BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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French

     The engineer Gautier (1660-1733) wrote Le Traitté des fortifications. He was also known as Gauthier de Nîmes, and his first name, Henri or Hubert, has never been documented with absolute certainty. He is alternately referred to as Henri (Paris, BnF) or Hubert (Encyclopaedia Britannica). “H. Gautier” as he signed his memoirs and his writings, was the son of a Huguenot carder originally from Nîmes. Trained as a doctor in medicine at the university in Orange in 1679, Gautier turned to the profession of military engineer before taking up that of civil engineer. His career can be divided into two periods. During the first, which runs from approximately 1684 to 1689, documents mention Gautier as military engineer in Languedoc and in Protestant strongholds in the South of France. Thus he worked in Orange in 1685, then at the fort of Nîmes from 1686 to 1689 before being appointed engineer of the province of Languedoc in 1693. That same year, probably held back by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) which hampered the progress of his career, he converted to Catholicism in Nîmes on June 26, 1689. From then on, until his death in 1733, Gautier focused on a career as civil engineer, becoming in 1713 one of the first inspectors of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées. Although he is today mainly known for his civil engineering treatises on roads, canals and bridges (Traité de la construction des chemins,1693; Traité sur les canaux de navigation, 1693; Traité des ponts, 1716), Gautier was a verbose author, curious about the scientific advances of his time and attentive to his contemporaries’ opinions on art and history. Well-versed in earth sciences, he was also interested in the formation of the earth’s crust, about which he wrote Nouvelles conjectures sur le globe de la terre, published in 1723 in a work with much wider intellectual ambitions entitled La bibliothèque des philosophes et des savants. An archeologist and antiquarian, he was also one of the first engineers to be interested in antique architecture, and more widely in the heritage of past generations. Thus in 1720 he published a Histoire de la ville de Nîmes et de ses antiquités accompanied by plates and plans of all the Roman antiquities of the city. He also wrote L’art de laver ou nouvelle maniere de peindre sur le papier (1687) which he rrepublished in a revised form under the title L’art de dessiner proprement les plans, porfils, elevations geometrales, & perspectives (1697).
The Traitté des fortifications published in 1685 is an early work written by Gautier during a stay in Berne at the beginning of the 1680s when he was only twenty. He probably left France, like approximately 45,000 of his fellow Calvinists between 1680 and 1700, in order to practice his religious convictions freely in Switzerland. Gautier took advantage of his temporary exile during which he had appreciated “the tranquillity and gentleness” of a government regulated by “the effects of wisdom and moderation” (preface) in order to write his “Traitté de fortification” with a privilege dated 1684. The book was published the following year in Lyon at the presses of Thomas Amaulry, a Parisian printer-bookseller established in Lyon since 1675 and whose business came in part from Calvinist writers (notably the erudite antiquarian Jacob Spon).
Gautier’s youth and inexperience (he had only a medical doctor’s degree at that time) could explain the mediocrity of his treatise. Planned as a compendium for the attention of “the instruction of the young” and “elite young men” whom he had known in Berne, who were very probably no older than he, Gautier’s book successively states a few rules of geometry useful in the art of building fortifications, a glossary of terms useful to know, the maxims of construction used the most, a few principles of balistics and a series of examples of the construction of regular and irregular fortifications. Without plagiarizing his elders, notably Georges Fournier whose inspiration is not far, Gautier stayed very universal in his remarks. If he seems to be aware of a great number of “systems” of construction, in particular those of Samuel Marolois, Jean Errard, Blaise de Pagan, Antoine de Ville et Allain Manesson Mallet, he does no more than expound their principles; his analyses remain very superficial. Finally, he seems to have remained totally isolated from the great improvements of his period perfected by Vauban in the art of attacking and defending strongholds. Here Gautier signed an early opus, mediocre when all is said and done, especially when compared with the richness of his later work, but which must certainly have been extremely useful to him in order to return to France the following year and take up a career as military engineer.

Émilie d’Orgeix (Université Michel de Montaigne – Bordeaux III) – 2013

Critical bibliography

A. Brunot & R. Coquand, Le Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, coll. “Histoire de l’administration française”, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 1982.

F. Ellenberger, “À l’aube de la géologie moderne: Henri Gautier (1660-1737)”, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 1980, 33, 3, p. 279.