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Iconomania: studies in visual culture
The Symposium Issue:
Spaces of Transformation

Paris Organique—Paris Critique:
Urbanism, Spectacle and the Saint­Simonians [ * ] Spyros Papapetros



1 Philippe­Joseph Machereau, Ceremony at Ménilmontant, 1832. Ms. 13910, p. 34v, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris [back to text]

1. In the spring of 1830, Juste Olivier, a young Swiss teacher of history and literature, visited Paris for the first time. He stayed there for four months, during which time he kept a diary of the artistic and political events he witnessed. [ 1 ] Also an author, Olivier was ambitious. In a rather short time he gained entry to the literary salons of Alfred de Musset and Alfred de Vigny where he became a close friend of Sainte­Beuve. He even managed to have a private meeting with Hugo in his house, while the maître was struggling to finish his Nôtre Dame de Paris. Olivier passed his days with visits to the new Musée Colbert where he saw Delacroix's latest tableaux, or to the arcade of the dioramas where he saw Daguerre's newly constructed Tableau de Paris. But the young man's nights were even more "spectacular": Being at the theatre almost every night, Olivier had the good fortune to attend the first theatrical stagings of Hugo's Hernani at the Comédie­Française, the melodramatic performances of the operas of Rossini at the Théâtre­Italien and the dancing appearances of the Taglioni sisters at the Opéra. 
2. One night, however, Olivier did something different—or at least something which seemed to be different. Encouraged by Sainte­Beuve and accompanied by two of the great critic's loyal friends, Olivier visited a small apartment in a Parisian Hôtel which constituted the first "Temple" of the socio­political and, increasingly, socio­religious group of followers of the late political philosopher Claude­Henri de Saint­Simon, known as the Saint­Simonians. Seated together with a small number of disciples around a table, the uninitiated Olivier had to endure several hours of intense social catechism and indoctrination delivered by the Saint­Simonian proselytizers. [ 2 ] Olivier remarked on the "hardly agreeable" and "prophetic" appearance of the first speaker who had long messy black hair and was missing some teeth. Although deeply impressed by the orator's sonorous, majestic voice and imaginative eloquence, Olivier was alarmed by the religious assurance with which the orator prophesied the events of the future: "His voice has something of a shine. He believes in the future; he predicts what will happen." [ 3 ] Olivier's unschooled remarks illuminate an aspect of Saint­Simonian thought which erudite social historians have failed to see, that the discourse of the Saint­Simonians did not have so much to do with an ideal utopia, as with the concrete reality of an architectonic master plan. 
3. Ambivalent after this first experience and a no more successful second visit to the Saint­Simonian Temple, [ 4 ] Olivier, in the end, did not join the movement; he remained "uninitiated." There is, however, another reason I chose to begin with the testimony of an outsider and not with one of the official accounts of the Saint­Simonian movement. Although electrified by the rhetorical fervor of the Saint­Simonians, it is doubtful whether the uninitiated Olivier ultimately managed to understand anything of the complex historico­political "system" that they presented. However, he did grasp one point, clearly enough for it to appear twice in the notes of his diary; this had to do with something that was repeated during both sessions about two sorts of "epochs" that all societies undergo, the one "organic" and the other "critical"—époques organiques et époques critiques. In their early nineteenth century semasiology, both these terms have a signification which is very different from what they tend to mean today. Saint­Simon's organic has nothing to do with a return to nature, the way the "critical" philosopher Rousseau would mean it, but with technological—mechanical—organization and "method". [ 5 ] Organic epochs are the productive epochs of general systematization and progress; critical ones are the sterile epochs of both crisis and critique through which the civilization of an era disintegrates. [ 6 ] This bi­polar rhetorical schema of the organic and the critical, introduced by Saint­Simon and elaborated with further positivistic fervor by August Comte and Philippe Buchez, [ 7 ] proved to be influential, and would ultimately become the theoretical trademark, not only of the Saint­Simonian doctrine, but of a whole era that wanted to portray itself as organic. 
4. Although Olivier, does not mention the names of the speakers, apart from Buchez, [ 8 ] it is very probable that the person whose sonorous voice impressed him that night was none other than Emile Barrault, who had become the official orator of the Saint­Simonians that same year. Two months earlier, in March of 1830, the movement had published anonymously, as a pamphlet distributed gratis, Barrault's text Aux Artistes du Passé et de l'Avenir des Beaux­Arts (To the Artists of the Past and the Future of the Fine Arts) [ 9 ]— a text whose influence in art and architectural discourses, historians have noticed only recently. [ 10 ] Barrault's text, primarily an explicit act of "proselytism" of the Saint­Simonian religion aimed at French artists, is also the first systematic application of the doctrine of Saint­Simon to the arts. His art historical account evolves around the essential opposition of the organic and the critical. [ 11 ] Barrault wants to reverse the opposition imposed by Enlightenment philosophers, such as Voltaire and Diderot, between darkness and light—visuality and religious "vision". For the Saint­Simonians, the religious art of the "so­called dark middle ages" is organic because it is continuous with the social structure and organization of the epoch; the skeptical discourse of the arts of the Reformation and its epigones, including the Enlightenment is critical because it is limited to the act of criticism and offers no positive alternative for the modern socio­religious crisis. [ 12 ] The text ends with an invitation to the artists to join hands with the movement in the perspective of the new organic era to come in the near future. 
5. Barrault, himself a professor of literature, believed eloquence and rhetoric to be more powerful and didactic than the visual arts in their ability to affect and touch the people. [ 13 ] He hardly refers to painting or sculpture; it is in architecture that he sees the prophetic strength of an organic age appearing in a visual sense. The building of an organic era such as the Gothic, resembles "a built prophesy, made visible for all." The purpose of architecture is to be a sign. [ 14 ] Moving away from the nostalgic reverie of museum ruins, buildings should stand and speak as the concrete embodiment of the future. On the contrary, he considered the decadent urban state of 1830s Paris as a symptom of the general confusion of a critical era. Buildings have been deprived of their rhetorical value by their loss of order and convenance. [ 15 ] According to Barrault, modern churches resemble "indifferently, a palace, a show room or a market." [ 16 ] The building that represented that moral and architectural disjunction between style and function, was none other than the Palais­Royal, both a palace and a market as well as a "house"—an open­air brothel with female prostitutes exhibited among its arcades. Perhaps, this is what another Saint­Simonian critic had in mind when he decried Parisian buildings as "a confusion of all genres" presenting "an idea of the ancient saturnalia or the primitive chaos of the world: . . . a melange of all antipathies, a pêle­mêle of orgies, a true dance of the Sabbath." [ 17 ] 
6. This ambivalent urban atmosphere combining festivity with decay and social sickness was conflated with the advent of a medical sickness which two years later was to attack the organism of the French capital; that is, the cholera epidemic which arrived from London in April 1832. [ 18 ] The Saint­Simonians responded immediately with a series of articles published in their official newspaper Le Globe. [ 19 ] The plan of action they proposed, however, did not primarily concern immediate measures for the control of the disease. Instead, their long­term strategic program contained a systematic reform of the city of Paris accompanied and extended by grand­scale projects throughout France and even Europe. The parts of the city that appear as inherently unhealthy in these articles are the dark quartiers of the working classes between the Louvre and the Bastille [ 20 ] which the Saint­Simonians proposed to heal through demolition and their replacement with grand connecting boulevards. 
7. Among these journalistic appeals, however, were two articles which have a slightly different tone. [ 21 ]  These were written by Charles Duveyrier, an attorney and librettist officially known in his Saint­Simonian vocation as the "poet of God." [ 22 ] Duveyrier wanted to awaken the dying city of Paris by offering it the rejuvenating vision of its future state as the "metropolis of the globe."The French capital would become the center of projects of a "universal patriotism" that would bring together "the populations of Europe, Asia, Africa and America. . . . under the law of the Gospel (Evangile) and the Koran. . ." [ 23 ]  In his plan, the city of Paris is split in four compartments or "camps" with their own barricades (barrieres) occupied by four separate sections of a pacifist army of workers. [ 24 ] Each camp acts as the module of a system of universal communication: The first team is that of the canal workers who form "a radiant stream" springing from the Seine to Russia; the second camp of the "liberals", "planted" at the plain of Montrouge, sends its message to America; the villejuif—the Jewish section—is the center of philanthropy extending to Asia and Africa. Finally, the fourth group, after marching through the Louvre, Versailles and the bois de Boulogne, colonizes England and the rest of Europe. [ 25 ] Duveyrier's globalizing textual image, superimposing familiar sights of Paris upon remote continents of the planet, is not a product of a wild literary imagination; moreover, its technique is not literary but primarily visual. Its model is none other than the Daguerrian diorama in which the viewer is surrounded by tableaux of familiar Parisian districts, beyond which images of distant landscapes appear through a succession of diaphanous screens. 
8. Duveyrier would couple his "projects"(travaux) with a festival (fête) to celebrate their imaginary completion. With music and drama, "sound and light," all the nations of Europe celebrate their future communion by strolling to the steps of "waltzes and polonaises" and the sounds of "female choruses." All the great artists of the world—"les Taglionis, les Rossinis. . ."—are invited to come to Paris and crown the occasion with extraordinary dancing and operatic performances. Although Duveyrier's imaginary "hope for Paris" might seem a delirious dream in the midst of the cholera epidemic, the strange amalgamation of sickness and festivity manifested in his text is highly symptomatic of an essentially "operatic" understanding of urbanism, in the "romantic" phase of this genre, where the reality of death is restaged with the theatricality of melodramatic spectacle: After all, even the most anemic or deliriuos operatic heroines miraculously recover their strength in order to deliver their triumphal final aria before they expire! 
9. However, the iconographic prototype of Duveyrier's festive images did not come directly from opera but from another type of spectacle which might be considered relevant to the latter; i. e. the festivals that the Saint­Simonians had themselves instituted the same year. The group was known all over Paris for the notorious private soirées where male and female companions danced together à la Saint­Simonienne. However in 1832, ending a long period of domesticity, the leaders of the movement decided to move their "chamber theatre" to the open­air arena in their retreat in Ménilmontant outside Paris where they staged a series of public "ceremonies". [ 26 ] The content of these festivals was both religious and political. In presentation, the Saint­Simonian festivals were veritable theatrical and musical performances with instruments and choruses, reminiscent of religious oratorios: the master soloists, dressed in the Saint­Simonian three­coloured costume would rise one after the other, from the U­shaped bench to deliver their rhetorical monologues while a female chorus answered them with musical phrases. [ 27 ] As Olivier corroborated, Emile Barrault, the principal propagandist of the movement, was a formidable orator who with his sonorous voice and carefully rehearsed dramatic gestures—annotated in text—could make men shiver or exclaim with enthusiasm while women would burst into tears. The audience for these performances was a heterogeneous mixture of faithful followers and curious disbelievers; primarily military engineers, present or former students of the Ecole Polytechnique, society women, intellectuals and musicians. The members of the working class whose "social problem" the movement was supposed to address were absent. 
10. It is apparent from lithographs of festival scenes by Philippe Machereau on the cover of the musical compositions of Félicien David that these celebrations had an ambiguous atmosphere of religious asceticism and civic festivity—a strange combination of esoteric initiation and theatrical publicity. And it is within this double framework that Saint­Simonian architecture comes literally "into play." 
11. In Machereau's engravings, the first festival performances of the Saint Simonians took place in a "sacred", almost Druid­like, landscape with no stage set other than the essentially Gallic countryside of Ménilmontant. [ 28 ] Later drawings, though, show some signs of preliminary constructions, including a double platform flanked by some indefinite elliptical lines on the ground and a series of finished semicircular steps in the front(Fig. 1). [ 29 ] One gets the sense that what Machereau is depicting is not an existing architectural construction but a "projected" plan in a state of anticipation. Nevertheless, these clearly marked steps in his drawing have a very particular history. 
12. As we learn from the official accounts of the movement, on July 1, 1832, an enthusiastic crowd of "over five thousand people of Paris" commenced the works for the foundation of a Temple in the festival area of Ménilmontant. [ 30 ] The operation was executed in a thoroughly ceremonial manner and exhibited a hierarchical organization: The Saint­Simonian master­builders were divided in separate groups according to building vocation. Each directed a separate group of worker­followers situated according to geometrical patterns constituting a human architecture—not as an ornament but as a "structure." The "project" proceeded at a feverish tempo until later that night it was dramatically interrupted by the police who arrested the leaders of these unauthorised festivities on a variety of charges. The building of the Temple was abandoned leaving only a few unfinished stairs which thereafter would be symbolically represented floating, as an apparition, in the background of some Saint­Simonian portraits. [ 31 ] 
13. This suspended "architectural event" marked the last public show of the Saint­Simonians. However, the "Temple" and the other architectural projects of the movement have an interesting textual afterlife. As with the discourse regarding their festivals, the Saint­Simonian architectural texts present a unique blending of rhetoric, social politics, religion, scientific technology and theatrical performance. 
14. On July 14, 1832, exactly forty­three years after the French revolution and two weeks after the alleged suspension of the works of the temple, Prosper Enfantin, the self­proclaimed "Father" of the Saint­Simonian religion and former student of the Ecole Polytechnique, announced in front of a small number of disciples his own insurrection. [ 32 ] His revolution was primarily not political but architectural and concerned the undertaking of grand urban projects. As earlier articles in the Globe had described, the Saint­Simonian "symbolic model plans" would transform the French capital into an intercontinental metropolis, the center of the flame of "universal patriotism" which would connect all nations and all religions. The organism of the new city would be the ultimate reincarnation of St Augustine's "City of God", the built embodiment of a "New Jerusalem." [ 33 ]Rhetorically asking his architects what the form of this city should be, Enfantin answered: "The form that is the most alive, the most appropriate to inspire in man the love, the knowledge and the practice of what Man should do in the world; The Human Form; Vitruvius had already envisaged this." [ 34 ] Enfantin's citation of Vitruvius here might refer to the Vitruvian figure popularised in a series of drawings—especially to Claude Perrault's French edition of Vitruvius, or to Vitruvius' references in book four to the anthropomorphic origin of the architectural orders. [ 35 ] However, Enfantin's description is more reminiscent of the celebrated episode in the introduction of Vitruvius' second book in which the Greek architect Dinocrates presented—naked—to king Alexander his project of forming Mount Athos "in the shape of a man holding in his left arm a grand city and in his right a cup with the water of all rivers springing from the mountain reversed into the sea." In addition to previous illustrations, this passage was brilliantly depicted in a magnificent drawing in Fisher von Erlach's historical treatise on architecture (1721). [ 36 ] In Enfantin's conceptualisation of Dinocrates' vision in modernity, the sea of the Aegean was to be substituted by the waters of the Seine and the Paris metropole would constitute the modern Alexandria. In what follows I would like to examine the way Enfantin's anthropomorphic organism of the modern city was consequently "designed and coloured" in two other texts by his collaborators. [  37 ]




2 Le Livre des Cent­et­un, cover 1834 [back to text]

15. The first was Charles Duveyrier's lengthy prose text published at the end of the same year in the periodic publication Le Livre des Cent­et­un with the title La Ville Nouvelle ou le Paris des Saint­Simoniens. [ 38 ] The frontispiece of this publication portrays a scene which would be typical of a "critical epoch" in the manner of the Saint­Simonians: a diable boiteux (a "devil in two sticks" as was the English title of Le Sage's book) dressed as a rigolo—a jester—sits on a globe, while underneath lies the quintessential scepticist philosopher Diogenes with his lantern(Fig. 2). The journal, originally conceived with the title Le Diable Boiteuxá Paris, is exactly an application of Le Sage's textual invention of invading private spaces by removing their rooftops. [ 39 ] In contrast to the panorama which would only show facades, Le Sage's "diabolic" invention enables the reader/viewer to "see" inside the space which housed the object of his curiosity. Duveyrier, in his text, attempts to combine Le Sage's devilish manner of abruptly appearing in the spaces of Paris with the static visual technique of the panorama. His text presents a bird's eye view of Paris which reconfigures Hugo's analogous vista of medieval Paris in his recently published Nôtre Dame de Paris by reprojecting its form into the future. [ 40 ] Reconfiguring Enfantin's Vitruvian man­city in the context of Shelley's Frankenstein, [ 41 ] Duveyrier presents the dismembered decaying city of Paris as a "monstrous mass" whose vital "organs" are gradually reassembled into a coherent gigantic "organism" that receives the breath of life from his divine Architect/Creator and starts walking. [ 42 ] The feet of this "colossus" are made of bronze and are supported by stone and iron. The people of the new town, the human organisms inside the civic one, will also have the "forms" and the "plan" of the city "inscribed" on their hearts and faces and there will be "not a nail, not a hair" that, in its free will, would move differently from its "proper movement." [ 43 ] Following Enfantin's orders, Duveyrier situated at the head of the colossus the "temple" of the city, at the chest the academies, the universities and all educational institutions, at the stomach the "factories and workshops of production," at the thighs parks and promenades, and at the feet theatres and dancing halls "as places of rejuissance after work." [ 44 ] However, Duveyrier's "new city" is not simply a conceptual, disembodied master­plan evolving in the abstract space of a dessert like Fourier's phalanstère. On the contrary, Duveyrier superimposed Enfantin's anatomical plan on the existing geographic map of Paris and amalgamated it with the operatic festivity and Balzacian polychromy that the Parisian landscape of the 1830s already contained. 

3 Philippe­Joseph Machereau, Saint­Simonian Temple and City, 1832. Ms. 13910, p. 38v, Bibliotèque de l'Arsenal de Paris [back to text]

16. In neither of its two nineteenth­century editions did this text appear illustrated. Nevertheless, there is an engraving by Chambellain, a student of Greuze, that presents the splendid Saint Simonian "vision" of Paris of the next century looking almost like a grey industrial suburb of Liverpool of the 1850s. [ 45 ] There are also some rough sketches by Philippe Machereau which have recently surfaced from the archive of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, which illustrate the vision of Enfantin in a very faithful and "literal" manner. [ 46 ] Machereau depicts the Saint­Simonian temple as a female figure, representing the Saint­Simonian "Female Messiah" seated on the solar plexus of the city (Fig. 3). [ 47 ] To illustrate the Saint­Simonian belief in the merging of the Occident and the Orient, the Gospel and the Koran, as well as the male and the female, the strangely asymmetric and perhaps androgynous building­statue is half in gothic and half in orientalising style: The left tower where the goddess rests her hand is a column made out of bodies of naked "virgins" topped by a minaret, while the right tower has linear, masculine forms crowned by a pointed gothic roof. The oriental left foot is naked while the gothic right one dressed. Here, one guesses that the roughly sketched circular steps which we saw earlier in Machereau's drawing of the festival platform correspond to the base of the two towers lateral to the main entrance of the "unbuilt" temple. 

    
    

    4 Philippe­Joseph Machereau, Saint­Simonian Temple, 1832. Ms. 13910, p. 9v, Bibliotèque de l'Arsenal de Paris [back to text]

17. Machereau's other sketch is a different illustration of the same project, whose iconography corresponds both to the relevant part of Duveyrier's text, as well as, to a symbolic poem by the economist of the movement Michel Chevalier [ 48 ] with the title Le Temple (Fig. 4). [ 49 ] Being the last part of Enfantin's project, Chevalier's poem, written also in 1832 but published only twenty years later, shows a more technologically advanced employment of architectural imagery as the source of theatrical didacticism. In its base, Chevalier's Temple includes a massive amphitheatre which is accessed by a central door between the sculpture's legs. The womb­like opening is flanked by two smaller apertures in the iron robe of the deity penetrated by escalators that are supposed to run throughout the building's interior, from the feet to the head. As Duveyrier had described it, the deity rests her right arm on an illuminated "crystal sphere" while her left hand holds a scepter with a flaming pyramid of light that would "make visible at night the smile on her face." [ 50 ] Employing all possible means of energy—sunlight, steam, gas as well as electricity and magnetism—the temple, according to Chevalier, would emulate a "Voltaic battery" that would burst out with energy like a "gigantic thermometer" or the "erect member of a man." Combining the contemporary scientific terminology of Lamarck with the rhetorical fervor of a modern evangelist, Chevalier would add to his Temple theatres, concert halls, museums, panoramas and dioramas as well as a telegraph transmitting "the good news" (les belles nouvelles) all over the world. Through this "immense communion", Chevalier's "magical orchestra" would become a providential machine for the universal " moralization of the people." [ 51 ] 
18. Unlike Dinocrates' seated man­city, the Saint Simonian woman­temple is not naked, but dressed. The whole architecture of the female temple consists of the building elements of her "dressing": escalators as her shoes, doors as the pleats of her robe, shopping arcades as her skirt, galleries as her belt and the window­rosettes as a brassiere covering her breasts. One may be tempted to smile at the verbatim manner in which the Saint Simonians translate their literary metaphors into architectural forms, but I propose to take this "literal translation" seriously. A few decades later, Gottfried Semper would present "dressing" (Bekleidung) as the very origin of building—an allegory for his understanding of architecture as the "dressing" of social and political conditions following the conviction that the building tissue of architecture represents the very fabric of social bonding. [ 52 ] The Saint­Simonians, in their "figurative" logic decided to treat architecture literally as a "dress"—i. e. a mythological costume amalgamating archaicness with modern technology, which, however, would not only cover the skin, but would reorganize the anatomical structure of the urban organism and reshape its social forms. 
19. Chevalier and Duveyrier's twin texts were the final written testimony of Saint Simonian architectural ideas. In the following year, 1833, following the imprisonment of its leaders for obscenity, the group had to abandon France for Egypt. And here, one remains essentially baffled: How is it that the leaders of a movement evidently on the verge of financial and political bankruptcy, would embark upon such grandiose architectural projects? [ 53 ] Does this mean that the Saint­Simonian masters had no sense of reality, that their project was an unrealisable, hallucinatory "utopia"? 
20. I would like to argue that Enfantin's project, in accordance with the whole of Saint Simonian philosophy, is not "utopian". On the contrary, his plan shows an ingeniously calculated time frame of realisation. As Enfantin argued, these highly "symbolic" projects were not meant to be "finished plans", as would be the case with Fourier's phalanstères; they are "capital models"—whose "progressive form" would gradually "evolve" and flourish through time. [ 54 ] This is the Saint Simonian answer to what "organic" in architecture could really mean. [ 55 ] 

5 Hibach, La Phalanstère [back to text]

21. The legacy of the Saint­Simonians, soon after the dispersal of the movement in 1837, was subjected to public ridicule, as shown in the caricatures and popular novels of the times. Let me give an example of this uninformed mockery: In a collection of essays with the title La Grande Ville—Nouveau Tableau de Paris, comique, critique et philosophique) edited in Paris in 1845, there is an extensive piece by Balzac, entitled Monographie de la presse Parisienne. There the author presents a critique comique of the "physiology" of the several genres existing in the Parisian press. [ 56 ] In the chapter entitled "The Prophet" (Le Prophéte) Balzac [ 57 ] implicitly mocks the Saint­Simonians as the "mahomets" of Paris and as characters possessed by a spiritual maladie; [ 58 ] Balzac makes a special reference to the extravagant projects promoted by these prophets, relying on human "phalanges" (phalanxes) of absurd numbers, as for example in a project for the Panama canal. [ 59 ] The author, here, is alluding to the program of Michel Chevalier in 1844 for the opening of a canal in the isthmus of Panama by using the "phalanges" of a pacifist "industrial army" from Europe consisting of several million workers. [ 60 ] The word "phalange" here has nothing to do with Fourier's "phalanstère." However, this is not the way that the caricaturist Hibach, who illustrated Balzac's piece, understood things. His caricature (Fig. 5) shows a Saint Simonian prophet, dressed as a polytechnicien, pointing to a tableau where two parts of a jungle­like continent, instead of being separated, are bridged by an actual huge phalanstère accompanied by three smaller ones adding the title "La Phalanstère" (as in Fourier's illustrations). [ 61 ] Next to that tableau however, there is a portrait in profile of a person with a very big nose and the title L'Humanitaire. [ 62 ] Although several nineteenth century ideologues would acquire the title of the humanitarian, the peculiar nose of that personage is an unmistakable clue of Saint Simon's celebrated profile. So here, for the ignorant reader, Saint Simon, and not Fourier, becomes the inspirer of the Phalanstère. 
22. I would suggest that this blatant "mistake" of Balzac's caricaturist is justified, that is, his confusion is finally clarifying. While the Fourierists, with their phalanstère, had a visual signature which was recognisable to everyone, the Saint Simonian architectural emblem was invisible: the only "memorable" visual sign that the Saint Simonians ever had was their master's nose. Their gigantic electrical Virgin of the Saint­Simonians remains anonymous even today. [ 63 ] However, if one considers that Fourier's celebrated idea is used in this circumstance, as a ground for ridicule, the invisibility of the Saint­Simonian models, proves to be "precocious." 
23. Saying this, it might come as no surprise that the Saint­Simonian architectural ideas, in contrast with those of Fourier, were almost completely ignored both by their contemporaries and by present­day architectural and cultural historians. Moreover, from what I have presented so far, the architectural "projects" of the Saint Simonians might seem to be a ruinous assemblage of left over constructions, rough pencil sketches and quasi hallucinatory manuscripts that even their own authors seems to have forgotten. However, it is exactly from such sparse fragments reminiscent of Cuvier's fossils, that nineteenth­century science claimed to be able to reconstruct a prehistoric organism in its gigantic magnitude—if not to bring it back to life, millennia after its disappearance. [ 64 ] One last textual illustration might show how this applies to the resurrection of the Saint­Simonian architectonics, a few decades after their collapse. The second publication of Duveyrier's La Ville Nouvelle appeared at some point after 1865, in the eighth volume of les Oeuvres Completes of Saint­Simon and Enfantin. The editors chose to put Duveyrier's piece inside the Notices Historiques by Enfantin, in the section covering October 1832, obviously because of the date of the letter accompanying the original publication to the editor Ladvocat (signed by Duveyrier on October 6, 1832). [ 65 ] However, the text constitutes an awkward intersection within Enfantin's autobiographical narrative and in order perhaps to make the transition more fluent, the editors felt compelled to add a small prefatory note: 

A côte des médtations religieuses d'Enfantin et des travaux scientifiques qu'il inspirait autour de lui, la poésie et la prophétie ne restaient pas inctives. Duveyrier, qui s'était appelé lui même le pöte de Dieu, était là toujours prêtâ donner une expression, une forme nouvelle aux pensées d'avenir dont il se nourrissait sous l'aile du chef suprême. La plan d'un nouveau Paris fut imaginé et trace par lui, puis adressé à l'editeur du livre des Cent­et­un, en ces termes: [Oeuvres de Saint­Simon et d'Enfantin, vol. VIII, 64­5].

24. The new editors seem to be informed that Duveyrier's text was essentially the "expression" of Enfantin's conception. But the case I am trying to make is different. Certainly, Saint­Simon and the Saint­Simonians were obsessed with the "new" ("nouveau"), as in their} Nouveau Christianism, Encyclopedie Nouvelle, Le Livre Nouveau, or La Ville Nouvelle to mention only a few examples. However, the phrase "Nouveau Paris" does not appear in any of their writings in the 1830's—this verbal combination was not yet invented at that time. "Le Nouveau Paris" was Baron Haussmann's catchy signal­phrase during his own assainissement—or rather "total reconstruction"—of Paris after 1853. Thus, the editors, either by mistake, or intentionally, associated Enfantin's/Duveyrier's La Ville Nouvelle with Haussmann's' Nouveau Paris and attributed the later to the former authors. 
25. Indeed, a closer inspection of the later civic' career of the Saint­Simonian leaders in major governmental positions during the Second Empire shows a surprising correspondence between the architectural projects undertaken by Napoleon III and the early Saint Simonian prophecies. I refer not only to the urban transformation of Paris under Haussmann, but also to the organisation of the first grand international exhibitions in London and Paris, [ 66 ] Bartholdi's statue of Liberty for New York, and a number of other "colossal" public projects where the role of the Saint­Simonians, although central, has remained invisible. [ 67 ]  Perhaps all this has been said before; [ 68 ] but no extensive "archival" research has been undertaken to show the exact machinations through which the professed symbolic "utopia" of the Saint Simonians was solidified into the concrete reality of modern urban space. That, however, is the subject of another paper. 
26. For now, I would only note that the strange contradiction between the former "spectacular" display of visual metaphors manifested in the Saint­Simonian texts of 1832 and their later obscurity, despite their urban consolidation under Haussmann, is at the core of what one would call the architectural "project" of modernity. While destabilising the dividing lines between the "utopian" and the "real", the rational and the absurd, building and rhetoric, and even socialism and capitalism, [ 69 ] 3 ] the twofold nature of the Saint­Simonian urban "organism", "organic" and "diabolic" at the same time, provided an architectural enclosure for the phantasmagoric theatre of ideas of the modern metropolis. 


Post­Script 

27. In December 1832, the same month that Duveyrier's Ville Nouvelle appeared in Le Livre des Cent­et­un, the complete version of Hugo's Nôtre Dame de Paris was finally published; it contained three previously omitted chapters, including the well known "Ceci tuera cela." [ 70 ] There might be something more in this historical coincidence; something that is as much historical, as it is mythological and it would further justify my pairing of the organic with the diabolic in the discourse of the Saint­Simonians. Ceci tuera cela: "this will kill that," or, as the exegetic subtitle of a later English edition reads,} "the book of stone, so solid and so enduring must make way for the book of paper, still more solid and enduring." [ 71 ] I would choose to interpret this struggle between architecture and printed literature in the terms of an underlying complicitous partnership. If indeed the Saint­Simonian Ville Nouvelle became Haussmann's Nouveau Paris, that is the edifice of the book killed and by the same token regenerated the building of the city, Saint­Simon's textual prophesy calls for a reconsideration of Hugo's "enigmatic speech"—"paroles énigmatiques"—enunciated by his literary archdeacon. 


——Spyros Papapetros
Ad Hoc Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography
University of California, Berkeley
370 Wurster Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
"Paris Organique—Paris Critique: Urbanism, Spectacle and the Saint­Simonians" Iconomania: studies in visual culture (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/Icono/papapetros/simonian.htm) 1998.
spyros@uclink4.berkeley.edu

---


Notes to Text

*.  This essay was originally written as a paper for a seminar given by Carlo Ginzburg in Spring 1996 at the University of California, Los Angeles. I would like to thank Professor Ginzburg for without his insistence this research would never have been done; I am also indebted to Sylvia Lavin for introducing me to Barrault's text, as well as, Anthony Vidler for his suggestions and help. 

The paper is part of a broader study on the relation between architecture and rhetoric in the Saint­Simonian discourse. Since the architectural discourse of the Saint­Simonians lacks a comprehensive study, I will attempt to give an account of the existing secondary literature dealing with the topic. 

Perhaps the most coherent study of the subject—although it refers equally to Fourierism—is the article by Ann Lorenz Van Zanten "The Palace and the Temple: Two Utopian Architectural Visions of the 1830s" Art History 2, no. 2 (June 1979): 179­200. The recent study by Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, Social Art and the French Left, 1830­1850 (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1993) although it presents some remarkable unpublished material on architecture, it does not attempt to make a reconstruction of Saint­Simonian architectonics in a chronological development; however it remains the most comprehensive study, thus far, for the aesthetic ideas of all particular groups within the socialist' discourse of the period. The first extensive examination of the architectural ideas of the Saint­Simonians is in Paul Bénichou Le Temps des prophétes, Doctrines de l'âge romantique (Paris: Gallimard 1977) where the author discusses the architectural writings in Ménilmontant of 1832 (301­310). The new edition of Le Livre Nouveau des Saint Simoniens, ed. Philippe Régnier (Paris: Du Lérot, 1991) contains almost all the basic Saint­Simonian texts of the 1832­3 period, that have an architectural interest, and it gives valuable new information on the manuscripts. d'Allemagne in his comprehensive history of Saint­Simonianism, is the first historian who deals extensively with the architectural projects of the movement; see H. R. d'Allemagne, Les Saint­Simoniens 1827­1837 (Paris 1930), 308­310. Anthony Vidler gives a short but straightforward account of the ideas of Saint Simon and his followers in his article "The Scenes of the Street," in Streets, ed. S. Anderson (MIT, 1977): 28­111, especially, 58­60. Recently, several nineteenth century architectural historians have noticed the importance of the Saint­Simonian ideas for the architectural discourse of that time, including David van Zanten, Neil Levine, Barry Bergdol and H. F. Mallgrave. However, certain revisions, omissions or discrepancies among these studies leave room for re­examination of the already published material and for research in possibly unnoticed texts in the French archives (in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal alone there are 35000 manuscripts]. 

For the complete bibliography of the movement until 1964, see Jean Walch, Bibliographie du Saint­Simonisme (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1967) and for 1964­1984, Regards sur les Saint­Simonisme et les Saint­Simoniens ed. J. R. Derré (Paris: 1986). See also Anton Gerits, Additions and Corrections to Jean Walch Bibliographie du Saint­Simonisme (Amsterdam 1986). [back]

1.  Juste Olivier (1807­1876) never published his Paris journal (dated April 17 to August 5, 1830) which contained unique information about the main figures and events of that era, including the July revolution. It was edited and published for the first time in 1951 in Paris under the title Paris en 1830, by A. Delattre and M. Denkinger. [back]

2.  The entry on the Saint Simonians is dated May 29, midnight [Olivier, 62­65]. "Nous sommes arrivés rue de la Ferme­des­Mathurins, numéro 19, dans une salle meublée trés­simplement. On a fait cercle autour d'une table oú se trouvait une lampe. Un jeune homme était assis à côté, sans papier, sans livres. Il a pris la parole et a développé un point de leur système relatif aux savants" (ibid., 62). Translations by author unless otherwise noted. [back]

3.  "Sa figure est peu agréable; il manque quelque dents, je crois; mais sa voix est forte, sonore; c'est une voix d'orateur. Il parle avec facilité, véhémence, imagination. Ses phrases ont une sorte d'éclat. Le dogmatisme de ses opinions a chez lui quelque chose de fanatique. Il croit à l'avenir, il prédit ce qu'il sera " (ibid., 65). [back]

4.  Olivier, ibid., 71­74. [back]

5.  Raymond Williams in the entry on the term organic in his Keywords notes that until the nineteenth century, when biology and the life sciences were further developed, the organic is a synonym of the mechanical while later they become opposite terms. It is also around that era that the organic follows a different course than the organized. Only after the beginning of the industrial revolution does the term organic incline towards the natural—"an organic society was one that has grown' rather than been made"; that is, only after this point, does the organic becomes the opposite of the artificial—as is the contemporary semasiology of the term. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 227­229. [back]

6.  Reinhert Koselleck argues that the relation between the notions of critique and crisis is a distinctive product of Enlightenment thinking that led to the creation of utopian thinking. For an account of the issue until the French Revolution see his Critique and Crisis, Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988) [back]

7.  Saint­Simon's division of world history is best exposed in L'Industrie (1817) and in L'Organisateur (1819). Buchez's ideas first appeared in Le Producteur, the first journal published by the followers of Saint­Simon in 1825­26. See the elaborate account of the issue in François Isabert "Epoques Critiques et Epoques Organiques: Une contribution de Buchez à l'élaboration de la théorie sociale des saint­simoniens" in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 27 (1959): 131­52, here 134. See, also Frank Manuel, The New World of Henri Saint­Simon (Cambridge Mass: Harvard, 1956), especially section 19, "Epochs Organic and Critical", 219­237. [back]

8.  For the aesthetic and religious convictions of Buchez and his followers, see Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, Social Art and the French Left, 1830­1850, especially Chapter V: "Sentiment and faith: Philippe Buchez and his circle", 123­165. [back]

9.  Doctrine de Saint­Simon [Émile Barrault], Aux Artistes du Passé et de l'Avenir dans Beaux­Arts, Paris 1830. Later, these pamphlets were distributed under the title Religion Saint­Simonienne. [back]

10.  Referring to the whole initiative behind Barrault's Aux Artistes McWilliam comments: "Though, as we shall see, this initiative met with only limited success and provoked often hostile comment, it nonetheless marks a crucial turning point in the development of social aesthetics during the July Monarchy and Second Republic" (McWilliam, ibid., 54), which attests to the ongoing influence of the Saint­Simonian ideas even after the dispersal of the movement in 1837. Barrault's text was about to be republished in 1832 in a collection of prédications from that year, but economic hardship did not allow its publication. See editor's note at the end of the second volume: "A la fin de ce volume, nous devions réimprimer l'ecrit Aux Artistes par Barrault, écrit publié en Mars 1830, et qui est épuisé nous avons été obliges de nous arrêter ici faute d'argent" (Religion saint­simonienne: Recuiel de prédications, 1831­ 2 [Paris, 1832]). 

In 1831, another pamphlet by Barrault was published with the title L'art, that is quite similar to the text of Aux Artistes but shorter in length. See Oeuvres de Saint­Simon et d'Enfantin (Paris, 1865­78, 47 vols, hereafter cited as O. S. S. E.) vol. 43. 160­189. [back]

11.  Organic epochs, according to Barrault's account, are the "religious" eras of Greek polytheism and of Christianity. Critical—"irreligious"—epochs are first the philosophical era of the Greeks until the advent of Christianism and then the times following the fifteenth century to the present.

In the first exposition of the doctrine, 1828­29, the beginning of that era is situated in the advent of Lutheranism that disintegrated Catholicism. See Religion saint­simonienne: Recueil de prédications, 1828­9 2 vols (Paris Au bureau du Globe, 1829). In Barrault's text there are no references to Catholicism but only to an indefinite' Christianism. [back]

12.  See for example the following passage in Barrault:

Au premier coup d'oeil jeté sur cette partie des annales du monde, au premier souvenir de nis études une honteuse obscurité semble le partage des époques organiques. Un glorieux éclat, au contraire, est réflechi sur les époques critiques par quatre siécles immortelles. . . . Enfin on a épuise sur la succession de ces deux époques, et toujours à l'avantage des secondes, les comparaisons du jour dissipant la nuit, du réveil remplaçant le sommeil, de l'enfantement après des jours de stérilité; si bien qu'aujourd'hui, pour ce qui tient aux arts et à leur influence, les epoques organiques sont regardées comme des temps de ténèbres, d' inertie et d'impuissance (Aux Artists, 13). [Emphasis added.]

Compare the previous passage with a quotation from a prédication by Jean Reynad of 1831: 

Elle [l'humanité] proteste depuis trois siècles contre cette loi d'expiations et de sacrifices, contre le mépris des choses terrestres; elle a proteé par la réforme et la philophie, par Luther et par Bacon, par Montaigne et par Calvin; elle a soufflè le gallicanisme à Bossuet, le scepticisme à Voltaire, elle a fait dire à Rousseau qu'une societè de véritable Chrétiens ne serait pas une societé d'hommes (Recueil de Predications 1831­2, I (Paris 1832), 81).[back]

13.  "Et d'abord, qu'est­ce que la poesie? La puissance d' émouvoir. Qu'est­ce que les beaux­arts? Les diverses expressions de cette puissance" (15). "L'eloquence poussera les peuples dans les voies de la civilisation" Barrault, ibid., 83. [back]

14.  "Mais, aux temps les plus reculés, ou n'existait point cet usage [i. e. glorification of ruins] en creusant des fondations, l'on découvrait presque toujours, telle était l'opinion commune, un gage certain des destinées attachées à l'édifice prêt à s'élever, et, aux yeux des générations successives, l'édifice semblait le présage lui­mème bati en quelque sorte et devenu visible pour tous. Le propre des monumens des époques religieuses, c'est d'être un signe" (ibid., 16). [Emphasis added.] [back]

15.  I refer to the principle of the architectural theory of the time known as convenance (fitness or congruity) implying the issue of the appropriate style of a building according to its purpose. This is mainly a rhetorical idea, as can be seen in the French edition of Aristotle's Rhetoric in 1822, where Chapter VII of Book III referring to the notion of to prepon (the appropriate—according to the subject) is described in the Index as du style convenable au sujet; see La Rhetorique d'Aristotle, traduction Nouvelle, M. E. Gros, 601. [Emphasis added.] [back]

16.  "Otez de quelques unes des églises modernes la croix qui les surmonte, vous en ferez indifferement un palais une salle de spectacle, ou une bourse." Barrault, ibid., 19. [back]

17.  This is a quotation from a text I refer to extensively later in the paper: "Nous vivons dans une confusion de maisons, de temples, et d'édifices de tout genre, qui peut donner une idée des saturnales des anciens, ou du chaos primitif du monde: mélange effronté et criard de toutes les antipathies, pêle­mêle d'orgies, vraie danse de sabbat" (Charles Duveyrier, "La Ville Nouvelle", in Le Livre des Cent­et­un vol. VIII (Paris 1832), 316­317). [back]

18.  Paul Rabinow, in his study French Modern also stresses the relation between epidemics and the destine of French modernity. See Paul Rabinow, French Modern; norms and forms of the social environment (Chicago 1989). [back]

19.  The articles reprinted by Michel Chevalier, Stéphane Flachat and Henri Fournel refer to the issues of Le Globe on April 2, 9, 11 and 13. [back]

20.  See for example the article in Le Globe "Mesures prises contre le choléra morbus. Mesures à prendre pour assurer l'existence des travailleurs" by Beranger: "Une partie des travaillers de Paris vit dans de misérables demeures privées d'air et où la lumiere ne pénètre qu' à peine; les rues habitées par eux sont sales, boueuses, étroites, infectes; une telle disposition, jointe au défaut d' alimens sains et abondans, suffit pour faire naître une foule de maux bien plus faciles à prévenir par les mesures sagement combinées, qu' à faire disparaître lorsqu'ils sont arrivés" (1). [back]

21.  Charles Duveyrier, "Travaux publics­Fêtes," Le Globe (11 April 1832): 407­8; (16 April 1832): 425. [back]

22.  Duveyrier (1803­1866) Lawyer and collaborator in L'Organisauter, "chef de la musique" in the Ménimoltant festivals, incriminated together with Enfantin and Chevalier in August 1832 for articles in Le Globe related to the Female Messiah. His libretto for Verdi's Les Vêpres Siciliennes was written together with Scribe (1855). See Ralph Locke, Music, Musicians and the Saint Simonians (Chicago, 1986), 117. [back]

23.  The cult of universalism would become prominent for the movement in the following two years during the Saint­Simonian Egyptian campaign. Barrault would publish several articles on the issue of L'Occident et l'Orient and he would write a poem with the same title during his imprisonment in Sainte­Pelagie in April 1833. The international connections that Barrault makes are similar with the ones by Duveyrier, although the oriental element is more intense in Barrault:

L'Occident et l' Orient,/ c'est France et l'Angleterre;/ciest Paris français et Constantinople russe;/ c'est Rome et la Mecque;/ c'est Omar et Ali;/ c'est l'Ottoman et l'Arabe;/ c'est le Turc et le Mogol;/ c'est l'Europe et la Chine;/c'est la Chine et le Japon;/c'est l'Afrique et l'Amerique
(Le Livre Nouveau des Saint­Simoniens, ed. Phillippe Régnier, ibid., 250).[back]

24.  In the same pamphlet with a reprint of Duveyrier's articles there is also the piece by Charles Beranger, "Les Maitrises­Organisation d'une armée Pacifique" where he issues an invitation for the creation of pacifist regiments (Régimens pacifiques) composed of all sorts of artists as painters, sculptors, decorators, and musicians. [back]

25.  Ann Lorenz Van Zanten comments on the Saint­Simonian concept of universal "communion" through architecture and its essential difference from Fourier's project as follows: "In 1832, the Saint­Simonians hoped to bring the world to their hilltop in Ménilmontant, while the Fourierists were prepared to spread themselves and their doctrines around the earth" (see, A. L. van Zanten, "The Palace and the Temple" ibid., 197. [back]

26.  See "La retraite à Ménilmontant" and "Abolition de la domesticité" in Sébastien Charléty, Histoire du Saint­Simonisme (1825­1864), (Paris: Gonthier, 1896), 137­148. [back]

27.  See the account given by Ralph Locke in Music, Musicians and the Saint Simonians, ibid., 123­145: "Music in the Ménilmontant Retreat (1832)." [back]

28.  Philippe Joseph Machereau: Cover to Ménilmontant. Chant religieux by Félicien David, 1832. [back]

29.  Philippe­Joseph Machereau: Ceremony at Ménilmontant, 1832. Ms. 13910, 34v., Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris; reprinted in McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, ibid., 106. [back]

30.  See Cérémonie du Dimanche, 1er juillet­Ouverture des traveaux du temple in O. S. S. E., VII, 134­152. [back]

31.  See full length portrait of Enfantin with steps floating on the background in Locke, ibid., plate 14; the same steps appear in plates 17­18, Locke, ibid. [back]

32.  Enfantin, Premiere Séanse: "Le Livre Nouveau," Le Livre Nouveau des Saint­Simoniens, ibid., 63­81. [back]

33.  Saint­Augustine, La Cité de Dieu, ed. Paris 1746. (The editor of Le Livre Nouveau, P. Régnier does not refer to that connection) [back]

34.  I cite here the whole final passage from Enfantin's Séance:

Pour que ces PROJETS de TRAVAUX fussiest susceptibles de realisation, il faudrait en effet que la CONCEPTION fût de nature à se traduire en un MODÈLE CAPITAL, servant d'exemple et fournissant une ISPIRATION continuelle par le CULTE dont il serait environné, pour tous les TRAVAUX dont ce modèle serait le SYMBOLE. . . . 
Or la CAPITALE du MONDE nouveau, du royaume humanitaire, la METROPOLE de la FOI UNIVERSELLE, est ce modéle, car c'est le point d'où part toute DIRECTION de grands TRAVAUX sur le GLOBE entier.
Voici la CITE de DIEU, la JÉRUSALEM nouvelle. ARCHITECTES! Quelle doit être sa forme? La plus VIVANTE, la plus propre à INSPIRER à l'homme, L'AMOUR, la CONNAISSANCE et la PRATIQUE de ce que l'HOMME doit faire dans le MONDE; 
LA FORME HUMANE 
VITRUVE l'avait RÊVEE 
Et maintenant, ENFANS, que MICHEL, dessine ma PAROLE, et que CHARLES la colore; écoutez
(Livre Nouveau, ibid., 81). [back]

35.  Claude Perrault, Les Dix Livres d'Architecture corrigez et traduits nouvellement en François, Paris 1684. [back]

36.  Fischer Von Erlach, Johann Bernhard, Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur, with French and German text; 1st ed. Vienna 1721, 2nd edition Leipzig 1725; English edition A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture, London 1730. [back]

37.  I repeat here Enfantin's phrase at the end of his first Séance: "Et maintenant, ENFANS, que MICHEL, dessine ma PAROLE, et que CHARLES la colore; écoutez" (Livre Nouveau, ibid., 81). The editor of the new edition of Le Livre Nouveau notes that this last sentence does not exist in the first draft of the text. Whether the sentence is or not a later addition, it does not cancel the point that the later "architectural" texts of Charles Duveyrier and Michel Chevalier were preconceived by Enfantin and are written around the same time with Enfantin's Séance, i. e. between April and July 1832. [back]

38.  Le Livre des Cent­et­un (Paris: ed. Ladvocat, 1830­34) VIII (December 1832), 316­344. (The title here has a mistake: Le Paris des saints [sic]­simoniens). The text is also cited in the complete works: O. S. S. E., vol. 8. 64­93, and in the Livre Nouveau, ibid., 222­236. Parts of it are quoted in d'Allemagne, ibid., 309­10 and Benichou, ibid., 301­3. Anthony Vidler, also refers to the same text in his "Scenes of the Street," ibid., 60. [back]

39.  See Le Sage, Alan René: Le Diable Boiteux, Paris 1707. Before the Livre des Cent­et­un there had already been published another collection of essays with a similar theme, see: Chaussard, Pierre Jean Baptiste (1766­1828) La nouveau diable boiteux, tableau philosophique et moral de Paris (1799). The author uses the pseudonym Dr Dicaculus. Finally, Balzac would sign his articles as le Diable à Paris. [back]

40.  Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, containing the celebrated passage on the reconstruction of a bird's eye view of Paris in 1480 "Paris à vol d'Oiseau," was published in March 1831. (The text was written in late January and Hugo insisted that it be included in the first edition). Duveyrier's critique of contemporary confusion and his celebration of the Gothic has references to Hugo. 

Both texts use the same panoramic technique for describing the city. However, one could argue that Hugo, presents solely a nostalgic view of medieval Paris with no solution of the future, while Duveyrier does the opposite. None of the two is exactly true though. Duveyrier, perhaps unintentionally, merges his vision of the city's future with its present reality, while Hugo's picture of the past, is not totally innocent from future projections. The Paris of 1480 that Hugo portrays is one of order and clarity arranged according to two streets perpendicular to the Seine: "les deux rues régénatrices, les deux artéres de Paris. . . ces deux rues principales, diamétrales, perçant Paris de part en Part, dans sa largeur, communes á la capitale entière" (119). The city is organised into three parts "organically"—Cité, Université, Ville—like "mother and daughters." This clarity is later blurred resulting gradually to the contemporary chaos. In this way, it would seem that his so called outmoded' view of the ideal city was actually quite similar to the modern one, calling for a return to order, though Hugo projects his model into the past. The following year, when Hugo published the complete version of Notre Dame, his new prologue again dealt with the state of architecture and caused the wrath of Considerant who castigates him in his Considerations sociales sur l'architectonique (Paris 1834). 

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (Gallimard, 1974), 115­138. and for chronology, ibid.,1084­1093. [back]

41.  Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, 1st ed. London 1818. Shelley's work is the most famous among several popular novels of the time dealing with the theme of "re­animation." [back]

42.  "Les membres qui le composeront, divises et mêlés, sont une masse monstrueuse, informe, inanimée, morte. Ils sont comme étaient les chairs, les os, les nerfs, la cervelle et les entrailles de l'homme avant que d'une secousse de ma volonté je fisse se dresser cette masse inconcevable et effrayante en un être harmonieux et vivant; avant que les os s'emboîtassent les uns dans les autres; que les nerfs, les veines, les chairs, s'appliquassent sur les os; que la cervelle versât dans ce crâne sa membrane fragile; que la tète prit place sur les épaules, le coeur, le foie sous les côtes, les entrailles aux cavités du bassin, et que l'homme parût superbe, radieux, merveilleusement ordonné comme un seul édifice" (Le Livre des Cent­et­un, vol. VIII, 328). [back]

43.  "Ainsi, par ma volonté et par les bras de mes enfants, sera bâtie en un seul édifice ma ville vivante, et pour aucun ma volonté ne fera scandale ou servitude, car de ces hommes de ces femmes, de ces vieillards et de ces enfants, et de ces édifices, ces magasins, ces chantiers, il n'y aura ni un clou, ni un cheveu qui bouge autrement que de son propre movement et par sa libre volonté. . . . Et les peuples accourront, et ils sauront qu'ils portent en eux­mêmes les formes et le plan de ma ville; ils la reconnaîtront, ils descendront comme en extase devant la face et les membres du géant" (Le Livre des Cent­et­un, ibid., 332­3). [Emphasis added.] [back]

44.  See the very interesting discussion between Enfantin and the doctor Léon Simon in front of an human anatomical map, where le Père organises his urban plan for his Ville Nouvelle; Conversation du Père avec Leon Simon (Ms Arsenal, 7641 cited in d'Allemagne, ibid., 308­9). [back]

45.  The drawing appears in d'Allemagne's history (ibid., 308­9), with no date or other information than the title and a telling subtitle: La Ville Nouvelle: tell que l'imagination des Saint­Simoniens elle devait exister un siècle plus tard. [back]

46.  Philippe­Joseph Machereau: Saint­Simonian Temple, Arsenal Ms. 13910, 9, V 13 and Saint­Simonian Temple and City, Arsenal Ms. 13910, 38, v, Paris 1832. Both drawings are published for the first time in McWilliam 1993, ibid., 81­2. Although the author mentions Duveyrier's and Chevalier's texts in relation to these drawings, he does not elaborate their specific connections. Previous accounts of these texts, as in d'Allemagne or later in Van Zanten do not mention the existence of these drawings. [back]

47.  For the ambiguous feminist politics of the Saint­Simonians see Kari Weil, "Spectacular Bodies: Women in the discourse of the Saint­Simonians," Nineteenth­Century Contexts 16 (1992) 1, 33­45. [back]

48.  Michel Chevalier (1806­1879), student of the École Polytechnique at 1823 and director of Le Globe. He acted as the principal theorist of the movement in matters concerning the Organisation industrielle, systems of Chemin de fer, etc. In 1832­33 he was imprisoned together with Enfantin for six months in Sainte Pelagie. After he was released, he visited America. In 1844 he wrote a treatise for the construction of the canal in the isthmus of Panama (Paris: Fournier, 1844) and in 1875 he established the first société for opening a tunnel under the Manche. (Livre Nouveau, 325). See Dictionnaire Ouvrier, ibid., 414 and the monograph by Jean Walch, Michel Chevalier, Économiste Saint­Simonien (Paris 1975). [back]

49.  A version of Chevalier's poem was published for the first time in the original edition of Le Livre Nouveau in 1853. A complete version can be found in Van Zanten's The Palace and the Temple, ibid., 181­184. The same version is also reprinted in the new Livre Nouveau, ibid., 237­243. McWilliam quotes parts of a similar manuscript by Chevalier with the title Notes sur l'Architectonique (Arsenal, Ms 7641), see McWilliam, ibid., 83. [back]

50.  Duveyrier uses the same iconography in his Ville Nouvelle:

Sa robe descend en arrière sur la grande place des parades, et forme des plis de sa queue un immense amphithéâtre ou l'on vient jouir du spectacle des pacifiques carrousels et respirer le frais sous des orangers. 

Le bras droit de la bien­aimée de ma ville est tourné vers les coupoles et les dômes industriels, et sa main repose sur une sphère au sommet de cristal, à la surface enluminée du vert tendre des jeunes gazons, du jaune argenté des blés mure et de toutes les nuances vives que les belles campagnes épanouissent sous les premiers baisers du matin; cette sphère forme en dedans du temple l'emplacement de mon théâtre sacré, dont les décors sont de panoramas (Le Livre des Cent­et­un, ibid., 339­40).[back]

51.  The following passage is from a discussion between Enfantin and Chevalier on architectural matters, dated September 7 1832, which ends with a reference to the Temple: "Un Temple pile de Volta; . . . La vie des hommes manifesteé par la musique, par tous les arts, par la profusion des peintures et des sculptures, par les panoramas et dioramas qui réuniraient en un seul point tout l'espace et tous le temps, quelle communion immense! Quelle gigantesque moralisation de tout un peuple! Quelle glorification de Dieu, de son messie et de l'humanité!" (181). Michel Chevalier, "Conversations avec le Pére; 7 Septembre," Livre Nouveau, ibid., 176­181. [Emphasis added.] [back]

52.  See Gottfried Semper, Die Vier Elemente der Baukunst: Ein beitrag zur vergleichenden Baukunde (Brunswick: Vieweg und Son 1851), English translation by H. Mallgrave and W. Herrmann in Gottfried Semper: The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). 

As H. Mallgrave in his recent monograph on Semper shows, Semper, who was in Paris twice during 1826­1830, was familiar with the theories of Saint­Simon and his followers and their notion of an "organic epoch." [back]

53.  See H. F. Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper, Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996). 

Indeed, the financial capacity of the Saint­Simonians to continue even with the project for their temple was rather doubtful. The day after the suspended works, Chevalier, in a letter to Humann (July 2, 1832) comments: "Nos finances sont déplorable." See Régnier, Livre Nouveau, ibid., 56. [back]

54.  "Que les poétes apprennent de nous à sentir profondément le génie apprennent de nous à sentir profondément le génie propre aux deux grandes poésies du passé, et qu'ils devinent dans les inspirations incomplétes que nous leur livrons la po'esie nouvelle. Je n'appelle pas des architectes pour leur montrer une ville bâtie sur un plan nouveau; mais je leur révèle une forme progressive; à eux de batir la ville" (Livre Nouveau, ibid., 148). [Emphasis added.] [back]

55.  The first reference of the term organic in architecture, is in the work of the German architectural historian Alois Hirt, in 1807, referring to the structural logic of Gothic construction. For the discourse of organicism in architecture emerging at that time see C. van Eck, Organicism in Nineteenth Century Architecture, an Enquiry into its Theoretical and Philosophical Background (A&NP, 1994). Van Eck, though, does not discuss the social implications of the term in thinkers like Saint­Simon and also fails to point out the relation of the term with the scientific discourse on the mechanical. [back]

56.  La Grande Ville: Nouveau Tableau de Paris—comique, critique et philosophique par Honoré de Balzac (vol. I), par Paul de Kock (vol. II), texts by Paul de Kock, Dumas, Soulié, Gozlan, Briffault, Ourliac a/o Illustrations by Adam, Daumier, a/o (Paris: Maresq Libraire­Editeur, 1844­5). Balzac's piece is on vol. II (129­208) and is an extract from "L'Histoire Naturelle du Bismaire en Société". The text is also included in Oeuvres complètes de Balzac (Paris, 1956) vol. 24: "Oeuvres diverses." [back]

57.  Balzac was closer to the circle of Buchez and Leroux, both ex­Saint­Simonians who had disagreements with Enfantin. Although he shared the concerns about social ills, his criticism would be of a different kind. At the end of the essay, referring to the Saint­Simonians, he states that he finds their observations on " le malaise social" justified, but: "mais tout en est déparé sur une phraséologie ingrate, aride, fatiguante." Tableau de Paris, vol. II, 166 [back]

58.  "Ce qui rend Paris si profondément amusant, c'est qu'on y voit tout comme dans une immense lanterne magique. Or, il existe de Mahomet dans la Presse. A tout Mahomet il faut un dieu nouveau mais comme il est difficile d'admettre un dieu vivant, allant à la taverne anglaise ou chez Katcomb, on a déifié des morts. On a d'abord pris Saint­Simon, qui a produit le saint­simonisme. Cette doctrine s'est manifestée par le journal gratis, une grande idée qui a été tuée par le ridicule. Les hommes groupes autour du Globe furent remarquables, qui la plupart d'entre eux sont entrés dans les coursières ou ils ont très bien fait leur chemin. Malgré la chute des Saint Simoniens, on peut encore observer à Paris, le Prophète: il offre au philosophe une occasion d'examiner une maladie de l'esprit à laquelle on a bu jadis de grands résultats politiques, mais qui n'a plus d'action sur une époque ou tout se disait, et ou l'on envoie très bien un demi­dieu en coeur d'assises. . . " (ibid., 163­5). [back]

59.  Balzac's reference is the following: "Si l'on parle de faire disparaître l'isthme de Panama, le Prophète avance que, selon la politique de son Maître, la chose se ferait pour les phalanges de l' Europe, en un moment" (ibid., 164). [back]

60.  Michel Chevalier, L'Isthme de Panama (Paris: Fournier, 1844), and L'Isthme de Panama; examen historique et geographique des differntes directions suivant lesquelles on pourrait le percer et des moyens a y employer: suivi d'un apercu sur l'isthme de Suez (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1844). Also Des interets materiels en France. Travaux publics. Routes—Canaux—Chemins de fer, 6 ed. (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1841 [1st ed. 1838]). [back]

61.  For the Phalanstère see Considérant, Victor, Considerations sociales sur l'architectinique (Paris, 1834). There was also a well known at the time Fourierist journal with the title La Phalange, that might have played a role, here. [back]

62.  Saint Simon's first edition of the Geneva letters was named Lettres d'un habitant de Genéve à l' humanitè (Geneva, 1802). [back]

63.  Here, I allude to a connection that might be made between the figure of the Saint Simonian Virgin and several other images of gigantic female statues with religious or revolutionary symbolism in France at that period—connection mentioned in a footnote by McWilliam quoting Duveyrier's text (note 82). Such a connection has been examined in iconographical terms in the study of Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into battle: Republican imagery and Symbolism in France 1833­1851 (Paris, 1981), 58­60, where the author examines the antecedents that later led to Bartholdi's design for the statue of Liberty in New York. [back]

64.  By a curious coincidence, the eighth volume of Le Livre des Cent­et­un, where Duveyrier's Ville Nouvelle was published, carried on its first page the name of Baron Cuvier without specifying in what terms: guest editor, or dedication? (No other volume of the journal has something similar.) [back]

65.  The editors of the complete works of Saint Simon and Enfantin (1865­78) was a "conceil institué par Enfantin pour l'exécution de ces derniers volontes" (see Walch, Bibliographie du Saint­Simonisme [1967], 33­4).

Jean Walch, the editor of the bibliography of Saint­Simonism, writes about the editors of the collection of the Oeuvres Completes: "Les éditeurs des Oeuvres ont fait preuve de quelque fantaisie dans la distribution des textes publiés." The author mentions the existence of "La Ville Nouvelle" as a separate piece from the rest of the book, ibid., 33. [back]

66.  Perhaps the most accurate "realisation" of the panoramic inter­continental vistas of the texts of Duveyrier and Chevalier occurred in 1867, when the international exposition was organised in Paris, bringing together all the continents of the world in the French metropolis and arranging their representation in a single metallic construction as a gigantic panorama. Michel Chevalier, was actively involved in the French participation. See, Exposition Universelle, 1867. Jury International. Rapports du jury international publies sous la direction de M. Michel Chevalier (Paris, 1868). [back]

67.  A comprehensive investigation of the later career of the Saint­Simonians is presented in H. R. d'Allemagne, Prosper Enfantin et les grandes enterprises du XIXe siècle (Paris 1835). Although there are references to some earlier urban projects in Paris in which Enfantin was involved, the author has no references to Haussmann's "total reconstruction" starting 1853. [back]

68.  "In 1867, the year of the Universal Exposition and of Baudelaire's death, the New Paris (Nouveau Paris) was unveiled to the world. . . . In some fourteen years Louis Napoleon, with his dreams of Saint­Simonian splendor, and Haussmann, with pragmatic efficiency and astonishing ingenuity, had transformed the Paris of Balzac into the Paris of Zola". Anthony Vidler, "The Scenes of the Street," ibid., 99. [back]

69.  According to the fin­de­siècle sociologist Emil Durkheim, Saint­Simon and his epigones were the "generators" of the socialist idea in nineteenth century Europe (see Emile Durkheim, Le Socialisme; Sa Définition—Ses débuts. La Doctrine saint­simonienne, ed. Marcel Mauss (Paris, 1928). Following that assumption, recent intellectual history has classified the Saint Simonians as "utopian socialists", next to the followers of Fourier and Owen. Moreover, in the era of McCarthyism in the United States, the American historian Georg Iggers would declare the same group as the originators of modern day "totalitarianism", implying an analogy with the Stalinist Soviet Union (See G. G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority. The Political Philosophy of the Saint­Simonians. A Chapter in the Intellectual History of Totalitarianism (The Hague, 1958). However, in their numberless writings, the Saint­Simonians, combine their working class concerns with a positivistic faith in progress and complete economic and technological organisation by the means of the Banking system; their belief is permeated by the "sublime" vision of infinite "communication" of material wealth—an obsession which is similar to the one that, in the same age, informed capitalism in its embryonic stage. [back]

70.  See the concordance table with Hugo's manuscripts in the critical edition by Jacques Seebacher and Yves Gohin. Victor Hugo, Nôtre Dame de Paris—Les Travaileurs de la mer (Paris: nrf, Gallimard, 1974), 174­188. [back]

71.  The edition I refer to is a rather provincial autonomous edition of this chapter in America: Victor Hugo "A major art; that the book of stone, so solid and enduring must make way for the book of paper, still more solid and enduring" designed and printed for his friends by S. Vance Cagley, San Francisco, December 1926. 

For a discussion of this particular piece by Hugo in relation to architecture see Neil Levine, "The romantic ideal of architectural legibility: Henri Labrouste and the Neo­Grec" in The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux­Arts, Arthur Drexler ed. (MOMA/MIT, 1977), 325-416. [back]


Return to Top of Spyros Papapetros, "Paris Organique—Paris Critique: Urbanism, Spectacle and the Saint­Simonians," Iconomania: studies in visual culture (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/Icono/papapetros/simonian.htm)