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- 1. Giambologna (1529-1608)
Architecture, c. 1565
Marble - H: 152 cm
Florence, Bargello
Photo: Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 3.0) - See the image in its page
In less than a year, the history of architecture (ill. 1) has seen a series of deaths of figures who have left their mark, to varying degrees and in different circles, on this demanding discipline. We are thinking first and foremost of Jean-Louis Cohen (1949-2023), whose work on the twentieth century was so influential, and Jacques Lucan (1947-2023), a remarkable theorist and teacher. Closer to home, three months apart, two great historians of modern architecture have left us: Claude Mignot (1943-2023) and Jean-Pierre Babelon (1931-2024), whose work often intersected during their respective long careers. We would like to take this opportunity not only to pay tribute to them, but also to emphasise the debt that a whole generation of architectural historians owe to them.
To measure this debt, it is worth going back to the situation of the discipline in the middle of the twentieth century. After being intellectually detached from history in the last third of the nineteenth century, art history in France was given academic recognition with the creation of a chair at the Sorbonne in 1899, at the instigation of Ernest Lavisse. The first holder, his friend Henry Lemonnier (1842-1936), a chartist by training and future member of the Institut, was a historian of seventeenth-century French architecture. His work on art and power under Louis XIII and the Palais de l’Institut, as well as his publications, notably the 10-volume edition of the Procès-verbaux de l’Académie royale d’architecture (1671-1793), paved the way for a history of modern architecture based on sources, using building monographs as well as syntheses.
In 1938, Pierre Lavedan (1885-1982) was elected to the same chair. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, this specialist in French urban history was to give the chair a more typological slant, using new methods such as site studies and photography. He left a three-volume Histoire de l’urbanisme français, the volume on the modern age (1941) having been republished and expanded in 1982; for a long time very useful, this work is less effective today. In 1955, Lavedan gave way to André Chastel (1912-1990), the last professor of modern art history at the Sorbonne before May 1968 and the division of the University of Paris into thirteen entities. Chastel, who was also a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, was a recognised specialist in Italian Renaissance art; he also enjoyed a wider profile than academic circles, thanks to his work with the newspaper Le Monde, where he wrote a column on the discipline, and soon on what was not yet known as heritage.
At the time, the great historian of French architecture was Louis Hautecoeur (1884-1973). This brilliant graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, who graduated top of his class in history, had a dual career as a museum curator and professor of art history at the University of Caen and then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In turn, he specialised in seventeenth-century French architecture: in 1924, he wrote a stimulating article on the Dôme des Invalides and, three years later, published Le Louvre et des Tuileries de Louis XIV. Based on extensive archival research, and supported by a remarkable ability to summarise, this major book is undoubtedly his masterpiece. It was followed by an ambitious but less convincing undertaking, launched in the middle of the war and stretching out over twenty years: a monumental "Histoire de l’architecture française classique (1500-1900)", a sum that is as fascinating as it is indigestible and ultimately, by its very structure, not very usable. Too many pieces, no doubt, were missing at the time to compose a solid picture of such a complex movement.
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- 2. Jean-Pierre Babelon
Photo taken from a video - See the image in its page
In this context, we can appreciate how original the path chosen by Jean-Pierre Babelon (ill. 2) is. Born in 1931, he comes from a line of great numismatic scholars, his grandfather Ernest (1854-1924), a professor at the Collège de France, like his father Jean Babelon (1889-1978) having directed the cabinet des Médailles at the Bibliothèque nationale. Like them, he was trained at the École des Chartes, for many years the crucible of medieval art studies, from which he graduated in 1954 with an innovative thesis on "La Demeure parisienne sous Henri IV et Louis XIII" (Parisian residences under Henry IV and Louis XIII); this work, based on extensive archive research and including a prosopographical catalogue of Parisian master builders, was supplemented by a thesis from the Ecole du Louvre, defended in 1956 on "Recherches sur l’architecture et la décoration d’hôtels parisiens, 1589-1643" (Research into the architecture and decoration of Parisian hotels, 1589-1643). By choosing a cultural environment, with a fine historical, social and urban context of the capital; a tight chronology, between the Renaissance and the century of Louis XIV; finally, a broad typological approach (palaces, mansions, bourgeois and common houses), Jean-Pierre Babelon produced a pioneering study, published ten years later [1]. Reissued in 1977 and 1991 by Hazan, it is undoubtedly a "classic in the history of French architecture" (Claude Mignot), written with a fine pen.
In 1957, Jean-Pierre Babelon joined the Archives nationales as a curator, where he soon became head of the ancient section [2] .His qualities as a historian of Paris and his broad vision of both learned and ordinary architecture led him to join the Commission du Vieux Paris, alongside Pierre d’Espezel and above all a chartist, archaeologist and historian with a strong personality: Michel Fleury (1923-2002). With a third accomplice, Jacques Silvestre de Sacy, president of the Société pour la protection des paysages et de l’esthétique de la France (now Sites et Monuments), he became involved in the great struggle for Les Halles, publishing in 1968 a work on the old houses in the district, then threatened with destruction like Baltard’s beautiful pavilions [3]. This skilfully militant inventory played a major role in the final preservation of a key sector of the old centre of the capital. His work and research for the Commission du Vieux Paris, of which he was one of the key players at the time, as can be seen in the Procès-verbaux of the meetings and the Cahiers de la Rotonde, as well as his summary of Paris monumental [4] (1974), which covers a wide chronology, made Jean-Pierre Babelon a leading figure in heritage, a notion on which he wrote a stimulating essay with André Chastel, on the occasion of the "l’année du patrimoine" ("Year of Heritage") [5] (1980).
Like Louis Hautecoeur, Jean-Pierre Babelon combined his career as a curator with that of a teacher, with the IVe section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études welcoming him as a lecturer from 1969 onwards. For twenty years he taught a course on Parisian architecture and topography. He continued his research on the capital, studying in detail the buildings of the National Archives as well as the Arsenal (1970) and the church of Saint-Roch, in a small work that has been reprinted many times. Above all, he wrote a series of articles based on the best archival research on the great houses of the Marais, often linked to contemporary restoration work on these buildings. At a time when the Monuments Historiques did not systematically carry out preliminary studies, Jean-Pierre Babelon broke new ground with his research, which was part and parcel of the rehabilitation movement in a district that became a ’safeguarded sector’ in 1965, under the Malraux law. This sequence culminated in the fine exhibition "Le Marais, mythe et réalité" at the Hôtel de Sully (1987), photographs by Caroline Rose, Paris, éditions Picard.
But not all his research was confined to Paris: Jean-Pierre Babelon also worked on King Henri IV, for whom he published a monumental biography in 1982, which is still very useful. Through the Société Henri IV, which he founded in 1993 and chaired from 1999 to 2009, he remained faithful to the Béarnais and to studies on the first Bourbon king, until the unfortunate affair of the pseudo-head of this sovereign in 2013. As an accomplished architectural historian, he published two more ambitious works in 1986: a major volume on Paris au XVIe siècle (Paris in the sixteenth century [6]) and, as director, a pioneering work of synthesis on the French castle [7]. This original book heralded a new field of research: in addition to his monumental study of French Renaissance châteaux, published three years later [8], he produced several monographs on iconic buildings: Chantilly (1999), Amboise (2004) and, most recently, Chenonceau [9].
In 1989, after four years as Inspector General of the Archives de France, Jean-Pierre Babelon succeeded Yves Bottineau (1925-2008), a university professor, as Director of the Musée National du Château de Versailles. The building had just undergone major restoration work of varying quality, as a result of the 1978 programme law. He will be the last director with a scholarly profile, as the government has decided to transform the museum of French history into a public institution, like the Pompidou Centre, the Louvre and the young Musée d’Orsay. In 1996, after serving as its first president, he handed over the reins to an unassuming enarché with ties to the head of state at the time. This marked the beginning of a succession of presidents whose credentials to run Versailles are sometimes thin, a situation which was fortunately put an end to in February 2024 [10].
A member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, where he was elected in 1991 to the chair of the Byzantinist André Grabar, Jean-Pierre Babelon was soon entrusted with the administration of the Jacquemart-André museum in Paris, then the Chaalis abbey, until 2018, putting his organisational skills at the service of these two precious monuments. Fortunately, however, the director has not annihilated the researcher. In 1998, J.-P. Babelon and Claude Mignot curated a major commemorative exhibition on François Mansart at the Château de Blois and the Archives nationales, and that same year he edited a stimulating issue of the Revue de l’Art on seventeenth-century painted ceilings in Paris. In 2005, he orchestrated another monograph on the Palais de l’Institut, the first since Lemonnier’s [11].
Weakened by illness and marked by cruel family bereavements, Jean-Pierre Babelon had become less active in recent years, although he remained loyal to his friends and always curious about current research. He died on 2 February, in the shadow of his Montmartre parish, "Saint-Jean des briques". A list of all his official positions, titles and orders of knighthood (Légion d’honneur, Mérite, Arts et lettres, Médaille de la Ville de Paris) shows that France did not spare its gratitude to the great scientist that was Jean-Pierre Babelon. However, this image only imperfectly reflects the man we were lucky enough to know and get to know from 1992 onwards: endowed with a certain phlegm, gentle and willingly deadpan, he had an ascetic face brightened by a sparkling gaze. Voluntarily enthusiastic, this Catholic with a strong faith was an upright character, an enemy of conflict. Some may have criticised him for being an "heir" - he himself spoke mischievously of "a heavy heredity": for our part, we on the contrary find this title magnificent; the aristocracy of the mind is fully worthy of admiration, as Jean-Pierre Babelon illustrated with nobility [12].
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- 3. Claude Mignot
Photo taken from a video - See the image in its page
Very different appears the career of Claude Mignot (ill. 3), not much his junior. Born in 1943 in Laon into a Catholic bourgeoisie family (his doctor father was a renowned alienist), he embarked on literary studies, which led him to the École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm and the agrégation in classics (1968). His meeting with André Chastel was to prove decisive; Chastel had brilliant ideas about architecture, not to mention Italian painting, and attracted a number of young disciples with diverse backgrounds, including the literary Claude Mignot and Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, who had graduated from Sciences Po. This was the start of the Inventaire Général adventure, created in 1964 by Chastel with the support of Malraux, which was to revolutionise the methods used in the history of French architecture by shifting the focus away from ’aristocratic’ monographs and towards built objects and their territories. Claude Mignot opted for modern architecture, completing his academic training during a two-year stay at the Villa Medici (1971-1973), now open to art historians since the Malraux reform. Italy remained close to his heart, and he would return there again and again for the rest of his life.
On his return to Paris, he was logically thinking of studying seventeenth-century Italian architecture, with particular reference to Pietro da Cortona, when Jacques Thuillier (1928-2011) turned his attention to French art, and above all to monographs of the kind he was conducting at the time on French painting of the same period. Architectural monographs were so widespread in Italy that they seemed to have been completely neglected in France, after unsuccessful attempts such as Albert Laprade’s confused François D’Orbay (1960). Thus, in a reversed national pattern, the English school, following Anthony Blunt and his famous Art and architecture in France. 1500-1700 (London, 1953) has undertaken a series of studies on the masters of the ’century of Louis XIII’: David Thomson is studying Du Cerceau, Rosalys Coope Salomon de Brosse and Braham and Smith François Mansart...
Claude Mignot, a senior lecturer at the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, took up the challenge and embarked on a study of an original figure, Pierre Le Muet (1591-1669). An architect and theorist, Le Muet left behind a major work of religious architecture in Paris (the Val-de-Grâce), which Mignot unravelled in his then muddled dossier [13]), but also civil (hôtels d’Assy, de Saint-Aignan, de Laigue, de Ratabon) and provincial (châteaux de Chavigny, Pont-sur-Seine and Tanlay...); above all, he remained famous for his work of 1623, Manière de bien bastir pour touttes sortes de personne, which Cl. Mignot republished with expert commentary in 1981. His vast literary and historical culture, his taste for architecture, but also for painting and cinema, opened him up to other horizons: in 1983, he published his first work, L’architecture au XIXe siècle, an original and too little-read synthesis [14]. This book is part of the great moment of rediscovery and reassessment of the century of industry, as well as the struggles that arose from the scandal of Les Halles, demolished ten years earlier. He also carried out a number of projects with the Inventaire during this period, notably on seaside architecture and Breton manor houses (Le manoir en Bretagne (1380-1600), Paris, Cahiers de l’Inventaire général no. 28, 1993) with Monique Chatenet, his loyal partner.
In 1985, having become a lecturer at Paris-IV, Claude Mignot began working with Antoine Schnapper, then professor, on a number of dissertations on seventeenth-century French architecture, alternating between building monographs (Hôtel de Lauzun, Hôtel de Bretonvilliers) and monographs on second-line architects (Jean Marot, Daniel Gittard, Gabriel Le Duc, Pierre Cottart, etc.). He furthered his own research on the "century of Louis XIII", writing all the sections on architecture for the catalogue of the major exhibition on Cardinal de Richelieu (Richelieu et le monde de l’esprit, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1985) and, in the same year, contributed with Françoise Hamon and Catherine Arminjon to the Inventaire handbook on "L’hôtel de Vigny", then the headquarters of the institution, a complex building disfigured by a shoddy restoration. Finally, he co-directed the major symposium on "the Parisian hotel" held in 1989, alongside Jean-Pierre Babelon [15].
In 1991, he defended his doctoral thesis on Le Muet, under the supervision of Jean Guillaume. As the state thesis had been abolished in 1984, this new-style doctorate was followed by his ’habilitation to direct research’, which enabled him to become a professor. He was then elected to the chair of history of modern architecture at the University of Tours, where he succeeded Jean Guillaume, who had left for the Sorbonne. The crowning glory of his career came in 2000, when Claude Mignot took over from Jean Guillaume. During his twenty-one years as a professor, he trained a series of PhDs, all of whom were very attached to this master, who was as benevolent as he was demanding, and whose spirit of synthesis and clarity were marvellous. Monographs on major architects (Libéral Bruand, by Joëlle Barreau; Jacques Lemercier, by the author of these lines; the Franques, by Béatrice Gaillard; Louis Le Vau, by Alexandre Cojannot, the Métezeau, by Emmanuelle Loizeau ; Etienne Martellange, by Adriana Sénard), studies of materials and building sites (the stone of Paris, by Ania Guini; the building sites of Parisian churches, by Léonore Losserand), typological studies (the town hall in seventeenth-century France, by Pascal Liévaux ; the Parisian house, by Linnéa Tilly-Rollenhagen; the town of Saumur, by Éric Cron; hotels in Dijon, by Agnès Botté; the distribution and furnishing of Parisian hotels, by Nicolas Courtin; the Norman manor house in the 15th century, by Xavier Pagazani; the bathroom in civil architecture, by Ronan Bouttier), religious orders (the Visitandines, by Laurent Lecomte)... A new picture of the art of building in the 17th century, finer, richer and more complex, is finally taking shape [16].
Claude Mignot’s research in the latter part of his career led him to deepen the furrows already dug in the late 1970s: the French château, with a fine book on Tanlay [17]; the Parisian hotel, with works by Le Muet; architectural drawing and engraving, based on Jean Marot and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau [18]. He has also worked on a number of other subjects: architectural theory, with the question of models and orders; the figure of François Mansart in particular, on whom, after the 1998 exhibition with Jean-Pierre Babelon, he published a highly documented monograph in 2016 [19]. He left dozens of studies and articles, striking for their intelligence and logical construction. Far from any over-interpretation, but open to the contribution of other disciplines, attentive to sources as well as texts, Claude Mignot practised an open history of architecture, without exclusivity or doctrinaire position.
Through the stimulating international colloquia in Tours, the proceedings of which were published in the "De Architectura" collection by Editions Picard, or during the famous Friday afternoon seminar, the whole family of French architectural history gathered around him, without Claude Mignot ever having the character or authoritarianism of a mandarin. He was fundamentally a good man, never straying into areas that are common among some academics, such as jealousy or hyper-narcissism. No doubt this benevolent character and his ability to help others, colleagues and students alike, as well as the late publication of his thesis in 2022 [20], prevented Claude Mignot from occupying an even greater place in the media landscape [21]. The Republic did not honour him with any medal or distinction.
Like all architectural historians, like Jean-Pierre Babelon as we have said, he was obviously interested in heritage, both in his work and in his involvement with associations (Momus, and later at Le Crotoy, in the Bay of the Somme, a holiday resort that he loved so much and defended here) and also as an expert: he sat on the Commission du Vieux Paris from 2008. A Parisian at heart, in 2004 he produced a deliberately didactic Grammaire des immeubles parisiens, designed to educate the eye of the walker [22]. Claude Mignot ended his days in the heart of the New Athens that he loved so much, to the point of chairing the 9e Histoire association for six years. He died on 13 November. At the ceremony at Notre-Dame de Lorette a few days later, we were able to gauge the attachment of his students as well as his friends and colleagues, who were deeply affected by his death [23].
Each in his own way, with intelligence and sensitivity, Jean-Pierre Babelon and Claude Mignot transformed the history of modern architecture in France. The extent to which they have covered identical ground - Paris, the arts in the seventeenth century, the relationship between France and Italy, François Mansart, the private mansion, the heritage issue, Les Halles and Old Paris - is striking, while shedding similar yet distinct light on each. Using monographs as well as typological studies, summaries as well as case studies, in the field and in the archives, they have given a new lease of life to a discipline that needed less certainty than constant questioning and a sharp eye for every detail of the whole.
At a time when the history of architecture is evolving, with less and less emphasis on the university and more on the schools of architecture, these departures are an occasion for regret on two counts: that of seeing two exceptional individuals leave, both for their work and for their personalities, and that of feeling that a page is gradually being turned.