Versailles

El Nuevo Olimpo fue una representación y mascarada en honor del cumpleaños de Mariana de Austria, sobrina de Felipe IV y su flamante nueva esposa. Con este matrimonio se debía obtener la descendencia que legitimaba al monarca, aunque ya tuviera éste una hija de su anterior esposa, María Teresa, con Isabel de Borbón. En 1665 muere el Rey y con la debilidad de su sucesor Carlos II, empieza un torneo político por establecer quién de sus dos hermanas podría ser la legítima heredera al trono español en caso de que éste muera repentinamente: su medio hermana María Teresa, entonces Reina de Francia, o su hermana natural Margarita Teresa, emperatriz del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico. Una legitimidad que, además de librarse en conflictos europeos, lo hará también en una auténtica guerra fría a través de la imagen; la que proyectan personalmente las mismas soberanas mediante el vestido y su apariencia; y la que proyectan alegóricamente en conjunto con sus reales esposos a través de los grandes fastos y espectáculos de corte.

ABSTRACT
El Nuevo Olimpo was a representation and a masquerade ball in honour of Phillip IV’s niece and new spouse Mariana of Austria. This nuptial bond should result in a descendant that legitimates the monarch, although Phillip already had a daughter, Maria Theresa, from his former wife Isabel of France. In 1665, the king dies and due to the weakness of successor Charles II, a political tournament starts in order to establish which of the two daughters would be the legitimate heiress of the Spanish throne in case of repentant death. The two candidates were Charles II’s half-sister Maria Theresa, Queen of France at that moment; or his sister Margaret Theresa, empress of the Holy Roman Empire. This legitimacy, besides existing in European conflicts, will take part as well in a real cold war when it comes to image: The two queens will portray a physical image through her costumes and appearance and an allegorical image with their royal husbands through grandiose feasts and court spectacles.

Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden is an eclectic, yet rigorous reflection on the relationship--historical, present and future--between humanity and the garden. Through the lens of Utopian Studies--the interdisciplinary field that encompasses fictions all the way through to actual political projects, and urban ideals; in a nutshell, addressing the human natural drive towards the ideal--Earth Perfect? brings together a selection of inspiring essays, each contributed by foremost writers from the fields of architecture, history of art, classics, cultural studies, farming, geography, horticulture, landscape architecture, law, literature, philosophy, urban planning and the natural sciences.
Through these joined voices, the garden emerges as a site of contestation and a repository for symbolic, spiritual, social, political and ecological meaning. Questions such as: "what is the role of the garden in defining humanity's ideal relationship with nature?" and "how should we garden in the face of catastrophic ecological decline?" are addressed through wideranging case studies, including ancient Roman Gardens in Pompeii, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, the Gardens of Versailles, organic farming in New England and Bohemia's secret gardens, as well as landscape in contemporary architecture.
Issues relating to the utopian garden are explored thematically rather than chronologically, and organised in six chapters: "Being in nature", "inscribing the garden", "green/house", "The garden politic", "economies of the garden" and "how then shall we garden?". each essay is both individual in scope and part of the wider discourse of the book as a whole, and each is lusciously illustrated, bringing to life the subject with diverse visual material ranging from photography to historical documents, maps and artworks.

In 1755, the Marquise de Pompadour commissioned a marble statue of Eros-Harpocrates, the right index finger resting on the lips, to decorate the hôtel d’Évreux, the future Palais de l’Élysée. This gesture of the little Horus, who is nothing else in Egypt than the simple sign of childhood, was the object of an interpretatio romana transforming the son of Isis and Osiris in a god of silence and mysteries. This interpretation had a long legacy, revived in the Renaissance and somehow consecrated by the work devoted to the god by the Dutchman Gisbert Cuper in 1676. Become a true allegory of political prudence and scientific or esoteric secrets, it is still Harpocrates who, today, stands at the entrance to the courtroom of the Palais du Luxembourg, seat of the Senate of the French Republic.

The contributions of Korean and Taiwanese authors to the many and varied formulations of interwar pan-Asianism have so far remained a relatively unexplored subject of scholarly research, despite an unbroken interest in the trajectory of state-based Japanese pan-Asianism. Focusing on Korean students and independence activists, this article discusses alternative configurations of regional unity and solidarity that emanated from the interactions among Korean, Taiwanese, and other Asian actors who resided in Tokyo during the 1910s and 1920s. When the ethnic-nationalist interpretations of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination failed to materialize, a portion of anti-colonial activists in Asia began to emphasize the need for solidarity by drawing on what they perceived as traditional and shared " Asian " values. While challenging the Western-dominated international order of nation-states that perpetuated imperialism, such notions of Asian solidarity at the same time served as an ideology of liberation from Japanese imperialism. Examining journals published by Korean students and activists, including The Asia Kunglun, this article adds another layer to the history of pan-Asianism from below, a perspective that has often been neglected within the larger context of scholarship on pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism in Asia.

This article, drawn from my forthcoming 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (September 2017, Zone Books, N.Y.), studies the animal fountain sculptures of the Royal Labyrinth built by Louis XIV in 1674, in the context of a broad and variegated use of animals in and around 1668.  In this article, which forms the basis of chapter 8 in the book, the animals of the labyrinth speak to the legitimating cultural frame of Louis XIV absolutism: the imposition of strong royal authority on a state of disorderly animal nature.

""Il contributo indaga l'eredità ideologica di Bisanzio negli Stati dell'età moderna e contemporanea. Naufragato il progetto – promosso da Bessarione e da Pio II e imperniato sulla figura di Tommaso Paleologo – di una rifondazione della basileia in Morea, secondo la nuova e ristretta formula statale ideata da Gemisto Pletone e dalla Scuola di Mistrà, e fallito con esso il piano di "salvataggio occidentale" del titulus costantiniano, il matrimonio – orchestrato da Bessarione – tra la figlia maggiore di Tommaso, Zoe Paleologina, e Ivan III di Russia segnò il passaggio dell'eredità propriamente dinastica dell'impero ortodosso da Bisanzio a Mosca, la Terza Roma; il che determinò una prima e quasi diretta assimilazione del suo lascito non solo culturale e ideologico (anzitutto la dottrina dell'autocrazia di diritto divino), ma anche politico-amministrativo (a partire dalla riorganizzazione, effettuata da Ivan IV, dell'amministrazione imperiale secondo i princìpi dello statalismo centralista bizantino) da parte dell’impero zarista. Un secolo dopo Ivan Groznij e molto più a occidente, nella Francia del XVII secolo, la riscoperta dell'eredità di Bisanzio negli studi e nella riflessione degli eruditi diede luogo a una riattualizzazione della basileia di diritto divino in quella figura di “re-sole” – eredità della monarchia ellenistica nell’ideologia politica bizantina dei primi secoli ma ancora riaffiorante in modo esplicito, al crepuscolo dell’impero, nei versi bessarionei dedicati a Manuele II Paleologo – che è posta ora al centro della moderna monarchia assoluta (la cui specifica teorizzazione sarà compiuta, a fine Seicento, da Jean Domat). Già all'epoca di Luigi XIV può dunque collocarsi la nascita della bizantinistica in Francia, con la prima opera di classificazione ed edizione delle fonti storiografiche bizantine (il «Corpus del Louvre») patrocinata da Colbert e con gli scritti e le riflessioni di Du Cange. La Francia del Seicento fu inoltre la prima, nell’Europa occidentale, a elaborare un'estetica bizantina, connessa alla grandeur della monarchia assoluta: nella ripresa della grande tradizione cerimoniale della corte costantinopolitana si espresse un vero e proprio transfert Costantinopoli-Versailles. All’inizio del XIX secolo, dopo il Congresso di Vienna, la fiaccola passò alla monarchia di una nazione in ascesa, la Prussia, e parallelamente il Corpus del Louvre trovò continuazione nel Corpus di Bonn. Ulteriori revival di Bisanzio scandiranno il secondo Ottocento europeo, tra Ludwig II di Baviera e Napoleone III, con sempre minore, tuttavia, vitalità politica, per arrivare a quella Francia fin-de-siècle, dove ogni genuina memoria della tradizione statale bizantina verrà obliterata o mistificata e si formerà l'immagine stereotipa di una Bisanzio come decadenza infinitamente protratta, vacuo regno di effeminati intrighi. Mai estinta invece nell’impero zarista, l’eredità bizantina troverà la più importante attualizzazione politica nel filobizantinismo dell’autocrate novecentesco Stalin, che promuoverà gli studi di bizantinistica ed esalterà il modello autocratico sussunto da Ivan Groznij; la concezione e l'estetica del potere bizantino vedranno così la loro più compiuta rielaborazione nell’opera cinematografica di Ejzenstejn (Ivan Groznij e Ivan Groznij II ovvero La congiura dei Boiari), dove la ricostruzione storica rivela allusioni contemporanee, omaggio e al contempo autenticamente bizantina Kaiserkritik al governo stalinista.

This contribution investigates the legacy of Byzantium in modern and contemporary nations. After the dual failure of the project - promoted by Bessarion and Pius II and planned around the figure of Thomas Palaeologos - to re-establish the basileia in Morea, according to the new concise formula created by Gemistus Pletho and the School of Mystras - and of the plan to save the titulus of Constantine in the West, the marriage orchestrated by Bessarion between Thomas’ eldest daughter Zoe Palaeologina and Ivan III of Russia marked the passing of the strictly dynastic legacy of the orthodox empire of Byzantium to Moscow, the third Rome. This determined a first and almost direct assimilation of Byzantium’s legacy – not only cultural and ideological (above all, the doctrine of divine right autocracy), but also political-administrative (starting from Ivan IV’s reorganisation of the imperial administration along the principles of Byzantium centralist statism) - by the Tsarist empire. A century after Ivan the Terrible and much further west in 17th century France, the rediscovery of the legacy of Byzantium in scholarly thought and erudition gave rise to a revival or “modernisation” of the divine right basileia in the figure of the “Sun King” – an inheritance of Hellenistic monarchy in the first centuries of Byzantine political ideology that was still emerging clearly when the empire was waning in Bessarion’s verses dedicated to Manuel II Palaeologos – now placed at the centre of modern absolute monarchy as Jean Domat would theorise succinctly at the end of the same century. Already at the time of Louis XIV, therefore, we can date the birth of Byzantine studies in France with the first work of classification and editing of Byzantine historiographical sources (the Louvre Corpus) financed by Colbert and with Du Cange’s writings and reflections. Furthermore, seventeenth century France was the first country in western Europe to develop a Byzantine aesthetic connected to the grandeur of absolute monarchy: an authentic Constantinople-Versailles transference found expression in the revival of the great tradition of Constantinopolitan court protocol. After the Congress of Vienna at the beginning of the 19th century, the torch passed to the monarchy of a nation on the rise, Prussia, and in parallel fashion, the Louvre Corpus found continuity in the Bonn Corpus. Further revivals of Byzantium would mark the second half of the 19th century in Europe - between Ludwig II of Bavaria and Napoleon III – with increasingly less political vitality until fin-de-siècle France when every authentic memory of the Byzantine statist tradition would be obliterated or mystified and the stereotyped image of Byzantium as cypher of protracted decadence and vacuous kingdom of effeminate intrigue would form. However, never extinct in the Tsarist empire, the Byzantine legacy would find its most important modern political realisation in the philo-Byzantinism of the twentieth century autocrat Joseph Stalin, who would promote Byzantine studies and exalt the autocratic model subsumed from Ivan Grozny. The Byzantine concept of power and aesthetics would thus see their most complete re-elaboration in the cinema of Eisenstein (Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Terrible II: the Boyars’ Plot), in which the historical reconstruction contains contemporary allusions, a homage and, at the same time, an authentic Byzantine Kaiserkritik of the Stalinist government.
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This paper will seek to introduce the first historically never ending revolutions which is the French revolution. The French revolution is considered a never ending revolution for the purposes of this paper as a never ending revolution because if we pretend this was 1788 and we were looking through a crystal ball we could see that instead of ending with the demise of the

After the collapse of the November Uprising (1831), a great patriotic and political exodus began. Several thousand Polish insurgents fled to Western Europe, primarily to France. The diplomatic and cultural centre of the Great Emigration was Paris, where attempts were made to reconstruct political, cultural, educational and scientific structures, creating a substitute for an independent Poland in exile. Archival materials indicate that another significant centre of Polish emigration formed after 1831 near Paris in Versailles, a fact hitherto unnoticed by historians. The article attempts to answer the following questions: why did Polish emigrants choose Versailles and what institutions did they set up there? What function did the Château and the city perform in their lives? How were these places perceived and described in the first half of the nineteenth century? Analysis of Polish journals, diaries and letters shows various strategies in the description and interpretation of the royal residence and the city: as a tourist attraction, a testimony of past power, a symbol of a social cataclysm (the Revolution) and-in the context of the creation of a historical gallery in 1837as a place reflecting the narrative of historical policies and Polish-French relations.

There are a lot of doors in the world of the court, many of them shut. He who holds the keys controls access to the treasure within-in the case of the Chambre du Roi, the monarch himself. Entrusting a set of keys to someone involves-literally-trust. So whom did the King of France trust? Who was given authority to regulate proximity, the sine qua non for the acquisition of power and wealth? Perhaps these were the personal favourites of the monarch, men he had grown up with. Or perhaps they were men of exalted rank and ancient lineage, qualities which, as explained by Castiglione, would compel them to act in an upright manner so as not to sully family honour. 1 Or even more narrowly, perhaps the sovereign would depend on princes of his own blood, whose sense of dynastic honour was tied up even more completely with his own.

The legacy of Versailles is a rather well-defined and thoroughly researched area in the discipline of History. But what did the Treaty of Versailles and the events surrounding the peace conference give to the discipline of International Relations? In order to answer this question, the article first examines the place of Versailles in the foundational myths of the discipline. After that, in the second part, it briefly reviews the most persistent and influential ideas in IR which have emerged during the construction of the new world order of the time, putting a special emphasis on the concept of national self-determination as the “new master principle” of the international society after Versailles.

Alexandre Benois, the founder of The World of Art (Mir Iskusstva) movement, a brilliant graphic designer, a prominent art critic and historian renowned for his writings on art history , and a distinguished theatre artist who worked for Serge Diaghilev's Russian Seasons, was fascinated with Versailles. His passion lasted over thirty years and resulted in the Versailles (Versal') series that culminated in more than six hundred drawings, watercolors, pastels, gouaches, engravings and canvases created during two prolonged stays in France (1896-1899 and 1905-1907). Although the research on Benois's oeuvre has expanded during the last two decades, the majority of his works have yet to be interpreted. This article examines an unexplored aspect of Versailles, a distinctive Rococo-revivalist style which Benois assimilated in France. Examined through the prism of the Europeanization of Russian art, this article will explain Rococo revivalism of Versailles in a historico-cultural context.

À partir de 1670-1680, la fable/le fabuleux, cible de critiques de plus en plus virulentes, sert de moins en moins de sujet allégorique. Que se passe-t-il quand le sujet fabuleux n'est plus compris comme allégorique ou mal compris ? À partir des débats suscités à l'époque, l'étude propose l'examen de quelques réponses apportées par les contemporains (au sein de l'Académie royale de peinture mais aussi dans le contexte versaillais) à cette problématique déliaison de l'allégorie et de la fable : elles sont de trois types, l'étonnement ou l'incompréhension ; l'abandon ou la reprogrammation ; le détournement ou le  recyclage.

For a long time, historians – especially French ones – considered that Versailles “a servi de modèle à toutes les cours de l'Europe” [“served as a model for all European courts”] (Louis Réau, “Le rayonnement de Versailles”, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 1/1, january-march 1954, p. 24-47). Since a few years, this idea has been debated and sometimes challenged. But how did this evolution happen? The aim of this contribution is to catch the articulation between the work of historians and the construction (or the deconstruction) of a myth of Versailles. To explore this question, I will follow the chronological order of historiographical production. First, I will get back to works written during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in a context of tensions in Europe and nationalism in France. This will be the opportunity to focus on Louis Réau, an art historian whose works affected the next generations for a long time. Then, I will try to show how this one-sided vision has been criticised, with a focus on transition works such as Yves Bottineau’s or Hugh Murray Baillie’s. At last, I will review the recent historiography and the situation of this questioning nowadays.

Avec son incroyable agilité, son étonnante dextérité et ses capacités mimétiques qui lui donnent parfois l’air d’un humain bouffon et moqueur, le singe n’en finit pas de fasciner. Dans l’Europe des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, l’engouement pour les singes était tel qu’on les retrouvait à jouer la comédie sur les scènes de théâtre et que l’on peignait leurs effigies sur les toiles et les plafonds. Mais l’époque était aussi aux voyages d’exploration, à la découverte scientifique d’espèces nouvelles et aux
interrogations sur la part d’humanité de ces animaux si ressemblants à l’homme. Écrits par des spécialistes de littérature, d’histoire de l’art, d’histoire des sciences et de philosophie, les articles rassemblés dans le présent volume offrent un éclairage transversal sur la représentation des singes et la réflexion inspirée par cet animal dans l’Europe classique, des Flandres au Portugal et de l’Angleterre à la Pologne.

Drawing on an unusual group of letters written in the wake of a terrorist attack that targeted the Palace of Versailles in 1978, this article analyzes social reactions and solidarity practices following this type of event. Complementing existing research that tends to focus on recent terrorist attacks, this article demonstrates the interest of socio-historical analysis to understand those responses to terrorist attacks. Beyond content analysis, its purpose is also to show the value of investigating the writers’ sociography and social contexts in which the messages are composed in order to understand what actors say and do when they write following a terrorist attack.

En s’appuyant sur un corpus inédit de lettres rédigées suite à un attentat commis contre le château de Versailles en 1978, l’article se propose d’analyser les réactions sociales et les pratiques de solidarité qui émergent face à de tels événements. En complément des travaux existants, souvent centrés sur les attaques terroristes les plus récentes, l’article montre l’intérêt d’emprunter un détour socio-historique pour penser ces réactions mais aussi d’interroger, au-delà du contenu stricto sensus des messages, la sociographie des scripteurs et la situation sociale d’écriture afin d’approcher ce que les acteurs font et disent quand ils écrivent après un attentat.

À travers cette histoire environnementale du domaine de Versailles, Grégory Quenet illustre une « autre histoire », loin du stéréotype d'une nature rationalisée et contrôlée que laisse supposer le fantasme de l'« absolutisme environnemental » où la nature serait entièrement au service du souverain et ordonnée, à l'image des jardins à la française. Sa volonté est de faire revivre le « Versailles organique, vivant, énergétique » (p. 8) d'autrefois, faisant intervenir une multitude d'acteurs autres que le Roi. Il s'agit aussi de faire ressortir un Versailles « heurté, incontrôlé, contesté », au terri-toire dynamique dont l'emprise s'étendait bien au-delà des terres du Roi, à travers les grands travaux d'hydraulique et la gestion de la faune et de la flore à des fins cynégétiques au sein du Grand Parc. G. Quenet s'éloigne des récits anthropocentristes et décli-nistes au profit d'une étude des interactions société-environne-ment où nature et culture se confondent, se façonnent mutuel-lement pour créer des formes hybrides par Laëtitia Deudon Candidate au doctorat en histoire - Université de Valenciennes et Université de Montréal

If we want to understand how the propaganda machinery of the Versailles court of Louis XIV worked, and what unintended consequences of what causes contributed to the progress of the practice of the fine arts and their theories, and later to the birth of an autonomous realm of Aesthetic thought, then we need to have a look at the way how did centralised organisation effect the contemporary artworld,m and the everyday routine of the individual arts in particular. Perhaps the most important individual arts that are important in this respect are architecture, painting, gardening and the theater. Not only because theyhad to confront challenges in Versailles , but also because these arts embody the Versailles phenomenon as such.

Ha meg akarjuk fejteni, hogyan működött XIV. Lajos versailles-i propagandagépezete, és milyen hatások szándékolatlan következményeként járult hozzá döntő mértékben a szépművészetek gyakorlatának és a velük kapcsolatos gondolkodás fejlődéséhez, majd az ízlésesztétika függetlenedéséhez, akkor érdemes röviden áttekintenünk: miként hatott a központosított szervezés a korabeli művészeti élet, azon belül is egyes művészeti ágak tényleges működésére. Talán legérdekesebb számunkra e szempontból az építészet, a festészet, a színház és a kertművészet lehet. Nemcsak azért, mert ezek gyakorlására igen tág teret nyitott Versailles, hanem mert a versailles-i jelenségegyüttest e művészetek magukban is képesek megjeleníteni és jellemezni.

Az esszé későbbi, monografikus kontextusa: Esztétikai gondolkodás a felvilágosodás korában (1650-1800) (Aesthetic Thought in the Age of Enlightenment, in Hungarian), Gondolat, Budapest, 2013, pp. 27-66.
Elérhető a következő linken: https://www.academia.edu/10208587/Az_udvari_kult%C3%BAra_Court_culture_in_Hungarian_