The Widely Ignored Parts of Le Corbusier's Biography

Le Corbusier is hailed as a great architect. He is depicted on the Swiss 10 Franc note. At his funeral in 1965, tributes from all over the world poured into Paris. It is time to have a look at the real Le Corbusier and what he stood for.

Le Corbusier, or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, died in 1965 in France near to Monaco. His funeral was held at the Louvre Palace in Paris and was a grand affair. Tributes were paid by the President of the United States, by the Kremlin, by Salvador Dali (one of his most ardent critics to be fair to the painter), and Japanese television transmitted the proceedings live in full length. Probably none of this would have happened if his carefully edited biography had been known in full at the time.

As a young man and artist, he had written about his Swiss home city of La Chaux-de-Fonds: “The little Jew will certainly one day be vanquished. I say ‘little Jew’, because here they command, make a nuisance of themselves and strut about, and their fathers have bought up the entirety of the local industry.”

In 1930, he acquired French citizenship. He wanted to escape Switzerland as he saw that the democratic structures of the country would be diametrically opposed to the monstrous architectural urban development he planned. He had travelled Europe, spending the Great War in Switzerland to return to Paris after everything was safe again.

When Marshall Petain proclaimed the collaborationist regime in Vichy France, he wrote to his mother: “If he (Petain) means what he proclaims, then Hitler can crown his life’s work: The reorganisation of Europe.” In the same letter he wrote about the Jews that “their blind greed for money has corrupted the country.”

At this point in his life, he tampered for the first time with his biography. When applying for a post in the Vichy administration, he forgot to mention his Swiss origins or any link to Switzerland at all. He had, over night, acquired a purely French pedigree and upbringing. He was consequently accepted into the administration and held several different and influential posts in fascist France.

After France was freed, he was immediately hired by the government. How could this have happened? Well, his biography had undergone another magical change. The Swiss element was quite prominent this time and Swiss are notoriously neutral, aren’t they? The blank of the Vichy regime years didn’t draw any particular attention, as many French opposed to Hitler had blanks to show for that self-same time.

It took 40 years for historians to fill in the blanks Le Corbusier had planted in his biography to cover up his involvement with fascism. There was no mention of his plans to rebuild Algiers, that he had built for the Kremlin, or that he had offered plans for a European city in Addis Ababa to Mussolini. But at last, looking at his soul-less and cold architecture, one is able to understand its function. His ‘modern urbanism’ was conceived as slave pens for the masses to serve their fascist masters. It’s a twist of irony that his architectural influence mostly damaged US cities.

What really makes you wonder is the fact how he came to grace the Swiss 10 Franc note. But that is a mystery the Swiss National Bank is bent on keeping a secret. Even more disturbing is the fact that at the same time Le Corbusier was intended for the 10 Franc note, Basel’s famous historian Jacob Burckhardt came under scrutiny of Swiss Parliament for his anti-Semitism, while Le Corbusier was never mentioned.

The holes in Le Corbusier’s biography are only slowly being filled in, and they open a can of worms. Most tellingly, the holes persist in many Wikipedia entries, having only been filled in the German version so far.

Further reading
Naga Queen
The Principality of Monaco in World War II
Assassinate Hitler: Maurice Bavaud