Designing Versailles: landscapes and the perspectival peace

Abstract

This article analyses the importance of the 1919 peace treaty's signing at Versailles and the consequent signalling (both explicit and implicit) about its terms, particularly regarding then emerging notions of self-determination, one of US President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Given the treaty's enduring significance as a site for testing the possibilities of international law, particular attention is given to the troubling negotiating arrangements concerning the Middle East. In acknowledgement of the backdrop's grandeur and the Council of Four's cartographic approach, the design discipline of landscape architecture is employed for estimating how far self-determination was (or was not) realised. For Louis XIV, Versailles's landscaping represented Culture's triumph over Nature. Equally, for the 1919 peacemakers the treaty symbolised law's triumphant return after the unequalled annihilation evident on the Western Front and Dardanelles beaches. Both grand projects suggested Cartesian notions. More compellingly, both Louis XIV and the Four (and in particular Clemenceau and Lloyd George) fetishized an avaricious hegemonic order. As well as embracing aesthetic, pictorial meanings in the visual arts, tellingly, 'landscape' also concerns 'limited section[s], administrative area[s], territory'. Although the treaty-artefact was a matter of fact, it was also a historically situated aesthetics : framed and presented in particular ways, in a particular interior, to situate the gaze of specific viewers and imply certain political associations. Like many design ideals devised to dazzle passive onlookers, attractions were firmly located in the creators' eyes. The construction of Versailles’s artistically stunning landscape had emphasised an all-authoritative French territorial state. In 1919 Versailles was also a cultural practice and its landscape had value '…as a process by which social and subjective identities' were formed. In June 1919, just as in the curve of the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, power's material realisation was confirmed at Versailles.