The Enlightenment in France

The relative lull in architectural debate in the first decades of eighteenth-century France mirrors a more pervasive lethargy that both shifted and sapped intellectual performance at large. Rococo theory, on the one hand, turned the focus of architectural attention from monumental practice toward residential planning – a trend discernible in the three editions (the second and third each greatly expanded) of Augustin-Charles d'Aviler's Cours d'architecture (Course of architecture; 1691, 1710, 1738) and Jacques-François Blondel's De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, et de la décoration des edifices en general (On the layout of country seats, and the decoration of edifices in general; 1737–8). French rococo theory, on the other hand, was a body of thought planted on soft political and economic underpinnings. The great promise of the early reign of Louis XIV soon dissipated. The fate of his cultural renaissance in France was largely sealed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which sent tens of thousands of productive Huguenots into permanent religious exile. The whimsical overbuilding at Versailles and the disastrous War of Spanish Succession (1701–13) further depleted state coffers and undermined French morale, so much so that when the corpse of the monarch was wheeled to its burial place at Saint Denis in 1715, it was jeered along the way by angry mobs.