1717 in France
Events from the year 1717 in France.
Incumbents
- Monarch - Louis XV
- Regent: Philip II of Orleans
Events
- 4 January - Triple Alliance treaty between France, the Dutch Republic and Great Britain against Spain
Arts and culture
- 27 March - Actress Adrienne Lecouvreur is invited to join the Comédie-Française in Paris, performing first in the title rôle of Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon's Electre
- 16 May - Voltaire is sentenced to eleven months in the Bastille and banished from Paris for criticizing the Duc D'Orléans; while in prison he writes his first play, Oedipe
- The last two volumes of Antoine Galland's Les mille et une nuits are published posthumously in Lyon of the first translation of One Thousand and One Nights into a European language, including the first translation of the story of Ali Baba
Births
- 18 January - Jean-François-Marie de Surville, trader and navigator
- 8 May - Charles Guillaume Le Normant d'Étiolles, official, husband of Madame de Pompadour
- 20 June - Jacques Saly, sculptor
- 27 June - Louis Guillaume Lemonnier, botanist
- 13 August - Louis François, Prince of Conti, nobleman, military leader
- 15 August - Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, dramatist
- 5 October - Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle duchess de Châteauroux, mistress of King Louis XV
- 16 November - Jean le Rond d'Alembert, mathematician and encyclopædist
- 29 December - Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, statesman and diplomat
Full date unknown
- Claude Humbert Piarron de Chamousset, philanthropist
Deaths
- 3 March - Pierre Allix, Protestant clergyman
- 5 March - François de Callières, diplomat, member of the Académie française
- 3 April - Jacques Ozanam, mathematician
- 5 April - Jean Jouvenet, painter
- 8 April - Antoine Benoist, painter and sculptor
- 17 May - Bon Boullogne, painter
- 9 June - Jeanne Guyon, mystic
- 11 June - Louis de Carrières, priest and Bible commentator
- 29 June - Augustin le Gardeur de Courtemanche, soldier and ambassador
- 13 August - Nicolas Perrot, explorer, fur trader and diplomat
- September - Casimir Oudin, monk and librarian
- October - Philippe Pastour de Costebelle, naval officer and Governor of Newfoundland
- 21 November - Jean-Baptiste Santerre, painter