When animals and their symbolic representations-in the Royal
Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy-helped transform the
French state and culture. Peter Sahlins's brilliant new book
reveals the remarkable and understudied "animal moment" in and
around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables
appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and
especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman
beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal
Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and
graceful birds. In the unfolding of his original and sophisticated
argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and
others were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance,
nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an
entire worldview in France-what Sahlins calls Renaissance
humanimalism toward more modern expressions of classical naturalism
and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals
and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes's
animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At
the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the
animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic
language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of
sovereignty after 1668 in which his absolute authority is
represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and
justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668
explores and reproduces the king's animal collections-in printed
text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique
interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668
together and to life as he observes them critically in their native
habitats-within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the
paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden
installations of Andre Le Notre, the literary work of Charles
Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry
of Madeleine de Scudery, the philosophy of Rene Descartes, the
engravings of Sebastien Leclerc, the transfusion experiments of
Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the nonhuman and human
agents of 1668-panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels
and weavers-in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will
engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and
readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human
history.
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