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Article ID: CBB001422228

Versailles as a Family Enterprise: The Perraults, 1660--1700 (2013)

Rabinovitch, Oded (Author)

French Historical Studies
Volume: 36, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 385-416

DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2141091

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Animals Manuscripts Science and culture Dissection Court sponsored science; patronage Courts and courtiers Natural history 17th century France Perrault, Charles Perrault, Claude Colbert, Jean Baptiste Académie Royale des Sciences (France)

Historians usually treat Versailles as a site of courtly interaction, or as a source for courtly “taste.” This article, however, examines processes that connected Versailles to the wider world, arguing for a model of Versailles's role in the cultural politics of the monarchy, which stresses appropriations by men of letters and supplants “top-down” models of cultural absolutism. It explores the symbolic and material uses of Versailles in the social and intellectual ventures of the Perraults, a family of Parisian men of letters. While acting as authors, members of royal academies, or aides to Colbert, the Perraults used Versailles as a source of exotic animals for scientific dissection, a depository of manuscript texts, a weapon in literary struggles, and a site of sociability. As the Perraults appropriated Versailles, they used their access to the palace for their own devices, unrelated to the goals of a state-run propaganda machine; yet these appropriations brought Louis XIV's grandeur to new publics.

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