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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 Gettys document,
and probably lacked also the handwritten entries facing the inside back
cover, as it is only in these two places that Molls 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 Molls, as even a cursory examination
shows.
Molls 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 Molls behalf by the Tribune Challan.
Here the recommendations are extended to include adoption of Molls
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 Emperors
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.
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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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