"Post-Absolutism" and Laughter in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

Institutionally speaking, the absolute monarchy of the French Bourbons outlived Louis XIV by almost three-quarters of a century, but the three books under review here all argue that what Jay Caplan calls a “post-absolutist culture” came into being much earlier. By the time of the Sun King’s death, if not earlier, the monarch’s power to impose cultural and ideological standards was already fading, yielding both to the new power of the anonymous marketplace, highlighted in Caplan’s analysis of Watteau’s painting L’Enseigne de Geraint, and to the resurgent forces of a nobility whose members were instrumental in forming the culture of laughter and mockery that is the subject of Elisabeth Bourguinat’s and Antoine de Baecque’s studies. Post-absolutist culture represented a protest against the orthodoxies of the late seventeenth century, but it was not necessarily a foreshadowing of the new values to be proclaimed in 1789. In varying ways, these three studies all insist on the autonomy of France’s “short” eighteenth century and the importance of seeing it as something more than just a transition from absolutism to liberalism.