French minister denies ‘complicity’ in rehabilitating a ‘fascist’ over new Le Corbusier museum

France’s culture minister has been forced to deny "complicity" in rehabilitating a "fascist’ for backing a new museum in honour of France’s best-known architect, Le Corbusier.

It has long been known that Le Corbusier, famed for his revolutionary concrete creations, including a housing project in Marseille called La Cité Radieuse, had some ties to France’s collaborationist regime under Field Marshal Philippe Pétain.

But recent research suggests that one of the world’s most famous modern architects was a "militant fascist" who was far more anti-Semitic and a bigger fan of Hitler than previously thought.

Debate over whether one can separate his ideology from his work was reignited this week over plans to build a museum in his honour at Poissy, west of Paris, where Le Corbusier built his modernist Villa Savoya – a Unesco World Heritage treasure.

Scandalised by the plans, a group of university professors and architects, along with a feminist, a writer and a film director, published an op-ed in Le Monde accusing France’s culture ministry of “complicity in an attempt to rehabilitate a man who rejoiced in the French defeat (to the Nazis) of June 1940”. The museum has the backing of the national monuments centre, which answers to the culture ministry.

Le Corbusier, they said, had embraced fascism in Paris in the 1920s and was a paid-up member of the Pétain regime, spending 17 months in Vichy. He had made no secret of his anti-Semitism and wrote in 1941: “A glimmer of good: Hitler.”

Known as one of the main pioneers of the modern movement in architecture, Le Corbusier influenced France’s post-war planning policy for decades with his ideas of functional apartment blocks with parks. The policy ended in 1973 over claims these were soul-destroying and led to urban ghettoisation.

Paris only narrowly avoided seeing its historical centre wiped off the map in favour of one his 1925 “plans".

In their op-ed, the critics said his architecture reflected his totalitarian leanings, citing German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who said he sought to reduce men to “standardised termites”.  

Signatory Xavier de Jarcy, author of Le Corbusier, A French Fascism, said: “His ideas on urbanism, his social project are really fascism. He wanted to raze old districts, centralise power in towers and banish workers to the outskirts.”

“That’s why we believe the culture ministry can in no way give official approval to Le Corbusier”, they said, adding that it should withdraw participation in the museum project and the Le Corbusier Foundation, tear down a statue of the architect just inaugurated in Poissy and offer “no public support” to him.

In a written response, the culture ministry said it could not comment on “the extent to which Le Corbusier was fascinated by totalitarianism nor the scale of his commitment to the Vichy regime” – a “legitimate” debate it left to “historians”.

However, it said it “took full responsibility for the fact that the architectural work of Le Corbusier is of an exceptional nature” and should thus be cherished, adding that it was protected by Unesco.

The ministry received support from Michel Guerrin, editor of Le Monde, who said if you follow the signatories’ logic, why not order "our state-funded architecture schools to erase the artist from their teachings, close his buildings to visitors, remove his name from plaques and banish his works from museums”.

They failed, he said, to “take into account the complexity of the interwar period where modern aesthetics – purity, functionality, rationalism – passed through ideologies and regimes."

Le Corbusier, “this Picasso of concrete”, may have admired Hitler and Mussolini, he was later also close to the Communists and the Resistance and in 1965, then culture minister André Malraux pronounced at his funeral eulogy.

“This tribune, which aims to cast judgment on the attitude of an artist in today’s climate, is above all of our time,” he went on. “Given that great artists are generally not saints," they may have their work cut out to whitewash them all, he said.