Luxury in the garden: La Nouvelle Héloïse reconsidered

Abstract

Garden historians have consistently acknowledged Jean-Jacques Rousseau's description of the Elysée in Book 4, Letter XI of Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amants habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, recuellis et publiees par Jean Jacques Rousseau (1761) as providing an imaginative model that spurred the dissemination of the French picturesque style.¹ Historians in the past 20 years have demonstrated the difficulties of establishing direct links between the ideas propagated by the philosophes and political realities; garden historians have ignored this methodological problem, assuming a direct correlation between Rousseau's fictitious Elysee and garden practice.² This methodological bias, endorsed by Dora Wiebenson in her pioneering study The Picturesque Garden in France, proposed that the picturesque style incarnated Rousseau's philosophy.³ Rousseau's description ostensibly provided the occasion for the French to ‘jump the proverbial garden wall’ and to embrace the picturesque as a new vision of the natural.