Maur Dessauvage

The opening decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of new attitudes towards historical change that simultaneously overturned the aesthetic norms and political codes of the Enlightenment. This dissertation examines the relationship between architectural and legal theory in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, a transformative period during which architecture and law were tasked with nothing less than the construction of the modern German state. A long-standing fixture of university education in the German-speaking world, jurisprudence played a formative, though overlooked, role in the emergence of historicism across the humanistic disciplines that significantly impacted architecture. This research explores how legal theory—in particular, the study of Roman law—sharpened the historical vision of figures such as Christian Ludwig Stieglitz, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Sulpiz Boisserée, and Leo von Klenze. By attending to the hermeneutic lenses through which nineteenth-century thinkers interpreted the diachronic development of architecture and law, this dissertation shows how historicist discourse both reflected and affected the transition from the eighteenth-century ancien régime to nineteenth-century bourgeois society.