Review: The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France, by Iris Moon

Abstract

Iris Moon The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France London: Routledge, 2017, 186 pp., 10 color and 40 b/w illus. $160 (cloth), ISBN 9781472480163 “Relationships,” Iris Moon tells us, “are a form of paperwork” (13). In this fascinating book, she asserts that bureaucracy of various kinds underpins our understanding of how the architectural team of Charles Percier and Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine established their mutual practice, continuing it against the odds through dramatic regime changes in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. More important, however, paper itself—as maddeningly contingent material substrate, as substitute for solid buildings, and as money—emerges here as a determining force. With so many projects unrealized or unrealizable during the French Revolution and Empire, architecture took to the page. Moon's focus is how interior decoration provided new ways of giving shape to hitherto unimaginable forms of modern sovereignty while simultaneously realizing architectural ambitions that were otherwise thwarted. This concentration on the interior marks a notable departure from much scholarship on the Revolution's visual culture. Internalizing revolutionary rhetoric about the virtues of transparent political spaces, scholars have tended to accentuate that culture's more monumental public-facing forms, masking an unease about revolutionary architecture's perceived lack of substance and betraying a suspicion that its facades concealed little of note. However, Moon is eager to stress that Percier and Fontaine's remarkable designs for interiors should not be read as mere compensation for a paucity of resources. Rather, their attention to mobile objects such as furniture was bound to more profound historical dynamics: the Revolution's destruction of buildings and the way architectural spaces and the objects they contained were rendered fungible by the new commercial opportunities that followed the Terror. Moon argues compellingly that Percier and Fontaine's development of an aesthetic of classical order made sense as a bulwark against the motility of visual signs, the instability of materials, and the processes of repurposing and making do that characterized the politically and commercially insecure climate of postrevolutionary Paris. …