tabouret

Tabouret comes from French tabouret, a diminutive of tabour (drum), from Arabic ṭabūr or Persian tabīr (drum). The stool was named for its shape: a small, round, drum-like seat without a back. The connection between a percussion instrument and a piece of furniture was purely visual — both were cylindrical and flat-topped.

At the court of Louis XIV, the tabouret became the most coveted privilege in France. Only duchesses and princesses of the blood were allowed to sit on a tabouret in the presence of the king and queen. Everyone else stood. The right to the tabouret — le droit du tabouret — was a matter of intense social competition. Marriages were arranged, alliances forged, and feuds fought over who could sit on a small stool in a room where most people had to stand for hours.

Saint-Simon, the memoirist who documented life at Versailles with obsessive detail, wrote extensively about tabouret disputes. The Duchess of Rohan's right to the tabouret, the debate over whether a foreign princess outranked a French duchess — these occupied the court's attention as seriously as matters of state. The furniture's simplicity was the point. The stool had no back, no arms, no cushion. Its value was entirely social.

After the Revolution, the tabouret lost its political charge and became what it had been before Versailles: a small stool. The word survives in French and English for a drum-shaped stool or stand, often used by artists and craftspeople. The most politically significant piece of furniture in ancien régime France is now sold at IKEA.