Two new books claim Le Corbusier was a fascist

Artnet - Two recently published books assert that famed French architect Le Corbusier was a fascist and Nazi sympathizer with links to France's World War II Vichy regime. Both books - Xavier de Jarcy's Le Corbusier, un fascisme francais (Albin Michel, 2015), and Francois Chaslin Un Corbusier (Seuil, 2015) - claim the architect was active in several fascist groups in France beginning in the 1920s, but did a good job of keeping his involvement under wraps.

"I discovered he was simply an out-and-out fascist," de Jarcy told the AFP. In his book, he writes that Le Corbusier was close friends with Pierre Winter, a doctor who headed France's Revolutionary Fascist Party, and worked with him to found the urban planning periodicals Plans and Prelude. de Jarcy claims that in the journal, Le Corbusier wrote in support of anti-Semitism. Chaslin's research uncovered anti-Semitic sketches attributed to Le Corbusier.