Reading and Writing with Nature: Social Claims and the French Formal Garden Author(s): Chandra Mukerji

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 6 (Dec., 1990), pp. 651-679 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657755 . Accessed: 29/06/2011 16:41
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Reading and writing with nature Social claims and the Frenchformal garden
CHANDRA MUKERJI
Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego

In The Structures of Everyday Life' Fernand Braudel dismisses out of hand Werner Sombart's suggestion2 that there is a close connection between the ravenous patterns of consumption in early moder court life and the growth of capitalist production. The idea that businesses and trade might have been spawned to fill this demand is not, to Braudel's mind, worthy of serious consideration. Court sumptuousness is a cultural aberration to Braudel, not an essential part of an emerging capitalist economy. There is a tone of deep contempt in this dismissal, presumably because Sombart's approach would lead researchers to sanctify outrageous spending and to study the well-known stock players of elite history, not the equally fascinating but more obscure characters now the major focus of historical research. Sombart violates current norms by thinking and writing about kings and queens. Worse than that, Sombart's approach takes the development of capitalism out of the hands of ordinary entrepreneurs, and puts it squarely into the laps of aristocrats who did little business yet reaped rewards from the economic efforts of others. It seems an insult to those living more modest lives who helped to transform European life through the development of new business practices and a new economic mentality. However much I might sympathize with Braudel's point of view, I am much taken with Sombart's argument. I am also less convinced that the world of court society was so detached from the world of business. What Sombart recognizes quite correctly, I think, is that the court cultural system was not outside capitalist economic development. To understand the culture of capitalism we need to understand how the business culture developing in the early modern period made possible and shaped court life as well as the world of trade. I think of this article as an opportunity to respond to Braudel by
Theory and Society 19: 651-679, 1990. ? 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

652 demonstrating the deep interdependence between seventeenth-century courtly gardens and the materialist culture of the early modern period central to the rise of capitalism. I hope to show both the theoretical value of this approach and the empirical rewards of this work. On the theoretical level, I think one can start from a much broader and deeper definition of materialism in court culture than the simple demand for luxury that Sombart describes (or the even simpler one Braudel attributes to Sombart). As Braudel points out, life at court may have been glittering, but it was not comfortable, so we should not confuse court sumptuousness with the pursuit of bourgeois comfort or even organized desire for pleasure.3 What Braudel misses in Sombart is that the latter associates court luxury with social ambition and mobility, not comfort. At court, luxury was used for making social claims, not a comfortable life because the economic system was creating a new financial elite that wanted to realize social aspirations through court society. Sombart demonstrates how much the sumptuousness of court culture was part of a capitalist reorganization of culture, spawned by new elites to underscore their importance.4 Court culture was not, as traditional art history suggests, some pure and inherently elite system of style and taste. In this article, I use garden history to look at how material culture was used at court for creating, declaring, and reading claims about social station. I try to show how the development of new garden designs and the cultivation of imported plants was made possible by the growth of capitalist trade, trade in plants themselves, and also by the publication of books on horticulture that spread gardening practice. In these ways, gardens that were designed to symbolize high station through material means ended up being places in which capitalist enterprise penetrated court life. On the empirical level, it turns out that there is a surprising need for more careful historical study of court consumption because so much of the extant literature on the material life of courts is written in the language of traditional art history, designed more to help connoisseurs understand design traditions than to help historians understand elite culture. The gardens are "read" as asocial texts, made meaningful through analysis of the rules of their internal orderliness, compared to texts in other media, and placed in the history of garden design. It is difficult indeed looking at the symbolism of grottoes or the literary sources of designs for fountains to see patterns of court consumption as having anything more than politically symbolic and aesthetic dimen-

653 sions.6 Only the brilliant work by the sociologist Norbert Elias on conspicuous consumption in the French court7 begins to suggest the potential theoretical rewards of rethinking this history. He argues quite convincingly that developing a highly complex and expensive culture of consumption within the court was not just a way of distracting a bored aristocracy, but a central means by which Louis XIV controlled the French aristocracy. He is concerned more with the political than the economic and cultural consequences of court culture, but he demonstrates definitively that there is still much left to be learned about court society and its ways of transforming life in early modern Europe. The research I have done on early modern gardens has been focused mainly on the history of French formal gardens, and patterns of gardening in France. However, it is impossible to look at these gardens in isolation. They had roots in both Dutch and Italian gardening;8 they were to influence patterns of garden design throughout Europe; and they can be understood in important ways by comparing them to the English gardens that followed them. Thus the French experience was not simply a local one, and the consequences of the cultural forms nurtured there were not local either. They were deeply entwined in an economic internationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism, helping to define both.9 It turns out that the history of French formal gardens is a particularly rich place for seeing the multiple manifestations of materialism in early modern Europe. Gardens are forms of material culture inscribing affluence and power, legitimating social stations made problematic by economic change. They are places in which statues glorifying Europe's classical heritage and rare imported plants, testifying to the economic reach of the international capitalist trading system, were used to buttress the social claims of their owners and designers. In addition, these gardens were designed. They were active means for communicating social location because they were carefully planned and executed, using the rich book culture that was being expanded through capitalist development in the book trade. With these tools, gardens were constituted as models of the exercise of power over nature, narratives for describing the virtues of discipline and of integrating divergent elements within an organized whole. There are four kinds of materialism involved in the development of French formal gardens: (1) the collector's culture that fueled elite consumerism and was used to justify economic mobility, including the col-

654 lection of rare plants in gardensand the collection of sculpture,both antiqueand new; (2) the new thinkingabout gardensmade possible by the widespreaduse of writing,drawing,and figuringon paper and in books - that material means for intellectualchange proliferatedby capitalisttrade in books; (3) the economic sources of and commercial spreadof elite design, in other words,the connectionof gardendesign to systems of trade;and finally (4) the role of French gardens in the culturalredefinitionof naturefrom a manifestation God to a kind of of secularpropertyto be controlledand used for economic and political power. Gardensas sites for conspicuouscollection Walk around Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte,Chantilly,or the Renaissance gardensin Italy, such as Villa d'Este, and you are surrounded with exotic marvels. In Renaissance gardens, you can see the most wonderfulsculptures,fountains,and grottoes;in Frenchgardensfrom the seventeenthcentury,you see in addition a tremendousvariety of vegetation as well as numerousbuildings for both enjoyment of the gardenand the propagationor cultivationof rare plants.Many of the exotic plants in today's French formal gardens were planted in the gardens eighteenthand nineteenthcenturies,but seventeenth-century would not have had orangeriesfor housing tender plants or machines for moving huge potted trees indoors and out each year unless they were meantto hold and protecttenderimportedflora. Collecting exotic objects, includingplants, was not new to the early modern period, but the collecting of plants in gardens of this period was part of a larger cultural and economic shift that was new. The European trading system expanded so dramaticallyand brought to Europe such a wealth of plants along with more economicallysignificant items of trade that these gardensbecame emblems of an impressive globalreach.At the same time, they illustratethe developmentof a broaderculture of collection that expanded in this period along with trade, justifyinga new reliance on objects in society and helping to that makesense of the social restructuring accompaniedthe redistribution of wealthwith trade.10 Objects collected took on new meaningin this period. The capitalist economic system, based on accumulationof capital, grew up with a culture that sanctioned the collection and use of goods. Sometimes

655 these goods were capital goods, new machines or ships for spawning industries, but more often they were consumer goods used to distinguish social rank by taste.11 In theoretical terms, one could argue that Bourdieu's system of stratified tastes'2 that people today use to reproduce and to make sense of social stratification was brought to life in this period. The disjunction between traditional sources of rank and new sources of economic and political power made social station more problematic, and people used consumption to lay claims to the now less clearly assignable social positions. In this situation, culture became more essential both to mobility and its restriction. If rank was to be partially determined by wealth in the new set of social relations, and wealth was less directly associated with the economic benefits of landowning, then some system other than inheritance was needed to give children of elites greater chance of achieving high rank in the next generation. Precisely the elaboration of manners and other "civilized" codes (think of Elias'3), signs of conspicuous leisure and training (think of Veblen14) could give those from elite backgrounds identifying cultural markers that would help them fit into court society. At the same time, those achieving economic success for the first time had identifiable signs of elite cultivation to learn in order to legitimate inclusion in the gentry (at least for their children). So taste became more important as capitalism made social rank more unstable. The culture of collection was central to this system because the ability to collect was dependent on wealth and access to trade, and because in bourgeois culture it was in accumulating goods that people displayed their tastes. Collection was not just an aesthetically sanctioned excuse for hoarding. Objects collected in a household were put to work in the world of status just as capital was put to work in the world of business. Collector's items were used to claim and negotiate social rank. They were active as a communication system just as subtle as written language. Gardens were a medium in which people "wrote" and "read" about the social world in which they lived. Conspicuous consumption s was an important and elaborated cultural practice for nobles as well as the bourgeoisie in the period. Social rank was problematic for all members of the elite in this period of restratification, hence even members of the most elevated noble families made claims about social rank using goods. When Louis XIV ascended the throne, the legitimacy of the French monarchy itself was not firm. The

656 monarchy might have been more powerful structurally than monarchies elsewhere, but the power of the king was disputed and sometimes rejected (by the Frondeurs;'6 for example). So even the monarch himself was engaged in a process of making social claims about the monarchy when he built his great palaces with their dramatic gardens. The buildings he built for his mistresses were objects the mistresses used to make claims about their position at court. Fouquet, when he built the great gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte made claims about his power that cost him his position and almost his life.17 Saint Simon is eloquently clear about the fluidity of statuses within the court, how they changed from season to season, and how much these changes meant.'8 Given the power of subtle moves in and out of favor, one can see how social instability was reproduced within court society and helped to promote the extensive use of material culture for making social claims. In this society, knowing who to imitate in patterns of consumption and how to use prescribed fashions showed political shrewdness and made social life possible.19 Garden design (like dress and architecture) was an object of fashionable change. When garden designs changed periodically, people felt compelled to follow fashion.20 Gardening did not enter the fashion system as early as dress did. In fourteenth-century Burgundy, fashionable clothing was important to social rank, but only in fifteenth-century Italy do you see self-conscious use of gardens for claiming rank. Gardens entered the fashion system in this period as a revived form from the classical tradition. Great gardens were signs of rank in part because of their reference to the elaborate gardens and garden architecture of the classical past.21 The association of gardens with ancient Roman culture made change there less rapid than in clothing styles. Gardens could and necessarily did change over time, so fashion could be followed. On the other hand, large gardens were slow to plant and mature, and much more expensive to change than a dress, so garden design was necessarily less volatile than fads in clothing, but nonetheless, there was also a special tie to the Roman past that kept garden design more stable. That is probably why the Renaissance Italian garden remained a model for so long. Still, French gardeners created a cultural revolution in the seventeenth century. As French thinkers contemplated the divide between the ancients and modems and thought about how to improve upon the wisdom of the ancients, French garden designers looked for a new way to use classical style, one still with deep stylistic and allegorical ties to the past,

657 but one even more clearly expressing the economic success of the region, and the cultural and political ambitions of its court.22 Gardens could express the social ambitions of their owners in a variety of ways. Certainly the general design was central, but I turn to that later. For gardens as sites for collection, the plantings themselves were essential. The art of accumulating and arranging plants was the heart of the garden. A design could only be realized if the plants could be made to grow, and of course not just any plant could do. Great gardens were not just made of lawns, local shrubs, and ordinary trees. French formal gardens were notorious for the use of tender plants in large tubs that could be taken in or out of doors, depending on the weather. These potted plants were not local flora; they were prized and petted exotics from other climates and parts of the world. That is why these gardens could be seen as collectors' maps, marking the international reach of the trading systems that reached their owners. They were filled with novelties from other European countries and the places in the East and New World where European travelers stopped. Rare plants and animals were simultaneously placed in orangeries and menageries.23 Images of the same flora and fauna even appeared inside houses embroidered on fabrics for dress, upholstery, and draperies.24 They testified to the power both of the European economic empire and of those who could control such a range of plant life. House and garden were continuous sites for cultural accumulation and display, with parterres in the transitional position, bridging house and garden, carpet to lawn. Gardens were extensions of the house in architecture as well as decoration. Each housed exotic novelties from far away - chinoiserie inside and rare bulbs outside. Petted tender plants were even given their own houses. (Compare this to Veblen's ideas about horses as beloved by elites because they are so expensive to keep25) Orangeries were built for wintering tender trees. Stoves (or heated glass houses) were developed for growing palms and other large tropical plants as well as medicinal plants.26 Buildings, complex systems of irrigation, the large pots for trees, and soil amendments were used to give collectors the God-like power to control the elements and make their own gardens of Eden. Bruno Latour27 argues that scientists use nature as an ally when they promote their theories and the power of their institutions. They do this whenever they claim that the data tell them what they know. In a similar vein, one can argue that elites of the early modern period who had

658
exquisite gardens also recruited nature as an ally to attest to their powers and high status. An exotic tree was a marker as well as a prize (or prized as a marker), locating its own in social space at the same time that the owner located it in the garden. French gardens were certainly places to collect rare plants. They were also places to collect the statues, fountains, grottoes, and tables for outdoor dining derived from classical models. These links to the classical past were used as touchstones for defining gardens as part of a uniquely European culture: the Great Tradition. Garden owners used them to display a superiority of culture reifying their estimates of their own social standing. Gardens as sites for collection, then, were maps of social ambitions as well as economic reach. On both the level of status and of economics, gardens functioned as means of legitimizing ambitions. A closer look at the too-familiar story of Vaux-le-Vicomte may be useful for specifying the tie between ambition and conspicuous display in gardens. The story goes that Fouquet, Louis XIV's Treasurer, built this chateau and its beautiful gardens to show his good taste and high standing. The association between high status and collecting artworks was already well set by Mazarin. But Fouquet went a bit further. He made himself into a patron of rising French artists: the architect, Le Brun, designer, Le Vaux, and garden designer, Le N6tre. When the work was completed, he had spent enormous sums of money and helped to establish in France a distinctive type of design, particularly garden design. To show off the results, he invited the king to come visit the new chateau, and attend a party in his honor. When the visit was over, Louis had Fouquet imprisoned on charges of graft, and then took Le Brun, Le Vaux and Le Notre to build Versailles. Ranum argues that Fouquet was among the new financiers of France who expressed their new elevated social standing through acquisition of property and its lavish development; their new standing was expressed in new cultural forms. Fouquet was simply too successful in his cultural innovations and thereby made too grand a claim for his social standing. As a result, he lost his office, his property, and his role in the development of culture in France.28 From this story, we can see how potent gardens could be as a cultural medium in this period. We can see how they were modulated to negotiate rank in a socially unstable environment. And we can see how they did this by functioning as repositories for collections of plants and arti-

659 facts that testified to the high taste (and hence high station) of their owners.

Materialistmeans for makingdesigninnovations In my earlier work on the culture of materialismI argued that the growth of capitalistmanufactureand trade in early modem Europe spawned the productionand distributionof new culturalobjects that in added to the materialism Europeanlife. In tryingout these new culturalobjects,Europeansbegan turningawayfrom traditionalforms of One can see some expressions and consecultural performance.29 of this shiftin the historyof printand literacy. Withthe growth quences of printingpeople began to communicatemore with books and less through face-to-face discourse. The result was a new reflexivity of thoughtand design throughexposureto new ideas and the use of print to reflecton currentideas. Thinkerscould now comparetheir ideas to those proposed by authorsliving in other times and places, increasing the self-consciousnessand cosmopolitanismof their thoughts.At the same time, they could look on their own ideas in a more detached mannerwhen they set them on paper and put them on a table next to the work of others.30 The resultingintellectualshift was clearlytied to capitalistdevelopmentof the book trade,and gardendesignwas caught up in the movement. As much as Frenchformalgardenswere materialmeans for communicatingsocial claims and relations,they were also resultsof a reflexivity of design bred by their originson pieces of paper.Jack Goody argues that being able to record and review thoughtson paper allows people to thinkin new ways.31He presentsthis argument a theoryof literacy as and its cultural consequences, but one can make similar arguments about ciphersand images.All these media (writtenwords,pictures,and numbers)were used to formulateFrenchformalgardens,makingthem veryliterate(here meaningreflexivelydesigned)gardens.The formality of the gardenstestifies to their planning.They are carefullymeasured and generally bilaterallysymmetrical;their measurementsare made accordingto theory and precedent;and their contents are often connected to classicalallegories.In a culturein whichthe trappingsof literacy were signs of high standing, these highly literate gardens were meansto claimingrank. appropriate Historiansoften say that French formal gardenswere designed to be

660 seen from the upper stories of the buildings around which they were planted. Boyceau wrote about the relation of the proportions of buildings and the gardens around them. He also talked about how the parterres near the house should look from these windows.32 Visitors to French gardens have often marvelled at the views from the house. So there is much to be said for this point of view. The problem is that many French gardens had mounds and balastrades from which to view the beds from above, and although they were secondary to the views from the upper house, they show that the gardens could be seen from above from a variety of perspectives.33 I would argue French formal gardens were really designed to be seen from a bird's eye view, because they were made first and foremost to look good as a plan on paper. The views from elevated spots like the house were only the best earthly approximations of that heavenly perspective. In their origins on paper, French formal gardens were like their predecessors in Italy. The classical revival in Italy was a major spur to the development of garden design there, just as it was a spur to city planning, design of military equipment, design of hydraulic equipment, and architecture. The Romans had been avid planners, and passed this preoccupation through manuscripts to Renaissance Italy along with the traditions of art, science, and engineering. In Italy prior to the Renaissance, there was increased production of manuscript books on natural history and horticulture that also had a role.34 The smaller and earlier classical revival that accompanied the development of universities and bookselling in Europe had given birth to a literature of herbals and other books like the Tacuinum Sanitatus that illustrated plants, their culture, and their uses. They are among the first books of practical gardening. Manuscript books from the fourteenth century also demonstrate an early association between the collection of rare flora and fauna, and high status. Accurate pictures of plants and animals also filled decorative borders of traditional books like the Visconti Hours or the Hour Book of Catherine of Cleves; they were "collected" there as rare decorative objects, giving value and honor to the words they surrounded. These images demonstrate text origins of the passion for collecting plants and animals that developed later in Renaissance gardens. Garden designs themselves appear in print with Alberti, using ideas about garden design he absorbed with classical study, namely reading the ideas about the pleasure garden written by Pliny the Younger.35The

661 garden was to be enclosed and cool, situated on a hillside, and equipped with a table for outside dining. Water was a central feature in the garden, both pools and fountains. And so were topiary bushes, cut in fanciful as well as geometrical patterns. The garden was a place of retreat and fantasy, wish-fulfillment rather than practical activity. It was to be situated by the house so the garden could function as an outdoor living space. The great romance that made Aldus Manutius's fortune was also a model for Renaissance gardens.36 The Poliphili Hypnerotomachia not only described in luscious detail great garden delights, but contained delicately beautiful illustrations that depicted garden details that later appeared in Renaissance gardens. The intricate fountains, topiary work, and trellises were to become measures of the pleasure garden. So too were the playful surprises like waterjets to douse passing visitors. Water-run automata were also described in the book, and helped to stimulate the development of elaborate moving statues in grottoes and water organs. The garden was also tied to performance and play in ways that fit the period when performance culture was fed by wealth and literacy, but before it was undermined by them.37 The tie between texts and gardens in the Renaissance is quite direct and runs through one of the greatest publishing houses of the period. The literacy behind these forms is indeed deep. The stylistic shift toward French formal gardens also had roots in writings and drawings. The garden architect most closely associated with the French formal garden, Andr6 Le N6tre, was not (to the despair of French garden historians) a theorist who wrote down his ideas. But many of the ideas that he molded into the French style derived from the gardens of earlier French designers who did write and wrote extensively. Bernard Palissy, Salomon De Caus, Charles Estienne, Oliver de Serres, Jacques Boyceau, and Claude Mollet38 were the most notable of them. Many of them used their books on gardens mainly to teach bits of practical horticulture, but they also considered ideas behind the practice of gardening, sometimes philosophical ideas and often design ideas. Geometry was a central concern to most of these writers. The beauty of a garden lay in the geometry of its design, the proportions with which the beds were laid out. The garden was lovely because it revealed the orderliness of God in nature. The geometry of the garden had to be a central abiding concern of designers, for it was here that the value of nature could be expressed.39 The extent to which the geometry of the garden was a detached system of numerical proportions to be

662 applied to any garden or simply a system to be worked out for each garden site varied from one author to the next. The centrality of science or God as the essential marker of the orderliness of nature might vary from one to the next.40 The attention to details of design, careful thought about the engineering problems and possibilities of waterworks,41 or ideas about the shapes of topiary bushes or the lines of alleys varied from one author to the next, but the central issues of geometry and the desire for grounding practice in philosophy remained in most of the writing.42 This idealist emphasis in gardens might seem to divorce it from the materialist culture of the period, but the irony is that the philosophical debates animating intellectual life were fed by the capitalist book trade and the literate uses of the text that it made possible.43 Concern about the geometry of gardens was mirrored in France by the controversies over geometry in architecture that also developed in the seventeenth century. Were the proportions handed down by the ancients absolute forms that determined what was or was not beautiful? To what extent did proportions have to be varied to make up for point of view? To what extent were numerical proportions simply arbitrarily discovered from experience and then codified rather than grounded in some deeper reality? These were larger issues of design that enter into the debates about gardens. What is important about them is less their forms and point of view than the fact that they tied garden design through theory to a highly developed literate elite culture. The powerful members of court society may have been not so bookish themselves (if John Evelyn is to be believed);44 they left off schooling early to learn riding, dancing and good manners. But the culture that sustained them was organized around literatures that furiously debated issues central to philosophy, and gardens were among them.45 By looking a bit more closely at Boyceau's theories, we can begin to get a better sense of how design ideas were connected to larger currents of thought. To Boyceau, nature had two primary characteristics: orderliness and diversity. These were the aspects of nature that were revealed by scientific study. The diversity was made clear by empirical observation of particulars. The orderliness was revealed by the fact that natural laws could be written in the language of mathematics. The garden was a representation of the natural, so it too had to display the diversity and unity of nature. Boyceau argued against the boring use of square garden

663 plots that had been typical of medieval gardens and reproduced in many Italian gardens of the early Renaissance. These square gardens, surrounded by hedges and walls, were static and uninteresting because they did not make use of the diversity of nature. Boyceau felt this diversity should be revealed first in the choice of plants put in the garden, but not be displayed only there. It also should be in the plan of the beds themselves. He liked to have beds of different sizes in the same garden, not just different-sized rectangles either, but circles with beds around them to form a square, lozenge shapes, or rectangles sliced by radiating lines. He also advocated the use of "embroidery" ("broderie") in parterres, not the geometrical forms for mazes that had been popular in an earlier period. The development of these elaborate designs, made from box hedges and flowers and fashioned to resemble oriental rugs, also gave garden beds more complexity and better captured the diversity of the natural world. The complex beds, in turn, were incorporated within the overall system of bilaterally symmetrical and geometrical forms that made them as "lawlike"as nature was thought to be.46 Claude Mollet went further. While Boyceau only included parterre designs in his book, Mollet presented entire garden plans illustrating the rules of proportions for a formal garden. The gardens were bilaterally symmetrical, and the size of the beds got longer as they moved farther from the house. In this way, the rules of perspective were applied to the design of garden plots. Again diversity and complexity were held tightly within a geometrical system for ordering the garden and making it a whole.47 I should mention here that the lengthening of the beds as they receded from the house in these plans has been taken as additional evidence that these gardens were meant to be viewed from the house. Although this argument could be made for small gardens, in which the entire garden could be seen from the house, it does not hold for the large gardens typical for the period. These grand gardens were made on such a scale that the view from the house could not encompass the whole vista and viewers could not distinguish all the proportions. This is one bit of evidence that the use of perspective and foreshortening in these plans was not of practical use for viewing the garden, but rather displayed the designer's knowledge of perspective and foreshortening, adding to the literacy of the design and bestowing greater honor on its owner.48 In this and many ways, the French formal gardens were deeply literate

664 forms. The use of geometrical beds testified to the numeracy of their designers and the importance of numerical proportions derived from classical sources (Vitruvius in particular).49The use of classical allegories in garden architecture, statues, and fountains gave the gardens this additional stamp of elevated learning. Even the plant collections had an intellectual edge, because cultivating them was a complicated horticultural experiment that requires some botanical knowledge. But the most "literate"thing about the gardens was the obvious centrality of ideas to their design. The garden to Boyceau was a mirror of nature, but it hardly reflected the look of natural landscapes. Instead, the garden was a realization of the ideas of nature current in the period. The land had to undergo extensive changes to fit the images set on paper. And the elaborate plans gave workmen - from engineers building a water system, to masons building walls, to gardeners setting and filling beds means for coordinating their activities. The ordering of the garden and the organization of its construction were both made possible by the use of paper plans (in other words, a rich material culture). With them the French constructed the elaborately unnatural depictions of "nature" typical of seventeenth-century formal gardens.

French formal gardens and the development of trade The development of capitalism seems so far from the gardens of Versailles that it appears unlikely at first blush that there is any connection between the two, but there are actually a number of clear and some less clear connections. The court life at Versailles was indeed isolated from the day-to-day commerce of urban life in Paris;50 the gardens were often a refuge from the daily intrigues within the chateau.51 The intellectual richness of the gardens also seems to remove them from commerce, by setting them freestanding in the Great Tradition. How then could that idyllic world affect or be affected by growing trade and manufactures? The connection seems less absurd if put in the context of crown-sanctioned manufactures that were used to create much of the material culture at Versailles. Gold and silverwork, porcelain, silk, and tapestries came to court from French industries, some of which were set up by the government or individual members of court to produce the rich luxuries for court life.52 But this is only the beginning of the connection. These manufactures were stimulated by government initiative and court demand for luxury, but they were situated outside of court life

665 itself. There was also entrepreneurial activity by underlings who served the monarch, his family, and his entourage. These were people (from midwives to gardeners) who made a living by serving at court, not in business; that is why it is difficult to identify their entrepreneurialism. But they still sold their services (usually in the form of advice) or published books filled with their expertise, taking economic advantage of their position at court. Certainly, there were numerous books on gardens written in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by gardeners with positions at court and reputations based in large part by their elevated status. These gardeners were gentlemen, not laborers, and they were educated because they needed education to provide the kinds of literate touches to the garden for its elite aura. Still, these same gardeners could act as businessmen, periodically designing gardens for other gentlemen for a price. Additionally, when they published books on gardening, they made their ideas about garden design and the cultivation of plants available commercially through text.53 There were two kinds of books published on gardens in this period: ones on horticulture alone, and ones that included some ideas about garden design. The former were by far the most numerous, and they were extremely popular, going through multiple printings.54These dealt with how and where to plant fruit trees; how to prune and graft; how to improve soil for making a garden; how to grow plants in pots; how to make hothouses for tender plants; how to design orangeries to suit the trees in them; how and when to plant different kinds of bulbs; and how to lay out a vegetable garden or orchard. Some described different varieties of fruit and how they tasted and lasted on the trees. Others illustrated common gardening tools, pruning and grafting techniques, and the flowers of different bulbs so people could know what to expect from them.55 This kind of information was useful for gardeners of all types, from wealthy gentlemen wanting to put in a new large garden to a literate family with a small piece of land. The fact that it was written by someone with a high position in society gave the words of advice more authority. The books that contained advice on garden design as well as horticulture may well have had even more authority. Beautiful parterre designs might not have been used by most readers, but they would have made the books even more attractive to gentlemen who were thinking about a well-designed garden. The association with court gardens would have

666 been a commercial asset for many of these authors, since readers of all ranks would tend to trust their judgment. Of course, there were less credentialed gardeners who wrote successful garden books, too. They were often people who wrote on a variety of subjects, including gardens. They were intellectual members of the gentry whose commercial ties came through books.56 Court gardeners also were tied to commercial life through the plant trade. Many of the new plants brought to please the court were attractive to other gardeners, and found their way into commercial circles. In the sixteenth century, the international trade in plants was driven by the movements of travelers and exchanges of plants along interpersonal networks. Market gardening and international trade in plants did not grow large and efficient until the seventeenth century. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, much of the trade in plants was initiated by aristocratic demand and realized by gardeners who collected plants for the aristocracy or by ambassadors and pleasure travelers who brought back plants or seeds from their trips.57 These new plants often found their way into the market place through grafts, seeds, and cuttings. Commercial collectors and cultivators of rare plants had much in common with their counterparts at court, sharing similar interests and expertise. So it should not be surprising that plants would have moved between the two groups, eventually entering the world of market gardeners, where plants as well as fruits and vegetables were brought to market. I have not found much evidence to link directly court plant collection and the growth of the plant trade in France, but there is ample evidence of it in England, and the English in the seventeenth century are continually lamenting the poor state of the plant trade in England compared to what it was in France.58This may mean that market gardeners on the continent were more active than in England in seeking out new plants and bringing them to market, bypassing the court trade in plants. But there is evidence that still by the late seventeenth century gentlemen coveted any new seeds or seedlings they could acquire, suggesting that the plant trade was still not so organized in France that commercial sources could supply all the plants gardeners desired to use. The growth of the plant trade, both through court gardens and market gardens, may well have stimulated the demand for the horticultural books mentioned earlier. With the growing range of plants to use in their gardens, gardeners could not depend on traditional horticulture

667 to guide them in the cultivation of their plants. Moreover, when they were faced with new plants to raise that were unknown to them, they were in charge of very precious objects whose death would be sorely felt. So the desire for practical knowledge of plant culture must have been exacerbated by the expanding trade in plants. One indication of this interaction of commercial forces comes from The Retir'd Gard'ner,59a book from 1706 containing translations of two French books on horticulture from the seventeenth century. The Englishmen (George London and Henry Wise) who made the translation were from a family of market gardeners who had good reason to want English clients to be able to keep their plants alive, since the death of any plants from their nursery could be blamed on them. They also did a bit of promotion in the book, saying that readers should be sure to get plants and seeds from someone of high standing, because even the best care would not keep unhealthy plants alive. (This idea also supports the contention that gardeners with court appointments were likely more commercially desirable as consultants on gardens or as sources of rare plants, since they were indeed people of high standing in the world of gardens.) The merging of commercial and court culture affected garden design as well as the distribution of plants and garden books. Just as Michael Baxandall argues that Renaissance painters used commercial values when they placed such emphasis on the mass of objects in their paintings,60 one can argue that the French garden designers who were so carefully calculating garden geometries were also using the systems of rational calculation associated with the rise of capitalism. The movement toward increasingly dissociating numerical values from some system of absolute value was exactly like the move toward a currency system not based on the value of the metal in the coins but based on abstract attribution of value.61The emphasis on a garden design requiring careful measurement of land, taking advantage of surveying techniques and elevating the capacity to measure land exactly into a central element of design, could also be taken as clear evidence of the place of commercially inspired skills in the development of the formal garden. Even the development of rational systems of horticulture, the intellectual rationalization of the gardener's skills, can be taken as a commercially necessary shift in the period when market gardening was growing and agricultural experiments based on science were defined as valuable. The entirety of the designs cannot be explained in these terms, but neither can they be explained solely in terms of the symbolic resources

668 of the Great Tradition. The Great Tradition and capitalist enterprise were continuous parts of the same culture, a materialist culture geared toward appropriation of the natural world. In these and other ways, the great parks at Versailles, Chantilly, and elsewhere were not just refuges for elites to recover from the debilitating aspects of court society and international politics; they were also places where the commercial world entered into the world of the court without any fanfare or recognition. There was nothing to make noise about. After all, the court lived off the success of France's commercial society. Moreover, social mobility at court was mixing the world of commerce with the world of the traditional aristocracy. Hence it could not be so surprising that court gardeners would cultivate ties with the commercial world to enrich their thinking, their gardens, and perhaps also their pocketbooks. The commercial world could enter court culture in this way because it helped to enrich elite consumption. New, highly literate, garden plans realized with exotic plants were easier to construct given expanded trade in plants and garden books. The social claims articulated in parterres and bosques could be more grand at the end than at the beginning of the seventeenth century because the commercial resources available to gardeners were simply much more developed.

The meaning of nature in the garden Expanded commerce and wealth provided European elites with new resources for making claims about their social station, but they did not determine what the claims would be. Stylistic shifts in garden design during the early modern period not only expressed regional variations in gardening, but also variations in the kinds of messages about social station that elites wanted to convey. So far in this analysis we have treated social claims as uniform across the entire period, but even a brief glance at shifting garden iconography shows this is not the case. We can begin to make sense of the stylistic differences among the gardens of Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century France, and eighteenthcentury England by thinking of them as systems for mapping social ambitions on nature. And we can begin to tease out the themes in these three periods by turning to Keith Thomas's writing on the changing meaning of nature in the early moder period.

669 Thomas argues that there was a fundamental transformation in the meaning of nature during the period, a movement away from seeing nature as creation - as Man's dominion set up by God - and toward a vision of nature as a mechanistic system distinct from the human world, set up by God but working by its own orderly laws.62This trajectory takes one from an idealist theology to a materialist science. The problem is that Thomas's model does not fit the French formal garden very well. His first view of nature maps well onto the Italian Renaissance garden, and the second fits the English landscape garden, but the French formal garden has an ambiguous (and hence very interesting) position in the middle. We can learn something about both the transformation that Thomas tried to explain and the value of French formal gardens to the court by examining these relations more closely. The Renaissance pleasure garden was very much in tune with the vision of nature as creation. The garden was a kind of Eden, brought to life for the pleasure of human beings. The garden was a playful space, a site for innocent (and not so innocent) delight. Italian Renaissance gardens were full of jokes. They made funny noises, created illusions, sprayed visitors with water, and tricked them with mazes. They were alternately enclosed and open, opening up great hillside views and allowing people to hide from one another in trellises and grottoes. At the same time, Renaissance gardens were spiritual and mysterious. The presence of Greek and Roman gods might make one think that Christian spirituality had no role here, but it was not true because the Renaissance pleasure garden was so clearly an Eden. It was not just that the gardens were idyllic (although they were that); they shut out the world with high walls and tried to fill the inside with perfect beauty in flora and fauna. But they also were designed to exercise God-like control over those who visited them. They were full of tricks (from waterworks to mazes) that disarmed the unwary and demonstrated that a larger power was at work in the garden. Only the designer of the garden (to continue the image of Eden) or his agents were able to anticipate what the automata would do, where the mazes would lead, and where the unsuspecting visitor would get wet. The garden, like Eden, was both perfect and treacherous because it was designed and controlled by an impersonal power. The owners of Italian Renaissance gardens, using their parks as means for conspicuous display, claimed the right to a kind of dominion, a

670 control over part of Eden. To the extent that they connected the design of their gardens to the Great Tradition, they also claimed to be an intellectual elite, better suited to rule than non-elites who lived lives closer to that of animals. Nature was theirs both by spiritual right and because of their special capacity to rule over it. And their social superiority was legitimated by their intellectual and spiritual superiority.63 In contrast, the English landscape garden was based on a completely different conception of both nature and the garden. The landscape was meant to reproduce God's creation, the earth, not Eden. This was not a garden for people to enter and control, but for people to observe and admire for its own orderly, natural beauty. Beauty was located in the contour of the land, the shape of a tree, the sudden vista the opens up when rounding a corner of a path, the "poetry" written by nature "herself." The English garden was a place of study and contemplation of a nature that was other, and perfect in its otherness. It was something beyond human control, and yet under control because people had come to understand and work within its autonomous movements. The garden designer again gave those in the garden access to God through the organization of the garden itself; at the same time, classical gods and architecture decorated the garden. Both God and antiquity were here, as they were in the Renaissance garden, but this time, they were models of perfect order. What were important in the landscape garden were the proportions of the buildings, the carefully constructed perfect views (and obstructed bad ones), and the sense that the garden had no end because it was part of the whole of nature. Nature was outside of man's dominion and better controlled that way. Water was made to fall and flow, not spray into the air. Farm animals were used to cut the lawn, and there was no menagerie or aviary.There were no Eden here, just an ideal vision of the country. This nature was property (or poetry), not dominion. The English landscape garden ran to the horizon both because it was continuous with nature itself and because, as property, it needed to be vast to be impressive. There was no boundary; the ha-ha (a deep ditch surrounding the property) was used to keep the cattle and sheep in place without showing the property line. The garden provided a sense of limitless landholdings and so much wealth that vast amounts of it could be left unproductive. The English who cultivated these gardens on their property made clear claims about being landowners. Many of them had their portraits

671 painted in their gardens, showing their elegant clothing in the foreground and their landholdings in the back. They had their images set in a nature that they were clearly not part of. Nature was less a source of pleasure to them than a measure of their ability to tame it, sometimes for economic gain, sometimes not. In these portraits, land was thoroughly tamed around them, but it was also as idle as they were.64 What was the role of the French formal garden in relation to these two visions of the natural (and hence the garden)? French gardens seem to have had elements of both. They imposed even greater order on the land than Renaissance gardens, and they were clearly pleasure gardens, full of surprises and delights. They made water do tricks; they made garden beds look like rugs rather than patches of wild flowers. At the same time, they were vast and open, moving toward the horizon. They were meant to represent nature as it was understood by science, full of order and diversity. They were designed with long walks that were alternately open and closed, providing lovely views, and quiet places to sit and think.65 One could think of the formal garden as a hybrid, holding these contradictory cultural tendencies together (once again making French gardens integrate diversity), but that would not do justice to the innovative character of the style. The garden at Vaux-le-Vicomte was no muddle, forming a bridge between Italy and Britain; the French formal garden presented a distinct vision of nature. The French neither played with the garden as their dominion the way the Italians did nor contemplated the garden as their property the way the English did. I would argue that they held the garden as a piece of territory, distinct from the forest or fields around it, but extending as far as possible. This garden did not have a God as much as it had a monarch. At Versailles the Greek gods and goddesses were set in the garden as comments on the power of the monarch, not as markers of spirituality or even the classical past. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, there was no monarch, but certainly a territorial claim of grand proportions. At Chantilly, the Grand Conde manipulated his garden, the only territory still left to him after his defeat in Paris.66 When the designer of the French formal garden organized the garden around the house, pointing to the chateau as the design center, he did this not because he wanted to give the owner a superior view of the garden, but to mark the garden as territory.

672 This territory was property but not the sort found in the English garden. The English controlled land. The land was meant to look like land, something potentially productive, if not in use. The French formal garden was land that was surveyed and measured, stamped as something under human control, not an Eden attributed to God or a fertile field; this land was territory attributable to its ruler. We can understand what this means a bit better by looking at the land acquisitions of the Parisian financiers who rapidly bought up property around Paris in the seventeenth century. These men were not buying land to work for profit as much as they were seeking territories with which to make social claims. They wanted titles and holdings that would improve their status, not their wealth; the latter they acquired elsewhere. They wanted to translate economic power into political and social power, and for this they needed territories to express their prowess, not land in the English sense. The glory of the French formal garden was that it integrated such diversity of form and content within its geometrical patterns. One could think of them as models of French government, putting together different departments into a coherent system of order. But that would not quite speak to the garden as a model of nature. To understand that, we need to pay closer attention to the provocative relationship between warfare and gardening in the period, which suggests a relationship between territorial acquisition and gardens. Certainly, Louis XIV frequently punctuated periods of fighting with periods of garden-building. As we just saw, the Grande Conde, after his retirement to Chantilly, devoted himself to gardening. One could think of these as rhythms of aggression and retreat, the garden forming the place of retreat, but I think there is more. Expansion of a garden was a way of annexing territory. Finding ways to integrate new areas into a garden was a model of political integration of territory or rethinking the shape of a territory that could not be expanded or had to be cut. The territorial character of these gardens was also evidenced in the centrality of borders to the different units of the garden. Unlike the English landscape garden, the French garden was a mass of boundaries, not the walls of the Renaissance garden that closed out ordinary life to create an ideal garden interior, but a plethora of hedges and trees marking the end of one plot of land and the beginning of the next. These lines of demarcation were meant to be seen, but not to impede

673 vision. Moreover, they was meant to help articulate the relation among the parts of the garden. It is interesting to think about a comment frequently made by garden historians about Le Notre's designs. They say that he developed a strong visual rhythm through his arrangement of these borders. The way the hedges around parterres were articulated in relation to the trees around bosques constituted a central visual feature of the designs, simultaneously delineating and separating the garden's parts.67 The resulting design had the rhythms of a political map in which territorial units and their defined boundaries were the central feature. Ironically, the seriousness of the garden as a symbol of territory helps to make sense of the garden as a play space. The French court was famous for its playfulness,68 and gardens were sites for many kinds of sport - from lavish festivals to short hunting parties. If you believe Huizinga and theorists of child's play, playing games can be very serious business. It allows people to transform problematic aspects of their lives into rules of a game that they can manipulate without serious consequence. Children play with their problems to learn to think, act, and feel like adults. Adults work out their problems with cultural forms designed in part for that purpose.69 Take, for example, carnival. It is described by Peter Burke as a "world turned upside down," one in which people can reverse and make fun of the social control systems that normally repress them. So, too, one can think of the French formal garden, with its organized parcels of land, as a place where political elites could think about the acquisition and management of territory. They could act out dramas of warfare and territorial expansion, when they tried to acquire and tear down old villages to enlarge their parks; they could consider ways to integrate diverse territories into a common unit, whenever they considered reorganizing the garden; they could play with the development of vast water systems and transportation systems when they considered how to fill their fountains and where to lay their walkways; they could tinker with ways of symbolizing power for political ends when they decided what allegories to refer to in their statues and fountains; and most fundamentally, they could take the organization of diverse land parcels into a whole garden as an aesthetic rather than political issue, defusing but still raising the central territorial problem for the state. It was all very innocent pleasure. If a parterre or bosque did not work out, it could be torn down and rebuilt; if a new fountain was desired, the water system would be rethought. The

674 owners of French formal gardens who played with the construction and remodelling of their gardens did not have to think about territory in a conscious fashion. The fact that they did not have to think of the garden as serious allowed them to play with it, and through the play they worked on skills that were actually important to their political lives. These gardens were design triumphs in a period of intense political consolidation and change. They were not direct models of the territorial problems of the period to be played with like toy dolls and soldiers, but they were fun precisely because they addressed some of the issues about territorial acquisition and develoment that accompanied state formation and capitalist development. At the same time, they were reassuring because they displayed an illusion of complete control that generated a deep sense of security and ease. The beauty of Le N6tre's gardens lay in large part in the tranquility they maintained in spite of their size and complexity. There was an effortless way in which they integrated the land and house, wood and parterre, grotto and topiary confections. The sense of ease was achieved through excruciatingly careful planning. The control would be impressive in any age, but it meant more perhaps in the seventeenth-century world of shifting social positions and territorial claims. Le N6tre's gardens were, at least, enormously seductive to people of the seventeenth-century French court who were trying to secure their own positions in society and establish the position of their country in the European economy. The image of nature that emerged in the French garden was neither the Christian vision of an Eden for human dominion nor the image of the natural world as a fertile field (both poetic and profitable) simultaneously distinct from and manipulated to enhance human affairs. It was a materialist vision of nature, one equating land with property, but corporate property more than private property. This nature was an expression of a culture of mercantile capitalism, where economic organization was organized around collective control (through guilds or state companies, for example). Land in this system was still an economic resource, but not an individual one, and economic progress was expected to be achieved in large part though large-scale projects to improve transportation and trade. The garden at Versailles was a kind of territory appropriate to this social world. It showed land dominated and delineated, measured and weighed in relation to other bits of territory, and put to work for enhancing the prestige and therefore the power of France. This kind of garden was developed through the techniques of rational measurement useful to the political economy; and it

675 was organized in space, like the maps of states and plans of estates so frequently drawn from surveys in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus the elaborate garden design of the period was continuous with systematic efforts to organize a state-based economic and political life.

The French garden as a social claiming device Early in this article I emphasized that gardens were used by individuals to claim social status. Now I must add that they were also used as the basis for collective claims about the status of France, its economy, and the French state. Contemporary commentators from England certainly read them as measures of French economic success, indications of Louis XIV's power and success in inspiring the loyalty of his subjects, and markers of the ambitions of the French state. So the communication of political and economic claims for France is clear enough at the time. The fact that the gardens were usually open to the public (from the 1640s), in spite of their being "private"property, helps to support the idea that they were treated in part as French assets rather than private ones. And certainly, Louis XIV acted as though he designed the garden at Versailles to impress foreigners above all else, to give them a grand impression of the French state in his reign. Ambassadors were the primary audience for the promenade he devised through the park. He made the park more than a stage for displaying his power; he made it an actor in the politicoeconomic relations among European states. In this way, he made the garden a measured model of territorial control suited to his politicoeconomic ambitions. The royal gardens in France were, then, very much part of a system of social claims using material culture. They were not just used for claiming individual rank; they were also used to claim common identity. Just as stratification was disrupted by the growth of the market and put new strains on elites to claim their social rank with material means, regional identity was strained by state formation and put strains on elites to forge collective identities around the new geo-political boundaries. Gardens were used for both these purposes. If I am at all close to the truth with this analysis, then there is much being claimed and done in French formal gardens. These wonderfully elegant and seemingly transcendent creations are deeply caught up in the growth of the modern politicoeconomic system. They are products

676 of a trade in plants that was piggy-backed on more economically central trading patterns. They are places in which the problems of social mobility and instability generated by capitalist economic activity were played out in claims for social position and importance. They are symbolically transformed maps of territorial hegemony, playful models of control and systematic use of land for power. And they are tributes to the beauties and ambitions fueled in garden designs by the seductiveness of using pen and paper to think about gardens based on drawings and models of design available in print. Most of all, they are markers of the cultural experimentation made necessary by capitalist development to legitimate and organize the new sociopolitical realities of European life.

Notes
1. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1979). 2. Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism (Ann Arborg: Univ. of Michigan [1913] 1967). 3. Braudel, 186. 4. Sombart, chs. 1, 4. 5. See also C. Mukerji, From Graven Images (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1982), particularly chs. 1, 5, and 7. See also, Roy Strong, Art and Power (London: Boydell [19731 1984). 6. See, for example, William Howard Adams, The French Garden (New York: George Braziller, 1979); Derek Clifford, The History of Garden Design (New York: Praeger, 1963); Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves (New York: George Braziller, 1982); Miles Hadfield, Topiary and Ornamental Hedges (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1971); Elisabeth McDougall, editor, Fons Sapientiae (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978). 7. Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon [1969] 1983). 8. For the Dutch influence, see Florence Hopper, "The Dutch Classical Garden and Andre Mollet" Journal of Garden History 2: 25-40. Italian influence is discussed in every standard history of gardens. 9. I should add that these gardens are both interesting and terribly difficult to study in part because of French attitudes toward them. There is not the kind of extensive French literature on gardens that you find in England (either in the seventeenth century or the present). In the last few years, there have been some renewed interest in the subject in France, but it tends to be very traditional in its admiration for the abstract character of these gardens, its concern for locating the philosophical roots of Le N6tre's work in Descartes, and its notable lack of concern for how or why these gardens were built or maintained. There is also a terrible problem because Le N6tre did not leave any substantial writings or drawings to use as primary sources for reinterpreting the gardens. One is left with images of his gardens made by engravers, and descriptions of gardens by travelers (mainly English). This is dangerous ground for making historical assertions. But being a sociologist for

677
whom theory-building and modeling history is the primary purpose of looking to the past, I am by definition suspect as an interpreter of historical materials, and I am using that to my advantage. More seriously, I rely heavily in this article on the more extensive thinking on materialism in the early modern period that I did in previous work. Mukerji, ch. 1. Mukerji and Sombart. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, R. Nice, translator (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Nobert Elias, The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen Books, [19391 1978). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor Books, [18991 1953). Veblen, [1899] 1953. Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). Ranum, 252-259. Saint-Simon, Saint-Simon at Versailles, ed. L. Norton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958); Saint-Simon, Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, vol. 1 ed. L. Norton (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). See, also Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans, A Woman's Life in the Court of the Sun King, E. Foster, translator (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958). Gardens had a more limited role in this system than grooming, jewelry, hair dressing, and clothing because they were not portable and thus could not be used as continuously for displaying rank. Still, gaining favor from the King was often expressed in such things as the king's gardener designing a favorite's garden. Grand gardens were particularly indicative of high rank because they were only useful socially if others could be brought to see them. Clothes you could take anywhere. This means that not all members of court society were in a position to cultivate and use a great garden. Only those that the court would visit could have the proper communicative effects. Thus having an elite garden at all was from the beginning saying something dramatic about the social centrality of their owners. See Clifford, and Thacker. For a brief description of the geography of fashions in dress, see Mukerji. See Alberto Perez-G6mez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). For a description of the collection of rare plants at Versailles, see Ferrier quoted in John Lough, France Observed (Stockfield: Oriel Press, 1985), 147. Locke mentions a menagerie at Versailles and another at Chantilly. See John Locke, Locke's Travels in France, ed. J. Lough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 153, 168-169. T. Beck, Embroidered Gardens (New York: Viking, 1978). Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor [18991, 1953), 143. John Hix, The Glass House (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). Ranum, 252-229. Dent argues that the financiers were not the only group using land for making social claims. People from the high state administration were doing the same thing - albeit with less resistance. He also argues that the financiers were not a particularly capitalist group, in large part because of their importance to state finances, which involved them with the deep irrationality of the state financial sys-

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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tem. Still, financiers had a peculiar social position. They were distrusted because of their economic importance. Thus, while their use of land to acquire titles and enter into the nobility was not in itself clear evidence of the entrance of the world of commerce into court life, it was still resented because finance was seen as deeply at odds with nobility. Dent argues that the financiers were vulnerable to social distaste (and violence) because they were individualistic rather than corporatist. They had no group culture to protect them. In this way, they displayed an individualism that is usually associated with capitalism and commercial culture. They were carriers of a commercial culture that was seen as at odds with court life, but was so essential to it that they were able to experience mobility in spite of the cultural resistance to it. See Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers and Society in 17th-Century France (New York: St. Martins, 1973), ch. 9 and conclusions, particularly, 235242. As we see in a later section of the article, this movement was not a gradual and smooth trend. At first, performance culture was inhanced in early modern Europe by the wealth that could be applied to it. Renaissance processions and festivals are well known. But the materialist culture and capitalist economic development eventually began to undermine these traditional forms and replace them with a more object-oriented culture. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, ch. 7. See E. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Jack Goody, "What's in a List?" in Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1977). See Adams, and Franklin Hazelhurst, Jacques Boyceau and the French Formal Garden (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1966). F. Hamilton Hazelhurst, "Le Nostre at Conflans," in Dumbarton Oaks, The French Formal Garden (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1974). See Lucien Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, D. Gerard, translator (London: NLB [1958] 1976) on the change in books in this period. Sieveking quotes from Pliny on 15-18; see Thacker, 95-96 on Alberti. See Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979). Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1978). For a description and list of many French garden books from the period, see Phyllis Crumb, Nature in the Age of Louis XIV (London: Routledge, 1928), 5. For the texts cited here, see Bernard Palissy, Recepte veritable, 1563; Salomon De Caus, Les raisons des forces mouvantes [16151 (Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1973); Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault, L'agriculture et la maison rustique (Lyons: A. Laurens, 1702); Oliver de Serres, Theatre de l'agriculture et menage (Paris: Michel Vanlochom, 1600); Jacques Boyceau, Traite du jardinage, 1638; Claude Mollet, Le jardin de plaisir (Paris: De Sercy, 1678). See also Dezallier d'Argenville, La theorie et la practique de jardinage (Paris: J. Mariette, 1709). This books was supposed to contain the theories of garden design behind the gardens of Le N6tre. See Boyceau. See De Caus. See Palissy, Boyceau, and Estienne in particular for philosophical speculation.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

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43. See Mukerji for print and capitalism. See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) for the consequences of books for thought. 44. See Evelyn in Lough, 1984, 95-96. 45. P6rez-G6mez. 46. Boyceau; Hazelhurst, ch. 3. 47. Mollet and Hazelhurst, 1974. 48. Samuel Edgerton discusses perspective as part of a shift in cultural vision, not just a technique for drawing and representing the world. See Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic, 1975). 49. See Perez-G6mez; Claude Perrault, Les dix livres d'architecture de Vitruve, 1684. 50. Ranum, ch. 12. 51. Orleans. 52. For discussion of Colbert and the growth of French industry, see A. J. Sargent, The Economic Policy of Colbert (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), ch. 3. For more extensive discussion of Colbert's policies and their effects on the development of luxuries in France, see Charles W. Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964), vol. II, chs. 10-12. And for descriptions of the support of luxury manufacture by individual members of the court, see W. B. Honey, French Porcelain (London: Faber and Faber, 1950). 53. See, for example Mollet; Boyceau. 54. Crumb. 55. See Estienne and Liebault; Boyceau; Mollet; De Caus; d'Argenville; Gentil, The Retir'd Gard'ner (London: 1706). 56. Locke; Palissy; Perez-G6mez. 57. Ronald Webber, The Early Horticulturalists (Plymouth: David and Charles, 1968); Hix; Hopper. 58. Webber, Locke describes aspects of this trade. See 216 for the role of correspondents in these exchanges and the mixing of social ranks in this trade. 59. Gentil. 60. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in 15th-Century Italy (N.Y.: Oxford, 1974). 61. Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in 17th-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 62. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 63. For discussion of this elite sense of superiority and its relation to Renaissance scholarship, see Lowry, ch. 1. See also Thomas on the equation of non-elites to animals in the period. 64. Ann Berminghom, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 65. Dumbarton Oaks; Tacker; Clifford. 66. G. Macon, Chantilly (Paris: H. Laurens, 1929). 67. See Bermingham; Thacker; Clifford. 68. See, on Versailles, Bernard Champigneulle, Promenades dans Versailles and ses jardins (Club des Libaries de France, 1961), 19-20. On the Luxembourg gardens see Evelyn's account in Sieveking, 108-109 and another in Lough 1985, 114. 69. See, Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949); Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Early Growth of Logic in the Child, 1964.