Du « Siècle de Louis le Grand » au « Grand Siècle » : Charles Perrault bâtisseur de la mémoire politique du xviie siècle

To understand what the notion of the Grand Siècle owes to seventeenth-century France, this article examines Charles Perrault’s contribution to the critical history of the concept and, in particular, its genesis within the context of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. As both observer and actor closely connected to power, and as a key figure in the development of Versailles, Perrault participated in the politics that fostered the fantasy of absolute monarchy. His writings reveal the political instrumentalisation of time, leading him to define his own era as both a culmination and a suspension of history—at once the product of becoming and the end of it. Through this privileged witness, the article seeks to demonstrate how the category of the Grand Siècle depends on the intellectual and imaginary experience of temporality peculiar to the subject of the absolute monarch, and how it represents the legacy of the political fabrication of memory undertaken under Louis XIV.