d’Orgeix, Émilie: Au pied du mur. Bâtir le vide autour des villes (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle). Avec une préface d’Antoine Picon, 325 pages, 20,7 cm × 22,5 cm × 2,0 cm, ISBN : 9782804706333, 33,90 €
(Éditions Mardaga, Bruxelles 2019)
 
Rezension von Camilla Pietrabissa, Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura, Torino
 
Anzahl Wörter : 1772 Wörter
Online publiziert am 2019-10-22
Zitat: Histara les comptes rendus (ISSN 2100-0700).
Link: http://histara.sorbonne.fr/cr.php?cr=3701
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          Émilie d’Orgeix wrote a history of the militarized areas bordering French fortified cities which represents a welcome addition to a growing, but still relatively undeveloped, literature that combines urban studies and visual culture studies in the early modern period. While urban historians of the Ancien Régime have tended to focus on the evolution of the built environment intra muros, d’Orgeix explores those areas which were – only apparently – vacant: the zones non aedificandi, variously called ‘tour de ville’, ‘pourtour’, ‘abords’, ‘circuit’ in the archival sources. Due to the lack of historical studies on the zones, she turns to Jean-Louis Cohen and André Lortie’s 1992 study on the Parisian fringes in the twentieth century in which they postulated that ‘toute l’histoire des villes se grave dans leurs limites’. Bringing together a wealth of visual and textual material including maps, plans, topographic drawings, letters, royal decrees, etc., the author erects a solid defensive wall against a scholarly tradition which has consigned these areas to the margins; instead, she reconstructs the historical reality of the imposing landscape surrounding the early modern city and convincingly argues that its planning and representation were central to political discourse.

 

          As the title anticipates, the book’s main concern is to demonstrate that the zones were only apparently empty. In actual fact, these areas were traversed and inhabited at times of peace, and were increasingly employed as battlefields at times of war. In the crucial period 1650-1750, when the French strategy of defence changed radically, the areas non aedificandi became a key agent of urban transformation. Under Louis XIV, Sèbastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), commissaire général des fortifications, transformed more than 160 fortified towns and conceived 9 new cities ex nihilo to create his network of fortresses called ‘ceinture de fer’. In theory, this system of closeted cities, whose population remained confined within the fortified perimeter, ensured the safety of the kingdom and symbolized the military superiority of France abroad. In practice, as this book demonstrates, since its introduction various generations of engineers, administrators, local noblemen and high ranking officers tried to rearrange the areas bordering both sides of the fortifications. A mix of public and private interventions gives rise to the notion of the fortified town as a permanent building site, a chantier.

 

          The reader is therefore frequently reminded of the gap between established representations – in visual or textual form – and historical realities. By the mid eighteenth century, the process of transformation of French provincial cities was so complex and so differentiated that the book convincingly renounces the established notion of ‘embellishment’ for the entire territory, suggesting that it should only be applied in the case of monumental towns such as Paris or Bordeaux. The progressive removal of fortifications, achieved only in the second half of the nineteenth century, changed the morphology of cities and the life of their inhabitants even though some elements of this military history have survived. For example, the association of the zone with central power, in symbolic and in functional terms, was fully established by the late eighteenth century and endured well into the nineteenth century. One of the great merits of a book covering a long chronological span is to offer an image of the fortified city very different from the one fabricated by central power and opposing vacant and occupied, empty and full, horizontal and vertical.

 

         The book is divided into four parts, thematically and chronologically organised. The first part narrates the emergence of the ‘villes invisibles’ at the end of the 16th century and then of the French ‘place forte royale’ by looking at the intellectual tools available to Renaissance architects to design defensive systems. The first chapter, for example, examines the models devised by Alberti, Filarete and Dürer; the second chapter considers the level of logistic calculation and administrative confidence with which the Bourbon kings organised a system of strongholds in the national territory. At the end of this chapter, a survey of the sources found in the military archives – manuscript tables, lists, annual reports and atlases – demonstrates the richness of the material available to researchers today.

 

         The two chapters which form the second part detail the uses and functions of the areas inside and outside of the fortifications. Chapter three gives a picture of the complex morphology of the zones, dealing with issues of legislation such as the complex system of exemptions, permissions and funding of maintenance work. Chapter four presents some case studies of rebellion against local power and of tension between local and central administration, as well as the evolution of practices by local military officers who, especially in the eighteenth century, used the zones for modernization projects such as public parks or botanic gardens. Both chapters illustrate d’Orgeix’s engaging model of methodological enquiry: inspired by urban anthropology, she traces a ‘national cartography of urban leniency’ by comparing official reports, correspondence, and iconographic sources with the system of rules established by ordinances and royal edicts. Two parallel systems of power emerge, not rarely coming to confrontation: that of warfare and that of commerce. By the mid eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie would openly protest the system of urban enclosure on the grounds that it slowed down economic exchange within the city and with the potential marketplace outside of its walls. In this narrative, the mediators in these processes – engineers and military administrators in charge of the vacant areas – emerge as new protagonists of the French history of urban development.

 

         The third part depicts a vivid portrait of the engineers, who are on the front line in the material history of the zone. The decades-long process of construction and remodelling of fortifications and their bordering areas were the training field for a new generation of French engineers. By the eighteenth century, the engineer is not the expert in geometry and calculus which they used to be, but the person in charge of the overall planning and execution of the works, in short the supervisor around the building site, as represented in Claude Masse’s Livre de fortifications completed in 1728. To move and solidify masses of ground, to shape the glacis and improve their appearance, to plant trees and till the glacis for grass, are his new competences, developed at the same time as the jardiniers working for the Bâtiments du Roi learned how to decorate the parterres (Chapter five). By comparison with the primacy given by architects to wood and stone, the engineer’s material is the soil, and his career was decided in the zones. At the same time these engineers participated in a corporative rivalry with architects and, on some occasion, with scientists skilled in mechanics (Chapter six). While both architects and scientists could count on their Académies to publish and circulate their technical and intellectual knowledge, the engineers were not, until the creation of the military schools in the eighteenth century, backed by a formal institution.

 

         Art historians will be particularly intrigued by the last part because it deals with the development of a symbolic apparatus to represent the zones. Chapter seven delineates the evolution of the portrait de ville from the fifteenth century, when images of the fortified city emphasised vertical development, to the nineteenth century, when popular vignettes of the vast glacis and more generally of the zones symbolised the segregating power of the state. As a result of the model of the modern rampart, characterised by a larger volume and by the plantation of trees to hide the cityscape, the portraits were now often created from the distance and from an elevated viewpoint. The chapter moreover illustrates the role of specialised draughtsmen such as Joachim Duviert (v. 1580-1648), architects such as Étienne Martellange (1569-1651), and engravers such as Israël Silvestre (1621-1691), Jean Marot (1619-1679) and Johann Martin Weis (1711-1751) in this process. D’Orgeix convincingly demonstrates that the representations of the zones, by their imposing proportions and by their uncanny emptiness, more effectively established the presence of central power than the representation of the inner city. The peintres de guerre are the protagonists of the last chapter. Adrian-Franz Van der Meulen (1632-1690), Jean-Baptiste Martin (1659-1735), and their followers on military campaigns emphasise in large elaborated drawings  the visual reappropriation of the city margins by royal authorities. As the zones non aedificandi were increasingly employed as a battlefield and a site of triumphal parades, preparatory drawings convert what once were just empty areas into fully formed landscapes with distinct natural and architectural features. The duc de Choiseul’s idea for a cycle of decorative battle pictures celebrating the King’s 1745 campaign in the Flanders was famously never brought to completion. However, the extant drawings by Jean-Baptiste II Martin Le Jeune (1700- v.1750), son of Martin des Batailles, give evidence of the new interest in the illustration of the zone as a landscape rather than of the military action itself. The quality of the visual analysis in this chapter is remarkable.

 

         Throughout the book, d’Orgeix brings a fresh look to an abundance of images, including old maps of the fortresses, new drawings found in the archives of the Ministre de la Guerre at Vincennes, royal almanacs and plates from military manuals. The high quality of the illustrations, accompanied by captions with extensive commentaries, help the reader understand the author’s visual arguments. During the 1960s and 1970s, when urban history of early modern France emerged, disciplinary divisions and complicated access to sources restricted scholars in their field. D’Orgeix’s book belongs to a renaissance of studies at the service of a holistic view of cities and adds a perceptive observation of the visual and material world of the past.

 

         Au pied du mur is an outstanding book which opens up a new field of research where urban history, technical anthropology, visual culture and material studies intersect, and clearly reveals the richness and complexity of the issues raised therein. By addressing the marginal and the peripheral, d’Orgeix exposes the centrality of these areas for the urban and political history of France. Today’s reader can really make use of a book that reflects on the everyday reality of the areas under strict military control and examines the physical and symbolic cracks of political planning. D’Orgeix is open about her aim to connect the early modern period to the present by revealing the roots of the contemporary unease with urban limits and military zones. The history written from the margins ultimately exposes the continuity of a system of power which still shapes urban life.