Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles
Written by Chandra Mukerji
Published in 1997 by Cambridge University Press
Excerpts from Chapter 5: Social choreography and the politics of place
page 198
The gardens at Versailles may have been, on one level, a cold, inanimate structure in which military power was flaunted, bloodless collections displayed, and daunting waterworks devised―all for the celebration of power; but it was also a stage on which the court played and tried to glitter so brightly that the glory of France would be visible throughout Europe and beyond. Breathless chronicles were appropriately enrapt by the scale of the king's festivities, the lavishness of the nobles' dress, the formality of the decorum, the sumptuousness of the food, the exoticism of the fruits and candies, and the attention to detail and choreography that made possible the elegance and apparent ease of the court's ritual life.
page 199
In this context, the garden at Versailles was a public space, but one strange by modern standards. It was open to the public, but it had no speaker's corner or public arena for political debate: it was surely not a site for a nascent bourgeois public sphere or a throwback to the Roman Republic, where gentlemen could speak their minds. Rather, it was a place where the nobility practiced a form of “politics by other means,” a politics of things and bodies, not ideology. The events that went on in the garden were filled with costumes, predetermined roles, and choreographed ritual, rendering a politics of simulation, gesture and indirection that was an outgrowth of earlier (sometimes church-based) ways of celebrating and marking power.
page 200
Parties or festivals were also important vehicles in France, and had been from the reign of Henri II. Mascarades were the early favorites. These precursors to court ballets were not so much large costume dances as the English word suggests today, but rather relatively small-scale parties in which nobles paraded, danced, sang, and recited poetry, using verses and songs given to them in written form; through their words and movements, they enacted a scripted, central narrative.
page 200
With costumes and sets, past and present could collide and be fused in elaborate spectacles of power.
page 201
In this period, [Marie de medici and Louis XIII, 17th century] the dramatic, narrative elements of the ballet became secondary to the symbolic and decorative ones; movements were choreographed to set out tableaux vivants and other formal arrangements of bodies with symbolic significance. the techniques used in developing and decoding the ballets changed; ribbons were sometimes used to join together dancers so their movements would help to constitute geometrical figures with numerological significance. Audiences were given programs to help them recognize the meanings of the forms. Songs and recitations punctuated the dancing, coordinating the voice with the music and ritualized movements of the body. Even the point of viewing these events changed: the audience was supposed to gain moral and psychological value from considering the symbolism, rather than derive overt political messages from it.
page 223 -224
If the dramaturgical school of social theory is to be believed, performative forms may actually be more common than we think in social life―even in politics. Much face-to-face interaction is self-consciously performed behavior, planned and sometimes even rehearsed for specific audiences and occasions. Politics is much the same―just with more pretense. Political groups in the twentieth century often hold demonstrations to show the ties of members to political positions and to make visible the size of their membership. The speeches ubiquitous to demonstrations are often less powerful political statements than the size and energy of the crowds, for example, the embodied commitment of participants to the events themselves.
Group life in general, according to Erving Goffman, emerges from mutually choreographed performances. We use performative forms to signal our intentions and expectations of others; we use tie-signs such as touching and mutual glances to make visible social bonds; we use stares and grimaces to tell others on the road or on the sports field what we are going to do next. This gestural level of social interaction may not seem politically important unless we realize how often diplomats look for signs and gestures behind statements in order to determine the “real” political relations behind the expressed positions among nations. Signs of friendship are sought in the meetings among heads of state; arms build-ups in one country are read as communicative acts that influence military positions in others. This is not to say that political ideology and position statements have no authority in politics, but it makes the point that politics has been and remains in part a domain of performance, and hence the performative politics of the seventeenth century was not quite so strange a part of our political ancestry as it might appear at first blush.
page 247
The promenade, that mixture of parade and dance, was the ultimate expression of this culture of body and land. Legs, fingers, and hands marked, measured, gestured, and moved as they did in a dance or while playing instruments. They made manifest the significance of the space as they moved through it. More than other forms of body work, the promenade joined land and body, Franc and French nobles, in the ultimate dance of social and geographical place. This was a dance choreographed by the king himself to demonstrate his political power.
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