The Abbé Jean-Louis de Cordemoy (1655–1714) was a French architectural historian, prior of St-Nicolas at La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre (Seine-et-Marne), and a canon at St-Jean-des-Vignes, Soissons (Aisne).
Influenced by Michel de Frémin and Claude Perrault his ideas of ordonnance, disposition and bienséance as expressions of integrity to nature and structure were early precursors of the modern concepts of functionalism and truth to materials.
He also participated in an acrimonious debate with the engineer Amédée-François Frézier regarding sacred architecture in the Jesuit periodical Mémoires de Trévoux, a skirmish in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
Gerauld de Cordemoy’s other children were Joseph-Charles, seigneur of Tournelles at Sery, in the diocese of Soissons, and of l’Epine-aux-Bois (Aisne); Jacques, abbot of Narcé, in the parish of Faye-la-Vineuse, near Richelieu (Indre et Loire); Jeanne-Marguerite, chatelaine of Ailleval, near Roucy, east of Soissons in the Aisne valley; and Adrien, seigneur of La Saulsaye (Sauldaye) and of Nueil, described as “lecteur ordinaire du dauphin”.
After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Jacques de Cordemoy formed part of a mission, led by Fénelon, to convert the Protestants of Saintonge.
Fénelon arrived in Saintes on 15 December 1685, he returned to Paris in June 1686, but Jacques seems to have stayed on for ten years, or more, based at the port of La Tremblade, on the mouth of the Seudre, south of Rochefort, where Protestants gathered to embark for abroad.
He was engaged in a lawsuit in 1691 with Paul de Lusignan, bishop of Rodez, abbot of Saint-Barthelemy at Noyon, as to the rights of Belle Fontaine, a case judged in his favour.
Antoine’s address was given as rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, where the Perrault brothers lived, hard against the abbaye de Sainte-Geneviève, in Paris.
According to parish registers, he died on 16 October 1714, at the age of 59, or thereabouts, at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre and was buried next day under the steps of the chancel of Saint-Nicolas.
Following Perrault and Fremin, he also recognized something of the clear-cut structural expression he aimed at in Gothic architecture – he named the churches of Longpoint, Royaumont and Sainte-Croix at Orléans.
Cordemoy’s aims emerged more clearly than before, with the argument, involving much scholarly hairsplitting and sarcasm, centred now on the arrangement of early Christian basilicas as a model for church architecture.
Though Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously, was concerned with “embellissement” and the ordering of cities, the spur might have been Fénelon’s, in particular his account of the rebuilding of the state of Salenta in that most political of his writings, Les Aventures de Télémaque, of 1699.
No more than a handful of churches were to be built in France during the first half of the eighteenth century with freestanding columns and lintels, but the subject of the letters was taken up (unacknowledged) by Antoine Desgodetz, professor at the Académie d’Architecture from 1719 until his death in 1728.
Laugier was also to stir a new interest in town planning, expanding Cordemoy’s remarks to provide a whole chapter in his Essai, “De l’embellissement des villes”.