A palace of one's own: Stanislas I's Kiosks and the idea of self-representation

The notion of self-representation, understood as a deliberate distancing from one's own political, cultural, and social contexts, emerged in the Enlightenment as an explicit goal of action. (1) Differing from the notion of representation, which is a process of objectification of power, as in the case of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great, self-representation developed as a force from the periphery of power and is entangled in the psychology of the displaced and the politically precarious. (2) Its aim, ultimately, was not so much dismantling the hierarchical relationship between center and periphery as empowering oneself through the expression of the other within. Recent interpretations of the portraits of Mme de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, and in particular the Turkish Sultana Taking Coffee by Carle van Loo (ca. early 1750s, now in the Hermitage Museum), have been discussed in terms of such dispersal of the subject and construction of power. (3) Inspired by an illustration in a Turkish costume book, the Turkish sultana in van Loo's painting has been identified as the portrait of Pompadour herself and interpreted as "a kind of veiled genre painting representing self commentary" designed to elevate Pompadour's position from mere mistress to the royal favorite, if not the "queen." (4) Thus, the painting's phantasmagoria, Pompadour simultaneously as herself and as a queen in disguise, acts as a mirror that constantly unsettles not only her identity but also her reception. (5) The Turk in this context offers a forceful and recognizable symbol of might that can also be mined for stylistic individualization (that is, physical distinction) as well as subjectivity (that is, autonomous intellectual and moral features). Yet within this open-ended discourse, the subject is not power (as in a portrait of the king, Louis XV being power in person, as it were) but, rather, the self-representation that empowers Pompadour via difference, novelty, metaphor, and iconography.

The aim of this article is to explore further this conjunction between the uses of Turkish forms and empowerment as self-representation--that is, the metaphoric expression of the other within--in the case of another marginalized political figure in eighteenth-century France: the onetime king of Poland Stanislas Leszczynski (Fig. 1). This will involve two strands of analysis: first, a recounting of Stanislas's eventful biography and, second, a stylistic decoding of his hitherto unstudied Turkish-inspired buildings.

Stanislas was elected king of Poland in 1705 with the help of the Swedish King Charles XII as a diplomatic buffer against the expanding Austrian and Russian powers, but he was subsequently defeated by Frederick Augustus I, elector of Saxony (who became Augustus II), and forced to escape from Poland. (6) Following his defeat he spent several years in exile in various parts of Europe and under Ottoman protection in Bendery or Bender (in today's Moldova) and Adrianople (Edirne) from 1712 to 1714, before taking up a temporary residence at Zweibrucken, a Swedish principality controlled by Charles XII. (7) On the death of Augustus II, in 1733, he made a second and final attempt to gain the Polish throne, which also ended in fiasco. Finally, in 1737, his son-in-law, King Louis XV of France, offered him the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar in France on the condition that he give up all claim to the Polish throne for good, in order to ensure peace in Europe. Twice-deposed and several times displaced, Stanislas devoted most of his time between 1737 and 1753, with the assistance of his architect Emmanuel Here, to the design and construction of his final residence at Luneville (Fig. 2). Stanislas's building program entailed major alterations to the chateau and its gardens, which were formerly occupied by Duke Leopold until his death in 1729 and originally designed by the eminent royal architect Germain Boffrand. (8) Here's modifications to the chateau--whose elegance, sadly, can only be imagined after the recent fire on January 2, 2003, that left it in ruins--seem to have been geared toward a greater fragmentation of the existing facade into smaller components, as opposed to the effect of a unified complex that usually marked the character of European palaces, such as Versailles. This tendency to use smaller units to achieve a greater unity could also be observed in the very first buildings Stanislas commissioned: the Kiosque (1737), which became his primary residence for a while, and the Trefle Pavilion (1738), which was reserved for his favorite guests (Figs. 3,4). Such a tendency was intimately bound up with the character of the buildings' Turkish origin: the Topkap1 Palace, the seat of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul. In addition, Stanislas commissioned a Grand Canal, a Pavillon de la Cascade (1741), an automated panorama of a miniature farm called Le Rocher (1742-44), and the Chartreuses (1741-44), a series of small cottages placed along the Grand Canal, assigned for Stanislas's so-called tenants who were designated by him at will. (9) He also commissioned several other complexes in his nearby estates at Commercy and Chanteheux, which also included pavilions based on Turkish prototypes.