Versailles and Court Culture in an Age of Absolutism

VERSAILLES AND COURT CULTURE IN AN AGE OF ABSOLUTISM

(revised May 2014; introduction to Absolutism revised Jan 2015))

Robert Baldwin

Associate Professor of Art History

Connecticut College

New London, CT 06320

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This essay was written in 1990 and has been revised three times since then. In the last significant revision of 2011, I expanded the discussion of Enceladus and added three sectionson the growing importance of art in European court politics since the Renaissance, on the collapse of the separation between mythology and modern life, and on theatricality and illusion in Baroque Court Culture. Until May 2014, these three sections appeared as a separate essay.

Primary Artists at Versailles (does not include 18th-century artists)

Le Vau (architect)

Mansart (architect)

Le Notre (landscape gardener)

Le Brun (painter, designer of decorative programs for sculpture, painting, furniture)

Coysevox (sculptor)

Tuby (sculptor)

Marsy Brothers (sculptors)

Girardon (sculptor)

ABSOLUTISM AND AESTHETICS IN 17TH-CENTURY FRANCE

Absolutism and Aesthetics in 17th-Century France

Absolutism was the prevailing political system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and shaped all court culture in Europe. At that time, almost all of Europe was composed of empires, monarchies or feudal states run by powerful, hereditary rulers. The only two republics were the Netherlands and Venice (an aristocratic republic).

Prior to the seventeenth century, kings and emperors were relatively weak and shared their power with high nobles with whom they made many compromises. In contrast to the modern, centralized, nation state where a single ruler or senate exercised central authority through national institutions and infrastructure, the traditional kingdom before 1600 was a loose affiliation of smaller territories, some governed by the king, but most by high nobles and feudal lords (dukes, counts, marquis) or religious rulers – the abbots running abbeys and monasteries which owned huge tracts of land and commanded enormous revenues. These local lords – whether secular or religious - controlled laws, taxation, and the judicial system in their territories and were, in effect, mini-kings. In general, these local lords fiercely guarded their local autonomy against the centralizing impulses of royal power. In 1600, there were no countries or nation states in Europe, only kingdoms where kings or queens vied for power with the leading nobles and church officials.

Absolutism was the new royal ideology of unshared power, reserved entirely for the king, queen, or emperor. It arose in the mid to late sixteenth century and took hold in the seventeenth century (although the English monarch shared power with a new, centralized Parliament). Absolutism was the ideology of the emerging nation state and arose only where kings were able to impose centralized political, economic, and judicial institutions on the whole of the land, usurping the traditional, local power of the feudal lord. (Even in the nineteenth century, many new countries such as Germany, Italy, and Belgium, rose as monarchies or empires before later transitioning into democracies after World War I.)

The new kings of the emerging nation states also had to combat the deeply entrenched, feudal powers of Catholic religious institutions, especially abbeys and monasteries which owned huge tracts of land commanding enormous revenues and enjoying supreme local authority over laws and courts. Henry VIII of England solved this problem by breaking with the Roman Catholic church, seizing church lands, and creating a national Church of England headed by the monarch. In Catholic France, Louis worked to harmonize national and Roman Catholic institutional power while quietly usurping powers over French ecclesiastical appointments. Without breaking with Catholic Rome, he gradually took control of the church in France. To crush the potential autonomy of French Protestants, he eventually outlawed and exiling them.

Absolutism as Divine Right

Reduced to its simplest claim, absolutist thinking claimed monarchs possessed a divine right to rule which descended directly from God and was beyond question or critique and, most importantly, was shared with no one. In 1652, Louis XIV himself decreed,

"All authority ... belongs to us. We hold it of God alone, and no person, of whatever quality he may be, can pretend to any part of it".

Expanding on this idea, one French official commented,

"When Kings come to the Crown, they swear on the Holy Gospels that they will maintain the Church of God to their best ability; that they will observe the fundamental laws of the State, and that they will protect their subjects according to God and reason ... in consideration of this oath, the people are obliged to obey them as Gods on earth...". [i]

Such absolutist values developed in France in the mid-seventeenth century as part of a royal effort to revive monarchical power after a period of decline amid aristocratic gains in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Among the many areas of social and cultural life effected by absolutist values, three were particularly important for Versailles.

National Bureaucracy.

Louis set up an extensive bureaucracy administered by abourgeois elite to help him control the nobility. Middle class bureaucrats lacked any intrinsic power and were much easier to control with offices, money, land, and titles. Their historic rivalry with the nobility also made them more sympathetic to Louis' political ambitions. (Bourgeois officials who became overly ambitious were also much easier to destroy as with the case of Louis's finance minister, Fouquet.) [ii] This tendency to develop national bureaucracies was all encompassing and generated national academies in many major cultural and intellectual arenas including painting, theatre, ballet, opera, science and technology. It also led to the building of royal factories manufacturing unprecedented quantities of tapestry, furniture, and ceramics. By investing so heavily in cultural and scientific production, France achieved a relative cultural and intellectual dominion in later seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.

Ceremony, Etiquette, Festivities and the Absolutism of Daily Court Life.

Louis also reintroduced a conservative ceremonial and etiquette at Versailles reviving old, highly formalized customs and rules from the sixteenth century. For example, all present had to bow when the royal food passed. And when Louis entered a room, everyone had to use a more formal mode of speaking. Versailles's most important ritual was the daily levée or triumphal rise and ceremonial appearance of the monarch each morning as he rose like the sun in a god-like epiphany witnessed and attended by the highest nobles who assembled to assist in his dressing. Each item of clothes was ceremonially passed down the line of courtiers, in order of rank, toward the king. His ceremonial retiring at the end of the day offered a second daily opportunity to subordinate high nobles in a theatrical ceremony honoring royal preeminence. Through these ceremonies, the highest nobles competed for physical proximity to the king, even at the expense of acting like chamber maids and valets.Louis, in turn, kept the aristocracy in their lesser place by shuffling the list of nobles included, and excluded, from these daily rituals.

By the later 1660s, with the memory of the civil war still fresh in mind, Louis began encouraging high nobles to live at Versailles (or to visit frequently) where they would be caught up in his ritual system and watched by his many informers and spies. [iii] Louis himself was known for his keen scrutiny of who was present and his fine memory. (His postmaster also opened all private mail for the king or his agents to read secretly.) As the high court noble, Saint Simon, commented,

"He not only required the constant attendance of the great, but was also aware of those of lower rank. He would look about him at the levée and the coucher, at meals, and while walking through the state apartments or the Versailles gardens, where none but courtiers might follow him. He saw and noticed every one of them, marked very well the absences of those usually at Court and even those who attended more rarely, and took care to discover the reason, drawing his own conclusions and losing no opportunity of acting upon them. He took it as an offence if distinguished people did not make the Court their home, or if others came but seldom. And to come never, or scarcely ever, meant certain disgrace". [iv]

In this way, Louis used Versailles to construct a closed, ritual arena in which he could continually scrutinize the highest nobility and subordinate them to his all-powerful presence. So too, he used ritual to divide, intimidate, and control the high nobility (even as he ensnared himself in the make-believe world of flattering illusions). Once again, Saint Simon provides a useful commentary.

"The frequent entertainments, the private drives to Versailles, and the royal journeys, provided the King with a means of distinguishing or mortifying his courtiers by naming those who were or were not to accompany him, and thus keeping everyone eager and anxious to please him. He fully realized that the substantial gifts which he had to offer were too few to have any continuous effect and he substituted imaginary favors that appealed to men's jealous natures, small distinctions which he was able, with extraordinary ingenuity, to grant or withhold every day and almost every hour. The hopes that courtiers built upon such flimsy favors and the importance which they attached to them were really unbelievable, and no one was ever more artful than the King in devising fresh occasions for them. ... Another of his contrivances was his ceremony of the candlestick, which he allowed some courtier to hold every evening at his coucher. [v]

At a deeper level, the new ceremony and etiquette at Versailles fostered a constant anxiety of the self as it continually adjusted and structured its own behavior and speech in relation to a larger social hierarchy whose members were in constant flux and intrigue. Trapped in a world of extreme formality which both concealed and revealed an unstable, uncertain social-political dynamic, the courtly self had to scrutinize the behavior of superiors for clues to the constantly shifting power relations. At the same time, one also had to scrutinize the behavior of lesser persons continually to insure compliance with the proper hierarchical orders.

Since real power at court was transformed into ritual and formal etiquette while at the same time remaining distant from it, human manners and speech took on the utmost importance. By requiring the nobility to worry continually about both performing and deciphering the enigmatic mask of courtly manners and ceremony, Louis distracted the highest, most powerful nobility. So too, he undermined their attempts to organize internally by pitting them competitively against each other within a larger hierarchy which descended from him and which worked continually to suggest that all power flowed downward from his celestial body.

By imposing an inflexible, absolutist grid on daily behavior, dress, and speech, the new ceremony and etiquette also communicated the power and centrality of the king throughout the social and aesthetic spaces of the palace and grounds. All activity and consciousness was thus transformed into something explicitly structured by the royal presence regardless of whether or not the king was physically present. While this new formality was softened by the more relaxed rules and decoration which obtained out in the many garden pavilions and by the numerous festivals and entertainments put on by Louis, the king's powerful presence was present everywhere in the "natural" surroundings thanks to the rigid, highly geometrical gardens designed by Le Notre. The long avenues radiating out from the chateau as far as the eye could see made visible the king's godlike, "cosmic" power over the surrounding countryside and its people. As the contemporary English poet, Marvell, wrote in one of his villa poems, "like a Guard on either side, / The Trees before their Lord divide".[vi]

The king's presence in nature was further confirmed by the overall royal scale and magnificence of the gardens and by the use of floral arrangements and topiary to represent heraldic flowers (fleur de lis), royal colors, and other royal themes. So too, the sculpture allegorized cosmic themes of a god-like nature and of hierarchical order (and the punishment of all those rebelling against "nature's" orders and higher authority.) Even the temporary, relative relaxation and social informality experienced in the gardens and their pavilions was meaningful only in relation to the royal formality of the palace grounds which it escaped.

As for the many festivals, ballets, operas, plays, concerts, and balls staged on the grounds, Louis was present in at least four ways. First, these events were ceremonially staged for the centrally placed royal gaze with other members of the audience arranged hierarchically around the monarch's seat. Second, Louis was present in the royal extravagance and scale of these festivals and plays and in their high quality in so far as he commanded the best writers and composers and required that they debut the most important works at Versailles. Thirdly, the king appeared in the festivals' and operas' explicit or allegorically coded references to Louis's many heroic political and cultural accomplishments and his numerous virtues. Most musical pieces began with prologues explicitly praising Louis's achievements and virtues. As Saint Simon recalled, Louis

"could often be heard in his private rooms singing the verses written in his praise in the prologues of the plays and operas. You could see that he reveled in them, and sometimes even at State dinners he hummed the words under his breath when the orchestra played these tunes". [vii]

Needless to say, reality was never an obstacle in this world of cultural flattery.

Fourth, Louis himself appeared in some operas and festivals, especially in his early years (1651-1669) when he soloed in numerous mythological ballets, often dancing the role of a triumphant Apollo. In the Ballet of the Night (1653), the fifteen-year old Louis-Apollo drove away the night with its lesser stars and its ignorant darkness. Speaking directly to the audience in the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis (1654), Louis-Apollo compared Apollo’s victory over the serpent to the king’s triumph over the coalition of nobles and bourgeoisie who rose up against him in the civil war known as the Fronde (1650-53).

I have vanquished that Python who devastated the world,

That terrible serpent whom Hell and the Fronde,

Had seasoned with a dangerous venom:

The Revolt, in one word, can no longer harm me;

And I preferred to destroy it,

Than to hasten after Daphne.[viii]

Seen as a larger "culture of absolutism," the ornate, ceremonial festivals and operas at Versailles performed the same function as the royal painting, sculpture, tapestry, coins, and prints which flourished under Louis's patronage where he played a variety of heroic roles including: Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, Alexander the Great, and the Good Shepherd. He also appeared more directly as the greatest living monarch, as World Ruler, Defender of the Faith, and Protector and Patron of the Arts and Sciences. Other images used mythological language to praise his military triumphs over the Dutch and over his rebellious French subjects.

The emphasis at Versailles on parties, gambling, and constantly changing fashion also served the king's political intentions by encouraging the high nobility to squander their wealth on gambling, food, and clothing. On a number of levels then, Louis used festivals and a culture of festivity to weaken the aristocracy and force them to serve as spectators of his unsurpassed gloire.

At the same time, Louis himself was caught up in this ritual and its illusions of power. By surrounding himself with so many flattering images, historical narratives, rites, ceremonies, mythological ballets, operas and musical festivals, plays, gardens, firework displays, and perspectival spaces stretching to the horizon in his gardens and reaching to the heavens in dozens of illusionistic ceiling paintings, Louis replaced reality with a far more compelling, beautiful world of artistic illusions. Surrounded by seductive poetry and transcendent music, by spatial and mythological illusions trumpeting his all-important glory to the four corners of the earth (as in the ceiling of the Salon of Apollo or the Staircase of the Ambassadors who arrive from the Four Continents), Louis created a universe of his own divine splendor at Versailles. Here, in his own lifetime, he could contemplate his own immortality, his eternal fame conferred by the timeless rhetoric of grand monuments. Immersed in a perfect world of artistic illusions which filled his royal field of vision wherever he looked, surrounded by the highest nobles of the land now transformed into flattering servants, it was all too easy for Louis to believe in his own omnipotence and to become an unwitting prisoner of the perfect illusions of Versailles.