Representing Royal Spectacle in Paris, 1660-1662

Representing Royal Spectacle in Paris, 1660-1662 Alice Grier Jarrard THE SHIFTING SITES of royal performance over the first 20 years of Louis XIVs personal reign have long been considered emblematic of the establishment of royal power. Such changes have been attributed to the king's passage from youthful engagement to mature sobriety, to the gradual retreat from the contested realm of the city to the distant garden splendors of Versailles, and to the typical trajectory of spectacle at absolutist courts. Royal performances have also been examined as laboratories for iconography used later in permanent form and, beyond questions of content, have been analyzed as settings for the "mise en scène de l'Etat.'" Louis Marin's analysis of the royal "representation-effects" achieved by linguistic means has shifted study from these issues towards modes of presentation, yet visual images are still all too often examined as unmediated documents of royal splendor.2 A closer look at prints of the seminal festivities at the outset of Louis's reign unmasks their role in defining the fiction of royal presence; long after the events portrayed, they offer a crucial indication of the crisis of representation which occurred in the early years of Louis XIVs reign, before spectacle moved away from traditional processions held in urban settings and into theaters and gardens located far from Paris. The circumstances and material components of Louis XIVs spectacles in Paris show how, at the outset of his reign, etchings distilled the complexities of an unprecedented festive contract between the king and his people. Voltaire would signal the royal wedding as initiating "un caractère plus grand de magnificence et de goût qui augmentera toujours," yet it is often forgotten that the king's first triumphal entrance, opera, and carrousel in Paris were also associated with his political alliance to Maria Theresa of Spain.3 Delays in the preparations dissipated the full effect of the events: the marriage took place 9 June 1660, but slow progress on the arches impeded the entry into Paris until late August, and problems in construction of the new theater hall and temporary amphitheater delayed their inauguration for almost two more years. Additional delays in the publication of the official prints and texts meant that the audience towards which these commemorations were directed was quite different from that which had attended the initial events. Although commissioned ten days before the entry by the "prévôt des marchands et echevins," the authoritative description of the royal entrance was published only in 26 Fall 1999 Jarrard 1662.4As for the carrousel of 1662, Charles Perrault's account was printed in the Gazette de France alongside François Chauveau's prints of noble equestrian participants immediately following the event, but it was only eight years later that an official account was produced, in a luxury edition containing 90 prints and a revised version of Perrault's text.5 Appearing seven years after narratives about the garden realm of Versailles had begun to solidify a royal identity that was distinct from the urban capital of Paris, these prints signal a final attempt to redefine the king's relationship with the city. The entry of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa into Paris, on 26 August 1660, was the first to be decreed a royal prerogative funded by specific taxes, and was the "last great royal-entry ceremony" produced by the city.6 Because of its royal focus, its civic sponsors, and the postponements which allowed enterprising writers to pen works before the event, the entrance survives as the most richly documented festival of the seventeenth century: over 84 printed pamphlets were dedicated to it, from satires criticizing the costly delays to manuals meant to guide interpretation of individual arches.7 In the supposedly authoritative guide published in 1662, Jean Tronçon calls attention to discrepancies between word and image, imploring the reader to "[se] raporte[r] plûtost à l'Escrit qu'à la figure, [parce que] celle-cy estant limitée ne peut pas entrer dans le détail des circonstances comme l'autre" («Advis au lecteur», n.p.). Though intended to establish the supremacy of his own account, Tronçon 's words cast...