Abbé de Saint-Pierre
Charles François Irénée Castel Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) was born on 13 February 1658 at château Saint-Pierre-Eglise situated between Cherbourg and Barfleur in Normandy, France. Helped by ...
Académie Française
A French literary academy with a constant membership of forty, responsible for the standard form of the French language and for compiling and revising a definitive dictionary of the French language. ...
Amphitryon
Three‐act comedy in free verse by Molière, first performed 1668. It is an adaptation of a plot used also by Plautus and Rotrou. The Greek general Amphitryon is married to ...
André-Charles Boulle
(1642–1732) French cabinet-maker,one of a number of skilled craftsmen maintained in the Louvre Palace by Louis XIV to design for the court. Boulle created a distinctive marquetry of tortoiseshell and ...
Anne D'Autriche
(1602–66).Daughter of Philip III of Spain, queen of Louis XIII, and regent during the minority of her son Louis XIV. She (with Mazarin) was the object of much popular ...
Anne of Austria
(1601–66)Wife of Louis XIII of France, whom she married in 1615. She was the daughter of Philip III of Spain. Her friend Madame de Chevreuse was involved in plots against Richelieu, and she was ...
Army, Navy, Military Service
1Until the middle years of the 17th c. the French army retained the characteristics of the feudal system. Its recruitment was essentially feudal and seigneurial, with large bodies of ...
ballet
Entertainment in which dancers, by use of mime, etc., perform to mus. to tell a story or to express a mood. The ballet was largely developed in the courts of Fr. and It. during the 16th and 17th ...
ballet de cour
(Fr.).Fr. court ballet of the 17th cent. The Balet comique de la royne, comp. for the marriage festivities of the Duc de Joyeuse and the sister of the queen of Fr. in 1581 is considered the first of ...
battle of Malplaquet
(11 September 1709)A battle fought in north-east France, close to the Belgian frontier, that saw Marlborough's last victory over the French in the War of the Spanish Succession. Marlborough's ...
Bérénice
Tragedy by Racine, first performed in 1670 in competition with Pierre Corneille's Tite et Bérénice. Its plot can be summed up in a sentence from Suetonius: ‘Titus, who was even ...
Bourbon
The surname of a branch of the royal family of France. The Bourbons ruled France from 1589, when Henry IV succeeded to the throne, until the monarchy was overthrown in 1848, and reached the peak of ...
Camisards
A group of fanatical French Protestants, who rose in revolt in the Cévennes district in 1702 against the rigorous steps taken by Louis XIV to suppress their religion.
Charles II
(1630–85),king of England, Ireland, and Scotland (acceded 1649, restored 1660–85). Charles received his practical education in 1648–51 when he learnt how to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, ...
Charles Perrault
(1628–1703),French writer, is remembered today for a collection of fairy tales published under the name of his son Pierre: Histoires et contes du temps passé (1697), subtitled ‘Contes de ma Mère ...
Choisy, François-Timoléon, abbé de
(1644–1724), French cleric, diplomat, and writer.Perhaps best known as a cross-dresser, Choisy was a prolific author of works on church history as well as memoirs and fiction. He knew ...
Claude Fleury
(1640–1723), ecclesiastical historian. From 1689 he was one of the tutors to Louis XIV's grandsons, and after his death (1715) he was chosen as confessor to the young Louis XV. His chief work is his ...
clergy
The body of all people ordained for religious duties, especially in the Christian Church. Recorded from Middle English, the word comes via Old French, based on ecclesiastical Latin clericus ...
column and line
One of the age-old problems of tactics and battlefield handling is the tension between the need for shock action and the requirement to deliver effective fire at a distance. This ...
Condé
A junior branch of the French royal House of Bourbon. The name was first borne by Louis I de Bourbon (1530–69), prince de Condé, a military leader of the Huguenots during the first phase of the ...
