| Summary: | In the seventeenth century, copies of court regulations seem to have multiplied, so much so that each regulation organizing court life can be found in several copies in the archival holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Archives Nationales. This proliferation was in part the result of the royal commitment to archive old texts, in order to have reference documents. From the 1650s onwards, this work made it possible to publish new versions of court regulations, which were largely based on previous normative acts. But it is also a sign of the desire of the officials to have documents describing ancient customs, to maintain the organization of the royal houses during previous reigns, and their efforts to reaffirm and preserve their rights. As a result, the innovative nature court regulation during Louis XIV’s reign seems more measured than was previously thought, since a large portion of the usages are old and only written or copied from older regulations dating back to the fourteenth century.
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