Luneau on Presutti (2024)

In Land into Landscape, Kelly Presutti argues that landscape representation in the century following the French Revolution became essential in re-envisioning and redesigning France’s ideal national landscape, in which the reciprocal relationship between aesthetics and administration paved the way for a transformation of France’s pays into a French paysage. As privatization increased across France, new representations of various French regions reflected a shift away from provincial distinctions toward a unified national landscape. Within this context, Land into Landscape shows the impact of representations on regional and national efforts to remake landscapes into something that could be identified as French, demonstrating the tangible impact of these artistic and intellectual developments.

Presutti expands this analytical scope beyond landscape painting, examining representations across various mediums including maps, photographs, engravings, porcelain, and other visual forms. The book also incorporates a range of actors, including lesser-known artists who worked as agents of the state as well as others who challenged official narratives. Land into Landscape highlights the concept of aménagement, an ideology employed by state agencies that sought to impose rational land management for economic gain and political prestige. In analyzing these developments, Presutti aims to avoid the “metropolitan gaze” of the urban bourgeoisie by drawing upon local perspectives that were often in conflict with state efforts to transform marginal spaces into unified productive landscapes.

Land into Landscape includes four chapters, each examining a different landscape typology perceived in the early-nineteenth century as being in a state of disrepair and lacking a fixed definition. Chapter one explores perceptions and representations of mountains which, in the eighteenth century, were seen as stable forms that constituted “natural” borders. Nineteenth-century geologic and artistic studies of the Alps and Pyrenees challenged these notions, showing them to be more porous and unfixed than previously imagined. This chapter opens with an analysis of architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s images and diagrams of Mont Blanc, which “documented both how Mont Blanc appeared and how it had evolved over the course of millennia due to the action of glaciers, erosion, flooding, and human intervention in the landscape” (22). Addressing the difficulty of depicting the sheer scale of mountains, Viollet-le-Duc glued an additional strip onto the canvas of his drawings, thus challenging the notion that mountains were unrepresentable. The chapter then turns to the Pyrenees, examining “picturesque prints [which] would bring value to neglected parts of France,” creating a “necessary intervention in a region where identity was blurred” (36). Surveying collections of paintings, photographs, and lithographic prints, Presutti reveals how representations of mountains emphasized their state of disrepair, reinforced by geologic studies of erosion and other forms of environmental degradation that inspired rehabilitation efforts to preserve a defining feature of France’s borderlands.

Chapter two follows the mountain to the sea and its coast, which also presented challenges of scale and fixity. As sites of material and cultural exchange, coasts were figuratively “unfixed” borders that “muddied the waters” of French identity (64). Simultaneously, coasts also exhibited representational challenges related to their vast extent and shifting nature. The chapter traces artistic endeavors to represent ports and other coastal features both as sites of exploration as well as markers of French maritime strength. Presutti also examines efforts to reimagine and redefine the extent of France’s maritime boundaries in the Paris port de mer, a proposed project to transform Paris into a seaport via a massive canal linking Paris to Dieppe, as well as the development of the Musée de la Marine in the Louvre, creating a “seaport for Parisians” (85).

Chapter three examines France’s vast forests following the Revolution and the end of monarchial protections, using two analytical categories: industrial pine plantations harvested at regular intervals, and dense, old-growth forests reminiscent of France’s rural past. Though Presutti argues that France’s forests have always been managed environments, representations in the nineteenth century negotiated “overlapping definitions of a forest—as an aesthetic site of national patrimony, a tool for modern statecraft, and a reserve of capital…” (109). Throughout the chapter, Presutti analyzes the role of forest representations in resource extraction, such as the works of Paul Laurent and students at the École forestière, as well as artists who campaigned to preserve forests, notably Théodore Rousseau and the Barbizon school of painters. 

Chapter four focuses on the drainage of the Landes de Gascogne wetlands in Southwest France, described in pre-nineteenth century accounts as a dark, mysterious, decayed expanse that was “un-French in ways that frustrated the formation of a recognizably French landscape, one anchored in visible, representable, and clearly demarcated ground” (151). Under the guise of aménagement, the state sought to rehabilitate this “backward” corner of the nation by draining wetlands, replacing them with dense, tightly managed pine forests that would inscribe regularity onto the landscape while providing resources for France’s continued industrial development. Presutti shows how paintings of Barbizon artists, along with a collection of photographs by Félix Arnaudin, documented a disappearing landscape. However, other representations aimed to document and advocate the transformation of this “dismal” landscape.

Rooted in relevant theoretical frameworks while still maintaining a highly readable narrative, Land into Landscape provides a nuanced examination of the role representation played in redefining the French landscape. Each chapter incorporates a variety of perspectives among the artists, administrators, engineers, and local inhabitants that contributed to processes of landscape representation and modification. Presutti refers to parallel processes that played out across France’s colonial empire, noting that land and landscape played a key role in imperial expansion and the civilizing mission. These aspects appear sporadically throughout the book, most notably in the second chapter on coasts, but they are somewhat underdeveloped compared to her focus on the metropole. However, these theoretical frameworks articulated can provide ample opportunity for scholars to examine the role of land and landscape across the empire. Nonetheless, Land into Landscape is an outstanding work that will contribute significantly to both the history of nineteenth-century art and French environmental history.