Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

Description

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.

"This is a masterful deconstructionist study, in which careful contextual analysis allows for reconstruction of the political world that Louis created over the course of his reign...a major accomplishment." Choice "...brilliant and beautifully presented..." Robert Forster, Jrnl of Interdisciplinary History "Territorial Ambitions should be of interest not only to social theorists but also to others intersted in exploring relations between people and the built environment, as builders and as inhabitants." Lisa A. Pellerin, Contemporary Sociology "What is territorial policy, and does it have a history? Chandra Mukerji makes a bold effort to pose and answer these questions..." Josef W. Konvitz, American Historical Review "Territorial Ambitions is provocative, original, and striking for the sophistication of its argument, its breadth of evidence, and its novelty of associations." Claudia Lazzaro, Technology and Culture "In a marvelously well-illustrated book, based on an impressive mastery of technical literatures on everything from fountain building to tapestry weaving, Mukerji reveals the many different ways in which the gardens served as arenas for Louis XIV's ambitious attempts to remake his state." David S. Bell, American Journal of Sociology "Territorial Ambitions is probably the most ambitious and original study of seventeenth-century France in the service of a sociological argument to be published since Norbert Elias's book on the court society." Peter Burke, Journal of Modern History