A short life of the author
Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) was a French author, poet, and member of the Académie Française who is remembered almost exclusively for a single slim volume — Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités (Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals, 1697) — that contains the most influential collection of fairy tales in Western literature. Cinderella’s glass slipper, Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle, Little Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the wolf, Puss in Boots’s cunning, and Bluebeard’s forbidden chamber all originate, in their best-known literary forms, from Perrault’s pen. He did not invent these stories — they existed in oral tradition and in earlier literary versions — but he gave them the shapes that have persisted in the cultural imagination for over three hundred years.
Life and Career
Perrault was born in Paris to a wealthy and influential bourgeois family. He studied law, served as secretary to his brother Pierre (a tax collector), and entered the service of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s powerful finance minister. Through Colbert’s patronage, Perrault became controller general of the King’s Buildings — essentially the administrator of royal architectural and artistic projects — and was elected to the Académie Française in 1671.
He was a literary figure of some importance before the fairy tales. His long poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (The Century of Louis the Great, 1687) ignited the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes — the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns — by arguing that contemporary French literature was superior to the literature of classical antiquity. This was a genuinely audacious claim in an intellectual culture that venerated Greek and Roman models, and the resulting debate, in which Perrault championed the Moderns against Nicolas Boileau and the defenders of the Ancients, was one of the defining intellectual controversies of the late seventeenth century.
The Fairy Tales (1697)
The Histoires ou contes du temps passé was published in 1697 under the name of Perrault’s teenage son, Pierre Darmancour — possibly to protect the father’s literary reputation from association with a “childish” genre, possibly as a genuine collaboration. The volume contains eight prose tales, each followed by a verse moral:
“La Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty) — a princess cursed to sleep for a hundred years is awakened by a prince’s arrival (not, in Perrault’s version, by a kiss).
“Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood) — in Perrault’s version, the wolf eats both grandmother and girl, and there is no rescue. The moral warns young women against predatory men.
“Barbe bleue” (Bluebeard) — a wealthy man with a blue beard gives his wife the key to a forbidden room containing the bodies of his previous wives.
“Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté” (Puss in Boots) — a clever cat secures wealth and a royal marriage for his impoverished master through audacious deception.
“Les Fées” (The Fairies) — a kind girl is rewarded with jewels falling from her mouth; her cruel sister is punished with toads and vipers.
“Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” (Cinderella) — the version that introduced the glass slipper, the pumpkin coach, and the fairy godmother, elements absent from earlier Italian versions by Basile and Straparola.
“Riquet à la houppe” (Ricky with the Tuft) — an ugly but witty prince offers a beautiful but stupid princess the gift of intelligence.
“Le Petit Poucet” (Tom Thumb) — the smallest of seven brothers outwits an ogre.
The Tales and Their Sources
Perrault drew on oral folk tradition, on the Italian literary fairy tale tradition (particularly Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone, 1634–1636), and on the salon culture of late seventeenth-century Paris, where educated women — notably Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame de Murat — were writing and exchanging fairy tales as a fashionable literary pastime.
His genius was compression and tonal control. He stripped the stories to their essential narrative elements, delivered them in elegant, deceptively simple prose, and appended witty, often ironic verse morals that addressed an adult audience. The tales operate simultaneously as children’s stories and as social commentary — they are about obedience and transgression, curiosity and punishment, cleverness and power.
Influence
Perrault’s tales became the foundation of the fairy tale tradition in Western culture. The Brothers Grimm, two centuries later, collected many of the same stories from German oral tradition but were heavily influenced by Perrault’s literary versions. Walt Disney’s animated adaptations of Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959) draw primarily on Perrault rather than on the Grimm versions.
The glass slipper — pantoufle de verre — has been the subject of one of literary history’s most persistent debates. Balzac suggested that Perrault meant pantoufle de vair (fur slipper), but most scholars now believe the glass was intentional, precisely because it is magical and impossible.
Collecting Perrault
Original editions of the Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697) are among the rarest and most valuable books in children’s literature — any seventeenth- or eighteenth-century printing is a major collector’s item. Nineteenth-century illustrated editions — particularly those by Gustave Doré (1862) — are highly sought after and bring $500–$2,000 or more depending on condition. English translations abound; Andrew Lang’s and Angela Carter’s are particularly notable.