106 J.-A. PEMBERTON
In its monumentalism, the Palais de Chaillot has long been seen (as
with the neighbouring Palais de Tokyo), as embodying an aesthetic
that would have been equally at home in Berlin, Moscow or Rome.^73
Yet some have challenged the view of neoclassical monumentalism as
an essentially totalitarian architectural style. Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
for example, notes that it was embraced in that decade as the style in
which the state ‘visually manifested power and authority,’ noting that
as such it could be adapted for the purpose of underlining the solidity
of liberal-democratic institutions just as much as it could be employed
in order to give expression to the all-absorbing power of the total state.
Indeed, it was because this style was seen as lending grandeur to the
institutions it was intended to represent, that it informed the design of
the new Geneva headquarters of the League of Nations which in the
autumn of 1937 hosted for the first time a meeting of the assembly.^74
When used with reference to the LON’s new headquarters, the descrip-
tion of neoclassical monumentalism as ‘government international’
acquires an added significance.^75
Ory makes a similar point to that of Schivelbusch, noting that the ‘clas-
sical monumental logic’ that the Palais de Chaillot embodies was at the
time considered a ‘democratic response to the surrounding totalitarian
propositions’.^76 As Bertrand Lemoine explains, the Palais de Chaillot is
neither a monument of “socialist realism” nor a monument “nazi” or
“mussolinian”: it conforms certainly to an aesthetic of representation of
the State, but with an ethic that is modern and progressive, linked to val-
ues [that are] democratic and hedonistic....The composition of the palaisl’inaguration du Musée de l’Homme,” op. 164: An Examination of Performance Practices
and Contemporary Solutions, PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2010, 13, http://hdl.
handle.net/10159/195792; and Conley, Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marbelous in
Everyday Life, 117.
(^73) Dagen, ‘La malédition du Palais de Tokyo,’ 48.
(^74) Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s
Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933– 1939 , trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2006), 4.
(^75) Lois Craig and the staff of the Federal Architecture Project, The Federal Presence:
Architecture, Politics, and Symbols in United States Government Building (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1978), 331, 334. See also Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, 4.
(^76) Ory, ‘Paris, capitale des expositions universelles,’ 10.