François Racine de Monville

François Racine de Monville (born October 4, 1734 in Paris ; † April 1797 ), also François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville, later François Racine, was a French administrative officer of King Louis XV. and amateur architect. His most famous creation is the Désert de Retz landscape park .

Life

Racine de Monville grew up with his maternal grandfather. His father was the head of the financial administration of Alençon ; he was imprisoned for fraud from 1742 to 1750. Nevertheless, the young François enjoyed a good education. First attempts to gain a position at court failed. In 1757 Racine became the supervisor of the waters and forests in Normandy. He took up this position again from 1764.

Racine moved at the court of Louis XV, was active as a composer and was a skilled ball player in the jeu de paume . Exact details of his life and information about his income are not known. From 1774 Racine began to realize his plan to create a "Désert" . He understood it to be a landscape garden in the English style , the concept of which is based on an atmospheric landscape staging.

For this purpose, Racine acquired a property with a country house in Saint-Jacques-de-Retz from a royal valet. He procured four thousand trees, provided a system of watercourses and ponds for irrigation. In the following years he had various garden decorations built, the best known in the form of an oversized column ruin. This building became his home. How Racine financed the extensive and expensive landscape changes and structures is not known.

The political events in the wake of the French Revolution moved Racine to sell his Paris city palaces and the Désert de Retz and henceforth to live as a simple citizen. He was arrested in 1794 and spent his life in dungeon until the end of the Grande Terreur of the Jacobins . Racine died in 1797 completely depleted on gangrene .

literature

• Julien Cendres: François Racine de Monville. In: Michel Racine (ed.): Créateurs de jardins et de paysages en France de la renaissance au XXI siècle . Editions Actes Sud, Arles 2001, pp. 166-168, ISBN 2-7427-3280-2 .