Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. [1] The late king Louis XIV, to whom France is indebted for so many useful establishments of letters, having been persuaded that: they would provide a strong advantage to the nation, that an Academy that would work in inscriptions , currencies and medals would spread on to his monuments good taste and noble simplicity that would make them a true prize, did not hesitate to lend his hands once having birthed these ideas [2]. He formed a company first from a small group of persons chosen within L'Académie Françoise, which he began to assemble in 1663 in the library of Monsieur Colbert, from whom they received his majesty's orders. They met together most ordinarily on Wednesdays, and in the summer, Monsieur Colbert often led them in oaths in order to lend more agreement to their meetings and employ himself more peacefully. One of the first works of this nascent academy concerned plans for the royal tapestries, so that they might be seen along with the collection of published engravings and descriptions. Monsieur Perrault was given responsibility next for the description of Carrousel printed with illustrations after it had been examined and approved by the group  [3]. Currencies began to be made for tokens of the royal treasure, casual profits, buildings, the navy, for all the years in which they were newly given. Finally, an history tracing the principal events of the reign of the king they endeavored to produce in medals - and this work would not have been so late to appear if Monsieur Colbert had not interrupted the group's labor so often, in continually obligating it to invent or examine different plans that it sought for Painting and Sculpture to embellish Versailles, to engrave the design and principal views of the royal house, and to attach to them inscriptions. Monsieur Quinault had partially involved the Academy as well when he had been given the responsibility by the king to labor on tragedies set to music, even as Father Félibien produced his dictionary of arts and his dialogues on painting, because his accompaniment had been rendered judge of these different works and several others; none appeared until he submitted his exam and received approbation. These academicians were only in the number of four initially, all coming from the L'Académie Françoise, that is Monsieurs Chaplain, de Bourzéïs, Charpentier et Cassagnes. Monsieur Perrault, the building controller, was admitted into the assemblies without being a member of their body at first, although he eventually took the position of Cassagnes. Monsieurs Bourzéïs and Chaplain being dead, the first in 1672, the second in 1674, they were replaced by Father Tallement the younger, and Monsieur Quinault, both of L'Académie Françoise. At the start of 1682, Monsieur Perrault, having left the building commission, being seen less by Monsieur Colbert than heard, leaving the assemblies where he held the pen since it had first been introduced, was replaced by Father Gallois. His absence was seemingly a loss for his company, which then languished for eight months until the death of Monsieur Colbert. Monsieur de Louvois, succeeded by the minister in charge of the building superintendent, left not the least marks of affection for the Academy. And after having several times assembled the members at his Paris and Meudon homes, he finally fixed their assemblies at the Louvre, in the place where were held those of L'Académie Francoise, and he had wanted that they be held Mondays and Saturdays, from five in the evening to seven. Monsieur de Chapelle having become building controller, arranged to write its deliberations, and thus became the fifth academician; shortly after, he added Monsieurs Racine and Despréaux as the sixth and seventh; for the eighth, Monsieur Rainssant, director of the cabinet of antiquities of the king.

Under this new minister, the academy revisited with medals its history of the king, and began to make plans to cast them for the most extraordinary wars. Having lost Monsieur Quinault in October 1688, and Monsieur Rainssant in June 1689, these two positions remained vacant until 1691, when they were filled by Monsieurs de Toureil and Renaudot. Monsieur Félibien occupied for some time that of Father Gallois, who came exclusively by the oversight of Monsieurs Charpentier and Quinault, who, questioned by Monsieur de Louvois about the names of their conferees, would name him as fourth, then present, rather than Monsieur Gallois, whom they could not honor. Monsieur de Villacerf, having been made building superintendent after Monsieur de Marquis de Louvois, did not continue care of the academies, and his Majesty gave responsibility of them to Monsieur Ponchartrain, at this time controller general and secretary of state, and since then, chancellor of of France. It was under him that the academy, known almost until then under the title de petite académie , became better known as l'académie royale des inscriptions and médailles. And finally, like Count Pontchartrain, his son could often be found at these assemblies, and he set their time to Tuesday and Saturday. The inspection of the group was given by Father Bignon, his nephew, whose genius and talents already were universally recognized. Let us review with care all medals for which we have halted their designs, from the time of Monsieur de Louvois. Several were reshaped, and added to a great number; they were all reduced to the same grandeur. Monsieur Coypel, since becoming the premiere painter of the king, was given the responsibility of executing the designs of these medals imagined by the academy; the history of the king in medals finally began to be presented to him some time after Monsieur de Ponchartrain had been raised to the dignity of chancellor, having returned in the month of September 1699. Father Bignon fearing this work finished, the situation of the academy not yet fixed, not likely released nor even dissipated, and even then considered assuring its state, making a proposal to his majesty. And the king, having tasted of this proposition, made by his royal order, a determination sent to the company shortly after. This determination among others states "that the academy shall be under the same protection of the King as the sciences, that it shall be composed of fourteen academicians, ten honoraries of which one shall be president; two may be foreigners and ten pupils; that one of the pensioners shall be secretary, and one shall be treasurer, that the assemblies will be held at the Louvre on Tuesdays and Fridays each week from three in the afternoon until five, etc." This determination, which one may read in its entirety in the first volume of the memoirs of the academy of Belles-Lettres produced at Versailles in July 1701, changed the face of the academy, adding to the occupations of its members the study of everything concerning ancient and modern literature. [4]

This determination began to be executed the 19th of the same month, as the academy held its first private assembly in its prescribed form. This establishment was confirmed in 1713 by patent letters given to Marly in the month of February and which were registered in parliament and in the Court of Finances. The academy takes for its seal of arms of France with a medal of gold in the center, in which the head of his majesty is engraved. A jeton of this same company represents a muse, holding in her hand a crown of laurels, and having behind her cippi and obelisks, and for substance, the following saying of Horace: Vetat Mori . [5] In 1716, the late Monsieur Duc d'Orleans, then regent to the King, being made always to share the taste and talents of the arts and sciences, showed that the title of the academy of inscriptions and medals conveyed only one part of the object of this company, having cut off state council to the king on the 4th of January, 1716, by which this title was changed to académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres , and by convention is more commonly designated as académie des Belles-Lettres, a simpler title, and which expresses everything contained in the first. In this same halting of service, the king suppressed a class of pupils for which their names repelled those of certain merit, and his majesty ordered that this class of associates be augmented by ten subjects, who would be presented to him by the Academy in normal fashion. Finally, after March 23rd, another cut-off of the state council had been made, ordering that the title of veteran could only be nevertheless accorded to currently installed academicians, who, after having usefully labored under the academy for at least ten years, found themselves out of state by a kind of impossibility of continuing their labors. We have twenty-seven thick volumes in quarto of history and memoirs of this academy already, the rest published by the royal press from which much of what has appeared comes after 1733. Monsieur president Durey de Noinville, has established an annual prize, which must be distributed to those who, according to the judgement of the academy, have better succeeded in the proposed subject. The initial distribution of this prize was made in the session following Passover in 1734. Moréry

Notes

1. "Inscriptions et Belles Lettres" is derived from an entry in the dictionary of Louis Moréri, a 17th Century precursor to the encyclopedists. See Louis Moréri, Le Grand dictionnaire [Sic] historique ou le mélange curieux d'histoire sainte et profane (Lyon: J. Girin et B. Rivière, 1674).

2. The importance of the establishment of the French Royal Academy is reflected in the writing of La Font de Saint-Yenne on the salon of 1747, Réflexions sur la peinture, signifying the ways in which the firm institution of state-sponsored artists would then make it possible for a modern art criticism to emerge. It is no surprise then that at the end of his Réflexions , La Font pays tribute to both Louis XIV and XV for their role in establishing royal art, and he specifically points to the role of inscriptions and medallions in its collections, pp. 149-50: «Combien de faits célébres chez les Grecs et les Romans, combien d'Edifices qui on été détruits, de Temples, d'Arc de triomphe & de monuments fameux & remarquables, & qui nous auroient échapés sans les Médailles qui les ont surpassés en durée, et qui sont aujourd'hui les preuves les plus authentiques et les plus incontestables de l'Histoire ! Celles du siécle de Louis XIV. Et celles du siécle de Louis XV. Qui ne leur sont point inférieures, seront recherchées dans le tems extremement éloingées, comme aujourd'hui les Médailles Greques ou du haut Empire. Mais ce ne sera pas seulement l'habileté de nos Graveurs qui les rendront précieuses, les savans Académiciens établis par nos Rois à ce sujet, auront le meilleure part à leur prix & à leur valeur.» [How many celebrated deeds in the work of the Greeks and the Romans, how many edifices which have been destroyed, temples, Arcs de Triomphe, and famous and noticeable monuments that should have escaped us without the medallions that surpassed their duration, are today the most authentic and most incontestable proofs of history! Those of the century of Louis XIV and those of the century of Louis XV not inferior to them will be sought in extremely distant times, as Greek medals or the High Empire today. But it will not be only the skill of engravers that renders them precious, but the learned academicians established by our King in this subject will provide the best part of their price and value.] Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, Réflexions sur quelques causes de l'état présent de la peinture en France. Avec un examen des principaux ouvrages exposés au Louvre le mois d'Août 1746 (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 149-150.

3. Charles Perrault, Courses de testes et de bague faites par le Roy et par les princes et seigneurs de sa cour en l'année M.DC.LXII (Paris: Impr. royale, 1670).

4. This genealogy of royal academicians to the king permits one to envision a unique moment in public funding of artworks in which the practice of Belles Lettres - if not also the ideologies of the works themselves - seems to fully subscribe to notions of building a royal state, relatively prior to the emergence of modern critical aesthetics and politics in Hogarth, Diderot and then the French Revolution. Although Moréri describes the works being produced, much of the preceding text narrates a pure sequence of artists glorifying the King, as if it were not important that, in particular, Perrault documented urban architecture in the royal procession at Carrousel or that Quinault wrote musical tragedies. And in fact, subject possibilities conversely multiply with the determination of the King to then protect the academy of belles lettres , just as it had protected that of the sciences.

5. See Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Carmina bk. 4, §8, v. 28, "Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori" [Our Muse praises him, worthy, staves off his death], is taken from the "odes" of Horace on the question of immortality that he affirms or invents: "Ereptum Stygiis fluctibus Aeacum / virtus et favor et lingua potentium / vatum divitibus consecrat insulis. / Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori, / caelo Musa beat." [Aeacus, snatched away by the flow of the Styx / Virtue charged in both favor and tongue / She enshrines the prophet in a luxurious home / Our Muse praises him, worthy, staves off his death, / She exalts him to heaven.]