Then, on September 12, he delivered Yvonne to Vézelay. The demarcation line would now separate them, but the move was imperative, for life in the spa town had become untenable for her.
Once he was back in Vichy, Le Corbusier’s days were more of a waiting game than ever. In spite of his head scarves and other preventives, he again suffered from a nasty cold, forcing him to remain cooped up in his room at Queen’s Hotel. He profited from the time to write but became convinced that his enemies had now taken over the important committees in Vichy, reducing his potential role to next to nothing.
Still, Le Corbusier would not give up. After a year of waiting, he was willing to grasp at straws.
20
On September 14, Le Corbusier’s mother wrote him, “You laconically report that you have worked a lot, that this has been acknowledged in high places, and that your contribution to French National Reconstruction has been appreciated at its true value.” Even as she mocked his manner, she apologized for her previous harshness: “As you tell me, I know and believe in your inviolate filial love; for my part I regret the excessive language I have used when speaking in anger. Perhaps we shall never see each other again! That is why I cherish the beautiful love of the past, so precious to my heart, intact and complete.”78
When she wrote two weeks later, in anticipation of her son’s fifty-fourth birthday, she referred to herself in the third person. “Your Maman thinks of you, alone as you are all the time, she thinks of your work, and of the powers that you lavish upon it; she hopes such undertakings will ultimately take their rightful place among the great labors of a renewed France.” Then, going into the first person, she offered marital advice: “I think, too, about your separation from Yvonne and your isolation there. And Yvonne herself must suffer so, even surrounded as she is by good friends…for a loving friend never replaces a husband, and for a man it is worse still, since it is his wife who creates a loving ambience.”79
Marie Jeanneret was softening up. She concluded, “My dear son, courage, good health, robust morale—such are the wishes I make for you with a loving heart. Be assured of our love.”80
TWO DAYS AFTER his birthday, the architect was operated on for a hernia. “It’s really a trifle,” he had assured his mother before the procedure.81 Afterward he proudly told her that the surgeon, after removing the staples, told him he had the skin of a baby. He considered the days in the medical clinic in Vichy “a sojourn in paradise”—time when he could read and meditate in silence, for long hours.82
Ruminating there, Le Corbusier had concluded that Vichy was looking less and less like a base for changing the world. But he had other irons in the fire. On November 1, the new president of the Municipal Council in Paris asked him to take charge of a condemned housing block, “number 6.” After requesting authorization from the Germans to travel to the capital, Le Corbusier received word that he would have to wait until the third week of December. But the important thing was that he was returning to Paris to work for authorities other than those associated directly with Pétain.
He was ready for the change. “I feel like burning down my 20 cities and my 400 villages, as I’ve already said, and turning over a new leaf,” Le Corbusier wrote his mother. He could no longer bear to wait for developments to unfold when he had no control of them. “What’s really hard is being a bird in flight with no resting place. Waiting, watching the fatal slowness of developments and measuring the fatality of the miseries that are gathering on the horizon and that will implacably fall upon us in their inevitable, unremitting order.”83
21
From Geneva, where he had detoured on his way to Paris, Le Corbusier warned Marie Jeanneret that it would be impossible to reach him once he was in the occupied zone. Yvonne had tried to write him in Vichy from Vézelay, but her letter had been returned. The only correspondence that could pass the demarcation line were official documents. The same would be true with mail from Vevey to Paris. All was “terribly harsh and premature.”84 But, as always, one had to make the best of it.
Le Corbusier counseled his mother, “Take note of the season.” Like him, Marie suffered from serious winter blues—worse now that she had gone deaf in one ear and was losing her eyesight. Moreover, the maintenance problems in the house grew more difficult at this time of year.
Le Corbusier was in Paris from November 10 through November 12. Then, another of his terrible head colds forced him to Vézelay, where Yvonne and Pinceau greeted him ecstatically. By the twentieth, he had recovered sufficiently to return to Paris, where he checked on the condition of Raoul La Roche’s and Albert’s houses. Except for a water leak in Albert’s stairwell, for which Le Corbusier could handily blame the war, all was fine. Léon Perrin was monitoring the apartment on rue Nungesser-et-Coli.
Le Corbusier met with the female janitor there, who was so plagued by the occupation that she was imagining voices. When the architect gave his mother a report on the French capital—in a postcard he was able to mail only after returning to Vichy—that reference to the janitor’s hallucinations was his sole acknowledgment of the German presence: “All the same Paris is a beautiful, powerful city and appears so when you have been gone for two years [sic]. It is here, after all, that we find the creative spirits, and it is here that the present drama is unfolding. I shall figure out a way to obtain a permanent pass which will permit me to travel back and forth.”85
Madame Jeanneret had received a handwritten letter on official stationery from André Boll—at the Ministry of Industrial Production and Labor of the “French State,” as the Vichy government called itself. Boll was writing to reassure her that he had excellent news from Le Corbusier, who was still in the occupied zone but was about to leave it. Boll had been asked to let the architect’s mother know that his health was good, as was that of his wife, whom he had visited in Vézelay.
DURING HIS FEW DAYS in the occupied capital, Le Corbusier worked feverishly “liquidating old things and preparing new,” but nothing came either of the project to rebuild the housing block or of an agreement he had hoped to sign to become the advisor to one of the largest French companies.86 By the end of November, he was back in Vichy, completely confused. He wrote his mother, “One’s head is so full of For and Against, of arguments and debates over unknown quantities, that nothing can be easily explained. One confronts a situation, one builds a scaffolding, one prepares a line of conduct.”87 Now he was dubious about having his proposal for Algiers endorsed.
All that Le Corbusier knew with certainty was that resilience and flexibility were imperative: “I had no desire to be specific in a letter, since tomorrow changes everything. It is on such matters that people exhaust themselves; yet this is precisely where we must remain intact and confident and ceaselessly focused on the work.”88
22
Le Corbusier spent an evening in Vichy listening to two men and a group of women sing for three hours. They intoned marching songs and folk songs dating back to François I: “Astonishing poetic treasure, full of brilliance, light, clarity, and lyricism; perhaps the most intense manifestation of the French soul there is, yet no one knows anything about it.”89 These honest and simple forms of human expression, pertinent for everyone and close to the heart, were an essential element of human civilization. More than ever, Le Corbusier deplored art that belonged uniquely to the domain of the elite. It was worthless compared to his beloved Balkan pots, the singing of Maurice Chevalier, and the dancing of Josephine Baker.
But there was another aspect to this taste for popular culture. The adulation of the “honest, healthy, robust nature” in those traditional French marching songs could also fuel a lethal patriotism. To people like Giraudoux, Darlan, and de Pierrefeu, such patriotism encouraged a sense of superiority over the members of society who were considered less fit, and in a more extreme form it called for the extinction of those deemed lacking the national soul.
LE CORBUSIER decided to stay on in Vichy. The opposition against him was plain to see, but he also knew he ha
d allies.
The material deprivations were difficult, but his mother sent provisions from Switzerland. While he declined further chocolate and coffee, he was grateful for anything with fat in it and wrote her that he constantly craved sausage. He also desperately missed tobacco—until he dined with one of the most important tobacco producers in France, who gave him some as a gift; there were always solutions to problems.
Even with Algiers on hold, he still had sufficient faith in Pétain and his subalterns to make him want to tough out the problems. Le Corbusier explained to his mother on December 15, “for the moment, everything is spiritless: reaction triumphs everywhere, fear, weakness, backward glances. Yet we are an army of the righteous, but it must be reinforced. Only the Maréchal is young.”90
23
“What a business!” Le Corbusier wrote his mother toward the end of 1941. “This time we’re losing our footing, things make no sense any more, good only for liquidating a collapsing civilization. Then will come the internal squabbles, the most agonizing of all. What scores to settle! It seems to me that international hostilities cannot go on forever. Those who have no music, art, or thought are pitiable, the rest of us redeemed by what we have. Courage then! Here in this insipid and ill-heated Vichy we are bored to death!”91
Le Corbusier saw his own actions as redemption—as if he were clinging, in this shipwreck of Europe, to art and music as he had held his own leg when the fishermen pulled him to safety in Saint-Tropez. His tenacity finally paid off. By the end of the year, he was using the official stationery of the Ministry of Industrial Production of the French state. Le Corbusier had become a legitimate part of Pétain’s government.
Everything was again for the best. His mother had sent andouilles for Christmas. Yvonne was in Vézelay while he was in Vichy for the holiday—Le Corbusier calculated that in the twenty-one years they had been together, she had never spent Christmas with him, except for the previous one in Ozon—but all the privations were manageable now that he was truly at the seat of power. Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “I dearly love my little wife; she is all loyalty and dignity.”92
24
After their years of close partnership in Paris, Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier had been sundered by the war. Charlotte Perriand later suggested that Pierre, like Le Corbusier, had not been strong enough against the forces of collaboration, but there was a substantial distinction: Pierre never went to Vichy. When he was living near Le Corbusier in Ozon, Pierre had worked with him on ideas for prefabricated housing for workers and engineers and on a youth program that Le Corbusier was going to present to the minister of youth in Vichy, but the quieter cousin soon went his own way.
In this period at the end of 1941, when Le Corbusier had finally established himself in Pétain’s government, Pierre wrote him from Grenoble, “I haven’t a clue where you are…in South America? In Algeria?…but not in Vichy.”93
Pierre knew perfectly well where Le Corbusier was; he had addressed the envelope to a Vichy hotel. It was an odd ploy—presumably Pierre’s way of expressing shock. But he kept his disapproval veiled: “Your silence doesn’t surprise me, I’m not complaining about it, I deserve it, for I write so little. I have my reasons. I don’t like to write when I can’t express just what I want to say. Besides, what I’d like to say to you might be very complex. Fortunately material matters are simple, and in writing that is the only aspect I adopt.” Pierre was clearly disappointed by Le Corbusier’s move to Pétain’s power base but was not so disgusted as to give up on the relationship. “It’s over a year that we’ve been working, each on his own. At the time of my departure I wanted to organize an effective collaboration with my friends from Grenoble. You, Le Corbusier, always opposed such a notion. You had your reasons. Nevertheless each of us works, I believe, with courage and pleasure. Being able to see each other in a favorable atmosphere remains for me a luminous hope.”94
Pierre Jeanneret was one of those people for whom, no matter what, Le Corbusier belonged to another category of human being, heroic in spite of his flaws: “In any case, my dear Le Corbusier, you remain for me the great exemplar of architecture, specifically the perfect explorer of the Modern Aesthetic and all its consequences, thanks to your clear, sharp mind and a profound and discriminating analysis of the past.” Pierre accepted his position as acolyte to a god: “Despite your onslaughts, justified or not, my esteem, my gratitude, and my friendship remain great.”95
Trying to survive in tough times, Pierre, too, was trying to hold steady even if he could not have countenanced doing so in Vichy.
I try to preach elementary principles now and then in order not to lose my way in a dingy world….
What will become of the New Year? Do you think the world will overflow its banks? For obsessed individuals like ourselves, we need merely plunge into our work as effectively as possible—design, perfect, and prepare fine things for the year to come. By then the great problems will be (I hope) vast and harmonious.96
Many years would need to pass, however, before they would again work together. Pierre was not inclined to voice his disapproval, but he never fully forgave Le Corbusier for working with Pétain. It was to take a major turn in history before the man who was considered a partner in the firm was again willing to cross the threshold of 35 rue de Sèvres.
XXXV
The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
1
By the end of January 1942, Le Corbusier had again lapsed into a period of unbearable restlessness. He wrote his mother, “My Vichy patience is at an end, and I am packing my bags. This is an administrative city that has replaced a resort where the bilious sought cures. An unbreathable atmosphere, impossibility of making contact with people so different from ourselves, at the antipodes, entirely given over to administrative tasks, which is to say officious, frightened, inassimilable. Nothing here will move unless it receives a kick in the ass, either from the masses or the elite, at which point the flow of ideas will be clarified. Now I am twenty years in advance of the rest, which represents a certain gap.”1 What troubled him had nothing to do with compliance with the Germans, only with the inertia that was preventing him from building.
His eighty-one-year-old mother was unhappy about how he looked in a recent picture she had seen in the newspapers; she had not seen him in person for half a year: “I’m not really fond of the photo. You look tired, bitter, disabused, for all the stylishness of the suit and the necktie.”2 She disapproved of the dandyishness that prompted him to pay too much attention to details of his wardrobe and not enough to himself.
TWO WEEKS AFTER announcing that his bags were packed, everything had changed. On February 12, still in Vichy, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “Here the situations are singularly improved. I’m being sought out!”3
Again, he thought his moment had come and his patience had paid off: “I can tell you that the Maréchal’s cabinet—both: civil and military—has definitively sided with me and is organizing a movement on my behalf, to be made manifest by real and singularly eloquent facts.”4 He expected to have another important audience—if not with Pétain himself, then with one of his closest associates—in which he would be officially asked to lead a mission to deal with family housing. Additionally, thanks to efforts made on his behalf by Pétain’s office and by the Ministry of Youth, he was being interviewed increasingly on national radio. When, in late February, he again received clearance to cross the demarcation line and go to Paris and Vézelay, he was determined to be back in Vichy within two weeks.
The journey from the new capital of France to the former one took longer than he anticipated, but its purposes made it worth the time. One of Le Corbusier’s reasons for being in occupied Paris was to sign a contract with Ugine Electrochemical, a private business. As their advisor, he was to design a factory building and propose housing for their employees in Savoie. But a far more grandiose concern ha
d captivated him. The authorities in Vichy intended to put him in charge of the reconstruction of the place he still considered the center of civilization. Little could be better, he wrote Jean Berthelot, secretary of state for transportation under Pétain, that February: “Paris is extraordinarily stimulating. Great and beautiful, a splendid city, powerful and upright. I shall be concerned with its immediate destiny.”5
People were beginning to return to Paris. The areas within a comfortable radius around the place de la Concorde were safe again; only the industrial zones on the periphery were still dangerous. The rue Nungesser-et-Coli was too near those outskirts for Le Corbusier to stay there, but he had been able to return to 20 rue Jacob, where Pierre had taken over his old apartment, and sleep there during his visit.
Le Corbusier spent a total of sixteen days in Paris and an equal number with Yvonne in Vézelay. He was concerned about his wife; she had palpably suffered from five months of solitude and was tired because of her liver problems. But the place he considered a springboard for action beckoned, so by mid-March Le Corbusier was back in Vichy. It was the start of spring, and the architect was as excited as he had been discouraged two months previously: “Since the 7th of February a page has been turned and everything is turning out differently for me…. I quickly adapt to an exceptional situation,” he told Marie.6
2
Near the end of March, Le Corbusier wrote his mother and brother to say that he had news that would fill them with joy. A decision had been made “on the highest level” that was truly one of the peaks of his life. None other than the office of the Maréchal himself and the president of the Municipal Council of Paris had announced that Le Corbusier would be a member of the committee that he had “scaffolded.” With the Vichy gift for long-winded titles, it was called the Committee for the Study of Habitation and the Urbanism of Paris.7 Giraudoux was on the committee, as was Gaston Bergery.
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