XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Rodolphe Baudin (Sorbonne Université, France), “Parc management as Political Practice and Metaphor: The Politics of Public Space Management in Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler
While walking around Paris and Versailles in the spring of 1790, Karamzin’s Russian traveller reflects on garden landscaping, improvements made by monarchs or grandees in public parks and popular reactions to these changes. This talk postulates that Karamzin uses the Traveler’s comments on this topic to reflect on the way Authorities use parks and gardens to manage public discontent and the way the population oppositely uses it as a space of social independence to escape disciplining efforts from the top. As a result, this co-management of nature in public space is used as a metaphor for the social contract and its mismanagement by the authorities as a metaphor for the ongoing French Revolution, an event Karamzin reflects on using a nature-based discourse typical for conservative thinkers in his time.
