Overview

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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9781935408994

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Did Le Brun's drawings mean to dissolve a findamental division between human and animal, to reveal how we are all united far more closely than anthropocentric religion and sience woudl have us believe? This is one of the many questions that preoccupates the historian Peter Sahlin in 1668: The Year of the Animal in France. As it happens, Le Brun's sketchwork turns out to be just one moment in the monentous year in which everyone, it seemed, was looking at the animal wtih new eyes. -Los Angeles Review of Books

Did Le Brun's drawings mean to dissolve a findamental division between human and animal, to reveal how we are all united far more closely than anthropocentric religion and sience woudl have us believe? This is one of the many questions that preoccupates the historian Peter Sahlin in 1668: The Year of the Animal in France. As it happens, Le Brun's sketchwork turns out to be just one moment in the monentous year in which everyone, it seemed, was looking at the animal wtih new eyes. --Los Angeles Review of Books

Peter Sahlins examines the disruptive influence of the new menagerie at Versailles, alongside other events... packed with fascinating history about animals in the 17th century, particularly their appearances in art. -Hyperallergic Sahlins's account is a model of what can be accomplished by cultural history... the virtue of Sahlin's account is that he shows how culture, politics, and science can be permeated with animal concerns. -New York Review of Books Did Le Brun's drawings mean to dissolve a findamental division between human and animal, to reveal how we are all united far more closely than anthropocentric religion and sience woudl have us believe? This is one of the many questions that preoccupates the historian Peter Sahlin in 1668: The Year of the Animal in France. As it happens, Le Brun's sketchwork turns out to be just one moment in the monentous year in which everyone, it seemed, was looking at the animal wtih new eyes. -Los Angeles Review of Books Sahlins brilliantly analyses a chronology of events from 1661, when Louis XIV started to personally assume leadership of the government, to 1674 and the completion of the Royal Labyrinth in the gardens of Versailles... -ESPACE Art actuel Sensitive, intelligent, and well-informed readings of specific cultural monuments and encounters. Each of Sahlins's case studies provides insights and surprises, and each displays his ability to see connections among apparently disparate phenomena. -Journal of Modern History

Author Information

Peter Sahlins is Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.

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