott,_Simone.html https://eprints.qut.edu.au/55892/ http://thresholds.mit.edu/issue/41a.html 26/09/2012 DRAFT 1 26/09/2012 DRAFT 2 Architecture et révolution: Le Corbusier and the Fascist Revolution Simone Brott In a letter to a close friend dated April 1922, Le Corbusier announced that he was to publish his first major book “Architecture et révolution” which would collect “a set of articles from L’EN”1—L’Esprit nouveau, the revue jointly edited by him and painter Amédée Ozenfant which ran from 1920 to 1925.2 A year later, Le Corbusier sketched a book cover design featuring “LE CORBUSIER–SAUGNIER,” the pseudonymic compound of Pierre Jeanneret and Ozenfant, above a square-framed single-point perspective of a square tunnel vanishing toward the horizon. Occupying the lower half of the frame was the book’s provisional title in large handwritten capital letters, ARCHITECTURE OU RÉVOLUTION, each word on a separate line, the “ou” a laconic inflection of Paul Laffitte’s proposed title, effected by Le Corbusier.3 Laffitte was one of two publishers Le Corbusier was courting between 1921 and 1922.4 An advertisement for the book, with the title finally settled upon, Vers une architecture,5 was solicited for L’Esprit nouveau number 18—the original title conceived with Ozenfant that had in fact already appeared in two earlier announcements.6 “Architecture ou révolution” was retained as the name of the book’s crucial and final chapter, the culmination of six chapters extracted from essays in L’Esprit nouveau, containing the most quoted passage in Vers une Architecture, used by numerous scholars to adduce Le Corbusier’s political sentiment in 1923, to the extent of becoming axiomatic of his early political thought.7 Interestingly, it is the only chapter that was not published in L’Esprit nouveau, owing to a hiatus in the journal’s production from June 1922 to November 1923.8 An agitprop pamphlet was produced in 1922 after L’Esprit nouveau 11-12 advertising an imminent issue “Architecture ou révolution” with the famous warning: “the housing crisis will lead to the revolution. Worry about housing.”9 I would like to propose that it was Le Corbusier himself who changed the 1918 title to Architecture ou révolution, in 1922, at the precise moment Le Corbusier–Saugnier’s self- same rubric for the forthcoming issue of L’Esprit nouveau materialised; and that was, in turn, reserved for the final chapter of his book. Laffitte suggested the “et” in what was a partial neutralisation of the architect’s theoretical intent. Le Corbusier acquiesced to the edit, and soon after—and behind Laffitte’s back—submitted a draft manuscript with Laffitte’s version of the title to Besson. However, by January 1923, Le Corbusier had reverted to his original book title of 1918, Vers une architecture, as per the advertisement in L’Esprit nouveau. This 26/09/2012 DRAFT 3 history of names is neither pedantic nor trivial if we consider the appearance and disappearance and reappearance of the word révolution. Despite—or perhaps in spite of—the return to Vers une architecture in 1923, that very same year, Le Corbusier’s cover sketch- design curiously bears the title Architecture ou révolution, from which we can deduce that the modern architect held on to la révolution as the leitmotif of his project until the very last moment. The book ends with the said remark: Society violently desires one thing that it will obtain or that it will not. Everything lies in that; everything will depend on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided. (Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 243.)10 Historians have interpreted this passage hence: Le Corbusier believed modern architecture (mass housing and the “engineer’s aesthetic”) was the prevention of social unrest, a translation consistent with the dominant reception of Le Corbusier’s early philosophy as a Saint Simonian social-utopianism, whose paradigm is the Ville Contemporaine with its technocratic associations.11 Following Le Corbusier’s early association with the twenties’ Redressement Français, there exists a notion of a radical shift in Le Corbusier’s philosophy by the forties, when he joined the Vichy regime.12 This is based on the facts that in the 1930s Le Corbusier was associated with Georges Valois and Hubert Lagardelle, that he was the editor of the syndicalist journal Prélude, that he delivered a lecture in Rome in 1934, by invitation by Mussolini, and most importantly his collaboration with Vichy from the 1940s. Yet, despite Le Corbusier’s late authoritarian activities and affiliation, the architect’s postwar works such as the Unité d’Habitation, are still often paralleled with the Phalanstère and ideal city of Charles Fourier as industrial socialist models of the city.13 The conception of modernism as a utopian project of social redemption endures in no small part because of this historical reading of Le Corbusier’s refrain Architecture ou révolution in 1923. This is the reading I will contest in this essay. It is widely known the young architect condemned the French Revolution of 1789 which he felt was responsible for the decline of French art.14 Yet Charles Edouard Jeanneret- Gris was also proud of the revolutionary history of his ancestry, as per the account he provides of his grandfather’s participation in the 1831 and 1848 revolutions, in Crusade or 26/09/2012 DRAFT 4 the Twilight of the Academies.15 Le Corbusier must have known that L’Esprit nouveau was the title of a book on politics in 1875 by Quinet, an intellectual and rioter in the very 1848 revolution. In 1923, further, Le Corbusier reproduces the first principle of the French Revolution in Enlightenment France at the end of the eighteenth century; he casts himself as a revolutionary intellectual, entitled to property.16 I propose the locution “Architecture ou révolution” is neither against social revolution nor is it socialist credo per se: “Architecture or Revolution” is a heuristic device, that transcends the received socialist dialectical reading of Le Corbusier’s argument, architecture/revolution. The architect’s contended and self- proclaimed “politics” and “beliefs” should be considered historical projections that converge on the Realpolitik of twentieth-century thought between the two wars, a politico-conceptual groundswell he cannot have avoided. For in 1923 there was a real revolution unfolding before Le Corbusier’s eyes: the Fascist revolution of Benito Mussolini. The international surge of fascism and authoritarian philosophy in the beginning of the twentieth century forms prima facie the atmosphere and lining of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s literary project (even if the architect declared himself to be a socialist in 1919, and then a conservative in 1920). Less than a year before Vers une architecture was published, the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) rose to power. Le Corbusier noted in his memoirs “1922 Fascist march on Rome. Mussolini takes power in Italy”—and he was deeply moved.17 Mussolini had successfully deployed the fanatical Squadristi (the Blackshirts) to extinguish Italy’s socialist movement as early as 1920, the year L’Esprit nouveau debuted. Ten years later Le Corbusier would describe the Exhibition for the anniversary of the March on Rome as “the prodigious Rome-Exhibition of the Revolution.”18 This is the revolution intended by Le Corbusier, a violent reversal by an authority—not the proletarian revolution that he denounced. For him, Italian Fascism was revolutionary in the true sense of a radical (structural) change in power that takes place at lightning speed.19 If Italy was late to adopt modern architecture, compared with France and Germany, in the making of authoritarian politics and history, Italy was precocious.20 It is didactic in this regard that unlike Italy, France did not experience massive popular support for fascism—notwithstanding the Vichy collaboration, which was not strictly “conservative” and preserved many of the progressive social programs of the Front Populaire, and further, a spectrum of fascistic groups in 1920s-1930s France.21 Instead, France provided the intellectual antecedents for fascism prior to the 1920s, in earlier movements such as the far-right monarchist Action Française, founded in 1898 during the Dreyfus affair; Emile 26/09/2012 DRAFT 5 Zola’s publication “J’Accuse;” the nationalist response to the latter in figures such as anti- Semite Maurice Barres, and even the Jacobinism of the French Revolution (1789-1799).22 It is well known, modern fascist political philosophy first manifested in France in the fin de siècle movement of the 1880s, whose proponents were a mixture of Italian and French intellectual figures such as the French revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel. By 1909 Sorel and his followers had moved from the radical left to the right, and Sorelianism came to be seen as the precursor to twentieth-century fascism. Even while fascism in France failed to captivate the masses, it formed the intellectual framework and inspiration for Mussolini, who would later acknowledge his debt to Sorel in “The Doctrine of Fascism.”23 Under these conditions, L’Esprit nouveau was coolly received, with its socialist urbanism and aspirations of land reformation. All the while Le Corbusier yearned for “a Napoleon I, a “Louis XIV,”24 or a Haussmann—and lamented that France had no Mussolini or Hitler. Such facts have been presented as evidence of a contradiction in Le Corbusier’s position or politics.25 Historians have vacillated between this theory of a shift in the architect’s thought (from the ‘Left’ to the ‘Right’), and a second reading of his ideological position as “contradictory,” “ambivalent” or “elusive.”26 Yet, this alleged contradiction lies outside Le Corbusier, and rests instead within the very gestation of fascism in France and Italy via the split within the revolutionary Left (the Socialist Parties in each country).27 The militant revolutionaries and fascists are linked prior to twentieth-century politics through a bitter intellectual battle that traces back to the birth of authoritarian thought. For Sorel and the French anarcho-syndicalists, violent revolution was a noble act carried out by both the proletariats and capitalists, in order to intensify and not eliminate class warfare. Violence and war, the mythic catalyst for production, was the first tenet of Sorelianism.28 Le Corbusier’s sentiment, therefore seen through Sorel’s eyes—“Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain, or may not. Everything lies in that. Everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided”—does not evoke a socialist utopian revolution but its unconscious ideological shadow, namely that society has a desire for violence at the dawning of Fascism in 1923, a problem that would become the precise object of Wilhelm Reich’s study Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (the Mass Psychology of Fascism, later banned by the Nazis). Reich argued that it was not because people were stupid that they submitted to fascism, rather they desired it. The desire for violence which it may or may not obtain—is manifestly erotic: the perversion seeks satisfaction through violent force, 26/09/2012 DRAFT 6 on the one hand, and derives pleasure in desire without gratification, on the other (Sorel’s war is an end in itself). In short, it speaks Walter Benjamin’s warning about the aestheticization of violence. Le Corbusier is nascently aware that desiring fascism is a neurosis—even while he calls it “revolution”—and implores us to observe its “alarming symptoms.” In 1925, the Duce announced his five-year plan to restore Rome to its original condition under Augustus. True to plan, he ordered the decimation of all urban fabric surrounding the great Roman monuments: In five years Rome will appear beautiful to everyone in the world; vast, ordered and powerful as it was under Augustus. You will liberate the trunk of the great oak from everything that encumbers it. You will open up the areas around the theater of Marcellus, the Pantheon, and the Campidoglio; everything that was created during the centuries of decadence must disappear. In five years one must be able to see the Pantheon from the Piazza Colonna. You will also free the majestic temples of Christian Rome from their parasitical constructions. The millennial monuments of our history must stand isolated and majestic. (Benito Mussolini, Discourse of 31 December 1925)29 Le Corbusier shared Mussolini’s image of Rome of “decay” and “decadence,” meaning cluttered with post-Roman urban fabric.30 The architect had a similarly austere urban vision for Paris. Yet there is another resemblance between Mussolini’s aestheticisation of Rome and the architect’s historical rendering in Vers une architecture, where Le Corbusier did not merely valorise Greece and Rome, and the age of classical antiquity: the Parthenon, Paestum, and Hadrian’s Villa, which are the formal quintessence of the “new spirit.” He graphically “isolated” and “purified” ancient monuments in the book by deleting surrounding structures and architectural elements, from the original photographs, that were visual obstructions to the “majestic” formal concept of each building. In the pulpit of Santa Maria in Cosmedin he eliminated columns and blackened the windows.31 Once “freed,” the postcard images were serialised on the page, resembling Mussolini’s stark serializing vision of Rome. Just as Mussolini called the Pantheon and Piazza Colonna to stand in a strict visual line, “Leçon de Rome” begins with the famously austere line up of monuments: the Pyramid of Cestius 12 BCE, the Colosseum 80 CE, Arch of Constantine 12 CE, that renders each building beautiful, large, and alone, in what is fundamentally revisionist historiography.32 26/09/2012 DRAFT 7 In another sequence, the Notre Dame de Paris, the Arc de Triomphe, Place de l'Opéra, and Saint-Jacques church tower are isolated and serialised over a black silhouette of “The Cunarder Aquitania” ship. France, here, is suspended in Le Corbusier’s beloved méditerranée—and Italy becomes the birthplace, the primordial sea, of modern architecture. For “The Lesson of Rome” is not a reactionary preservation by isolation, and Le Corbusier’s pictures of Rome are not allegory or anachronism. Instead, there is a sense in both Le Corbusier and Mussolini of a fatalistic palingenesis: their revolution is a destined rebirth that must be activated by a purification of the metaphysical ground. In 1922, the first year of Fascist rule, Mussolini introduced a new Fascist calendar and renumbered the year 1922 “Year 1 EF” (Era Fascista). Revolution in this sense is no return to a constituted past, redacted or untouched, but to creation ex nihilo—it is an ontological return. The Italian reception of Le Corbusier’s book was spectacular not because of its valorisation of Italy and antiquity, but the promise of a return to the very beginning of time itself. It is with this sense of an elusive degree zero that Le Corbusier grasps la révolution and le nouveau—for him, these are essentially metaphysical concepts on Time and Being. Le Corbusier’s revolution as a theory of time derives from his reading of Nietzsche’s concept Eternal Return in Also sprach Zarathustra, on the infinite rebirth of the universe, rooted in the ancient Greek Stoic philosophy on the cyclical nature of temporality.33 Eternal return is a concept Nietzsche also used to defend Amor fati—the choice to love one’s fate including suffering, loss, destruction—hence the notion of revolution as a creative-destruction that resurfaces in Le Corbusier. These ideas are evident even in Le Corbusier’s choice of title, Vers une architecture, “Toward” indicated the elusive character of time, of futurity, and of their expression in architectural terms. “Des yeux qui ne voient pas” came from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Le phénomène futur. Le Corbusier saw himself as Henri Provensal’s artiste du futur and the Nietzschean Surhumain: “a new type of man … who embodies the future.” Thus his architectural vision which elsewhere I described as an “esprit futur” reached for the eternal return, a spirit of the future materialised in an idealised permanent present.34 It is not only Zarathustra’s mastery of “la bête” but the mastery of temporality and the future itself that inspired Le Corbusier. The revue’s name was also indebted to Apollinaire’s manifesto “L'Esprit nouveau et les poëtes” which captured the revolution Le Corbusier had in mind (the two met in 1908): “They will carry you … Into universes which tremble ineffably above our heads. Into those nearer and further universes which gravitate to the same point of infinity as 26/09/2012 DRAFT 8 what we carry within us … a renewal of ourselves, that eternal creation, that endless rebirth by which we live.”35 Le Corbusier’s very definition of geometric volumes was an effect of the horizon illuminated by the sun to express the “eternal Ideal” or “absolute.”36 Such concepts are more evocative of Hegel than Nietzsche. However, unlike the studies connecting Le Corbusier to Nietzsche,37 the unconscious Hegelianism that underpins Le Corbusier’s writing has been neglected, with one exception. Paul Venable Turner’s dissertation of 1977 established the Hegelian basis of Le Corbusier, not through any documented reading or knowledge of Hegel by Le Corbusier, but rather by tracing the Geist, Hegel’s “pure spirit” as it survives in Le Corbusier’s thought. According to Turner, it was through Le Corbusier’s study of Provensal’s book L’Art de Demain, given to him by L’Eplattenier, that Le Corbusier unconsciously adopted an Hegelian method. Provensal’s philosophy of architecture was based on the nineteenth-century tradition of German Idealism of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, “especially Hegel,” after Kant, a chain that is reinvoked with Le Corbusier’s very concept L’Esprit nouveau.38 Turner points out that Le Corbusier was unique in his conception of the Parthenon as “pure creation de l’Esprit.” 39 Of course, the notions of temporality and le nouveau derive from the Greeks, yet “spirit” as the essence of revolution is quintessentially Hegelian, from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and it re- appears in Nietzsche. Le Corbusier had studied Renan’s Vie de Jésus where Jesus is a heroic “revolutionary;” leading Turner to state that “the revolution that most impressed Le Corbusier, the sections he bracketed in Renan’s reading was the revolution of the intellect and devotion to spirit.”40 Ironically, Le Corbusier dismissed Germany architecturally and culturally (both deemed inferior to Italy and Greece), yet despite having possibly never read Hegel his philosophy is entrenched in the German metaphysical tradition. Le Corbusier, like Mussolini, saw himself as a “prophet” with a spiritual calling. The violence that they praised is not populist violence, but the violence of the superman: La révolution for Le Corbusier was precisely that of a master like Mussolini. The figure of the master (surhomme) is the one feature that continues throughout Le Corbusier’s career irrespective of activities and alliances, left or right. This persistent identification with the master connects him to authoritarian thought and to the Hegelian “master-slave dialectic,” the seminal passage of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. “At the threshold of the house they will install a vigilant guardian: the conditions of nature. On their coming, the revolution will be accomplished.”41 Thus,,Le Corbusier does not mean revolution in the Marcuse or Marxian sense. Architecture is not a surrogate for revolution in Le Corbusier, and neither does 26/09/2012 DRAFT 9 revolution mean “mass housing” or the “engineer’s aesthetic.” Le Corbusier’s theory of revolution does not derive from Fourier, Saint Simon or the French Revolution (except when they are derogatory references), but rather from Nietzsche and Hegel. Le Corbusier’s philosophy is not political philosophy, anyway, but Western metaphysics in the tradition of German aesthetics: that is the real site of la Révolution. I propose that European statecraft in the 1920s and 1930s is a better model for understanding revolution in Le Corbusier’s philosophical schemata than France’s serial revolutions and its bloody past. What Le Corbusier produces is not a theory of French State formation but an architectural formation suspended in the viscid fluid of an eternal present (a perpetual rebirth of architecture’s future in the present moment), concepts and themes that were circulating in France through exposure to Italian politics and its prevailing theories of temporality that were essential to the fascist conceptual apparatus. Le Corbusier’s love of Italy and admiration of the Fascist Italian revolution contribute in a disturbing yet elusive way to the development of Le Corbusier’s thought. For this reason, perhaps, Le Corbusier’s fascist imaginaire may have received less exposure or treatment, in the architectural academy, than the architect’s views on social reform. This is not to rehabilitate the weak, dialectical theory of Le Corbusier’s ideation, right and left. Rather, the task ahead is to examine the fascist contents of Le Corbusier’s utopia, alongside a study of the genealogy of utopia and fascism in the French Enlightenment and its culmination in the French Revolution (1789), where such contradictory discourses and concepts freely circulated. The Hegelian method identified in Le Corbusier and Mussolini provides critical insight into the Zeitgeist between the two wars, and is further key to the relation between the two prolific writers. This is not to say that Hegel is the ‘philosopher of fascism’ in any reductive sense, as Nietzsche was ascribed to Nazism; but, rather, that Hegel and Plato are fundamental to Western thought and the birth of modernity. Adorno and Horkeimer’s project situated Hegelian philosophy as fundamental to the relation of modernity and fascism, a problem they called the “dialectic of enlightenment,” the reversion of humanism to barbarism under enlightenment philosophy. Obversely, postwar historiography situated modern art and the avant garde against fascism, notwithstanding the work of the Frankfurt School on the complicity of the avant with ideology during the Third Reich. It was only by the 1980s and 1990s that a number of studies emerged on the contribution of modernism and avant-garde culture to the formation of fascist ideologies between the wars.42 These studies were undertaken by historians in Political Science, Art History, French Studies, and German 26/09/2012 DRAFT 10 History; notably, Mark Antliff’s essay on Le Corbusier and the anarcho-syndicalist Georges Valois, in his edited collection on Fascism and Art; and Zeev Sternhell’s account of Le Corbusier’s affiliation with Valois’s group.43 Within the architectural academy, the most important work on fascism and Le Corbusier has been undertaken by Mary McLeod, Robert Fishman, and Jean Louis Cohen, as noted earlier.44 Yet, the relationship between architectural modernity and fascism remains in some other, unspoken sense ungraspable, a block in architectural thought. There is a vast literature on the architectures of regime during the two wars, but the question has been historically conceived by way of an allegorical model, toward the symbolic value of fascist architecture, such as Italian rationalism, in serving or representing a regime—within the circuit of patronage or profit. Likewise, historians have depicted the embrace of Le Corbusier by the Faisceau, who believed Le Corbusier’s plans represented their mythic La Cité, as naïve or not fully grasping the conception of Le Corbusier’s work..45 These representational schemata fail to engage the question of how philosophical fascism was instrumental to the conceptual methodologies of the avant garde, to dominant modernism as imaginaire and the formulation of architectural objecthood. It is possible that fascism was not the enemy of modernism, but its principal technique. 1 Le Corbusier to William Ritter, 7 April 1922, R3(19)391, FLC: “Architecture et révolution;” “suite des articles dans l’EN.” 2 He had already published Étude sur le mouvement d'art décoratif en Allemagne in 1912, and Après le cubism in 1918 with Amédée Ozenfant, but Vers une architecture was Jeanneret’s book debut. 3 Jean Petit, Le Corbusier Lui-Même, Panoramas Forces Vives (Genève: Éditions Rousseau, 1970), 57. 4 Le Corbusier to Paul Laffitte, 17 February 1922, B2(7)18, FLC. Le Corbusier had already submitted a manuscript with the title Architecture et révolution to Besson of Georges Crès, in January 1922, who ultimately published the book. See Jean-Louis Cohen’s Introduction in the new translation: Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, ed. Jean-Louis Cohen, trans. John Goodman, Texts & Documents (Los Angeles, California: Getty Research Institute, 2007). I am grateful to J. L. Cohen for his painstaking and illuminating survey of Le Corbusier’s book. From hereon all citations are to this edition of the book unless otherwise stated. 5 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (Paris: Georges Crès, 1923). 26/09/2012 DRAFT 11 6 Viz in Après le cubisme (1918), the November issue of L’Esprit nouveau (1921), and also in a letter to his parents (1919). Invoice from L’Esprit nouveau to G.[eorges] Crès, 9 January 1923, A(1)10, FLC; advertisement in Amédée Ozenfant, Après le Cubisme (Paris: Editions des Commentaires, 1918), un-paginated book;Amédée Ozenfant and Charles Eduard Jeanneret, "Les Idées D’esprit Nouveau Dans Les Livres et la Presse," L’Esprit nouveau 2, no. 11-12 (1921): 1344.; Le Corbusier to his parents, 9 January 1919, R1(6)49, FLC. 7 See Mary McLeod, ""Architecture or Revolution": Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change," Art Journal 43, no. 2 (1983), 136. Mary McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy, ed. Princeton University (Ph.D.) (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1985) ; and Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), and Cohen in Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture. 8 Cohen in Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture. On the forthcoming publication of “Architecture ou révolution,” see A1(5)304, FLC. 9 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 243. My translation. 10 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 243. My translation, italics added. For published translations see Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1927). Reprinted as Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: The Architectural Press, 1978 [1946]), 268-69. And Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 307. 11 See McLeod and Cohen. 12 See McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy, 6. 13 E.g. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 163 and "Chapter 20: Architecture or Revolution," 182-7. Peter Serenyi, "Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema," The Art Bulletin 49, no. 4 (1967): 282. Anthony Vidler, "Asylums of Libertinage: Sade, Fourier, Ledoux," Lotus International, no. 44 (1984). 14 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Étude Sur le Mouvement D'art Décoratif En Allemagne, La Chaux-de-Fonds (1912). Cited in Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Étude Sur le Mouvement D'art Décoratif En Allemagne, La Chaux-de-Fonds (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 9. 15 Le Corbusier, Croisade ou le Crépuscule des Académies (Paris: Crès, 1933). H. Allen Brooks, Le Corbusier's Formative Years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997 [1999]), 8. 26/09/2012 DRAFT 12 16 See Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 260-61. 17 Petit, Le Corbusier Lui-Même. 18 Le Corbusier to Paul Otlet, 29 June 1934, FLC: "En fait d'exposition, j'ai vu deux manifestations capitales: l'une a Rome-Exposition de la Revolution-l'autre a Milan- Exposition de l'Aeornautique -qui ont fait des miracles de visualization et d'enseignement." My translation and italics. In August, the same year, Le Corbusier praised Italy in a Fascist revue: “the present spectacle of Italy, the state of her spiritual powers, announces the imminent dawn of the modern spirit. Her radiance, by its purity and force, illuminates the paths that have been obscured by the cowardly and the profiteers." Le Corbusier, "L'esprit Romain et L'esthetique de la Machine," Stile Futuristica 1, no. 2 (August 1934): 13. On Le Corbusier’s “extreme enthusiasm” for the Exhibition of the Anniversary of the March on Rome see: Libero Andreotti, "The Aesthetics of War: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution," Journal of Architectural Education 45, no. 2 (February 1992), 76-86. 19 I will from hereon use the capitalized “Fascism” to refer to the Italian Fascist movement of Benito Mussolini and otherwise the lower case “fascism” for any other reference to fascism as theory or praxis in Europe. Le Corbusier’s admiration of war and its necessity captures his sense of an authoritarian revolution, as opposed to Marxist revolution. Andreotti writes that Le Corbusier thought “that warfare on a national scale had taken over the best that political [proletarian] revolution had to offer: war had absorbed the latter’s dynamic potential, that is, revolution’s vocation to accelerate time while neutralising revolution’s socio-economic effects….” See Andreotti, "The Aesthetics of War: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution." 20 Maria Stavrinaki, "Big Flower, Small Root: Germany, War and Revolution According to Le Corbusier," Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 2 (2011). 21 Robert J. Soucy, "The Nature of Fascism in France," Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 1 (1966): “According to Réne Rémond, fascism was a phenomenon quite alien to French political traditions. Most of the so-called fascist leagues of the 1920s and 30s were not really fascist at all but Bona-partist and Boulangist in character and inspiration, connected with past nationalistic movements.” See René Rémond, La Droite En France de 1815 à Nos Jours; Continuite et Diversité D'une Tradition Politique (Paris: Aubier, 1954), 207. Soucy contests this view exemplified in Rémond for the reason that philosophical fascism was deeply rooted in France even though France did not openly embrace “fascism.” 22 See Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism; Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century, An Anvil Original, (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964), 12, 19. 26/09/2012 DRAFT 13 23 Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, "La Dottrina Del Fascismo," in Enciclopedia Italiana (1932). Gentile’s and Mussolini’s essay is the opening section of the encyclopaedia entry “Fascismo.” The official translation was printed in the Fascist government publication Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)," in Fascism Doctrine and Institutions, ed. Benito Mussolini (Rome: Ardita Publishers, 1935). 24 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Editions Crès, 1925). Translated as Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (London: J. Rodker, 1929); reprinted in Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 251-72, 302. 25 This argument is overturned by Paul Venable Turner’s 1977 Harvard dissertation that reveals Le Corbusier’s unwavering thought. Turner argues that Le Corbusier retained the early German idealist position learned from Provensal until the end of his career. 26 See Cohen in Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture. Le Corbusier is sometimes regarded as neither left nor right, an example of the phenomenon Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle calls “la pensée non-conformiste.” Les Non-conformistes des années 30, une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée française (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 27 Such political ambivalence is symptomatic of the authoritarian complex. The incorrect notion of ambivalence as indecisiveness or lack of rigour creates an historical shield from authoritarian thought, where such contradictions are critical symptoms, to be examined, not accidents. 28 Georges Sorel, Reflexions Sur la Violence (Paris1912); Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1915). Reprinted in Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Peter Smith, 1941), 98-99. See Mark Antliff, "La Cité Française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier, and Fascist Theories of Urbanism," in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 29 Benito Mussolini, Discourse of 31 December 1925, cited in D. D'Apice-Mazzetti, Roma: la Città Contro L'uomo (Roma: Schirru, 1970), 76. Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome, 1870-1950: Traffic and Glory (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, University Art Museum; Gabinetto fotografico nazionale; University of California, Santa Barbara, Art Gallery, Gallery, H., 1973). 30 Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, 195. 26/09/2012 DRAFT 14 31 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 129-131. Image: “Intérieur de Sainte-Marie de cosmédin,” (129) pulpit of Santa Maria in Cosmedin; Alinari photograph 26562, retouched by Le Corbusier. See B2(15)87, FLC, 13. See Cohen on the modification of images. 32 Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 124-125. 33 Eternal return first appeared in aphorism 341 of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 34 Simone Brott, "Esprit Futur," Log 23 (Fall 2011). 35 Guillaume Apollinaire, “L'Esprit nouveau et les poëtes,” lecture given at the Vieux Colombier, November 26, 1917. “The new spirit and poets” in Guillaume Apollinaire, Translated by Roger Shattuck, Selected Writings, (New York, NY: New Directions, 1950), 235. 36 Le Corbusier, Le Voyage D'orient (Paris: Editions Parenthèses, 1987), 125.“I think that the flatness of the horizon, particularly at noon when it imposes its uniformity on everything about it, provides for each one of us a measure of the most humanly possible perception of the absolute. In the radiant heat of the afternoon, suddenly there appears the pyramid of Athos!” Le Corbusier was drawn to the “limitless horizon of the southern sea.” my translation. 37 Jean Louis Cohen, "Le Corbusier's Nietzschean Metaphors" Kostka and Wohlfarth (1999) 57-59. 38 Paul Venable Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier: A Study of the Development of Le Corbusier's Thought, 1900-1920 (New York: Garland Pub., 1977), 17. 39 Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier: A Study of the Development of Le Corbusier's Thought, 1900-1920. 40 Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier: A Study of the Development of Le Corbusier's Thought, 1900-1920. 41 Translation of Francois de Pierrefeu and Le Corbusier, La Maison des Hommes (Paris: Plon, 1942);Le Corbusier and Francois de Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, trans. Eleanor Levieux (London: Architectural Press, 1948), 132. 42 These include Zeev Sternhell, Jeffrey Herf, Alice Kaplan, Richard Golsan, Mark Antliff, Romy Golan, Boris Groys. 26/09/2012 DRAFT 15 43 See Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 44 See also, Robert Fishman, "Le Corbusier's Plans and Politics," in The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier, ed. Russell Walden (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977). 45 McLeod, in her discussion on the Faisceau, reveals Valois’s great admiration of Le Corbusier’s work for wordlessly representing the Faisceau, on a purely symbolic level, without Valois having had any substantive conception of Le Corbusier’s work. McLeod, Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy, 101.