This collection of twenty essays, of which five are in French, written by leading English and French literary and historical scholars, deconstructs the ethical and political framework supporting and circumscribing the actions of a powerful elite in France between the early 1600s and the final years of Louis XIV's reign. Reflecting a diversity of individual concerns, the essays, which offer a radical double questioning of the absolute values in which were founded the authority of Church, King and nobility, have been divided into two interrelated parts in acknowledgement of the complex tensions...