The twenty-first-century visitor to the gardens of Versailles has at least one thing in common with Louis XIV, the Bourbon king of France responsible for their creation in the third and fourth quarters of the seventeenth century: Upon leaving the chateau and proceeding into the gardens, one is unclear which route along the alleés and through the bosquets is optimal for experiencing the essence of the park. As Robert W. Berger and Thomas F. Hedin establish in Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles under Louis XIV, the king himself was of many minds regarding how best to visit the gardens. But he believed that finding the ideal itinerary was important enough to warrant his personal attention to the matter. The garden, after all, was not just a pleasure park for the courtiers of Versailles, it also served as a setting for the reception of royal guests and diplomatic parties during which royal favor was curried and the impression cultivated of the cultural and political superiority of France in the age of Louis XIV.

Historians and art historians have long (correctly, of course) asserted that in the royal parterres Louis XIV cultivated the idea that the power demonstrated over nature in the gravity denying fountains, climate disavowing flowers, and artfully clipped topiaries represented metaphorically the political and cultural power the king wielded over his subjects. But was there a systematic means of making and communicating this message? Scholars have struggled with the fact that there is no clear narrative thread organizing the bosquets, sculptures, and fountains. And while they have explored the means by which the king used the gardens—as settings for the grand fêtes, as stages upon which courtiers performed—the intended reception of these spaces has remained less clear. Given the absence of a structured narrative, what message might the king have wanted important political visitors to take away from their tour? And how did the king perceive the gardens capable of communicating that message?

In exploring the gardens of Versailles for their political applications, Berger and Hedin are plowing familiar ground. Much scholarship, Berger’s own work included, has focused on the explication of the political symbolism infusing the Baroque fountains and sculptures in the royal parterres. Theorists such as Jean-Marie Apostolidès in Le roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Minuit, 1981) and Jean-Pierre Néraudau in L’Olympe du Roi-Soleil: mythologie et ideologie royale au Grand Siècle (Paris: Société d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1986) have deconstructed the gardens and the courtly performances staged there in their explanations of how the Sun King myth functioned. Other scholars, like Chandra Mukerji and myself (see Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), have approached the gardens from a material and cultural perspective. Mukerji argues in Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997) that the means by which the king marshaled the landscape around Versailles into the shapes and forms and plans it took was literally (and not just symbolically) part of the multiple military, economic, industrial, and political endeavors Louis XIV and his ministers were attempting toward an absolutist modernization of France. Most recently, Michel Baridon’s A History of the Gardens of Versailles (published in 2008 in the same series, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Press, as Berger and Hedin’s new work) offers a synthetic interpretation of the royal parterres, seeing in their design evidence of the collusion of the aesthetic and the engineered in the communication of the king’s greatness.

In their study, Berger and Hedin approach the question in much more concrete historical terms, choosing to look for the political uses of the garden on the occasions in which the gardens were put to such a purpose: the diplomatic tours of the garden. The result is a welcome contribution to the history of the Versailles gardens that will oblige future scholarship to examine the political uses of the royal gardens with greater precision. The underlying premise of Berger and Hedin’s work is that understanding where and by what route the king went in the garden can help reveal what the king wished the garden to communicate in its most overtly political role—the entertaining of diplomatic guests. To that end, their volume is built around the assembly of a complete record of the diplomatic and otherwise official tours of the gardens of Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV, the accomplishment of which is the book’s most important contribution. In addition, they have reproduced in the appendices a number of textual descriptions of the gardens born out of those tours. While the lengthier and better known of these accounts, such as Jean Donneau de Visé’s contemporaneous special editions of his Mercure Galant given over to the description of the Siamese ambassadors’ tour, are not included, the reader will find a number of texts seldom cited by historians and art historians. Their inclusion, it is hoped, will lead to more nuanced analyses of the formal use of the gardens. With this information gathered, Berger and Hedin employ these texts to trace each tour through the gardens toward the goal of establishing a record of the routes used by the king to show off the park to his visitors. Each stop on the tours is keyed to black-and-white illustrations in the volume—seventeenth-century garden plans, prints, and paintings of Versailles depicting the layout, fountains, sculptures, and auxiliary structures in the gardens. These contemporary views of the gardens are uneven in their ability to illustrate features of the gardens, many of which do not survive. And the volume should not be taken for a picture book tour of the gardens. But it is nonetheless possible to reconstruct some idea of what the visitors were being taken to see.

The recounting of the tours is organized chronologically into chapters delineated both by major patterns in the routes and significant diplomatic tours of the garden. Berger and Hedin trace the diplomatic history of Versailles from the 1664 tour granted to Cardinal Flavio Chigi (who was delivering a papal apology to the king), through a series of ambassadorial guests from Italy, Spain (whom the king escorted himself), Russia, Morocco, Algeria, and Genoa until the famous reception of the Siamese Ambassadors in 1686, described by Donneau de Visé in four volumes of his Mercure Galant. Berger and Hedin analyze the visit of Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, who was shown around the gardens by André Le Nôtre, the tour granted Mary of Modena in 1689 (which inaugurated the period from 1689 to 1705 from which survive the king’s handwritten itineraries for viewing the garden), to the visits of the Duke of Mantua and the envoy of the Bey of Tripoli.

As Berger and Hedin make abundantly clear, a royal tour of the gardens was not simply a matter of the king deciding to take his guests for a walk. As is well known, the king’s hydraulic engineers waged a constant losing battle with local water sources to coax enough water volume into the plumbing to make the royal fountains play. It was simply not possible to make all of them play at once. Nor did the king wish to be in the park without the pleasures the fountains afforded. Royal strolls therefore required considerable coordination of water and people. A memorandum written by Charles Perrault, clerk to Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Louis XIV’s minister of finance—who comes closer than anyone to being a first minister to the Sun King) at the Bâtiment du Roi, on 18 August 1672, prescribes the order by which the fountains must be turned on depending upon which path the king followed through the gardens. Ensuring that the king saw only fountains at play required a team of Claude II Denis, the king’s fountain engineer, three assistant fontainiers, and six fountain boys all armed with whistles to communicate the whereabouts of the king. Fountains were to be turned on just before they came into the king’s view, and turned off as he passed out of sight (15). But it was not only for the king’s pleasure that the fountains were to be played. For, as Berger and Hedin show, Perrault concluded his instructions by relaying the command that, “The King wishes that all this that is said for His Person be observed for people of consequence who are in the park or to whom His Majesty has ordered the waters be shown” (17). A proper garden tour with fountains playing was reserved for the king or those he deemed important enough to warrant the necessary logistical arrangements. Being treated to a tour of the gardens, and especially to a show of the waterworks within them, could be taken as a sign of favor. The tour thus became a diplomatic tool. As such, the king could decline to offer a tour (as in the case of Muscovite envoys denied the pleasure of seeing the gardens in 1687 (71)), send guests on a truncated tour, provide diplomats with a knowledgeable guide to lead them on a tour, or, for those deemed most worthy, personally guide visitors through the park.

Berger and Hedin demonstrate that the paths the king chose to follow in escorting guests through the gardens evolved constantly over the course of the reign of Louis XIV, but are revealing of what the king believed to be most important about the gardens. They determine that the king was engaged in the planning of garden visits from the mid-1660s—much earlier than the surviving itineraries written by the king (which date to the late 1680s, 1694, and 1702–1704) suggest. The evolution of routes preferred by the king reveal that he favored the water features of the garden (as Berger and Hedin assert (17), if a part of the garden was sparse in water features, it was not visited) and had a desire to show off new or newly renovated parts of the garden. Berger and Hedin determine that the emphasis on hydrological wonder and novelty contributed to the transformation of the preferred garden itinerary from a counterclockwise route, with visitors beginning at the Parterre du Nord, through northern features in the garden, crossing in front of the Apollo Fountain, and re-entering the chateau on the south side, to the clockwise itineraries recommended by the king in the much later “Manière de Montrer les Jardins de Versailles.” The emphasis on waterworks suggests a desire on the part of the king to show off the accomplishments of his engineers—the Mercure Galant reported that the Moroccan ambassador asked that the fountains be turned on and off so that he could study them (27). But Louis XIV’s itineraries also demonstrate the king’s favoring of routes best for featuring grand perspectives. The clockwise tours of his later years began at the center doors to the chateau, proceeding from the Parterre d’Eau toward the Apollo Fountain and the incomparable vista offered down the length of the Grand Canal.

To what extent might these diplomatic garden tours be deemed successful? The accounts assembled by Berger and Hedin reveal a recurring narrative replete with exclamations of awe and wonder at the size, complexity, and beauty of the gardens. But as Berger and Hedin make clear, the historical record makes it difficult to assess—apart from Nicolas Tessin’s unusual candor in critiquing the changes to Le Nôtre’s masterpiece at the hands of Jules Hardouin Mansart—the messages taken away from these tours by the visiting dignitaries. Sadly the Siamese ambassador’s journal of the visit has been lost, leaving only Donneau de Visé’s biased account of their reactions to the gardens. Even more importantly, we know little about how the iconography of the glory of the king would have been understood by envoys from vastly different cultures. Tantalizing is the curious account of the royal tour given to Hadgi Mustafa Aga, the envoy of the Bey of Tripoli. Following his official audience with the king, he was escorted around the garden (fountains playing per royal order) by François Pétis de la Croix, orientalist and official interpreter who, according to the Mercure Galant, “carefully explained to him all the fables that the fountains depicted, in such a way that he could understand their meaning, following Cabalistic sense and superstitions (the Turks and the Arabs take an interest in the Jewish and Arab Cabala). For example, instead of calling Apollo the god of the sun, he said to him that it was the angel to whom God had given the command of the sun, and thus with the other divinities of mythology” (68). The layers of cultural misunderstanding illustrated by this example make us wonder how much of that message got through. Scholars will continue to probe accounts of the Versailles gardens for answers to less tangible questions regarding the reception and understanding of the gardens. But future work should and will have the advantage of Berger and Hedin’s essential volume upon which to build.