Blouet´s unpublished and unofficial autograph journal describing a tour in the United States in the winter of 1837, designed to study the United States’ renowned penitentiary system, organized by the French government in the wake of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont’s similar seminal mission a few years earlier in 1831 and predates Charles Dickens’ tour in 1842, signed and dated, of which no other copies have been found. The manuscript is joined by a letter from John Haviland to Blouet, in which Haviland shows his appreciation to Blouet for sending his publication and also to inform Blouet of some of the modifications he had recently made to improve penitentiary architecture.
This manuscript contains a detailed and lively autograph manuscript journal by Blouet describing his tour in the United States in the winter of 1837, aimed at observing and studying the United States’ renowned penitentiary system -already famous at the time- during a voyage organized by the French government. Like Tocqueville and Beaumont before him, Blouet was given unprecedented access to American society, its institutions, and buildings, including a personal audience with the then President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, of whom Blouet includes an amusing description (p. 23).
Guillaume-Abel Blouet (1795–1853), a French architect fresh from having completed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, was sent to the States along with the penal reformer and jurist, Frédéric-Auguste Demetz (1796–1873), at the end of 1836 arriving in New York on 3 January 1837. After a brief sojourn in New York, they departed for Philadelphia, where they began their investigations, and continued south via Baltimore, Washington D.C., Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Richmond and Norfolk, throughout Blouet comments on the racial composition of American society and is critical of slavery, particularly in Norfolk where Blouet still observes an active slave trade.
They travelled by road, steamboat and, most significantly, by rail road – Blouet describes here for the first time he took this novel conveyance, on the stretch between Baltimore and Washington D.C., as ‘a mode of transport which was very efficient and very comfortable’ noting that they were able to cover 40 miles in just three hours (p. 21), which had only began to carry passengers within that decade; they used the railroad on numerous occasions including on the return journey to New York from where they then travelled to Boston via Hartford and then inland to, among other places, Albany and Buffalo in order to study Auburn Prison, built in 1816 and home to its eponymous correctional system in which prisoners were housed in solitary confinement at night and performed penal labour in silence during the day, a system of which Blouet is somewhat critical. Having completed their research in Auburn, Blouet and his companions visited Niagara Falls, ‘The Niagara Falls is an incomparable wonder of water’ (‘Les chûtes du Niagara sont des merveilles incomparables comme effect d’eau!’, p. 67), and en route encountered many indigenous peoples, whom Blouet describes as majestic and beautiful. Subsequently, Blouet’s dramatic illustrations of the Niagara Falls were often reproduced and issued in engraved form. After their return to New York, Blouet sailed for Liverpool in the United Kingdom and from there by land south to London and Dover before sailing to Calais and home.
Throughout their journey, Blouet, Demetz and their assistant, Verel, were invited to the theatre, the ballet, dinners, balls and guided tours of the places they visited along with their most notable buildings, including being housed in Boston at the luxurious Tremont House hotel, the first to have indoor plumbing and running water and whose other notable guests included Davy Crockett and Charles Dickens. They encountered many eminent characters in American society, such as the first wife of Jérôme Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson (1785–1879), the businessman and sinologist Nathan Dunn (1782–1844) and the renowned chemist and physician Robert Maskell Patterson (1787–1854). They met several of the most distinguished figures in American architectural history including John Haviland (1792–1852), Thomas Ustick Walter (1804–1887) and William Strickland (1788–1854), all instrumental figures in the development of American Neo-Classical Architecture. Walter, for example, who gave Blouet a personal guided tour of his recently completed Girard College as well as Philadelphia’s prisons (p. 20), was the fourth architect of the Capitol and responsible for adding its north and south wings as well as the central dome.
In the 19th century, there was an intense debate internationally about prison systems and their function. In this, architecture played a pivotal role and the fast expanding United States was at the forefront of developing and testing emerging philosophies. This makes Blouet’s observations particularly fascinating. It is evident from this journal that Blouet and Demetz, as specialists on an official commission from the French government, were given considerable access to prisons in the United States. They visited these institutions at each of the locations to which they travelled spending hours and even days at each of them completing their research, among them some of the most famous in US history such as, in addition to the previously mentioned Auburn Prison, Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Sing Sing in New York, Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore, the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, Virginia, and the famous Leverett Street Prison in Boston.
On their return to France, Blouet was appointed Inspector General of French Prisons and was largely responsible for the design of the agricultural reform school, the Mettray Penal Colony. Blouet and Demetz published their official descriptions of US prisons and their assessement of the Auburn system in Rapports à M. le Comte de Montalivet, sur les pénitenciers des États-Unis (1837), the second part (which comprises Blouet’s official reports, as opposed to this his journal) includes 45 lithographs of architectural plans, details and views of the prisons they visited.
Haviland (1792–1852) was an American architect, a major figure of the Neo-Classical movement, mostly active in Philadelphia. The autograph signed letter that accompanies the Journal is from Haviland to Blouet, where he thanks Blouet for sending the Rapports. In it, Haviland took the opportunity to inform Blouet of some of the modifications he had recently made to improve penitentiary architecture, most notably with respect to ventilation.
Provenance: Sotheby's, France; offered with a French export license.
We were unable to find any manuscript copies of this text.
