François de Monville: le Colonne Détruite, Désert de Retz (1781-1785)
from François de Monville:
Cahier des Jardins Anglo-Chinois (Paris 1785)
[1]
The Désert de Retz
I became fascinated with the Désert de Retz while a student at the
Architectural Association School. I visited it long before it was renovated and its centrepiece, the Colonne Détruite, was still a ruin. The Colonne Détruite was actually a ruin of a ruin, as it had been built deliberately as a ruin - a ruined column.
François de Monville: the Colonne Détruite, Désert de Retz (1781-1785)
© Thomas Deckker 1984
The state of the Colonne Détruite at my visit, as an agricultural store. Incredibly it was a family home until 1949.
Henry Flitcroft: Temple of Apollo, Stourhead, seen across the lake
© Thomas Deckker 2013
Claude Perrault: Ordonnance des cinq especes de colonnes selon la methode des anciens (Paris 1683)
Plate III. The plate shows a fluted column of the Doric Order similar to the lower part of the Colonne Détruite.
De Monville was certainly interested in architecture: he had a least one
hôtel particulier (private mansion) in Paris designed by the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, best known for his visionary schemes of sublime architecture. Boullée's only remaining Parisian
hôtel, the Hôtel Alexandre, while certainly not as sublime as his visionary schemes, shows a tendency to break the rules of composition regarded as epitomising
French aesthetic superiority. The giant order at the entrance supports not a temple front but a recess, surmounted not by a pediment but by an entablature.
Eugène Atget: the former Hôtel Alexandre (1763-66) by Étienne-Louis Boullée
Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France
It is tempting to see the Colonne Détruite as prefiguring the French Revolution, when both the orders of classical architecture and divinely-ordained monarchy were overturned. Although a prominent figure of the Enlightenment, and possibly a Freemason, it is unlikely that de Monville attributed the significance that may be given to it in hindsight. Thomas Jefferson, United States ambassador to France at the time and future president, is known to have visited the Désert de Retz with his mistress Sally Hemings. Roman architecture was considered, in the United States, as representing Republican virtues rather than the Monarchy it was associated with in France. The oft-repeated claim that the garden design represents a Masonic initiation ceremony, if at all true, is likely to be little more than an interesting narrative drafted in to supplement the main ambition of a rural idyll in much the same way as the narrative of Aeneas visiting the underworld was drafted on to Stourhead.
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François de Monville: the Désert de Retz (1781-1785)
© Thomas Deckker 1984
Views from the entrance of the Désert de Retz to the column, and the base of the column. The original entrance was in the present location.
The base was completely hidden by undergrowth. At the time of my visit there was speculation that the entrance to the column was through a tunnel from the base, as part of a Masonic rite, but no evidence has emerged of this.
Etienne-Louis Boullée: Cenotaph for Newton (1784)
Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France
Note the entrance through a tunnel into the centre of the sphere.
The very conventional entrance is a sure sign of an amateur architect. The form of the column, on a change in ground level exposing the base, has the potential for a very dramatic and unusual entrance.
François de Monville: the Désert de Retz (1781-1785)
© Thomas Deckker 1984
Little remained of the original interior.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Barrière St Martin, Paris (1785-1790)
© Thomas Deckker 1984
The barrières of the city of Paris, a wall and customs posts, were one of the immediate causes of the French Revolution. They were sacked and burned in 1789, 4 days before the fall of the Bastille.
The
Désert de Retz has been beautifully, if partially, restored and is now the property of the commune de Chambourcy. The tranformation is remarkable and the condition when I visited is unrecognisable.
If one finds oneself in Chambourcy a visit would make a pleasant outing. The nearest railway station is Poissy, so it could be combined with a visit to Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, another Arcadian pavilion. The Désert de Retz belongs to the vanishingly small group of buildings by amateur architects worth visiting for their architectural merit. It is a place of fantasy and dreams, worth appreciating in any form and condition.
Footnotes
Thomas Deckker
London 2022