Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

Download or read book Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles written by Chandra Mukerji and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In seventeenth-century France, land took on new importance for the practice of politics and rituals of court life. In her major new book, Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the two seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design. She shows how, at Versailles in particular, the royal park showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality. She challenges the association of state power with social and legal structures alone and demonstrates the importance for Louis XIV and his state of a controlled physical site, a demarcated French territory within the wider European geo-political continent.