Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

Abstract

Reviewed by: Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles* Claudia Lazzaro (bio) Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. By Chandra Mukerji. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xxii+393; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $79.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). Territorial Ambitions treats the seventeenth-century garden of the French king Louis XIV at Versailles not as an aesthetic object or an expression of literary and artistic culture, but in relation to land-management practices, water control, gardening techniques, and much more. Chandra Mukerji presents the garden as a material object: the earth and natural elements and their manipulation and alteration, which paralleled that of the larger territory of France. Her thesis is that the construction of the garden at Versailles corresponded with the creation of the territorial state of France. The idea that gardens are political—that the garden of Versailles is an expression of [End Page 660] the power of the state—is not entirely exceptional, although Mukerji’s take on it is. Territorial Ambitions is provocative, original, and striking for the sophistication of its argument, its breadth of evidence, and its novelty of associations. The most emphatic of the parallels between garden and state concerns military engineering. This required similar skills in mathematics and survey geometry, but even more significant were the visible resemblances, in wall systems of stone or brick and the grading of the new fortifications. These consisted in alternating flat terraces with ditches and canals, much like the changes in level in the garden and with the same end of managing vision. The extensive planting of trees in the garden recalled the forest management system designed by the finance minister, Colbert, which served the military’s need for large quantities of timber. The king’s insistence on ever more water for the garden’s canals and fountains required a vast hydraulic enterprise, the counterpart in the garden to the water system that brought drinking water to Paris and the canal system throughout the state of France that made the land more productive. Louis’s demand that the kitchen garden be planted in a swampy area entirely inappropriate for fruit and vegetable production and forced to ever earlier maturity led to constant experimentation with drainage, soil nutrients, and various difficult and expensive techniques to protect and heat plants, all of which eventually spilled over into commercial agriculture. Mukerji argues not simply for a relationship with contemporary techniques of engineering and hydraulics, but for a parallel process between the construction of the garden and that of the territory. To make France out of the land that Louis ruled required not only the absolute power of the monarch and military might defining its boundaries, but also a state bureaucracy to extend the authority of the king throughout the territory and to construct a visible and distinguishably French material culture. Canals, forests, and fortresses imprinted the central authority on the whole state. Regional identities were suppressed in favor of a national one through the creation of distinctive French fashions and textiles. For example, silkworms were cultivated and a market for silk manufacture was encouraged among the idle nobility that inhabited Versailles. The floral patterns in the silk garments closely resembled those of the parterres in the garden. Mukerji offers a corrective to the recent literature on nationalism, asserting that Louis XIV and the state bureaucracy constructed a France that was not a concept, title, or product of an imagined history, but a place, which “lay in the land and the peculiarities of its ordering” (p. 324). Mukerji draws on an impressive range of sources, from warfare and military engineering to gardening, cartography, economics, mathematics, and more, and there is much that will be of interest to historians of technology. The book is also grounded in recent trends in Marxist scholarship and in Foucault, reworked to emphasize material objects. It is tightly [End Page 661] woven, but some individual points are not wholly convincing for being more asserted than demonstrated. My principal gripe is the artificial contrast of the Versailles gardens with the earlier Italian garden tradition by reducing the latter to a single, inaccurate idea (an “Edenic” garden). The considerable recent literature on Italian Renaissance gardens, including but...