The Uses of Inventories in Early Modern France, from the Bureau de la Ville de Paris to Antoine Furetière’s »Roman bourgeois«

This essay eclectically traces the cultural significance of making and checking inventories in domestic, public, and bureaucratic contexts in early modern France. The analysis centres on the specific uses of inventories found in two interconnected spaces, the office and the library. A third space, the discursive space of a literary text (Antoine Furetière’s »Roman bourgeois«), problematises the inventorial practices found in the other two spaces. Furetière’s strategies of representation, foreshadowing those of Balzac, constantly recalibrate and tot up documentary forms of writing within and alongside literary forms.