Power houses: furnishing authority in New France 1660-1760
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In New France, public buildings were imbued with powerful symbolism both inside and out. The use of terms such as castle (château ), palace (palais ), and private townhouse (hôtel or hôtel particulier ) to designate structures built for colonial notables underscored their rank within the socio-political framework of the French Ancien Régime. Inside stately colonial residences built at royal expense, material manifestations of power and fashion converged to create microcosms of monarchical absolutism and aristocratic sociability an ocean away from the metropole. Like their counterparts in France, colonial governors, intendants, bishops, and others made full use of physical objects and spaces to legitimize authority, articulate elite identity, and arbitrate good taste. Imported furniture, tapestries, mirrors, and other items allowed these individuals to live according to courtly etiquette and style launched at Versailles in addition to trends for comfort refined in Paris. Through the lens of archival records, architecture, and decorative arts, this study draws connections between the ownership of such commodities in New France and the development and entrenchment of elite cultural practice there. An approach combining Atlantic world history, biography, material culture theory, and social history specifically targets expressions of authority through material display, unpacking efforts by colonial officials to adhere to an established set of values and standards that were thoroughly French. Considering their experiences in both France and in French colonies stretching from Canada to Louisiana, this thesis further contextualizes the nearly vanished material worlds of political elites in New France. The interpretive period spans the 1660s, the decade in which French North America was made a royal province, through the 1760s, when it was lost to Great Britain and Spain at the end of the Seven Years' War
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".