ABSTRACT

In 1801, the year Percier and Fontaine began issuing the first plates of the Recueil de décorations intérieures, a curious series of articles appeared in the daily Journal de Paris deploring the frenzy for furniture à l’antique that had overtaken Paris. Authored by the political economist Pierre-Louis Roederer, but published anonymously, the articles took the form of a fictive epistolary exchange between a man who had returned to Paris after living abroad for 10 years and the friend he had put in charge of refurnishing his vacant home in preparation for his return. The unnamed gentleman wrote to his friend to thank him for so tastefully updating his home, yet took umbrage at the furniture. Their stiff antique forms had completely supplanted comfort with a goût dominant that had taken over Paris fashions for the last two years.1 He decided to replace all of the new pieces with antiquailles, outdated models that were reliably familiar and cozy. The friend who had decorated the house responded in turn by reprimanding the homeowner for not realizing the true aesthetic worth of such objects, distilled from countless studies of the most beautiful monuments of antiquity: “More than 10,000 prints, 500 medals, and two hundred cameos contributed to making this beautiful whole.”2 In his reply, the homeowner friend could not bring himself to appreciate all of antiquity’s merits when it led to such physical discomfort: “What right do my bed and my chair have to demand that I rearrange myself for them? They wish to be picturesque when I demand that they be comfortable.”3 In this fictive exchange, one can detect the real threat posed by a new style that is codified and imposed within a domestic space left vacant. In demanding (however jokingly) what right his furniture had to impose a style upon an individual, Roederer’s piece demonstrates the ways in which post-revolutionary discussions of taste intermingled with a language of politics and the law, of rights, force, legitimacy, and authority, particularly when it came to the furniture, the material difference between property and indigence, habitation and vacancy.