Charles Perrault
1628-1703 · French · Paris, France
For younger readers
Charles Perrault lived in France about three hundred and fifty years ago. He had an important job working for the king, but the thing he is remembered for is much smaller: one thin book of fairy tales that he wrote down for children. Almost every princess story you know started in that book.
Life
Charles Perrault was a French government official who, late in a respectable career, published a slim book of eight fairy tales and accidentally invented the modern genre. His Histoires ou contes du temps passe of 1697 gave the world the versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots that everyone still tells. He took stories that had been passed around kitchens and inns for centuries, wrote them down in clear elegant French, attached a rhyming moral to the end of each, and pointed them at children rather than scholars.
Moments from their life
1628
Born in Paris
Charles Perrault was born in Paris on 12 January 1628, one of seven children in a well-off legal family. He was a bright and argumentative schoolboy who once walked out of a lesson after a disagreement with a teacher and continued his education at home with a friend.
1654
A comfortable career in government
Perrault trained as a lawyer, disliked it, and went to work for his brother collecting taxes. He was good at administration and better at knowing people, and by his forties he was working for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the most powerful minister in France.
1671
Elected to the Academie francaise
He was elected to the Academie francaise, the body that guards the French language, and threw himself into its work, including the enormous project of the first official French dictionary.
1687
The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
Perrault read a poem to the Academie arguing that modern French writers were the equals of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This caused an enormous and long-running literary war, with Perrault leading the Moderns against furious defenders of the classics.
1683
Losing his post, and his wife
Colbert died and Perrault lost his position at court. His wife Marie had died in 1678 after six years of marriage, leaving him with young children. He never remarried, and he raised them himself.
1697
Stories or Tales of Times Past
At sixty-nine he published eight short tales: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, The Fairies, Cinderella, Ricky of the Tuft and Hop o' My Thumb. It appeared under the name of his eleven-year-old son, Pierre.
1703
Death, and what happened next
Perrault died in Paris on 16 May 1703, aged seventy-five. Within a century his eight tales had been translated across Europe, and the Brothers Grimm would collect German versions of several of them, not always realising they had come from a French book.
Things you might not know
- Perrault published the tales under his young son's name, possibly because writing fairy tales was not considered a serious thing for an important man to do.
- The glass slipper may be a mistake. Some scholars think the original was fur (vair), misheard as glass (verre), though others think Perrault chose glass on purpose because it cannot stretch.
- He added a rhyming moral to the end of every tale, which is where the idea that fairy tales must have a lesson comes from.
In their words
- “A great many tales are told to amuse; some are told to teach.”
Stories
Ages 4-9
Cinderella
A girl is made to sleep in the ashes by her stepmother and stepsisters while they go to the ball. With help from her godmother she gets one night out, one beautiful dress, and one warning: be home by midnight. She very nearly is.
9 min readCharles PerraultRead itAges 4-9
Little Red Riding Hood
A girl in a red hood takes a basket to her grandmother's cottage and meets a wolf on the path who asks exactly the right questions. He gets there first. What follows is the most famous conversation in any fairy tale, and it does not end the way she expects.
7 min readCharles PerraultRead itAges 4-9
Sleeping Beauty
A fairy nobody remembered to invite curses a newborn princess to die on a spindle. A younger fairy, hiding behind the curtain with her gift still unspent, cannot undo it and argues it down to a hundred years of sleep instead. In Perrault's original there is no kiss at the end. The hundred years is simply up.
9 min readCharles PerraultRead itAges 5-10
Puss in Boots
A miller leaves his youngest son a cat. The cat asks for a bag and a pair of boots, invents a nobleman called the Marquis de Carabas, and spends three months lying to a king on his master's behalf. There is a river, a field of frightened mowers, and an ogre who should never have taken the bait.
8 min readCharles PerraultRead it
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