Revolutionary Amusement by Ane Cornelia Pade

Today’s special episode is by Ane Cornelia Pade. Ane is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores French fine and decorative arts of the 18th and early 19th centuries, with a particular focus on the relationship between elite artistic production and popular visual culture during this period. In this episode she’ll be talking about the famous Tivoli gardens in Paris, an amusement park that originated just before the Revolution.

At the height of the Terror, as the blade of the guillotine fell on the necks of thousands of Parisians and even more fled France as émigrés, the Revolutionary government replenished its dwindling coffers by confiscating the homes, land, and possessions of its many victims. In Paris, grand hôtels, palaces, and numerous parks and gardens were transferred into the hands of revolutionaries. This was, in many ways, as much a problem as a solution. While the government was eager to fund its wars by selling confiscated church land and auctioning off the king’s furniture, maintaining the extensive gardens of the Tuileries, Parc Monceau, Jardin du Roi, and Bagatelle from falling into complete wilderness proved costly – after all, how could a government that condemned aristocratic luxury justify employing an army of gardeners? The republic needed bread and soldiers, not manicured lawns.

So, what did the revolutionaries do when left in charge of Paris’ most sumptuous garden? - They threw a party. My name is Ane Cornelia Pade, and as part of my PhD research at the University of Cambridge, I look at the fate that befell Paris’ most splendid gardens in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789. Today, we will explore a garden whose name is so synonymous with entertainment, you might not realise where it came from – The Tivoli Garden.

On the outskirts of Paris, on the corner of rue Saint-Lazare and rue de Clichy, was one of Paris’ most luxurious gardens. It was built for the royal treasurer of the navy, Charles-Simon Boutin, who poured his vast fortune into its construction in the 1760s. Boutin’s garden was a whimsical fantasy. It encompassed an Italian garden, an English garden, and a potager; it was adorned with picturesque temples, a dairy, a mill, Swiss chalets, artificial mountains, a river, and a grotto. Boutin took such pride in his fantastical creation that he named it Tivoli in reference to the celebrated Villa d’Este garden outside Rome. The English writer and politician Horace Walpole, a man well-known to his contemporaries for his mocking wit, described Boutin’s garden in 1771 as a collection of artifice, topped by, and here I quote, ‘three or four very high hills, exactly in the shape of tansy pudding.’

For men like Boutin, constructing elaborate gardens was a way of announcing their taste, wealth, and power to elite society. Boutin’s garden cost a fortune to construct, and just as much to maintain. The magnificent gardens created by aristocrats and financiers in the second half of the 18th century were inspired by Rousseauvian ideals and contemporary discourses on the union of art and nature. Garden retreats allowed those at the very top of pre-revolutionary society to indulge in the fantasy of rural life, shielded behind a protective screen of foliage. Baroness de Oberkirch drank milk from golden cups in Boutin’s dairy in 1782 and noted that compared to Boutin’s Tivoli, the Queen’s Hamlet at Versailles seemed an innocent expense. The painter Élisabeth Vigée le Brun was a frequent guest in Boutin’s Tivoli, and Queen Marie Antoinette passed her final day before the doomed flight to Varennes in the garden. On special occasions, well-to-do Parisians were allowed to buy tickets to see the garden – paying for the chance to peer into the closed world of the Ancien Régime. However, the garden walls could not withstand the tides of change.

The Revolution of 1789 flung open the door to the realm of the elite, including to Boutin’s Tivoli. In 1794, as the Reign of Terror neared its end, Boutin was guillotined, and his Tivoli Garden was seized as national property. The decadent garden, with its flowers, arbours, and pudding-shaped mountains, was now the property of the people. Robespierre followed his victims to the Guillotine later that year. When the Directory government took power in 1795, it inherited the problem of what to do with Paris’ confiscated gardens. The question was urgent. Already, paths were overgrowing, and rare tropical plants, gathered from across the world, were dying from neglect. So, what was their solution? Sell and rent out the rest!

The politician Jacob Gérard des Rivières and pyrotechnician Claude Ruggieri rented Boutin’s Tivoli from the government in 1795 and transformed it into a public pleasure garden. They added swings, carousels, a dance pavilion, and a rollercoaster; they turned the dairy into an ice cream café and served refreshments in Boutin’s grotto. In the Italian terrace garden, visitors admired orange trees and fountains. In the potager, flower beds and hothouses presented a vivid display of exotic flowers. In the English garden, visitors found child actors dressed as shepherds tending sheep. Coloured lanterns illuminated the garden's groves and set its paths ablaze with light and shadow. Above, blossoms of fireworks illuminated the night sky. To walk in the Tivoli Garden was to experience not one landscape, season, or geography, but several united into one. Tivoli was, in essence, Paris’ first amusement park – and Parisians loved it! 

Men and women from all levels of society flocked to Tivoli’s lawns in the years following the Terror. The entrance fee was low, and the attractions were numerous. The end of the Terror did not spell immediate safety for the people of Paris. Fear continued to hang in the air, like the rumbling of thunder after lightning. A lack of funds and the lingering stigma associated with overt displays of personal wealth prompted Parisians from all social classes to turn to popular entertainment. This made Tivoli a social theatre where all of Paris appeared in the early years after the Terror. The influential Journal des dames et des modes, one of the most widely read papers of the era, wrote of Tivoli in the summer of 1797: “Anyone who has not seen Tivoli cannot obtain an idea of the pleasures of Paris.” In the Tivoli Garden, formerly exiled aristocrats rubbed shoulders with the new political elite, nouveau riche speculators, soldiers, shop girls, office clerks, and middle-class merchants. And on this stage, set against the backdrop of carousels and flowerpots, women assumed the leading role.

Fashionable women gathered on Tivoli’s central promenade all summer long to see and be seen. The Parisian press promoted the Tivoli Garden as one of the greatest fashion displays in town, and none more so than the Journal des dames et des modes. The fashion journal was read not only in France but also across Europe, helping to set the template for elite femininity and female consumer culture after the Revolution. The journal’s fashion illustrations, drafted après nature, based on stylish women seen around Paris, were widely admired. Of the 48 fashion illustrations published by the journal des dames et des modes in 1797, 15 depicted women in the Tivoli Garden. The directors of Tivoli turned this to their advantage, using their female clientele as a marketing tool to attract the crowds. The thin mousseline dresses and short-cropped hair styles of the Tivoli women were as popular a spectacle as the gardens’ nightly fireworks. For tourists, many of whom were familiar with the illustrations in Journal des dames et des modes, which circulated widely in the French provinces and abroad, Tivoli was a necessary stop when visiting the French capital.

Not everyone enjoyed Tivoli’s radical mixing of people and the female charms so readily on display. The close proximity of Parisians of different classes, ages, and genders inspired both enthusiasm and anxiety. Many were sceptical of the attention and freedom of movement women enjoyed in the Tivoli Garden; As one horrified commentator observed:

‘Everyone runs there; a worker, more miserable than a schoolboy, will borrow even from his porter, a girl will use, to buy the madness, her jewellery or her honour as a pledge. […] It brings together all the various attires. There is the elegant and rich provincial woman; Here, the frock, the dress, and the sword. It is a spectacle, a magic mirror, where you can hear and see everything.’

Critics feared that respectable women would be corrupted by the entertainment and abandon their roles as wives and mothers in favour of a life of pleasure. On the garden paths, a shopgirl in a fashionable dress might be mistaken for a respectable woman, and a respectable woman might be mistaken for a promiscuous shopgirl, endangering the stability of the new social order. As Tivoli proved more popular than the official celebrations mounted by the government, critics feared the garden’s air of aristocratic leisure would sow the seeds of royalism in the hearts of citizens. The Journal des dames et des modes remarked in 1797, following the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries Palace:

‘ I ask everyone I meet today, where were you yesterday? one answers me at Tivoli; the other at Bois de Boulogne; this one, at the spectacle; that one, at Velloni. No one in Champ-de-Mars.’

The revolutionary festivals were overburdened with ceremonious symbols and left little room for Parisians’ spontaneous enjoyment. Tivoli, by comparison, made the egalitarian mixing of people part of its entertaining appeal, rather than a republican duty. At Tivoli’s country balls and firework displays, one could imagine that the men and women standing only inches away were former dukes and duchesses. The idea that one might see, talk to, laugh, or dance with someone who, a few years earlier, had inhabited a distant realm of privilege, fuelled the imagination of the Tivoli crowds. It was curiosity, shared laughter, a desire to see and be seen, as well as the pleasure of entering a world once reserved for the few that united the people of Tivoli.   

Popular entertainment venues, such as the Tivoli Gardens, provided a much-needed antidote to the torments of the Revolution. Parisians were exhausted by years of social upheaval and endless political turmoil. They wanted to dance, to laugh, to heal. The English journalist and travel writer Francis Blagdon wrote of the Parisians in 1801: ‘However divided its inhabitants may be on political subjects, on the score of amusement at least the Republic is one and indivisible.’

The Tivoli Garden was one of many private spaces transformed by the Revolution. In the former Capuchin convent, Etienne Gaspard Robertson created frightful horror shows using projections, smoke, and actors, in which the dead rose from their graves to the distress and amusement of Parisians. As the bodies of the condemned piled up under the Terror, part of the Parc Monceau was parcelled off as a mass grave. The remainder of the garden opened as a commercial pleasure garden in 1797, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to excite public enthusiasm. Bagatelle, in the Bois de Boulogne, was rented out to an ice cream merchant, and Queen Marie Antoinette’s hamlet at Versailles, once the ultimate symbol of royal pastoral indulgence, was rented to the lemonade seller, who opened it as a restaurant and festival ground.

The confiscation and commercialisation of formerly private spaces forever changed the physical and mental landscape of the French capital and its surroundings. What had once been sacred ground under the monarchy was invaded by the people - be it the vaults of St. Denis or the Queen’s bedroom, which market women meticulously cut into pieces in October of 1789. As Louis-Sebastian Mercier, one of the finest social commentators of the age, wrote of the Parisian pleasure gardens in 1798:

“The hotels of princes, of great seigneurs, and of men the most opulent, are open to you with all their luxury, their furniture, their mirrors, their English gardens; and there you find music, dances, illuminations, fire-works, plentiful tables, and iced fruits; you throw yourself softly down on the rich sopha of an emigrant; you admire yourself in the large pier-glasses of the Dutchess of Bourbon; and all these enjoyments cost you half a crown.”

The Tivoli Garden closed its gates in 1810. By then, it had been reclaimed by the heirs of Boutin, and the republic was quickly fading into memory. However, for a moment in time, the Tivoli Garden facilitated public debate in the Parisian press and on the garden paths regarding women's access to public spaces, consumer culture, class conduct, the duties of citizens, and the merger of aristocratic and popular culture. In doing so, the Tivoli Garden enabled Parisians to debate, test, and implement the very structure of the new nation. After years of bloodshed and betrayal, Parisians longed for normalcy. In Tivoli, they found laughter, light, and the comfort of performance. As one journal wrote, ‘a woman, startled by the sound of military cannons, breathes a sigh of relief upon learning it was only a drill. "Ah!" she exclaims. "Let’s see if there’s a party tonight at Tivoli.’