The French garden in the eighteenth century: from Belle Nature to the landscapte of time

In the Times Literary Supplement of 20 May 1977, a notice of a new book on landscape gardens in the eighteenth century contrasted French and English gardens in political terms, and purported to show that the free English people had free gardens where they might ‘expatiate freely’, while the French ‘under tyranny, had manicured, trimmed restrictive gardens...’ The opposition is, in eighteenth-century terms, rather nice; but it is false. One might well judge of gardens in political terms, but only if one admits as a first proposition that aesthetics precede politics, which may indeed have been the case in the eighteenth century, in which case the opposition of the two garden types is not one between a free people and one under tyranny, an opinion only possible after the French revolution polemically voiced by revolutionaries, but between different aesthetic systems in regard to something the eighteenth century never ceased talking and writing about, Nature. Obviously to our post-romantic eye and mind the so-called English garden looks more ‘natural’ than the French, but in fact neither was natural. By the end of the eighteenth century the term had become rather vague and all-embracing, as the Marquis de Sade well saw. The Grand Siècle had known better.