Anthony Vidler's recent monograph on the eighteenth-century French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) characterizes certain aspects of Ledoux's work as Masonic. Vidler defines Freemasonry primarily as an instrument of sociability. His recognition of Masonic imagery and intent, especially in Ledoux's Ideal City, combines with certain details of Ledoux's life to convince Vidler of Ledoux's adherence to a Masonic or quasi-Masonic lodge. / The matter remains open to debate. Vidler's view of Freemasonry does not entirely accord with its factious and ambitious condition in eighteenth-century France. Nor does he sufficiently address the public manifestation of Masonic symbolism which, despite the Order's code of secrecy, was divulged to the profane, emerging architecturally as part of Neoclassicism's stylistic revival of the antique. The weakness of Vidler's analysis becomes apparent when he overlooks Masonic symbolism in a project that does not conform to his positive image of the Order: Ledoux's network of customs houses for Paris, the project he called the Propylaea.

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By the end of the eighteenth century, as imagination makes its appearance behind representation, man enters the field of knowledge and literature emerges in the world of fiction. L'Architecture of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux is too complex a work to make its mapping possible in such a short study. I therefore tried to unfold the work through the question that seemed to me to be the most revelatory of this time. The notion of caratere derived from the specific codes of a culture where representation was the foundation of a possible order. In L'Architecture, between the fictional character and his caractere is this space where representation and imagination coincide through what makes the specificity of human nature: the identity, the ability to speak, the power to act, and the perception of time.

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