The Three Natures
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Book Series
Early Modern Gardens and Landscapes, vol. 2
- Pages: approx. 376 p.
- Size:220 x 280 mm
- Illustrations:263 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2025
- € 75,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-1-915487-51-3
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Sep/25)
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Gardens in Revolution offers an incisive look into how aristocratic and royal landscapes were used to represent dissent, undermine, and then ultimately recast and reinvent absolutism in the pivotal decades preceding the French Revolution.
Subject(s)
BIO
Gabriel Wick is a landscape historian and a senior lecturer in art history at New York University in Paris. He received his doctorate in history from Queen Mary - University of London in 2017. He also holds a masters in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley, and landscape conservation from ÉNSA-Versailles. He is the author of a number of books on 18th-century French landscapes, and curates exhibitions for the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
Summary
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: In the Gardens of the Princes Patriotes: The princes de Conti and Condé and the Duc d’Orléans
Chapter 2: Triumph through Disgrace: The Duc de Choiseul at Chanteloup
Chapter 3: Révolte à l’Anglaise: The Duc de Chartres at Monceau and Saint-Leu
Chapter 4: A Revolution at Court: Marie-Antoinette, the Petit-Trianon and the Reinvention of the Royal Garden
Chapter 5: Prince of the Public Sphere: The Comte d’Artois’s Landscapes
Chapter 6: The Crown’s New Estates: Rambouillet and Saint-Cloud
Chapter 7: A Modern Domain for a Republican Prince: Orléans and Le Raincy
Conclusion: The King’s Last Garden: Tuileries
Bibliography