Le Corbusier

XXXIV

A man who prides himself on following a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility. There are no such things as principles: there are only events, there are no laws but those of expediency…. A man is not obliged to be more particular than the nation.

—HONORÉ DE BALZAC, Eugénie Grandet

At the start of 1940, Le Corbusier and Yvonne moved back to Paris, where there was now heating oil. Pierre and Albert also returned to the capital. Le Corbusier reopened the office on the rue de Sèvres and met again with Raoul Dautry about the proposed munitions factory.

Le Corbusier boasted to his mother that the arms minister had said, “Le Corbusier is a man of courage, and he has done something with his life.” Proud to have garnered approval in the precincts of the new government, he wrote her, “You cannot imagine what perseverance it takes to offer one’s service to one’s country when such service means dealing with tomorrow.”¹

Dautry, like Giraudoux, was a strident nationalist whose faith in hard work and the common man appealed to Le Corbusier. For the catalog of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the minister had written, “In France it is the peasant who holds the secrets of the race. In the harmonious construction called France, the land and its cultivation provide the fundamental economic, social and cultural foundation.”² Le Corbusier was delighted that the author of that statement was now his main client. By mid-February, the munitions factory had evolved into a structure for three thousand workers, with temporary living facilities for one thousand.

Not only was he fulfilling his hope of being part of the war effort, but Le Corbusier also believed that he had found the cure for his perpetual foe, the common cold. “Colds,” he wrote his mother: “I’ll give you the prescription: from the first symptom sleep with a woolen turban or ski helmet around your head. If you do this, the cold goes no further. For years I’ve been victimized by these damned colds that used to flatten me several times a winter. You can understand this: at night your skull is exposed. And when the skull gets sick, we leave it out in the cold. You must enforce this procedure, it’s a golden rule.”³

YVONNE REDID the apartment on the rue Nungesser-et-Coli, impressing her husband immensely with her clever management of domestic life in a period when there was neither staff nor cash. The architect bragged to his mother that his wife got up before him in the morning and went to sleep after: “She does her work admirably.”⁴ But Yvonne was suffering from an obstruction of one of her tear ducts, which periodically had her screaming in pain. For the first time, Le Corbusier reported her in a dark mood—the product of her physical discomfort combined with their isolation in a deserted section of Paris.

In mid-March, at the first hint of spring, Le Corbusier again took up gardening—in a deliberate attempt to maintain his “euphoria under the daily threat of horrors.”⁵ And then the horrors came. On May 10, he and Yvonne were woken at dawn by an air alert. At 8:30, they learned over the wireless radio that the Germans had entered France.⁶

At noon, while waiting for a second radio broadcast, Le Corbusier informed his mother, “Such events do not discourage me; on the contrary, my temperament finds in them that movement and that struggle which alone can ultimately lead to the world’s improvement. One cannot, one must not cling desperately to a dead past. Ultimately one must raise one’s head and set out.”⁷

At a moment that sent shivers of fear up the spines of almost everyone else in Paris, Le Corbusier counseled his mother that she should enjoy her existence and maintain a light touch. “Let a good life flow gently past, whatever follies it commits, whatever pleasures it chooses.”⁸

At 1:00 p.m., he added the news that Switzerland was mobilized; Pierre, a Swiss citizen, was going to have to leave Paris. Le Corbusier was worried that Albert would have to as well.

The day was a turning point in the history of France. It was the start of the Wehrmacht offensive; within five weeks, the Germans would kill some ninety-two thousand soldiers and take nearly two million prisoners. The French air force was inefficient and underequipped, unable to resist the German advance. For Le Corbusier, this invasion of a foreign culture, even though he disdained it, was stimulating; he was determined to flourish with the change.

ON MAY 21, Le Corbusier and Yvonne were still in their penthouse apartment. There were frequent air raids, but they felt themselves out of danger. Having mostly avoided the cellar of 20 rue Jacob during the previous war, now he was proud that the basement at number 24 was considered the best bomb shelter on the street.

Le Corbusier reported to his mother, “Yvonne is doing just fine. All the same, her ultra-nervous temperament makes her suffer at times.”⁹ His plan, although he did not follow through on it, was to send her to Vézelay while he would remain in Paris to work on the munitions factory, which was under construction in the foothills of the Pyrénées and was to be two kilometers long. Le Corbusier was to have the responsibility for housing its twenty thousand workers and their families; the plight of these people in the mining basin had become desperate, which meant that he could realize his ideas on urbanism as he had dreamed: to benefit the people who needed the most help.

It was a moment of opportunity, even if Hitler’s power and success were horrific. He loathed the Nazi leader and his backers—“that cruel Hitler…. In truth the German people is stupefying in its choice of such a master. For they have chosen him”—but was determined not to crumble.¹⁰

“One develops a sort of hole in one’s stomach when one imagines even for a second that this dreadful simpliste—powerful because of his simplicity, a beast for being so deliberately simple—could annihilate us here,” he wrote, “before the horror of such a situation, the world comes to a realization, belatedly, as ever. It is up to us to be vigilant, to exert strength in our turn, once the pressure is off. There is such a thing as courage, there is such a thing as faith. But our conscience must have new motives.”¹¹

AS THE GERMANS advanced into Paris, government authorities urged the city’s inhabitants not to panic and ordered them to stay where they were, but the plea was to little avail. Some of the people in charge fled, leaving a betrayed and resentful citizenry to follow. On many farms on the outskirts of Paris, only the livestock was left. Observing the exodus from the air, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry compared it to the sight of an enormous anthill toppled by a giant.

By June, the Germans had completed their takeover of the French capital. They were to remain there for the next four years.

CONSTRUCTION ON the munitions factory came to a halt, and Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier closed their office at 35 rue de Sèvres. They and Yvonne left Paris together and went almost as far from the city as one could while still remaining in France—to Ozon, near Tournay.

Seeking a secure location now that it could no longer maintain its traditional seat in the capital, the French government, under Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, moved to Tours and then to Bordeaux. The deputy prime minister, Maréchal Henri Pétain, became its main spokesman. On June 16, Reynaud resigned in Pétain’s favor, and the following day, five days after Le Corbusier and Yvonne arrived in Ozon, Pétain went on French radio to say that “with a heavy heart” he was declaring the end of hostilities.¹² Five days later, he signed the armistice, accepting the defeat of France.

To many French people, Pétain, who had played a heroic role during World War I in the battle of Verdun, seemed a savior. They believed that with the French army having succumbed to the Germans, the British now would as well. In all likehood, the war was lost, but, thanks to Pétain, at least the devastation of France would not be total.

NOT EVERYONE ACCEPTED French defeat, however. On June 17, General Charles de Gaulle, the undersecretary of the War Ministry, flew from Bordeaux to London to organize a continuation of the war effort. Le Corbusier admired the bravery but did not agree with the choice: “Now for some courage. But for me, my role is here, in this country. I will not and cannot leave France after this defeat. I must fight here where I believe it is necessary to put the world of construction on the right track.”¹³

At least this is the rationale Le Corbusier later gave for working with the Pétain regime. This and similar quotations are cited ambiguously in Corbusier Himself, the book the architect wrote in 1960. He gives the impression that this is what he said in 1940. But there is no documentary evidence that the notion of the nobility of remaining on French soil to work was anything but an afterthought inserted into the record well after the war.

What is certain is that, on July 1, Pétain and his government established itself in assorted hotel rooms in the spa town of Vichy, in the middle of France, in the so-called Free Zone just south of the jagged border that divided France in two parts. By July 3, Le Corbusier, too, was in Vichy.

On the balcony of his hotel in Vichy, 1942. On the reverse he has written, “à Yvonne, pour remplacer son homme. Vichy 1942.”

For the next two years, Vichy was Le Corbusier’s main base. He stayed in one or another of its large hotels, sometimes on his own, at other times with Yvonne and their dog. These hotels, built for the visitors who came to the spa for the curative power of its waters, were one of the reasons the new government had selected the desultory town in the northern part of the Auvergne. Vacant now that people could not indulge in luxury travel, Vichy provided housing for the new ministries and instant accommodations for everyone on Pétain’s team. The town also boasted an unusually sophisticated telephone switchboard.

Pétain had his offices on the third floor of the Hotel du Parc, overlooking some gardens; his second in command, Pierre Laval, was on the floor below. The Ministry of the Interior had established itself in the gaming rooms of the casino. Spaces were cramped, with people’s offices in their bedrooms and bathtubs serving as filing cabinets.

The town was small; if you didn’t run into someone in your hotel lobby, you might well do so on the street. This was how encounters took place and plans were made, in an atmosphere of constant gossip, intrigue, and power plays.

On July 10, six hundred deputies and senators convened in Vichy’s old opera house and voted for the end of the Third Republic. The terms of the armistice with Germany charged the new government with maintaining order, thus minimizing the need for German manpower. While occupying Paris and the more populous and productive part of France, the Germans intended to maintain their latest conquest as a base for further military action and make optimal use of French resources.

Many of the French believed that Pétain was a leader who could counter the decadence that had led to their defeat. He favored a “strong, authoritarian government.” By a vast majority, the National Assembly granted the eighty-four-year-old leader the role of president and prime minister combined and gave him unrestricted powers. His slogan of choice—in lieu of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”—was “Travail, Famille, Patrie.” It was a call for “the virtues of hard work, honesty, and respect for one’s social superiors, which he imagined had existed in rural society.” His goal, and that of his supporters, was “elite rule, the protection of private property, social harmony and order.”¹⁴ To that end, in October, both Laval and Pétain had cordial and productive meetings with Hitler.

With a model for a skyscraper for Algiers, ca. 1939

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the invasion of Paris, Le Corbusier had flown, under the auspices of this new French government, to Algiers for eight intense days of discussions on his renewal of that city. The trip had thrilled him—in part because of the air journey, which allowed him to go, in five and a half hours, from unexpectedly “glacial” spring temperatures in Paris to tropical heat.¹⁵ And Algiers offered the greatest of elixirs: the prospect of work.

Le Corbusier knew that the lack of material resources put all building projects at risk. But when he arrived in Vichy two days after Pétain did, he was determined above all to move his Algerian proposals from the planning stage to reality.

Yvonne accompanied Le Corbusier to Vichy. Suffering from malnutrition and miserable at another dislocation, she found it hard to settle into the dilapidated spa town. “Obvious undernourishment a vicious circle, nothing to be done,” Le Corbusier lamented to his mother about his frail wife.¹⁶ The weather conditions were debilitating, and even though Yvonne was already taking the waters for which Vichy was famous, she and Le Corbusier knew that she needed mountain air instead.

She did her best to make the most of their situation. Le Corbusier proudly told his mother that his wife made herself loved by everyone. She organized their mediocre hotel room impeccably, with true artistry, and made him feel completely at home. This was high praise from one of the world’s greatest designers of domestic interiors.

In these tough times, such comforts were even more welcome than usual. Food was hard to procure, and meat, normally a staple of Yvonne’s and Le Corbusier’s diet, scarce. Yvonne’s ability to add charm to their existence buoyed his spirits in this new, uncertain life where the eighty-four-year-old maréchal seemed the one source of hope.

LE CORBUSIER gave his mother a detailed account of a significant event that occurred shortly after his arrival in Vichy, concerning his and Yvonne’s beloved dog, the schnauzer Pinceau. One day when the architect was out walking him, Pinceau was spotted for his good looks and invited to breed with a bitch belonging to the son of Admiral Darlan. Darlan was almost as important as Pétain in the new government.

The admiral was a man of sharp views. He attributed France’s problems to its “Judaeo-Masonic political habits” and said that, while the British had always lied to him, the Germans could be trusted. Darlan was convinced that France was destined to become part of “German Europe”—as opposed to the America-dominated bloc of countries that would be its rival. Later in 1940, he met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, after which he declared, “My choice is made: it is collaboration…. France’s interest is to live and to remain a great power…. In the present state of the world,…I see no other solution to protect our interests.”¹⁷ Darlan helped create the General Commissariat for Jewish Matters, which in turn initiated the “secondary status of Jews.”

With his dog Pinceau I, on the roof of the Petite Maison, ca. 1935

Le Corbusier wrote his mother about the attempted breeding. “A little farce, this week: Admiral Darlan’s son wanted Pinceau as a stud for his bitch, going into her first heat. Pinceau having declared himself willing in the course of his promenades in the park. For two days, the two of them were brought together in the Admiral’s garage…nothing was consummated! Each creature sulked in his own corner!”¹⁸ Preoccupied with issues of potency, the architect was more bothered by his dog’s recalcitrance than by who the admiral was.

In August, Le Corbusier and Yvonne accommodated her need for mountain air by returning to Ozon. Yvonne hated its isolation and missed both Vézelay and Le Piquey, but they had become “sealed regions” and were no longer options.¹⁹

Sketch of Main Street in Ozon with Pinceau I urinating, in a letter to his mother, August 18, 1940

In Ozon, Le Corbusier evaluated his progress in Vichy. He had made little headway with the new authorities. In his feverish efforts to establish contact with anyone in a position to give him work, his sole success was a single response from René Belin, “former secretary of the G.C.T. [Confédération Générale du Travail, a trade union].”²⁰ Belin was sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s wish to work on Algiers and other projects, and he offered to help.

While Le Corbusier recognized that most government officials were caught up in more urgent matters, he wrote his mother, “All the same I knock tirelessly, day after day, on door after door. And perhaps someday we shall manage to serve the country usefully.”²¹ He assured Marie that if France in 1940 had managed a military victory, the scum would have taken over, and society would have only declined. What had happened instead was full of potential if one could take advantage of it.

Le Corbusier lectured his mother that libelous statements were too often believed by a misinformed public and that people who previously appeared to have been evil might actually help solve the recent rash of problems: “Here is what Balzac says: ‘Fools employ negative discretion: silence, negation, frowns, the discretion of closed doors, true impotence.’”²² With this rationale, as he waited for news from Vichy, he justified his “open-mindedness” about Maréchal Pétain and his minions.

MARIE JEANNERET-PERRET was one of many people who detested Hitler but did not connect Vichy with the Nazis and their atrocities. She was thrilled with her son’s efforts to link himself to Pétain’s regime. She wrote him and Yvonne jointly: “One is so grateful to know you are alive, and in good health, too, ready to work again, to start over, and to be one of the first active agents in the service of that France which seeks to rise again and renew herself…. Edouard’s beautiful letter read and re-read—so true, so serious in its deductions apropos of the tragic events which have led France to surrender—fills us with hope for her future destiny, when an honest, severe direction will cleanse, will purify, will heal her wounds…. [T]his is an epic moment, unique for France; that she will accept it is to be hoped with relief and certainty…. Our thoughts here in Switzerland follow Vichy’s movements and the vigorous speeches (of the old man whom some blame for letting himself be influenced by those who wield the powers of victory), admiring his robust good sense, his unflagging energy in the colossal task of renewal imposed upon him. And with pride we think of what you can contribute: your colossal work, your Swiss research, your magnificent intelligence, all in the service of the noble resurrection of a great country.”²³

Inspired to optimism by this leader who was even older than she was, Marie continued, “This old Maman nearing eighty has failed a lot; eyes and ears unsteady, frequent lassitude, legs a little less adjusted to 2000 and 3000 meters! Yet the situation is still splendid in comparison to old people of my age, and I dare say or do nothing but be eternally grateful for my lot.”²⁴ In that dark period of France’s history, Maréchal Pétain and Le Corbusier together had at last succeeded in infusing La Petite Maman with the optimism and well-being he had always urged on her.

On the eighteenth of August, anticipating his mother’s eightieth birthday by about three weeks, Le Corbusier wrote her from Ozon.

On September 10th you will be eighty years, proof that one is still young at such an age. Eighty years old and you remain your sons’ companion, staving off the years, ever smiling and laughing.

You find us closer to you than ever, for you have all our confidence, seeing that nothing daunts you, that your enthusiasm, your faith in what is good increases every day. Our family is quite small, but it is close and firm, and the vital memory of our Papa cements the fourth corner of the wall and that of dear Aunt Pauline is the fifth point of the star.

There you have our accounting. Brief, but dense and positive.

Let me tell you on the occasion of this splendid anniversary what I’m thinking of Albert your son attached to you by such strong bonds.²⁵

From there Edouard launched yet again into an analysis of his older brother and of Albert’s situation. Edouard emphasized that Albert led a less important life than he did and was too dependent on their mother. On the other hand, Edouard was grateful that Albert’s presence in Vevey enabled him to continue his own work elsewhere with the knowledge that their mother was not alone.

Edouard and Yvonne could not attend the birthday celebration in this time when the authorities would not permit travel across international borders, but his writing proved a great substitute. Marie was so moved by this letter that, when a group of friends and family members assembled for the birthday celebration in Vevey, she had it read publicly. The condescension toward Albert seemed to bother no one. The listeners, she reported back to Le Corbusier, were “overcome by such filial fervor, such love for our little family.”²⁶ Now that he was devoting himself to a cause she believed in, he could do nothing wrong.

AS SUMMER WOUND DOWN, there was nothing to do but swim every day and await further summons to Vichy. Le Corbusier decided not to return to Paris the coming winter; there would be no heat and no work. At least he had enough money to send Albert a bank draft to cover the cost of a nice meal on their mother’s birthday.

For his eighty-year-old mother, Le Corbusier used words remarkably close to those he later inscribed in the windows at Ronchamp in honor of another Marie: “We shall think a great deal of our dear Maman, so glorious and radiant.”²⁷ She had, he wrote, imbued in him his miraculous strength.

In the third week of September, Le Corbusier returned to Vichy—this time without Yvonne. The trip was “a journey through hell.” He got from Ozon to Toulouse easily enough, but then it took him another twenty-four hours before the packed train arrived in Pétain’s capital. He was astonished by the destruction of villages he saw en route and, as the congested train rolled on at its lugubrious pace, became increasingly worried about the wife he had left behind.

Shortly after arriving, Le Corbusier wrote Yvonne a letter that addressed issues he did not dare bring up face-to-face. In the infantilizing voice he always used with her, he wrote, “I have thought about you a great deal, dear Von, for I think of you often. At this moment I feel you are out of sorts, and I am very concerned. I look at you and I actually examine you, though you don’t believe it.”²⁸

Le Corbusier told her that he had urgently consulted one of Vichy’s medical specialists on her behalf. The doctor said that Yvonne was suffering from nervous agitation, exacerbated by menopause, and that her nature made her even edgier. Her difficulties, he explained, resulted from a glandular deficiency, for which she needed to take hormone replacement; he wanted her to see the best doctors and begin treatment right away.

He thought Yvonne would be happy to know that, after a tortured night of complete insomnia on the train, during which he ruminated on her situation, he had concluded, “You are wonderfully healthy you are not sick at all, what you have is simply a nervous depression. And we shall manage to overcome that…. Your illness comes in large part from your will.”²⁹

They had been together for twenty years; in his restive state, he had been full of memories of her beauty. Meanwhile, she should understand that he, too, was struggling. Determined to succeed in Vichy, he was exhausted; after that wretched trip, he had to walk around for two hours before finding a hotel room, which was both uncomfortable and overpriced. Nonetheless, he exemplified the benefits of a determination he urged her to emulate.

Nothing was easy: “To conclude, I have just pitched a duck wing onto my jacket (the one with polka dots) because the knife didn’t cut.”³⁰

AS PEOPLE WERE BEING marched off to concentration camps, the insufficiently sharp knife and the stain on his jacket disturbed Le Corbusier. He was in bad humor in general, because he had no idea what his future would bring; nor did he know where he and Yvonne should live. In Paris, he would be without work and unable to function; Ozon was becoming inhabitable in the cold weather, but the woodstove he had put into their room was proving inadequate. Vichy seemed as good a place as any to settle, although Yvonne’s condition made her unfit for the arduous journey there.

At the start of October, Le Corbusier became desperate for other reasons. For the previous two months, all mail had been blocked at the border, and the complete lack of news from his mother and Albert was unbearable. All was not lost, however; Le Corbusier assured his wife that, in the week he had spent in Vichy, he had met with a lot of people. The new authorities were efficient and capable. He admired the way the city had been cleaned up, and he imagined he could work well with these people.

Le Corbusier’s spirits lifted all the more when he finally heard from his mother. While she lamented the war—“Everything seems so utterly sad, really lamentable! The newspapers can no longer be read, at least I cannot daily ingurgitate so many acts of violence, such miseries and tragedies in this pitiless war. It is the end of civilization the world over”—she still believed that Vichy was a ray of hope. “Above all we think of France, in this present state of the world! We listen to the radio and we are moved by all that she is enduring with such dignity…. How many are those that have sided with this restoration and general reconstruction. All true Frenchmen call for it and will loyally serve the Good Cause, the rescue of beloved France.”³¹

Again Marie Jeanneret endorsed her son’s efforts to work with these good people in Vichy: “I think of you continually, hoping that you will soon be called upon to move, to function! God willing, I shall live long enough to see you as one of the best workers for your country, and with you others equally qualified.” Le Corbusier’s mother was proud of his connection with the fascist supporters of Vichy who favored the Germanization of France. She and his older brother were bursting with pride because Albert had met “Marcel Bucard, the leader of the French franciste party who at the mention of your name gave a start: ‘What! The great Le Corbusier. The unique Le Corbusier!’…It seems that this Bucard has even collaborated with you and your friends Winter and Pierrefeu.” Marie commended Le Corbusier for having left Paris, with all of its restrictions and privations, for Vichy: “Properly governed, France will once again become great and strong with our best sons. Honest, reliable—long live this new and beautiful France!”³²

Le Corbusier’s new friends embraced many of the ideals central to Vichy thinking. Bucard’s Mouvement Franciste, which the World War I veteran had founded in 1933, was a royalist, far-right organization financed by Mussolini’s government. Its members wore a uniform of blue shirts and practiced the Roman salute.

Le Corbusier’s old friend François de Pierrefeu had introduced him to Bucard. De Pierrefeu was a construction engineer who in the 1920s became director of major hydraulic works, overseeing the building of dams in metropolitan France, Algeria, and Morocco. In Tangiers, he had become passionate about painting, sculpture, and architecture, and in 1932 had published the book Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. That same year, de Pierrefeu had joined Le Corbusier and Pierre Winter on the masthead of the periodical Plans. The following year, the three of them, together with Hubert Lagardelle, created Prélude, the publication of the Central Committee of Regionalist and Syndicalist Action. Throughout the thirties, de Pierrefeu was a technical and economic advisor to Le Corbusier on various plans for Algiers and Nemours; now, in the winter of 1940–1941, he took on the task, among others, of trying to help Le Corbusier do whatever it took to remake Algiers as they both desired. De Pierrefeu was working with zeal to advance Le Corbusier’s cause within the internecine structure of Pétain’s government; to have Bucard as a champion was a big step.

In the stadium at Vichy, August 31, 1941

Thanks to Pierre Winter, the other person to whom Le Corbusier’s mother referred in using the verb “collaborer,” Le Corbusier had inaugurated, in 1925, the headquarters of Le Faisceau with a slide lecture, prompting its founder, Georges Valois, to write:

Le Corbusier’s conceptions translate our deepest thoughts. Le Corbusier is quite simply a man of genius who has conceived, as no one before him, the Modern City.

I do not want to set forth his conceptions here. They are of incomparable grandeur. We must request him to discuss them for a public of several million. He is a formidable figure. Our comrades’ initial reaction to his slides was a moment of astonishment; then they understood and entered into a moment of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the word. Before the city of tomorrow—great, beautiful, rational and full of faith—they saw their own dream materialized.

I then said how his grand conceptions expressed the deepest thought of Fascism, of the Fascist revolution….

Now, Fascism is precisely this, a rational organization of the entire national life, conceived so that the individual initiative is multiplied by ten. Le Corbusier’s work expresses this with genius: this must be said and said again. It is prodigiously in advance of Baron Haussmann.

Upon seeing his slides of the city of tomorrow, it occurred to all our comrades that Fascism is not the act of rioters sacking a ministry—no, it is a great constructive revolution which will give the world the cities of Light, of Joy, of Peace from which poverty will be banished. We expressed to Monsieur Le Corbusier, along with our thanks, our profound admiration.³³

Winter took Le Faisceau to a new level in 1928 when, as chief surgeon of the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, he had helped create the Parti Fasciste Révolutionnaire. He was a passionate believer in the Radiant City, which he saw as a means of realizing his political program and the fascist agenda of revolutionary changes in the fields of science and medicine.

There is a theory that, after the end of World War II, Le Corbusier destroyed a lot of the files relating to these connections that might now embarrass him. Even if documents concerning Winter are gone, certain facts still stand out. Winter was a true military hero of the type Le Corbusier admired. He had sustained various injuries in his service for the “forty-sixth battalion of Alpine hunters.” By 1930, he and Le Corbusier were close enough to write one another as “mon cher ami.” Winter had Le Corbusier become, at his behest, an active member of the Syndicat d’Initiative de Paris. That same year, when Le Corbusier represented France at CIAM, he counted on Winter to testify to the medical benefits of his views on “Air Sound Light.” As always, the request was made with evangelical urgency: “You will greatly assist the advance of modern times.”³⁴

Through the period of Vichy, Le Corbusier and Pierre Winter maintained the closeness they had formed as neighbors at 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli. Winter was a close colleague of de Pierrefeu’s and Giraudoux’s as well; they all had similar theories on “urbanism and biology.”

Le Corbusier was convinced that these associates and the other people in charge in Vichy would effect change that would benefit every aspect of French life. They would improve hygiene and sanitation. Their regulations concerning the production and labeling of alcoholic beverages, which the new regime instigated, were the sort of bold moves that improved human existence.

About those who stood to suffer rather than thrive with all the new laws and mandates, Le Corbusier had a rationale. From Ozon, where he had returned briefly to visit Yvonne at the start of October, he wrote his mother, “The Jews are going through a very bad time. I am sometimes contrite about it. But it does seem as if their blind thirst for money had corrupted the country.”³⁵

On October 3, 1940, two days after Le Corbusier wrote these words, the Statute on Jews was passed. While making an exception for certain assimilated Jews from families that had lived in France for a long time, it prohibited most French Jews “from elective office, from the civil service, from teaching and journalism.”³⁶ It established quotas in other professions as well.

The terms of the armistice demanded that German Jews who had fled to France return to Germany. This almost invariably guaranteed that they would be put to death. A decree passed the day after “the law of October 3rd” further sealed the fate of all Jews in France by requiring their internment in special camps. Then, on October 7, Algerian Jews were stripped of their French nationality.

In time, the Vichy government deported more than eighty thousand Jews. It confiscated Jewish property and sold the assets for its own benefit.

Nearly twenty-five years later, Le Corbusier gave the impression, in Corbusier Himself, that at the time he had been sensitive and prescient about such horrors. In truth, as long as he thought his own building program was at stake, he had ignored the plight of Vichy’s victims.

On British radio, Charles de Gaulle had summoned the French people to fight any form of Germanization. Brave individuals who opposed the occupying forces had started to publish the newspaper that gave their movement its name—Résistance—and to engage in guerrilla activities within the occupied zone. In the south, there were people making determined efforts to weaken the power structure in Vichy, and on other fronts there were men and women trying to circumvent Nazi authority and help people at risk escape. Le Corbusier evinced no interest in these rescue efforts and made no attempt to join the resistance; if he was to build or plan cities, his only possibility was to stay in Vichy.

Marie Jeanneret, too, acted as if there was no alternative. To be in Vichy was “all the same preferable to what a life must be in a city where people must beg for their wretched daily bread for hours on end; where so many restrictions are enforced; where freedom is abolished for the time being. Oh! who will restore to France all she has lost in the matter of material goods! But from another point of view, how much rubbish has been swept away.”³⁷

She longed for her worthy son to be duly respected, high up in that new power structure, “recalled to the ‘ranks’ as an active, precious intelligence.” Now he would rise to the stature he deserved. “How proud of you I am, my great Le Corbu!” wrote Marie Charlotte Amélie Jeanneret-Perret.³⁸ At last!

At the start of October, the war brought a new tragedy to the Jeanneret family. Albert’s wife, Lotti, had a son who had killed himself—after murdering his young wife, “whom he adored and who was to have a baby at Christmas.”³⁹ He was a career officer, recently promoted in the army, who had completely lost the ability to cope.

Lotti’s son, unlike her two daughters, had apparently never figured in her Paris life. While Lotti and Albert were, it seems, amicably separated, everyone was shattered. As if it needed to be said, Marie told Le Corbusier that not only was Lotti overwhelmed with grief but so were she and Albert. She provided an address for Lotti in Sweden, with instructions to Le Corbusier to write her a sympathy note.

Shortly after that horrific event, Yvonne’s health deteriorated to such an extent that Le Corbusier, back in Ozon, took her for a consultation with a new doctor near Lourdes. She was diagnosed with a treatable liver ailment. Le Corbusier told his mother that, after following the doctor’s orders for fifteen days, the volatile Yvonne had improved. He didn’t specify what those orders were, but alcohol was almost certainly the issue.

During this same autumn of 1940, Maréchal Pétain met with Hitler in Montoire-sur-le-Loir. On October 31, Pétain issued a public proclamation of support for the Führer: “It is with honor, and in order to maintain French unity…that in the framework of an activity which will create the European new order I today enter the road of collaboration.”⁴⁰

Le Corbusier believed that collaboration could lead to good things. That same day, the architect wrote his mother, “One may presume, depending on events, that the Government will return to Paris. In that case my conduct is clear, I shall return as well.”⁴¹ Pierre Winter had already returned. To be in the French capital while it was under Hitler’s control now seemed not only possible but appealing.

Le Corbusier, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly convinced that a marvelous transformation of society might be under way—and that the resistance being encouraged from England was foolhardy, its adherents at risk:

Here is the great problem facing the French government. We are in the hands of a conqueror whose attitude could be devastating. If he is sincere in his promises, Hitler could crown his life by an overwhelming creation: the accommodation of Europe. This is a stake that may tempt him, rather than a preference for a fruitless vengeance. That is the unknown quantity. Personally I believe the outcome could be favorable. France, barring a criminal transplantation or a German invasion, is a mouthful not to be chewed, and if the problem consists of assigning each nation its role, getting rid of the banks, solving real—realistic—tasks, then the prognosis is good. It would mean the end of speeches from the tribunal, of endless meetings of committees, of parliamentary eloquence and sterility. Such a revolution will be made in the direction of order and not without consideration of human conditions.

Whatever the case, the die is cast. England fulminates, Her French radio broadcasts spit out floods of eloquence, which in all sincerity ring perfectly hollow to my ears, though dangerous when heard by those who permit themselves to be beguiled by rhetoric.⁴²

The imploring voice he derided was de Gaulle’s.

TWO WEEKS AFTER Pétain announced his fealty to Hitler, Le Corbusier again begged his mother to take better care of herself. He warned her not to be frugal in spite of the realities of wartime, if it endangered her health. “No criminal economies!” the architect counseled, imploring the eighty-year-old to stop raking leaves—at least on days when it was too cold out.⁴³ He also accused her of not heating the house adequately.

Urging Marie to spend whatever was necessary to stay warm, Le Corbusier allowed, “In these matters, I know that I am preaching in the desert. Yet you must make up your mind: A/to spend what you must for heating. B/realize how cold it is and leave your household in peace. Which is to say, act with common sense and with an understanding of the hierarchy of things. You are at fault in this matter, but my dear Maman, I fear you are incorrigible.” Le Corbusier’s real issue with her, however, was Albert: “Albert, less determined than I, more malleable, has been to a large degree molded by you, by your wishes, your desires, your ambitions. All this as a consequence of the noblest kind of love, of course. But who tells you—who gives you the right to tell yourself—that your points of view, your perceptions of happiness attached (alas) to the notion of ‘success,’ are accurate? For whom are we living? For the gallery or for the fulfillment of destinies that are anchored deep within ourselves?”⁴⁴

Now wanting Marie to indulge his brother as a beleaguered genius, Le Corbusier lectured her for twelve pages on how she might better handle the eccentric composer—advising her to be less bothered by the lack of recognition for Albert’s music.

Edouard assumed a responsibility equal to hers: “As a boy, our Albert went to war with a violin under his arm, in order to become…a virtuoso: a debatable point of view. Reality frustrated this undertaking. Failure of the man, or of the program? The two must not be confused.”⁴⁵ His mother needed to be realistic and stop acting as if her son was the equal of Bach, Beethoven, or Satie.

Nonetheless, Le Corbusier was concerned that his brother would not earn enough money.

Where is happiness? In inner wealth, on condition that external poverty does not spoil everything. For black poverty can do that.

On the other hand, this year 1940 is the point of inflection between a world dying and a world being born. Comparisons no longer have any legitimate application. Nothing is the same any longer. Even if success had enjoyed a material, a tangible means of manifesting itself: money—well, money today is damned, and will be even more so.⁴⁶

Even if Albert had a regular job, it would not make a difference in such troubled times.

The younger son was at the pulpit: “Jesus, your great model, failed at each step of his life and by ordinary judgment deserved no better than the beggar’s lot, and he took that way to the end. Which constituted his mother’s enormous disappointment. It is probable that in his childhood he was promising. But the conclusion was that he did not keep his promises.” Both he and Albert, clearly, were in the same straits as Jesus: truthful creatures who might never gain their warranted recognition. The essential issue, Le Corbusier concluded, was self-respect: “It is our lot to be born and to die. And on the road between, not to be too ashamed of ourselves. If we are still entitled to respect ourselves, then we have defined happiness, our happiness.”⁴⁷

Le Corbusier was out of the good favor he had attained by working in Vichy. Marie did not respond favorably to his diatribe on the need to understand Albert or to his repeated advice that she must recognize her relative good fortune in life. Again she complained about the house he had built for her and about his brother’s inability to help with its maintenance:

Albert and I manage to use this house, anything but solid and costing both money and effort. It is quite different from the tranquil life I lived alone for years at the lake. One must face the fact that Albert is a man, and like you little disposed to concern himself with the normal maintenance of a house!…

But I think you should understand, you intellectuals, that nowadays life is complicated, terribly complicated for the housewife.⁴⁸

She was determined that Le Corbusier stop minimizing her hardships: “Restrictions rain down, it’s a kind of madness, and you have nothing to envy us for, because it is worse here than France! These days we need ration cards for everything.”⁴⁹ And as always, there were problems with the heating system; the new furnace was not working properly.

She reiterated, however, her one source of hope: “Listening to French radio every day, we participate in the great adventure of the Reconstruction of a new France, and we marvel at everything good and fruitful being undertaken. We hope you will also have your position, in order to serve and be useful to our dear France!” And if Le Corbusier could dispense advice, so could she: “And you, dear boy, take care of your lungs, don’t let yourself get too cold and go run cross-country to warm your limbs and your blood.”⁵⁰

At age fifty-three, Le Corbusier was still dealing with a mother who alternated between anger and maternal concern in rapid succession. She dispensed approval and disapproval like cannon fire.

IT WAS a particularly brutal winter. Le Corbusier wrote Marie with precise instructions on how to adjust the troublesome heating system so that she would be warm enough during the night. As for her advice on health: he proposed his own latest formula for avoiding colds. Albert should go to the lake, collect stones, heat them, wrap them in a light material, and put them in her bed. If she slept with the warm stones and a wool cap, she would ward off illness. With a watchmaker’s precision and the resolve of an engineer, Le Corbusier now added the detail that it is around 4:00 a.m. that the head becomes cold, which in turn causes illness.⁵¹

He was writing this from Vichy. The minister of the interior had summoned him from Ozon back to Pétain’s seat of power on November 25.

The minister, Marcel Peyrouton, had been appointed two months earlier. Le Corbusier had first met him in Algiers in 1932, when Peyrouton had a high government position there, and they had further discussed town planning when Peyrouton had been stationed in Tunisia. Now, Peyrouton appointed him as one of two experts on urbanism who would be responsible for all construction in the devastated regions of France.

Le Corbusier was in Vichy for only a few days, but he had three long conversations with Giraudoux. The playwright intended to ask Pétain and others in his cabinet to attend a public lecture, planned for December, on urbanism: Winter would speak on health, Le Corbusier on architectural technique, and he, Giraudoux, on civil spirit. Le Corbusier told Giraudoux he was sure that the government officials would be too preoccupied by other matters to sit still in an auditorium but said he would gladly return if the lecture became a reality.

It would not be hard, for with a higher position Le Corbusier intended to live in Vichy on a more permanent basis.

MARCEL PEYROUTON was a colleague of dubious merit. Just after he had been appointed minister, he had become so concerned about the Jewish “problem” that he developed a scheme to send two thousand Jews to Madagascar; the enterprise was halted in part because the Ministry of Finance deemed it too expensive.

In 1943, Charles de Gaulle had Peyrouton arrested; after the war, he was put on trial. On that occasion, Pétain’s former minister declared, “I did not pose questions. I repeat: I am a Republican, I am not anti-Republican. I am an agent, a functionary.”⁵² It was in that capacity that Peyrouton had summoned Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier had to wait in Ozon for a while until his new position in Vichy was formalized. He continued to admire his wife’s comportment in exile. Yvonne rose early, kept their simple accommodations impeccably clean, filled their room with flowers, sewed broderies, and made them feel at home in a setting that otherwise would have seemed alien. He told his mother he was impressed

by her never abandoned discipline to be always impeccably right about herself however varying and unexpected. While I get myself copiously criticized for my careless outfits, my wrinkled trousers and my slovenly hair. The daily round has the effect of leaving my body free and my mind cheerful. Which is a great thing.

She also takes her medicines with an impeccable discipline, follows her diet, and has given up her apéritifs. This girl who seems so free and capricious is actually quite methodical: everything is done, everything undertaken according to rule with songs along the way.⁵³

THEN, SHORTLY BEFORE the year was out, Le Corbusier got his marching orders. Just after New Year’s, he and Yvonne went to Vichy together. It was another arduous journey from Ozon, this time by car. Because of exceptional snow and ice that blocked the roads around Limoges for ten days, what should have taken a couple of days required fourteen. Regardless, when they arrived in Vichy in mid-January, Le Corbusier was delighted to be there.

Although the cold weather intensified her ailments, Yvonne was courageous as always. She stayed at her husband’s side, making their meager repasts as nice as possible while he struggled to secure his new post. Le Corbusier had difficulties because the Vichy regime considered him Swiss rather than French, in spite of his change of citizenship. Nonetheless, used to the presence of foes, he braced himself. Shortly after arriving, he wrote his mother,

I’m doing my duty: the impossible. I’m holding fast. Sympathy shown on all sides. But there’s a snake coiled around every doorknob.

Yet there must be no abdicating. This is the hour of events, when sides are taken, consequences revealed.⁵⁴

Le Corbusier decided that, if all went as he hoped, he would stay in Vichy indefinitely, while installing Yvonne back at Vézelay. Marie again encouraged him: “My fond hope is that you’ll resume your march on Vichy and that you’re presently in top form in all respects…. All of us listen tonight at 6:45 to Radio Français and its appeals to the goodwill of every French citizen. The testimonials of affection, of unanimous respect for Maréchal Pétain are very moving, and we’d like him to know of our great admiration for the endless task he has undertaken, which is surely bearing fruit already. We pray God will preserve him for many years more and allow him to see his fatherly work for our beloved France triumph over all obstacles.”⁵⁵

By the end of January, Le Corbusier had realized his mother’s fondest hopes. The nomination that had initially been cast aside because he was the son of a Swiss father had now been accepted, and he had formally become a consultant to the government official responsible for establishing the new guidelines and regulations for construction and urbanism throughout France. He reported with unabashed pride, “My role is to orient these things so that I can provide them with the New Spirit. I am regarded as a gentleman.”⁵⁶

Not that the power struggles were over. Le Corbusier claimed to his mother that his aesthetic foes were so entrenched that he was tempted to quit even before he started; traditional architecture was still the preference in the devastated regions. Le Corbusier assured Marie he knew it was his obligation to forget his pride and persevere.

Le Corbusier was heartened when the students at the local Ecole des Beaux-Arts invited him to their studios; it indicated a new acceptance of his approach. Things began to go so well in Vichy that he and Yvonne decided, for the time being, to abandon the idea of her returning to Vézelay or Paris. They could afford to have her remain in the spa town now that Le Corbusier was receiving a modest salary and free lodging; he considered himself part of the establishment there.

Yvonne, however, disliked her long days in the hotel room alone except for Pinceau. She had a terrible cold at the end of January and was suffering from an unsuccessful operation an oculist had performed on her blocked tear duct.⁵⁷ Le Corbusier began to waver—maybe they should repair to the villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin where he had painted his murals, or even to Vézelay or Paris. He imagined resuming painting in one of those other locations. But “Duty” was the deciding factor.

Pétain fired Peyrouton on February 9 in order to appease the Germans by replacing him with someone more clearly committed to collaboration. But even the downfall of one of his closest champions was not enough to discourage Le Corbusier. On February 17, he wrote his mother that he was an “initiator of profound action. I cannot be deterred from the path I follow.”⁵⁸

IF YVONNE had to spend her life in a hotel room, at least it was in one of the best places, the Albert Premier. At lunchtime, she and Le Corbusier ate in a restaurant where there was only one menu, but they were happy with it. For supper, they often had a picnic on their beds—there was no alternative during the nightly blackouts—but they did not mind. Yvonne was unwilling to go to the cinema at night, for fear of leaving Pinceau alone in the room, barking. Le Corbusier took advantage of the situation to read a lot.

Le Corbusier’s mother, meanwhile, was again complaining about the humidity in the walls and difficulties because of the flat roof of La Petite Maison, especially in a wet winter. While excoriating Edouard for the dampness in the house, she made his brother the embodiment of perfection: “And then there is Albert, a real sunbeam, content with his lot, free and at home in his snug little house.”⁵⁹

Marie expressed concern about Yvonne in the throes of menopause: “But it is sad to think of poor Yvonne and her health problems. I hope she can be patient, for the years preceding or following a fiftieth birthday are more or less good years for all women (without exception).”⁶⁰ In fact, Yvonne was doing better. By March, she and Le Corbusier had moved to Queen’s Hotel—an even nicer accommodation with a view of the park. Yvonne’s tear duct was operated on again and this time was successfully cured. She was taking the spa waters under a doctor’s supervision and feeling generally healthier than she had in a long time.

Le Corbusier spoke on the state radio station on March 19, with kudos afterward, and he sold a painting to de Montmollin. Everything was looking up; he could gaze out the window and see buds on some of the trees. The willows were already green, and the plum trees were covered with white blossoms. By the end of the month, elated, he wrote his mother, “My undertaking is acknowledged and favored in the highest offices of the land.” With Giraudoux as part of the team, he felt on his way to “a total victory.”⁶¹

Moreover, he had a backup plan. Le Corbusier had been asked to give a monthlong course at a Buenos Aires university for two hundred thousand francs—with two guaranteed building projects. His loyalty to the new France was not so complete that he would decline to leave if necessary: “If Vichy were suddenly to collapse, it would be Argentina without delay.”⁶²

On March 29, 1941, Le Corbusier had an interview with an official high up in the Vichy government—“the one who has the power to regulate all construction in France.” Le Corbusier’s dream had come true. “To our amazement, he declares his eagerness to use our organization and to regard it as his organ of inspiration,” he wrote.⁶³

Le Corbusier then told his mother it was “Le M. lui-même” who looked him in the eyes and said that the architect would be supported by every available resource within the government.⁶⁴ “Le M. lui-même” was in all likelihood Pétain himself. Le Corbusier had not used his name, but “Le M.” was a way of referring to “Le Maréchal”—indeed “the one” with the power Le Corbusier attributed to his interviewer.

Le Corbusier used one of his ultimate expressions of joy: “The horizon is clear.”⁶⁵ At last he would achieve what he had been trying to do for twenty years. His incessant vigilance was bearing fruit; important work and great buildings were imminent. Everything would now happen as he hoped. André Boll, the press officer of the new committee, would make sure the whole country learned, through newspapers and radio, about the latest building plans. The necessary laws and regulations would follow. The rejections, the waiting, the problems of December and January were behind him, and the future would now be as he hoped, even if it included inevitable challenges.

Le Corbusier concluded this encomium to his mother, “Everything is just beginning. Proofs will have to be given. Difficult days lie ahead.”⁶⁶ Nothing excited him more than a worthy battle.

That spring, Le Corbusier developed an idea for small buildings that he termed “Les Murondins.” (In French, mur means wall, and rondins are circles of wood or debris.) He wrote a thirty-six-page book, comprising sketches and text dedicated to this idea of a universal form with many applications.⁶⁷ It called for rudimentary adobe dwellings, related to Mesopotamian architecture and befitting nomads.

First, a simple trench was excavated and filled with concrete to prevent moisture from rising. Then, blocks measuring twenty by twenty by forty centimeters, composed of sand, gravel, lime, and mud that had hardened in the sun, were assembled as slabs, framed in timber. The slabs were made to stand like walls and placed at right angles to brace one another. A roof was made of branches and logs of uniform length culled from the forest at the side of the road; if there were no trees around, bituminous paper and turf or corrugated iron could be used. With the Vichy government behind him, he believed that this form of housing, inexpensive and viable in a range of settings, would quickly proliferate.

“THE SKY HAS TURNED BLUE. The trees green,” he wrote his mother on April 22; it was not just a report on the weather.⁶⁸

She wrote back bursting with “the happiness of knowing you are happy, understood, and involved in this magnificent restoration of men and things which is now in the air almost everywhere, and particularly in French territories.” But he must not forget the flaws of the house he had built for her: “Repairs cannot be made in this constant wet weather, and nothing is happening in the little house. Everything remains to be done.”⁶⁹ She was, she reported, losing an abnormal amount of weight in spite of eating a lot; perhaps it was the fault of his architecture.

On May 27, 1941, Maréchal Pétain signed the law that officially put Le Corbusier in charge of the creation of the “committee studying problems of habitation and construction.”⁷⁰ Two days later, the declaration was published in the state journal.

Then, like the regimes Le Corbusier had encountered first in La Chauxde-Fonds and then in Geneva and Moscow, Vichy had in its ranks individuals who effectively opposed him. A man Le Corbusier identified only as “the director in charge of general construction and production” maintained that he would under no circumstances work with the architect.⁷¹

Le Corbusier had one key supporter, however. “Our president is a noble prince who places the respect for human values above all else. It was precisely when he had been asked for a measure of abandonment that he showed his allegiance to us,” Le Corbusier wrote to his mother. The forces against him still had to be reckoned with, but, assuming that “notre président” referred to Pétain, the Maréchal’s backing heartened him to believe that now he was in the right place at the right time. “The enemy is ignorance itself—a phantom: everything which does not exist, from which one makes a mountain…but if, at last, we can be established where we have prepared a place, the work will be firmly based on thirty years of meditation.”⁷²

DAY AFTER DAY, Le Corbusier walked through the formal gardens of Vichy and passed the grand hotels and elaborate spa buildings where, since Roman times, people had drunk the local springwater to cure their livers, stomachs, intestines, and kidneys. Trying in that bizarre setting to gain support for his commission and goals, he periodically met with members of Pétain’s team.

Again, he and Yvonne moved. Having had to go to an inferior establishment, they now returned to Queen’s Hotel, where the music from the birds in the park outside their windows struck him as exotic. On his walks with Pinceau, “day after day, I have seen the buds and the leaves and the flowers, everything created, orchestrated by a talented gardener who has specialized in rare species. How beautiful the trees are!”⁷³ All was for the best again.

Le Corbusier had to create a lengthy document in accordance with the regulations of the Vichy government. It proved his qualifications to serve.

Entitled “Request for a waiver according to the law of July 17th 1940,” it was an elaborate c.v. that distorted the facts at will, particularly in its emphasis on Le Corbusier’s Frenchness. The architect gave his name as “LE CORBUSIER (Charles-Edouard).” He came “from a family of French origin, proscribed during the wars of religion.” He stressed his French naturalization and all the important official positions and honors he had had in France, Sweden, Britain, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia. In 1927, he won the “first prize in the construction competition for the Palace of the League of Nations”—but he failed to mention that it was never built. Le Corbusier declared that in 1934 he was “called to Rome by a decree of Mussolini in order to discuss theses of urbanism and architecture for union delegates.”⁷⁴ He cited his work in the field of urban development in Moscow, Brazil, Smyrna, Chile, Algeria, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Amsterdam, from 1928 to 1939—without pointing out that nothing ever came of any of these projects.

Le Corbusier’s self-promotion includes a list of publications, translations, reviews, and work as an editor. In a summation of his career, he wrote: “Has never had political involvements, but was alternately accused, as necessity commanded, of communism and fascism.”⁷⁵

THE VERY SAME DAY that Le Corbusier completed this document that would allow him to work with the new French government, the second Statute on Jews, the law of June 2, 1941, was passed. Its contents helped realize the goals of Admiral Darlan and others high up in the Vichy regime. Now all people considered Jewish were forbidden to work in banking, the stock market, journalism, publishing, or teaching, except at the lowest levels. Five days later, Jews started to be required to wear a yellow star. The following month, “the law of July 22nd for economic organization” dispossessed Jews of their furniture, their apartments, and most other worldly goods and forbade them to go out between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. It also prohibited them from owning bicycles or telephones, entering public places, or changing residences.

Just as the second statute was going into effect, Le Corbusier wrote his mother that within a week he would know whether everything would happen as he hoped. With all the political turmoil in France, he was still managing to publish, and he was optimistic that his work was moving ahead.

Marie Jeanneret-Perret, as given to dark moods as her son, was now ebullient, even if the horrors of war meant that former allies were now enemies: “I have regained my spirits, thanks to my beloved son…. Yet there are other enormities that are of the order of the day, unfortunately! The French soldiers in Syria at war with their former brothers in arms and fellow citizens. My God, what will happen to them all…. Edouard’s wonderful, detailed letter, received on Saturday, June 7th, brings us up to date with the situation of Vichy’s good soldiers. We think of them with ardent love and constant sympathy as we hope for a happy outcome. We can do no less for the new France! Courage, hope, faith!!”⁷⁶

Two weeks after saying he might head to Buenos Aires if Pétain’s government did not employ him as he hoped, Le Corbusier took a six-hour flight from Vichy to Algiers. It was a mission he deemed of critical importance, a harbinger of the ultimate victory of his ideas. And he was undertaking it on behalf of the new regime.

In Algiers, he ate better than he had in ages, writing his mother that there were entire legs of lamb. Everything felt like a holiday. He returned to Vichy feeling reassured that his great urban plan in North Africa was still alive. The architect then learned that he was being sent on a mission to Switzerland; accorded a rare visa for the trip, it meant he could see his mother.

Then setbacks came. The trip was postponed. François Lehideux, Minister of Industrial Production, rejected Le Corbusier’s role on the new habitation committee. The weather in Vichy was horrible that summer, with cold winds and heavy rains. Rather than taking an August holiday, he and Yvonne waited it out at Queen’s Hotel, with Le Corbusier one day imagining expatriation in Argentina and the next day believing Algiers would be his to do and he was about to take the promised journey to Vevey.

At least he was still in his mother’s good graces. She wrote him from the side of Lac Leman,

Stretched out on my chaise-longue I read with the profoundest inner peace, your beautiful and magnificent work on the reconstruction of Paris, the destiny of Paris.

How clear it all is, so limpidly expressed! I am overcome with admiration and so proud of my great son.⁷⁷

Marie Jeanneret was even happier when Le Corbusier finally made it to Switzerland during the first week of September. His journey back to Vichy took fourteen hours by train, with a long delay as the Germans, whom he referred to as “Les Fritz,” questioned him “aggressively,” but at least he had seen his mother again.

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.

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

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

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 had 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

“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

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.