Cultural Capital: Paris, Cosmopolitanism, and the Novel in Jean de Préchac's L'Illustre Parisienne

This article examines the construction and transmission of "Parisianness" in French short novels of the 1660s-1670s. Such fictions proposed to delight and instruct their readers through representations of the gallant manners associated with urban nobility and the well-heeled Parisian bourgeoisie, implicitly establishing Paris as a cultural capital to be admired and imitated by provincial and foreign readers. The bulk of this essay is devoted to a reading of one particularly compelling example of the "Parisian novella": Jean de Préchac's L'Illustre Parisienne, histoire galante et véritable (1679). Through the story of a sophisticated, bourgeois Parisian woman who becomes the object of foreign princes' desires, Préchac's novel both reflects and deconstructs the cosmopolitan status and cultural prestige attached to Paris and Parisianness. The novel discloses how an essentially urban set of codes and behaviors displaced "true" nobility as the mark of social stature and examines the challenges to traditional state and class structures implied by the European love affair with Paris.