ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the meanings and motivations behind the ‘French School’ of Comtean Positivist regionalism in Victorian Britain. It focusses specifically on how Auguste Comte, Richard Congreve, Patrick Geddes, and other Positivists considered architecture as central to delivering public education based on a republican political theory of civic duty for regional devolution. Positivist architecture was a means to inaugurate the Republique Occidentale, or a social reorganisation for the ‘Positive Era’. This chapter argues that Positivist architecture was part of an agenda to realise networks of garden city-states with an aim to confine women to the domestic sphere.
