Famous Parks: Parc Monceau Paris France

Parc Monceau is situated in the 8th arrondissement and covers an area of 8.2 hectares. Landscaped in the 18th century with many follies (Corinthian pillars, an Egyptian pyramid), Parc Monceau was restored during the Second Empire in an English style made up of curved walkways and randomly placed statues. The public garden is a very popular play area for children residing locally.

The park was established by Phillippe d'Orléans, Duke of Chartres, a cousin of King Louis XVI, fabulously wealthy, and active in court politics and society. In 1769 he had begun purchasing the land where the park is located. In 1778, he decided to create a public park, and employed the writer and painter Louis Carrogis Carmontelle to design the gardens.

The Duke was a close friend of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, and a lover of all things English. His intention was to create what was then called an Anglo-Chinese or English garden, on the earlier model of Stowe House in England (1730–1738), with its examples of the architectural folly, or fantastic reconstructions of buildings of different ages and continents. It was similar in style to several other examples of the French landscape garden built at about the same time, including the Desert de Retz, the gardens of the Château de Bagatelle and the Folie Saint James.

Carmontelle employed a German landscape architect named Etickhausen and the architect of the Duke, Bernard Poyet, to build the follies. The intention of the garden was to surprise and amaze visitors. This goal was clearly stated by Carmontelle: "It is not necessary for gardens or nature to be presented in the most agreeable forms. It's necessary instead to preserve the charm that one encounters entering the garden, and to renew it with each step, so that the visitor in his soul will have the desire to revisit the garden every day and to possess it for himself. The true art is to know how to keep the visitors there, through a variety of objects, otherwise they will go to the real countryside to find what should be found in this garden; the image of liberty.".

The garden designed by Carmontelle was finished in 1779. It contained a miniature Egyptian pyramid, a Roman colonnade, antique statues, a pond of water lilies, a tatar tent, a farmhouse, a Dutch windmill, a temple of Mars, a minaret, an Italian vineyard, an enchanted grotto, and "a gothic building serving as a chemistry laboratory," as described by Carmontelle. In addition to the follies, the garden featured servants dressed in oriental and other exotic costumes, and unusual animals, such as camels.

Though the Folly was (and is) frequently described as an Anglo-Chinese or English garden, its architect, Carmontelle, had a very different view. In his work, Jardin de Monceau, près de Paris, (1779), he wrote: "It was not at all an English garden that was intended at Monceau, but precisely what the critics said; to put together into one garden all times and all places. It is simply a fantasy, to have an extraordinary garden, a pure amusement, and not at all the desire to mimic a nation which, when it makes a "natural" garden, uses a roller on all the greens and spoils nature."

As garden fashions changed, in 1781 parts of the park were remodeled into a more traditional English landscape style by the Scottish landscape gardener Thomas Blaikie. In 1787, a new city wall, the Wall of the Farmers-General, was built along the northern edge of the garden, along with a circular rotunda in the form of a classical Doric temple, known as the Pavilion de Chartres, designed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux. The ground floor of the temple was used as a customs house, while the upper floor was an apartment with a view of the garden reserved for the Duke.

While The Duke was a supporter of the ideas of the French Revolution, and even voted, as a member of the Assembly, for the execution of his own cousin, Louis XVI, it did not save him. He was guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1793, and the park was nationalized.
Schematic depiction of André-Jacques Garnerin's parachute used in the Parc Monceau descent of 22 October 1797. Illustration dates from the early nineteenth century.

In 1797, Parc Monceau was the site of the first silk parachute jump, when André-Jacques Garnerin jumped from a Montgolfier hot air balloon, landing in the park where a large crowd was gathered. 

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