Emblematic of the ancien régime, the aristocrat was a subject of scorn during the revolution, when many nobles fled France under the threat of the guillotine. Lequeu’s design for a column comprising an aristocrat with shackled wrists punishes the former ruling class in effigy: the noble, denied liberty, is forced to support the weight of the building. This overtly political design
testifies to Lequeu’s active production of revolutionary iconography.

Turning to another ancient source—Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators—Lequeu transcribed a description of the rhetorician Isocrates’s tomb and rendered a fantastic vision of its appearance. While the original tomb was surmounted by a column bearing a mermaid, symbolizing Isocrates’s eloquence, a mistranslation of the original Greek led Lequeu to include a sheep as the base.

This proposal for a monumental entrance gate honoring the Celtic tribe that gave Paris its name was exhibited in the Hall of Liberty shortly before the Reign of Terror ended in 1794. It is dense with republican imagery. Atop an arch, a colossal figure of the Gallic Hercules wears a Phrygian cap, surmounted by a Gallic rooster, as he holds a statue of Liberty standing on a globe. Yet Lequeu’s apparent support for the revolution cannot be taken at face value. On the back of the drawing, he wrote, “A drawing to save me from the guillotine. Everything for the fatherland.”

This imaginary aqueduct was meant to provide the “most limpid virgin pure water to the Sacred City.” At left is a Tower of Liberty and at right a “republican road,” and beneath the arcade are paths for pedestrians and carriages. The tower is embellished with symbols of independence and liberation. At left, in a diagram of the cornice, the artist calls for decorating the frieze with cat’s heads; the feline was Lequeu’s favorite avatar
of freedom.

In year II of the republican calendar (1793–94), a competition was held to design a monument commemorating those who had died on 10 August 1792 while storming the Tuileries Palace to depose the king. Lequeu witnessed the celebrations organized in their honor, and some of his marginal inscriptions on this entry are copied from the ephemeral monument erected outside the ruined palace at that time. Even though Lequeu’s design was exhibited in the Hall of Liberty—the assembly room of the Revolutionary Tribunal at the Conciergerie prison—the project was abandoned after Maximilien Robespierre’s dramatic fall from power in July 1794.

Intrigued by subterranean labyrinths, Lequeu here envisaged the legendary tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena said to have been built around 500 BCE in Chiusi, Italy. Erected above an inescapable labyrinth, the massive structure boasted tiers of pyramids surmounted by a globe and adorned with bells that sounded in the wind. The scale of the monument is evident from the miniscule figures beneath the trees. At upper left is a rendering of a Roman coin struck in Spain; Lequeu interpreted its design as the mythical labyrinth of the Cretan king Minos. At right, Lequeu provided a compendium of ancient labyrinths based on descriptions from Herodotus and Pliny as well as contemporary travel literature.

Intrigued by celestial and terrestrial globes, Lequeu frequently employed spheres in his designs. This example reinvents the artist’s Temple of Equality (displayed nearby) but takes the earth as its subject. At center would be a “magnificent spectacle of a planetary model . . . Surrounded by the dome’s representation of the celestial firmament.” Lequeu initially submitted the design to the revolutionary authorities in 1794, but his proposal was unsuccessful. In 1819–20, under the Restoration, he recycled the plan for a competition to design a chapel dedicated to St. Louis in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. After it was rejected again, Lequeu included the drawing in his Civil Architecture as a Temple of the Earth.

Following his victory at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, Napoleon decided to build a monument to the glory of his Grande Armée. The Arc de Triomphe was erected up to the level of the vaults by Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin, but construction slowed when he died in 1811. Lequeu’s subsequent proposal sought a solution for the design during the intermediary period before the project resumed in 1823. He transformed the two piers into separate military towers, one on the left for soldiers of the newly restored Louis XVIII’s army and the other for the commanding generals and officers, with a monumental statue of the king situated in between.

The revolutionary constitution ratified 24 June 1793 (year I) established Primary Assemblies, each comprising between two hundred and six hundred citizens who would gather to vote, although this process was never implemented. Among the welter of architectural competitions in 1794 was one to
commemorate the constitution with a space for these assemblies. In his proposal for an assembly hall, Lequeu transformed Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’s Paris Corn Exchange (1763–69) into a grand arena, circular in plan, capped with a soaring dome, and illuminated by an oculus.

This design for a theater set was inspired by a 1793 edition of the play Virginie by Jean-François de La Harpe (1739–1803), a passage from which Lequeu copied on the verso of the sheet. As recounted by the ancient writer Livy in his history of Rome, Virginia’s father stabbed her to death to prevent her capture by the lustful Appius Claudius, who claimed she was a fugitive slave from his own estate. Her murder inspired Roman plebeians to revolt against a patrician tribunal. The revolutionary overtones of the subject undoubtedly appealed to Lequeu, who set the tragic action at left in front of a grand vaulted space reminiscent of the cloaca maxima—the Roman sewer—which underscores the theme of the decay of justice.

This scene envisages a Roman ceremony marking the deification of the deceased Emperor Trajan in 117 CE. It shows a colossal burning pyre surmounted by a wax effigy of the emperor being kissed by his successor. Lequeu turned to contemporary sources for details as he envisioned the ancient ritual.

Lequeu prepared this design for a temple in the former aristocratic garden adjacent to the Paris mansion of banker Nicolas Beaujon (now the Élysée Palace) in 1794. He had joined the Popular and Republican Society of the Arts that year, and members were required to demonstrate a refined form of patriotism—likely the reason Lequeu dedicated the temple to Equality. Lequeu adapted the spherical structure from a model popularized by Antoine Laurent Thomas Vaudoyer’s 1782 design for a globular house.

The Treaty of Amiens, signed by England and France in 1802, created a peaceful interlude during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A subsequent decree called for proposals for public art to commemorate the truce; the submitted designs would be exhibited for a month in the Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre. In Lequeu’s response, the Ionic capitals in the tower at left are embedded with hearts and rooster heads evoking the fighting cock of Rhodes, an animal celebrated by the ancients for its spirit and a symbol of courage and valor for the victorious French.