A dynasty of king’s perfumers: the Gallois/Huet and the factory appearances, from the court to the city, 1686-1789

Abstract

Patient and methodical, the constitution of a corpus of handwritten archives, from the collection of the Minutier central of the National Archives, had already made it possible to bring it to light: established in rue de l' Arbre-Sec at the "Royal Orangery", the dynasty of Gallois/Huet perfumers ensured for more than a century the supply of the king of France and the court with perfume and cosmetic goods. Drawing on an even larger documentary collection, comprising inventories after death, marriage contracts, sale and lease, articulating social history, history of the body and history of knowledge, this article intends to reconstruct the exceptional destiny of this Parisian artisanal company of the Old regime and draw the profile of the artisanal perfumer commensal. However, the representativeness of this model and the singularity of this history are also questioned here since they can be inscribed, on the one hand, in the wider panorama of the profession of glove-maker and perfumer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, on the other hand, in that of the developments in the appearance of the court in the city, from the reign of Louis XIV until the Revolution.