mukerji political mobilization of nature

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The Political Mobilization of Nature in Seventeenth-Century French Formal Gardens Author(s): Chandra Mukerji Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 5 (Oct., 1994), pp. 651-677Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/658091Accessed: 30-03-2015 01:02 UTC

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The political mobilization of nature in seventeenth- century French formal gardens

CHANDRA MUKERJI University of California, San Diego

According to Saint Simon, Louis XIV on his deathbed expressed regret about the pain caused others by his overwhelming passion for building and war. For Saint Simon, this is only a passingly sympathetic moment. He is more concerned about the suspect moral character of a king who would inflict so much suffering on his people to follow his own passion and who would wait until death to renounce his weakness. The deathbed confession is followed soon in Saint Simon's diary by the descriptions of the general glee in France and throughout Europe that followed the announcement of the king's death - a mirror, we suspect, of the author's own elation.1

If we set aside for the moment Saint Simon's moral sensibility and look more closely at this passion for building and war that he saw in the king, we can learn something about the material transformation of place that occurred in seventeenth-century France with the centrali- zation of state power there. Through examining how the French government in the late seventeenth century transformed the French landscape and provided technical means for doing so, we can learn more about how the Western heritage of state politics from that time has been embedded in the relations to "nature" that we in the West work from (and against) today. Part of what Louis XIV so passionately wanted to build and one reason why he wanted to go to war was a powerful, centralized state over which he was absolute monarch. The passion for building and war was part of his desire for domination, a lust for power that he shared with many political leaders before and since. What is important and interest- ing for our purposes is that this passion had a shape, a trajectory, that was not so historically constant. Building and war were particularly material means for controlling landmasses and the people within them.

Theory and Society 23: 651-677, 1994. ? 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


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As Louis XIV and his collaborators pursued their vision for his reign, there was a turn toward the material, toward the relationship of the built to the unbuilt environment, as a site of political action. We can see evidence of the new material culture of power in the great string of fortress cities built around the perimeter of France by Vauban and in the techniques for the attack and defense of places that he advocated.2 Great earthworks and diversions of rivers were part of these schemes; the conquests of the French army were not just written about in celebratory languages, but dug into hillsides and dredged along waterways. There was a turn toward material intervention into the French countryside, visible in the port cities created or "improved" in this regime, and in the canal and road systems, the manufactures, and all the economic "building" orchestrated by Colbert.3 Most important for this article, the political culture of land control that was transforming the French landscape into a marker of the state's power was showcased around the royal residences, particularly Versailles, in the formal gardens that mobilized the same technologies of material power used throughout the state but that employed them to create dramatic visual effects from natural forces. These dazzled foreign visitors from throughout the world.4 Versailles was a model of material domination of nature that was presented as a token of the strength of France.

Although, following Weber, sociologists tend to equate state power with control of violence,5 the seventeenth-century French state located its power (even its capacity for violence) more in control of the material - in weapons systems, buildings, landmasses, and infrastructural objects such as roads, canals, and drainage systems. Moreover, these new states invested most of their tax money in this material transformation of place. As a result, the power of the modern state began with intervention into nature through which a political material culture could be built.

John Brewer6 argues that the early modem state was less a rational bureaucracy designed to centralize power than a means of gathering the resources (taxes and trained fighters) that would support a strong military presence. Amassing military power was in many ways a material activity. Money was lavished on war almost as soon as it was extracted through taxes; soldiers were set in fortresses and armed with cannon; the states themselves were identified with the landmasses that soldiers could protect; and infrastructural projects run by the states (road work or forest management programs, for example) mobilized nature for strategic purposes. A strong military presence allowed states to bring more of the natural world under their political control.


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Pursuit of military power in this context yielded a rich material culture of power - weapon systems and forms of military engineering - that could mobilize nature for strategic action. This material culture entered into the relations among states, when leaders used assessments of the material strengths of friends and enemies to shape their political courses. In this context, even the illusion of power sometimes took on a material presence to serve diplomatic purposes. The royal gardens in seventeenth-century France with their miniaturized but dramatic dis- plays of land control, which were routinely used for impressing foreign visitors, played with technique to convey power over place. Studying the ways that military imagery and engineering entered into their designs can give us an unusual but revealing view of how the French state in this period made the earth serve politics.

Material culture and politics

The world of scholarship is filled with boundaries, which, like the relation of words to things, are basically arbitrary. They reduce the re- sponsibilities of scholars by writing out of their domains certain cat- egories and modes of analysis that have been defined, a priori, as not relevant to their thought. Such it is with material culture and politics. Culture and politics may be linked by broad-minded theorists through the realm of ideas, where ideology (ethnicity, nationalism, propaganda) is seen as productive of political action, but material culture is not even considered. It is left to the anthropologists or other cultural theorists who want to make sense of societies without the complex political structures of the modern West. Anthropologists including Clifford Geertz7 may draw attention to political culture and its ritual forms; others such as Marshall Sahlins8 may ask fundamental questions about the underlying cultural assumptions fueling world politics; and other analysts, e.g., Jim Clifford9 and Donna Haraway,10 may look at how Western intellectuals naturalize politics and political boundaries by attributing cultural attributes to the natural world and thereby hiding their political and cultural dimensions. But these scholars are ignored when political theorists and sociologists explain "grand historical phe- nomena" such as state formation. Only Norbert Elias's1 work on the disciplining of the aristocracy through conspicuous consumption under Louis XIV has been persuasive in demonstrating that lack of attention to culture can often prevent us from understanding some of the weapons of political life that shape history.12


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Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to follow in Elias's footsteps. To argue that material culture can help us explain the military power of the early modem state, as I want to do here, flies in the face of most com- monsense understandings of this history. "Everyone knows" that Col- bert's rationalization of the bureaucracy, Louis XIV's will to power, the growth of capitalism, and the breakdown of the Hapsburg Empire were the "real" reasons for the empowerment of the government in late seventeenth-century France.13 Nonetheless, most historians would agree that the seventeenth-century French state was importantly territorial, fighting to expand its boundaries and deriving its resources from the riches of the land. This state, this spatially defined locus of political power, was a bit of material political culture around and through which Colbert, Louis XIV, and all the other historical actors worked.

It is easier to believe this argument if we first accept that in the early modern period in Europe an emerging materialist culture was giving other kinds of material culture (consumer goods, technological innova- tions, and materialist science) new significance in social life.14 The material world took on new significance as more objects from a wider array of sources appeared in the marketplace; land took on new value and meaning, as its uses were linked to the plant trade and changes in markets; water pumps even took on new forms and functions as mining became more varied and profitable. Increased trade in goods placed more objects into the flow of social relations, culturally sanctioning the turn toward nature as a material resource for shaping social life and increasing the use of technological innovation as a means for achieving wealth and power.

Research by many historians, guided primarily by the Annales school, has scoured the material culture of this historical period, examining objects from common household items to artworks to read historical change through the world of goods.15 Even though low literacy rates in the period made written records all too sparse, the material culture was so rich and life so complexly attached to it that historians found they could mine this rich vein for writing early modern European history. Similarly, Foucault,l6 in his work on this period, also found it useful to focus on objects and the body, physical aspects of the cultural environment. He argued that power in that period (and to this day) has been written upon and worked through the object world, making the material culture of power just as important as the material culture of production. Within these analytic traditions, studying territoriality as a culture of state power has some rationale.


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On the other hand, one major reason for paying close attention to the material culture of state power is that most ideas about the social significance of material culture from the period treat the power of the material as a diffuse property. In both Foucault's theory and in economic analyses of consumer demand, things diffuse power into the far reaches of social life, power circulates everywhere.17 Studying the material culture of state power, on the other hand, points to the centrali- zation of power. It allows us to think about how power in material form can be accumulated, not through a system of accumulation like that of capital, which is accumulation for circulation, but the assimilation of fixed, politically meaningful spaces.18 Modern state politics gains a base for power in the articulation of landmasses and their control within a system of territoriality.

Political theorists, while ignoring material culture, accept that politics is, at its heart, struggle over things: territories, resources, populations, and ways of life. And social conflict, even though it seems a reified concept, also has a material presence. Weapons are among the most common of the objects that human beings seem to make. The desire for domination is palpable in military museums all over the world that present in frightening abundance the fruits of years of human effort and ingenuity put in the service of the arts of war. These acts of material assault are just as much material means of organizing relations as gift giving. The relations may be hostile, and the form of communication may be through missiles and bullets, but the message is both clear and material. It need not be circulated through language to have effect. A bomb blast can be enough.

Paying attention to the role of material culture in social life helps to make sense of the growth of science and technology as intentional and unintentional handmaidens to the modern state. Science and technology, as systematic means for acting in and with nature, creating new. ways of working with the material, mobilize nature to serve human (or inhuman) purposes. Nature is more than an ally that can help scientists promote a conception of the natural world;19 it is a source for the invention of new material culture.20

The material culture of the territorial state

The major item of political material culture drawn from and on nature in late seventeenth-century France, using the tools of science and tech-


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nology, was the territorial state: a land area with deeply political meaning. The French state was not so much a social formation, a bureaucracy, to those living in the period but rather a particular, marked part of the European continent.21 It was drawn on the earth with major construction projects along its borders; it was measured precisely in terms of latitude and longitude by the scientists of the observatory; it was surveyed and recorded on maps by military engineers and scientists; it was integrated by canals, roads, and bridges; it was drained and its fertility improved technologically; it was adorned with fortresses, har- bors, and the like; and it was reshaped on the battlefield. It was as much an engineering feat as a political one. It was the product of a (group) passion for building and war that transformed a landmass into a territory.22

The existence of a political culture of territoriality in early modern Europe is easy to overlook as ahistorical or unremarkable, if one as- sumes (1) that humans are by nature territorial creatures, (2) that extant theories of private property are adequate for explaining political attachments to place, or (3) that warfare and hence politics are always territorial. If states seek territories just as animals do, as places to demonstrate domination, then there is nothing much to say about the territoriality of a state. It is simply a collective manifestation of innate tendencies raised to the level of the social. But if territoriality were instinctual, it would not have become pressingly salient suddenly under one regime, place, and period in history. The desire for careful mapping of political boundaries would have been continuous across cultures and historical periods, and the history of cartography shows that it was not.

Alternately, if countries "own" their territories in much the way indi- viduals can own property, then there is no special political materialism needed to explain state territoriality. The state grew with capitalism in the seventeenth century and started acting as owner of the territory under its control, gaining power from its economic management. End of story. But although state territories have often been handled like properties, the state has not always derived its primary power from that wealth. If Brewer is correct, power in early modern states came from the successful transformation of wealth into military strength, not wealth itself.23 And to the extent that political legitimacy in the period still derived from religious sanction of rule by noble blood lines, wealth was not always able to be transformed into political power for individ- uals.24


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Finally, if war has always been a fight to control land, then power is always territorial and there is nothing particularly important about the territoriality in early modern France. Soldiers fight for battlefields, and the winners get to control that land after the fight is over. The more land they gain, the more power they accumulate for the political regime. But military strength, while always tied to land control, has not always been territorial. Power before this period in Europe was located spatially in citadels, fortresses, and cities that were separated by spaces whose political statuses were often ambiguous. In siege warfare in the period, the point of battles was to gain control of power centers, taking them away from the enemy. The great empires would control strings of these power centers, but not all the land in between them, only roads and waterways that connected them. Land was politically marked by these centers, but not bounded by them. The relationship of land to power did not depend on the measurements of land areas and boundaries that became a commonplace of political culture by the end of the seventeenth century in Europe.

The strongest evidence of this changing relationship between power and place comes primarily (but not entirely) from the history of cartography. Cartography changed dramatically in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as surveyors were commissioned in growing numbers to make detailed images of land areas. The results were often treated as much more than repositories of facts; some were decorated in a celebratory fashion with elaborate and often colored pictures - sometimes signs of power and other times symbols that marked the resources of the area mapped. This celebration of land and its power was equally present in the simplest surveys of the period. The desire for such careful measurement of land was itself a tribute to the growing importance of land areas as culturally meaningful objects. It was not that people had not surveyed before or cared about land. Certainly the Doomsday Book in late medieval England was a dramatically complete land inventory. But something changed during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Lines of demarcation on the land took on new significance. Before that time domains were certainly politically significant land-holdings, but they were identified by their centers more than their peripheries. Old maps were marked with castles and towns, centers of commerce and social action, and with the rivers, roads, and seas along which one could pass from center to center. The newer maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were different. They started to mark boundaries with clear lines (and to use color changes to emphasize them). Grid structures on maps were revived from Ptolemaic sources


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and were used not only to measure the earth in scientific terms but to locate borders more precisely.25

While careful land measurement seemed important to many Euro- peans in the period, it was not all of a piece. In England, new surveys were often made of estates for economic purposes, while in France, the vast majority of mapmaking was military and marked political boundaries. There is no clear argument to account for the difference. Certainly, England depended more on seapower than land, so it had less military need for land maps. Nonetheless, the British made county maps for military purposes from the sixteenth century. These political surveys were just not as central to the daily lives of elites in England as they were in France. Estate surveys were both more prominent and more salient to most of the elites who commissioned them.26

In contrast, Louis XIV shared with other French military leaders an obsession with political maps and models; they filled their chateaux with maps and globes that described, not so much their own private landholdings, but either political territories of foreigners (friends or enemies) or land that they had annexed in war. In addition, they had constructed the most wonderfully elaborate models of their own and others' towns and fortresses that could be used for strategic planning; techniques for making these clay constructions were illustrated in books on fortress-centered warfare.27 These military books were joined on French shelves by primers written by surveyors on how to use tri- angulation techniques for warfare, linking the measurement of territory to the techniques for capturing more of it. At the end of the century, the government even contracted for a great national survey to be made to lay claim to and embody the territorial reach of the French state. The techniques of land control obsessed the entire nobility during Louis XIV's reign.28

Why this would be is not entirely clear, although there are some indica- tive clues. The wealth of France lay both symbolically and practically in its land; there was reason to map carefully what was so central to its prestige among Europeans. The centrality of land power as a military resource could also have contributed; the fragile navy that Colbert was trying to build was hardly the match of the French army as a source of state power, and France had miles of land borders to learn about and protect. Perhaps less obviously but importantly, the peculiar social mobility of France may have made spatial identity there both more flexible and more urgent an issue. Financiers or merchants who bought


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titles to raise themselves socially had to purchase estates at the same time. They bought land where they could find it, not necessarily where they lived. The estates were more important to them for their political meanings than their economic and social value. This made locality problematic in new ways - both for old residents faced with the in- surgence of new elites and for the newcomers themselves. We all know that traditional social hierarchies were supposed to have been chal- lenged by these practices; perhaps the sense of place was undermined as well. Whatever the peculiar mix of factors, the French aristocracy surrounded itself with political cartographic imagery and routinely identified place with military purpose.

French formal gardens as laboratories of power

In an odd way, one of the clearest (albeit not immediately obvious) expressions of the new political interest in land in the period lay with the massive gardens that began to be constructed around the great royal chateaux of France. The gardens in seventeenth-century France grew dramatically in size and cultural importance. They became highly articulated and deeply structured forms, emerging from chateaux as quasi-architectural features and continuing along pathways and beyond sculpted masses of trees toward the horizon. They delineated living spaces and ceremonial stages beyond the walls of buildings; they con- stituted a site for an aristocratic way of life that linked social standing to territorial control and the accumulation of property. It seemed that buildings in this historical moment were no longer large enough or complex enough for the new cultural possibilities of the age. Something more was needed to contain the sculpture, fountains, and plants; a bigger stage was required for the elaborates fetes (or even frequent but modest promenades or hunting parties) that were part of court ceremonial life. Land itself needed attention and celebration, requiring ingen- ious decorative strategies and engineering feats, and embodying new visions of natural order. Enormous energy and passion were harnessed to bring together garden designers, gardeners, trees, shrubs, sculptures, and water systems to facilitate a massive restructuring of hills and valleys. This kind of activity seemed so important that Louis XIV began building the great gardens at Versailles before he began expanding the chateau there.29 Why was this? It was part of the king's passion for building and war, the material marking and control of territory as an expression of power.30


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By turning our attention to the formal gardens that began to emerge from royal residences, we can trace more carefully how nature was mobilized for this political regime, how it was transformed into a diplomatic vehicle, through which the natural wealth and political power of France could be made manifest. Some of the few pieces written in Louis XIV's own hand are itineraries for the garden promenades at Versailles that were used for diplomatic occasions; the king wrote these guides himself apparently because he placed great weight on the ritual tours of the gardens. The promenades were formal affairs, in which distinguished visitors were fed and entertained as they followed the prescribed paths through the gardens. What they did and saw in these circuits were meant to inform their assessments of the king and his court.31 Clearly, these gardens were serious political vehicles for the period, and hence the technical experimentation that went on there was an important, if obscure, means for the material celebration of the king's glory.

Some scholars have downplayed the symbolic significance of the itineraries arguing instead that they were necessary because of the technical limits of the water system. Fountains had to be turned on and off as the visitors progressed through the different bosquets and allees to assure that there would be enough water pressure to make the jets work to full effect. But why was the full effect of the fountains so important if the garden walks meant little? Why were distinguished visitors sent to the gardens to begin with? Why were the bosquets and parterres at Versailles made more and more elaborate during the period of the king's reign? Certainly, we can agree that the itineraries had practical advantages; they helped to coordinate the movements of water valves, cooks, servants, sedan chairs, and food required to make these rituals as lavish and well run as possible. They also assured that visitors would not miss any part of the gardens, and hence would be exposed to the full weight of these triumphs over nature. But these practical consid- erations were meaningful not in themselves but in light of the political culture of the promenades where the technical control of natural forces was a measure of the might of the king and the resources of the kingdom.

How did the visitors respond to their tours of the gardens? We can easily see how impressed they were with the gilded fountains, the dis- plays of precious metals, rare shells and gems, and classical statues brought from Italy (not to mention the collection of rare trees, the elaborate topiary, and other gardening marvels to be found there).


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Many visitors came away from the gardens, commenting in journals and letters on the natural and aesthetic wealth of France and declaring that the French court now surpassed anything found in Italy. Others spoke more about the sheer monumentality of the gardens, and the overpowering combination of beauty and scale. The vast array of fountains, the elaborate garden architecture, the huge canals, and impressive collections of rare trees and animals were the most impressive features to many visitors. The water works for Versailles, the fountains, aqueducts, and pumps that ran them, were what most astounded Locke when he visited Versailles; he was overwhelmed by their technical daring and success. When the gardens were described by visitors as dazzling, they spoke not just of their natural beauty, but of the level of technical control over nature displayed there. What nature was made to do in the glittering fountains, wonderful cool water tables, enormous Orangerie, and great grotto at Versailles seemed miraculous - which the land of the Sun King was meant to be.32

Garden historians have tried to find a narrative structure in the gardens at Versailles but without much success. The itineraries regulated how visitors viewed the gardens, but the routes Louis XIV chose for different occasions were not exactly the same, making it hard to argue that the garden features had an essential narrative order that the itineraries were meant to present.33 Moreover, the descriptions of the gardens written by Felibien (official publicist for the building projects at Ver- sailles) did not ascribe any narrative form to the gardens, only a set of Sun God/Apollo themes worked out in different statues and fountains.34 The gardens also do not seem to be precise markers of the history of the reign. The improvements in the garden were almost continuous, and although new features were frequently unveiled when the king returned from a military campaign, the statues, fountains, and other garden structures did not simply provide running commentary on the king's successes and failures at war or international relations. Some features were added for fetes that were (at least in theory) commemo- rating battlefield successes; others were built as direct celebrations of military victories; so they did indeed carry a history of the king's foreign adventures. But elements of the garden (the new kitchen garden, the new Orangerie, and the like) had no direct relationship to this level of political life.

We also know little about Andre Le Notre, the garden designer most responsible for the style of the French formal garden. He wrote no theoretical treatises, engaged in no known debates with the intellectuals


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of the court about his works, saved few drawings, and left even less written material to interpret them with. His ideas about gardening are often read from earlier traditions of French gardening or later texts on design that seem based on what he practiced in his gardens. An often- repeated story suggests that he drew a sharp line between good architectural design and good garden design. Whan Mansart designed the Colonnade, Le Notre was supposed to be contemptuous of the results. To him, this room of marble, even with its open walls and lack of ceil- ing, was not a piece of gardening; presumably it had too little nature in it. But if he was not making architectural gardens, why were his works so orderly and made up of so many forest "rooms?" Why was the garden at Versailles such a clear invasion of the chateau and its ritual life into the natural world? What else could have influenced his work? There is only one clear answer. He worked from an earlier French tradition of gardening that had begun a century before with exchanges of gardeners between Italy and France. A form of parterre design that resembled decorations in oriental rugs was cultivated in France particularly under Catherine de Medicis, who had moved from Italy to France when she became queen and supposedly brought Italian gardening with her. This earlier French gardening used symmetries and geometries much like what was being used in Italy but worked on parterre designs with a floral delicacy that became distinctively French.35

Some of the garden theorists from that early period, particularly Mollet and Boyceau, expressed ideas that can be interestingly read into the designs by Le N6tre. They argued that gardeners should depict nature's features in their designs, and that they should be influenced in this regard by the new understanding of nature being revealed by the sci- ences. They pointed to a fundamental orderliness in the laws of nature and a diversity in the expressions of those laws, claiming that gardens could and should reveal those aspects of the natural world.36 The parterres of the period can be seen as clear products of this theorizing. The careful weaving of floral elements within the parterres exemplified an astounding complexity, while the bilaterally symmetrical geometries that organized the different sections of the parterres placed this complexity in a simple form. A particular understanding of nature, then, was inscribed into the land itself, making it look the way theorists claimed it to be. The result was not architecture, although it was just as artificial; it was continuous with the baroque floral patterns that adorned furniture, porcelaine, and fabric in the period, which also pro- jected an image of nature from the human imagination onto the material world.


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While some of the geometrical/rational order of the gardens of Le Notre and their delicate complexity may have been derived from these sources, where did their original touches come from and what did they mean? Why did his central allees become so large and such powerful parts of the gardens? Why the greater simplicity of the overall structure and the greater use of different levels (grades) within the garden to control what visitors could and could not see there? Why do walls take on such importance even in these relatively flat gardens? Why are double rows of trees planted along the sides of walkways, canals, and bosquets?37

Many of the techniques he used to make his gardens distinct had roots in French military design and engineering, although attaching this char- acteristic to Le N6tre's intention is impossible. There is no particular evidence of his having an affinity for military engineering, although he seemed to use it often enough. He was frequently asked by Colbert to employ the army for his projects to save the treasury some money, so we know he had regular encounters with military men who may well have discussed the engineering problems with him or his workers. But this does not tell us much. The important evidence that needs explaining and is not clarified from documentary sources is how Le N6tre took over and dominated terrain with his designs. When he redesigned gardens, he pushed toward the horizon with a central axis and a fero- cious appetite for land. He staked out enlarged garden areas with a much simpler geometry than that used by his predecessors, pointing toward the boundaries of the properties and moving beyond them. He used advanced engineering techniques to make the garden areas as dramatic and vivid as possible. He imposed grand and sculptural order over the landscape. His workmen dug into the earth, grading it and giving it new forms and levels. He made great fountains rise above the trees. He made nature do tricks and take on forms that only humans would devise, and thus he made it testify to humans' power to exercise will over land.

If the gardens had a trajectory over the many years they were developed, it is best described in engineering/technical terms, controlling nature to extract new wonders from it. They realized ever more elaborate or difficult technical feats in wresting new heights from fountains, earlier fruits from trees, and new massiveness in the structures retaining the hillsides (as in the new Orangerie) or in the bodies of water that could keep the area drained (as in the Piece d'Eau des Suisses). With the notable exception of the Colonnade, newer garden features tended


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to express an increasing capacity of French artisans, laborers, soldiers, and gardeners to control and manipulate the land. Hence, when the king was on a military campaign and wrote back to Colbert to learn how the gardens were coming along,38 he was not just inquiring about forthcoming efforts to celebrate his military prowess or (on the other hand) turning away from the hardships of war to dreams of an idyllic landscape, but rather engaging in a search for territorial control that was continuous in his projects (and passion) for building and war.

The military and the gardens at Versailles

It is easy enough to see the gardens at Versailles as an expression of the king's obsession for building. Colbert saw them this way and com- plained continuously about the amount of money the king was lavish- ing on them. But the appropriateness of the scale of building at Ver- sailles to Louis XIV (which so annoyed Colbert) is perhaps best ex- plained by a continuity the king saw or felt between garden design and warfare. "His" gardens contained a strong military presence. One can see symbolic allusions to military images in things as diverse as statuary and garden layout. Adorning the walkways of Versailles, either inter- spersed with or embodied in statues of classical figures, there are equestrian statues and statues of hunters and warriors prepared for battle. They point quite straightforwardly to the military culture of the nobility still in force in the period, and to the particular interest of the king in war and hunting; excelling in these was both a great passion of the king and a virtue for men of his social rank. The statuary at court also presented to the world an image of Louis XIV as a great and powerful warrior. The Sun King, Apollo, in the fountain by that name, emerges in his chariot with powerful arms, strong will, and the look of a fine warrior.

Military imagery pervaded the plantings as well as the statuary of the garden. Old prints show topiary bushes around parterres or fountains cut, not in the familiar cone shape used today, but with three tiers of spheres, the middle sphere having two arm-like branches on the side. The resulting bushes look like sentries, standing guard along the edges of garden features. Allies and bosquets often had double rows of trees along their boundaries, reproducing the style of planting used on the barricades of French fortified towns. These long lines of trees constitut- ed a kind of symbolic standing army, guarding garden features, just as trees along barricades stood sentry, guarding and standing in for French soldiers, along the walls of Vauban's fortresses.


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Suggestively, formal promenades through the gardens sometimes started with a show of military marching. An itinerary for showing the garden at Versailles to Queen Marie d'Este of England (wife of James II) begins with military drills at the back of the chateau. Military parading of this sort was an innovation of the professional army that developed at Versailles. Only full-time soldiers could be regularly submitted to such discipline. Given the novelty of these drills, it should be no sur- prise that they would be of interest to visitors. What is provocative is that the marching was, in this case, part of a promenade through the garden, an introduction to the highly disciplined "nature" presented in the garden of Versailles.39

These hints of military influence are tantalizing, but a more revealing tie between garden design and military themes lies not in symbols, but in uses of military engineering in the formation of the gardens. Archi- tectural systems, survey techniques, bridge-building and road-building systems were all forms of engineering from the military that had a powerful place in the seventeenth-century French gardens designed by Le N6tre. Although these highly engineered gardens are usually thought to be architectural extensions of chateaux (continuous with civil architecture rather than with systems of fortification) or playful reconstructions of ideas about perception, power, and knowledge (hence continuous with non-military science), they in fact have many debts to military systems for acting on the land in order to control it. Moreover, the gardens often functioned as laboratories where technical experiments elaborated on these traditions.

The continuities between gardens and military technique are not just personal observations, but are located in the documents of the period. Allain Manesson Mallet's Les Travaux de Mars ou LArt de la Guerre,40 for example, has for its title page an image of a garden terrace with a statue in the middle, on whose base is etched the title of the book. Scat- tered around this statue are nobles talking, walking, standing, and taking their leisure, while in the background a battle is in progress. This image locates a readership for the book among nobles who had military ambitions; court nobles of this sort could realistically be found both in courtly gardens and by battlefields. But the image suggests more: an equation of the techniques of war and the techniques of garden design. The book is filled with geometry lessons that are sometimes presented against the background of a formal garden and other times presented against images of warfare - battlefields, siege scenes, and the like. The same mathematical systems could be used to measure


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spaces for garden plots, prepare a plan of attack, or determine the trajectory of a cannon. Mathematics was presented here as a means for acting on the earth to transform it into controlled territory. In gardens as in war, the land could be attacked, transformed, and, in so doing, mobilized to display power.

Fortification techniques were used routinely throughout the gardens at Versailles (and other sites where Le Notre worked) to hold up terraces and support battlement-like walkways along cascades, over grottoes, and the like. They were formed with grand and slightly sloping walls of stone, exactly the same type used for building the fortified cities around France designed by Vauban and commissioned by the king.41 The great wall (with double staircases) at the back of Versailles overlooking the fountain of Latona may look simply like a convenient spot for viewing the expanse of the garden below, but it is also like the back-filled barricade walls being built for military purposes elsewhere in France. This wall is much more imposing than the gentle terracing at Vaux that preceded it. It is also a more powerful architectural feature than the terraces in Italian gardens like Villa d'Este in Tivoli, Villa Lante in Bag- naia, Villa Farnese in Caprarola, and the Boboli gardens in Florence. These Italian gardens routinely used back-filled walls and terracing because they were built on hillsides, and unfolded in layers downhill, like a cascade of gardens, each providing a momentary stop on and different relation to the incline. Barricade-type walls were both technically necessary and aesthetic opportunities within the gardens, used to divide up spaces and define views of the layers of garden and valleys beyond. The terrace walls in these gardens were not imposing features of the visual space. They were broken up with criss-crossing staircases, niches full of statuary, fountains shooting water into the sky, or cascades that broke through the walls' visual barriers and revealed the garden below or house above. All these decorative elements pointed the viewer toward the sky or the earth, and away from the wall itself. In contrast, the wall behind the Latona fountain at Versailles is a massive presence in itself that is left unbroken by the walkways down its two extremes that move respectfully away from its center rather than trying to define it. The wall is unmarked by statues, and might seem only a quiet backdrop to the Latona fountain, if the wall did not threaten to overpower even that massive multi-level fountain. This horizontal and daunting line is only broken by the rhythmically spaced rows of topiary bushes that run along the top of the battlement and follow its contours. The chateau lies beyond this visible barrier, accessible but remote. The relation of wall to residence is closer to what one sees at Blois and


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other medieval royal houses, where military dominates over civil architecture, than the relation of house to garden typical in Italy.

This does not mean that French chateaux and gardens were much more medieval than Italian villas. The beds of Italian gardens still often used the simple geometries of medieval herb gardens, and the garden walls that gave Renaissance Italian garden their intimacy were relatively thin stone structures typical of medieval cities and castles. The Italian villa simply did not have the military relationship to place typical of French chateaux. The battlement form found in French gardens had Italian roots, but in city design, not garden design. The French took their own tradition of Renaissance building with its heavy debt to medieval castles and celebrated the military engineering found there. In seventeenth-century French formal gardens, low-level parapets were built in places where they were not needed as retaining walls. Opportunities for terracing were sought and invented in these flat gardens, so visitors could walk along them and survey the garden as they would survey the land around a fortress.

The terracing systems in French gardens both made use of and demonstrated the state of military engineering in France, a France that was already known for experimenting with military techniques. When soldiers paraded across the terrace above Latona, as they did for Marie d'Este, they could have been marching along the wall of any fortification in France. It was clear enough, of course, that these garden walls had no real defensive purpose; their massively visible staircases designed in the style of Renaissance gardens made their heights readily accessible. They did not place a barrier between the king and the countryside as castles did (in a way that might suggest that the king needed military defenses from the people). The Sun King was supposed to draw people to him, not send them away. Still, the walls expressed the military power of France. Like Vauban's fortified towns, the gardens at Versailles presented to the world marvels of French engineering that spoke directly to the might of France and its ability to control its territory.42

As moats disappeared from the architecture of chateaux (but remained a standard feature of fortress cities), moat-like features migrated into the gardens, particularly near battlement walls. Elevated walkways were routinely built near the canals, so visitors could peer over them and into the distance as they might survey the countryside from a fortress set over a moat. This kind of water feature contrasted markedly


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with the Renaissance reflecting pool that had preceded it. The peaceful, accessible, intimate, and spiritual center of so many Renaissance gardens was replaced by much larger, remote, and militarily-inspired means for using still water in the garden. The Piece d'eau des Suisses at Versailles was made to be surveyed at a great distance and height from the top of the Orangerie. The canal at Vaux was made to be viewed from the top of either the Cascades or Grotto. At Chantilly and Fon- tainebleau, where remnants of a moat remained, they were joined to garden terraces overlooking water that preserved these military features within Le N6tre's gardens. Moats even reappeared in miniature in some formal gardens. At Versailles, where there was not a trace of a moat around the chateau (large terraces front and back replaced it), the moat motif reappeared in the Salle des Festins; a great flat area with the shape of the "footprint" of an older castle (a rectangle with rounded turret-like shapes in the corners) was situated in the center of a pool of water. Similarly, the Galerie d'eau and the Obe'lisque were island forms with castle shapes surrounded by narrow moats. These were play spaces, where nobles went to attend parties, and where the military culture of the nobility could be referenced without threat to the state.

The battlement or parapet form had another and even more unusual site at Versailles: the jardin potager, or the kitchen garden. This garden does not usually get discussed in art histories of the gardens at Ver- sailles, in spite of the fact that the king was extremely proud of the garden and took distinguished visitors there. The jardin potager was a site in which intensive gardening techniques were furthered, particularly espalier techniques for stretching fruit trees along walls to create earlier and sweeter fruit. Walls were central to the design of this garden. Espalier trees needed walls, not just to support them but to absorb the reflected and retained heat from the sun. There was no reason why these walls should be thick enough to walk across, but the king insisted that the garden be built with battlement-type walls all around and through it, so visitors to the garden could promenade along them and look down at the plants below. The result is that the garden kitchen looks more like a fortification than any other part of the garden. Its walls surrounded and crossed it in a way that clearly resembles the walls at the fortified Chateau Trompette after it was rebuilt by Louis XIV in 1680. The plan en relief of this chateau produced at Versailles in 1705 shows dramatically the military origins of this sort of design.43

Other aspects of military engineering also showed up in seventeenth- century French gardens. Military skills in building bridges and roads


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(for moving troops and support materials) were applied to the design of grottoes, cascades, and walkways. Bridge-like edifices were no more the exclusive products of French culture and engineering than were battlement walls; they had Italian precedents in the elaborate military technology born in or revived from classical models for the warring city- states of Italy. The military debt of this engineering was simply made more visible in France. Some Italian gardens used arches in their walls and grottoes, but, for example, at the grotto in the Boboli gardens, the arches were not of equal heights; there was a soaring central arch that made the grotto look more like a church nave than a bridge or trium- phal arch. In contrast, the grotto at Versailles with its three equal and modestly-sized arches looked very much like a bridge across the exte- rior. A counter example might seem to be the back of the Oval Foun- tain at the Villa d'Este where a wall of arches, seemingly reminiscent of bridge structures, curves behind the water. But the clue here is the curve. Bridges are straight. Curved arches like this are actually found in the apse of churches or in Bernini's arcade in the Vatican, not as part of road systems. In contrast, the arcade added to the Trianon to join the two halves of the building (the one that most commentators take as distinctively Italianate) was made of a straight row of equal arches. From the road to this residence, one sees this arcade at a distance as a bridge across the trees, both capturing and framing the garden beyond.

Bridge architecture had a much more practical relation to the gardens at Versailles as well. The gardens were famous for their waterworks, and they depended for this magnificence on an elaborate series of aqueducts that carried water into Versailles. These structures were bridges of a sort, and show the less visible but equally important role of bridge architecture to the great gardens of the period.44

The usefulness of road and canal building techniques first to the state and then to garden design is clear enough that it does not need extend- ed comment. Both road and canal systems were an essential part of creating a unified state, serving both economic and strategic purposes, so it is not surprising that the military was recruited into engineering and building an expanded transportation system in France. Similarly, the garden was nothing without routes traversing it. Garden paths and canals shared common purpose with the transportation system in France by facilitating movement over a large territory and giving that land a unity.


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French formal gardens physically presented, then, a kind of model of French territorial control, one written on the land and demonstrated at work there. They presented France to itself and others just as much as the new maps of the period, and, like maps, they did more than just manipulate symbols of control; they embodied a practical system of management. The layout of the allees themselves resembled lines in a surveyor's manual. As French gardens moved away from the strict geometries of Italian and early seventeenth-century French gardens, they abandoned the use of walkways laid out in squares, rectangles, and circles. The new allees were laid out in lines of sight. Diagonal walkways cut across wooded areas and intersected with shorter walks that marked the depths of the forests. The allees were carefully measured and related to others, but they did not form simple geometries. There were economically few walkways to l'Encelade, the Salle Conseil, the Gallerie, and the Colonnade (this in a garden not known for its economy and simplicity). Where the walkways crossed, viewers could quickly gauge the size of the garden simply by looking at the vistas opening and closing around them, and following the punctuation of sculptures and gates.

When foreign visitors went on promenades in the royal gardens of Ver- sailles, using one of the king's itineraries, they moved from one site to the next, studying views, appreciating statues, and looking at the chateau from different positions. Following these scripted movements, they were made to survey the gardens, moving and peering through passages in the landscape in precisely the ways that would encourage them to measure the gardens' immensity. As new vistas would appear and disappear in these "gardens of illusion,"45 new relationships of space and land were made the focus of their gaze. The gardens' ap- parent openness made surveying seem simple; their complex control of vision made resurveying necessary at every turn.

Distances were not the only measures to be taken during these walks. As visitors were led from statue to fountain to statue again, admiring the artwork as they went, they were also encouraged to make informal inventories of the wealth on the estate and to measure the taste of the king. The promenade scripts were formally like medieval pilgrimage maps that defined routes from one landmark to the next, taking the pil- grim from town to town in quest of truth. The difference was the truth sought in the promenades was achieved through accounting techniques, measures of territory and its riches, rather than religious narra- tives. The royal ceremonial walks constrained viewers in a system of


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social control that highlighted the virtuosity of the technical control (particulary from military sources) displayed in French seventeenth- century territorial gardens.46

The territorial state and the natural world

Clearly, nature had important political meanings in seventeenth-century France that helped solidify Louis XIV's power during his reign. The built and unbuilt environment together were defining a space in which the state's power was exercised. Moreover, those acting in the center of power had their reach made visible to themselves in the rich material culture of territoriality surrounding them, in the gardens, the maps, the models, and statistical records of the kingdom. At the peripheries, peasants and princes alike could see the fortifications, canals, and port cities that marked the reach of the monarch. The power of the state was symbolized and realized through material mani- pulations.

Simon Schama and Svetlana Alpers have already pointed to the centrality of representations of landscape in the early modem period, in Holland and in France.47 The cartographic reductions of places to ciphers, the rationalization of images in the grid structures of maps, the horizontal vision of landscape paintings, and the idyllic search for truths in paintings of rural places all demonstate that land was culturally foregrounded in this time. But the story of French territoriality tells us a bit more as well. It points to the political significance of another kind of drawing: drawing on the land. Engineers and garden designers both drew with shovels and masonry, marking the land as a politically engaged, mobilized site for the exercise of material and not just symbolic power.

The social meanings of nature in Louis XIV's regime were dictated by the social uses of nature for geopolitics. Of course, land had been central to power before or used to manage the relations between states. People had developed new weapons of war before, and the results were important to the outcomes of wars and the fates of princes. It was not that infrastructural improvements had not been used in the past to improve the land. But in seventeenth-century France, these things were organized into a single system of material culture dedicated to the accumulation of power. The measure of power in this regime came to be a material one; the search for power centered on technological innova-


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tions; and the realization of power came through successful intervention into the realm of nature, making it the object of territorial ambi- tion. Geopolitics brought the earth to the center of the struggle for power, where techniques of intervention, destruction, and control over nature were no longer in the range of local action but became the busi- ness of states and important sources of state power.

Notes

1. Saint-Simon, Saint-Simon at Versailles: Selected and Translated from the Memoirs of M. Le Duc De Saint-Simon, ed. Lucy Norton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958). "My child, you are about to become a great King. Do not imitate my love of building nor my liking for war, but try on the contrary, to live at peace with your neighbors. Render to God all that you owe Him; recognize you duty toward him; see that he is honoured by your subjects. Always follow good counsellors; try to comfort your people, which it grieves me that I was unable to do..." (241-242). Saint-Simon soon reflected on the character of Louis XIV and said that he loved flattery and this made him seek glory in war and nothing but adulation in his life. "Flattery fed the desire for military glory that sometimes tore him from his loves, which was how Louvois so easily involved him in major wars..." (248). "Pride and vanity, which tend always to increase, and with which he was fed continually without even his perceiving it, even from preachers in the pulpits in his presence, were the foundations on which his ministers raised themselves above all other ranks" (240) "He acquired a pride so colossal that, truly, had no God implanted in his heart the fear of the devil, even in his worst excesses, he would literally have allowed himself to be worshipped. What is more, he would have found warship- pers; witness the extravagent monuments that have been set up of him" (252).

2. Mar6chal Vauban, De l'attaque et de la defense des places (La Haye: Chez Pierre de Hondt, 1736); see also, Vauban, Maximes et instructions sur l'art militaire (Paris: Chez Denis Mariette, Jean-Baptiste Delespine et Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1726).

3. Joseph Konvitz, Cities and the Sea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); A. J. Sargent, The Economic Policy of Colbert (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), ch. 3; Charles W. Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964), vol. II, chs. 10-12; Alfred Neymarck, Colbert et Son Temps (Geneve: Slatkin Reprints, 1970), livre II, ch. 1.

4. See diaries of visitors such as Lister, Locke, and others. Locke's Travels in France 1675-1679, ed. John Lough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); France Observed in the Seventeenth Century by British Travellers, ed. John Lough (Stockfield: Oriel Press, 1985).

5. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Roth and Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), volume I, part II, ch. 1, particularly 314. For an example of analysis following this idea, see Charles Tilly, "War making and state making as organized crime," in Peter Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

6. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power (New York: Knopf, 1988). See also Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), ch. 14.


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7. Cliford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in 19th-Century Bali (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1980).

8. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

9. Jim Clifford, UCSD Speaker Series on Border Culture, 1990. 10. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (London: Routledge, 1989). 11. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983). See

also The Civilizing Process, trans. Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 12. Material culture is, at its heart (for many scholars), an awkward way anthropolo-

gists have had to deal with the artifacts they have found in pre-modern societies. The term is the outcome of an intellectual conundrum. Anthropologists are supposed to reduce everything to culture, so they must find some way to include artifacts in their analyses. They cannot call all material goods they find in preliterate cultures art (because the politics of defining art is too complex); hence the term material culture is invented to fill the vacuum, but then is mostly (and wisely) neglected by anthropologists because they realize its fundamental weakness. This view of material culture was easy to sustain until recently, when more historians began to find that analyses of the artifacts of history could help them understand the lives of nonliterate people in the West. Material culture remained a difficult subject-matter because the techniques for its analyses were few, but it was (signifi- cantly) now no longer outside of the realm of historical accounts, but rather on the cutting edge in the discipline of history. Historians, who from the end of the 1950s had been turning against great man theories of history, were not content to explain long-term patterns of human collective life in terms of the actions of those at the top of social hierarchies. They even began to question the privileging of the hierarchies themselves in historical accounts. In the Annales school, they learned to think in terms of material ways of life and the mentalit6s behind them. When historians tried to take better account of the material resources that they relied on for their own work, when artifacts of history became the subject-matter of historical method as well as the means to doing history, then material culture took on a more fundamental importance for historians.

13. Cole, Colbert; Franqois Bluche, Louis XIV (Paris: Librairie Fayard, 1986); Im- manuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (London: Academic Press, 1976); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB 1974).

14. See Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Neil McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

15. See, for example, Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capital- ism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Lucien Febvre and Henri- Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. Gerard (London: NLB [1958] 1976); Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Feeney (New York: Penguin, 1982). For discussions of the Annales school and its influence, see S. Clark, "French historians and early modern popular culture," Past and Present 100 (1983): 62-99; Lynn Hunt, "French history in the last twenty years: The rise and fall of the annales paradigm," Journal of Contemporary History 21 (1986): 209-224.

16. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971); Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).


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17. Foucault, Discipline; History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Mukerji, From Graven Images.

18. For some of the ideas and histories of space and power eminating from France, see Andre Micoud, Des Hauts-Lieux: La construction sociale de l'exemplarite (Paris, CNRS, 1991), particularly, Louis Marin, "Le lieu de pouvoir a Versailles," 117- 132; Bernard Lepetit, "l'Echelle de la France," Annales ESC 2 (1990): 433-443; Dominique Poulot, "Patrimonie et esth6tiques du territoire," Espaces et Societes (1992): 9-37; Jacques Revel, "La connaisance du territoire," manuscript, 1989; and the seminal Henri Lefebvre, La production de l'espace (Paris: Editions Anthro- pos. 1974).

19. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987); Michel Callon, "Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and fishermen of St. Breiuc Bay," in J. Law, editor, Power, Action and Belief(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 196-233.

20. Critical theorists recognized this, although they did not know what to do with it. They saw it as part of a rationalization of society and relations to nature, but did not see it as a system of material culture. See William Less, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Braziller, 1972). In both everyday conversations and serious philosophical debates, science is often defended as a system of truth, not because it establishes fundamental human understandings of the world that survive the test of time, but because it "works." The success of scientists in experimenting with the material is supposed to indicate that they understand nature. Of course that does not necessarily follow. There are traditions of skill in artisan groups that have flourished historically without scientific understanding of why certain practices work. Perhaps we should be paying more attention to what "working" means. See C. Mukerji, "Toward a sociology of material culture," in D. Crane, Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives (London: Blackwell, 1994).

21. This kind of territorial identity is deeply tied to the transition to capitalism, devel- oping in one way in seventeenth-century France and manifesting itself in Eastern Europe today in another related form. It is an aspect of the culture of capitalism that students of materialism need to understand, even if they come to the subject mainly to analyze economic life. This is because territorial identities affect the development and meanings of material culture and thus have great economic importance. Belonging to a region of the world is often equated with a way of life, meaning a mode of consumption. In my earlier research, I paid particular attention to the play between local and international styles of dress and their economic con- sequences. What I did not notice at the time was that these geographical patterns of fashionable change were predicated on a territoriality that I had taken for granted. Perhaps more important for the study of materialism, though, is the fundamental recognition that it has a political as well as an economic dimension. Western history itself has been written in terms of a politics of territoriality and this part of our materialist culture has been masked by our tendency to naturalize rather than analyze it.

22. See Lepetit (1990); Revel (1989); Poulot (1992); Marin (1991); Micoud (1991). 23. Brewer, The Sinews of Power. 24. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1978). 25. See Chandra Mukerji, "Visual language in science and the exercise of power," Stud-

ies in Visual Communcation 10 (1984): 30-45, or "Voir le pouvoir" Culture Tech- nique (1985); Joseph Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660-1848 (Chicago: Uni-


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versity of Chicago Press, 1987); Raymond Lister, Antique Maps and Their Carto- graphers (London: G. Bell, 1970); R. V. Tooley, Maps and Mapmakers (New York: Crown, 1978). Duranthon argues that the history of maps in France is born in military and religious needs to administer lands. See Duranthon, La Carte de France (Paris: Solar, 1978).

26. Mukerji (1982), ch. 3. Konvitz (1987, 1978); Duranthon (1978). 27. Alain Manesson Mallet, Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre (Amsterdam:

Jan et Gillis Janson a Waesbergue, 1684), tome I; Paul Hay de Chastelet, Traite de la guerre ou politique militaire (Paris: Theodore Girard, 1668).

28. See, S6bastian Le Clerc, Practique de la geometrie sur le papier et sur le terrain (Paris: Chez Thomas Jolly, 1669). See also Konvitz, Cartography; Lister; Tooley. For a description of the roots of territorial gardens in the nobility earlier than this, see Thierry Mariage, L'Univers de Le Notre (Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga, 1990). And for more discussions of techniques of land control in the gardens, see Richard Mique, Les Jardins de Versailles et de Trianon d'Andre Le N6tre (Paris: Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1992).

29. The chateau at Versailles was being only slightly modified when Le N6tre started important work in the gardens. The famous first fete at Versailles took place before major renovations made the chateau large enough to function as the center of court life. William Howard Adams, The French Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 79-80; H. Franklin Hazlehurst, Gardens of Illusion (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1980), 59-64; Guy Walton, Louis XIV's Versailles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Alfred Marie, Naissance de Versailles (Paris: Editions Vincent, Fr6al, et Cie., 1968), 26-27.

30. The political territoriality that developed in France in the period was simultaneously a form of material practice and of political representation. We tend to think of territoriality as a state of mind, a way of feeling about a portion of land, but the territoriality that developed in seventeenth-century France was, first of all, a form of material practice, a way of acting on the land that helped to make it seem like France. Land was politically mobilized as territory in the period, using engineering skills to reshape it and in the process to alter its meaning. Land was measured and fitted within the languages of maps so it could be carried on pieces of paper and made a public image; it was marked and bounded with military fortresses so its breadth would be visible and its relation to state power tangible; and it was suffused with humanly engineered waterways and roadways that gave it internal orderliness and tied it to an economic rationality that was also associated with the state. In all these ways and more, defining state territory for France and making it useful for the state was an activity, not the consequence of a propaganda campaign but the result of a new way of life in which the state intervened in the landscape and gave it new form. Land was not just seen in a new way in the seventeenth century; it was handled differently, and this made it represent simultaneously a new materialism and new political trajectory.

31. The itineraries developed by the king are seen by Thacker (1972) as problematic to use for understanding the gardens, since they were developed as system for showing the garden, not explaining it. They told the visitor where to walk in the garden, what objects to look at, and what views to study, yet they provided no guide for analyzing the meaning of statues or the significance of the garden's lay-out. The itineraries generally had the visitor walk from the back of the chateau to one of the garden features to the left or right. Following a large semi-circular movement, the guide would take visitors to major fountains or statues to look at them. If these


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were (as they often were) placed at the intersection of walkways, the guide would tell the visitor which way to look to appreciate a view or to see the artwork or chateau from a different angle. In this process, the two major forms pointed out to visitors were vistas and artworks, spatial designs and the objects punctuating them. Not surprisingly, the vistas encouraged the visitor to look at and think about the garden as a diverse but integrated territory. The artwork drew attention to the new material culture and cultural materialism of the garden. The movement of studying bosquets, fountains, or statues, and then once again looking at an important view encouraged the viewer to consider two elements of control in the garden's design: its spatial and material claims. And although most garden histories do not mention this, these gardens encouraged viewing from multiple perspectives, while main- taining a clear system of centralized control.

32. Locke ([1679] 1983); Lough (1985), 150. See also Andr6 Felibien, Memoires pour servir d l'histoire des maisons royalles and bastiments de France (Paris: J. Baur, 1874); Description de la grotte de Versailles (Paris: Chez S6bastien Mabre- Cramoisy, 1672).

33. Thacker(1972). 34. Felibien, Memoires. 35. Mariage, L'Univers; F. Hamilton Hazlehurst, Jacques Boyceau and the French For-

mal Garden (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966). See also Alberto Perez- Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).

36. Hazlehurst, Jacques Boyceau; Jacques Boyceau, Traite de jardinage selons les rai- sons de la nature and de 'art (Paris: Vanlochon, 1638); Andre Mollet, Le jardin de plaisir (Paris: Editions de Moniteur, [1651] 1981).

37. F. Hamilton Hazlehurst, Gardens of Illusion (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1980).

38. See, for example, letters 49-51, 296-300 and letters 82 and 86, 324-26, 328- 330, in Pierre Clement, Lettres, Instructions et Memoires de Colbert, tome V (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1868).

39. For images of the topiary, see the vuees and perspectives by Pierre Aveline; the clearest views of the topiary are not at Versailles. See the "vuee et perspective du chateau royale de Vincennes" and the one on the "orangerie de St. Cloud." For images of French fortified towns that showed their landscaping, see Nicolas Faucherre, "Outil strategique ou jouet princier?" in a special section of Monuments Historiques dedicated to Les Plans-Relief 148 (1986): 38-44, particularly, 24-48. See also Antoine de Roux, Perpignan d la fin du XVIIe siecle (Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1990). For a description of a promenade in which there was military parading, see Christopher Thacker, "La maniere de montrer les jardins de Versailles," Journal of Garden History (1972): 49-69.

40. Mallet, Les Travaux. 41. See Roux, Perpignan. See also Michel Parent and Jacques Verroust, Vauban (Paris:

Editions Jacques Frdal, 1971), particularly 122 and the appendix "Notices historiques sur 12 citadelles ou places fortes en bon dtat de conservation" (288-297).

42. This kind of great wall adds to the sense of power of the garden and chateau. On the garden side of Versailles, the wall behind Latona is imposing, and gives the chateau a more elevated standing. The same sense of power is associated with the walls rising up in the avant-cour at the front of the chateau. The stones seem to rise up from the streets to raise the chateau high above street level. At the Trianon side of the canal, a similar effect is produced by the high wall that rises behind the foun-


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tain that abuts the end of the canal. A massive face of stone rises up from the water, giving the building above it a remoteness and grandeur. Similarly at Chantilly, a high wall between the courtyard and garden on the grotto side of the garden adds to the military posture of the house.

43. See the plan-relief on display at Les Invalides in Paris. 44. For a detailed and fascinating description of the activities of a surveyor for an aque-

duct project, see M. Picard, Traite du Nivellement (Paris: Estienne Michellet, 1684). For a description of the water systems at Versailles, see L. A. Barbet, Les Grandes Eaux de Versailles (Paris: H. Dunod et E. Pinat, 1907).

45. Hazlehurst, Gardens. 46. That labyrinths were part of both the culture of pilgrimmage and gardens suggests

the parallel between the two. Labyrinth shapes on the floors of cathedrals were locales for making a spiritual pilgrimmage. The labyrinth at Versailles was hardly a pilgrimmage site where one would reflect on God; it was the opposite. But it was a part of promenades that allowed visitor to meditate on the power of the king much as one would meditate on the glory of God. See Charles Perrault, Le Labyrinthe de Versailles 1677, reprint of 1677 edition from the Imprimerie Royale (Paris: Edi- tions du Moniteur, 1982).

47. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Simon Schama, Citizens (New York, Vintage, 1990); Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Knopf, 1987).


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Issue Table of ContentsTheory and Society, Vol. 23, No. 5, Oct., 1994Front MatterThe Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach [pp. 605 - 649]The Political Mobilization of Nature in Seventeenth-Century French Formal Gardens [pp. 651 - 677]Foucault's New Functionalism [pp. 679 - 709]The Foundations of Habermas's Universal Pragmatics [pp. 711 - 727]Back Matter [pp. 729 - 730]

mukerji political mobilization of nature

Documents

jstor terms

jstor archive

century france

overwhelming passion

terms conditions of

french landscape

french government

state power