Redefining the past: revolutionary architecture and the Conseil des Batiments Civils

The coupling of the Words "architecture" and "French Revolution" still calls to mind fantastic images of visionary creations - like as the abstracted forms of Ledoux's city of Chaux, or the sublime proportions of Boullee's civic records While the social and political circumstances that framed architectural production upon the eve of the Revolution have been closely studied in new decades,(1) the 1790s have not received similar scrutiny. The apparent homology between the political upheaval of 1789 and the radical change in architectural form evinced in illustrated treatises of the period has been seductive - the geometric purity and formal austerity of late eighteenth-century architectural drawings appear vaguely consistent with the progressive social and political ideals of the Revolution.(2)

Study of the formal manipulations of these architects of genius, however, illuminates single the very margins of architectural notion in the revolutionary decade. For the revolution that transformed the social and political orders revolutionized the entire building task. Traditional patronage collections - the crown, the body of ecclesiastics and the aristocracy - were eradicated, and advanced in years funding sources were thus make an incision in off. Institutional chains of command were severed and the educational apparatus dislocated. Amid this chaos, a destabilized profession was called on to conceive a host of fresh building types to accommodate the emergencys and express the ideals of successive revolutionary governments

Despite the removal of their greatest in quantity reliable clientele and the dire economic situation that preclud all ambitious of recent origin construction, architects continued to practice actively in the 1790 rallying their decimated ranks to the challenge of redefining the architectural remnants of the past in revolutionary terminuss It fell to the Conseil de Batiments Civils, architectural arm of the revolutionary management to preside over the physical and symbolic conversion of ancien-regime space to house and forward a new social agenda.

Conceived in 1791 on the other hand not definitively empowered until 1795 this state architectural authority was the last of several that emerg to fill the void created by the agency of the abolition of ancien-regime institutions.(3) Assuming the administrative functions of the Batiments du Roi and advisory capacities formerly held by the agency of the Academy,(4) this cadre of architectural advisers to the Ministry of the Interior was charged with overseeing the design, execution, and financing of all public building in France above a certain budget minimum.(5) by means of subjecting all projects to a standardized review proces the rule hoped to limit the take away from and control the quality of the nation's architectural fabric. The object of the Conseil, which began as an elite corps of three principals supported by dint of six inspectors and six verificateurs (auditors) was summ up in its initial plan of organization as follows:

1) First, to insure that no work relating to civic buildings be undertaken at national cost without its utility, necessity, or other possible advantages having been well established beforehand. 2) next to the first to insure that all work authorized be execut with all possible perfection, solidity, and economy. 3) Finally, to verify the legitimacy of all demands for payment and claims made regarding building shoot forwards already completed, currently under way, or suspended.(6)

Armed with this sweeping mandate, the Conseil would be augmented steadily in size and influence, in a short time attaining the status of a full-blown state bureaucracy. through the middle of the nineteenth hundred this institution of revolutionary gestation would tend hitherward to be regarded as a far more centralized and homogenizing force than either of its redoubtable ancien-regime predecessors.(7)

The proceedings of weekly meetings held through the Conseil during its formative years present a heretofore untapped chronicle of daily architectural activity in France in the wake of the Revolution. As the court of last appeal for all sizable public-building shoot forwards throughout the country from 1795 upon the Conseil provides an extremely good lens through which to gauge the actual impact of the Revolution upon architectural practice. Scrutiny of this source points up the shallowness of interrogating only nonpracticing architects and hypothetical throw outs to reconstruct the architecture of revolution. The imaginative schemes now conjur up through the label "revolutionary architecture" were dismissed through the Conseil as pipe dreams and transitory pleasures. Conseil member Jacques-Guillaume Legrand, prefiguring novel parlance, called it paper architecture. In a alphabetic character to his fellow advisers, evaluating a number of ambitious schemes submitted for review, Legrand writes of

beautiful illusions that the ardent mind of the artist creates for the pleasure of a twinkling Nothing restricts him then; he commits his philanthropic visions, his sublime ideas to paper; and like Citizen Renard, the olive or laurel wreath that he glimpses in his jovial delirium at the Temple of Memory is the solitary prize that can, or should, repay the toil of his genius.(8)