The Le Corbusier Scandal, or, was Le Corbusier a Fascist?

In 2015 an essay by the architect Marc Perelman was printed in Le Monde claiming Le Corbusier was a fascist and that the French academy had whitewashed this from architectural history. The 2015 exhibition Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme, a major retrospective of the architect, held at the Centre Pompidou was adduced as evidence since it did not mention Le Corbusier’s politics, despite three French books on Le Corbusier’s fascism appearing in 2015, and the scandal that erupted around them. The letter was signed by myself, Zeev Sternhell, Xavier de Jarcy, Marc Perelman, and Daniel de Roulet; and reprinted in English by Verso in January 2017. The Fondation le Corbusier, who are unhappy with this turn of events, wrote to me asking me why I signed the letter. This essay will attempt to answer the question by evaluating the French quarrel, on both sides, and allegations about Le Corbusier’s fascism.

fascism 6 (2017) 196-227 … I wrote my book because I was shocked. I only understood in 2013 that lc was a fascist. As I say in the introduction, I couldn't sleep anymore. I thought he was a democrat, a liberal. I suddenly felt guilty and ashamed for having admired him since I was 16. Then I started to investigate, and Arnaud Dercelles told me there was an exhibition to be held in 2015. So I sent some extracts of my book to Hélène Monsacré, Zeev Sternhell's publisher, and that is how it started. xavier de jarcy1 … The books of Chaslin, Jarcy and Perelman, because they appeared at the same time, were a 'thunderclap in a sky not too serene'; and the article that I wrote in Le Monde in May 2015 a genuine parricide. The organizers of the Beaubourg exhibition (2015) believed they were repeating the success of 1987. A tragic error. They believed and still believe in the existence of a plot by the three of us. My point of view is this: I don't think that Xavier's and my book disturbed them; it's Chaslin's book that annihilated them because François Chaslin comes from the seraglio -and there, he was a traitor; and he has been treated as such: cancellation of invitation[s], old friends or acquaintances have left him, and so on. It took him a long time to understand what was happening to him. He had put his finger where he should not have, in spite of his admiration for Le Corbusier. It was already too much for all the aficionados. Our three books have emerged as a return of the repressed (S. Freud). Olivier Cinqualbre and Nader Vossoughian. While I was not able to attend the symposium, its intentions are declared in its mission statement 'The Symposium will also examine the symbolic function of the scapegoat that Le Corbusier has embodied in his lifetime to this day. Le Corbusier's life and career have been forever interpreted as the generic explanation of the totalitarian dimension of modernity and its substitutes.' Jarcy wrote to me: 'Marc and François went to the symposium, and I attended a few talks. Jean-Louis Cohen first explained lc was a kind of reactionary businessman when managing his brick factory before working as an architect: he hated the trade-unionists who dared to go on strike. Then Cohen tried to demonstrate lc could also be considered a leftist, since he attracted some communists and socialists in the Thirties and tried to work for the Front Populaire government. But he also said: "In the Twenties Le Corbusier turned towards Italy." Baudouï said lc was an opportunist in a period of German occupation, that was very confused. Cohen (Columbia University, New York), and Antoine Picon. However, Chaslin does not fit into either camp, while he has had a major role, as he felt his book was unjustly conflated with Perelman and Jarcy's projects. Unlike those writers, Chaslin, a radical theorist against the academy, as well as being a journalist was also an insider, who, according to Perelman, is now considered a 'traitor' . The notion of two sides is subverted by Chaslin My essay will adumbrate the historiography of Le Corbusier's politics, left and right, present the evidence and arguments from two of the books; respond to the variety of objections to the books; and address the question, why these books are appearing now, since material on Le Corbusier's fascism has been available since 1970. I include Chaslin's book-as the most significant, that dealt the largest blow to the Corbusians-and Perelman's book as a vastly different project-which charges Le Corbusier's oeuvre itself with fascism. Taken together, these books, their opponents, and the Le Corbusier scandal can be compared to the film Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa, which films four consecutive witnesses narrating the same story about a murder-in alternative self-serving ways. The murder, the assemblage called le fascisme français, certainly took place, the question is what was Le Corbusier's true relationship with it? This scandal is not only significant for Le Corbusier studies and France's heritage, but for the understanding of modern architecture and the architecture discipline more broadly -given Le Corbusier's mythic status in the field -he is considered by some to be the progenitor of modern architecture and urbanism.
The question is complicated by the fact that there was not one French fascism. As Robert Soucy wrote: 'a major weakness of French fascism was its failure to coalesce behind a single individual or a single party. Even during the Nazi Occupation, Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français (ppf) and Marcel Deat's Rassemblement Nationale Populaire (rnp) failed to merge; the reasons are still vague, but the personal animosity and distrust between the leaders of the two formations was at times almost comic.'9 Instead there was a multiplicity of fascist groups often in conflict with each other: from the Action Française fascism 6 (2017) 196-227 and its transformation under Charles Maurras, to George Valois and Édouard Berth's Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, Valois' Le Faisceau, Jacques Doriot's ppf, Marcel Deat's rnp, and the panoply of fascist newspapers and fascist intellectuals-who moved in and out of different fascist groups and publications that were in open conflict with each other, with some common denominators, but never a consensus. Mark Antliff provides an important insight to the question: what 'united' the French fascists was their indebtedness to the ideology of myth making of Georges Sorel,10 the father of philosophical fascism, and 'their aestheticized theory of violence'11 derived from Sorel that was a fundamental tenet of fascist philosophy in France.12 Le Corbusier's experiences in various fascist groups, and the fascist newspapers-for which he was not only a writer but a founding member and editor-and the important fascist group that formed around Le Corbusier's theory of urbanism, a group that would reassemble at Vichy-very much reflects this difficulty of naming the French fascist matrix, on the one hand, but importantly the dominant role of architecture and urbanism that unified it.

Corbusian Historiography
The accusation that Le Corbusier was a fascist was already a problem during his life. In a vexatious letter to his ex-friend Christian Zervos, the art historian, collector, curator, and critic, who founded the magazine architecture, which in its promise of social revolution captured his vision for architecture and urbanism.23 I suggest it was Le Corbusier's construction of his political philosophy, and the attendant disciplinary myth surrounding his early writings, that contributed to this dominant view. In Right historiography, evidence of Le Corbusier's fascism was available in France since the French translation of Fishman's book in 197924 and available at the Fondation archives from 1970, in the form of Le Corbusier correspondence which became a key source for Chaslin's book.25 Yet, until 2015, the largely English writings on fascism did not take the form of condemnation of the French books; and they were somewhat backgrounded by the earlier dominant view that Le Corbusier was either left or nothing at all. In Fishman's brief and neutral presentation, Le Corbusier is portrayed as having mistakenly followed the syndicalists and then Vichy; and his grim professional failures that attend that mistake predominate the narrative. This account stands as an anathema to fascism-viewed as an order of excessive power-because Le Corbusier is shown to have had none. To Fishman, Le Corbusier's fascist tale is a tale of standing outside the order of power -and on that weak foundation, he loses any strong fascist identification. When I asked the Fondation why they objected to the accusation of Le Corbusier's fascism by Chaslin or Jarcy when those claims had been mentioned by Fishman, the answer I received was that Fishman presented a fair and balanced version of the truth contrary to the French authors. Perelman argues: 'in no passage of his chapter on Le Corbusier, [does] he [Fishman] characterize him precisely. On the contrary, he said: "Although he was neither a fascist nor a collaborator, he put his talents at the disposal of a regime that was both".'26 But Fishman's version contains one irregularity: 'Vichy was the culmination of a twenty year long path,' contradicting his position that fascism was accidental. Fascism was discussed in Macleod's dissertation Urbanism and Utopia, while it neither forms a significant portion of what is the longest and most famous study of Le Corbusier's political thought, nor does it name Le Corbusier as a fascist. Le Corbusier's affiliation with 23 Simone No one objected to Antliff's chapters -because these were simply not known to the insular architectural discipline, and Antliff's audience was art history, that has a well-established relationship with fascist modernist history. In 2003, Simon Richards devoted two chapters to the topic, 'Syndicalism' and 'Vichy'; but, damning as they were, they were camouflaged within the book's overarching theme Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self that never reverts to total condemnation of the architect.28 In 2008, Nicholas Fox Weber's biography of Le Corbusier thoroughly sets out the architect's relationship with Vichy and its pre-cursors, but again makes no judgement on these matters (though he makes it clear that others, notably Pierre Jeanneret, did make judgements). The story of Le Corbusier's fascism presented by three new witnesses in 2015 provides a new level of detail and comprehensiveness (Chaslin and Jarcy), and accusation (Jarcy and Perelman), unseen before.29 These are the first books on the architect with fascism as their target.

François Chaslin
Chaslin communicated that his book was grossly misunderstood, and that he was personally aggrieved by the media exposure, having been subjected to attacks following publication of his book, and what he sees as his unintentional role in the scandal.30 He wrote to me that 'this is a personal work that was One objection to this material is that eugenics was also popular among some communists. As communism desired to build a new man, some communists were eugenists; alternatively, Lyssenko, who was the 'official' biologist of the Stalinist regime, condemned eugenism. But importantly the context for Le Corbusier's eugenic ideas was Carrell and the fascist Vichy machine; and, eugenics at the time Le Corbusier adopted it was a major aspect of fascist ideology in Europe. An author from the Corbusian side who wishes to remain anonymous writes that In a joint effort of our two journalists, Corbu is abundantly associated with Alexis Carrel although the exchanges between the two men are reduced to a few couriers, and without Le Corbusier ever expressing any adherence to the racial theories of Carrel. The conference he gave to the Carrel Foundation in February 1943 resumed his speech on the radiant farms and villages but also his work undertaken for the ciam54 [conference of] Athens or that of Paris of 1937 on Housing and Leisure, [were] fully inspired by the Popular Front. Nothing infamous or suspicious appeared in this conference where the evocation of the conditions of nature, of solar rhythm and the house dominates . . . Apart from the fact that Carrel belongs to the (very) many characters left or right . . . they agree on this need to clean up the cities. When Le Corbusier states that it is necessary to put an end to the slums, those of Algiers or the unhealthy island No. 6 in Paris, he does not do so in the name of any eugenic or racial theory or . . . sterile rejection [of] the suburbs, but in the name of hygiene, which would make health a condition of life or nature essential to the development of man.55 This is an attempt to separate Le Corbusier from Carrell by way of Le Corbusier's work on health. However, what both Chaslin's and Perelman's books demonstrate is that biology, health, and hygiene were key to Le Corbusier's political thought, terms that were already linked to Le Corbusier's racism (that was established prior to the books), and not merely cleanliness. In my visit to 53 Ibid Guerrin, 'Le Corbusier, l'architecte de la Cité radieuse,' 4. 65 Cohen, who has family connections with the jewish millieu in La Chaux-de-Fonds acknowledged the antisemitic statements by Le Corbusier but adds 'Le Corbusier's friendship with certain Jewish clients, the sculptor Chaim Jacob; and, the presence in his office of architects who will emigrate to Palestine, like the Belarusian Shlomo Bernstein or Sam Barkai, and his apparent sympathy for the Zionist project. Cohen spoke of an unpublished text, written in December 1938 for one of his most active representatives, Wolfgang von Weisl: "Indeed, it is the whole of Europe and not only the six million Jews of the country beyond the Rhine that hangs the threat of annihilation. The Jews were the first victims, but they cannot remain the last or only prey for the unleashing of the racial passions".' fascism 6 (2017) 196-227 Cohen writes that Le Corbusier's antisemitism is of a different order than that of say 'Céline or Le Corbusier's master, Auguste Perret, president of the order of architects under Vichy which excludes Jewish members . . . [and] that others do not make these nuances.'66 But this argument about degrees of antisemitism does not acquit Le Corbusier, the varying degrees of hatred does not place a person outside of hatred. The anonymous author of 'Le Corbusier et le fantasme français' makes a similar objection: 'there is nothing that can testify to militant antisemitism as was the case of Brasillach, Rebatet, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline . . . What would be his acceptance as a member of the Jewish Circle of La Chaux-de-Fonds on November 30, 1914, especially as he is accepted . . . with more than two thirds of the votes, as required by the regulations. This closed circle would not have accepted an antisemite within it.'67 The question is why then did Le Corbusier write extreme antisemitic statements after having been welcomed by the Jewish circle as a member? Jarcy's response is: At that time, Le Corbusier had already been publicly accused of antisemitism, because he had designed the plan of a new district in La Chaux de Fonds, in which he placed the Jews in a separate zone68 . . . It is true he was not a militant [antisemite]. But he was surrounded by people -Lamour, Lagardelle, d'Eaubonne -who spread antisemitic allusions . . . and he praised Giraudoux's Pleins Pouvoirs, a racist, antisemitic, antimasonic and eugenist book.69 Chaslin presents the evidence of Le Faisceau, Vichy, eugenics, and antisemitism with an unprecedented level of detail and vigour by inserting the reader within the fascist millieu surrounding the architect, and for this he should be commended. But unlike the other authors he does not condemn Le Corbusier's collaboration or antisemitism sometimes even excusing it: 'Maybe Corbu was a banal antisemite, anti-Semitic without particular hatred and also pragmatic, considering that any problem, the "Jewish question" in particular, could find a solution by town planning. ' First, Le Corbusier studies 'resemble a large religious sect';74 and it 'relies mostly on abstract architectural data by Le Corbusier without critical examination.'75 'The reign . . . of an empirical sociology, quantitativiste and . . . positivist, which analyses only the brute facts and the definitive a priori givens' results in an impoverishment of theory he calls 'the worst form of pragmatic history' .76 Perelman is referring to the familiar disciplinary methodology that reproduces archival materials in forensic detail describing e.g. the gloss and thickness of the paper, the type of font. 'The accumulation of objects . . . (books, paintings, sculptures, tapestries) absorb, petrify and block reflection' because they 'reify' (commodify) those objects i.e. turn them into visual fetishes, in what is a classic Marxist argument.77 Next, Perelman attributes to Corbusian historiography the problem where historians excuse the crimes of an historical figure by casting them as 'servile protagonists' 'who are merely the children of a time and could be excused for their errors.' This is a bad argument says Perelman because 'all humans are 73 Email The methodology Perelman will now use to re-brand Le Corbusier's oeuvre as 'totalitarian' is pure French theory of the post-68 tradition. To justify his bold premise Perelman argues that Le Corbusier's politics cannot and should not be separated from his work, that his writings and buildings all converge on his fascist political project.82 Perelman sees in Le Corbusier's grand scheme for the 'measurement of life itself' a sinister order that is a form of oppression and control by a supreme nature without any intermediary like free will or choice.83 He derides Le Corbusier's 'oss/bone' architecture 'the identification with the skeleton . . . an assemblage of bones organized by nature . . . cleaned of all flesh.'84 For Perelman this is not a metaphor of the body but of death -life as such takes place under the authority of this figure of death he calls 'a large ossuary.'85 As such, it 'rests on a pathological foundation' namely a Freudian regression, making it not modern at all.86 78 Ibid., 25-26. 79 Ibid., 56. This remains controversial and unconfirmed, as to the incompleteness of the archive, denied by the Fondation. 80 Ibid., 58-59. 81 Ibid., 62. 82 Ibid., 56-57. 83 Ibid [It] admits of no screen or continuous surface that would arrest the gaze. The empty space is a transparent volume where the spectator-inhabitant visualizes the void up to the openings; the view extends past the window in length opened on the landscape, from the inside to the outside . . . The inhabitant is now in a relation of alienation with his habitat . . . in the sense that nothing is close . . . An . . . ontological substitution has . . . occurred between the whole of the body and a fragment of it, . . . the eye88 . . . This alienation, in the first sense of the term, evacuates the body from the interior, in a way that de-inhabits the apartment.89 Chapter 6 proceeds with an assault on each of Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture, primarily the tyranny of the gaze and totalizing effects of Corbusian visuality.90 The eye in Perelman's theory is the architecture itself, selfaware, it not only controls the vision of the inhabitant, what he sees and so on, but liquidates the subject's own consciousness as he becomes a docile servant of the architecture. Perelman's critique is so dazzling in its abstractness and intellectual virtuosity that on the one hand it's froid and on the other hand it explains Le Corbusier's Cinq points better than Le Corbusier ever could have. He cites Beatriz Colomina's work on the gaze, but the undeniable brilliance of his prose transcends any theoretical critique of Le Corbusier in the Anglo-American academy. Perelman's espace froid is compelling reading, but not equivalent to fascism -there being no test for whether an architecture constitutes a general fascism or fascist regime, and the very large difference between naming a city and a building fascist -but neither does Perelman definitively use the word fascist, favoring the term totalitarian. Fascism or fascist are not part of his book title. If we accept Perelman's reading of the gaze, Le Corbusier invented a language so interior, so severed from anything real, that it scarcely relates to any political system let alone fascism which was anti-rationalism. I suggest the abstract system of the gaze finds its model in German philosophy not in French politics. The Corbusian world of hyper-rationalism and cold idealism 87 Ibid.,  might fit more easily within the philosophy of Platonism or Hegel post-Kant, not the hot syndicalisme of Valois or Sorel.91 On the other hand, the reading that follows gets closer to its prize. Perelman writes, that for Le Corbusier, 'society is in its entirety understood as a body under the authority of an assemblage of different machines . . . welded to each other.'92 The Corbusian city becomes a vast cyborg, with the implication that all humans are evacuated, having become cyborgs plugged into the larger machine. This effectively describes the totalitarian subordination of the individual to the State via a sinister technology and co-option of the body therein.
A few years before his death Le Corbusier wrote 'the city is biology' describing his work in 1922 as a micro-biologist who 'undertook laboratory work' , produced a 'diagnosis' and 'thus cleared the fundamental principles of modern urban planning.'93 Perelman quotes Le Corbusier in 1960: 'We have need for a diagnosis and a line of conduct. In 1922, I tried to enter into the analysis, and undertook laboratory work. Isolating my microbe, I watched how it developed. The biology of my microbe appeared in indisputable clarity. Certainties were acquired and a diagnosis. Then, by an effort of synthesis, I cleared the fundamental principles of modern urban planning.' This shows Le Corbusier held these biological notions right until his death. 'The goal is to create a protoplasma-envelope, an identical cell membrane for each housing repeated to infinity, on the model of the human cell.'94 This would be merely another banal metaphor but for the attempt to fit humanity into this model. In Urbanisme Le Corbusier castigates 'the man with two legs, a head and a heart -an ant or a bee subservient to the law, fitting into a box, behind a window; [yet who] . . . crave[s] total freedom, a total fantasy, in which each would act according to his will . . . It is a law of human biology, the square box, the room . . . The dwelling [must be] able to hold the inhabitants of cities . . . to hold them back.'95 Perelman concludes this is a totalitarian definition of housing, insofar as it represents a carceral conception of housing. But is it fascist? Perelman's rendering of Le Corbusier suggests a eugenic model of architecture as a biological instrument of population control. But to make eugenics specifically fascist, it would need racism -Le Corbusier's racial ideas for housing. What Perelman demonstrates is that Le Corbusier was not merely using Carrel for political advantage but passionately believed in the biological 'control' model of the city and social life. The most compelling evidence in the book is the discussion of sport in Le Corbusier's oeuvre. First, Perelman confirms that Le Corbusier and Winter shared a sports ideology, and formed a joint project that issued directly from Le Faisceau. Perelman cites Winter in a statement that could have been written by Le Corbusier: 'In an article written late 1940 and published in hospital records (No. 11-12, 1942), [Winter] discusses . . . the great Vichy tradition and fascist return (the myth of a true origin) to "the great laws that direct the lives of the men on the planet, close to life, natural life" "the . . . natural laws of life, the cosmic rhythms which determine our organic balance and to which we must obey".'96 Winter then ascribes to Le Corbusier the task of curing France: 'We speak of one who will take responsibility for the health of France, one who, with the help of town planning, physical culture and sport, will finally find his true effectiveness.' Winter's essay 'Work, physical and sports culture' published in the monthly journal of general education and Pétain sports stadiums (1944), theorizes 'sport as a link between the workers and the bosses. A link which would allow the struggle of classes not to develop';97 in other words, using the syndicalist arguments of Le Faisceau.
On Le Corbusier's advice, Winter also developed the idea that the French government (Pétain) must 'build healthy logis everywhere, with their logical extension: the sports facilities, without which they would be inconceivable.' Also 'The ville radieuse is a thick weft of tangible [sports] centres, a dense connective tissue of land and equipment, a chessboard with sports bases.' Sports fields were to be built at the foot of houses combined with Le Corbusier's injunctions for workers and their families to undertake daily 'essential bodily activities' which would connect the workers to their bosses. 'Like a cellular tissue, the urban system is defined by the movement of sports, by bodies mobilized and framed.' 'It is through sport or physical activity that the body is structured to densify the urban fabric.' 'Sport means filling the free areas, gaps between the architectural buildings . . . and to fill the day of urbanized individuals.' 'Planning equates "free" time to 96 Perelman, Le Corbusier, 53-54. 97 Ibid.
sports time.' Perelman argues: 'This "sportivisation" of everyday life, is parallel to the "sportivisation" of economic life. The entire social structure is designed as a Sport, a violent . . . battle between all men: the weak [versus] . . . those who want to win.' He concludes, sport is 'the perfect totalitarian idea of urban society: competition, war, performance, discipline, etc.' Note, Le Corbusier also subscribed to social Darwinism, the idea that the totality of social life is a biological competition or war in which only the strongest survive. Perelman does not use the term fascist, here, but if fascism means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology -then he makes a case with the example of sport that Le Corbusier's city, if ever realized, could be called a fascist city.98 In his book, Perelman is not only naming the body and biology as key instruments in his definition of Le Corbusier's fascism, he is using the body as the key instrument of his critique, in the tradition of Foucault, Deleuze and the radical French left. The Fondation dismisses this as 'Foucauldianism' and therefore nothing at all to do with Le Corbusier or fascism. Yet such a neo-Marxist biopolitical critique is entirely appropriate to the question of Le Corbusier's fascism for the very reason that European fascism grew out of the French Marxist tradition from the nineteenth century, and reactionary movements during the French enlightenment, and it reemerges in the post-68 Foucauldian milieu whose target was precisely fascism -not a named regime or political system but a covert psychoanalytic phenomenon exploited by the State. If Perelman's critique of the gaze and of hyper-rationalism in Le Corbusier does not sound like true (political) fascism, the biological conception of architecture as a method of cleansing the city-state, and subordinating the individual to it, does, as does the sports-corporation dystopia that micro-managed the citizen at every level from the social to the cellular. Perelman's critique is Foucauldian, precisely because it is anti-fascist. 98 Some might argue that the 'sportivisation' of everyday life could be considered an attribute of socialism, but sportivisation in Le Corbusier appears in the historical context of La ville radieuse, after Le Corbusier had joined the syndicalist movement, which is also a key source of evidence of Le Corbusier's fascist thought in Chaslin

Objections to the Books (The Criminal Defence)
The first objection to these books is that they were part of a mediatized hyperbole -as confirmed by Chaslin's experiences. The urban architect Jacques Sbriglio describes the three books as Lynchage médiatique.99 Macleod objects to Chaslin's book on the grounds that it is essentially an argument of 'guilt by association' . Yet from Le Corbusier's founding role in fascist journals, and activities in fascist groups, and especially Bordachar's testimony, the evidence is hard to dismiss. The same anonymous author from the Corbusian front raises an important objection -these works condemn an architect based on his personal biography. This is true for Jarcy, but not Chaslin who does not condemn the master, or Perelman who criticizes the work itself. A related objection is that Le Corbusier was not confused but opportunistic -pursuing whatever movement would accept his plans and hire him. Cohen has the term 'mutual instrumentalisation' for this view, that has dominated the question of Le Corbusier's politics for fifty years. The anonymous author argues that 'Le Corbusier sublimates the question of politics by expressing his interest in all revolutions which undermine the conventions, habits and traditions perceived as obstacles to the implementation of his architectural and urban theories.'102 According to Cohen103 Le Corbusier's posture is not mere opportunism but a matter of 'seduction' , Le Corbusier 'Faced with the leaders to whom he intends to wrest orders, internalizes the discourse, which he takes to his account in an attempt to convince them . . . . In spite of his friendships for ideologues deeply involved in the politics of Petain, it is in the order of seduction that he will remain in Vichy, without arriving at the political act [itself].' 104 Chaslin opposes this view of Le Corbusier as 'the worst opportunism': 'I think on the contrary that Le Corbusier was primarily an ideologue, a politician and one of the "leaders" of what in another era would have been called a . . . group, a more or less dormant cell . . . a militant core that yearned for totalitarianism and that only the confusion of the moment confined it to failure. '105 The problem with the 'contradictory or confused' and 'opportunistic' arguments is that they dismiss Le Corbusier's thought as non-serious, lacking in integrity or intellectual focus. Any serious student of Le Corbusier including those at the Fondation will agree Le Corbusier was a serious thinker, a person of conviction whose writings expressed his innermost beliefs. Those who protest that Le Corbusier's left activities were elided by the French authors or that make a general claim that Le Corbusier was not a fascist but an ill-fated opportunist have not addressed the specific accusations of fascism ascribed to Le Corbusier by Chaslin and Jarcy. In fact Cohen was quoted saying: the books are 'manipulative but conceding the research was thorough.'106 The question is how to understand left and right in Le Corbusier's thought and action. fascism 6 (2017) 196-227

Ni droite ni gauche
Le Corbusier's peculiar political trajectory can only be understood within the development of the historical complex that was French fascism. Perelman contests the principal defence against Le Corbusier's fascism which promulgates 'the idea of a Le Corbusier who first tried Italian Fascism, then rallied to the Popular Front, later to be infatuated by the ussr. In short, we are introduced to a Le Corbusier caught between the often extremist political movements left or right,'107 that 'the reality [of fascism] is precisely a summation of multiple contradictions, and [each] dependent one on the other. '108 This idea that Le Corbusier couldn't be a fascist because he was also affiliated with the left ignores the complexities of French fascism, and the fact that key French fascists including those in Le Corbusier's circles were equally involved in left and right groups -for the same historical reasons -that fascism evolved in no straightforward way out of the split between the socialist groups in France at the time. The evolution of Le Corbusier's thought mirrored the evolution of French fascism, and the incontrovertible fact that socialism remained a part of it until the end. This history is also compounded by the fact that not only were there a variety of French fascisms; within the matrix of fascism and modernism there are a series of common denominators that receive greater or lesser emphasis depending on whether the orientation within the fascist matrix was left or right; and that this instability meant that, with changing socioeconomic and political conditions, individuals moved in and out of the fascist matrices while retaining some of these common denominators in the process. 109 The fascism scholar Zeev Sternhell locates the rise of fascist ideology across Europe in the 'anti-materialist' transformation of Marxism that took place in France after the First World War, which opposed classical liberalism and the rationalist ideology of the French Revolution. The first seeds for French fascism were planted by Georges Sorel's leftist students who violently rejected the material values of bourgeois capitalism, and decried the Marxist view that socialism issued from class struggle (the emancipation of the proletariat). The Sorelians took over the proletariat and materialist interpretation of historyin this perversion of Marxism that would be branded fascist.
The ideological biography of Sorel, the intellectual father of French fascism, traces an ambiguous intellectual trajectory that can be paralleled to that of Valois and the early Le Corbusier-because they issued from the same historical ground. In 1893, Sorel declared himself a Marxist and a socialist,110 writing for the earliest French Marxist journals, but by the turn of the century was active in the 'revisionist debate' and 'crisis of Marxism' . in French fascist circles in the 1930s.113 In Ni Droite ni gauche Sternhell traces the origins of this left-right contradiction to the French revolution and Enlightenment history. He writes that democratic and liberal France, Jacobin France, nurtured not only the ideology of the French Revolution but also its antithesis . . . France like Germany, gave birth at the end of the nineteenth century to a . . . cultural nationalism that was sometimes . . . of a biological and racial character . . . From the end of the nineteenth century, this other political tradition launched an all-out attack on liberal democracy . . . From the end of the nineteenth century, these two traditions [liberalism and nationalism] fought each other but also coexisted, often in the same work, in the thinking of the same person, independently of the celebrated left-right dichotomy. The traditional concept of a left-right conflict takes into account the realities of the period only very partially, and it often fails to take them into account at all. Neither right nor left, fascism therefore united antibourgeois, antiliberal nationalism, and revolutionary syndicalist thought, each of which joined in reflecting the political culture inherited from eighteenth-century France.114

Was There a Conspiracy?
An interesting question is why these French books appeared in 2015, and why this has turned into a scandal in France, when evidence of Le Corbusier's fascism has been available since 1970. I put these questions to the three authors.
In response, Perelman sent me his publications list on Le Corbusier's politics of the body spanning forty years: 'I did not wait until 2015 to attack radically the political positions, and the written and projected works of Le Corbusier.' But it was only in 2015 that Perelman's work on Le Corbusier was translated into English. As for why all three books came out now, Chaslin replied: 113 Macleod in a letter to Chaslin wrote that 'ni droite, ni gauche was one of Prélude's slogans. ' Chaslin, Email from François Chaslin to Simone Brott, 28 January 2017. 114 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), x, xiii. We can add from Prélude: 'Plus traditionnels que la droite, plus révolutionnaires que la gauche.' But one thing is very specific to the French fascism: the influence of the Action française, catholic, monarchist, antimasonic and violently antisemitic.
A trigger, . . . was the publication in January 2013 of the second of the three volumes of Le Corbusier's letters to his family  I do not know if there was a real conspiracy. There was a fierce defence of Le Corbusier through the flc. The archives of Le Corbusier -which Le Corbusier had surely after the war eliminated a good part! -were sorted and classified in the 1980s-1990s. Perhaps before! . . . Some individuals knew Le Corbusier's links with Vichy. For example, the 'resistant' Eugène Claudius-Petit; or the art historian Pierre Francastel who had very harsh words about Le Corbusier; Malraux, no doubt also, knew the history of this man. Françoise Choay, an architectural critic well known in France and abroad, has never had a clear position on Le Corbusier. [There was] still, great admiration, too much enthrallment to think the reality of Le Corbusier's projects. But for them and many others, we had to forget the past, reconstruct the cities destroyed by the war, move on to something else. You know that Paxton -an American -uncovered the role of Vichy vis-à-vis the Jews in the 1970s, not before. For Le Corbusier, it lasted even longer. But there was a screed of lead which forbade revealing Le Corbusier's past. It was totally taboo . . . In this case, everything is very political . . . from the end of the war until very recently there was an alliance -a kind of pact of silence -between De Gaulle's supporters and the Communists. This has weighed heavily, among others, on many aspects of French social and political life.118 Jarcy's response: France never admitted it's fascist past. President Chirac admitted only in 1995 the responsibility of the French State in the deportation of the French Jews. But most French historians still don't consider Vichy as a fascist regime. Why? Because that would mean admitting the treason of the French high bourgeoisie. Also, many historians have turned right wing, and they try to say Vichy was not so bad, or to whitewash some collaborationists.119 There is another obvious reason for these three books in France, the rise of a new fascism, a fascist wind spreading over Europe today, and the resistance movement that has emerged in relation to it. French writers are now looking to the fascist past for answers to the fascism of the present.