On October 5, 1744, the city of Strasbourg threw a party that would last through the five following days. There were processions, ceremonies, arches of triumph, costumed children, music, dancing, banquets, fireworks, jousting, water games, allegorical figures, decorated barges, and pageantry of all sorts. Some fourteen hundred Strasbourgers were recruited as "citizen troops" and dressed up in colorful military uniforms of scarlet, blue or pearl-gray, trimmed with gold and silver. The great Gothic cathedral and other public buildings were illuminated so brilliantly at night that the cathedral spire "seemed transformed into crystal."

Red and white wine spurted from fountains and loaves of bread were tossed from carts to the huge crowds thronging the squares, who could also feast on a whole roasted ox dished up in front of City Hall. Members of various guilds paraded through the streets with oversized tuns of wine and an enormous cake and hauled a stupendous catch of fish from the River Ill. It was a most splendid party.

The guest of honor was none other than the king of France, Louis, the fifteenth of that name, called (by some of his subjects, at least) "le bien-aimé." Strasbourg had become a French possession in 1681, when Louis XIV, great-grandfather and predecessor of the reigning monarch, had marched in and proclaimed it annexed to France, and not since that day had a French king set foot within its walls.

The occasion that had brought the king and his armies to that part of the world in 1744 was a military campaign, an episode in the War of the Austrian Succession that occupied much of Europe during the 1740s. He would have made it to Strasbourg sooner, but he was stricken with a mysterious illness in Metz and lay at death's door for several weeks. The festival in Strasbourg had a twofold purpose: to celebrate the "well-beloved" king's recovery, and to welcome the French monarch into the former Free and Imperial City.

Engineering the festivities was an amiable scoundrel, François-Joseph de Klinglin (1686–1753), who held the key municipal office of préteur royal, or royal praetor. Before the French annexation, Strasbourg, as a free city subordinate only to the Holy Roman Emperor, had been largely self-governing, and most of its centuries-old institutions had been allowed to remain intact, but now the king needed to keep a finger in the pie. That finger belonged to the royal praetor, his title borrowed from ancient Roman history. He represented the king in the assemblies of the Strasbourg Magistracy, where he exercised a veto power. In turn, he was expected to further local interests with the court in Versailles. The office was sometimes passed from father to son, and François-Joseph was the second of three generations of Klinglins to hold it. Unfortunately, this Klinglin had a fondness for luxurious living and no scruples about dipping into municipal coffers to indulge it. Greased palms, misappropriated funds and general financial chicanery were his stock in trade. A decade earlier, he had used municipal money to build a sumptuous mansion, then convinced the city to buy it from him so it could serve as an official residence for … the royal praetor.

On this occasion, the lavishness of the festivities he arranged, and of a book that would document them, had a twofold purpose: to demonstrate to the king the loyalty and devotion of his subjects in this remote, recently annexed frontier city (still largely German by culture and Lutheran by religion), and to curry favor at court with powerful people who could—so Klinglin hoped—intercede for him, as by this time some of his misdeeds were beginning to catch up with him.

Ah, the book. The Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library possesses two copies of it, and it is truly a wonder to behold. Titled Représentation des fêtes données par la ville de Strasbourg pour la convalescence du roi, à l'arrivée et pendant le séjour de Sa Majesté en cette ville, it measures some twenty-five inches tall by nineteen inches wide, and it weighs in at more than seven and a half pounds. It contains eleven exquisitely detailed double-page plates depicting the principal events of the festival. Each is nearly three feet wide and approximately twenty inches high, including the engraved legend beneath each scene of revelry. There is also an ornamented title page, followed by an equestrian portrait of His Majesty against a background of the city he was about to enter (a detail is shown above). The volume concludes with twenty pages of text describing the costumes and the festival events, and every word is hand-engraved, rather than printed from type. The whole is opulently bound and ornamented with the royal arms impressed in gold. Most of the edition of two thousand copies was destined to be presented by the city of Strasbourg to the king, to members of the extended royal family and royal household, and to powerful courtiers, ministers, princes of the church and others of exalted estate—as well as to a number of public and private libraries.

The book was almost certainly undertaken at Klinglin's initiative. It was produced under his guidance and that of the Strasbourg Magistracy, which (naturally) stood for the expenses, and it took almost four years to complete. The artist responsible for recording the festive scenes to be preserved as engravings was Johann Martin Weis (1711–1751), a Strasbourg native. He was also entrusted by the Magistracy with supervising the entire enterprise: plates, ornaments, portrait, text and binding, as well as the technical details of engraving and printing. In the drawing that became the first plate (shown above), he included a "selfie," in the form of a small figure in the left foreground sketching the royal entrance.

After his preliminary drawings were finished and approved, in June of 1746, Weis was sent to Paris with instructions to find the best workmen for the task of engraving them, and to watch over their work to ensure its accuracy and faithfulness to nature. He duly asked around and examined sample prints by the foremost craftsmen of the day before settling on one of the most prominent, Jacques-Philippe Le Bas (1707–1783), who rejoiced in the title of "graveur du Cabinet du roi." Le Bas has been called "the most complete incarnation of eighteenth-century engraving" (Portalis and Béraldi; see Sources, at end). He had a large workshop, and many of his pupils became celebrated engravers in their own right. In fact, it was known that his pupils usually executed the greatest part of the works he signed, though his finishing touches were often enough to add distinction to ordinary workmanship.

When he heard the price Le Bas was asking for ten double-page plates (Weis had already engraved one plate himself as a sample), Weis nearly fainted. It was considerably higher than the ten thousand livres the Magistracy had consented to allow. He was able to bargain Le Bas down a bit by arguing that artists usually granted discounts to other artists, but the contract he eventually arrived at was still two thousand livres more than foreseen. The Magistracy consented to the additional sum, though they grumbled that Weis could have found a capable but cheaper engraver. Weis demurred, citing his instructions to employ only "the best."

Seven other artists (besides the anonymous pupils of Le Bas) are known to have shared in creating the pictures and text included in the volume. The long-lived Martin Marvie (sometimes spelled Marvye) (1713–1813) engraved the ornamental title page border and two small festival scenes at the beginning and end of the text, depicting respectively the king's return from inspecting the Rhine bridge and a scene of revelry around a temporary arch of triumph adorned with fountains of wine. The first of these is reproduced farther down the page, while a detail of the second is near the beginning of this post. The exquisite rococo borders surrounding the text pages, and probably also the ornamented coats of arms beneath each plate, are the work of Pierre-Edme Babel (approximately 1710–1775), a noted ornamental engraver who was also a master woodcarver; among his commissions were furniture pieces for the palace of Versailles. He was for a time director of the Paris artists' guild, the Académie de Saint-Luc, where in the late 1760s he weathered a conflict between the guild's "artists" and "artisans," coming under attack because he was not a sculptor or painter. 

The text, including the title page and picture captions, was engraved by a specialist in this work, Le Parmentier, about whom almost nothing is known, not even his forename(s). His surname alone appears as the engraver on the title pages of a couple of instructive works on calligraphy, or the "art of writing." (You can see one of these here.) In our book, he uses the curious title "graveur ordinaire du Roy pour ces [ses] finances" I have no clue as to what his duties in the royal "finances" might have been (bonds, at a guess), but as one of the king's "graveurs ordinaires," he was entitled to lodgings in the Louvre palace or the Gobelins tapestry factory, among other privileges.

Finally, the equestrian portrait of the king that precedes the large plates is a collaboration among several artists, including Le Parmentier, who signed the especially ornate caption. The figure of the king in battle dress on a rearing horse was painted by Charles Parrocel (1688–1752), a specialist in horses and military accoutrements who admittedly wasn't good at faces. Accordingly, the "teste" (tête, or head) is by Jean Chevalier (approximately 1725–1790), a portrait specialist who was here following the work of yet another artist, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne (1704–1778), a sculptor noted for his lifelike portrait busts, including many of the king.

The finished portrait was engraved by Johann Georg (or Jean-Georges) Wille (1715–1808), German-born but living in Paris from his twenty-first year. In later life, he would be a noted art collector and dealer as well as a prolific printmaker, but at the time he was still making a name for himself as a portrait engraver and a protégé of the great portraitist Hyacinthe Rigaud. He would go on to operate one of the largest Parisian printmaking workshops, comparable to that of Le Bas, which would become a gathering place for artists, collectors and dealers, as well as the training grounds for a generation of young German artisans whose wanderlust had brought them to the City of Light. Unlike Le Bas, however, Wille actually executed the prints he signed, including this one (here, he spells his name "Will").

The portrait was rather an afterthought. Klinglin may have noticed that the figure of the king in the festival scenes was conspicuous by its inconspicuousness, hidden in the royal carriage or indistinguishable on a crowded balcony. Only in Plate 4 (with the help of a numbered key) can the king's form be discerned with certainty, and he also appears in the vignette on the first page of the text, though he's only recognizable by the fact that his is the only caparisoned horse and by the general direction of the crowd's gestures (I've added a red arrow to the version shown below). The king and other intended recipients of the commemorative volume would surely appreciate a more triumphalist image of the monarch heading up the suite of prints. 

But when it was finished, Klinglin wasn't satisfied. As late as January 1748, he complained to Andrieux, the Strasbourg chargé d'affaires in Paris who was assisting with the administrative side of the project, that the portrait didn't look like the king—in fact he had never seen a portrait that so little resembled him. He wanted the plate retouched. But Andrieux replied that the final proof had been corrected by "the famous Lemoyne and Parrocel," and engraved by Wille, whom some thought the most skilled craftsman in all Europe. Klinglin had to let it go, reasoning that the engraving process can never produce as good a likeness as a painting. 

When the costs of the additional engravings (title page, portrait, text) were added to the 12,000 livres promised to Le Bas for the ten plates, the expense rose to just under 20,000 livres for the engraving alone. To this, the Magistracy had to add Weis's fee of 5,400 livres and sums for the purchase of materials such as the huge copper engraving plates and the reams of fine paper, as well as the cost of the actual printing and of lodging the printer, Laurent Aubert, on the floor above Weis's Parisian abode, along with his press. This last was necessitated by the fact that the Magistracy had originally stipulated that all printing would be done in Strasbourg, the better to keep an eye on the process and ensure that no single copies of the prints leaked out on the open market. When the time came to begin the printing, in late 1746, Weis persuaded the Magistracy to let the printer stay in Paris, but he had to promise to watch the operation like a hawk. Of the paper samples Weis sent to Strasbourg for the Magistracy's approval, the most expensive was chosen, following Klinglin's recommendation that they should use the finest paper that was to be found in Paris. All this drove the total expenses for the project up to 40,660 livres by the end of 1747, when the printing was finally completed.

And that was before binding. Though books in the eighteenth century were often sold unbound or in a simple binding supplied by the bookseller, the nature of this project meant that the Magistracy would have to go for luxury in the outer dress of the volumes as well as the interior. Therefore their choice fell on the most celebrated binder of the day, Antoine-Michel Padeloup, called Padeloup le jeune (1685–1758), "relieur ordinaire du roi de France" since 1733 and one of the first binders to sign his work, by means of a small label usually on the inside of the front cover. Here, it is mounted on the title page, beneath the printer's name, signaling that the binding was an important part of the presentation. 

Padeloup was noted for his work with this kind of oversized volume of prints. Because of their size, he worked with large plaques to impress the gilt decoration, rather than the small tools used on ordinary volumes. Originally, the plan was to have him bind all 2,000 copies, but that would have cost more than the amount spent on everything else to date, so it was decided that half the edition would be issued in plain paper wrappers. For the other thousand copies, Padeloup's bill came to almost 22,000 livres, bringing the project's total cost to the Magistry to 62,595 livres. This was about three-quarters of the annual sum brought in by the Stallgeld, a direct tax on capital levied by the city.

Historical currency comparisons are difficult, but some sources indicate that around 1750, a French day laborer would have been paid less than a livre a day on average. One figure I came up with has 62,595 French livres worth £2,608 in 1750s British currency, which is reckoned as the equivalent of around $532,143 in modern US dollars. Calculating it another way, at that time the official value of a livre was set at 0.312 grams of pure gold (to use the modern unit of weight). In April of 2015, a gram of gold is selling for about $38.55, which would give us a sum of $752,868. In any event, it seems probable that the production costs for the edition of 2,000 copies would work out to several hundred modern dollars per volume.

There were five classes of binding of various orders of luxury depending on the prominence of the intended recipient. The first three classes (223 copies) were of morocco, with gilt borders and the royal arms in the center, like the Spencer Collection copies; some had the Strasbourg arms or personal arms as well. The two cheaper classes (777 copies) were of calf, but still with gilt ornaments and the royal arms. All of this work was done in the opening months of 1748, which suggests that Padeloup's workshop in the Place de la Sorbonne must have employed many assistants. 

In April of 1748, the wondrous volume was finally ready, and of course the first copy would go to the king. And who better to present it than the préteur royal himself? On April 30, he breathlessly informed the Magistracy:

"I have reason to think that it would be very satisfying for you to be apprised that on the 24th of this month ... I traveled to Versailles; that the minister admitted me to a private audience with the king, just back from the royal hunt, and that there, in the midst of the most populous and most brilliant court, I had the honor to present to His Majesty, in your name and on your behalf, Messieurs, the book containing the prints and the description of the festivities celebrated in 1744 on the occasion of the king's recovery and on His Majesty's arrival and during his visit. This presentation was made in the presence of the dauphin, the princes and ministers, and other grandees of the court ...Their Majesties and the royal family, and very distinctly the king himself, deigned to show much satisfaction with this new proof of your zeal, Messieurs, and with the magnificence of your book, as likewise the beauties of the contents were admired by the entire court."

The volumes were then duly distributed to the intended recipients, including everyone whose influence was deemed potentially useful to the city of Strasbourg or to Klinglin personally. Important Strasbourgers also got copies, especially if they were Klinglin's friends. The distribution continued for several years, but eventually efforts were made to sell the remaining copies, with mediocre success.

Both Klinglin and Weis were rewarded for their efforts in this cause. Klinglin obtained the assurance that his office of préteur royal would be passed on to his son, and Weis was granted the right to style himself "graveur de la ville de Strasbourg," which is how his name appears on the title page of our book and in his signature beneath each plate. However, long-term benefits were scant. Klinglin's chicaneries finally caught up with him. Accused of gross malfeasance, he was arrested and thrown into prison in the citadel of Strasbourg on February 25, 1752. He died the next year before his case could come to trial. His son and successor, François-Christophe-Honoré de Klinglin, was also brought down in his fall. He was arrested a month after his father and also died in prison, in 1756. Meanwhile, Weis, his health broken (as he said) by his indefatigable labors on the book, had died a year before Klinglin's arrest, just three years after the publication of the fruit of his efforts. He was only forty. 

Sources

Most of the illustrations in this post are details of the plates in one of the Spencer Collection copies. A couple of larger images are from a copy belonging to the French Institut national de l'histoire de l'art that has been digitized. It may be viewed online, or you can download your very own copy as a .pdf file. If you have a large enough monitor, you can get some idea of what the prints look like when viewed "in real life." I do not recommend viewing them on your phone!

My main sources for the text are a lengthy article from an Alsatian art journal, published in 1923, and a thesis from 2003. Both quote extensively from Strasbourg archival sources, including the correspondence of Klinglin (in French) and Weis (in German). They are:

1. Hatt, Jacques. "La Représentation des fêtes données par la ville de Strasbourg pour la convalescence du roi en 1744: histoire d'un livre." Archives alsaciennes d'histoire de l'art, année 2 (1923), pages 140–166.
2. Mangin, Jacqueline. L'entrée royale de Louis XV à Strasbourg: le livre et les festivités. Thesis, Université de Haute-Alsace, 2003. PDF available online.

For background on the artists and craftsmen, I've used standard reference sources such as the Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon (the online version is available at all NYPL locations) and Oxford Art Online (available onsite at NYPL and from anywhere for NYPL cardholders). In some cases, information I found there led me further afield. Here are a few sources for more extensive information:

1. Devauchelle, Roger. La reliure en France, de ses origines à nos jours. Paris: Jean Rousseau-Girard, 1959–1961 (3 volumes). ("Padeloup, Antoine-Michel, relieur du roi Louis XV," volume 2, pages 37–45.)
2. Dilke, Emilia. French Engravers and Draughtsmen of the XVIIIth Century. London: George Bell and Sons, 1902. Available online via HathiTrust. (Chapter V, "Wille and his pupils," pages 69–83; chapter VI, "Laurent Cars, Flipart and Le Bas," pages 84–96.)
3. Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. Portraits intimes du dix-huitième siècle. Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880. Available online via HathiTrust. ("Le Bas," pages 287–314,  including some marvelous anecdotes about Mme. Le Bas, who once dared to shush the great Voltaire himself when he talked during a performance in the Comédie française.)
4. Portalis, Roger, and Henri Béraldi. Les graveurs du dix-huitième siècle. Paris: Damascène Morgand et Charles Fatout, 1880–1882 (3 volumes). Available online via HathiTrust. (Entries on Babel, Le Bas, Marvie, Parrocel, and Wille.)

Finally, for information on the singular institutions and traditions of mid-18th-century Strasbourg and the career and downfall of François-Joseph de Klinglin, see: Livet, Georges, and Francis Rapp, editors. Histoire de Strasbourg des origines à nos jours, tome III, Strasbourg de la guerre de Trente Ans à Napoléon, 1618–1815. Strasbourg: Éditions des Dernières nouvelles de Strasbourg, 1981. (In particular, livre IV, "Institutions, traditions, et sociétés," by Georges Livet, pages 253–375.)