Fashion beyond Versailles: Consumption and Design in Seventeenth-Century France by Donna J. Bohanan (review)

Donna J. Bohanan sets out in this book to consider what she calls ‘the society of the object’ (p. 16) in the seventeenth century by studying post-mortem household inventories from the region of the Dauphiné, drawing from her findings consumption patterns in provincial France beyond Paris and Versailles. The first chapter deals with the sociopolitical world of noble consumers from the provinces, and with the emerging sense of France as the domain of fashionability and taste (with cursory references to major theorists of the taste and style of the time such as Norbert Elias, Michael Moriarty, and Joan DeJean). The remaining chapters, which tend to follow the pattern of starting with Parisian styles and then analysing the Dauphiné in particular, are concerned with different types of goods: Chapter 2 revolves around the acquisition of luxury goods, including furnishings, clocks, and paintings; colour schemes and matched sets designating the growing importance of ‘régularité’ form the focus of Chapter 3; Chapter 4 charts the prominence given to comfort and convenience as well as innovation in both lighting and furnishing; and Chapter 5 is devoted to dining and sociability. Although Bohanan’s findings are hardly startling (in almost all cases the Dauphiné nobles tended to follow Parisian fashion), the details of daily life that she reveals are always instructive: it was interesting to learn, for example, that, as the seventeenth century progressed, lists of paintings that had previously been left unattributed began to be assigned artists’ names. Notions of the public and private are touched upon (with suitable reference being made to Philip Ariès’s and Georges Duby’s multi-volume edition Histoire de la vie privée (1985–87)), but writers on public/private spaces such as Jürgen Habermas and Hélène Merlin-Kajman receive no mention. It is also regrettable that the book itself, in all its forms, is ignored by Bohanan. Did the noble households in the Dauphiné not have libraries or book collections? Also, when different ideas of taste are being compared, it would surely have been useful to refer to contemporary literature. Consideration of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for instance, would have added to her analysis of what was deemed fashionable or suitably luxurious. Literary texts of the time, and indeed the Mercure galant (to which she refers elsewhere), might also have helped in assessing the question of gender and fashion, which she dismisses because her ‘sources do not allow for its consideration’ (p. 5). Overall, however, the book makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of seventeenth-century customs in the provinces and serves as a reminder that future studies of the seventeenth century need not remain overly fixated on Paris and Versailles.