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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
During the period extending from late in the reign of Louis
XIV through the regency of Philippe d'Orleans (c. 1690-1723), French
literature, art, and music were undergoing the same conditions of
crisis, flux, and change that were affecting the society and institutions
of France. Seventeenth-century classicism, the love of sweeping
form and grandiose expression, the centralization of France, both
politically and artistically, had formed an ensemble of grandeur that
soon toppled under its own weight, falling into fragments. It is this
fragmentation of society and of art forms, as well as the breaking
down of many moral and theological structures, that found expression
in the opera-ballet.
The treatment of the opera-ballet, a musico-literary phenom­
enon unique to this period, as literature is not a new idea to the
history of French letters. In fact, such a treatment may be justified
a priori on the basis of the historical French attitude toward opera,
ignoring more modern considerations. An important literary genre to
the critic, the man of letters, and the writer of manuals in the seven­
teenth and eighteenth centuries, the opera in France was sired by
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