Sacredness as Morality: Ledoux and Chaux’s Utopia

In 1804, Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806) published L’architecture considerée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation (Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Morals, and Legislation). Despite the travails it took to complete the work—which was in the making for almost twenty years and was to have been released as an opus of several volumes, but was finally published as a single large book—the architect’s editorial choice was quite focused: He wanted to tell of an ideal city, to be built in the countryside and to be modeled after the emerging physiocratic ideas. The selected location was Chaux, a tiny village in the Franche–Comté region near the Swiss border where, between 1775 and 1779, Ledoux had built the Royal Saltworks (listed since 1892 as a World Heritage site by UNESCO, for its architectural value). While the Saltworks were the result of a specific professional engagement, all subsequent designs for Chaux came from Ledoux’s imagination; in fact, they exist solely on paper. Their purpose was to show their audience a city that could be built, at least in virtual form, and to lend credibility to its textual description and accompanying comments: true literary proof that aimed to show the possibility of a conciliatory utopia, in which social conflict could be subdued by a cult of Nature that everybody would subscribe to. Nonetheless, Ledoux was not content with a simple cult. Instead, he imagined secular rituals that would revolve around the budding public institutions, and that he later attempted to extend to community life. In so doing, he made a fundamental contribution to the efforts of the Enlightenment—which were almost universally frustrated—to transform sacredness into morality.