ABSTRACT

Historians have not emphasized enough that the launching of the Dictionnaire raisonn de l'architecture immediately followed the declaration of the empire in late 1852. One of the theses that run through the series of volumes is that a return to the Gothic is not merely a means of bringing architecture back to its true principles, but an attempt to regenerate France itself, an idea perfectly attuned to Louis-Napoleon's goal of "restoring" French society. According to Lenormant, Viollet-le-Duc, if among the greatest "architectes-dessinateurs" of France, "remains an outsider to the great historical debates that absorb the leading minds of our epoch". He certainly admired the Dictionnaire raisonn de l'architecture as a thorough analysis of Gothic architecture, but he mocked the book's overarching historical theories, calling Viollet-le-Duc an "abstracteur de quintessence". Gothic, pretended Viollet-le-Duc, was that "French" architectural language ready at hand. A national language is in circulation as a living medium of exchange that transcends any individual man's capacity for invention.