Giulia Pacini

A Culture of Trees: The Politics of Pruning and Felling in Late Eighteenth-Century France

Before the French revolutionaries adopted the tree as a symbol of freedom, artists used arboreal images to discuss issues of royal policy and reform. Hubert Robert, Peyraud de Beaussol, Jacques Delille, Michel-Paul de Chabanon, and Adélaïde de Souza drew scenes of felling and pruning to comment upon the solidity of a cultural and political system—the ancien régime—that seemed to be vacillating at their feet. Their work was inspired by the monarchys involvement in the management of forests, by the construction of the gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV, and the dramatic event of their replanting in 1774–5.

Grafts at Work in Late Eighteenth-Century French Discourse and Practice

As they debated the pros and cons of grafting, eighteenth-century French agronomists, philosophers, novelists, and poets negotiated the tensions and contradictions that surfaced between their nostalgia for a ‘”natural” society, and their dreams of perpetual innovation, culture, and progress. The discourse on grafting helped authors articulate their understandings of the merits or faults of civilization, just as it also allowed them to define good civic participation and ideal forms of stewardship of the land. Furthermore, insofar as grafts could be read as figures of the transplantation and integration of foreign culture(s), they could be used metaphorically to allude to current political events and problems. As a result, the discourse on grafting intersected with, and engaged, some of the key issues of the French Enlightenment.

The Monarchy Shapes Up: Arboreal Metaphors in Royal Propaganda and Court Panegyrics during the Reign of Louis XV

On 25 February 1745, during a ball celebrating the Dauphins marriage to the Infanta of Spain, Louis XV dressed up as a pruned yew tree. A large watercolour and hundreds of prints produced by the royal office of the Menus Plaisirs offered contemporaries a stunning image of this event. This article analyses the self-fashioning implicit in the kings sartorial choice, arguing that it informed a new political script characterised by an increasingly technical arboreal discourse. Royal epithalamia in particular drew on tree metaphors to describe the health of the body politic in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Arboreal and Historical Perspectives from Calvino’s Il barone rampante

Abstract This article considers Calvino’s Il barone rampante (1957) as a parable of the deforestation and excessive urban development that took place along the Italian Riviera, starting in the late eighteenth century. The novel’s inter- textual references point to the intellectual foundations of the author’s ecological ethics, and reveal his understanding of the Enlightenment as a culture vested in the protection of its forests and interested in recasting human relationships with the natural world.