Peter Sahlins. 1668: The Year of the Animal in France.

Abstract

Peter Sahlins has reinvented himself once again with 1668: The Year of the Animal in France. Following investigations into poachers in French forests in the early nineteenth century, the Franco-Spanish border in a Pyrenean valley, and the status of foreigners in the Kingdom of France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he now invites us to revisit the “civilizing process,” as described by Norbert Elias in the eponymous 1939 book, through the prism of nonhuman animals at court. Provocatively, in the manner of Roberto Rossellini’s famous film on the rise to power of Louis XIV, The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966), Sahlins regards the year 1668 as crucial to the assertion of absolutism with regard to animals. His inquiry is located at the meeting point of three approaches that structure his book: a study of the creation of the royal menageries as an institution; investigation of the emergence of a visual culture of dead animals through the king’s interest in anatomy; and last, in the shadow of Descartes, an exploration of the role of animals in the emergence of a savant mechanistic naturalism.