Gardens in Revolution

Landscapes and Political Culture in France, 1760-1792

Wick, Gabriel F.

Following France’s defeat in the Seven Years War, a number of leading French aristocrats pointedly began to embrace English fashions, pastimes, and behaviors. What better means to demonstrate one's disaffection with the absolutist monarchy than to espouse the culture of Britain, its avowed enemy? These anglomanes wanted France to adopt Britain's more fluid social structure, dynamic economy, and pragmatic monarchy.
Emulating their English peers, aristocratic anglomanes embraced landscape gardening as a fitting pastime. The studied naturalism of their 'English' landscapes was the antithesis of the formalism associated with the French court. The most prominent creators of the jardin anglais, men like the prince de Conti, the duc de Chartres, and the duc de Choiseul were also figureheads of the so-called Partie Patriote, an increasingly bold opposition faction. Frequently exiled from court, their jardins anglais came to represent their physical and ideological distance from Versailles, while their country estates were celebrated as visible manifestations of their opposition.
This book explores the links between garden-making, politics, and ideological expression in the twilight of the Ancient Regime. It considers how, in this context of crisis, landscape design became a central form of ideological expression.
With the advent of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the book considers how English tastes progressively shed their transgressive and foreign associations and naturalistic landscapes soon made inroads at Versailles. Turning to a series of crises of the 1780s, it examines how the king, the queen, and their rivals used landscapes to materialise their respective visions of how the monarchy needed to evolve.