Louis XV Research Articles

Rationalism, Science, and Freedom of Speech: Voltaire.

The 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began to regard observation as a primary means of gaining knowledge. Crucial to this were the discoveries of Isaac Newton and the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704). Isaac Newton was previously mentioned in this series (1). Locke maintained that the only source of our knowledge was our senses, and that there was no innate knowledge that a human possessed. This view implied that knowledge had its limits because things that were unavailable to sensory perception would be unknowable. Locke also addressed the process of scientific induction, acknowledging that inductive knowledge may yield errors; therefore, knowledge at any point was not unchangeable and might need to be corrected in the future. He extrapolated some of his epistemological comments to thinking of politics and government. His lasting contribution was the view that, because there was no absolute knowledge, political tolerance was essential (2, 3). France at that time was ruled by Louis XV, after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Elsewhere in Europe this was the time of the so-called enlightened despots: Frederick II in Prussia …

Jean-Baptiste de Sénac's (1693-1770) Important Work on Cardiology and Valvular Disorders.

In the 18(th) century clinical cardiology was based on pulse examination and auscultation by placing the ear directly on the patient's chest, while diagnosis of heart diseases was done in postmortem examination. In 1749, Jean-Baptiste de Sénac, physician of King Louis XV, published his work on the heart Traité de la structure du coeur, de son action et de ses maladies. It was the result of years of anatomical and physiological study, in an attempt to illuminate heart and its functions. Sénac recognized among several heart disorders, aortic regurgitation, mitral calcification, and mitral regurgitation. His work remained a landmark in valvular pathology and cardiology until the early 19(th) century.

Zamore “the African” and the Haunting of France's Collective Consciousness

In July 1772, the Countess Du Barry, mistress to King Louis XV, took a ten-year old Bengali boy to the baptismal font in great pomp. Young Louis-Benoit Zamore had been brought to France a few years...

Louis XV and Mary Leszczynska’s wedding in Strasbourg in 1725 : a royal, religious and popular celebration

Le mariage de Louis XV et de Marie Leszczynska a Strasbourg le 15 aout 1725 n’est pas un evenement inconnu dans l’historiographie alsacienne et francaise. L’utilisation des trois sources de documentation inedites, a savoir la correspondance du marechal du Bourg, celles de l’intendant Harlay de Cely et du cardinal de Rohan permet de preciser les preparatifs et les contours de la fete organisee dans la metropole rhenane au cœur de l’ete 1725. Fete eminemment royale, la ceremonie se transforme aussi en fete religieuse et en fete populaire.

The Monarchy Shapes Up: Arboreal Metaphors in Royal Propaganda and Court Panegyrics during the Reign of Louis XV

AbstractOn 25 February 1745, during a ball celebrating the Dauphin's marriage to the Infanta of Spain, Louis XV dressed up as a pruned yew tree. A large watercolour and hundreds of prints produced by the royal office of the Menus Plaisirs offered contemporaries a stunning image of this event. This article analyses the self‐fashioning implicit in the king's sartorial choice, arguing that it informed a new political script characterised by an increasingly technical arboreal discourse. Royal epithalamia in particular drew on tree metaphors to describe the health of the body politic in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The deathbed of Louis XV

The deathbed of Louis XV

Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et “foi des simples”. Études d’anthropologie religieuse (XVI e –XVIII e siècles) by Dominique Julia (review)

Reviewed by: Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et “foi des simples”. Études d’anthropologie religieuse (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) by Dominique Julia Joseph Bergin Réforme catholique, religion des prêtres et “foi des simples”. Études d’anthropologie religieuse (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles). By Dominique Julia. [Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. 118; Sous-collection Ad Deum nfl 2.] (Geneva: Librairie Droz. 2014. Pp. 525. €75,00/$98.40 paperback. ISBN 978-2-600-01753-4.) Now that the quarante glorieuses of postwar French historiography are themselves becoming an object of increasing historical curiosity, several scholars who are little known to a wider public have been gaining the recognition they deserve. The golden age of the French historical sociology of religion, as it was called, was inspired primarily by the distinguished medievalist Gabriel Le Bras; the subsequent shift toward religious anthropology was the work of an early modernist who was the radical opposite of Le Bras, Alphonse Dupront. Dominique Julia managed the feat of being a disciple of both men! It was Dupront, who published scarcely anything during his lifetime, that founded an influential research institute, the Centre d’Anthropologie Religieuse Européenne (CARE), of which Julia, an indefatigable researcher and participant in collective projects, has been a pillar over the years. The essays in this collection cover only part of his oeuvre, as Julia has been active in several other major fields of research without ever abandoning his earlier terres d’élection. These include the history of schooling, literacy, reading habits, universities, colleges, teaching orders, pedagogical credos, childhood, pilgrimages, miracles, and historiography. Nor is this all: from the outset, his publications have been accompanied by the hard-graft of inventorying and editing extant sources. Hardly any of this enormously varied output, which runs to approximately 200 items, has been in book form, apart two early forays—one with Michel de Certeau and Jacques Revel on language politics during the French Revolution, another with Roger Chartier on education in early-modern France. This reviewer has long considered Julia a master of the extended and thoroughly researched monographic article, which has become so rare in any language today. Indeed, the volume under review contains two such publications—“La Réforme post-tridentine en France” (pp. 137–231) and “Un miracle à Paris en 1725” (pp. 343–410)—both of which have hitherto been available only in Italian publications that can be difficult to find. The first of them dates from 1973 and remains the most comprehensive and lucid synthesis of the research done by Le Bras’s disciples on pastoral visitations as a source for the history of popular religious practices. It is supported here by two further essays on the Tridentine reform’s campaign to separate popular “profane” culture from authorized religion and on the culture of the French clergy in Champagne, one of whom, the famous Jean Meslier, was a secret atheist. A major debate of the 1970s concerned the subject of de-Christianization before 1789. Julia’s long essay on that question deals with the evolution of the eighteenth-century Diocese of Auxerre, where the religious culture [End Page 639] imposed by a Jansenist bishop and clergy led to bitter divisions by the 1760s, prefiguring similar changes elsewhere in France. A third essay examines the political questions—an unusual subject for Julia—which produced an ever-widening gap between church and monarchy under Louis XV. By contrast, the essay on the 1725 miracle in Paris, which dates from 2007 and arose from more recent research inspired by Dupront on pilgrimages and miracles at the CARE, is unfortunately the most isolated of the collection and would have benefited from being flanked by one or more essays from Julia’s pen on this subject. Finally, as Julia is also a learned and astute guide to historians’ methodology, with an impressively wide range of interdisciplinary reference, it is no surprise that the volume opens with three essays on historiography, but with a characteristic focus on sources and their relative value. One of the essays reprinted here was first published in the celebrated 1970s collection Faire de l’Histoire. In 1995, Julia coedited Passés recomposés...

Biographie & Politique: Vie publique, vie privée, de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration ed. by Olivier Ferret, Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre (review)

Reviewed by: Biographie & Politique: Vie publique, vie privée, de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration ed. by Olivier Ferret, Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre Joanny Moulin (bio) Biographie & Politique: Vie publique, vie privée, de l’Ancien Régime à la Restauration. Ed. Olivier Ferret and Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre. Littérature et idéologies. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2014. 263pp. ISBN 978-2729708788, 22€. This anthology is in part the result of a colloquium organized in 2011 by the research group LIRE (Littérature, Idéologies, Représentations XVIIIe–XIXe) at the University of Lyon II (France). This is a remarkable book, carefully edited, which both illustrates new methods in the practice of literary science, and contributes significantly to the advancement of knowledge in the emerging field of biographical studies. In his introduction, Olivier Ferret engages in a debate principally with François Dosse’s theses in Le Pari biographique (2005), some of which he respectfully, but very appositely criticizes, as for instance Dosse’s classification of biography into three “ages”—“heroic,” “modal,” and “hermeneutic”—although this nevertheless goes on to preside discreetly over the whole book. This general presentation deserves particular attention, first because it demonstrates a well-read approach to biography defined as “a field of research, and perhaps even a discipline of knowledge” in its own right. Second, it is also worth reading because it vindicates that this collection of articles aims to investigate how modern biography came into existence in the history of literature towards the end of the seventeenth century—that is, at the beginning of this “long eighteenth century” that is the period of predilection of this study. Indeed, it calls implicitly for a full-length analysis of how the rise of biography coincided with the rise of the novel, “in a period when history was not yet conceived of as historical science, but was still largely part of the ‘belles-lettres’.” Such is not the main objective of this volume, however, which undertakes to show, by carefully selected case studies, how biography as a literary genre in the larger sense participates pragmatically in the construction of political discourses. The methodology of literary research elaborated here with great efficiency, borrowing both from New Historicism and Reception theories, deserves to be praised. A brief second introduction presents, and quickly comments on, some well-chosen examples of the illustrations that often accompany the biographies under scrutiny, thus showing how biography overlaps the field of literature, as much as it distinguishes itself from historiography. This efficiently composed book falls into four parts—“Agir,” “Édifier,” “Justifier,” “Interpréter”—each introduced by Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre in such a way that the reader never loses sight of the coherence of the whole, which reads easily, with the sustained interest of distinguished erudition elegantly expressed. The volume begins strong, with a study by Christophe Cave of Pidansat de Mairobert’s Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry and other works on the [End Page 450] same topic, showing how they pertain to the libels and the libertine, erotic, and pornographic narratives then in fashion, as well as borrow from the pica-resque novel. This “type of political biography, half libel and half true story,” partakes in “the Voltairian method in philosophy applied . . . to politics.” Samy Ben Messaoud then studies several examples of “Private Lives,” ranging from the Vie privée de Louis XV to the Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin, the latter being then further analyzed by Olivier Ritz. It is one of the great assets of these articles that they chose to study several texts at a time, always avoiding locking themselves up in a single work, but practicing instead a lively style of comparative literary criticism. “Political biography,” writes Ben Messaoud, “emerges between light and shade, through these texts that are excessive indeed, but which translate a demand for transparency, and an aspiration to the constitution of a new Pantheon.” One of the most interesting articles in this anthology is certainly Shojiro Kuwase’s “Reconnaître Rousseau,” where he focuses on the tension between the idealized image of Rousseau that his readers had inferred from his works of philosophy and fiction, and...

Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism by David Charlton (review)

Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism. By David Charlton. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. [xxi, 413 p. ISBN 9780521887601 (hardcover), $124.99; ISBN 9781139786065 (ebook), $100.] Music examples, illustrations, portraits, charts, diagrams, bibliography, index.David Charlton's Opera in the Age of appears on the heels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tercentenary, in a year that also saw the publication of an insightful colloquy in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. In its introduction, Jacqueline Waeber comments on the perpetual historiographical chasm between Rousseau's intellectual and musical output which, as she claims, inevitably fuels the cliche of the dabbler ( Jacqueline Waeber, convenor, Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 [Spring 2013]: 253). From Andre Gretry's Memoires through nineteenthcentury criticism and into our post-Derridean musicological present, critics concentrated their evaluations of Rousseau's musical thought on his individualism and his personality, focusing almost exclusively on his prose writings. Rejecting the Great Man model, Charlton offers a thorough reexamination of Rousseau's musical milieu. His book, then, is not as much about as it is around Rousseau. By examining Rousseau's famous one-act Le devin du village alongside Eustachio Bambini's bouffons troupe, as well as little-known contemporaries, Charlton presents a comprehensive study of musical life in and around Paris between the years 1739 and 1774, roughly between Rameau's zenith and Gluck's advent (p. xi). In short, Opera in the Age of is a massive achievement in its comprehensive reexamination of a critical period in French musical history.Charlton draws on a dizzying array of primary source material, and touches on issues of patronage, comic and tragic conventions, the politics of repertory choice, modes of historical and pastoral representation, discourses of opera reform, and the mobility of operatic works between Parisian theaters. In chapter 1, entitled Palaces and Patronage: Le Devin and the 1754 Alceste, Charlton discusses the theater group of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompa dour, the official chief mis - tress of Louis XV from 1745 to her death in 1764. Scholars of the period, Charlton argues, hitherto focused on luxury and image-making as the principles driving Pompadour's selection of theater works for her court. But published accounts, Charlton writes, have rarely assessed the musical and operatic achievement of the woman who commissioned twelve new operas, eight of which reached the Paris stage in largely authentic form, many circulating in the public domain through printed scores and librettos; who trained, rehearsed, sang and acted the female (or male) leading role in all of them; and who oversaw the running of a group whose decisions were taken exclusively by women (p. 15). In support of this claim, Charlton includes a useful table that provides an overview of theater works sponsored by Pompadour (Rousseau's Devin was performed there in 1752, a year before its public premiere at the Theâtre du Palais-Royal).Charlton's discussions of staging, acting, costuming, and singing conventions offer valuable insights into the technologies of operatic production in eighteenth-century France, a severely understudied area of scholarship. Charlton identifies two primary types of comedic movement: haut (high) and bas (low), represented by stylized gesture and realistic movement, respectively. Such distinctions are found in Opera librettos that record the practices of earlier revivals and also record the stage directions for the use of subsequent generations (p. 36). Two examples of such librettos are M. Favart's Don Quichotte, set by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (see table 2.1, p. 37) and Jacques Autreau's Platee, set by Jean-Philippe Rameau (see table 2. …

Ahead of Its Time: An Innovative Obstetric Simulator in 18th Century France

The use of obstetric simulators is common practice in contemporary health care education. However, they are not a recent innovation. In the late 1700s a French midwife, Madame du Coudray, invented an obstetric simulator which she used to teach midwifery to more than 4,000 peasant women. Appointed in August 1767 by King Louis XV to teach midwifery “throughout the whole extent of the Realm,” she faced the challenge of teaching a complex scientific process to science‐illiterate students. This inspired her invention which received the endorsement of the French Surgical Academy. Using the simulator and her midwifery manual, describing the manipulations necessary to deliver an infant, she taught midwifery throughout France for 20 years. Each community where she taught was required to purchase a simulator for the local surgeons to use after she left, to train more midwives. Although she produced hundreds of them, only one exists today and is housed in Rouen, France. Made of cloth, leather, and bone, it resembles a pregnant woman from waist to knees. It includes a small baby (doll) which can be manipulated through the birth canal. How realistic is her simulator? Is it possible that she used active brain‐based learning in the 18th century? This study evaluates the simulator for fidelity (how realistic it is) and its potential for active learning. Photographs of the simulator were compared with thirty‐five quotes from the manual describing manipulations performed during delivery. Raters, with medical training, were asked to rate how feasible, on a scale from 0 to 4, it would be to conduct the manipulations on the simulator. The average rating ranged from 2.5 to 4. The interrater reliability was 94%. This study showed that the simulator has good fidelity, and could be used for active learning. No funding was received for this study.

Autochthonous Politics and Capitalist Development in Thailand

Autochthonous politics is defined as indigenous-developed politics. Adherence to autochthonous politics allows for the gradual evolution of indigenous political regimes in the face of foreign alternatives. Autochthonous politics is said to exist when indigenous political systems are not displaced by foreign political systems over time. Successful autochthonous power systems often revolve around a central political figure like a monarch or a dictator who maintains a stranglehold over the entire regime through a network of loyal sycophants and supplicants. The monarch or dictator retains central control over political power through legal and extra-legal means. The clearest example from European history was Louis XV. The Sun King or le roi soleil, meant when he said “l’etat cest moi” or “I am the state”. The singular repsentation of a political demi-god derives legitimacy from mysterious universal sources. In the case of Thailand, the powerful Siamese monarchs sat on their thrones above heaven, earth and all men. All beings paid homage to the great and absolute power of the autochthonous monarch. The summative power of the monarch was made all the more powerful because of the grand narratives that surround the mystery and spirituality of the King of Kings1.

Украинский казак на службе Людовика XV или польский шляхтич на службе двух королей: документальная деконструкция исследования И. Борщака о П.-Г. Орлике

Украинский казак на службе Людовика XV или польский шляхтич на службе двух королей: документальная деконструкция исследования И. Борщака о П.-Г. Орлике

The Gazette Littéraire de l'Europe and Anglo-French Cultural Diplomacy

In the wake of France's defeat in the Seven Years War (1756-1763) Louis XV's ministers experimented with a number of reforms intended to reimagine the nation as something citizens could invest in financially, politically and even emotionally. Led by Prime Minister Choiseul, the regime encouraged discussion of state policy and in particular of the lessons to be learned from her erstwhile enemy. Under the patronage of Choiseul's cousin, foreign minister Praslin, two established journalists and savants, the Abbé (François) Arnaud and J.-B.-A. Suard, established a weekly review as part of the regime's publicity offensive. Published under official auspices from 1764 to 1766, the Gazette Littéraire de l'Europe was to serve as an intellectual clearing house for Europe, and reassert French as the language of savants. A study of its coverage of British arts and letters as well as of the private correspondence of its editors reveals the internal conflicts which characterized cross-Channel exchange, pursued as both a Enlightened and a political project.

Textes, mensonges et idéaux: les vérités labiles du “Journal” de Collé

Honore Bonhomme’s 1868 edition of the Journal et Memoires de Charles Colle sur les hommes de lettres, les ouvrages dramatiques et les evenements les plus memorables du regne de Louis XV (1748‑1772) is nowadays widely used by various scholars as a first‑hand source about 18th century literary life. Taking Colle’s treatment of Francoise de Graffigny as a test case that leads to a general methodological reflection, we first analyze the internal coherence of the Journal and exhibit its various contradictions. We further confront the Journal with Graffigny’s Correspondence as well as with other contemporary sources, such as Freron, Grimm or Clairon’s Memoires and thereby highlight Colle’s inventions, modifications and concealments, especially concerning the genesis of Guimond de la Touche’s tragedy Iphigenie en Tauride. Overall, this shows that we, as literary scholars, should be more cautious with the reliability and historicity of sources we use, however famous they may be.

“Взяла Лаиса микроскоп…”. Русские вельможи и парижские актрисы: литературные и исторические контексты пушкинской эпиграммы

Taking Pushkin's epigram “Laisa took a microscope…” and its French origins as a point of departure the article sketches the manifold relationships of various eighteenth-century Russian nobles with Parisian ladies – dancers, actresses, courtisanes, etc. Highly enlightening sources in this respect are the reports of Paris police inspectors to Louis XV.

“To Judge and to Be Judged”: Jewish Communal Autonomy in Metz and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Eighteenth-Century France

Once regarded as the defining feature of early modern Jewish life in Europe, communal autonomy has been viewed through the prism of a state within a state, or a nation within a nation. Within this conception, Jews retained the right to be judged by their own laws, and the states which they inhabited demarcated clear boundaries between secular and religious jurisdiction. Yet even before Jewish emancipation, the boundaries between secular and Jewish jurisdictions were not impermeable. Jews were well aware of the power wielded by secular authorities and of the potential benefits of stepping outside the Jewish community to present their cases in front of non-Jewish courts. The present study follows this uneven path, examining the internal strife of the Jewish community of Metz, as well as the triangular relationship that developed between the community, the local parlement, and the French monarch, Louis XV, during the mid-eighteenth century. It uses the experience of the French translation of Jewish law as a lens through which to understand the evolution of Jewish communal autonomy in Metz and the increasingly tense relationship between local and royal authority as the eighteenth century progressed. This episode, perhaps the penultimate chapter in a much longer history, directly challenged notions of sovereignty and forced the concept of legal coexistence to become a reality.

The Condition of the Lyon Weavers in the Letters to Louis XV and Monseigneur Poulletier (1731 and 1732)

On 8 th May, 1731, an ordinance of Louis XV, King of France, imposed separation between the production and sale activities of the weavers of ‘gold, silver and silk’ at the famous Lyon Manufactory in which hundreds of families worked. The ordinance plunged into despair the workers ( maitres ouvriers ) who, up till then, for centuries, had been allowed to sell their goods freely and were now in danger of being reduced to poverty by a handful of traffickers who knew nothing about their extremely sophisticated, skilful trade, but would be enabled to capitalize on their work. They therefore addressed two petitions (the first in 1731 and the second in 1732) to the King and Monseigneur Poulletier, the King’s Superintendent and the Manufactory’s Overseer, asking for the abrogation of the ordinance and a revision of the Manufactory’s regulations. The interesting aspect of these two petitions is that they show the workers’ consciousness of their rights; indeed, their denunciation of these abuses foretells, a century before, the two important revolts of the canuts (as the Lyon textile workers were known) which were to break out in 1831 and 1834.

Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France by Kathleen Wellman

Reviewed by: Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France by Kathleen Wellman Isabel dos Guimarães Sá Wellman, Kathleen – Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. 433. In general, the study of royal mistresses is undertaken separately from that of queens, but that approach, as Kathleen Wellman’s book demonstrates, has the inconvenience of separating the part from the whole, ignoring the relationships established by the individuals concerned. It thus makes perfect sense to study queens and mistresses jointly, especially in France, where the status of the latter seems to have been so important as to make their influence almost indistinguishable in terms of power. The author has analysed these women in the Renaissance, understood as a broad period, ranging from 1444—when Charles VII designated his first official mistress, Agnès Sorel—to 1599, when Gabrielle d’Estrées died before she could marry Henry IV. This means many queens and mistresses have been studied in detail, and sometimes also other women who were neither, such as Louise of Savoy whose role as regent and political partner to her son Francis I the author explores. Such an achievement requires the mastery of a multitude of characters, episodes, and political circumstances over a range of a century and a half, which the author dominates effortlessly. The quantity of cases displayed was not feasible through the reading or re-reading of manuscript sources; Wellman relies mainly on bibliography and printed materials, such as chronicles, travel accounts, ambassadors’ reports, memoirs, letters, etc. However, the reader is not informed either about their authors or the context in which they were writing, making the discussion of the weaknesses and strengths of the primary sources generally absent in the book. However, this is a minor fault within the book’s many virtues, as it is the first comprehensive study of a subject that attracts a great deal of attention, and is certainly in need of fresh approaches. Recent historiography on queenship has emphasized the role of women as political actors and cultural agents, and it is now clear to historians that the political and cultural history of Early Modern Europe can no longer ignore them. However, queens and mistresses always related to royal male figures; their role was exerted always in relation to a man, and they exerted power rather informally, except in specific circumstances (such as regency in the case of queens). Also, as the author makes perfectly clear, the status of mistresses was more fragile than that of queens, as they did not have legal rights, and as such, their influence ceased [End Page 278] after the king’s death or loss of favour. The location of women’s powers in the private sphere makes it sometimes very difficult to assess their real roles. Even so, Wellman has succeeded in demonstrating how crucial these women were in shaping court culture, the visual arts, and politics, thus being able to argue that women did have a Renaissance. Some features seem to be specific to the French monarchy, and puzzle the reader. First of all, the king’s legitimate and illegitimate children could be reared together in the same palace, generally separated from the one where the king was living. Second, some foreign young royal brides were educated in the French court from early childhood, and thus there was the possibility of being refused after a lengthy stay in France, as happened to Margaret of Austria (1480-1530), who was engaged to Charles VIII, and Mariana Victoria of Spain (1718-1781), formerly to wed Louis XV and later queen of Portugal by her marriage to Joseph I. Also, French queens might be crowned in separate ceremonies, that is, not jointly with their husbands, whereas in some kingdoms coronations were replaced by other rituals of passage, not extensive to royal wives. Last but not least, the very status of royal mistresses: even though virtually all kings in Europe were entitled to have them, France seems to have been a case where these women displayed an official status unrivalled anywhere else, meaning that such mistresses predictably created similarly official extra-magnetic fields for competition among courtiers. Why such important differences occur is...

The rhinoceros (fl.1770–1793) of King Louis XV and its horns

While receiving remarkable animals as presents was a common practice among European monarchs, the rhinoceros of Louis XV (Rhinoceros unicornis) became one of the most famous. The live male Indian rhinoceros was a gift to the King from Jean-Baptiste Chevalier, French governor of Chandannagar in West Bengal. It left Calcutta on 22 December 1769, and arrived in the port of Lorient, Brittany, six months later on 11 June 1770. From there it was transported to the royal menagerie in Versailles, which had been built in response to increasing interest in zoology and Louis XIV's passion for the exotic, in 1664. When the rhinoceros died in 1793, having been in captivity in France for more than 20 years, its skeleton and stuffed hide were preserved and have been held since then in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris. Here it remains on exhibition as an almost three-hundred year old relic of R. unicornis, an invaluable source for museum studies and the history of taxidermy. Why the original horn of this rhinoceros was replaced by a much longer one, and why, in turn, this was replaced by a short one is discussed.

Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Alison McQueen (review)

Reviewed by: Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Alison McQueen Alexandra K. Wettlaufer McQueen, Alison. Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xx + 348. isbn: 978-1-4094-0585-6 Alison McQueen’s rich and beautifully-illustrated study, Empress Eugénie and the Arts: Politics and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, presents a revealing new look at the role played by Eugenia de Guzmán, Napoleon III’s Spanish-born consort, in the political and artistic realms of Second Empire France. Best known today for her staunch Catholicism and fashionable crinolines, Empress Eugénie has generally been relegated to the sidelines of cultural history as a latter-day Marie Antoinette: beautiful, foreign, modish and mistrusted. McQueen sets out to prove, however, that the Empress was actively engaged in constructing a far more modern identity and “used art to define herself as empress, for the citizens of France and the international community” (4). Consulting a wide variety of archival texts, McQueen traces Eugénie’s patronage of artists and causes from her marriage to the French emperor in 1853 until her death in 1920 and makes a compelling case for reading the empress as one of the more important female figures of the nineteenth century. Chapter one, “Shaping a Nation-State: The Politics of Piety, Charity and Education,” examines Eugénie’s early attempts to construct her political persona through the support of public charities and imperial commissions that were in turn represented in print culture and the emerging mass media. Paintings and prints of her work with maternal societies, orphanages, nurseries, hospitals and prisons established Eugénie’s efforts on behalf of France’s most vulnerable citizens and solidified her position as the nation’s matriarch while aligning her with progressive causes not often associated with imperial politics. While these charities might be considered conventionally “feminine” in their focus, McQueen insists on the empress’s active agency in working for women’s causes in a more political sense. Most notably, her [End Page 142] life-long commitment “to improve the status of women through increased education and political autonomy” (10) is manifested throughout the Second Empire, from her work on the Fondation Eugène Napoléon (1853–1856), a boarding school for impoverished girls which she personally designed, oversaw and funded, to her collaborations with Victor Duruy on reforms for girls’ instruction primaire, enseignement secondaire, and even a proposal for a women’s medical school in Paris. As an advocate for social reform, Eugénie was an unexpectedly-powerful voice for progressive policies protecting women, children and the poor. Chapter two, “Imperial Identities: The ‘Ornament of the Throne,’” investigates the ways in which Eugénie’s myriad portraits in various media presented a consciously-constructed persona both to the French and to the rest of the world. McQueen’s analyses of this series of images highlights the transition from Dubufe’s Portrait of Empress Eugénie (1853), which shows an unmistakably Spanish-looking subject with the medal of the Order of Maria Luisa draped across her breast, to the later Winter-halter portraits that emphasize pale porcelain skin and fashionable Parisian gowns. Where the widely-circulated public portraits present Eugénie as the idealized embodiment of the culture of luxury and consumption in Second Empire France, Mc-Queen asks us to reconsider these representations of the empress in a “passive and decorative role” (97) by examining the fascinating private images that the empress herself commissioned in a variety of exotic costumes and poses. These paintings and photographs capture Eugénie en travestie performing Otherness in “Persian, Circassian, Algerian, and Spanish costumes, in the eighteenth-century styles of Louis XV, Louis XVI, and Watteau, and dressed as Queen Marie Antoinette and an Odalisque” (129), and give us a far more complex sense of the empress’s understanding of and even resistance to her manufactured identity. In “Collecting an Imperial Persona: Collecting Practices and Intimate Spaces” (Chapter three), McQueen contends that “Eugénie was among the most important collectors of her time” (149) and used her patronage of French artists...