Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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
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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
Figure 1. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur lArchitecture, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1755),
frontispiece (Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania).
240 / W I T T M A N
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,
242 / W I T T M A N
*
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
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.
244 / W I T T M A N
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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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
248 / W I T T M A N
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
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252 / W I T T M A N
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.
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).
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
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.