Paris

Paris is presented both as a possible center of elaborate royal entertainment and as a place where recruitment for military service operated through coercion. The contrast links the city’s projected spectacle with the harsh machinery of state power described in the same account.

The Proposed Royal Circus

In 1700, a French promoter sought to build a royal circus in Paris at a projected cost of 400,000 francs. D’Argenson opposed the scheme, and the promoter then went to England with a related proposal: a London theatre equipped with machinery and a fourth under-stage intended to surpass the one at the court of Louis XIV. Paris therefore enters this episode as the original setting for an ambitious entertainment project, though the proposal described for the city was opposed rather than realized.

Recruitment in the City

The account also describes Paris as a center of forced military recruitment. Men going about their business in the streets could be seized by recruiters and shut inside houses known as ovens. Those judged fit for service were selected there and sold to officers. In 1695, the passage reports, Paris had thirty such ovens. The city’s streets and buildings thus form part of a system that turned ordinary movement through public space into exposure to confinement and conscription.

Contrasting Uses of Paris

These two references give Paris opposed roles: a proposed venue for costly royal spectacle and a site of organized coercion. The circus scheme depended on machinery designed to produce theatrical effects; the recruiting ovens subjected people to a different kind of machinery, one that sorted and transferred men for military service. The account sets both beside discussion of English naval impressment, while noting that soldiers were also pressed in France, placing Paris within a broader comparison of state coercion across the Channel.