Gauvin Alexander Bailey's Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire is a tremendously ambitious, wide-ranging examination of the history of the built environment across the territories in the Atlantic world colonized by the French between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It is ambitious on the part of the author, certainly, but also on the part of the publisher, McGill-Queen's University Press, which committed to producing a striking, large-format volume constituted of seventeen chapters and an epilogue, and, in addition, seven contemporary maps of the areas in question, a glossary, and a timeline (as well as notes, bibliography, and an index). Even more impressive than this extratextual material is Bailey's use of an extraordinary range of graphic material, reproduced as color plates in the volume: this material ranges from manuscript and printed historical maps and plans (making good use of details and insets), to architectural drawings and perspectives, and includes a fair number of photos taken by Bailey himself. Indeed, the great strength of the book is that it brings a tremendous corpus of visual material, drawn from a wide range of libraries, museums, and archives, to audiences who wouldn't necessarily otherwise be aware of or have access to these materials.
As Bailey himself remarks, this work is the first sustained global study of the architecture of the first French empire, defined as reaching from New France to the Caribbean and the Guianas, and across the Atlantic Ocean to Senegal; despite its ambition, it cannot attempt to cover the entirety of that enormously baggy subject. Usefully, Bailey lays out the book's scope clearly in the introduction: he addresses both built and planned architectural projects; he does not cover military architecture; and the work is necessarily selective, with the goal of demonstrating the range of projects and the resources needed and deployed to realize them across the continents and centuries of imperial development.
To this end, the book's organization is thematic. After a chapter on ideology and reality, the work is divided into a large section on labor, containing chapters that correspond to racial categories (Amerindians, Africans, free people of color, whites) that overlap with chapters on professional categories, such as royal engineer architects and civilian architects/builders. This section is followed by one on urbanism (three chapters), a chapter on gardens, a section on secular and church architecture (two chapters each), and two chapters on vernacular architecture and traditions.
To a large degree, Bailey is successful at uncovering this tremendously diverse set of histories, drawing out patterns that emerge and highlighting aspects that deserve greater study. Particularly compelling examples include Bailey's sensitive treatment of the questions of race and labor; his investigation into the rise of surveying and the evolution of the profession of the ingénieurs du Roi; and the chapter on formal and scientific gardens across the French empire, including at Gorée and Ouidah. As an eminent architectural historian of the Baroque period, Bailey has worked extensively on the Iberian Americas, and in this volume he explicitly draws comparisons between the French and the Spanish- and Portuguese-American architectural contexts that he knows well. Oddly, his comparisons with the Iberian Americas appear to make claims for them being a model against which the French must be compared, and Bailey returns again and again to the grandeur of French ambition, in contrast with the paucity of surviving French colonial architectural heritage, in a tone of open disapproval.
Given Bailey's ability to compare across empires, it is exactly in this work that I would anticipate reading an informed reflection on the questions of how and why Aztec or Andean influences on the Spanish colonial architectural legacy differed from Abenaki or Haudenosaunee or Galibi influences on the French colonial legacy—not incredulity in the face of these differences, and even less, dismissiveness of the French ability to leave an architectural legacy comparable to the Spanish or Portuguese. Nevertheless, Bailey's close analysis of the material world through the study of architecture and the built environment succeeds at bringing readers straight to the heart of the implantation, growth, functioning, and spread of the first French empire, including its failures and disasters, and the wide-ranging stories of architects, planners, urban projects, gardens, labor, and expertise related here provide a perspective not available in more conventional political or social histories. This book is an exceptional resource for an extensive array of readers interested in the history of empire, the history of architecture, and the history of the French Americas.
