Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (review)

The material culture of the French seventeenth century has been of increasing interest to scholars in recent years, and studies of the formal garden such as Chandra Mukerji’s Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997) have re-read the garden, its hydraulics, perspectives and thematic programmes, as a function of political ideology and a form of soft power. The present study investigates the micro-role that flowers played within the broader ambitions of the formal garden, reading both the flowers themselves as material objects and the cultural meanings projected onto them. Hyde’s study moves fluently between garden history, history of science, gender studies and cultural studies to argue that in the seventeenth century men refashioned floral symbolism and co-opted the world of flowers for their own displays of taste and sociability. So, the beauty and fertility of flowers, previously identified first and foremost with the feminine and the world of nature, became, not only in the garden but also in interior decoration, painting and print, part of a male visual vocabulary of taste and refinement. Cultivation of a florist’s flower, be it a tulip, a carnation, anemone, hyacinth, or auricula, was successfully equated to the cultivation of a mind. On the one hand, Hyde’s analysis is Bourdieu-heavy and accordingly accents those social practices and displays that conferred distinction upon the floriculturally literate. But on the other hand, the hard graft of archival research and interpretation is much in evidence here, particularly in the extensive final chapter’s analysis of the appropriation of floral symbolism by the culture of political absolutism. Previously little-read financial and gardening records reveal an entire system of royal nurseries and forced cultivation, including an extensive bulb nursery at Toulon, and surviving planting plans of the private royal garden at the Trianon in the 1680s document the developing fashion that this elaborate supply structure enabled. By the end of Hyde’s tight and convincing argument, it actually begins to seem logical and indeed clever of Donneau de Viséto compare Louis XIV to a pansy, as well as to 34 other plants and flowers, in the Histoire de Louis le Grand, contenüe dans les rapports qui se trouvent entre ses actions, & les qualités, & vertus des Fleurs, & des Plantes, by means of which he hoped to gain an appointment as royal historiographer (and succeeded). The only health and safety warning to be issued here is that the book is very sadly let down by the quality of its translations into English, which are not just uniformly infelicitous to the point of incomprehensibility, but also frequently faulty with respect to structures, tenses and even vocabulary. Compounding the problem, the French, given in the notes, is occasionally mistranscribed. But students of the natural and of the history of attempts to inflect it, whether those attempts are alchemical, cosmetic or, as here, floral, will nevertheless find this book a fertile field.