Marcel Poëte was a founding figure of French urbanisme, or town planning, both its pedagogy and its codification as a discipline and practice in the early twentieth century. The philosophy of Henri Bergson was central to his writings on the city and teaching at the École des Hautes Études Urbaines. I argue that Poëte's use of Bergson's philosophy, his ideas of the vital impulse and duration, may be understood in two ways. First, Poëte's Bergsonian urbanism participates in the greater context of continental fascism wherein Bergson's vitalism fomented a critique of scientific positivism and class hierarchy. Second, Poëte imports Bergson's ideas of time, la durée or duration, and “creative evolution,” into urbanisme as a means of resistance to vulgar functionalism in architecture and town planning.
Plato, Republic, trans. B. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN : Hackett, 1974); Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! ( Paris : Galilée, 1997); Jacques Derrida, Le droit à la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique ( Paris: Éditions Unesco1997); and Jacques Derrida , Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997).
2.
Pierre Ansay and René Schoonbrodt , Penser la ville: choix de texts philosophiques (Brussels: Atelier de Recherche et d'Action Urbaines, 1989), 34.
3.
Donatella Calabi, Marcel Poëte et le Paris des années vingt: aux origines de "l'histoire des villes," trans. from Italian into French by Pierre Savy ( Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 7.
4.
Marcel Poëte, Introduction à l'urbanisme (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2000), 81, 84; and Rémi Baudoui , "Marcel Poëte et Le Corbusier: l'histoire dans le project d'urbanisme," Les annals de la recherché urbaine, no. 37 (December 1987-February 1988): 46. Baudoui calls Poëte's "ideology" a "vitalist theory."
5.
In 1924, the École des Hautes Études Urbaines (EHEU) was integrated into the Sorbonne and became the Institute of Urbanism of the University of Paris. See the Web site of the University of Paris 12 Val de Marne: http://www.univ-paris12.fr/1132932971374/0/fiche___article/ (accessed June 2, 2008).
6.
For the history of the teaching mission at the Institute of Urbanism , see its Web site: http:///www.univ-paris12.fr/iup/hi/lcdhisti.htm (accessed February 2006).
7.
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982); Calabi, Marcel Poëte et le Paris des années vingt, 115-27; and Bernard Huet in conversation with Chantal Béret, "Conversation autour de l'architecture urbaine," catalogue from the exposition Architectures en France Modernité/Post-Modernité ( Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1981), 48-55.
8.
Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1986); and Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
9.
Marcel Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme," in Mélanges Paul Negulesco (Bucharest, Romania: Imprimeria Nationala , 1935), 11.
10.
Poëte's course on the evolution of the city was also inspired by a course he had taken on the same topic in 1916 at l'Hôtel de Saint-Fargeau, the first locale of the Library of the History of Paris. See Calabi, Marcel Poëte et le Paris des années vingt, 17.
11.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"3.
12.
Marcel Poëte , "Paris: son evolution créatrice,"La vie urbaine, vols. 14-15 (1937-1938), 275-318, 359-74, 21-43, 79-109. See also the Web site of the Institute of Urbanism: http://www.univparis12.fr/1132932971374/0/fiche___article/ (accessed June 2, 2008).
13.
Donatella Calabi , "Marcel Poëte: un militant de l'histoire urbaine,"Le visiteur: ville, territoire, paysage, architecture, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 86.
14.
Ibid., 91-93.
15.
The rather monistic belief that the modernism of Le Corbusier and CIAM [Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne] is the modernism of twentieth-century French urban and architectural development is both reductive and misleading. We owe this misunderstanding to the French media's recent exploitation of the now tumbledown modernism of large midcentury suburban high-rise housing developments known as les grands ensembles. The exorbitant crime rate and dereliction of some of the grands ensembles have together come to constitute the most potent representation of twentieth-century urbanisme tout court, in turn making Le Corbusier and CIAM modernism into the twin bêtes noirs of World War II reconstruction-era development (1943-1973). Greater scrutiny of both the contemporary landscape and history reveals a harried field of complexity, not to mention a few important specifics: not all grands ensembles are failures; not all postwar development occurred in the vocabulary of the towers, bars, and slabs of CIAM-style modernism; and beyond the influences Le Corbusier and CIAM, postwar French urbanization is the congelation of state-led financing and technocratic pragmatism, the Beaux-Arts training of architects and urbanists, and the teaching of urbanisme at the EHEU or what is today the Institut d'Urbanisme at the Sorbonne.
16.
Carola Hein , "Maurice Rotival: French Planning on a World-Scale (Part 1),"Planning Perspectives17 (2002): 5.
17.
The philosophy of vitalism exists in the present, as Gilles Deleuze is, indeed, by some measure, a vitalist. See the explicitly vitalist essay by Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," in Pure Immanence: Essays on Life, trans. Anny Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 25-33.
18.
Sanford Schwartz , "Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism," in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 277-8.
19.
Élan vital is variously translated as "life force," "vital force," and "vitality."
20.
Schwartz, "Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism," 290, 297.
21.
Frederick Amrine , "`The Triumph of Life': Nietzsche's Verbicide," in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131-2. This is a useful essay in that it successfully links Nietzsche and vitalism by way of copious long quotes from Nietzsche's writings. The essay also brings together Nietzsche's vitalism and the rise of National Socialism in Germany. A more persuasive, if not accurate, reading of Nietzsche's relationship to Nazi Germany is found in Gilles Deleuze, "Nietzsche," Pure Immanence: Essays on Life, 61-62.
22.
Marcel Poëte , "Une vie de cité par l'image,"Le visiteur: ville, territoire, paysage, architecture, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 107. This essay is an extract taken from Poëte's Une vie de cité, Paris de sa naissance à nos jours (Paris : Picard,1925).
23.
Henri Bergson , Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 118.
24.
Ibid., 142.
25.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"575.
26.
Bergson, Creative Evolution , 109.
27.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"575.
28.
Bergson explains that the "unforeseen reactions" of "living bodies," or the future, is propelled by "past experience." See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 65.
29.
Bergson, Creative Evolution , 163.
30.
Poëte, Introduction à l'urbanisme, 81. For Poëte, town planning [l'Urbanisme] is both a science and art.
31.
Ibid., 81.
32.
Poëte, "Paris: son evolution créatrice," vol. 14 (1937), 281.
33.
Bergson, Creative Evolution , 126.
34.
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 62.
35.
Ibid., 61.
36.
Ibid., 4. Sternhell explains that "the France of integral nationalism, of the revolutionary Right, was the real birthplace of fascism."
37.
Ibid., 6.
38.
Ibid., 7.
39.
Ibid., 10.
40.
Ibid., 4.
41.
Ibid., 5.
42.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"4.
43.
Ibid., 7.
44.
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 233-6; For the Futurist Manifesto, see http://www.wwnorton.com/nto/20century/topic_2_05/ftmarinetti.htm (accessed February 2006). The manifesto was published in French in the newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909.
45.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"4. Although it is unclear who Poëte quotes here, as he makes no citations, the reader is to presume that it is Bergson.
46.
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 28. Sternhell explains that syndicalists, such as "the Sorelians shared with nationalism a horror of bourgeois democracy, the eighteenth century, the secular spirit, and the French Revolution but also a respect for classical tradition and culture" (p. 78).
47.
Gaston Bardet , La Rome de Mussolini: une nouvelle ère romaine sous le signe du faisceau (Paris: Ch. Massin Editeurs, 1938), first page of book 1.
48.
Ibid., 3.
49.
Ibid., 303. Bardet quotes the Italian newspaper, La Roma Fascista, from June 21, 1931.
50.
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 6.
51.
Bardet, La Rome de Mussolini , n. 1, 304.
52.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"3.
53.
Bergson, Creative Evolution , 9.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid., 11.
56.
Ibid., 174-5.
57.
Poëte's lectures ultimately became a standard course on "The Evolution of the City" in an early curriculum at the École formulated by the preeminent French planner Henri Sellier. This course gave rise to Poëte's own academic chair as professor of "Cities in Evolution."
58.
In fact, we should see in the title "Paris: son évolution créatrice" an explicit nod to Bergson's L'évolution créatrice published in 1907.
59.
Bergson, Creative Evolution , 4.
60.
Ibid., 114.
61.
Poëte, Marcel , Introduction à l'urbanisme: l'évolution des villes, la leçon de l'antiquité (Paris: Boivin, 1929), 11.
62.
Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme,"11.
63.
Poëte, Introduction à l'urbanisme, 11. As Calabi explains, to avoid reducing the causality of the city's growth and transformation to a set of economic forces, Poëte is careful to note that the city evolves through time according to action made on it from the outside, namely, the economic, and the inside, namely, the citizens. See Calabi, "Marcel Poëte: un militant,"96.
64.
Robert J.Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
65.
Bergson, Creative Evolution , 39.
66.
Calabi, MarcelPoëte et le Paris des années vingt, 70.
67.
Ibid., 73.
68.
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 225.
69.
Ibid., 31.
70.
Ibid., 15. Just prior to this definition, Geddes explains the term with respect to the physical space of the city: "To focus these developments, indeed transformations, of the geographic tradition of town and country in which we were brought up, and express them more sharply, we need some little extension of our vocabulary. . . . Some name then for these city regions, these town aggregates, is wanted" (p. 14).
71.
Joseph Abram, L'Architecture moderne en France tome 2: du chaos à la croissance (Paris: Picard, 1999), 297.
72.
Frédéric Bertrand , "Une exposition et des rencontres,"Colonnes archives du XXe siècle, journal of the Institut français d'architecture , no. 19 (November 2002): 4; Pierre Clément, "Un pionnier de la recherche architectural et urbaine: pour une architecture comparée,"Colonnes archives du XXe siècle, journal of the Institut français d'architecture, no. 19 (November 2002): 20-21. The correlation between Auzelle and Durand reveals a certain tradition of pragmatism in French architecture and urbanism.
73.
Robert Auzelle , "Plaidoyer pour une organisation consciente de l'espace,"Architecture d'aujourd'hui, no. 104 (October-November 1964): 3.
Ibid.For further commentary from Auzelle on the future, see "Les grandes villes et l'urbanisation de l'avenir,"Urbanisme, no. 102-3 (1967 ): 10-23.
77.
Ibid., 37-38.
78.
Ibid., 37.
79.
Rosemary Wakeman , "Nostalgic Modernism and the Invention of Paris in the Twentieth Century,"French Historical Studies27, no. 1 (Winter 2004 ): 117.
80.
Ibid., 117.
81.
Baudoui, "Marcel Poëte et Le Corbusier,"46. Baudoui calls Poëte's "ideology" a "vitalist theory."
82.
Calabi, "Marcel Poëte: un militant,"93-94. Bergson describes an artist painting a canvas and how his "novelty arises from an internal impetus" that is "irreducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space." Bergson, Creative Evolution , 371. See also A.E. Pilkington, "Le rire and the Theory of Art," in his Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 12-16.
83.
Marcel Poëte , "Paris: son évolution créatrice,"La vie urbaine14 (1937): 275-318; La vie urbaine14 (1937): 359-74; La vie urbaine15 (1938): 21-43; and La vie urbaine15 (1938): 79-109.
84.
Marcel Poëte , Une vie de cité, Paris de sa naissance à nos jours Album (Paris: Picard, 1925).
85.
Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002): 141.
86.
Bergson, Matter and Memory , 9.
87.
Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, 141.
88.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 169-70, 177-8.
89.
Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, 143. Bergson's "image" seems an especially enticing manner in which to think our present world, in particular, the predominance of screen-based entertainment, from blockbuster movies to video art. However, for Bergson, the technology of the cinema, with its stringing together of atom-like stills, offered a reified and mechanical sense of reality. Our cinematographic view of reality is a result of adaptation: rather than intuition, it is a result of knowledge. Perhaps the advent of digital technology offers an exception to Bergson's concept of the cinematographic. See Bergson, Creative Evolution, 332-3.
90.
Poëte, "Une vie de cité par l'image,"109.
91.
Poëte, Introduction de l'urbanisme, 15.
92.
Ibid., 29.
93.
Ibid.
94.
Calabi, "Marcel Poëte: un militant,"98-100.
95.
Ibid., 95, quoting Poëte, "Les idées bergsoniennes et l'urbanisme," n. 41.
96.
See Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: Norton, 2006). See, in particular, the section titled "The Postmodern Right,"102-5.
