The Aristocratic Town House in Regency Paris: Hotel du Maine and Hotel de Matignon

This dissertation examines the aristocratic town house in the context of the political and social upheavals of Regency Paris (1715-1723). Two Regency town houses serve as case studies, the Hotel du Maine (Robert de Cotte, Armand-Claude Mollet, Antoine Mazin; 1716-26) and the Hotel de Matignon (Jean Courtonne, Antoine Mazin; 1720-25). The study argues that in the uncertain period following the death of Louis XIV, sword nobles broke the rules of architectural decorum by deploying signs of princely status in their houses. The first chapter considers why each family built a town house and finds that both the Maine and Matignon sought to use architecture to bolster their claims to princely status. The second and third chapters examine the floor plans of these houses, which exemplified the new art of domestic planning of the early eighteenth century. Based on previously untapped archival sources, these chapters offer a more complete picture of each hotel than that offered in the plans published in the eighteenth century by Jean Mariette and Jacques-Francois Blondel. Chapter Two explores the realm of servants, both service areas and servant lodgings, in each town house. Each family employed a large household of officers and domestic servants, partly as a way to symbolize their power and potential to rule, and thus the provision of architectural space for domestic servants had a representational significance. At the same time, an emerging distrust between master and servant compelled the architects to devise methods to make the servants invisible to the family they served. Chapter Three focuses on the family apartments, and examines how the architects designed each house to be seen and understood by court society. In the realm of their town houses, the Maine and Matignon families boldly transgressed the rules of architectural decorum by including room types commonly associated with princes and by using fashion to proclaim rank. The myriad symbols of rank embedded within each hotel were aimed at a specific audience, namely court society and the Regent, who were ultimately not persuaded to acknowledge either the Maine or the Matignon families as princes.