“L’Affaire des Princes”: Baroque architecture and Factional Politics in Regency Paris, 1715-1723

“L’Affaire des Princes”: Baroque architecture and Factional Politics in Regency Paris, 1715-17232014
“L’Affaire des Princes”: Baroque architecture and Factional Politics in Regency Paris, 1715-1723 Jordan Hallmark Portland State University
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Recommended Citation Hallmark, Jordan, "“L’Affaire des Princes”: Baroque architecture and Factional Politics in Regency Paris, 1715-1723" (2014). University Honors Theses. Paper 96.
10.15760/honors.94
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An undergraduate honors thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
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Bachelor of Arts
Introduction: Baroque and Classicism in the Age of Absolutism
On 17 August 1661, a magnificent fête was held at the newly constructed château de
Vaux-le-Vicomte, about thirty miles southeast of Paris, in honor of the French king, Louis XIV,
who arrived at the prestigious venue from the nearby château de Fontainebleau.1 The king was
accompanied by a large retinue of courtiers, who marvelled at the grandeur of the château and
the splendor of its formal gardens, which surpassed in magnificence all of the king’s own
residences. After a tour of the château’s richly decorated rooms and the garden’s intricate
network of parterres and fountains, the guests were treated to a sumptuous dinner, followed by a
performance of Molière’s comedy-ballet Les Fâcheux, with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, and a
spectacular fireworks show, which illuminated the night sky as flashes of light burst over the
château.2 This astonishing orchestration of spectacle was put together under the direction of one
man, the king’s superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, who sought to use the château de
Vaux-Le-Vicomte as a venue in which to pursue his own political ambitions. Work on the
château began in 1658, after Fouquet commissioned architect Louis Le Vau to design the edifice,
and put painter Charles Le Brun in charge of its interior decoration.3 As one of the first private
residences in France to be decorated in the exuberant Roman Baroque manner, the château de
Vaux-Le-Vicomte (fig. 1) allowed Nicolas Fouquet to present himself as the sole legitimate
successor to the kingdom’s most power political figure, the king’s chief minister, Cardinal
Mazarin. Soon after Mazarin’s death on 9 March 1661, however, Louis XIV, in a speech that
would become famous, declared that he would take personal control of the French state and
1 Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, 5th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 151. 2 Victor-Lucien Tapié, The Age of Grandeur: Baroque Art and Architecture, trans. A. Ross Williamson, 2nd ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), 103-4. 3 Blunt, 147-8.
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abolish the position of chief minister.4 Convinced that the inexperienced twenty-two year old
sovereign was incapable of governing on his own, Fouquet would host his marvelous fête at
Vaux-Le-Vicomte in order to impress, as well as to intimidate, the young monarch, and to
present himself as an indispensable ally who, as chief minister, would enable the king to realize
his dreams of personal glory. But Fouquet’s plan backfired. Rather than exciting the admiration
of the king, the unparalleled splendor of Vaux-Le-Vicomte inflamed Louis XIV with envy.5 Just
a few weeks later, Louis XIV had Fouquet arrested and subsequently imprisoned for life in the
fortress of Pignerol.6 This well-known episode in French monarchical history has often been
cited by historians as the event that signaled the birth of royal absolutism in France, forging a
highly-centralized system of hereditary monarchy in which there would be no place for any form
of competition with the king––political or otherwise.7 Throughout this absolutist regime, which
was to endure until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the French monarchy asserted
its political supremacy through the visual language of classicism, a grand, but severe style of
architecture and interior design that allowed Louis XIV and his successors to articulate absolutist
ideology through a codified system of architectural principles. This classical manner has
traditionally been presented in art historical scholarship as the defining feature of France’s
cultural identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as an aesthetic mode with which
the French monarchy could promote its own socio-political ideals of order and reason,
employing classicism to define itself in opposition to the capriciousness and irrationality of the
4 Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 61-4. 5 Blunt, 151. 6 Alan James, The Origins of French Absolutism, 1598-1661, Seminar Studies in History (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 87. 7 Ibid., 85-95; Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600-1789 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 8-9; Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 165.
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Italian Baroque, a style which, because of its use by Fouquet as a visual language with which to
compete with, and even eclipse, the monarchy, became associated with disorder, pomposity, and
political antagonism.8 The Italian Baroque style of architecture and interior decoration, which
developed in Rome during the early 1600s before spreading throughout most of Europe in the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was, therefore, as most scholars maintain, prevented
from exerting much of an influence on French architecture after 1661.9 Yet, rather than being
fully eradicated from the architectural history of early modern France, the Italian Baroque style
was destined to experience a revival in French architectural and interior design, brought about by
the unique social, political, and economic conditions that arose in France during the Regency, an
interim political regime that extended from the death of Louis XIV in 1715 until the beginning of
Louis XV’s personal reign in 1723. A period of relative political decentralization, the years of
the Regency saw the formation of different rival factions, whose members used the exuberant
Italian Baroque language of architecture and decoration to create magnificent residences with
which to compete with the Regent.10 By examining the Parisian residences commissioned during
this period by the Regent himself, Philippe d’Orléans, and by his two main political rivals, the
duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse, this thesis will demonstrate both the ways in which
specific Roman Baroque designs and motifs were used by French architects during the Regency
to express the political ambitions of their patrons, as well as how the introduction of these
Baroque models was facilitated by the socio-political effects of the affaire des princes, a
factional struggle for political influence that took place during the Regency.
The “Affaire des Princes”
8 See Tapié, “France Between Baroque and Classicism,” 86-109. 9 Ibid.; Blunt, 217. 10 Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-century Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 70, 120.
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During the eight-year period of the Regency, Louis XIV’s nephew, Philippe II, duc
d’Orléans, served as Regent of France, governing the kingdom on behalf of the young king,
Louis XV, who would fully assume his monarchical powers in 1723 at the age of thirteen. At the
time of his birth in 1710, Louis, duc d’Anjou––the future Louis XV––stood far down the line of
royal succession. As the youngest great-grandson of the king, Louis XIV, the duc d’Anjou was
preceded in the order of succession by his grandfather, le Grand Dauphin; his father, the duc de
Bourgogne; and his elder brother, the duc de Bretagne. On 8 March 1712, however, following a
devastating outbreak of smallpox, which took the lives of the Grand Dauphin, the duc de
Bourgogne, and the duc de Bretagne, among others, the duc d’Anjou became first in line to the
throne, receiving the title of Dauphin de France, which he would retain until his succession to the
throne as Louis XV on 1 September 1715. Although Louis XV had been first in line to the throne
since the death of his father and elder brother in 1712, the young prince was not Louis XIV’s
only direct descendant. Over the course of his long reign, Louis XIV fathered numerous
illegitimate children with his different mistresses, including seven children by Françoise-
Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan, whose tenure as the king’s maîtresse en titre had lasted from
1667 until around 1680. In December 1673, Louis XIV issued letters patent to his first two sons
by madame de Montespan, three-year old Louis-Auguste and one-year old Louis-César, as well
as to their six-month old daughter, Louise-Françoise, which legally legitimized the three children
and bestowed noble titles upon each of them.11 The legitimization of the king’s illegitimate
children triggered a major scandal in France, particularly among the nobility, who saw the entry
11 Jacques Bernot, Mademoiselle de Nantes, fille préférée de Louis XIV (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 2004), 14.
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of illegitimately born persons into their own aristocratic ranks as an act of usurpation.12 As
madame de Montespan was already married at the time of her affair with Louis XIV, who was
himself married to the Spanish infante Marie Thérèse of Austria, their children were regarded as
the products of a double adultery, the most disgraceful form of bastardom in the eyes of the
church, and, according to the social and moral codes of ancien régime France, a permanent mark
of impurity.13 Yet, in spite of the moral outrage that followed the revelation of their adulterous
liaison, the king went on to legitimize all of his children by madame de Montespan, with the
exception of their very first child, who had died in 1672, before the first letters patent had been
issued. In July 1714, two months after the death of the duc de Berry had established the four year
old Dauphin––the future Louis XV––as the last surviving Bourbon heir to the throne, Louis XIV
issued an edict according his two surviving sons by madame de Montespan––Louis-Auguste, duc
du Maine; and Louis-Alexandre, comte de Toulouse––the right to ascend to the throne after the
legitimate princes du sang.14 The king then appointed the two legitimized princes, whose new
rank placed them just below the princes du sang and above the rest of the French nobility, to a
regency council presided over by the king’s legitimate nephew, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, which
was tasked with governing the kingdom in the event that Louis XV had not yet reached the age
of majority at the time of his succession to the throne.15 When Louis XIV died on 1 September
1715, the duc d’Orléans maneuvered to have himself proclaimed sole regent of the kingdom by
the Parlement of Paris, who reversed the king’s will and excluded his legitimized sons, the duc
12 Jay Caplan, In the King's Wake: Post-Absolutist Culture in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20. 13 Bernot, 14; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 96-7. 14 Ziskin, 119. 15 Ibid., 119-20.
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du Maine and the comte de Toulouse, from the regency government.16 Unlike the highly
centralized absolutist regime of Louis XIV, however, whose authority had gone virtually
unchallenged throughout the entirety of his personal reign, the political powers of the Regent
were ambiguous and not absolute, allowing for the emergence of rival factions that would
compete with Philippe d’Orléans for control of the Regency.17 Among the most important of
these competing factions was that of Louis XIV’s legitimized children, the ‘Old Court’ faction,
led by two of his legitimized sons, the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse.18 The political
decentralization that took place under the regime of the Regency was paralleled in the cultural
sphere by the movement of artistic activity away from the royal palace of Versailles and into the
emergent aristocratic milieu of Paris, following the relocation of the government to the capital at
the outset of the Regency in 1715.19 During this period of factional strife and decentralization in
the social, political, and cultural spheres, the urban landscape of Regency Paris became an arena
in which the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, and his principal rivals, the duc du Maine and the comte
de Toulouse, vied for social and political supremacy, in a factional struggle known as the affaire
des princes, by engaging in competitive forms of architectural patronage. By undertaking
ambitious architectural and decorative projects, these rival princes constructed magnificent
Parisian residences with which each could craft his own royal identity and assert his right to the
Regency.
Italian Baroque Architecture: A Historiography
The principal aim of this thesis is to show how and why Italian Baroque styles of
16 Ibid.; John J. Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 125. 17 Hurt, 125-7. 18 Ibid. 19 Ziskin, 1, 119-20.
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architectural and decorative design were adopted in the ambitious building and remodeling
projects undertaken by the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, and his rivals––the duc du maine and the
comte de Toulouse––at their respective Parisian residences during the period of the Regency.
Therefore, before we can proceed, it is necessary to explain what is meant by the term ‘Baroque’
in the context of this study. Over the last few decades, a debate has arisen among scholars about
the benefits and limitations of the use of the term ‘Baroque’ in the discipline of art history,
triggering a wave of revisionist scholarship that has provided a wide spectrum of approaches and
perspectives on the issue.20 In 1979, renowned British art historian Anthony Blunt composed a
preface to the fourth edition of his seminal art-historical survey, Art and Architecture in France,
1500-1700 (first published in 1953), in which he acknowledged the problematic nature of a
group of stylistic terms that appear throughout the text of his book. “On rereading this book
thirty years after it was written,” he explains, “I became aware of the fact that it is based on the
use of certain stylistic terms––particularly ‘Mannerist’, ‘Baroque’, and ‘Classical’––which are
not defined and the meanings of which are not so obvious now as they seemed to be in the
1940s.”21Before the publication of Anthony Blunt’s Art and Architecture in France in 1953, the
standard usage of the term ‘Baroque’ in art historical scholarship was still largely based on Swiss
art historian Heinrich Wolfflin’s application of the term in the late- nineteenth century. In his
classic study Renaissance and Baroque (1888), Wolfflin employs the term ‘Baroque’ to refer to
the art of the seventeenth century, whose distinctive formal qualities he contrasts with the
‘Classical’ characteristics of the Renaissance.22 Subsequent generations of art historians were to
rely on Wolfflin’s method of periodization for formulating their own interpretations of the
20 For a recent group of important revisionist studies of Baroque art and historiography, see Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 21 Blunt, ix. 22 See Heinrich Wölffllin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (London: William Collins Sons, 1964).
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Baroque, a period label they would use as a blanket term for the cultural ethos of seventeenth-
century Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, art historians like Anthony Blunt and Victor
Lucien-Tapié published a number of important studies on Baroque art and architecture which
abandoned Wolfflin's method of periodization in favor of a more nuanced approach which
examined the relationship between style and historical context.23
In the preface to the fourth edition of his survey, Anthony Blunt defined the Baroque “as
the art which was created in Rome roughly in the period 1620-1680 (and then spread to other
countries, including France) in which artists used means which can be summed up in the term
‘rhetorical’, the aim of which was to strike astonishment and admiration in the spectator.”24
According to the traditional historiography, however, this grand rhetorical style had only a
limited influence in France, where, by the second half of the seventeenth century, the visual arts
had taken on a more restrained character, in keeping with the tradition of classicism that
prevailed at the court of Louis XIV.25 In his influential book The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and
Classicism in Europe, Victor Lucien-Tapié analyses the various conditions that led to the
“triumph of French Classicism” during the personal reign of Louis XIV.26 For Lucien-Tapié and
a number of other scholars, the turning point came in the first years of Louis XIV’s personal
reign, with the decision to complete the East façade of the Louvre in a classical style, rather than
following the Baroque designs provided by the Italian sculptor and architect, Gian Lorenzo
Bernini..27
On 3 December 1665, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Europe’s most celebrated living artist,
23 See Tapié; Blunt; and Anthony Blunt, ed., Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 24 Blunt, ix. 25 Ibid., 217; Tapié, 134-6. 26 Tapié, 132; 27 Ibid., 110-31; Blunt, 218-20.
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returned to Rome after a troubled sojourn in France, where the sixty-six year old artist had stayed
over the last six months at the invitation of the French king, Louis XIV, to design the East façade
of the Palais du Louvre. While Bernini’s entry into France earlier that year had been met with
great excitement, prompting his French hosts to accord him a number of honors traditionally
reserved only for the reception of princes, his presence at the French court had soon become the
focus of resentment, particularly among French architects, whom the king had passed over for
the Louvre commission in favor of a foreigner.28 Ultimately, the king would reject all four of
Bernini’s design proposals (fig. 2), deciding instead to commission a group of French architects
to build the East façade of the Louvre in an imposing but severe Classical style (fig. 3).29 By
choosing the traditional French classical language of order and uniformity over Bernini’s
innovative style of exuberance and eccentricity, Louis XIV gave architectural expression to his
absolutist system of monarchy, and formally banished the Roman Post-Tridentine visual rhetoric
with which Nicolas Fouquet had endeavored to surpass the monarchy just four years earlier. Yet,
as we will see, Louis XIV’s banishment of the Italian Baroque style would only amount to an
extended exile. While Gian Lorenzo Bernini would die in Rome on 28 November 1680,
frustrated with the failure of his Louvre project, the Roman Baroque style that he and his Roman
contemporaries, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona, in particular, had created through
their architectural and decorative projects was to finally traverse the Alps and arrive in Paris
during the period of the Regency.
Philippe II, duc d’Orléans and the Palais-Royal
After the death of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, duc d’Orléans, called Monsieur, on 9
June 1701, the son of the late duke, Philippe II (fig. 4), known hitherto as the duc de Chartres, 28 Blunt, 118-20. 29 Ibid.
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inherited the title of duc d’Orléans and established himself at his father’s Parisian residence, the
Palais-Royal. Built during the first half of the seventeenth century by Jacques Lemercier for the
Cardinal de Richelieu, the Palais-Royal, known as the Palais-Cardinal until its bequest to the
crown in 1642, was given to Monsieur in 1692 by the duke’s elder brother, Louis XIV. The
palace was presented to Monsieur on the occasion of the marriage of the duke’s son Philippe II,
then known as the duc de Chartres, to the king’s illegitimate daughter, Françoise-Marie de
Bourbon, along with an enormous dowry awarded by the crown as compensation for the social
humiliation imposed on the Orléans family by this mésalliance.30 Soon after taking possession of
the Palais-Royal in 1701, Philippe II, duc d’Orléans (henceforth referred to as Philippe
d’Orléans) continued his father’s efforts to…