Marie-Antoinette's Legacy: The Politics of French Garden Patronage and Picturesque Design, 1775-1867

This book challenges the idea that the French picturesque garden movement was an international style by arguing that it was instead a liminal zone at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts constructed their gardens as spaces of gender and identity politics, promoting embodied strolling and creating a forum for spatial politics. The spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 316 pages
Publication date: 15 November 2022
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

This book challenges the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, contending that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts—queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugénie—constructed their gardens as intermediaries between court ritual and personal agency, transgressing sociopolitical boundaries to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography, and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.

Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts—queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugénie—constructed their gardens as intermediaries between court ritual and personal agency, transgressing sociopolitical boundaries to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography, and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789463724241