An exceptional figure in twentieth-century architecture, Le Corbusier is less so for his political positions than for the contribution his theories and projects have made to thinking about cities and buildings. At the same time, he never ceased to appeal to public opinion and to public decision-makers, urging them to adopt his plans.
An analysis of his relationship with politics reveals a number of recurring positions. The first is simply denial, the repeated assertion that he has no interest in politics. While he professes a manifest phobia for politics, his latent interest is sustained. In fact, he never ceases to situate himself according to the balance of power of the moment, while he himself is annexed by political forces.
The public relations campaign he launched in 1920 with the publication of L'Esprit nouveau, followed by the presentation of his urban projects on the Parisian scene, made him a public figure that the press could not ignore. Each of the configurations of his political affects must therefore be read from two perspectives - that of the authors who criticize or praise him, and that according to which he appropriates the discourse of his political interlocutors or puts them on notice to follow him.
There is indeed a discursive dimension to all these exchanges, through which Le Corbusier internalizes and reformulates the themes and lexicon of the politicians, holding up to them an architectural mirror of their program, without in the least altering the substance of his projects: he will be more Bolshevik than the Russians, more Petainist than the Marshal and more Christian Democrat than Eugène Claudius Petit.
We retrace the long series of these exchanges, from his early socialist sympathies to his intense flirtation with technocrats in the 1930s, his interest in the Front Populaire, his temptations during the Vichy period and his pacifist professions of faith in the post-war period.
