BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

Consult in image mode

Transcribed version of the text

French

     Lacking writings by Vauban who always preferred considering the terrain to thinking theoretically, starting in the 1680s several authors wrote about one or several of his methods to fortify strongholds. Desmartins l’Ainé (L’expérience de l’architecture militaire..., 1685), Jean-François Bernard (Nouvelle manière de fortifier les places..., 1689), Nicolas de Fer (Introduction à la fortification..., 1690-1693) and Jacques Ozanam (Cours de mathématique... Tome troisième. Qui contient la géométrie et la fortification, 1693) all put forward Vauban’s principles among those of others. On the one hand Abbé Dufay and the Knight of Cambray referred exclusively to the master; their respective treatises, practically identical, maintained a certain bibliographic confusion for quite a while. If we can have confidence in certain copies, in 1681 du Fay apparently published his Maniere de fortifier les places, at the printing shop of Jean-Baptiste Coignard’s widow, in partnership with his son, but it seems that this date appearing on the copies is a misprint, for Coignard senior died in 1689 and his wife could not have been widowed in 1681.
     Nothing is known about the life of this member of the church. In fact he published at the shop of Coignard senior, who was a printer for the Académie française and had to his credit the great names of architecture, Claude Perrault (Ordonnance des cinq especes de colonnes...,1683) after the works by Vitruvius (1673, 1684) and l’Abrégé (1674), André Félibien (Principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture et de la peinture..., 1676), Antoine Desgodetz (Les édifices antiques de Rome...,1682) and the translation of Scamozzi’s Book VI by d’Aviler (1685). The book had the patronage of Vauban himself (Lazard 1933, p. 25): “This little treatise on fortifications contains nothing that would be inconsistent with those being constructed in the King’s strongholds. Written in Paris, March 2, 1691”. The manual, small in format, (in-12) like Vitruvius’ Abrégé, is made up of two parts. The first, brief, is a “Preliminary treatise on the principles of geometry”, cut up in chapters dealing with the circle, angles, the triangle, polygons, surface areas and finally volumes. The second is devoted to the “Method of fortifying according to Monsieur de Vauban”, a continuous text this time, but in an unusual arrangement: moral considerations, a brief history of defensive fortification (moat with palisades, the defensive wall, then towers, finally bastions). Two pages on artillery come next, then considerations on construction technique. Du Fay next looks over fortified elements, praising Vauban’s method which is “simple, easy and good in all areas” (1691, p. 99). In particular he mentions Vauban’s flank contregards like the ones at Landau and Belfort, but without illustrating them, whereas they were published by Nicolas de Fer the same year. The 1693 edition, reviewed and enlarged, added two illustrated sections, the “Plan and profile of a magazine” and the “Major attack on Mons” [1691]. The plan of a powder magazine, Vauban’s invention, which had previously appeared in the text, is in a separate section here. It is presented for the first time in a plan and a section, the model which would become the standard of its kind. The book ends with advice to the future officers who would have to go in the field in order to complete their training and with praises to the glory of Vauban, “a superior genius who organizes everything” and, in order to bring peace to the kingdom, keeps war away by constructing forts.
     The manual, copiously illustrated with woodcuts or copperplates according to the editions, in which the images tally with the texts (rarely the case in this sort of publication where the diagrams are more often grouped together separately), furnishes all the practical information on Vauban’s “first system”. In this respect it could have been a response to the book published in Amsterdam by the Knight of Cambray in 1689. Like Cambray’s edition, Du Fay’s was published several times, nine, of which three were in Italian, and twelve others combined with Cambray’s text, of which one was in Spanish and one in German.

P. Bragard (UCL, Leuven) – 2015

Critical bibliography

A. Blanchard, Vauban, Paris, Fayard, 1996.

P. Bragard, “Du Fay et les autres. La diffusion de la fortification selon Vauban dans la théorie européenne autour de 1700”, M. Virol, P. Bragard, N. Faucherre, M. Steenbergen (eds.), L’influence de Vauban dans le Monde, Namur, Les Amis de la citadelle de Namur, 2015, pp. 17-38.

C. Duffy, The Fortress in the age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1660-1789, London, Routledge & Keegan, 1985.

K. Jordan, Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Festungsbaues von den Anfängen bis 1914, Marburg,Deutsche Gesellschaft für Festungsforschung, 2003.

P. Lazard, Vauban 1633-1707, Paris, Alcan, 1933.

M. Virol, Vauban, de la gloire du roi au service de l’État, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2003.

I. Warmoes, “Vauban et l’art de la fortification”, I. Warmoes, V. Sanger (eds.), Vauban bâtisseur du Roi-Soleil, Paris, Somogy, 2007, pp. 190-197.