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In 1803, however, Moll published, in both Paris and Bienne, a proposal for the design of a city of 100,000, accompanied by a single plan. Strickler describes this as his crowning achievement. The text of this project survives in several libraries, although I have discovered the plan itself, which is physically independent of the treatise, only in one of the two copies in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.
(Fig. 2) The treatise anticipates many of the same ideas found in the 1805 Cahier, but the composition, from a literary standpoint, is quite different, suggesting that Moll returned to his project in 1805 as if making a fresh start rather than a revision.

The 1805 Cahier, though unknown to Strickler, was briefly described by Albert Brinckmann in 1920 and again in 1922, but only on the basis of a copy of a lost original in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin that apparently lacked any identification of the author. The copy Brinckmann describes was probably missing the cover of the Getty’s document, and probably lacked also the handwritten entries facing the inside back cover, as it is only in these two places that Moll’s name either appears or can be deduced from the information given. Brinckmann (1920, 87-89; 1922, 311), the catalogue of the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen, Nr 2450), and Helen Rosenau (35) (citing Brinckmann) attribute the project to Jean-Jacques Huvé (1742-1808), who in 1802 proposed a Ville Bonaparte on the site of the battle of Marengo. The project that Huvé describes in the Journal des Bâtimens for 9 Frimaire An X, is, however, quite unlike Moll’s, as even a cursory examination shows.

Moll’s authorship is in any case indisputable, even without the evidence of his name printed on the cover of the Getty document. On 27 March 1805, the Cahier was formally offered to the Tribunat, a consultative body of the French State in existence from 1800 to 1807. The records of that meeting in the Archives Nationales include an hommage signed by Moll (who even includes his Paris address), offering the document to this body and recommending its adoption for new departmental capitals and for a new town adjacent to Antwerp, which had come under French control in 1800. Facing the inside back cover of the 1805 Cahier are several entries in the same handwriting referring to the presentation and reproducing, though with inaccuracies, the record of the event in the official newspaper, the Moniteur (29 March 1805). The Moniteur, indeed, duly summarizes the event and specifically names "M. Moll."

A note in a different hand in the Archives Nationales appears to be the draft of the speech made on Moll’s behalf by the Tribune Challan. Here the recommendations are extended to include adoption of Moll’s designs for "Napoléonville," presumably one or both of the two projects - the modern Pontivy in Brittany and La Roche sur Yon in the Vendée - then underway for new towns named in the Emperor’s honor. The histories of those projects, also accessible in the Archives Nationales, are complicated, but Moll did not contribute to them.

Further entries in Moll's hand at the end of the Cahier state that copies were presented through official channels to Napoleon himself, to the Emperor of Austria, and to the Czar. These copies remain to be discovered, as does the one deposited on Moll's behalf in the library of the Tribunat. Although that library is now held within the Archives Nationales, it is not accessible to the public, and a search on my behalf turned up no evidence of anything attributable to Moll. The Getty's copy bears no library stamps of any sort. Perhaps it was Moll's own copy.

The plan for a city of 100,000 to which Moll's 1803 treatise is a gloss has much in common with the plans in the present document, but does not offer the advantages of combination in different organizations or various scales. It is apparently to this document and plan that Moll alludes in the opening paragraph of the 1805 Cahier, which, he says, is intended to amplify the earlier one in exactly those ways.


Fig. 2. J. J. Moll (1803), Plan for a city of 100,000. Bibliothèque Nationale, Departement des Estampes et de la Photographie.

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