![](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="6000px" width="4836px"></svg>)
“He who did not live in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of living and cannot imagine how happy life can be.”
T he Prince of Talleyrand, whose political career started before the French Revolution and spanned several upheavals and regime changes, captures a sense of an irreversible loss to French culture after the Revolution in this famously wistful quotation. The period of French history from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV (1643) to the French Revolution (1789) is so often spoken of as a golden age for France and its arts, but how and why? The violent bloodshed and seismic social change following the Revolution have always made the history of this era contested and highly political, but few would dispute the glories attained by the decorative arts of the time. A unique confluence of historical, cultural and artistic currents means that this era produced some of the finest furniture the world has ever seen, which has been enchanting and dazzling collectors ever since.
The engine that powered the market for the refined furniture of the period was undoubtedly the royal court, the seat of political power and also wealth, elegance and artistic patronage. When Louis XIV moved his court to the countryside palace Versailles, he brought together all of the courtiers and aristocrats into a much more compressed space than they had been in Paris, creating a rarefied, glittering world where refinement and beauty were continually on display.
At the centre of the world of the court was the absolute monarch, whose all-powerful word was law: Louis XIV famously expressed this in his declaration that L'État, c’est moi, ‘I am the state’.
Around the kings were not only his ministers, but queens and mistresses who also wielded immense power – the fascination with royal furniture is linked in part to the allure of personalities like Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV and Marie Antoinette, the final queen of France who was guillotined in the Revolution, both of whom were important tastemakers and commissioners of exquisite furniture. Versailles even had a sophisticated official system of allocating and distributing furniture in the palaces known as the Garde-Meuble: each piece of royal furniture was stamped by the Garde-Meuble with a unique number which was carefully noted in their official records, allowing modern researchers and collectors to cross-reference and verify royal provenance despite the passage of the centuries.
In the domain of furniture production, France found a harmonious balance between various elements of production and innovation that it never replicated afterwards in the same way. The furniture-making industry was closely regulated by powerful guilds, making it highly difficult or illegal to make authorised furniture outside of its strictures and tests – this led to a maintenance of very high standards for individual craftsmanship. Craftsmen were highly specialised, too, and the wonderful objects that we see today were the result of several stages of specific labour by craftsmen who were not permitted to stray beyond their particular skill.
A system this rigid could have stifled creativity, but this is where the marchands-merciers played a crucial role: these dealers of furniture and luxury decorative arts were in close contact with their clients, responding to their needs by commissioning innovative new forms from craftsmen that they knew to be in healthy demand. Makers of furniture were able to tailor the luxuriousness of their work depending on the client, but would always produce the finest for royal patrons: the legacy of the greatest furniture makers of the period, like André-Charles Boulle, Charles Cressent, Jean-François Oeben, ‘BVRB’ (short for Bernard van Risenburg), Jean-Henri Riesener, and Georges Jacob, are the well-documented and widely admired pieces they made for Versailles and other royal residences.
After the Revolution, the furniture guilds were dissolved and the general quality of furniture suffered following the shift to industrial-scale manufacture. One reason for its recovery later in the nineteenth century was an obsession with the glorious quality of furniture in the ‘golden era’ before the French Revolution. Historical styles became popular, and a strong market was established for high-quality reproductions of famous pieces of royal and aristocratic furniture from before the Revolution.
While France was buffeted by numerous later revolutions, wars and regime changes, the furniture of the eighteenth century became a prestige category for nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors alike. Indeed, there are significant museums of royal furniture across the world that are made up of the collectors of single passionate individuals, such as the Wallace Collection in London, the Frick Collection in New York City and the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris.
Today, the French state also recognises the significance of these precious artefacts, bidding frequently in auctions to pursue its policy of purchasing back important furniture to place back in the palaces they were created for. Furniture is one of the most exquisite glories of the French eighteenth century, and its survival allows us to admire first-hand a distant historical period of unique artistic greatness.
