The rhetoric of architecture and the language of pleasure : the maison de plaisance in eighteen-century France

Abstract

This thesis investigates the history of the petite maison (otherwise known as a little house) in eighteenth-century France. In particular, I focus on a popular libertine novella written in 1758 by Jean-Francois de Bastide entitled appropriately enough La Petite maison. In the novella, Bastide conflates concepts of vice and virtue in his descriptions of the little house. By doing so, the author set into play a terminological confusion of meaning that rendered the house as a problem that required a resolution. This thesis tracks the resolution of the ambiguous meaning of the little house in the work of the late eighteenth-century architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. I look at three different projects by Ledoux in order to trace how he transformed the "little house" as a literary trope illustrated by the author Bastide into a country house architectural typology. The first project discussed is a built music pavilion designed for fetes, entertainments and pleasures at Louveciennes for the mistress of Louis XV named Madame du Barry. The second project is an imagined house for a Marchande de modes (woman milliner tailor) represented in Ledoux's treatise entitled Architecture considered in relation to art, mores, and legislation, published in 1804.

(cont.) The third imagined project, an institutional monastery cum brothel entitled Oikema is also represented in his treatise. This thesis shows how Ledoux's architectural typology of the little house resulted in nothing less than a formulation of a modem architectural conception of house and home. By demonstrating that the little house is located at the fault lines of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, manners, architecture, sexuality, class, and nation building this thesis removes the building type from the historical margins that it has, until now, been relegated to. What is at stake, here, in this discussion of the petite maison is nothing less than the history of the formulation of a modem architectural syntax of domesticity. In this context, discussions of morality in elite discourse had forced sexuality out into the open. This thesis questions how the little house functioned as a vessel by which the language of sexuality came to be explored in both architecture and architectural theory in the twilight years of the eighteenth-century.