Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century.

Von Kalnein was introduced to French architecture during World War II, which he spent as a Fine Arts Officer on the celebrated staff of the Kunstschutz under Count Metternich. That reveals a lot about this book. The occasional depredations of Goering apart, the occupying Germans treated French art and architecture superlatively well, as the allies discovered after D-Day. Along with his fellow officers, Kalnein held all those gilded and polished halls in aristocratic respect and started to study them. Such became his expertise that he was asked to write the architecture section of the Pelican History of Art volume on eighteenth-century France, which came out in 1972. The current volume is a greatly revised spin-off from that text. It is among the first results of Yale's attempt to give new puff to the Pelican History. They have a difficulty: many of the texts they have inherited are beginning to look fundamentally old-fashioned.

Taste has changed since the war, and one wonders how many people now warm to the chilly glories of French early eighteenth-century architecture, to Boffrand, De Cotte and the later embellishments of Versailles. That is where Kalnein's heart lies and where the book scores, for there is nothing else much up-to-date on this in English. He gives admirable scope to interior decoration. Inevitably, his is the view from the centre, from Paris and the Court. Like its subject, the treatment is refined, competent, scholarly but bloodless. For the bloodier second half of the century and the advent of neo-classicism, Allan Braham's The Architecture of the French Enlightenment (1980) still provides the more readable and animated account.