ABSTRACT

Viollet-le-Duc’s last book, L’histoire d’un dessinateur. Comment on apprend à dessiner, published posthumously on December 13, 1879, was another contribution to Hetzel’s Bibliothèque d’éducation et de récréation (Fig. 15.1). The didactic tale, written just a few weeks before Viollet-le-Duc’s death, offers a summary and a final testament to his ideas about education through the story of a young boy’s apprenticeship in drawing and various other sciences. The novella, whose autobiographical character has often been noted,1 becomes a most appropriate conclusion to my investigation. Rewriting his past, Violletle-Duc seeks to transform his childhood experience into an ideal pedagogical model. The two protagonists of L’histoire d’un dessinateur, the master and the disciple in a story about apprenticeship, are but idealized projections of Viollet-le-Duc himself. With that last publication, he accomplishes nothing less than a self-restoration, demonstrating how, thanks to proper mentoring, the innate qualities of his young avatar, petit Jean, could develop unhindered. “Restoration” is of course the appropriate term, given that Viollet-le-Duc conceived of an analogy between the education of an individual and the regeneration of an architectural tradition. In L’art russe, published just two years earlier, he showed how Russian art’s “native qualities had been stifled,”2 and needed to be restored by untangling the complex web of origins and identifying the art’s natural path of development. He went on to draw an explicit parallel with his own upbringing: “We know how mis-education can stifle the [instinct for the harmony between form and function]; we know it from our own sad experience.”3 It was that “sad” upbringing that Viollet-le-Duc sought to transfigure in the story of a model apprenticeship in L’histoire d’un dessinateur, granting himself a second childhood, as it were. Viollet-le-Duc’s last publication thus brings him back to the family scene with which my book opened, to show how trauma can be channelled into a pedagogical method for the future regeneration of France.