In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French furniture of the classic period 1660-1815, has been collected as passionately by non-French amateurs, with the English in the historical lead, and has set record prices consistently, since the Hamilton Palace sale of 1882. In the metropolitan culture of France, French furniture connotes Parisian furniture; furniture made in provincial centers such as Blois and Orl?ans in the Loire valley, and at Lyon or Li'ge (never part of France politically but within its cultural orbit), followed at some distance the design innovations that were initiated in the luxury trades of Paris, often with a time lag that could amount to decades; its history is told separately: French provincial furniture. In Paris, an unbroken tradition of apprenticeship, already fully-formed when the design center for luxury furnishings shifted from Antwerp to Paris in the 1630s, was slowly disrupted by the Industrial Revolution after the mid-nineteenth century. Perhaps the last of the Parisian ?b'nistes working from a traditional atelier was ?mile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933).



In Paris, the furniture trade was divided among craft guilds with jealous regard for infringements. Menuisiers were solely occupied with carved furnishings, which included beds and all seat furniture, as they were for the carved boiseries of the interiors they were destined to occupy. Carvers and gilders worked directly for them. ?b'nistes, who drew their name from the ebony that they worked into cabinets that were carved in shallow relief and incorporated veneers of tortoiseshell and ivory, a specialty of Paris furniture in the mid-seventeenth century, retained their control over all carcase furniture that was intended to be veneered, often with elaborate marquetry. The bronze mounts that decorated these high-style case-pieces, from the 1660s to the abolition of guilds in the French Revolution, was furnished, and even carried to the ?b'niste's workshop by separate guilds of foundrymen.

French furniture of the Ancien R'gime, often characterised by dealers and collectors by reign-names, as "Louis Quinze furniture", etc., can be seen as representative, even formative, manifestations of broader European styles: French Gothic furniture, of which so little has survived; French Renaissance furniture of the sixteenth century; Early Baroque furniture associated with Louis XIII, comparable to what was produced at Antwerp; sculptural and tectonic High Baroque furniture associated with Louis XIV; Rococo furniture, associated with the R'gence and the reign of Louis XV; and Neoclassical furniture, associated with Louis XVI.

French furniture of the Revolution and the First French Empire is imbued with a more severe, self-consciously archaeological phase of Neoclassicism, which began to lose its grip on styles in the 1830s, with Gothic and Rococo revivals, leading to the eclecticism of the French Second Empire. Art Nouveau provided one form of reaction to the battle of the historicist styles, and Modernism marked a more rigorous break with the past. Art Deco offered a decorative version of Modernism.

Since the Second World War, the manufacture of furniture in France, devolved from the prominence of the capital itself, has been part of the increasingly international world of industrial design.

The grand tradition of French royal furniture received its impetus from the establishment of the Manufacture royale des Gobelins under the organisation of the arts in the service of Louis XIV of France that was controlled and directed by his minister of finance, Colbert. Favoured craftsmen would be eligible for premises in the galleries of the Palais du Louvre, a practice that had been initiated on a small scale under Henri IV. At the Gobelins, much more than tapestry was made for the furnishing of the royal palaces and the occasional ambassadorial gift: the celebrated silver furnishings for the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles was produced by silversmiths working to designs by Charles Le Brun at the Gobelins.