(b Paris, 12 Jan 1628; d there, 16 May 1703). French author. He first worked as a lawyer, and was a supporter of Lully's style of opera, writing two librettos. His well-known Contes, such as La belle au bois dormant and Cendrillon, have inspired music by Rossini, Tchaikovsky and others. His brother Claude (1613-88) was a polymath whose interests included music and acoustics.

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(1628-1703)

In 1697 this French writer published Histoires et Contes du Temps Passé, eight fairytales with traditional plots, rendered in a polished and witty style; they were translated into English in 1729 as Mother Goose Tales, a term taken from Perrault's subtitle. Five are now among the basic tales all English children know: ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Bluebeard’, and ‘Red Riding Hood’.

Perrault, Charles (1628–1703), French writer, poet, and academician. He was born in Paris into one of the more celebrated bourgeois families of that time. His father was a lawyer and member of Parliament, and his four brothers—he was the youngest—all went on to become renowned in such fields as architecture and law. In 1637 Perrault began studying at the Collège de Beauvais (near the Sorbonne), and at the age of 15 he stopped attending school and largely taught himself all he needed to know so he could later take his law examinations. After working three years as a lawyer, he left the profession to become a secretary to his brother Pierre, who was the tax receiver of Paris. By this time Perrault had already written some minor poems, and he began taking more and more of an interest in literature. In 1659 he published two important poems, ‘Portrait d'Iris’ and ‘Portrait de la voix d'Iris’, and by 1660 his public career as a poet received a big boost when he produced several poems in honour of Louis XIV. In 1663 Perrault was appointed secretary to Jean‐Baptiste Colbert, controller general of finances, perhaps the most influential minister in Louis XIV's government. For the next 20 years, until Colbert's death, Perrault was able to accomplish a great deal in the arts and sciences owing to Colbert's power and influence. In 1671 he was elected to the Académie Française and was also placed in charge of the royal buildings. He continued writing poetry and took an active interest in cultural affairs of the court. In 1672 he married Marie Guichon, with whom he had three sons. She died in childbirth in 1678, and he never remarried, supervising the education of his children by himself.

When Colbert died in 1683, Perrault was dismissed from government service, but he had a substantial pension and was able to support his family until his death. Released from governmental duties, Perrault could concentrate more on literary affairs, and in 1687 he inaugurated the famous ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ (‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’) by reading a poem entitled ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand’. Perrault took the side of modernism and believed that France and Christianity could progress only if they incorporated pagan beliefs and folklore and developed a culture of enlightenment. On the other hand, Nicolas Boileau, the literary critic, and Jean Racine, the dramatist, took the opposite viewpoint and argued that France had to imitate the great empires of Greece and Rome and maintain stringent classical rules in respect to the arts. This literary quarrel, that had great cultural ramifications, lasted until 1697, at which time Louis XIV decided to end it in favour of Boileau and Racine. However, this decision did not stop Perrault from trying to incorporate his ideas into his poetry and prose.

Perrault had always frequented the literary salons of his niece Mlle Lhéritier, Mme d'Aulnoy, and other women, and he had been annoyed by Boileau's satires written against women. Thus, he endeavoured to write three verse tales ‘Grisélidis’ (1691), ‘Les Souhaits Ridicules’ (‘The Foolish Wishes’, 1693) and ‘Peau d'âne’ (‘Donkey‐Skin’, 1694) along with a long poem, ‘Apologie des femmes’ (1694) in defence of women. Whether these works can be considered pro‐women today is another question. However, Perrault was definitely more enlightened in regard to this question than either Boileau or Racine, and his poems make use of a highly mannered style and folk motifs to stress the necessity of assuming an enlightened moral attitude toward women and exercising just authority.

In 1696 Perrault embarked on a more ambitious project of transforming several popular folk tales with all their superstitious beliefs and magic into moralistic tales that would appeal to children and adults and demonstrate a modern approach to literature. He had a prose version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ (‘La Belle au bois dormant’) printed in the journal Mercure Galant in 1696, and in 1697 he published an entire collection of tales entitled Histoires ou contes du temps passé, which consisted of new literary versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’), ‘Barbe Bleue’ (‘Bluebeard’), ‘Cendrillon’ (‘Cinderella’), ‘Le Petit Poucet’ (‘Little Tom Thumb’), ‘Riquet à la Houppe’ (‘Riquet with the Tuft’), ‘Le Chat botté’ (‘Puss‐in‐Boots’), and ‘Les Fées’ (‘The Fairies’). All of these fairy tales, which are now considered ‘classical’, were based on oral and literary motifs that had become popular in France, but Perrault transformed the stories to address social and political issues as well as the manners and mores of the upper classes. Moreover, he added ironic verse morals to provoke his readers to reflect on the ambivalent meaning of the tales. Although Histoires ou contes du temps passé was published under the name of Pierre Perrault Darmancour, Perrault's son, and although some critics have asserted that the book was indeed written or at least co‐authored by his son, recent evidence has shown clearly that this could not have been the case, especially since his son had not published anything up to that point. Perrault was simply using his son's name to mask his own identity so that he would not be blamed for re‐igniting the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’. Numerous critics have regarded Perrault's tales as written directly for children, but they overlook the fact that there was no children's literature per se at that time and that most writers of fairy tales were composing and reciting their tales for their peers in the literary salons. Certainly, if Perrault intended them to make a final point in the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’, then he obviously had an adult audience in mind that would understand his humour and the subtle manner in which he transformed folklore superstition to convey his position about the ‘modern’ development of French civility.

There is no doubt but that, among the writers of fairy tales during the 1690s, Perrault was the greatest stylist, which accounts for the fact that his tales have withstood the test of time. Furthermore, Perrault claimed that literature must become modern, and his transformation of folk motifs and literary themes into refined and provocative fairy tales still speak to the modern age, ironically in a way that may compel us to ponder whether the age of reason has led to the progress and happiness promised so charmingly in Perrault's tales.

Bibliography

• Barchilon, Jacques, and Flinders, Peter, Charles Perrault (1981).
• Burne, Glenn S., “‘Charles Perrault 1628–1703’”, in Jane M. Bingham (ed.), Writers for Children: Critical Studies of Major Authors since the Seventeenth Century (1988).
• Lewis, Philip, Seeing through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault (1996).
• McGlathery, James M., ‘Magic and Desire from Perrault to Musäus: Some Examples’, Eighteenth‐Century Life, 7 (1981).
• Marin, Louis, ‘La cuisine des fées: or the Culinary Sign in the Tales of Perrault’, Genre, 16 (1983).
• Seifert, Lewis C., ‘Disguising the Storyteller's “Voice”: Perrault's Recuperation of the Fairy Tale’, Cincinnati Romance Review, 8 (1989).
• Soriano, Marc, Les Contes de Perrault. Culture savante et traditions populaires (1968).

— Jack Zipes

Perrault, Charles (1628-1703). Perrault is a household name today as the author of the Histoires ou contes du temps passé (usually known as the Contes), one of the most popular books in the language; he was known in his own time for writings of a quite different sort.

Born in Paris, the son of a lawyer, he was a twin, but his twin brother did not live—Soriano sees this as a significant factor in the composition of the Contes. Three of his surviving brothers also had successful careers: Nicolas (1611-61), a Jansenist theologian; Claude (1613-88), a doctor, author, and designer of the new colonnade of the Louvre; and Pierre (1608-80), one of Colbert's right-hand men. Charles trained as a lawyer, and thanks to Pierre, entered the service of Colbert, subsequently becoming Contrôleur des Bâtiments. Protected by Colbert, he had a successful career, becoming a member, and in 1681 the director, of the Académie Française, and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions. His wife, Marie Guichon, died in 1678 after only six years of marriage, leaving him four children. Dismissed from government service after Colbert's death in 1683, he devoted himself to his family; his Contes are a product of the education he gave to his youngest son, Pierre.

He started writing early, producing a satirical translation of Aeneid VI while still at school, and publishing in 1653 the burlesque Les Murs de Troie ou l'Origine du burlesque, written in collaboration with his brothers. These playful early works betray a disrespect for the Ancients which was to blossom later in life. Subsequently, moving in fashionable circles, he wrote a number of lightweight pieces, including a ‘Dialogue de l'Amour et de l'Amitié’ (1657), which was presented to Fouquet, and a précieux fantasy [see Preciosity] in a mixture of prose and verse, ‘Le Miroir, ou la Métamorphose d'Orante’ (1661). Perrault's main concerns as a writer, however, were the celebration of the reign of Louis XIV and the defence of contemporary artistic culture. Like many of his contemporaries, he wrote odes, speeches, and other texts in praise of the monarch and his artistic patronage. The newly created gardens of Versailles provide the theme for ‘Le Labyrinthe de Versailles’ (1675), in which Perrault invents ingenious amorous morals for the fountains (designed by Le Brun) representing Aesop's fables.

The celebration of the regime, together with his burlesque and précieux inclinations, led Perrault to adopt an uncompromisingly modern position in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In 1674 he defended Quinault's opera Alceste against the attacks of Boileau and Racine, claiming that it was superior to Euripides' tragedy. In 1686 he published a Christian epic, Saint Paulin, asserting, against the sarcasms of Boileau, that the modern Christian age, and in particular the glorious age of Louis XIV, should have its own Christian culture rather than seeking to emulate the Ancients. This position was proclaimed openly and provocatively in the poem ‘Le Siècle de Louis le Grand’, read at the Academy in January 1687. The poem began the most virulent phase of the Querelle, in which Perrault and Boileau did battle until being publicly reconciled in 1694.

Perrault's modernist position is spelled out in his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, published in four volumes between 1688 and 1697. This is a dialogue, set in Versailles, in which the ancien position is defended by the not unreasonable president against a chevalier and Perrault's mouthpiece, the abbé. The discussion ranges over the arts and the sciences, eloquence, and poetry. Confident in the progress of humanity, Perrault dismisses the ancients as childish, irrational, immoral, or barbarous; in particular, in Book 3, he launches an assault on the puerility and vulgarity of Homer. The level of the discussion is not very high, and the praise of contemporary culture is not particularly convincing, but the work is vigorously written. The Contes, composed between 1691 and 1695, are associated with this defence and illustration of modern culture, but they quickly outgrew this polemic to become one of the classics of European literature.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• M. Soriano, Les Contes de Perrault: culture savante et tradition populaire (1968)
• J. Barchilon and P. Flinders, Charles Perrault (1981)

(shärl pĕrō') , 1628–1703, French poet. His collections of eight fairy tales, Histoires ou contes du temps passé [stories or tales of olden times] (1697) gave classic form to the traditional stories of Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Little Red Ridinghood, and Hop-o'-My-Thumb. In the frontispiece of the collection appears the expression “Contes de ma mère Loye” [tales of Mother Goose]. Perrault also published three tales in verse (1694). He is also famous for the stormy literary quarrel that he aroused with a poem (1687) comparing ancient authors unfavorably with modern writers. Boileau, the chief defender of the ancients, bandied insults with Perrault until 1694. This “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” is considered a harbinger of the 18th-century Enlightenment.

French writer. His Contes de ma Mère l'Oye (c. 1697) includes “Tom Thumb” and “Sleeping Beauty.”

Perrault, Charles (1628–1703), French poet, literary theoretician, and fairy tale writer. Charles Perrault belonged to a family of middle-class government functionaries, among whom was his brother Claude, an architect best remembered for his remodeled columns on the Louvre. Charles began his literary career by writing satiric verse ("The Burlesque Aeneid," 1648) and gallant poetry while he was studying law. He developed his work under the patronage of Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, and wrote a forgettable Christian epic entitled "Saint Paulin." Perrault's shorter poetry was more noteworthy, and his poems praising the young Louis XIV (1638–1715) were well received at court. Nonetheless, at the time his influence on culture derived less from his verse than his position in the royal administration in the 1660s, where he served under the protection of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683). As general comptroller of buildings, Perrault sought to centralize efforts from the various academies, including the French Academy, of which he became a member and the secretary in 1671. With the death of Colbert, however, his influence at court declined, and he found himself in bitter literary arguments with Jean Racine (1639–1699) and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), historiographers of the king and staunch proponents of the "ancients." Boileau even mocked Charles' brother Claude.

Perrault's poem "Le Siècle de Louis le Grand" (The century of Louis the great), which he read aloud to his assembled fellow academicians in 1687 was both a panegyric to the king and a manifesto of the modernist position. While comparing Louis with Alexander the Great, he proclaimed that the French king's exploits surpassed those of Alexander and that progress was possible not only in politics, but in science, and even in the arts. The ideas and terms of the dispute were not new, but Perrault's poem synthesized them eloquently and launched an intense quarrel that lasted seven years (and indeed, in various forms, into the following century). He developed his position at length in the prose Parallèles des anciens et des modernes (1688–1697; Parallels of the ancients and moderns, 4 vols.).

As this phase in the quarrel subsided, he published three verse fairy tales (including "Donkey Skin") in 1694, which were soon followed in 1697 by eight prose tales in Histoires ou contes de temps passé: Contes de ma mère l'oye (Stories or tales from olden days: Tales of my Mother Goose). The concisely written stories became an immediate and huge success and established Perrault's literary reputation. Tales such as "Cinderella," "Puss 'n Boots," "Tom Thumb," and "Bluebeard" had been staples in the oral folk tradition for centuries, and they now became written texts to be circulated and enjoyed among the bourgeoisie and nobility, both old and young alike. Fairy tales were a genre that had been popular in women's salons since the mid-1680s, practiced by such writers as Mme Catherine d'Aulnoy (c. 1650–1705), Mlle Catherine Bernard (1662–1712), and Perrault's niece, Mlle Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier (c. 1664–1734). Perrault used the tales' popularity to present stories that exemplified his own literary theories and taste. By their origin the tales are not part of the Greco-Roman tradition, and their subject matter of fairies, ogres, and magical objects removes them from the mythology of classical antiquity. Although he refused the canon of acceptable textual models, Perrault's approach followed many of the tenets of French classicism in that he did not invent his material (with the exception of "Little Red Riding Hood"), and he expressed himself with an economy of language and stylistic devices. The role of magic in the tales is often minimal, and greater emphasis is placed on human nature and social conduct, both good and bad.

The tales exhibit a didactic intent, both within the stories themselves and in the explicit, verse "morals." And even though the events are set "once upon a time" in a fictive land where animals talk and fairy godmothers wave magic wands, the tales are filled with references to seventeenth-century life and satiric commentaries on contemporary society. Perrault retained enough elements of archaic language, repetition, dialogue and dramatic tension to convey a sense of the oral tradition in his sparse, simplified narration. The tales appear as a synthesis, therefore, of both the oral and the literary, of classicism and an anticlassical verve. These competing forces give dynamism to these modern versions of old stories.

Readers today, who are more familiar with the versions of the fairy tales retold by the brothers Grimm, may find some striking, and brutal, points of contrast with the Perrault stories: Little Red Riding Hood is not saved in the end, and Sleeping Beauty marries her prince only to discover he has an ogress for a mother. The decorum demanded in the classical aesthetic did not extend to this new genre with its extremes of fanciful whimsy and cruel violence.

Bibliography

Barchilon, Jacques. Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose. 2 vols. New York, 1956.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York, 1976.

Lewis, Philip. Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault. Stanford, 1996.

Marin, Louis. Food for Thought. Translated by Mette Hjort. Baltimore, 1989.

Morgan, Jeanne. Perrault's Morals for Moderns. New York, 1985.

—ALLEN G. WOOD

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