The Politics of Pageantry: Dynasticism, Diplomacy, and Ephemeral Festival Architecture in France, 1729-1763

Abstract

This dissertation examines the temporary structures erected for celebrations occasioned by major dynastic events in France during the reign of Louis XV. The study looks specifically at examples from festivals staged in cities across France and its overseas empire in a politically volatile period between 1729 and 1763 when the Bourbon monarchy faced existential threats like succession crises, shifting alliances, and territorial loss. While temporary structures have remained largely on the periphery of scholarship in architectural history, this investigation uses ephemeral festival architecture to read major ideological shifts happening at this moment and the role that architecture played in reflecting and contributing to those changes. I argue that far from being static decorative objects, ephemeral structures actually constituted a durable form of infrastructure that afforded the monarchy a flexible means of publicly performing power in changing political circumstances.

Structured as a series of case studies, the dissertation examines the collision of ephemeral architecture with gender, geopolitics, technology, and the rise of the administrative state. The first chapter addresses ephemeral festival architecture more generally. I begin with an examination of how the genre was theorized within the discourses on architecture, pyrotechnics, and spectacle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I then use previously unknown archival documentation to trace the processes established by municipal authorities in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century for the design, fabrication, deconstruction, and repurposing of temporary décor. The second chapter examines the ephemeral decorations built for celebrations of dynastic marriages, including the temporary structures erected on the disputed frontiers of France to facilitate the ritualized transfer of noble women as part of their unions. Chapter three analyzes the ephemeral architecture built for celebrations of royal births as the Bourbons, beginning in 1729 with the birth of Louis XV’s first son, sought with increasing urgency to remedy a decades-long succession crisis. The fourth and final chapter looks at the temporary décor constructed for celebrations of military victories during the Seven Years War (1756-63) and looks forward to the transformation of festival culture brought about by the Revolution of 1789.