The Crux of Luxury: Manufacturing Dreams under the Sun King

Abstract

France is the world leader in luxury goods, and, according to the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry, more than half of the world’s 270 prestige brands are French. French luxury has become a global marker of “Frenchness,” but it was Louis XIV and his minister of finances, Colbert, who bestowed onto the “made-in-France” label connotations of prestige and unparalleled luxury craftsmanship. This dissertation historicizes the business of French luxury and the seductive power of its goods. Throughout the study, luxury is limited to the manufactured luxury goods of the seventeenth century: lace and embroideries, wool-fitted and silk stockings, gold and silver brocades, ribbons, faux pearls, furs, fine leathers, wigs, tapestries, draperies, mirrors, and other such goods.

Through an analysis of Colbert’s letters on trade and commerce, the first chapter of this dissertation writes the history of how the minister of finances established a thriving French luxury goods business and began to position France as the global leader in luxury. It chronicles the origins and refinement of the made-in-France label and examines how Louis XIV and Colbert politicized luxury to mobilize a French socio-political body.

Definitions of luxury have historically relied on a conception of the term as surplus: the unnecessary, that which begins where need ends. The subsequent two chapters demonstrate how the sociological and cultural changes of the reign of Louis XIV, notably around considerations of the self, cultivated a culture of endless luxury consumption and engineered luxury as the ultra-necessary. For a good to be a true luxury, it must be both desirable and inaccessible and thus must be worth counterfeiting to satisfy demand for its appeal. Jacques Savary’s business manual guides the second chapter’s examination of counterfeiting as a unique savoir-faire that served as one of the foundations on which the French luxury industry was built. Travel guides by Abraham du Pradel and Louis Liger direct the chapter’s analysis of the dissemination of trends, luxury goods, and their knock offs, a trio that fueled desire for and the consumption of French luxury. The final chapter dissects the heart of the ultra-necessary conception of luxury: what I have termed the dream-doorway. Colbert’s manufactured luxuries inspired dreams of self-reflection acting as doorways and interfaces between the self and the social framework. This chapter explores how the kingdom’s evolving culture of self-awareness and self-fashioning encouraged the consumption and development of luxury by assigning value to its goods as social, aesthetic, and cultural markers, and it uses the tales of Perrault and D’Aulnoy to illustrate how the dream-doorway was crystallized in and disseminated through the literary fairy tale of the 1690s.