What do we have in common in the landscape ?

| History shows that ‘landscape’, a particular version of cosmophany (the appearance of the world proper to a certain being), for a long time has been the privilege of an elite. In the present world, it has become a notion common to a good part of Humankind. A philosopher like Giorgio Agamben qualifies it as “a phenomenon which concerns Man in an essential way”, and goes as far as to suppose that it stretches out to the animal kingdom. One tries here to set a few historical and ontological bench marks in this popular soup. For whom is there "landscape"? The last edition of the Petit Larousse (2019) gives "landscape" the four following definitions: "1. Extent of land that offers itself to view: panorama. 2. Such an extension, characterized by its appearance: Desert landscape. 3. Representation of a natural or urban site by painting, drawing, photography, etc. 4. Fig. Overall aspect of such field, such sphere of activity: Political landscape, audiovisual (...) ". The first edition (1906), for its part, gave the following: "Scope of country that presents an overview: admire the landscape. Drawing, painting representing a country site: Corot has left beautiful landscapes. We see that between 1906 and 2019, while the first meaning remained the same or approximately ("country" becomes "land", "Extent" becomes "Extended" ...), substantial changes have occurred for the rest. The landscape is no longer just "rural", it is today "natural or urban"; and most importantly, the term has acquired figurative meanings that it did not have before. For this double, and especially the second, it has become widespread. The landscape is more talked about than in the past, and in more diverse cases. In other words, the noun "landscape" is a more common name than a century ago. Given this, this phenomenon goes beyond the lexicographic domain. This means that a change has occurred in the relationship between society and its territory, that is to say, in its spatiality, and even in what makes it on the Earth. In some respects, and to a certain extent, which it is up to us to examine, this report, here called "landscape", is no longer what it was in Cezanne's time (contemporary of the first edition of the Petit Larousse). What was it then? Let's see what the person said (if we believe his historiographer, Joachim Gasquet): "With peasants, hold on, I sometimes doubted that they know what a landscape, a tree, yes. It seems odd to you. I went for walks sometimes, I accompanied a farmer behind his cart who was going to sell his potatoes at the market. He had never seen Sainte-Victoire. They know what is sown, here, there, along the road, how long it will be tomorrow, if Sainte-Victoire has his hat or not, they smell like animals, like a dog knows what is that a piece of bread, according to their only needs, but that the trees are green, and that this green is a tree, that this land is red and that these fallen reds are hills, I do not believe that the most feel it, they know it, outside their utilitarian unconscious" (Gasquet, 1921/2002, 282-283). What Cezanne tells us here is that the peasants of his time did not see Sainte-Victoire as a landscape. Certainly, not being more blind than Cezanne, they saw it too, but as something else. As what? That Cezanne does not tell us, and besides, the look of the hicks, it does not interest him: it is "the way of animals, like a dog", and what it can see is not worth not define it. The peasants of Cezanne's time, they have "never seen Sainte-Victoire" in a qualifiable way; point. We, on the other hand, have today to describe it, that look which, in the days of Cézanne and the first Petit Larousse, was certainly that of most people: one in two Frenchmen was then working in the fields, not to mention those who worked at the factory. Neither peasants nor workers would have understood anything at the sign of the A7 freeway which now, around Aix-en-Provence, enjoins us to see there the "landscapes of Cézanne". What are, "the landscapes of Cézanne"? Augustin Berque Retired director of studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. What do we have in common in the landscape? *Corresponding Author: abilande@wanadoo.fr +33153635161