Paris Hails the Mighty Garden Gnome

PARIS - Garden gnomes - 2,000 of them! - are sprouting at the Jardins de Bagatelle, the 24-hectare pleasure garden within the Bois de Boulogne. A huge beer-bellied gnome in blue bathing trunks waves a greeting from Bagatelle's 18th-century chⴥau, others occupy a raft on one of the ponds or emerge from impeccable greensward. It is as if Walt Disney's Dopey and Happy have taken over the enchanting landscape and it has made many garden lovers distinctly Grumpy...

...If one wished to, one could study gnomes extensively (why, for example, do Australian ones wear green caps instead of red?), and Jouannais has. Supported by quotations from Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Proust and Sartre, he argues that garden gnomes are pure symbols of life's painless routines, little creatures with no personality problems because they have no personalities. ''They incarnate, because of their adorable earthiness of spirit, the myth of happiness.''

While the gnome ''industry'' began in Thuringen, Germany, in 1880, at just about the same time as the use of the word kitsch, Jouannais quotes Hans Prahl, the leading German gnome authority, or zwergenexpert, in tracing their origin to ancient mines in Cappadocia, where the shafts were so narrow that only tiny people could go down them. Dressed in bright colors so they could be fished out in case of danger, their pointed caps filled with grass to protect against falling rocks, they spent their lives in the depths and to the rest of the community were mysterious, strange and perhaps possessed of magical powers. Figurines of the miners were put at pit heads and had such success as decorative objects that they were exported to Europe. In Germany the first trace was in princely parks in 1460 and the taste was later adopted by the middle classes. In 1871 gnomes were used to protest against Bismarck - a symbol of security and rooted earthiness in an expansionist era.

For gnome lovers, only those made in ceramic count: Plastic ones have no soul. Switzerland and France boast activist groups to protect gnomes by such means as lawsuits when they feel the folk have been insulted, and the occasional gnome kidnap. The founder of the famed Gnome Reserve in Devon, England, sees them as the guardians of the environment and insists that visitors don red caps at the entrance so as not to disturb the inmates.

Garden gnomes are a lot easier to ignore than to love. But Jouannais suggests that they are part of the collective unconscious. ''The decorated garden is kitsch, but these days what isn't? Our secret gardens, it is certain, are crammed with plastic gnomes.