Paris - The World As Plaything

In 1783, only six years before the start of the French Revolution, work began to build a village for Queen Marie Antoinette.

The Queen had a part of the vast estate at Versailles for her own use: even her husband, Louis XVI, could only enter with her permission. Her main possession there was Le Petit Trianon, a house begun twenty years earlier, where a formal garden with fountain and flower beds gave the Queen her own small world to command. But formal gardens - the 'French' style - were going out of fashion as Rousseau talked about the virtues of 'going back to nature' and the 'English garden' style was becoming popular. Marie Antoinette has such a garden laid out in the mid 1770s. Then she added a theatre in which she and her friends could perform plays - in some she acted the part of a shepherdess.

The Queen loved her little world, which was one of make believe. She could act in her theatre and she could act in this, her corner of the Versailles Estate. Marie Antoinette wanted a world of her own. so it was that in 1783 the architect Richard Mique began to oversee the building of eleven 'village' buildings that he designed in a picturesque style which seem to have blended real traditions with fictions from the royal imagination. A house for the Queen, a mill (pictured here), a farm, a dairy, a barn and others were placed decorously around a lake. The farm has cows, sheep and goats and crops of cereals and fruit. Here, Marie Antoinette could entertain her friends, serve food from 'her' farm - its production owed nothing to her own hand - as well as act as the lady of the village.

It was a life whose days would be numbered. Deeply unpopular with the wider French public, she and her husband, Louis XVI, died under the blade of the guillotine in 1793.

Now, her village, L'Hameau de la Reine has been restored. surviving buildings again appear as they did more than two hundred years ago. Crops, fruit and flowers are growing and animals graze in fields. There is a wonderful sense of the private, safe, fictitious world that the Queen inhabited, cut off from the harsh realities of rural France. The restoration and presentation has been thorough. Hardly any presence can be felt of attendants or curators, so that ordinary visitors are able to enjoy the little world in a way that they never could in the 1780s.

Marie Antoinette's village is one of the earliest - perhaps the earliest - example of an aspect of the world being created to preserve, present and perform a particular way of life for visiting people. It is part museum, part 'living history', now part educational project. At one and the same time it is both real and fake, as it always was. We can understand more of the way of life of the French monarchy when we see it and glimpse into the mind of the royal system that ruled France. It is possible to visualise life in farms and cottages on the eighteenth century while at the same time begin to measure the gap between Marie Antoinette's fantasy and life as it really was, a gap so wide and destructive that it helped bring about a revolution. And we can see an early example of those showcases that included the great museums and world expositions, through the open air museums and theme parks to present day conservation areas and discovery centres, all of which seek to entertain, explore and educate in varying proportions.