Sharl Perro

Charles Perrault was a famous French fairy-tale writer, poet, and critic. He became a member of the French Academy in 1671.

He was born into the family of Pierre Perrault, a judge of the Paris Parliament, and was the youngest of his seven children (his twin brother François was born at the same time and died six months later). Among his brothers, Claude Perrault was a famous architect and the author of the eastern façade of the Louvre (1665–1680).

The boy’s family was concerned with the education of its children, and at the age of eight Charles was sent to a collège. As historian Philippe Ariès notes, Perrault’s school record was that of a model student. During his studies, neither he nor his brothers were ever whipped with rods — an exceptional case for the time. He studied at the University College of Beauvais, which he nevertheless left before completing his studies. After the collège, Charles took private law lessons for three years and eventually received a law degree. He bought a license to practice as a lawyer, but soon, growing bored with the judicial profession, he became a clerk to his brother, the architect Claude Perrault, and gained the trust of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, so that in the 1660s he largely determined Louis XIV’s court policy in the field of the arts. Thanks to Colbert, in 1663 he was appointed secretary of the newly established Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres; he was also the general controller of the Superintendence of Royal Buildings. After Colbert’s death (1683), he fell out of favor and lost the pension paid to him as a man of letters, and in 1695 he also lost his post as secretary.

Few of our contemporaries know that Perrault was a distinguished poet of his time, a member of the French Academy, and the author of renowned scholarly works. Perrault was a fairly prolific writer (his first work was the mock-heroic poem “The Walls of Troy, or The Origin of Burlesque,” 1653), but his literary works, with the exception of the fairy tales, were soon forgotten. He entered literary history as the chief ideologue of the “Moderns” in the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Per