The ‘revelations’ prompt, once again, the question of the extent to which his political thought between the early 1920s and the liberation of France was dependent upon and even determined by his proposed architectural and urbanistic programmes. The question has to be posed that way round: the contrary notion that his aesthetics were politically fomented is a non-starter. He might compromise himself but he never compromised his art. His manoeuvring was risibly opportunistic, obvious to all his targets. He shifted unconvincingly between the ever-mutating factions of French fascism.

The short-lived far-right party Le Faisceau, while keen on technocratic Taylorism and Fordism, was equally infected by a blood-and-soil folksiness derived from Barrès and was inimical to Le Corbusier’s ‘internationalist’ abstract purism: ‘internationalist’ meant Jewish.

So Le Corbusier sidled up to Le Redressement français, a movement of industrialists that placed rather less emphasis on collectivism: this apparently accorded with his enthusiasm for monk’s cells. The next object of his sycophancy was Hubert Lagardelle, the future minister of labour in the Vichy regime; his regional syndicalism preached anti-capitalism, localism and direct action.

It is improbable that these parties, whose ideologies were all but indistinguishable save to the engaged, had any effect on the schemes Le Corbusier wanted to realise. He was an architect, thus a promiscuous tart: it goes with the job. An intrinsic facet of servility is to flatter whomever it is that holds the purse strings by professing to share his convictions. Show me an architect who genuinely believes in this or that doctrine to the exclusion of all others and I’ll show you a low-waged specialist in loft conversions, a high-minded purist who would never betray his ‘principles’.

Le Corbusier was so committed to fascism that his first building on a vast scale was the Centrosoyuz in Moscow. This work was among those that caused him to be vilified as a communist — or at least a communist sympathiser. Now, Le Corbusier’s fellow Switzer Alexander von Senger really was a fascist. He devoted a book entitled The Trojan Horse of Bolshevism to lambasting Le Corbusier whom he had already had excluded from the Federation of Swiss Architects. When von Senger himself was expelled from Switzerland as a Nazi informer, he went to live with his paymasters. He wrote Race and Architecture and became a contributor to the Völkischer Beobachter whose sometime editor Alfred Rosenberg appointed him to a chair at Munich architecture school.

This was a far grislier involvement than Le Corbusier’s with Vichy, which was, yet again, an exercise in fruitless opportunism and, retrospectively, blustering self-exculpation and stage-whispered hints of resistance activities.