Taste and Power

Louis XIV, regency, rococo, neoclassical, empire, art nouveau and historicist pastiche; furniture styles march across French history as regimes rise and fall. In this extra-ordinary social history, Leora Auslander explores the changing meaning of furniture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Analysing furniture makers, sellers, buyers, and arbiters, Auslander reveals how the aesthetics of everyday life were as integral to political events as to economic and social transformations. She traces changes in furniture's place in the making of social and political life from Absolutism to Republicanism, from courtly consumption and artisanal production to bourgeois tastemakers who denigrated artisanal aesthetics and subtly realigned gender dynamics. Enlivened and enriched by Auslander's experience as a cabinetmaker, this work demonstrates how furniture served to represent and even generate its makers' and consumers' identities.