Born: Paris, France, 12 January 1628. Education: Educated at College de Beauvais, Paris, 1636-44; licentiate in law, 1651. Family: Married Marie Guichon in 1672 (died 1678); three sons. Career: Clerk for his brother Pierre; tax collector, Paris; adviser to Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister; appointed by Colbert as the founder member of the Little Academy of Inscriptions and Medals, 1663 (expelled 1683); first clerk of buildings, 1668, supervising contruction at Versailles and other royal palaces. His poem, Le Siecle de Louis le Grand [The Age of Louis the Great], outraged the Academie frangaise and provoked the outbreak of the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, 1687. Member: Academie frangaise, from 1671, instigated a series of major reforms; chancellor, 1673; director, 1681. Died: 15 May 1703.
Publications
Collections
Oeuvres diverses. 1757.
Oeuvres choisies, edited by M. Collin de Plancy. 1826.
Oeuvres completes, edited by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. 3 vols., 1969-70.
Fiction
Contes de ma mere l’Oye. 1697; as Fairy Tales, translated by Robert Samber, 1729; also translated by Guy Miege and Robert Samber, 1785; as The Tales of Mother Goose, translated by C. Welsh, 1903; as The Authentic Mother Goose Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes, translated and edited by Jacques Barchilon and Henry Pettit, 1960.
Histoires; ou, Contes du temps passe avec des moralites. 1697; edited by Daniel Conty, 1978, Roger Zuber, 1987, Marc Soriano, 1989, and by Catherine Magnien, 1990; as Histories or Tales of Past Times, translated by Guy Miege and Robert Samber, 1729.
Contes des fees. 1724; edited by M. le Bon Walkenaer, 1836; also edited by C. Giraud, 1864, revised edition, 1865; A. Lefevre, 1875; Jacques Barchilon, 1956 and 1980; Gilbert Rouger, 1967; J.P. Collinet, 1981; Roger Zuber, 1987; Catherine Magnien, 1990; as Perrault’s Popular Tales, translated and edited by Andrew Long, 1888; as Fairy Tales, translated by Norman Denny, 1950; also translated by Geoffrey Brereton, 1957; Anne Carter, 1967; A.E. Johnson, 1969; Angola Carter, 1977; Anne Lawrence, 1989.
Verse
Le Siecle de Louis le Grand. 1687.
Adam; ou, La Creation de l’homme. 1697.
Other
Los Murs de Troie; ou, L’Origine du burlesque. 1653.
Dialogue de l’amour et de l’amitie. 1660.
Carrousel; ou, Courses de tete et de bague. 1670.
Recueil de divers ouvrages en prose et en vers. 1675.
Labyrinthe de Versailles. 1677.
Banquet des dieux pour la naissance du duc de Bourgogne. 1682.
Saint Paulin, eveque de Nole. 1686.
Parallele des anciens et des modernes. 4 vols., 1688-1697; revised edition, 2 vols., 1693; edited by H. Jauss and M. Imdahl, 1964.
A Mgr le Dauphin sur la prise de Philisbourg. 1688.
A l’Academie frangaise. 1690.
Le Cabinet des Beaux-Arts. 1690.
A M. le President Rose. 1691.
Au Roi, sur la prise de Mons. 1691.
La Chasse. 1692.
Ode au Roi: Lettre a M. D touchant la preface de son Ode sur la prise de Namur. 1692.
L’Apologie des femmes. 1694; as The Vindication of Wives, translated by Roland Gant, 1954.
Le Triomphe de sainte Genevieve. 1694.
Reponse aux Reflexions critiques de M. D sur Longin. 1694.
Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siecle. 2 vols., 1696-70; reprinted 1970; as Characters Historical and Panegyrical of the Greatest Men that Have Appeared in France During the Last Century, translated by J. Ozell, 2 vols., 1704-05.
Portrait de Messire Benigne Bossuet. 1698.
Pour le roi de Suede. 1702.
L’Oublieux. 1868.
Memoires de ma vie, edited by Paul Bonnefon. 1909; as Memoirs of My Life, edited and translated by Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, 1989.
Pensees chretiennes, edited by Jacques Barchilon and C. Velay-Vallantin, 1987.
Translator, Portrait de Messire Benigne Bossuet, by F. Boutard. 1698.
Translator, Fables de Faerne. 1699.
Critical Studies:
Les Perrault by Andre Hallays, 1926; Les Contes de Perrault: Culture savante et traditions populaires, 1968, and Le Dossier Perrault, 1972, both by Marc Soriano; A Concordance to Charles Perrault’s Tales by Jacques Barchilon, E. Flinders and J. Foreman, 2 vols., 1977-79, and Charles Perrault (in English), 1981, by Barchilon and Flinders; Perrault’s Morals for Moderns by Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, 1985; Fairytale Romance: The Grimms, Basile and Perrault (includes bibliography) by James M. McGlathery, 1991; Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in the Writings of Charles Perrault by Philip Lewis, 1996.
Charles Perrault achieved world-renowned status in a context that ironically deprived him of an original literary identity. Histoires; ou, Contes du temps passe avec des moralites (Histories or Tales of Past Times) came to be among the world’s most famous stories, transmitted orally and in print from generation to generation; the eight tales included were ”La Belle au bois dormant” (”Sleeping Beauty”), ”Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (”Little Red Riding Hood”), ”La Barbe bleue” (”Bluebeard”), ”Le maitre Chat, ou Le Chat botte” (”Puss in Boots”), ”Les Fees” (”The Fairies”/”Diamonds and Toads”), ”Cendrillon, ou La Petite Pentoufle de verre” (”Cinderella”), ”Riquet a la hoppe” (”Ricky with the Tuft”), and ”Le Petit Pouget” (”Little Thumbkin”/”Tom Thumb”). Perrault became immortalized as the father of French children’s literature; as the legend of the tales grew, however, his authorship became a problematical issue. In the sweep of 19th-century nostalgia for the origins of ”national” folk culture, Perrault’s own role in the tales’ composition was reduced by scholars to that of an unwitting precursor of the Grimm brothers, transcribing the tales for the presumed entertainment of his children.
In their original versions, however, the tales are moral commentaries upon 17th-century adult behaviour, with satirical allusions to literary and social practices of the time. Each prose tale is followed by one or two ”morals” in verse, a witty coda that often ignores or undermines the apparent lesson conveyed by the tale. For many critical scholars, the prose/verse dichotomy presented a contradiction that could only be resolved by attributing the authorship of the prose tales to Perrault’s son, and acknowledging Perrault himself only as the author of the sophisticated verse morals.
Recent criticism, however, attributed sole authorship to Perrault on several grounds. First, the apparent simplicity of the prose tales belies a complex structure in which elements evocative of oral tradition are deliberately juxtaposed with tongue-in-cheek authorial commentary. In ”Little Red Riding Hood”: when instructed to jump into bed with the wolf ”she was very surprised to see how her Grandmother looked in a state of undress.” And in ”Bluebeard”: after participating in a round of lavish entertainments, ”the youngest daughter began to think that the owner’s beard was not really so very blue.”
Second, the tales’ stylistic traits are compatible with those of numerous other works of prose and poetry by Perrault, most importantly the three tales-in-verse: ”Griselidis,” ”Les Souhaits ridicules” (”The Ridiculous Wishes”), and ”Peau d’Ane” (”Donkeyskin”). In these poems, a folkloric subject is given a sophisticated stylistic treatment, in a manner analogous to that of the later tales in prose.
Third, and most significantly, the tales are now recognized to be part of a large body of work that Perrault produced as an outgrowth of his other principal literary contribution: as a proponent of the Modernist cause in the literary ”Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.” This ongoing intellectual debate, over the merits of classical antiquity versus modern progress, took a distinctive turn in 1687, when Perrault composed Le Siecle de Louis le Grand, a poem celebrating the age of Louis the Great as an epoch in which the French nation under Louis XIV surpassed the accomplishments of all preceding history.
The reaction of Perrault’s colleagues in the Academie frangaise was extreme, including an exclamation of outrage by his longstanding rival Boileau. While advances in science and technology seemed unarguable, the claim that modern French writers had eclipsed the sublimity of Homer and Virgil was a shocking assault upon the canon. In response to this criticism, Perrault produced a series of works specifically elevating the merits of ”modern” invention over the ”naive” notions of the past.
Perrault’s most important overtly polemical works on this subject were the Parallele des anciens et des modernes [Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns] and Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siecle (Characters Historical and Panegyrical of the Greatest Men that Have Appeared in France During the Last Century). In the Parallele, a series of imagined conversations take place between an opinionated conservative (the ”judge”), a social gadfly (”the nobleman”), and an intelligent, rational philosopher (the ”clergyman”); the Modernist viewpoint is inevitably argued with logical persuasion by the clergyman. The Parallele is now viewed as the most important literary document of the Quarrel, the intellectual debate which opened the way for the notion of ”enlightenment” in the next century.
Other works echo the Modernist cause in more subtle fashion. L’Apologie des femmes (The Vindication of Wives) was written in 1694 to counter Boileau’s misogynist tenth satire, and in his poetic rebuttal, Perrault declared that only the primitive morals of ancient times could explain such ignorant anti-feminism, and that the slavish imitation of that classical model (by Boileau) was indefensible.
Most importantly, Perrault’s Tales represent a new literary genre of non-classical inspiration. Like the classical fable, they are intended to serve a moral instructional purpose, but as Perrault argued, because of the greater sophistication of the modern age, their messages are more complex and, he believed, more worthy of praise. Fables of dubious moral virtue such as ”The Matron of Ephesus” and ”Cupid and Psyche” (both of which were recounted by La Fontaine, a proponent of the Ancients) were condemned by Perrault as having far less value than ”the tales which our ancestors invented.” The folkloric authenticity of the tales may be in doubt, since some parallel but not identical versions have been traced to the Italian writers Basile and Straparola, and other tales, notably ”Little Red Riding Hood,” have no known direct antecedents. Perrault wished, however, for the tales to be accepted by the reader as ”modern” inventions, distinguished from their classical counterparts by the incorporation of a praiseworthy moral.
The principal literary achievement of the Tales, aside from their role in the Modernist polemic, is that the text is both accessible and meaningful on multiple levels. Moral commentary is presented in a style of such apparent limpidity that the subtle messages may not be apparent at first glance. As Perrault stated, they contain ”a Moral which reveals itself more or less, according to the degree of penetration of the readers,” a stylistic achievement that allows a child to derive pleasure and instruction from one message, whereas an adult may derive another set of messages entirely. Perrault’s masterful command of what 17th-century rhetoric identified as ”simple” style resulted in his historical disappearance as the text’s real author, and only the critical reappraisal of the late 20th century has finally placed him in the ranks of the great moralists of 17th-century France.
