Raconter les fêtes de cour: publier, archiver, agir

Court festival descriptions are often viewed as traces of past events, as archives of a court characterized by oral traditions and ephemeral pleasures. By examining descriptions of the first court festival organized by Louis XIV in Versailles, Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée, this paper aims to shed a new light on these descriptions: rather than looking for traces of the past event, it studies how the descriptions constructed themselves as archives of the court and used this status in actions. This paper focuses on two cases: first, how the official festival narrative reported the writing of the Duke of Saint-Aignan, first gentleman of the bedchamber; and then the problematic inclusion of Molière’s plays, particularly La Princesse d’Élide and Tartuffe, both produced for court festivals. It shows that by describing the court as a place of ephemeral pleasures, the descriptions claimed their own value as archive of the court and constructed themselves as places of power. Getting a place these descriptions, as Saint-Aignan and Molière do, is a way of claiming a personal relationship with the king and a role at court, retaining an ephemeral favour, sustaining, even institutionalizing, precarious positions. Festival descriptions can’t be read as traces of the event, even distorted by propaganda: they are a mix of diverse actions that should be precisely situated in order to be properly understood.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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