As 'non-place', utopia inaugurates a space in which established cultural and national boundaries yield to an imaginary of universal association. Focussing on the aesthetic projects which emerge from some strands of nineteenth-century French utopianism, this paper will explore a privileged architectural figure in the textual and visual culture of the Saint-Simonian and Buchezian movements - that of the temple. In a range of images, poems and doctrinal texts the temple is presented as an instrument of social regeneration that presents a dramatic synthesis of the contributions made by diverse cultures and civilizations to the progress of humanity.

I propose to explore the critical and imaginative appropriation of aspects of these fanciful temple projects by the poet and art critic Théophile Gautier. I will argue that the art and architecture of Paul Chenavard and Louis-Auguste Boileau prompt Gautier to meditate on the potential for the aesthetic work to interrelate a vast array of cultural references in a dynamic form, but also to problematize what he sees as the ideological closure towards which these utopian projects frequently incline.