Absurdity of calling Le Corbusier a fascist
William J. R Curtis
THIS year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Le Corbusier (1887-1965), the architect and urban planner who created Chandigarh in the 1950s and who left his mark on Ahmedabad with four buildings, among them the masterly Millowner's Association Building (ATMA House) next to the Sabramati. Over the course of world history there are rare individuals who change the way we think and see things, figures such as Beethoven in music or Newton in science. Le Corbusier was one of these. In addition to creating several masterpieces, he altered the ground rules of the architectural discipline. While he had utopian visions for a better future, he never ceased to transform lessons from the past. In the true sense of the word he was a “radical”: A revolutionary who also returned to roots.
This 50th anniversary has been accompanied by several publications and exhibitions, including a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris with the title: “Le Corbusier, Mesures de l'homme”. Commemorative events are planned in Chandigarh for this October. There are probably 1,500 books on Le Corbusier, most of them frankly mediocre, and they often tell us more about the crankish views of the authors than they do about the architect.
Over the past few months there have been several texts attacking Le Corbusier's supposed reactionary political stance in the 1930s and 1940s. Polemical tracts rather than seriously weighed works of history, they attempt to present Le Corbusier as a “fascist”, citing in particular his attempt at working with the reactionary Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain in the period 1940-42.
None of this is news to Le Corbusier scholars, but in the present disturbed atmosphere of self-questioning in France, the emotive accusations have spread like wildfire. The press, and above all the French press, has brought more heat than light to the question of Le Corbusier's supposed “fascism” (a loose word if ever there was one !) The French, collectively, still have the greatest difficulty coming to terms with World War II, with the disasters of invasion and occupation, and with the facts concerning defeat, collaboration and resistance. The whole issue of what constituted the “legitimate state” of France in the early 1940s is rarely discussed in a coherent fashion, in part because of the rewriting of history to suit Gaullism and the post-war Pax Americana/ Brittanica, and the supposed continuity of “La République” represented by De Gaulle and the Free French.
Historical events are manipulated as half truths to suit the mood of the day, especially by politicians who appropriate “memory” (by definition forgetfulness!) to suit their own agendas. Opinion navigates over a sea of half submerged myths.The very evening of the opening of the current Pompidou exhibition there was a penetrating documentary about Marshall Pétain on French television, and there he was in 1944 addressing huge crowds in Nancy, then in Paris, and in the latter case the vast assembly rose to its feet and sung the Marseillaise publicly for the first time in four years.The giant D Day landing force was being assembled at that very moment in Britain, and De Gaulle would prove to be the man of destiny. But here were vast numbers of Frenchmen and women who still regarded Pétain as the legitimate Head of State. Events are complex, and they are very easily misportrayed, especially after the horrors of war, deportation and moral collapse.
Le Corbusier's connection with Vichy, the official government of the unoccupied southern zone of France (the so- called “Free France”) in the period 1940-42, was already well documented, long before the lightweight books mentioned above, notably by serious researchers such as Robert Fishman and Mary McLeod in the 1970s. My own Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (first edition, Phaidon, 1986, second fully revised edition, 2015) integrated these findings and dedicated a chapter to the issues of Le Corbusier's urbanism and politics in the 1930s and 1940s. It did not hesitate to evoke Le Corbusier's attraction to authoritarian political tendencies. But these were placed in the context of the crises of the Depression, and the polarities of his own muddled utopian beliefs, which drew together contrasting positions from Utopian Socialism to a species of technocratic determinism : The myth of the redemptive ‘Plan’.
Le Corbusier’s behaviour in 1940-42 was far from glorious, but not so very different from that of many other French citizens trying to survive in a corrupt and corrupting political framework, including one might add large numbers of the French architectural profession.
But to call LeC a “fascist” or even a “Nazi’ is altogether excessive, especially when this is mixed up with a misunderstanding of his so-called “authoritarian” planning ideas. To put it bluntly, he did not denounce Jews and he did not collaborate militarily in the police state as did the awful Milices. But he did not join the Resistance either. As a historian, I am interested in finding the difference between opinions and facts. Above all, one needs to reconstruct past contexts and not project current obsessions restrospectively. In fact, Le Corbusier never belonged to a political party and worked for a wide spectrum of clients. He collaborated with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s, and even projected a supreme idealisation of Marxist determinism in his “cathedral” the Palace of the Soviets project. But did that make him a Communist?
Hardly, although he later (when he was supposedly being a fascist!!) suffered from being dubbed a “Trojan horse of Bolshevism”. In 1936, Le Corbusier designed the Pavillon des Temps Modernes and collaborated with the Socialist government of the Popular Front: Scarcely the intervention of a “fascist” architect! And let us recall that in Germany at least, the dictatorial regime of the Nazis had almost no place at all for modern architecture.
After World War II, Le Corbusier gave symbolic expression to the ideals of the United Nations and to the democratic and secular aspirations of the post-colonial Republic of India in the monuments on the Capitol in Chandigarh. Does that mean that he shared the beliefs of his clients, including Nehru? Matters are more complicated than that. There are ideologies, there are political activities, there are symbols, there are idealisations of political aspirations in architectural forms. In the Chapel at Ronchamp and the Monasterey of La Tourette, Le Corbusier, a non-believer, achieved sacred spaces of a high order. Such are the complexities of architecture which cannot be reduced to ideological tags, least of all inaccurate ones.
The writer is a historian, critic, photographer and painter. He is the author of Modern Architecture Since 1900 and Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (2nd Ed, Phaidon, 2015) considered by many to be the best book on the architect.
