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Philippe II, duc d'Orléans and his architect, Gilles-Marie Oppenord, embraced the grand goût style and recast the Palais-Royal as a surrogate Versailles. This shift imagined the Palais-Royal as the center for royal power during the Regency period. This article traces the ways in which renovations from 1713 until 1723 transformed the Palais-Royal. While Louis XV moved the seat of power back to Versailles, Paris remained the center for French politics thanks to duc Orléans and Oppenord.

Bédard gives a review of Meredith Martin's Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press, 2011). This book traces the history of the pleasure dairy, a feature of the pastoral movement in Europe from a feminist perspective. Martin study draws on the literature dealing with the role of the visual arts in the construction of female subjectivity in Modern France to make the case of the importance of pleasure dairies as sights of empowerment from French Noblewomen. Bédard states that Dairy Queens is a strong contribution to discussions of how architecture and material culture reflects the values of court society.

This review of Richard Whitman's Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007) examines the relationship between architectural discourse and political power in Frame from 1671 until the end of the ancient regime. The volume successfully foregrounds the socio-political functions of architectural writing, though the use of Habermas' thesis proves to be less convincing. Some of his arguments also tend to be simplistic or schematics .Nonetheless, this volume is a valuable contribution to the study of French architecture during the eighteenth century.