The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XVI’s Paris by Anita Guerrini (review)

This work is original in its documentation as much as in its form and content. Anita Guerrini has limited herself to a relatively short time period: her study focuses on the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), but its historical breadth is unprecedented insofar as its topic is that of “animals and humans” in Grand Siècle Paris. In their broad outline, the six chapters of this rather complex book are organized around three principal themes that cross, intertwine, and sometimes melt into one another.

Guerini first addresses the question of beasts as objects of valorization. Although the wholeness of the captured animal is preserved, it is nonetheless an overdetermined object: it is caught in practices that exercise a form of ideological control over representations. The mechanisms of royal power are here shown, disassembled, and analyzed. Court society furnishes a model of intelligibility, if not of the animal world, then at least of the choice of which animals it incorporates and the perspective from which they are seen. Without politics, diplomacy and commerce we could not grasp the nature of the caged and enclosed animal. Without the pregnant symbolic values that are attached to the animal world, we would not understand the fascination which it exerted. From Vincennes to Versailles, the public went from circus to menagerie, from animal combat to animal exhibition, and from spectacular violence to the spectacle of life. The menagerie constructed by Le Vaux is a veritable symbol of the royal power that held courtiers, naturalists, and artists under its dependency: indeed, it is a prefiguration of the Panopticon. In any event, the taming of wild animals furnishes an image of the control of the aristocracy by virtue of its inclusion in the process of subjugating the court nobility.

But what about the place of the animal in sites of knowledge, that is to say, in the various institutions which housed anatomical inquiries? The cadavers of animals from the royal menagerie become objects of study, like those of criminals and deceased hospital inmates. To these should be added domesticated animals that are used for vivisections. We should also note here that it would not be anachronistic to speak of “vivisection” in this period: we find the thing (i.e., the animal), the word “vivi-sectionibus” (John Mayow, Tractacus . . . 1674, pp. 148, 176, 302), and the definition which aligns with its etymology, “to cut a living being.” This point is secondary as regards the description of serial research programs. The anatomy of different species of animals; an anatomy which compares humans and animals to record structural similarities and differences; a renewed anatomy of fine parts, visible only in the context of vivisections, which pose the controversial question of extrapolating the results from animals to humans.

The highly sensitive question of how animals were inserted into institutional projects is treated in a historical narrative that is not entirely seamless. The narrative could hardly be otherwise, considering the fact that it has to hold together both the individual and the collective, Riolan and Perrault, Cureau de La Chambre and Descartes, for whom the face is not the window on the soul. One might be tempted on occasion to respond to Anita Guerrini. It is not the animal that is in the foreground, but rather the codes of knowledge which serve as a heuristic model: for Vesalius, the animal is a basis for comparison; by the seventeenth century, it is an object of study in and of itself. Likewise, it is not the project of the Academy that drives it to amass eyewitness demonstrations, but rather the happenstance of vivisections which opens the path to discovery, most notably, that of the lymphatic system.

In Anita Guerrini’s book we find a perfectly mastered history of detail. But not only this: we also find, to borrow from Louis-Sebastien Mercier, the Tableau de Paris of...