Jardins-Spectacles: Spaces and Traces of Embodiment

Abstract

During the French Revolution, resourceful entrepreneurs seized properties on the outskirts of Paris to create jardins-spectacles, urban pleasure grounds that merged the former aristocratic practices of picturesque strolling with popular entertainments. Visitors paid entrance fees to explore the artfully contrived sensorium and watch astonishing performances, including fireworks displays and hot-air balloon launchings, while strolling. Simon Charles Boutin’s development of Tivoli, one of the most popular of the approximately twenty jardins-spectacles built from 1795 until 1820, reveals how these venues became places to perform embodied spectatorship. The ephemerality of the jardins-spectacles has marginalized their contribution to the history of visuality in the long eighteenth century.