Administrer les Menus Plaisirs du Roi: I'etat, la cour et les spectacles dans la France des Lumieres by Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier (review)

Probably best known to eighteenth-century specialists thanks to the Journal left by Denis-Pierre-Jean Papillon de La Ferté, Intendant from 1756 (first published in 1887), the Menus Plaisirs (or 'Argenterie, Menus, Plaisirs et Affaires de la Chambre du Roi') was a department of the royal household with responsibility for ceremonial matters, from coronations, funerals, and weddings to everyday manifestations of majesty, whose wide remit extended to oversight of the Comédie-Française and Comédie-Italienne. Owing to high costs, the royal household has sometimes been taken as an example of the monarchy's failure to reform, but the Menus Plaisirs has rarely been studied in its own right. Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier's monograph (based on her doctoral thesis) is interested in it as an institution, between court and state, and between Versailles and Paris, and the ways in which it evolved over the course of the eighteenth century. (It began its life as the medieval department of Argenterie) She is alternately concerned with five aspects: the 'spaces' (real and metaphorical) occupied by the Menus (court, state, Versailles, Paris); a close study of how the surviving written record reveals organizational developments; the Intendants themselves; management of the premises and particularly the store-room (magasin) constructed on rue Bergère; and the role of the department in spectacle, whether court festivity or such public theatre as fell under its purview. The case of the Menus Plaisirs allows Lemaigre-Gaffier to consider politics as intimately linked with a series of other fields, such as sacrality, of which royal ceremonial is one expression, and more widely to examine the imbrication of domestic service and state governance. Although her study uses terms such as 'administration' and 'bureaucracy' (for example, Chapters 5 and 8), she is concerned from the outset to avoid the teleological suggestion that the development of the Menus Plaisirs is unpro-blematically one towards a kind of 'modernity'; for on the contrary the department embodies the ambivalence of a court and state for which tradition is also of importance. Nevertheless, Part Two traces significant organizational development according to criteria such as transparency. Because of the high cost of the office, the Intendants generally came from the world of finance (Part Three), but their relationship with the First Gentlemen of the Chamber was delicate, and their place in court hierarchy sometimes tenuous. Of particular interest in this densely argued and impeccably researched work are the statistics on expenses (in the 'Annexes'). One central focus of the study is what administration might 'mean' in the eighteenth century, and, in articulating the world of the court to the 'public', Lemaigre-Gaffier reflects interestingly on Antoine Lilti's seminal Le Monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIII^e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005); her material concerning the budgetary priorities of the department will interest historians of consumption; and her precise and very detailed archival research will provide much-needed material to historians of theatre, both those familiar with La Ferté, and those coming to the topic for the first time.