Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault: The Courtier Who Legitimized Fairy Tales

The frontispiece of a manuscript prepared in 1695 shows an old woman spinning by a fire, telling stories to children; on the door behind her, someone has written *Contes de ma mère l'Oye* — Tales of Mother Goose. The man who arranged that image was not a peasant storyteller. He was a retired royal official in his late sixties who had spent his career administering the buildings and academies of Louis XIV, and who had just decided that the stories servants told in kitchens deserved to be printed in Paris.

A Family of Ambitious Brothers

Charles Perrault was born in Paris on January 12, 1628, the seventh child of Pierre Perrault and Paquette Le Clerc, into a wealthy bourgeois family that treated public office as a birthright. One brother, Pierre, became a tax collector; another, Claude, became an architect and scientist whose Colonnade of the Louvre (1667–1674) still fronts the palace. Charles was educated in Paris and trained as a lawyer before following his father and brother into government service, where the family talent for proximity to power found its ideal outlet.

Colbert's Man

The patron was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister and the architect of French cultural policy as an instrument of state. In 1663 Perrault was made secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres — the small body charged with devising the mottoes, medals and inscriptions that advertised the king's glory. He held posts touching the Academy of Sciences and the restoration of the Academy of Painting, and served as an official overseeing the royal buildings. He used that influence unashamedly, steering his brother Claude toward the Louvre commission. In 1671 he was elected to the Académie française. He had, by any measure of his century, arrived.

Then the machinery turned. In 1682 Colbert pushed him into retirement; when Colbert died the following year, Perrault's pension stopped and his remaining appointments were stripped away. He was in his mid-fifties, out of office, and—as it turned out—free.

The Quarrel

His first use of that freedom was to start a fight. On the side of the Moderns in the great literary controversy of the age, Perrault argued that literature improves as civilization advances, and that the writers of Louis XIV's France had surpassed the Greeks and Romans whom every educated Frenchman was trained to revere. *Le Siècle de Louis le Grand* (1687) put Molière above the ancients by name. *Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes*, published across 1688–1692, made the argument at length and drew the fury of Nicolas Boileau and the classicists. Britannica calls Perrault's position "a landmark in the eventually successful revolt against the confines of the prevailing tradition" — the moment French letters began to stop measuring themselves against antiquity.

The fairy tales are the same argument by other means. If value is not conferred by classical pedigree, then a story that came out of a French nursery can stand beside one that came out of Ovid.

Tales in Verse, Then in Prose

Perrault came to the stories late and, at first, sideways — as verse exercises for a sophisticated adult readership, in a period when the fairy tale was a fashionable salon amusement. Madame d'Aulnoy had coined the term *conte de fées* in 1690, and the vogue was collective. Perrault's contribution was to change register. Where the salons prized ornament, he stripped it out.

Eight Stories and a Borrowed Name

In 1697 he published *Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités*, subtitled *Contes de ma mère l'Oye*. Eight prose tales: The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Little Red Riding Hood, Blue Beard, Puss in Boots, The Fairies, Cinderella, Ricky of the Tuft, and Little Thumb. Each ends with a moral in verse, often wry, sometimes at odds with the story it follows.

The book did not appear under his name. It was attributed to Pierre Darmancour, his son, born in 1678 to his wife Marie Guichon, whom he had married in 1672 when she was nineteen and who died six years later. The reasons were probably prudential — an Académie française immortal did not want to be caught publishing nursery stories while at war with the classicists — but the effect was symbolic. The tales arrived in print already disowned, already presented as belonging to someone younger.

The University of Pittsburgh's folklore archive states the essential fact plainly: Perrault "did not invent these tales." They belonged to an established oral tradition. What he did was record them "with wit and style" and, in doing so, give them literary legitimacy. Britannica describes them as modern versions of half-forgotten folk tales "retold in a style that is simple and free from affectation." The glass slipper, the pumpkin coach, the cat in boots as we picture him — these come to us in Perrault's shapes.

The Afterlife the Author Never Saw

Perrault died in Paris on May 16, 1703, aged seventy-five, with no idea that the eight tales would outlive every ode, epic and polemic he had written. The book's transformation into children's literature was largely accidental and largely posthumous. In 1721 the Amsterdam publisher Desbordes reordered the collection, moving the short, blunt "Little Red Riding Hood" to the front in place of the long and intricate "Sleeping Beauty" — a rearrangement that pushed simple moral lessons ahead of narrative complexity and quietly reframed the whole volume. In 1729 Robert Samber's English translation fixed the names that the language still uses: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella. Nearly every subsequent edition followed Samber's sequence. The Brothers Grimm arrived more than a century after Perrault, working ground he had already broken.

Why Charles Is Called a Genius

The claim, made honestly, is not about invention. It is about editorial judgment and tone — a rarer gift than it sounds. Perrault faced a genuine formal problem: how to set down material from an oral, largely illiterate tradition without either condescending to it or dressing it in classical costume, which was what his entire education would have told him to do. His solution was a prose voice so plain that readers have mistaken it for transcription for three hundred years. The Pittsburgh folklore archive credits him with giving the tales "literary legitimacy"; Britannica credits the style as "simple and free from affectation." That plainness was a deliberate, contrarian aesthetic choice by a man who had just spent five years arguing that the moderns beat the ancients.

The counter-case is strong and should be stated. He originated almost no plots. The fairy-tale vogue was a salon movement he joined rather than started, and Madame d'Aulnoy got there first. He hedged, publishing behind his son's name. And a great deal of the tales' global reach traces to decisions made by other people after his death — Desbordes's reordering in 1721, Samber's English naming in 1729, the Grimms' collecting a century later. Sources do not record his contemporaries hailing him as a genius; they record a formidable administrator and polemicist who happened to possess a perfect ear. That ear is the whole case, and it is enough.

Legacy

Of a long career's output — odes, epics, essays, the biographical *Les Hommes illustres*, the great quarrel with Boileau — only the slim 1697 volume is still read for pleasure. It founded the modern fairy tale as a written genre and supplied the plots that opera, ballet, pantomime and, eventually, the entire animation industry would strip-mine for centuries. Perrault won the argument he cared about, that the modern can beat the ancient. He simply won it with the part of his work he was least willing to sign.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Tales of my Mother Goose
• Genres: fairy tale