Peaceful Conquests

Peaceful Conquest, land reclamation in Monaco. The title of this book, in the form of a deliberately provocative oxymoron, goes directly to the heart of the contemporary political issues that the Principality has opted to promote, namely development and environmental science. the two interact in concert to guarantee the country a peaceful future.
Because of the loss of territory that saw Monaco’s geography radically shrink after the Franco-Monegasque Treaty of 1861, space became an essential requirement. The limited access to land helped Sovereigns to imagine a host of initiatives, many of them technically pioneering and avant-garde.
The exhibition invites visitors to explore these geopolitical, social, urban, technical – in short, the human stories upon which Monegasque culture is built. To that end, it brings together a large collection of cartographical and photographic archives, along with various plans and models of past and present land reclamation projects and the new living spaces they created.