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This thesis examines the remarkable range of farcical prints that were marketed for 1 children in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Evoking controversial theatre plays, these prints picture slap-stick, sexually nuanced comic scenarios that do not seem in keeping with contemporary' convictions that the up-bringing of children was a key means to secure the future of the state. Yet there is evidence to indicate that this printed imagery did play a role in the education of middle-class children. Such contradictions open up significant questions about the reshaping of middle-class identity at a crucial moment in the emergence of the capitalist state. Indeed, the problem that this study investigates emerges from late seventeenth-century debates about the didactic function of comic prints and plays. Defenders of these forms argued that they effectively inculcated social norms-particularly mercantile ethics, gender roles, and class distinctions—in young viewers. Those who attacked the social role of this material, on the other hand, stated that it provided viewing pleasures that actually subverted these pedagogical intentions. Through an analysis of the prints themselves, I examine the ways in which the visual pleasures of these forms lured viewers in order to trap them within moral meanings. While this may have been their intended function, however, I also found much evidence that the enjoyment of farcical forms could, and did, overflow didactic restraints. It was this subversive potential that made comic forms particularly threatening to civic and church leaders of the day. In fact, a number of children's prints were linked to a series of farces that were banned from Amsterdam's theatre in the 1670's. With this, children's prints can be situated in historically specific contests about the control of urban spaces and populations. Throughout this thesis, the function of children's prints is not discussed solely in terms of either discipline or subversion, however. Rather, I argue that it is precisely the unresolved tension between comic pleasure and didactic instruction that characterizes these prints and their uses.

Three original stories are the basis for our study of rewriting during the French Ancien Regime: the story of Thibaud de la Jacquiere, that of the "sorcier Gaufridy" and that of the Marquise de Ganges, which Sade will rewrite as a novel. Having all originated from a "canard", they appear in the 1679 edition of the Histoires tragiques of Francois de Rosset, and two of them can also be found in Francois Gayot de Pitaval's Causes celebres. Each of these stories was rewritten by different authors at least three times. Using Gerard Genette's theory of the narrative, we will analyse the processes of transformation that the rewriting operates in the text, as well as the changes it imposes to its original meaning. The number of rewritings of each text---up to five for the Marquise de Gange---is a testament to the importance of textual reappropriation as much as it shows the relevance of a study which brings to light the role of rewriting in the survival of these stories.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the French garden history witnesses the triumph and then the decline of the French formal garden, to which succeeds the fashion of landscape gardening of foreign inspiration. Integrating and nourishing this debate, the literary texts of that period enable to grasp the stakes that it brings up. The garden notably lends itself to the expression of an emerging sentiment of nature, as well it also serves that of a political thought enlightened by new ideas. Effectively, the treatment that these texts give to the garden is a witness to the revival that installs itself in the way of conceiving nature, and the relation that nature holds with man and the art of the gardens. The garden's topic and scenography are a testimony of changes that in turn affect its imaginary and that of the walk. Finally, the critical discourse exploits the analogy that establishes itself between the art of the gardens and the exercise of power, polarizing the debate around the political metaphor.

The colonial contribution to the French naval shipbuilding industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, explored within the context of the forest from which the resources for the industry were taken, was a remarkably successful venture that came to an end with the onset of war. In the past, the end of the French naval shipbuilding industry in New France has been attributed to the action or inaction of France that resulted in the inefficient use of forest resources. Issues of interest in, organization or support of colonial efforts by France, however, were nevertheless, limited by the immutable realities of the colonial forest environment. This thesis argues that the success of the industry, considered within the appropriate context, is a consequence of colonial persistence in the face of constraints imposed by the colonial forest environment---despite these other significant issues. / The official correspondence, written by colonial officials in New France, record colonial efforts to supply France with timber and detail the development of a naval shipbuilding industry in the colony. These documents provide source material for a case study that demonstrates the constraints imposed by the colonial forests on the experience of colonists, timber suppliers and shipbuilders. The colonial forest was not the same as the forests in France. A simple transfer of knowledge and practice from one forest to another was insufficient to deal with the differences in climate, forest age, tree species and the extent to which human activity affected the different forests. These differences challenged the way in which colonists could use forest resources for their own needs, for export to France and for naval construction. To consider this use of resources, without considering the differences between the available materials in the colony and those available in France, is to look at the story removed from the setting in which it took place. The unique forest in the colony was the setting in which colonial shipbuilding took place. Any study of the development of this industry, or any other industry that relied on forest resources, must give consideration to the constraints and realities of that forest.