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
remarkable unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins
shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others (such as the
dogs and lambs of the first xenotransfusion experiments) 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 where his absolute authority is represented in
manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial
nature of his human subjects.
1668: The Year of the Animal in France 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 André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles
Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of
Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings
of Sébastien Leclerc, the trans_fusion experiments of Jean Denis, and
others.
The author joins the non_human 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.
