Fashion beyond Versailles: Consumption and Design in Seventeenth-Century France

Conclusion

114 Conclusion This book has examined the inventories of elite households and identified some important aspects of their owners’ daily lives and social world, not the least significant of which was a gradual shift in lifestyle. What their consumer purchases verify was a passage from the medieval/Renaissance household, furnished austerely in an unstudied manner, often the scene of raucous banquets for the larger community, to a more modern style of interior and sociability. Modern implied an interior that was decorated; it implied style according to a plan. Late seventeenth-century interior decoration relied on color schemes and sets of objects, accented by the strategic placement of splendid and showy goods. The household was one of comfortable furniture and convenient devices. And, as modern it was equipped to entertain heeding new forms of sociability—small groups assembled around elaborately appointed tables enjoying a cuisine for the informed palate and the occasion for conversation among social equals. By intent, this book is not a study of material culture that rests on the Veblen thesis and the thought that acquisition is foremost the product of a desire to emulate one’s social superiors.1 I do not deny the verity of emulation , but it does not explain all or even most consumerism. Roche’s work shows that fashion developed around the twin concepts of novelty and obsolescence, maturing forces in the increasingly rich consumer culture of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although I appreciate the role played by the überpatron, Louis XIV, in defining period styles and aesthetics, I do not see fashion itself as regime-bound. This is not to negate the role of king and court in defining style but to suggest that fashion could and did assume a life of its own, a force at once inspired by royal patronage and propelled by the market and its consumers. 115 Conclusion There were serious limits to royal power even under Louis XIV. For some time, historians of seventeenth-century France have written to recount the apparent limits of so-called absolutism.2 Their works depict a royal authority that radiated to the periphery in terms that are pragmatic, flexible, accommodating , and compromising rather than centralizing, reformist, and doctrinaire. And though Louis and his public relations/design team used furniture novelty and grandeur for political purposes, meaning to enhance power by depicting king and court as the font of design innovation, the adoptionofthesestyleshadmoreto dowithsocialandeconomicforces,the desire to be in style, than the power of the king. Given the practical limits toroyalpower,especiallyattheperiphery,possessionofLouisXIV–stylefurnishings did not necessarily radiate the power of the state.3 Louis controlled luxury production through control of the guilds, and thus his role was formative, and style was an aspect of the power of the state. Still, nobles bought the latest designs because they were fashionable, and here loomed the power of the marketplace. What was fashionable and state of the art in Paris captured the hearts and minds, and soon the purses, of provincial nobles, connoting a closer relationship between center and periphery than historians of grain prices and market integration have maintained—this because consumption of decorativeitemshadlittletodowithtraditionalmarketforcesofsupplyanddemand . Instead,socialimperatives,localpolitics,andfashionspurredelitefamiliesin their acquisitiveness, and the publications of the period showed them exactly how to amass. Fashion had an integrative effect that brought closer the material lives of center and periphery. As a catalyst for the drawing together of disparate parts of the realm, the marketplace of Paris earned for itself a special place. By the eighteenth century, the city, not the palace, was the acknowledged trendsetter. “Paris and not Versailles would be promoted as the capital of the modern, civilised world, as ‘the centre where all talents, all arts, and all taste come to perfect themselves and flower,’ as one journalist enthused.”4 Embedded in fashion was the incipient concept of taste; ideas of taste in turn instructed a component of a nationalistic discourse that insisted only in France did one find the most refined taste.5 Through patronage of artists, control of guilds, and the determination Fashion beyond Versailles 116 to associate France with the production of luxury goods, it is clear that the monarchy played a formative role in forging a national identity that esteemed the French as inherently talented designers of architecture and furnishings. And the success of this campaign can be measured by the extent to which foreigners were seduced or repulsed by it. The idea of the...