Le Corbusier

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  XXXVII

  1

  At the beginning of 1944, Albert had one of his kidneys removed. Le Corbusier was concerned mainly about their mother, who was left alone for a month in the badly heated house during the harshest period of the Swiss winter, while Albert recuperated in a clinic.

  To relieve her loneliness, Le Corbusier wrote “La Petite Maman” regularly, always signing Yvonne’s name as well as his own. He used those letters to declare his latest theories on his role in the grand scheme of things. Le Corbusier believed without question that the elite should make decisions for the many, that rare individuals like himself should establish the master plans. It was his responsibility to provide external circumstances that brought maximum joy to all of humanity.

  At this bleak moment of history, Le Corbusier, in an oblique way, seemed to be reflecting on where that sense of his own mission had led him during the reign of Pétain.

  Ours is a decisive epoch when countless sufferings classify people as selfish or charitable. I often think that Papa would not have had sufficient resistance to survive a period as fantastic as the one which began five years ago. Day after day, we see the implacable deliberation of events with endless consequences. And men’s hearts, or their minds, do not know exactly toward which poles to orient themselves. This great mutation exceeds our understanding, solutions are only provisional, incriminating generations to come. A man’s life no longer involves, as in stable periods, the gesture of sowing in order to reap. Sowing and reaping will extend over generations, and an individual man can live without having anything to harvest for himself….

  Moreover the human reason for living remains quite mysterious. And without a deeply rooted ideal, human beings become poor wrecks.1

  He saw himself as having maintained a consistent ideal throughout the epoch of Vichy. The behavior of others, however, incurred his wrath. The care packages that arrived at the rue Nungesser-et-Coli, lovingly put together in Switzerland, continued to be pillaged. As before, the salami was the thieves’ prime target, but now chocolate and cheese were also stolen, leaving only the condensed milk. In the course of 1944, Le Corbusier developed anger toward his mother’s grocer that was comparable to the invective he usually reserved for academics or bureaucrats. He flew into a tirade at the man’s idiocy and wastefulness in failing to pack things as instructed. Inefficiency enraged him far more than the thievery.

  Meanwhile, in spite of all that was patently wrong in the world, his cause was making progress through ASCORAL: “I am achieving this task of establishing a healthy doctrine of construction with the impassioned contribution of people of all kinds and all ages. Everything advances regularly, like a carefully seeded plant which when spring comes will flourish.”2

  While the spring of 1944 was a troubling time for most of humanity, Le Corbusier felt “the certitude of enormous fundamental changes. Only the first act is ending at this moment. The curtain will rise on the second. It requires vast provisions of patience to envisage with some serenity all that is imminent. But it is encouraging to realize that the evolution will be in the direction of the good.”3

  2

  On May 28, 1944, Pierre Jeanneret opened his own Paris office with his colleague Georges Blanchon. Le Corbusier claimed to be pleased with the development; he had come to find his cousin too meek as a partner. He admired Pierre’s physical prowess but felt that his mental attitude did not match it.

  At least this is the slant Le Corbusier subsequently gave to their breakup. The few known facts suggest another scenario. It was only on November 4, slightly over five months after Pierre opened his office ten minutes away, that the quieter Jeanneret even called on Le Corbusier to say hello. He had learned how to endure the master’s rages, but the alliance with Pétain was more than he could tolerate.

  Le Corbusier, meanwhile, was now trying to disassociate himself from his efforts of the past three years. That spring, he resigned from the projects with Carrel, saying that this approach no longer appealed to him. He willingly joined the momentum toward a new France. In April, just after the second anniversary of his having quit tobacco, he said that his days were flying as fast as cigarette smoke. Vichy, too, could disappear into thin air.4

  3

  On June 6, 1944, the Allied forces landed on the coast of Normandy. On August 15, additional French and American troops began their advance from the southern coast up the valley of the Rhone. Ten days later, Paris was liberated.

  Le Corbusier described the spectacle to his mother. Reading his letter in the serenity of her quiet living room, with Lac Leman lapping the shore only a few meters away, she would, he hoped, be able to imagine the scene in all its operatic glory.

  Here, from my roof, there was a month of preamble, then the violent realization of the liberation of Paris. And suddenly Paris was rid of them! What a moral sensation! Then came the shortages: of water, light, gas, and the closing of the Métros for a month. This inevitably occurred precisely at the time of a minor famine, since no further provisions arrived from the countryside. As always, the sly ones—prudent, as they are called, and they may still be the unconquerable egoists—have long since hoarded their supplies….

  The dogfights of planes in the sky, the bombardments, day and night, of railroad stations and bridges, the munitions depots exploding in the distance, close by, even 100 yards away—all this going on 24 hours a day, the sirens sending us to the cellars several times day and night. It was a busy everyday existence gleaming in the brilliant sunlight of the dog days. No elevator for months!…

  Saturday August 19th, at six o’clock in the evening, I see for the first time in years a French flag on the gun platform of the DCA {Défense Contre Avions: cannons for defense against air attacks} of the Lycée La Fontaine. It vanishes half an hour later, and it is only the following Friday that we went to the Bois de Boulogne to see the parade of the French army and the American army, which had arrived in the majesty of new vehicles and new uniforms, proving that a page has been turned. The next day came the parade down the Champs-Elysées and the hail of bullets from Notre-Dame. At midnight the enemy had returned; the American DCA is located in the Bois all around us, spitting an inferno of racket and luminous shells; the alcohols of the Halle aux Vins are burning. And coming down from our bedroom, we observe through my studio window an intense red light. Yvonne exclaims “Paris is burning!” she faints! That was the only time her senses failed her.

  What a life for women these last 4 years here! Crushing tasks—demanding, meticulous, endless! Above all, it is this absolute of the everyday which is so pernicious. There can be no doubt that these years have defeated many people. But let this scrap of narrative not persuade you that we are so damaged as to think only of ourselves. On the contrary. There is good reason to think of others—of the people and the country and very often of you!5

  LE CORBUSIER was convinced the time was ripe for his ideas to be realized. Maximilien Gauthier’s book Le Corbusier; or, Architecture in the Service of Mankind—the title was Le Corbusier’s own invention—was about to be published by Denoël. ASCORAL intended to publish more of his writings—if they could find the paper to print them on. The architect uttered his familiar cry with more enthusiasm and optimism than ever before: “A veritable swarm is forming around my ideas. A decisive battle is being fought which must see them triumph.”6

  Claude Laurens, son of the sculptor Henri Laurens, had carried Le Corbusier’s letter about the liberation of Paris to Marie. Henri Laurens exemplified, in Le Corbusier’s eyes, the human qualities he held most dear. He was “the sort of man whose life is exemplary, indicating where true happiness abides: within—in the human heart, an inexhaustible treasure.”7

  No one could have convinced him that Maréchal Pétain had violated that principle. But Le Corbusier was well aware that, following the liberation of Paris, Pétain was tried and sentenced to death—although he was spared execution because of his age and senility. Some ten thousand collaborationists were executed. Eleven th
ousand civil servants were dismissed—although many of them were reinstated within a few years. As recently as a year and a half earlier, some of those people had been Le Corbusier’s chosen colleagues.

  In April 1945, Le Corbusier was appointed urbanist counsel of the city of Saint-Dié. The position called for him to develop a plan for this city in the Vosges that had been heavily bombed on December 8, 1944. He wrote his mother that “Saint-Dié was systematically destroyed in 3 days. A splendid problem.”8

  The demolition of Saint-Dié and the need to rebuild it signified to the architect that he would at last undertake the postwar reconstruction work he had hoped to perform since July 1940. “My long retreat of 5 years has borne its fruits,” he wrote with unabashed satisfaction on a postcard to his mother.9

  Le Corbusier was awarded the assignment in Saint-Dié thanks to Jean-Jacques Duval, a prominent cheese producer in the region. The previous year—in a period when most cheese makers were, to the architect’s horror, forced to produce cheeses with no fat content whatsoever—Duval had sent him four full-fat cheeses. Le Corbusier rated the plan to rebuild Saint-Dié as a similar triumph: “It appears as the peremptory sign of France’s will to live.”10

  His idea was a prototype he believed could be recreated all over the world. Its components included a civic center with a skyscraper to house the city administration, an elevated roadway on pilotis, under which pedestrians could safely pass in areas reserved for them alone, the same spiral museum he had always wanted to build, and housing near the outskirts that could accommodate ten thousand people. The architect considered it nothing less than “an architectural melody…an opulent symphony…a plan of modern times.”11

  4

  After the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, Le Corbusier wrote his mother,

  May 8th, 1945. Darling Maman, peace will be proclaimed in a few hours. Five years ago, the Germans overran the west. Now we discover all the horrors that pride and overweening vanity can produce: the charnel houses of the camps!!! Paris is filled with sunshine. We are happy but actually unconscious of the value of the signature that was scrawled yesterday at Reims. Will our energies be kept united long enough to construct peace? I know there [is] a new war to be waged against money and sloth. I am armed and ready, filled with courage. Brazil—by the magnificent publications of New York and London—reveals to world opinion its astonishing effort of construction since 1936. L. C.’s “Radiant City,” people say, acknowledging it, and everyone is struck by the harmony launched by my 1936 trip to Rio. Received yesterday Albert’s undated card (stamped 4/26/45). The Lake Villa repainted? Fine. The same day a card from W. Ritter whom I thought was dead. Courage, hope, and joy in doing what one owes it to oneself to do.

  Tenderly from Yvonne and Le Corbusier12

  Were the “pride and overweening vanity” his own? Did he have a moral compass after all, or was he blind to the connection between what he thought would be the positive solutions of Nazism and the monstrosity that had engulfed civilization?

  Or was all that counted the effect on his own work? In late May, the architect received a letter from an assistant editor of Les Cahiers du Sud, a monthly literary review in Marseille. François Le Lionnais, its chief editor, had, during the war, been arrested by the Gestapo and deported. Now Le Lionnais “has just returned from Buchenwald. So our work will resume and soon be completed. Publication cannot be long behind.”13 Le Corbusier scribbled on the letter that the editor’s liberation from the concentration camp meant that his article on proportions could now appear.

  5

  In Le Corbusier Speaks, orchestrated during Le Corbusier’s lifetime although published only afterward, the crafty text jumps from third to first person, but in either case the message is mainly one of hardship and sacrifice in wartime: “During the Occupation, from 1940 to 1944? Le Corbusier, at that time separated from his cousin and associate, Pierre Jeanneret, received no architectural commission, his material situation remained precarious, despite unfortunate and fruitless efforts made with the Vichy authorities with whom he stayed in contact for a long time, he received no official commission…. I did not want to leave France after the defeat. I put my energies into the battle where I believed it was necessary to do so in order to put the process and possibility of construction on likely terms. For four years I was excluded from all commissions, and no work was entrusted to me. During the previous twenty years I had constantly been accused of being the advocate of Bolshevism. Darnand remembered. During this period when I lived under the threat of real material indigence, the French ambassador to Argentina sent invitations to come to Buenos Aires on dazzling financial conditions and give lectures on urbanism and build various structures; these offers were renewed for a whole year. I declined them and refused the golden bridge proposed; I judged that my duty was to remain in France, believing my battle was there and not abroad.”14 It was a strange choice to evoke the name of Joseph Darnand, a hero of the Great War, ten years Le Corbusier’s junior, who, in 1941, had created a paramilitary movement, which was actively anti-Semitic and endorsed by Pétain. Darnand had joined the Waffen SS in 1943, and had been condemned and executed in 1945. Le Corbusier may have hoped that since Darnand had accused him of Bolshevism, he would be seen as a victim of collaborationist evil.

  In Corbusier Himself, the architect distorted history shamelessly by reporting only that he bravely challenged Nazi authorities during the German occupation of Paris. When an exposition of Léger’s art was forbidden by the Germans, Le Corbusier allegedly insisted on an audience with Lieutenant Heller, director of intellectual propaganda, to protest the cancellation. Heller told him, “Everyone tells me you’re a Communist,” ending the interview;15 the implication is that Le Corbusier was too far to the left to have possibly had a sympathetic hearing from someone high up in the Vichy regime, even though the architect had bravely approached the man anyway. Le Corbusier allows that he met Arno Breker, but leaves out that they had a constructive discussion over a leisurely dinner; rather, he proudly suggests that he infuriated Breker by saying that the greatest two artists of the era were Picasso and Léger. And he describes how a M. de Precigout, a friend of a friend, who had spent an afternoon with him at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli in 1943 and had bought six canvases and eight gouaches, had subsequently been arrested by the Gestapo. He gives no reason for providing this information, although clearly it is to point out the horrors of the epoch and link himself, by implication, with a victim of Nazism.

  Whether any of this happened is not certain. But there is no question that, decades later, this was all that Le Corbusier wanted people to know of his behavior during wartime.

  MARÉCHAL PÉTAIN’S trial in August 1945 relied heavily on the Vichy’s leader’s own words. The prosecutor of the republic, André Mornet, quoted a radio pronouncement from the early period of Pétain’s rule in which the Maréchal had said, “All our miseries have come from the Republic…. The responsibility for our defeat lies with the democratic political regime of France…. A strong state is what we wish to erect upon the ruins of the old, which fell more under the weight of its own errors than under the blows of the enemy…. You have only one France, which I incarnate.”16 The arrogance of that sentiment helped convict a despot, but for three long years it had convinced both a desperate architect and his determined mother that they and the government at Vichy were on the right path.

  Le Corbusier justified his behavior between 1940 and 1942 with a simple explanation: “Here for the first time in my life was the occasion, since I had always been rejected by the administrative centers and consequently deprived of administrative data, of being able to know the general elements of the national plan and therefore of being able to conceive urbanism on a level hitherto inaccessible to me.”17

  For the rest of his life, he was savvy enough not to let his enthusiasm for Pétain and people like Carrel be public knowledge. Remarkably, no one publicly pressed the point. But some of those who knew never again felt the same about L
e Corbusier.

  6

  Charlotte Perriand was among those who perpetually disdained her former hero’s alliance with Vichy. When she returned to Paris in 1946, after having spent the war years in Indochina and Japan, she contemplated resuming work at 35 rue de Sèvres, but she could not forget what she considered a betrayal of decency.

  Perriand did, however, agree to meet Le Corbusier at the café Les Deux Magots. She reminded herself that, in 1936 and 1937, he had written to Léon Blum about the Ville Radieuse; he would as easily have worked with Blum as with Pétain. Le Corbusier had tunnel vision; he saw only the distant light, not what was going on, in close proximity, all around him.

  Charlotte Perriand did finally return to the fold, but with an awareness that, as focused as Le Corbusier was on the privileges of human existence, he was irreparably disconnected from certain truths.

  XXXVIII

  1

  Charles de Gaulle led a victory march down the Champs-Elysées on August 26, 1944. From the moment he had gone to London on June 17, 1940, de Gaulle, a junior defense minister with a special knowledge of armored warfare, had challenged the legitimacy of the Vichy regime. Now it was clear that he was the person who could lead the country after the war. For much of France, after four years of darkness, the charismatic leader was the epitome of triumphant leadership, an irresistible symbol of decent values and intransigence of the best sort. He had never for a moment failed in his devotion to maintaining democracy in France or considered courting the Germans.

  With de Gaulle at the helm, France was resurrected. Le Corbusier was as excited as if he, too, had never toyed with the policies of the leaders of Vichy. No one was more eager to help with the reconstruction of the country than the architect for whom France had offered personal salvation after the mundanity of Switzerland and the torpor of Germany. After all, to build for its people had always been his objective. When he was summoned to meet the general, he needed no persuading.