Dancing with the Sun King: The Performance of Privilege in the Reign of Louis XIV

Abstract

In 1653, the young Louis XIV, king of France, played a dual role in the Ballet de la Nuit, functioning simultaneously as both privileged performer and privileged spectator in the courtly performance. This Ballet—one of many ballets de cour given at the royal residences—mingled music, dance, verse, and visual spectacle to produce a potent image of the magnificence of the French court. Significantly, many members of the aristocracy joined their king in the Ballets. The courtiers surrounded their sovereign on the dance floor, while the monarch simultaneously danced alongside them and kept a watchful eye on them. Participation in the Ballets thus secured a bond between self and self-enactment that secured the noble qualities of the aristocracy through the production and reception of ritualized performance practices. Crucially, this bond was established by the authorizing presence of the king himself, who appeared in the Ballets as the embodiment of order, the organizing principle that assigned each member of the aristocracy a particular position within court hierarchy. In the Ballet de la Nuit, for instance, the king made his final entrance as the Rising Sun that dispelled the gloom of chaos by bathing the world with the ordering light of his gaze; a brief look at the text of this Ballet will show how the Sun King bathed his court in this light and thus secured the ordered structure of the court itself.