It was the most insane, the most extravagant, the most megalomaniac project. And it didn’t take long for it to materialize.
In the early 1910s, a couple of American artists based in Rome, Hendrik and Olivia Andersen, dreamed of an international city dedicated to the advancement of humanity. There would be art centers, sports halls, places of worship, science and knowledge, large gardens, exceptional buildings, gigantic monuments, all kinds of infrastructures dedicated to beauty and fraternity. world.
Their delirium of a utopian city seems quite unrealizable. And yet, the Andersens manage to rally the elite of American and European pacifist networks to their cause. An award-winning French architect joins them. Visionary Belgians support them. Patrons are mobilizing. They will even meet the King of Italy and, later, Mussolini.
Against all odds, the “Global Communications Center” enthuses the press and collects feature articles in major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Figaro. It took the outbreak of the First World War for the project to fall through, for obvious reasons.
One hundred years later, a thrilling tale tells the story of this unfulfilled and since largely forgotten dream. The investigation, signed by the French journalist Jean-Baptiste Malet, Albert-Londres Book Prize 2018, is entitled The capital of humanity. We follow, step by step, the birth of the fantasy and its progressive establishment, until the final collapse.
PHOTO FROM THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY
Urban Ledoux in 1924
We also and above all meet a gallery of enlightened, not to say hallucinated, characters who will carry out this project at arm’s length, with the conviction of being invested with an almost divine mission. Among them, a Quebecer, or rather a French Canadian of stock who immigrated to the United States: the hilarious Urbain Ledoux.
Militant before the hour
The project was already quite advanced when the Andersens, passing through New York, hired Ledoux as a “lobbyist”. Its work in Europe will be to convince pacifist networks to get involved in the “world city of communications”. Which he would do for nearly two years – with real impact – despite his drinking problems and rollercoaster moods.
“I think he’s pretty bright too and had real psychiatric issues, but he was sincere and without him this town wouldn’t have had the same success. It is a turning point in history,” summarizes Jean-Baptiste Malet, contacted in Brussels.
Urbain Ledoux seems to be the ideal candidate to join the World Communications Center team. He is a convinced humanist, bilingual moreover, who knows the workings of diplomacy well. But the Andersen’s project will ultimately only be a milestone in his astonishing journey.
Born in Sainte-Hélène-de-Bagot in 1874, Ledoux emigrated to Maine at a very young age, like 900,000 other Quebecers between 1840 and 1930. He founded two newspapers for the French-speaking community (Independence, The Illustrated Figaro), without being officially a journalist. Rather, he has the soul of a jack-of-all-trades, resourceful and original entrepreneur.
An idealist, he studied the priesthood in Quebec, but abandoned everything after witnessing certain abuses in the seminary, reports Wikipedia. Involved in politics, he was appointed United States Consul (!) in Trois-Rivières (!!), then in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Returning to Boston, then to New York, he abandoned the life of a diplomat to integrate into pacifist circles, which led to his collaboration with the Andersens, an episode almost unknown… until Jean-Baptiste Malet’s book.
At the turn of the 1920s, Urbain Ledoux became a star of the mainstream American by getting involved in a “performative” way for the cause of the unemployed and the homeless.
PHOTO FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Urbain Ledoux (on the right) in full “auction of the unemployed”, in New York, in 1922
Ledoux had already attracted attention in 1917 by jumping into the waters of the port of Hoboken (New Jersey), in pursuit of the “peace boat” chartered by the industrialist Henry Ford, an episode incidentally recounted by John Dos Passos in his trilogy USA But the newspapers and the media are especially interested in him during the periods of depression when, having become a social worker, he founds a soup kitchen in New York and organizes a series of happenings, including his resounding mock auctions of the unemployed, which will be worth to him to meet the president of the time, Warren G. Harding.
At this stage in history, Urbain is no longer Ledoux, but “Mr. Zero”, an anti-poverty activist and expert in the art of the publicity stunt. “He’s a kind of militant before his time,” sums up Jean-Baptiste Malet.
PHOTO FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Urbain Ledoux, alias “Mr. Zero”, at the White House in 1921 during a conference on employment
Little is known about what happened next, except that he joined the Baha’i religious community. And that in her name, he will kidnap (!) a wealthy widow involved in the sect (!!) interned against her will in a sanatorium for money (!!!), a scene worthy of a tragicomic film.
It’s difficult to think of the character with serious political grids. He is what we would call an irregular, a free electron. Draft, but capable of brilliant strokes. When we see him in the archival films, we feel that he is happy to help others while enjoying the light.
Jean-Baptiste Malet, journalist and author
Opportunist? Malet sees him more as a sincere eccentric. “In hindsight, that makes him quite attractive,” he says. But maybe in the end, he was just that. »
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PHOTO FROM THE DC PUBLIC LIBRARY
Urbain Ledoux leading a group of unemployed workers down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, October 1921
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PHOTO FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Campaigning for jobs, October 1921
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PHOTO FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Urbain Ledoux in 1932 when he was arrested by the police for having organized a demonstration of the unemployed in front of the White House.
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On the edge of the community
After his death in 1941, Urbain Ledoux sank into oblivion and only resurfaced in rare articles on the Great Depression or the French-speaking presence in New England.
In Quebec and in the small French-speaking towns of Maine, no one remembers this singular character. With good reason, since he quickly left the skirts of the French-Canadian community to blend into the mainstream in the United States, where he will shine with all his fire.
“It does not fit into the traditional narrative that people have been offered about Franco-American history,” explains Patrick Lacroix, who briefly mentions Ledoux in his book. Everything would be possible for us: a political history of Franco-Americans. “He’s someone who’s at odds with everything that’s going on in the Franco-American community. Its trajectory does not pass through Catholic parishes or Saint-Jean-Baptiste societies. His pacifist and socialist positions are considered suspect by ultramontane circles. »
It took the book of a French journalist, recounting the insane dream of an American couple established in Rome, for this colorful character, born in Montérégie but transplanted to Maine, to come to life again before our eyes. History is sometimes full of detours, like the strange journey of Urbain Ledoux, idealist, pacifist, entrepreneur, activist, diplomat, huckster, vaguely adventurous and marketing champion. When is the Netflix series?