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

Introduction

1 Introduction This is a book about things. By things, I mean the possessions that accumulate during a lifetime and, at death, are inventoried and dispersed to heirs. In a sense it is a book about material culture, but it is not about the actual things themselves. This is not a study of the objects; it is not a history of the decorative arts. It is social history, a book about what things can tell us about the lives and lifestyles of their owners. The larger issue is how people used their goods, why they purchased them, and what goods meant in their social worlds. I base my remarks on notarial descriptions of objects, which offer a particular observation point. What we now know about the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that the demand for necessities and fashionable luxuries grew by revolutionary proportions, thereby providing a very important stimulus for economic growth and industrialization. McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb were among the first historians of the eighteenth century to offer ample evidence for the important role of consumption in economic development , in their case British development.1 Historians of eighteenth-century France, such as Daniel Roche, Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, Colin Jones, and Rebecca Spang, have also described the rise of the consumer and, in the process, have challenged the older view that painted France as an underdeveloped nation of dispirited peasants and parasitic aristocrats. Recent historians have argued for a more vigorous economy in the eighteenth century , and among the evidence they cite is a new consumerism, a trend that extended well back into the preceding century.2 The households I consider were inventoried during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , roughly the period 1680 to 1715, the point at which the consumption of Fashion beyond Versailles 2 nonessential goods began to take off in France. These developments were the antecedents to the rise of modern consumerism. I will argue that such rising levels of consumption had special social significance in Dauphiné, a locale that had earlier endured a fiercely contested struggle over efforts to make nobles pay the detested tax known as the taille. As part of the debate over traditional tax exemptions for the nobility , the opposition mounted a rhetorical campaign challenging the nobles’ rights and questioning their antiquity and integrity. Royal government, by its financial policies and judicial responses to the local cases at the heart of the crisis, served as a catalyst for social conflict in the region. In the end, the conflict known as the procès des tailles was resolved in a manner that emphasized more than ever the antiquity of a family and its concurrent lifestyle. By 1680, the procès des tailles was forty years past, and I invoke its lingering memory as meaningful political context for elite patterns of consumption. The first chapter of this book focuses on the sociopolitical world of these consumers and establishes the importance of consumption and display . To contextualize elite consumption, it considers the crisis of regional politics and changing ideas of nobility—this in addition to cultural forces, such as the ideology of taste, that shaped nobles’ consumer choices. The remaining chapters are each constructed around a particular type of goods or furnishings. In discussing these, I examine their impact on the life of the owner, the potential reasons for their purchase, and what ownership and exhibition tell us about changes in aristocratic society. Chapter 2 deals with nobles’ acquisition of objects that communicated ideas of magnificence and connoisseurship in a direct, unambiguous, and traditional manner. These included paintings, tapestries, Oriental rugs, and clocks, among other things, the traditional luxury goods to which only wealth gave access, and their display made a clear and dramatic statement about the taste of the owner. As time passed, the standard of magnificence moved beyond the acquisition of specific goods to incorporate various theories of style. Chapter 3 considers the principles that guided French style as it matured and the methods employed to create a unified, harmonious effect. To achieve that kind of harmony and unity, known as regularité, the French made extensive use of a single color or color scheme or single textile . The use of matched sets of furnishings, or seriality, often enhanced this Introduction 3 unified effect. The growing use of more comfortable furniture, considered in Chapter 4, illustrates the evolution of the idea of luxury, an unfolding that involved not the abandonment...