The ideal garden of the Ancien Régime

Standing in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, with the Louvre at one end and the Place de la Concorde at the other, the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli running along one side of the park, and the Seine flowing on the other, beyond raised stone terraces, several things are noticeable. There are rectilinear alleyways, large water basins reflecting the sky, carefully trimmed trees and box hedges, and a wealth of statuary. There is a general impression of wide openness, laying bare an orderly pattern. Here is no artfully dishevelled response to nature: this is no English garden. Rather, such a geometrically laid out French park as the Tuileries speaks of Frenchness. But what does it reveal?

The model of ornamental gardens, borrowing the classical canons of architecture and featuring terraces, fountains, statuary, box hedges, and citrus trees, originated in Italy and was imported into France in the reign of Francis I. But the style we call jardin à la française really came into full flower under royal gardener André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), who in the 17th century designed the gardens at Versailles for Louis XIV. The French refer to the exceptionally long reign of the Sun King as Le Grand Siècle: it was a period during which many ambitious and resplendent aspects of the French nation were elaborated. In terms of garden design, decisive creative energy came from Le Nôtre, whose father and grandfather before him had been royal gardeners, and who, after studying painting and architecture, returned to landscape architecture with a particular interest in perspective and optical illusion.

Le Nôtre created the first important jardin à la française, not for the king, but for his newly appointed Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, who commissioned Le Nôtre to design a private park for his new estate at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The architect Louis Le Vau designed the château. The house and the gardens were integrated into a pattern symbolising power and success, with a grand perspective extending from the château and a complex composition of statues, basins, fountains and topiaries. On 17 August 1661, Fouquet inaugurated his new home by throwing a lavish party for the king and all the court.

This turned out to be a case of dangerously misguided ambition, and readers of La Fontaine’s moral fables would have found it easy to predict that it would not end well. Faced with the magnificent setting of Vaux-le-Vicomte and with Fouquet’s splendid display of wealth – fireworks, dancing fountains, a new play by Molière, a feast of game birds served on plates of gold – the king took umbrage. In the words of Voltaire, ‘at six o’clock in the evening, Fouquet was King of France; by 2 o’clock in the morning, he was nobody’. Fouquet was arrested for conspiracy against the king. He spent the rest of his life – 19 years – in prison.

Meanwhile, after confiscating all the orange trees from Fouquet’s orangery, Louis XIV embarked upon a major architectural project of his own, a new royal palace at Versailles, with gardens designed by Le Nôtre. This proved a colossal enterprise. The original site of Versailles was described by the Duc de Saint-Simon as: ‘without a view, without water, without trees, entirely made up of quicksands and marshes’. Transforming this into the king’s vision took Le Nôtre from 1662 until 1700, the year of his death. It meant moving vast amounts of earth to build terraces, dig canals and basins, and working out how to bring the enormous amounts of water required for irrigating the plants and for use in the many fountains to the gardens. A system of pumps and canals was devised to bring water from the Seine, but even after the addition in 1681 of a huge pumping machine, the Machine de Marly, there was still not enough water pressure for all the fountains of Versailles to play at the same time. They were instead turned on one after the other by a team of fontainiers, as the king made his way through the gardens.

As an expression of power, the gardens were laid out on an east-to-west axis that followed the sun’s path, the emblem of the Sun King. Beyond this, Le Nôtre developed some of the ideas he had already realised at Vaux-le-Vicomte, with perspective and openness as guiding principles. The central perspective extended beyond the garden, as far as possible through the woods and fields, to give the impression that man – in the case of Versailles, the king – looking out of his windows on the piano nobile of his palace, was in total control of nature.

In 1700, it was written about Le Nôtre in the gazette Le Mercure galant that: ‘He could not suffer closed-off vistas and did not think that beautiful gardens ought to resemble forests.’ Instead, his gardens resembled outdoor rooms. There was talk of ‘chambers’ and ‘theatres’ of greenery; hedges were described as walls and trees lining the alleyways as curtains. On the ground were carpets of grass adorned with parterres, complex geometric arrangements of boxwood compartments, plants and coloured gravel inspired by fabric embroidery. This is all best enjoyed from above, standing on a raised terrace in order to see everything at once and enjoy the gardens as a composition.

Though Louis XIV liked to use his gardens as a grand playground and setting for parties and plays, what is striking about the jardin à la française that crystallised during his reign is its deep seriousness, expressive not only of the absolute power of the king but also, more generally, of a particular relationship between man and the rest of Nature. The inexorable pursuit of order – straight lines, geometric shapes and clear boundaries – speaks of a sort of imperialist attitude, where nature is subordinate. In Le Spectacle de la nature, written in 1732, the Abbé Pluche, a priest and naturalist, writes about the well-ordered garden: ‘Here is a very Republic. A knowledgeable hand has parcelled out the entire ground, has assembled in it a whole people of plants and has assigned to each its quarter and its proper home… One could mistake our gardener for a legislator endeavouring to civilise a whole savage people.’

Over the course of the 18th century, ideas about the English garden, its cornucopia of mixed borders and tumbling hollyhocks and roses, its air of freedom and spontaneity, made their way into France. Here was a new model of domesticated nature which more closely resembled new philosophical ideas, especially those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom gardens were intensely political. Rousseau believed society and all its artifices had disfigured human nature, and he disliked formal gardens intensely. Toward the end of his book Émile, a treatise on the education of the ideal citizen published in 1762, Émile and Sophie (a girl also raised according to Rousseau’s ideal method) meet each other for the first time in a garden that Rousseau describes in terms antithetic to a jardin à la française. Informal and unadorned, with a vegetable garden instead of a parterre, a tangled orchard instead of a wide-open grassy park, and plenty of higgledy-piggledy flower beds, this new Eden is expressive of personal liberty.

The influence of the English garden did not bring about the French Revolution, but it fed into the fermenting of new ideas of Enlightenment. Since then, France has undergone a revolution and established a republic, but French ideas about the domestication and improvement of nature remain deeply entrenched, perhaps because they transcend notions of garden design and are continuous with other systematic ideals. One fundamental angle of difference between France and Britain lies in valuing norm over custom.

One might, for example, think of the English garden in relation to Common Law and of the French garden in relation to the Napoleonic Code. On the one hand, evolving custom based on successive judicial decisions; on the other, a normative codification of legal matters rooted in Roman and Napoleonic law. French legislators have conceived of human laws as no less immutable and universal than the laws of mathematics and natural sciences. Viewed through such a prism, the jardin à la française appears not only like an artificial imposition of order on the natural world, but also as the expression of a desire to reveal, in a way that is rarely perceptible to the naked eye, how nature is really structured – mathematically.