The City of Versailles under Louis XIV (1682–1715): Zones of privacy under­pinning social, political, and devotional aspects of power

The Palace of Versailles and Louis XIV go hand in hand with the idea of absolutism. The early modern belief in the “divine power of kings” is often invoked as an explanation for how monarchs like Louis managed to centralize their rule to geographically distant and culturally diverse regions. Our research investigates whether this assumption is sound, and how the private was accomplished at Versailles.

By focusing on the history of privacy in the town and at the court of Versailles, our case team investigates concrete, localized mechanisms that allowed Louis XIV and courtiers to perform publicly the idea of centralized power, but also to create small pockets of private interaction.

Sources
For this, we look closely at historical documents that originated in Versailles during this period. Architectural drawings of the palace, for example, allow us a glimpse at the structural organization of the court’s movement in space. Published theological treatises on devotional introspection can inform us about how secular and religious interests came together in the intellectual landscape of the time. Letters and diaries about devotional practices serve as a point of comparison between idealized religious ideals on the one hand and the day-to-day practice of religious belief on the other. And, of course, police files provide us with clues about which crimes were also considered sins, and thus worthy of stricter scrutiny.

 

Two Successful PhD Defenses and a Critical Edition forthcoming in 2023

In January 2023, Bastian Felter Vaucanson defended his co-tutelle PhD thesis for a double degree in church history (University of Copenhagen) and French literature (Université Rennes 2). La conversation éternelle. L’intimité spirituelle dans la correspondence Guyon-Fénelon is a detailed analysis of the private spiritual correspondence between the tutor to Louis XIV’s grandchildren, François Fénelon, and the dissident laywoman Jeanne Guyon. The study explores the effect of privacy on theological utterings at the court of Versailles, and it argues that Guyon developed a theology of intimacy allowing her to ascribe experiential authority to her teachings.

In June 2023, Fabio Gigone defended his PhD in the history of architecture at The Royal Danish Academy. States of Proximity - Privacy under Louis XIV in Versailles is a study focused on a series of interior spatial devices at the palace of Versailles (the balustrade in the royal bedchamber, the Cabinet des Tableaux, and the Appartement des Bains), and which combines their function with a range of written and visual primary sources. This combination allows a close study of the private within the French court. The thesis is completed in collaboration with The Royal Danish Academy and the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich.

In September 2023, Lars Cyril Nørgaard will publish a critical edition of several small books that Louis XIV’s wife, Madame de Maintenon, created and used in her private devotion. The critical edition is prefaced by a substantial introduction, where the author supplies a number of new insights to the research field. 

 

Activities in relation to the case

Since August 2021, the Versailles case is one of four PRIVACY research cases participating of PRIVACY BLACK AND WHITE, a research collaboration between In the Same Sea, CopeNLU, and the Centre for Privacy Studies which examines the role of privacy practices in the development of slavery and racism in the Caribbean-European colonial nexus (c. 1600-1850). 

As of August 2023, Bastian Felter Vaucanson has been awarded the Carlsberg Foundation’s Internationalization Postdoctoral Fellowship (ca. 500.000 DKK) for the research project Nuns at the End of the World: Cross-Cultural Contact in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Québec. Heavily indebted to the research method used at PRIVACY, the project will use recently discovered archival sources to investigate how private devotional practices may have facilitated reciprocal influence between the First Nations and the French Ursuline nuns.

 

Publications

Edition with introduction:

1. Madame de Maintenon, Les Petits Livres secrets, ed. L.C. Nørgaard (Honoré Champion: Paris, 2023).

 

PhD Theses:

2. Bastian Felter Vaucanson, La conversation éternelle. L’intimité spirituelle dans la correspondance Guyon-Fénelon. PhD thesis defended at the University of Copenhagen on 13 January 2023.
3. Fabio Gigone, States of Proximity: Privacy under Louis XIV in Versailles. PhD thesis defended at The Royal Danish Academy on 13 June 2023.

 

Edited volumes:

4. Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, eds. D. M. Neigbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023) [In Press].
5. Early Modern Correspondence: The Privacy Perspective, eds. Michaël Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard (Turnhout, Brepols, [In editorial process]).

 

 

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals:

6. Bastian Felter Vaucanson, “Between Faith and Works: Fénelon’s Conception of Charity for a Monarch”, French Historical Studies, 46:1, 2023, p. 37-55.
7. Bastian Felter Vaucanson, “Le pouvoir de la faiblesse. L’ethos mystique de Mme Guyon à la lumière de sa correspondence”, Femmes en correspondence, a special issue of Tangence, eds. Nathalie Freidel, Judith Scribnai, Emma Gauthier-Mamaril. [In peer-review].
8. Fabio Gigone, “The balustrade of Louis XIV’s Chambre du Roi: the architecture of the ban”,  Journal of Architecture, Arts & TheorySpring-Summer, no. 8 (2023): 190–95.
9. Nadav Borenstein, Natália da Silva Perez and Isabelle Augenstein, “Multilingual Event Extraction from Historical Newspaper Adverts”, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, [accepted] (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10928.pdf)
10. Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Eelco Nagelsmit, “Ah ! Mignard que vous louez bien ! : Le secret et le sacré dans le portrait de Madame de Maintenon”, Bulletin du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles. Sociétés de cour en Europe, XVIe-XIXe siècle [Online, 2021] « Ah ! Mignard que vous louez bien ! » : Le secret et le sacré dans le portrait de Madame de Maintenon (openedition.org)

 

Contributions to edited volumes:

11. Bastian Felter Vaucanson and Michaël Green: “Introduction”, in Early Modern Correspondence: The Privacy Perspective, eds. Michaël Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard (Turnhout, Brepols: [In editorial process]).
12. Christine Jeanneret, “A French Parnassus for the Danes: Divulgation of Knowledge, Gossip, and Eroticism in La Beaumelle’s Handwritten Gazettes in Copenhagen”, 1700-tal: Nordic Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. [Accepted].
13. Fabio Gigone, “Gift, Love, and Authority: a detour among paintings, architecture, and diplomacy in Versailles under Louis XIV” in Adaptive Cities through the pandemic lens, edited by Marco Pretelli, et. al.. Torino: AISU International, Politecnico di Torino, DIST (Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio) [Under Review].
14. Lars Cyril Nørgaard and Bastian Felter Vaucanson: “Privacy misconstrued? The Correspondence between Fénelon and Maintenon”, in Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence, eds. Michaël Green and Lars Cyril Nørgaard (Turnhout, Brepols: [In editorial process]).
15. Lars Cyril Nørgaard, ”Copie ou Création? Les petits livres secrets de Madame de Maintenon”, in “Toute la cour était étonnée”: Madame de Maintenon ou l’ambition politique au féminin, actes du colloque, eds. da Vinha & N. Grande. (Rennes: PUR, 2022), p. 137-148.
16. Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Les péchés secrets qui se commettent par la seule pensée. Confession as Private and Public in Seventeenth-Century France”, in Tracing Private Conversations in Early Modern Europe. Talking in Everyday Life, eds. N.K. Käfer & J. Ljungberg (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)  [In Press].
17. Mette Birkedal Bruun and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Considering Privacy at Court” in Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, eds. D. M. Neighbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023) [In Press].
18. Mette Birkedal Bruun and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Au Milieu d’une Cour Superbe & Tumultueuse. Devotional privacy at the Court of Versailles” in Notions of Privacy at Early Modern Courts. Reassessing the Public/Private Divide, eds. D.M. Neighbors, L.C. Nørgaard, E. Woodacre (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023) [In Press].
19. Natália da Silva Perez, “Sexual Surveillance in Versailles and Paris under Louis XIV”
    in Histories of Surveillance from Antiquity to the Digital Era: The Eyes and Ears of Power
    L. Skouvig and A. Marklund (New York: Routledge, 2021), p. 53-69.
20. Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Levels to ekphrasis in the Tableaux de la Pénitence, in Ekphrastic Image-making in the Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700, eds. A.J. DiFuria & W.S. Melion (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 410-482.
21. Eelco Nagelsmit and Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Portrait as Parable: Pierre Mignard and the Secret Marriage of Madame de Maintenon.” Quid est secretum?: On the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400-1700, eds. Dekoninck, A. Guiderdoni, W.S. Melion (Leiden: Brill, 2020), p. 521-545.
22. Lars Cyril Nørgaard, “Anchoring the Sacred: Abbé de Choisy’s translation of Imitatio Christi.”, Quid est sacramentum?: On the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400-1700, eds. Melion, E. Carson Pastan & L. Palmer Wandel (Leiden: Brill, 2019), p. 354-393.

 

Versailles Case Team Members:

 

Bastian Felter Vaucanson, Christine Jeanneret, Fabio Gigone, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Natacha Klein Käfer.

 

Former Members of our team:

 

Natália da Silva Perez, Michaël Green, Frank Ejby Poulsen.