A. Meunier, Comédie-Française
The Department of French & Italian presents a lecture by
Jeffrey Ravel
The Would-Be Commoner: Comic Certainty & Judicial Doubt in France ca. 1700
Friday,
September 29, 2006
3:30 pm
College Arts & Humanities Inst.
1211 E. Atwater Ave
Louis de la Pivardière, the third son of an impoverished nobleman from the Berry, married a commoner with a small estate near his birthplace in 1687, then served as a subaltern military officer in the beginning years of the War of the League of Augsburg in the 1690s. In the spring of 1695, however, he married a second wife, the daughter of a deceased innkeeper in Auxerre, thereby committing bigamy. More surprisingly, he told his new wife and her family and friends that he was the son of a Parisian merchant, and a commoner himself. Two years later, after a series of bizarre events, his first wife was accused of murdering him with the help of the local prior, allegedly her lover. The case was ultimately tried before the Parlement de Paris, the most important court in the kingdom. This talk will analyze two contemporary texts based on these events, a one-act comedy and a legal pleading, in an effort to understand contemporary response to the case of the "would-be commoner."
Jeffrey Ravel is Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Cornell University Press, 1999), and he serves as editor of Studies in 18th-Century Culture. He is a Co-Founder of CÉSAR, a web site devoted to the study of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French theater (www.cesar.org.uk).
Sponsors: Mary-Margaret Barr Koon Fund of the Department of French & Italian, Horizons of Knowledge, West European Studies, Department of Theatre & Drama, Dean of the Faculties, College of Arts & Sciences, and Department of Comparative Literature.
If you have a disability and need assistance, special arrangements can be made to accommodate most needs. Contact Isabel Piedmont at 855-5458 or ipiedmon @indiana.edu.
