Roses and Everyday Beauty in France

As someone who traffics in the sociological, the historical, the cultural, and the literary, I find three intellectual frames most useful to me: first, cultural sociology for its concern with how, where, when, and especially why cultural products work in society; second, a disciplined focus on the material objects within a culture and on what an eighteenth-century cookery book writer called “terrestriality”; and third, a more diffuse interest in the aesthetics of everyday life. I have come to roses by a serendipitous path. Other cultural products would most certainly tell some of the story that they tell. But roses, I shall argue, tell a story of modernization and modernity that has not yet been told. Theirs is a narrative of the creation of “ordinary beauty,” of making beauty part of everyday life.My story of beautification starts in early modern Europe, particularly seventeenth-century France. Like cuisine, like drama, like literature, like all of Versailles, flowers were turned to political use. For flowers to serve primarily symbolic or aesthetic purposes, their medicinal, cosmetic, and nutritional properties had to recede into the background. Flowers had to be cultivated on their own, in their own space, separate from the kitchen garden or potager. In the course of this separation, flowers became aestheticized, cultivated for “their own sake,” that is, for their beauty, their rarity, their fashionability. With the importation of exotic varieties, elites invested time, money, and intellect in collecting flowers. These collectors—men who moved into a domain profoundly associated with women—brought the rational order of civilization to an activity considered “disorderly.”Its symbolic capital notwithstanding, until the nineteenth century horticulturally the rose was something of a second-class citizen of the (Western) floral world. The “invention” of the rose, that is, its emergence and indeed constitution as a generalized but concrete social phenomenon, coincides with, as it depends upon, the rapidly changing social, economic, intellectual and cultural context of nineteenth-century Europe. The rose is not alone in its ties and contributions to this society in transformation, but more clearly than any other flower it demonstrates the nature and the scope of those connections.But why roses? And why France? What did roses do for nineteenth-century society that other cultural products, indeed, other flowers could not, or at any rate, did not? To what social demands did the rose respond? By virtue of what connections, what effects, can the rose be taken as the flower of modernity? And why did this “rosification” occur in France?The answer lies in large part in the “bourgeoisification” of the rose, that is, the diffusion of a once luxury good beyond the original elite consumers. The greatly expanded market redefined the cultural product and the practices associated with it. Middle-class domesticity extended into the garden, and the state moved into public spaces with the gardens that brought its benefits to a broad spectrum of its citizens, particularly those in urban centers. In the familiar dynamic of the capitalistic enterprise, the banalization of elite practices and products in turn set off the logic of distinction. The more roses that are made available, the greater the value of the latest rose, the variety that no one else has or has even seen. It would seem that we are back with La Bruyère’s fleuriste.1 France was at the forefront of this expansion because the social mechanisms were in place to encourage a commercialization dependent upon the diffusion of knowledge as well as availability of product. In this tension between diffusion and distinction roses illustrate a pattern common to other cultural products, from cuisine to dress to the arts. However, given the particular material characteristics of the rose, this tension plays out quite differently.The “bourgeoisification” of rose culture, its reproduction/appearance in print, in painting and in public venues, involved increasing numbers of people. While it would not do to overstate the egalitarianism of the rose world, particularly in the nineteenth century, it is nonetheless the case that the diffusion of this floriculture effected a certain democratization of the world of floral consumption. No longer were roses associated primarily with the elite collector. To a certain extent flowers brought together individuals outside the habitual patterns of interaction determined by class, occupation, and even gender. With the growth of the gardening market, the diffusion of horticultural knowledge, the presence of flowers in public venues, floriculture could cross classes more easily than the more traditional and more established literary or artistic cultures. Moreover, quite to the contrary of La Bruyère’s egocentric fleuriste, the sociability of this emerging bourgeois floriculture emphasized the sharing of discoveries and successes.Just as writing is essential to get food out of the kitchen into a more stable cultural form, so too art and science take flowers out of the garden into the books, the engravings, the prints, and the paintings that proliferated along with, and to a certain extent because of, the new roses of the nineteenth century. These social, literary, and artistic relations make the French rose and the rose French.Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, 2006