Joseph Andre Motte

Joseph Andre Motte describes the climate in which he and others were working during the Reconstruction:

After the war, we found ourselves amidst a heap of ruins with nearly a million buildings destroyed. Claudius Petit, glorious Resistant who was now appointed to the Ministry of the Reconstruction, immediately put us to work, against the style and habits of the time.... considering the magnitude of the reconstruction, our job transformed itself. The pre-war decorator and rich clients had disappeared. The office which represented essential decoration projects like embassies looked to another generation, that of Jacques Dumont and Etienne-Henri Martin. It wasn't ours. Furthermore, we were too young for them to trust us with those projects......We worked like slaves, mostly against popular opinion and official thinking....our generation was also confronted with an ambiguous situation: the public, whose old houses, old furniture, old streets, had been destroyed, wanted simply that we reconstruct the same thing in the same place!....The furniture people, far from what we were designing, preferred fruit wood, curves, references to the past. We had to support this ambiguity for many years. It was thanks to such as Claude Petit or Paul Breton that we were able to survive. ({Diane Saunier, Pierre Perrigault, pp. 55-56)