Introduction

In the closing decades of the Ancien Regime, princes, aristocrats and financiers invested staggering sums to create pleasure pavilions in suburban Paris; luxury retreats often associated with libertinage, these pavilions were notably surrounded by gardens. Simon Charles Boutin (1720–1794), an immensely rich financier, allegedly invested over one million livres in his residence and garden then known as the Folie Boutin. The word “folie” intimated that Boutin's lavish venture was eccentric and perhaps frivolous, but building a folie further indicated that Boutin's garden was an extravagant financial investment. Unlike the majority of his peers, Boutin opened his 20–acre garden at the northwestern limits of the city to the public in 1771, issuing bi-weekly entrance tickets. Boutin effectively joined his cultural and financial clout with entrepreneurship, a carefully crafted gesture that would initiate the creation of a new type of garden experience—the jardin-spectacle . Boutin's folie , better known as Tivoli, serves as a case study to examine the evolution of jardins-spectacles as they materialized from elite pleasure grounds into liminal spaces during the Revolutionary decade. From 1795 until c.1830, approximately 20 Parisian jardins-spectacles opened, closed, and reopened as entrepreneurs’ fortunes rose and fell with the quickly changing economic and political developments. Tivoli is visible in the northwest quadrant of a map designed for tourists visiting Paris in 1824 (Figure 3.1.). Establishing the fundamental connection between garden strolling and jardins-spectacles , I contend that despite their ephemerality, the jardins-spectacles left affective traces that continue to influence contemporary landscape design and the development of virtual landscapes.