ABSTRACT
The ‘English garden’ movement, the first major architectural movement in Europe to challenge the doctrine of the uni ver sality of classical architecture and to sup port the par ticu lar, the nat ural, and the regional, was more than a century old when the Napoleonic Wars ended, in 1815. As we have already seen, the movement, mostly under the name ‘pic turesque’, spread around the world as a set of design rules, a style, with the ori ginal polit ical regionalist intentions of the movement hardly being remembered. The new polit ical reality that followed the Napoleonic Wars left behind eighteenth-century preoccupations for new targets, one of them the ‘redrawing of the map’ of Europe and the future of its regions. This new list of prob lems made up the agenda of the Congress of Euro pean leaders that convened in Vienna on Octo ber 1, 1814, a year before Napoleon’s final collapse. Among the parti cip ants were Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, and a number of smaller states including the Helvetic Republic, repres ented by a group consisting of one delegate from each canton of the repub lic. The reason the or gan izers, chaired by von Metternich, admitted the Swiss crowd was to dem on strate that the Congress respected the particu larist reality of the Euro pean regions and that it was not bound to the old formulas. During these meetings, the con tin ental Euro peans were confronting the decline and pos sible decomposition of the old empires, the emergence of new ‘national’/regional identities, and the redefinition of the idea of state and sover eignty. The British appeared to be less attracted by these questions, being inter ested mainly in the issues of freedom of navigation and keeping the seas open, con ditions advancing globalization. Perhaps for this reason, the question of the ‘Gothic’, which played such an im port ant role in the construction of the new German identity in the German-speaking ter rit ories during the second part of the eight eenth century, did not play such a vital polit ical and cultural role in Britain. The Gothic ruins and Gothic structures used in English ‘pic turesque’ gardens rarely carried an im port ant regionalist/nationalist polit ical message, as the English way of designing gardens had once done.
