Charles Perrault - Biography, Fairy tales

Writer, born in Paris, France. He became a lawyer, and in 1663 was a secretary to Colbert. He wrote several poems, and engaged in debate over the relative merits of the ancients and the moderns, but is best known for the fairy tales published by him under the title Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697), with the further title on the frontispiece, Contes de Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose's Tales). They were translated into English by Robert Samber (1729). Collected from fables current in different times and among different peoples, the tales are among the most archetypal of their kind, such as ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Blue Beard’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Tom Thumb’.

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Charles Perrault (January 12, 1628 – May 16, 1703) was a French author who laid foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, and whose best known tales include Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le Chat botté (Puss-in-Boots), Cendrillon (Cinderella), Barbe Bleue (Bluebeard), Le Petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb), Les Fées (Diamonds and Toads), la patience de Grisélidis,Les Souhaits, Peau d'Âne and Ricquet à la houppe (Ricky of the Tuft). Perrault's most famous stories are still in print today and have been made into operas, ballets ( e.g., Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty), plays, musicals, and films, including the highly-successful animated features Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty by The Walt Disney Company.

Biography

Perrault was born in Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family. When the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres was founded in 1663, Perrault was appointed its secretary and became Colbert's right hand.

He was a major participant in the French Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes), which pitted supporters of the literature of Antiquity (the "Ancients") against supporters of the literature from the century of Louis XIV (the "Moderns"). He was on the side of the Moderns and wrote Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis the Great, 1687) and Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (Parallel between Ancients and Moderns, 1688–1692) where he tempted to prove the superiority of the litterature of his century.

Fairy tales

Perrault's tales were mostly adapted from earlier folk tales (for example by Giambattista Basile) in the milieu of stylish literary salons in the 1690s, as a diversion from the more strenuous energy expended in the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns or the struggles of Jansenism.

Mythologist Jack Zipes has emphasized that these tales served the interests of the educated ruling classes. Instead of wily peasants, as in "Jack and the Beanstalk" (not a Perrault tale), Perrault's stories feature princesses.

Some of the droll fun of Perrault is in the mock-heroic contrast between the folktale context and fashionable life. The contrast between the fiery dragon-drawn goddess-like arrival and the courtly yet familiar gesture of handing her down, caused a ripple of entertainment to pass through Perrault's assembled listeners, too refined to laugh out loud.