PhD Oral Defence: Edward Houle

The apparatus of intimacy and Louis XV's apartments at Versailles

King Louis XV operated his dining suites in the Petits Appartements and Cabinets du Roi at Versailles as an apparatus upholding royal power at court, strategically deploying the architecture of eighteenth-century sociability and privacy to present a space of purported intimacy with the king. Louis XV thus protected the rest of his private apartments as a retreat, and preserved his personal autonomy at court in the midst of pressures for his accessibility. I analyze biographical sources, firsthand accounts, and primary-source drawings to trace how the king and his architects heuristically adjusted the apartments’ architectural strategies. My study also situates the king’s private apartments in the history of French royal apartments and early modern domestic architecture, demonstrating how emergent conventions of private and sociable interiors were rhetorically used to claim private space in the heart of absolutism’s most emblematically public palace.