In 1750, the architect Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni built a Temple of Love in Gennevilliers, just north of Paris for the notorious libertine, the Duc de Richelieu. The new social freedom gained by the decline of the ancien regime gave birth to a democratic space that first appeared in the theatre and a personal freedom which changed the currents of thought on love. Servandoni's work as a painter, theatre designer and engineer of spectacles are promoted in the theory of Jacques-Francois Blondel and later Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres as prime examples of architecture in their theories of sensation. Libertine love, read through the literature of the time, clearly understands the limit of sensation and the "terrible state/loss of freedom" produced by real love. By general consensus an agreement to operate within the realm of sensation governs the ethics of libertine love and architecture. Servandoni's Temple of Love provides an ironic statement on love in the eighteenth century.

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