But Le Ballet de la Nuit—like Richelieu and Mazarin’s absolutist policies—was emphatically not enough. When Louis XIV acceded to the throne in 1661, he moved quickly to diminish the power of those who had challenged—or might challenge—his authority. He shocked the court by bluntly excluding the long-established “nobles of the sword” (so named for their right to bear arms) from his inner circle of advisors. Princes of the blood, prelates, cardinals, and marshals of France, whose prominence was a matter of ancestry and deep tradition, were all abruptly ousted from power and replaced by “newer” men: “nobles of the robe” (named for their professional dress) with technical and administrative backgrounds who knew they could be replaced at whim. These men did not necessarily have the traditionally requisite “four quarters” of noble blood thought to be proof of nobility; they owed their titles and status almost entirely to the king.
Shrewdly and in the same spirit, Louis also stripped the established nobility of its traditional military (sword) identity: he created a professional army under his direct control. This new force was still unwieldy and corruptible, but it nonetheless undercut the old nobles and diminished their standing and power. To further weaken them, moreover, Louis pulled these nobles away from their customary spheres of influence in Paris and on their own provincial estates and required their presence (an honor refused at peril) at his own far-flung courts at Marly, Saint-Germain, and Versailles. Forced to reside in these isolated and inbred environs under the strict rule and observation of the king, they had little choice but to “play the power game”—and to play it by Louis’s rules alone.
The consequences were dramatic: Louis effectively destabilized the nobility, calling into question the criteria according to which status had traditionally been measured for centuries past. This unleashed an almost pathological obsession with “good” marriages (better blood), birth, genealogies, purification (purging, enemas, bleeding), and separating “true” from “false” nobles. Emphasizing the point (and fanning insecurity), Louis’s officials demanded extensive genealogical checks and detailed documentation. The push to unmask “false” nobles thus heightened social anxiety and pulled the old and new nobles (sword and robe) alike into the strong orbit of the king. This was political, but it was also, and not least, economic. The monarchy was in chronic need of money, and the aristocracy had always been a drain: French aristocrats were traditionally untaxed. Moreover “the people”—who were taxed—could only be squeezed so much. “False” nobles who were demoted, however (and this was the trick), represented a new source of income: they could be forced to pay taxes. Ambitious and less established nobles were an even more vital source: they often came from the wealthy bourgeoisie and bought their way into the social elite by purchasing offices from the king. Louis thus used the intense desire for social recognition and status to political and fiscal advantage, creating a complicated and hermetic symbolic world at court, an ongoing theatrical performance of the hierarchies and lineages that defined the French state as he conceived it. There was little recourse: criticizing court or king was dangerous and could result in punishment, a humiliating loss of status, or, worst of all, exile.
In this situation, the grip of ritual and etiquette on court life was unyielding. Status famously depended—quite literally—on where you stood in relation to the king. Nothing was left to chance, and everything down to the type of chair a woman might sit on was regulated in the finest detail. Stools were mandated for those on the lower social rungs, and chairs with various levels of backs and arms, progressing up to a full-fledged couch, were designated for those of higher rank. In mourning dress, the length of the queen’s train was precisely measured to eleven aunes, while those of Daughters of France were nine aunes and those of Granddaughters of France seven aunes. Even the way a courtier moved was precisely choreographed: a noble of inferior rank was obligated to seat a higher noble to his right; the princes of the blood left the Parlement by crossing through the center of the room, whereas the bastard son of the king was required to walk obsequiously around the sides. And during the king’s ritual lever courtiers stood—like an obedient corps de ballet—in serried ranks to hand the king his shirt or wipe his bottom. As Madame de Maintenon once quipped, “The austerities of a convent are nothing compared to the austerities of etiquette to which the King’s courtiers are subjected.” But Louis knew what he was doing. “Those people are gravely mistaken,” he warned, “who imagine that all this is mere ceremony.”14
It was in this light that Louis founded the Royal Academy of Dance in 1661. This new academy was quite different, in both spirit and form, from the earlier sixteenth-century example. In the patent letters of the new institution, Louis XIV described his intent at some length: “The art of dancing … is most advantageous and useful to our nobility and to the other people who have the honor of approaching us, not only in the time of war, in our armies, but also in time of peace in our ballets.” The “disorders caused by the latest wars,” he explained, had led to “abuses,” and the purpose of the Academy was to “restore the art of dancing to its first perfection.”15
It was also to ratchet the discipline at court one notch tighter. Dance had long been seen to be “one of the three principal exercises” of the nobility, along with riding and bearing arms, and dancing masters had often accompanied noblemen on military excursions to prevent disruptions in their training. Dance was taught in fencing and riding schools, and was also a regular part of the curriculum in the academies established by the nobility in the early seventeenth century to give their children an advantage in the military and court arts. Dancing was thus an adjunct military art, a peacetime discipline akin to fencing and equestrianism, with which it shared some of its movements and a disciplined approach to training and physical skill. With the establishment of the Academy of Dance, however, Louis signaled once again the shift away from the martial arts and toward courtly etiquette: away from battles and toward ballets.16
The Academy, however, also posed a problem. Dance was not only a military art practiced by noblemen and kings, it was also a long-established trade: dancers, even the king’s dancers, had traditionally belonged to the guild of the Confrérie de Saint-Julien des Ménestriers, which also served musicians, jugglers, and acrobats. The guild controlled access to the profession (and provided benefits to its members), and dancers generally had to pass through it to secure the credentials necessary for good employ. Membership in Louis’s new Royal Academy of Dance, by contrast, was a privilege—or “private law” granted by the king—and thus a direct challenge to the authority of the guild. Indeed, the thirteen men appointed by Louis were not just any dancing masters: they referred to themselves as “the Elders” and included the dancing masters to the queen, the dauphin, the king’s brother, and later the king himself. As members of the Academy, they were awarded special access to the king and—most important—were exempt from guild fees and regulations, and from many other taxes besides. Like so many rewarded at court, these dancing masters were “the king’s men” and owed their status (and not inconsiderable wealth) to his patronage. It was a sinecure for the skilled.17
As we might imagine, the members of the guild found this vexing. In a series of sharply worded pamphlets, including one by the head of the guild, those opposed to the king’s new Academy took the high ground, accusing its members of tearing dance away from music and thus robbing it of all meaning. The very idea that a dance academy could exist outside a musical guild, they said, was wrongheaded and deeply offensive. Dance, they insisted (echoing the Pléiade poets), was a visual depiction of music, which itself was an expression of celestial accords. The relation between the two was “built on the model of divine harmony and therefore … should have lasted as long as the world.” Indeed, dancing masters had long been trained as violinists, expected to accompany themselves and in many cases to compose airs, and their art had been taken to be a branch of music.18
The supporters of the new Academy, however, aloofly noted that in f
act dance had outgrown music. Its new and proper purpose, they said, was to elevate the nobility to serve their king. Music was mere accompaniment, and the independence and superiority of dance was obvious: its instructors, after all, were well proportioned and graceful, whereas a violinist could be “blind, hunchbacked, or one-legged without damage to his art.” The outcome of this hubbub, however, was never in doubt. In 1663 the Gazette noted that “the master violins here were unanimously scandalized and opposed to the new institution, but their case was rejected.”19
It was a dramatic change: the most privileged ballet masters in France had become—officially at least—courtiers rather than musicians, their primary purpose to hone etiquette and perfect the artifices required of high birth. And thanks to Louis, there was a burgeoning demand for their skills. Because physical appearance was taken to be a sign of inborn nobility, courtiers worked very hard to look and act “noble.” And because they were increasingly bent on improving their status through flattery and elegant forms of behavior, a ballet master became a vital accessory. For to dance badly at court was not just embarrassing but a source of deep humiliation—a gaffe on a scale difficult for us to understand today.
The duc de Saint-Simon, himself a virtual patron saint of ambition and spleen, wrote in his memoirs of the devastating experience of one Montbron, an aspiring aristocrat who had the great misfortune of dancing poorly in the king’s presence. Having heedlessly boasted of his dancing skills, the young man was put to the test: he faltered, lost balance, and tried to hide his clumsy movements with “more affected attitudes and carrying his arms high.” Mortified, he begged for another chance but in spite of his best efforts was laughed off the floor. Embarrassed and disgraced, poor Montbron did not dare show himself at court for some time. It is perhaps not surprising that there were reportedly more than two hundred dancing schools in Paris in the 1660s, all devoted to training young noblemen to avoid similar dread breaches of etiquette.20
Who were these ballet masters? Pierre Beauchamps, to take one of the most dramatic success stories, belonged to a long line of dancing masters and fiddlers, and his father counted among the king’s musicians. One of fourteen children, he was apprenticed as a violinist and dancer and grew up in the modest world of master tradesmen with coveted access to court. Known for his skill and accomplishment, Beauchamps rose to become the king’s dancing master in 1661 and was later appointed head of the Royal Academy of Dance, among his many esteemed positions. Beauchamps danced at the side of the king, often assuming His Majesty’s roles when the king himself was indisposed. And he became a wealthy man, boasting a fine collection of Italian art.
His student Guillaume-Louis Pécour had a similarly impressive trajectory. Pécour was born in 1656, and his father was modestly employed as a messenger to the king. But Pécour’s connections to Beauchamps and his skill as a dancer—not to mention his unusually good looks—made him a popular figure at court, where he was much admired by the king’s brother, whose homosexual proclivities gave Pécour something of an advantage. Pécour taught and arranged dances for an aristocratic clientele, and in 1680 he acquired the post of dancing master to the king’s pages. He amassed considerable wealth, causing the essayist Jean de la Bruyère to marvel at this “young man who has risen so high through his dancing.” Toward the end of his life, Pécour acquired the royal privilege to engrave and print dances—many of which are still used by dancers today.21
If Louis’s Academy of Dance established etiquette and ballet as a central feature of court life, it also aimed to make French culture the object of wider European emulation. Indeed, it was one of many such institutions founded in the seventeenth century, including the French Academy (Académie Française) (1635), Academy of Painting (1648), Academy of Fencing (1656), Academy of Music (1669), and Academy of Architecture (1671). The idea was to centralize French culture under royal authority, but it was also to replace the old Latin-based humanist civilization of Europe with French language, art, architecture, music, and dance—to extend French influence in artistic and intellectual matters as well as military affairs. This was not hard to do: Louis was widely admired for his military victories and for his success in consolidating the French state, and the political and cultural elite across Europe readily embraced and imitated French taste and art. The once cosmopolitan and Latinate république des lettres was being subsumed, as one Italian diplomat would later put it, into “l’Europe française.”22
In this spirit, the king ordered Beauchamps to invent “a way of making dance understood on paper.” It was a crucial step: without notation, French dance would necessarily remain a local entertainment; with it, French ballet masters could send their dances abroad and reach an international clientele (couturiers similarly sent dolls modeling the latest Parisian fashions). The idea was to notate steps, but not necessarily whole ballets or productions: even productions that were performed many times were not as fixed as they are today, and dancers routinely changed steps or took a favorite dance from one ballet and inserted it into another.23
The king’s demand, made sometime in the 1670s, set off a surge of competitive research conducted on several fronts by leading ballet masters. (Not surprisingly, their work dovetailed with efforts to record the art of fencing, and the similarities in the movements—and in the efforts to notate them—are striking.) After years of painstaking work several different dance notation systems emerged, but Beauchamps’s prevailed. Beauchamps himself presented the king with five volumes of symbols, text, and notated dances, but his papers have since been lost—if indeed they ever were made public. Moreover, Beauchamps failed to request the necessary permission to go to press with his work and, much to his chagrin, his system was taken up and published in 1700 by a Parisian ballet master who also had strong connections at court, Raoul Auger Feuillet.
Feuillet’s notation became enormously influential. It went into several French editions, was translated into English and German, and was used by ballet masters working across Europe well into the eighteenth century. It even received the imprimatur of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s authoritative Encyclopédie, where it was described at some length by the painter and mathematician Louis-Jacques Goussier. Moreover, thanks in part to its success, more than three hundred dances recorded in Feuillet notation remain in use today, including one by Beauchamps and many more by Pécour.
Feuillet focused on what he took to be the most important and noble dances, what the courtier Michel de Pure called “la belle danse” and one historian has described as “the French noble style.” La belle danse designated a kind of social dance regularly performed at balls but also in court spectacles, where its steps were ornamented with more challenging technical feats. It was not a group dance: the vast majority of the dances Feuillet and his colleagues recorded were solos and duets, and indeed the notation was not designed to chart larger numbers. The highest and most revered form of la belle danse was the entrée grave, generally performed by a solo man or by two men together, accompanied by music of a slow and elegant meter. The movements were majestic and weighty, limbs unfolding with calculated grace and no hint of degrading acrobatic jumps or turns.24
Indeed, the crucial fact about la belle danse, and the entrée grave in particular, is that it was danced exclusively by men. Ballet would later privilege women and the ballerina, but not yet: this was the era of the danseur. The situation can be confusing because women did perform (though not the entrée grave), and their skills as dancers were often remarked upon. But their dancing was largely confined to social balls or the queen’s ballets; in the king’s ballets and court spectacles, and on the stages of Paris, female roles were danced by men en travesti. This would change in the 1680s, but for the moment it was understood that men were the virtuosos and leaders of the art. At its zenith, la belle danse was unequivocally masculine, regal and weighted with gravitas: it was, quite literally, the dance of kings. It was also the blueprint for classical ballet.
The pivot on which la
belle danse turned was etiquette, and it is in this regard that Louis XIV can be said to have presided over the emergence of classical ballet as an art form. As we have seen, ballet in court spectacle had a long history, but Louis and his ballet masters pushed dance technique to a new level and gave it a sharply felt raison d’être: social ambition. The elaborately enacted hierarchies and extraordinary artifice that defined nobility at Louis’s court—those measured trains, rules for passing superiors and sitting on particular chairs—were all pressed into la belle danse.
Louis did not invent the connection: dance and etiquette had always been bedfellows, and dance manuals reaching back to the Renaissance abounded with rules concerning carriage and comportment. The writings of Feuillet and Pierre Rameau (another prominent ballet master), however, took this fixation on etiquette to unprecedented extremes. In their books, one could learn the fine details of how to bow and take off one’s hat; how to enter an apartment, pass a superior on the street, or show respect in leaving a room; how to hold one’s skirts, when to lift the eyes, and how deeply to bend when and for whom; how to become, as another dancing master once put it, a “beautiful being.”25
Posture was key: the body must be erect but easy, head upright and shoulders sloping back with arms held loosely to the side, hands curved and poised, toes gently turned out. The idea, as Rameau put it, was to appear free, with “an air of ease that can only be acquired through dancing,” and to avoid falling into the “humiliation” of stiff, harsh, or affected movements. Poor carriage bespoke bad character, and a woman in particular had to appear “well disposed, without Affectation, or too much Boldness,” and never “poke her head forward”—a sure sign of indolence. “One has yet to find,” another ballet master later wrote, “a better form of exercise for shaping and molding man’s exterior.”26
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