Les jardins en Révolution (1789-1799) by Jan SYNOWIECKI – Château de Bénouville

See all events
  • Rendez-vous de l'Institut
  • Conference

Les jardins en Révolution (1789-1799) by Jan SYNOWIECKI – Château de Bénouville

Gardens during the French Révolution (1789-1799)
We can recall Camille Desmoulins haranguing the crowd on 12th July 1789 and, standing on a table in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, pulling a branch off a nearby chestnut tree to attach it to his hat as a cockade. We also remember the complex political iconography that adorned the Tuileries Garden during the ceremony in honour of the Cult of the Supreme Being on 22 Prairial of the Year II (8th June 1794), initiated by Robespierre. However, during the French Revolution, gardens were not simply passive theatres of the period’s political, social and institutional troubles; they also played a major role in the revolutionaries’ reflection on their nature and their function. The flowers that adorned the borders of the Tuileries Garden and the Luxembourg Garden – marks of monarchical luxury – were gradually replaced with potato tubercles and vegetables; ostentation was to make way for public and agronomic usefulness. Furthermore, Parisian gardens crystallised the ambivalence of this not quite domesticated urban nature: prostitution, in great 18th century tradition, continued to blossom there, whilst water seepage at the Palais-Royal threatened the Circus and the Art College established in the centre of the garden, etc. The evocation of these different facets of gardens will also offer an opportunity to rediscover the history of Paris under the Revolution.

Jan Synowiecki

Jan Synowiecki

Jan Synowiecki, a qualified professor in history, is a PhD student at the EHESS – École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Social Sciences), where he is preparing a thesis on the role of Parisian gardens in urban culture during the Age of Enlightenment, at the crossroads between social, cultural and environmental history.