A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France 9780812293869

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A Theater of Diplomacy

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A Theater of Diplomacy International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France

Ellen R. Welch

u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a

Haney Foundation Series A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Welch, Ellen R., author. Title: A theater of diplomacy : international relations and the performing arts in early modern France / Ellen R. Welch. Other titles: Haney Foundation series. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Haney Foundation series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045442 | ISBN 9780812249002 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Cultural diplomacy—France—History—16th century. | Cultural ­diplomacy—France—History—17th century. | Cultural diplomacy—France— History—18th century. | Performing arts—Political aspects—France—History— 16th century. | Performing arts—Political aspects—France—History—17th century. | Performing arts—Political aspects—France—History—18th century. | France— Foreign relations—History—16th century. | France—Foreign relations—History— 17th century. | France—Foreign relations—History—18th century. Classification: LCC JZ1587 .W44 2017 | DDC 327.44009/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045442

Contents

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Orchestrating Dissonant Concord in the Bayonne Entertainments (1565)

11

Chapter 2. The Ambassador’s Point of View, from London to Paris (1608–9)

33

Chapter 3. National Actors on the Ballet Stage (1620s–30s)

58

Chapter 4. Richelieu’s Allegories of War (1639–42)

82

Chapter 5. Ballet Diplomacy at the Congress of Westphalia (1645–49)

107

Chapter 6. Entertaining Personalities at Louis XIV’s Court (1653–69)

131

Chapter 7. Exotic Audiences (1668–1715)

156

Chapter 8. Diplomacy on the Public Stage (1697–1714)

185

Conclusion 209 Notes 215 Bibliography

271

Index 291 Acknowledgments 301

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Introduction

Metaphors of the performing arts abound in talk about diplomacy. Journalists condemn the emptiness of “diplomatic theater” when negotiations seem to serve no purpose other than political posturing. At other times, skillful negotiators receive praise for carefully “choreographing” a “diplomatic dance” and avoiding any “misstep.” The eighteenth-­century notion of a “concert of nations” survives in today’s discourse if only as an ideal of global concord.1 However trite, these metaphors retain their currency because they concisely evoke the aims and intricacies of diplomatic negotiation. Like a play, ballet, or symphony, diplomacy requires a coordinated effort by multiple players. It demands a degree of responsiveness, perhaps the ability to improvise. Diplomats need a sense of theatricality and an eye for symbolism—an awareness of how actions will be interpreted by negotiating partners and the broader public. Finally, when it works, diplomacy should produce—at least temporarily—order and harmony in the world. A similar lexicon pervaded discourses on international negotiation in early modern Europe. From the advent of those practices that we would recognize as features of modern diplomacy (such as ambassador exchange), commentators characterized diplomats as performers. Writers about diplomacy relied heavily on a theatrical vocabulary to describe the ambassador’s work. In the 1580s, for example, Italian theorist Alberico Gentili recommended that diplomats attempt to act like and even to “assume” the personality of the princes they represent, as if playing his character on a stage.2 In his influential tome L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions (first published 1680), Dutch legalist Abraham de Wicquefort wrote: “In all the world’s commerce, there is no personage more actor-­like than the ambassador.”3 In a 1716 work, French diplomat François de Callières echoed: “An ambassador resembles in some way an actor exposed on the stage to the eyes of the public in order to play great roles.”4 Although framed as comparisons, it would be unfair to characterize these references to theatrical performance as mere metaphors. As countless manuals stressed, a

2 Introduction

good ambassador needed a strong repertoire of performance skills. To succeed in his mission, he had to deliver good speeches and carry himself with grace in the elaborate ceremonies of diplomacy. He had to be able to dissimulate as well as any actor—to tell lies or at least conceal knowledge—in order to gather intelligence for his master. In addition, early modern diplomats were sometimes called on to perform in artistic contexts as well as in negotiations. As a resident in a foreign court, an ambassador had to be able to participate in the routine festivities of aristocratic society. This meant riding in equestrian pageants, dancing at balls, dressing up for masquerades, perhaps singing on occasion. It is not surprising, in this context, that ambassadorship was considered an “art.” In fact, throughout early modern Europe, the performing arts infused the day-­to-­day lives of ambassadors. In addition to their own quotidian uses of performance techniques, diplomats took part in the entertainments of music, dance, poetry, and pageantry that celebrated peace treaties and punctuated the annual rhythms of court life. Foreign diplomats constituted an important sector of the audience for masques in Stuart and Jacobin England, court ballets in Valois and Bourbon France, royal processions in Spain, and noble families’ theatrical celebrations of Catholic holidays throughout Italy. Ambassadors sometimes hosted parties with music, dancing, and fireworks to congratulate their host regime on a royal birth or to diffuse their own sovereigns’ good news abroad. Such “diplomatic entertainments” were frequent and common throughout the early modern era. Their ubiquity raises the question: Exactly what kind of diplomatic work did these entertainments perform? This book investigates the multiple, evolving diplomatic functions of theatrical entertainments from the mid-­ sixteenth to the early eighteenth century—the period in which “modern” diplomacy emerged and took hold in Europe. The culture of diplomatic entertainment developed in tandem with broad shifts in the theory and practice of diplomacy: the custom of exchanging resident ambassadors, pioneered in Renaissance Italy, was adopted throughout Europe by the second half of the sixteenth century.5 It became codified over the course of the following century, giving rise to internationally accepted rules and conventions regarding diplomatic immunity and extraterritoriality. By the Congress of Utrecht in 1713, a coherent diplomatic system— which some commentators consider the modern one—had been established throughout the continent.6 This set of shared diplomatic practices facilitated a major renegotiation of European powers’ relationship to one another in the long post-­Reformation era, gradually replacing the authority of the pope as

Introduction 3

the primary agent of mediation among princes. Throughout this extended period of transition, theatrical entertainments performed in diplomatic contexts—whether at court for an audience of resident ambassadors or at summits and congresses—both paralleled and played an active role in these shifts. In fact, the emergent diplomatic culture depended on a set of theatrical practices that translated seamlessly from the scene of diplomacy (the court, the summit, the negotiating room) to the stage. These practices could be grouped into three broad categories: embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship. As seen in the diplomatic manuals cited above, the language of theatrical representation pervaded discourses on diplomacy to describe the ambassador’s role. Ambassadors not only had to speak for their princes in addresses and negotiations but also were charged with continually embodying the “dignity” of their sovereigns, particularly in relation to other diplomatic representatives. The imperative to maintain dignity derived from the primary way the European diplomatic community was imagined and represented in the early modern period. From the early sixteenth century, the “rule of precedence” organized European states into a theoretical hierarchy of prestige, an international-­scale mirror image of the system of rank that governed interactions among barons, dukes, and marquises within individual court societies. The conventional “rule” by which kingdoms outranked duchies and other lesser principalities took concrete form whenever delegates from several states assembled—whether at a diplomatic congress, royal wedding, or funeral— and was reflected in the order of procession. Such ceremonies constituted dramatic representations in microcosm of the imaginary order that structured the European community of princes. Not only ambassadors but entire courts worked to represent the international dignity of the monarch through sumptuous, highly stage-­managed diplomatic ceremonies such as royal audiences as well as through formal entertainments. The representation of monarchal power is a familiar theme in scholarship on court spectacle. Roy Strong’s foundational Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 examines how entertainments became “a natural part of the apparatus of the Baroque monarch” and “a central instrument of government” by making manifest the ruler’s magnificence.7 A diverse array of scholars working in post-­structuralist or New Historicist traditions have also shown how court entertainments functioned as strategic or ideologically driven displays of power.8 But while most of these analyses have focused on representations’ power to “impress” domestic spectators with the prince’s overwhelming authority, early modern commentators more often described court

4 Introduction

entertainments as a means to dazzle foreign observers. During Louis XIV’s reign, for example, French theorist and playwright Samuel Chappuzeau wrote that spectacular performances should “make foreigners see what a king of France can do in his kingdom.”9 Monarchs competed with each other to design ever more impressive forms of entertainment at their courts. Christian IV of Denmark, for example, enchanted diplomatic visitors at his pleasure house in Rosenborg with “invisible concerts” performed by musicians concealed in an antechamber and piped in through architectural conduits, provoking wonder through a masterful display of “sonic control.”10 In mid-­seventeenth-­century France, ministers and diplomats worked to import Italy’s premier artists and engineers to enrich French court theater practices and make them the best in Europe. Performed before a captive audience of ambassadors, court entertainments exhibited the wealth and artistic talent amassed by the monarch for international appreciation. This understanding of entertainments’ function might be considered an early modern equivalent to what Joseph Nye calls “soft power”: the power that “arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture” and values in foreign eyes.11 The importance of such “attractiveness” in an early modern context resulted from the way European society as a whole was represented in the diplomatic imagination as monarchs jockeyed to maintain or achieve a favorable place in the fictive hierarchy of international society. Beyond their role as ostentatious displays of prestige, diplomatic entertainments also engaged explicitly in the task of imagining or reimagining international relations in their content, through allegorical iconography. Many ballets and pageants performed for a diplomatic audience reflected on international themes by personifying “nations” and even “Europe” itself as dramatic characters interacting with each other onstage. Iconographies for international relations offered a stylized language for thinking about the nature of political community. This was particularly true through the last decade of the Thirty Years’ War and during the Congress of Westphalia when French “ballets of nations” reenacted that country’s relations with Spain and the Italian and German states in allegorical form. These mise-­en-­scènes of European diplomatic society highlight the artificiality of the idea of Europe in the early modern period. Far from a static concept, it could be manipulated by artists and patrons to respond to shifting political conditions. The malleability of “Europe” comes into focus when viewed in the context of diplomatic entertainments and through the lens of performance studies. “Europe” appears here as a performative category, reinvented with each reiteration on the stage. In this sense, the practice of

Introduction 5

performance worked to mediate, or to enact, the broader legal and political reorganization of European diplomatic society. Anthropological theories of performance furnish one way to conceptualize this function of early modern diplomatic entertainments. Spectacles staged during times of international crisis lend themselves particularly well to analysis as examples of what Victor Turner terms “social dramas”: performances that function as quasi-­rituals to resolve fractures in a community. Such events move the community through four “phases of public action”: from a “breach of regular norm-­governed social relations,” to “crisis” and side-­taking, to “redress” through self-­reflexive contemplation and remediation, and finally to reintegration.12 Commenting on the “liminal” character of ritual performances, Turner remarks: “We are presented, in such rites, with a ‘moment in and out of time,’ . . . which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond.”13 Turner calls that “generalized social bond” communitas, a “community, or communion” brought together by feeling and symbolism rather than by social, political, or legal structures.14 Seventeenth-­ century theorists certainly noted the socially therapeutic dimension of diplomatic entertainments, attributing to them the power to heal rifts after international wars, for example. The Jesuit commentator Claude-­François Ménestrier recommended ballets for precisely this purpose, noting that a people “must rejoice . . . after such inquietudes.”15 There is a case to be made that routine performances, even those that took place during peacetime, also did important work to reimagine the political community represented by the statesmen and delegates who participated in them. Up until the early sixteenth century, the legacy of the Roman Empire and the idea of Christendom provided a strong basis for a discourse of European unity. As Anthony Pagden has shown, even though “Europe” was always an “uncertain and imprecise” concept, the cultural glue of Latinity and the political force of the Holy Roman Empire facilitated rhetorical formulations of unity, such as Charlemagne’s self-­proclamation as “Father of Europe” (pater europae) or Charles Quint’s title as “lord of all Europe” (totius europae dominus).16 That language lost its power in the sixteenth century, as the Reformation weakened the political authority of the Catholic Church and as European powers began competing over New World resources.17 The widespread adoption of modern diplomatic practices including the exchange of resident ambassadors could be seen as one response to the fracturing of the European political community. In Robert Jackson’s terminology, the “universitas” model for conceptualizing

6 Introduction

the community of Christian states shifted toward a “societas” model in which sovereign states adhering to different political and theological regimes came together to negotiate their relationships to each other through legal and diplomatic tools.18 In this sense, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent a prolonged transitional—or perhaps liminal—period in which Europe as an idea and as a community of states underwent a crisis and (partial, temporary) resolution of its identity. Theatrical entertainments had an important role to play in Europe’s conceptual reintegration. Often, they brought members of the diplomatic community together in the activity of performance. Foreign dignitaries played roles alongside local courtiers, as when the Spanish minister the Duke of Alba rode in a masquerade equestrian game in France in 1565, or when the English exiles the Duke of York and Duke of Buckingham danced in the Ballet royal de la nuit in Paris in 1653. Even when diplomats simply attended masques or ballets, they would be expected to “perform” alongside other courtiers in the social dancing that followed the show. These inclusionary gestures allowed court performances to celebrate values and behaviors that European statesmen held in common. At a time when ambassadors were drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the aristocracy, ballets and equestrian spectacles functioned as an aesthetic meeting ground for a transnational patrician community and as quasi-­ritualistic reenactments of bodily practices associated with nobility, namely dance and horsemanship. The importance of a social and civilizational foundation for diplomatic interactions has been stressed by thinkers associated with the “English school” of international relations, particularly Hedley Bull. He coined the phrase “society of states” or “international society” to designate “a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values” that “form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.”19 The history of international relations, in this view, entails attending to the construction of norms—cultural and social as well as legal and institutional—that governed the interaction of states over time. Bull and his followers did not elaborate on the role of artistic endeavors in forming international societies. It is clear, though, that the performing arts played an important role in early modern international norms of sociability. Ballets and other court entertainments functioned as community events or quasi-­rituals that brought the diplomatic corps together. They offered themselves as a stylized celebration of social practices common to European aristocrats, a spectacular reification of shared values. Yet, as performances, they also

Introduction 7

called attention to the fact that these shared values and the relationships they structured could be revised each time they were rehearsed anew. The overlapping yet conceptually distinct categories of dramatic representation and performance attend to how the production of theatrical entertainments influenced international relations. What about questions of reception? Diplomatic entertainments addressed themselves to particular publics, including both eyewitnesses of live performances (courtiers, ambassadors, sometimes paying spectators) and vicarious audiences who consumed secondhand accounts in correspondence or published relations. Strategies of address illuminate the kinds of effects diplomatic entertainments were thought to have. The language of harmony in early entertainments implied an almost mystical belief in poetry, music, and dance to instill concord among spectators. As one court artist wrote, experiencing a dance performance helped achieve “a conformity of the body to the soul, and the soul to music,” and “harmony perfectly unites all things.”20 Later, theatrical entertainments on topics such as war and peace rhetorically addressed their diplomatic audiences to persuade negotiators toward a particular course of action. Sometimes they used dramatic techniques to play on audiences’ emotions. Yet individual accounts of diplomatic spectatorship, preserved in diplomatic correspondence and memoirs, provide a corrective to theories of entertainments’ power as an effective force for unity and harmony. Confusion, misunderstanding, and conflicts about the quality of hospitality extended to diplomatic audience members all bring to concrete life the strife entailed in international relations. In these various ways, diplomatic entertainments lend themselves to an approach that Timothy Hampton has called a “diplomatic poetics.” In Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe, he proposes “a way of reading literature that would be attuned to the shadow of the Other at the edge of the national community, and a way of reading diplomacy that would take into account its fictional and linguistic dimensions.”21 Such a chiasmic reading produces an understanding of literature itself as “a space and tool of compromise.”22 A Theater of Diplomacy draws inspiration from Hampton’s diplomatic model of reading but shifts the focus from linguistic procedures to performance practices. To paraphrase Hampton, this book adopts a way of interpreting theatrical court entertainments that is attuned to the presence and participation of members of the international community, and a way of analyzing diplomatic encounters that takes into account the theatricality of international affairs. It examines how practices of dramatic representation,

8 Introduction

performance, and spectatorship transferred between the literal stage and the “theater of diplomacy” writ large. The intertwined histories of early modern international relations and the performing arts involve Europe as a whole but come into particular focus when viewed through the case of France. During the long period in which a modern image of the European community emerged, France excelled at using spectacular entertainment for diplomatic advantage. The strategic use of the performing arts in French diplomacy began under the queenship of Catherine de’ Medici, who imported Florentine traditions of court spectacle to France following her marriage to Henri II. The French quickly earned an international reputation as masters of the form. In particular, the French forged a style of court ballet that proved especially compelling for diplomatic uses. These perennial events on the court calendar were well adapted to commenting on matters of international import. With help from lavish costumes and explanatory poetic texts distributed in printed libretti, dancers incarnated allegorical or mythological figures to play out spectacular reflections on themes such as pleasure, love, the arts, war, and peace. For early modern audiences, moreover, ballet represented an ideal fusion of music, dance, poetry, and visual art in theatrical form. The hybrid genre modeled diplomatic negotiation at the level of art by containing multiple, often conflicting aesthetics within one performance. The fractured, polysemous nature of ballet might even be considered an advantage for diplomatic communication when obfuscation was more appropriate than clarity. Ambassadors in the audience could draw their own conclusions about the French position on an ongoing treaty negotiation or proposed alliance, all the while being impressed by the display of wealth and talent on the dance floor. Ballet was also instrumental in augmenting France’s cultural clout in Europe. The French form of ballet de cour influenced how other European courts practiced the art—sometimes exported with French princesses who married into foreign royal families (as when Henrietta-­Maria became Charles I of England’s queen and oversaw a renovation of the masque),23 sometimes imitated in an act of cultural rivalry (as when Christina of Sweden ordered the construction of a salle de ballet that mimicked the dimensions of French ballet stages).24 By Louis XIV’s era, the French court had established itself as the epitome of pomp, a European capital of theatrical splendor. This distinction bolstered France’s claim to precedence in international society in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, laying the groundwork for the emergence of the trope of “French Europe” in the age of the Republic of Letters.25

Introduction 9

Diplomacy itself became French in this era as French thinkers such as François de Callières established normative practices for negotiation and as French replaced Latin as the predominant lingua franca of diplomatic congresses.26 This cultural hegemony derived, at least in part, from France’s investment in spectacular entertainments whose reputation echoed throughout Europe. The chapters that follow investigate several of the most richly documented examples of diplomatic entertainment either organized or witnessed by French statesmen from the mid-­sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Arranged chronologically, the chapters trace major evolutions in the theory and practice of diplomacy and court spectacle, particularly from the French perspective. The book begins in the mid-­ sixteenth century when Valois patrons attempted—and largely failed—to heal international conflicts by commissioning entertainments from artists steeped in idealistic, neo-­Platonic theories of the performing arts’ ability to bring about earthly harmony. A more productive period for diplomatic entertainments was ushered in by a shift from neo-­Platonic to neo-­Aristotelian understandings of the arts’ power in the early and mid-­seventeenth century. As the custom of including the diplomatic corps in court entertainments became routine, a conventional repertoire of iconography and choreography emerged to reflect upon matters of war, peace, and international alliance. Ballets and other spectacles constituted a kind of rhetoric capable of engaging with diplomatic questions for an exclusive audience in possession of the cultural knowledge to understand and appreciate its rarefied languages. Across different European stages, sovereigns, via diplomatic spectators, engaged in a conversation about diplomacy through the performing arts. Under Louis XIV, the flourishing of court entertainment paradoxically led to a diminishment of its diplomatic efficacy, as the mise-­ en-­scène of absolute monarchy was increasingly inhospitable to the idea of a “conversation” among European powers. At the same time, entertainments aimed to construct a more global diplomatic society by expanding the audience for Louis’s glory beyond Europe into Asia and Africa. By the turn of the eighteenth century, French political and cultural dominance led to the emergence of a well-­codified, French-­inflected style of diplomacy that influenced diplomatic practice across Europe. This modern form of diplomacy emphasized legal and cultural training for diplomats and relied less on the aristocratic arts. By the end of Louis XIV’s reign, the form of expert diplomatic performance that transferred seamlessly between the ballet stage and the courtly one had lost its relevance. The pervasive theatricality of sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­century diplomatic practice was gradually transformed from

10 Introduction

an integral part of statecraft into an empty show. Throughout this period of transition, however, theatrical entertainments continued to play a role in diplomatic interactions. In particular, media coverage of internationally attended court fêtes or performances at the Opera or Palais Royal transformed diplomacy into a virtual spectacle directed at a broader audience of domestic subjects. The “theater of diplomacy” shifted from the exclusive space of the court to a more public sphere. This evolution set the stage for the emergence of modern “public diplomacy” or “cultural diplomacy” as we know it today. Attending to the artistic and theatrical dimension of early modern diplomacy, A Theater of Diplomacy answers John Watkins’s recent call for “a New Diplomatic History” of early modern Europe: a “cross-­disciplinary study of international relations” that would demonstrate diplomacy’s profound entanglements with all facets of culture.27 Complementing recent studies on literary representations of diplomacy, poets’ work as ambassadors, art objects in diplomatic gift exchange, and diplomats as collectors and connoisseurs, this book shows how the arts of spectacle informed diplomatic culture and practice.28 Although the form and uses of diplomatic entertainment evolved significantly over the long period considered here, spectacles consistently highlighted the centrality of theater to diplomatic interactions. Even more than clichéd metaphors likening the ambassador’s role to that of an actor, diplomatic entertainments reveal the performativity of international relations that only become visible through representations (such as allegorical ballets) or in the theatricalized context of a congress or treaty signing. Concrete examples of the uses of dramatic spectacle in international relations demonstrate that the theater served not only as a metaphor for diplomacy but as a site for imagining and theorizing the nature of diplomatic relations.

Chapter 1

Orchestrating Dissonant Concord in the Bayonne Entertainments (1565)

A series of luxurious tapestries housed in the Uffizi Gallery offers spectators a window into the culture of sixteenth-­century court festivity. Members of the French royal family stand at the border of each tableau, gesturing as if to welcome the viewer into their world. The eye tracks toward a middle ground occupied by marvelous displays: a swirling crowd of white horses mounted by richly costumed knights, golden boats circling a tiny island at the center of a bright blue lake, a thrashing sea monster observed by elegantly appointed noblemen and women. Viewers momentarily join the figures represented in the tapestries as witnesses of the renowned spectacles of the Valois court. These sumptuous depictions of royal entertainments likely began their life in a workshop in Flanders, making their way to France by the end of the 1580s.1 From there, they traveled to Florence, sent by Catherine de’ Medici as a gift to her granddaughter Christine de Lorraine on the occasion of her marriage to Grand Duke Ferdinand I in 1589.2 The tapestries’ voyage from the Low Countries to France to Florence exemplifies the importance of gift-­exchange practices in Renaissance Europe. Sumptuous art objects, often featuring complimentary portraits of the recipient, were meant to sweeten political negotiations or cement alliances between royal families. In the case of the Valois tapestries, the gift also represents the final chapter of a longer and more complex story of diplomacy and artistic exchange. The story begins with one of the events the tapestries depict: the series of entertainments staged by the French royal family at Bayonne in June 1565 as part of a diplomatic summit. Over several days, the court hosted a masquerade ring-­tilt joust, an allegorical assault on an enchanted castle, a chivalric

12

Chapter 1

Figure 1. Valois tapestry depicting “The Water Fête” at Bayonne. Polo Museale Regionale della Toscana, Gabinetto Fotografico, Arrazi 493.

tournament, a boat ride, and an island banquet, along with abundant music, fireworks, and feasting. Guests at the event included the French king Charles IX, his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, members of his court, his sister Elisabeth in her role as Philip II of Spain’s queen, and her entourage of courtiers and diplomats, as well as representatives of England, Scotland, Denmark, Venice, Tuscany, the Vatican, and other European states. In their aftermath, the festivities attracted a larger, vicarious audience. Catherine de’ Medici had

Orchestrating Dissonant Concord 13

the official written account of the entire series of entertainments published in France in a handsome in-­quarto volume.3 This account apparently served as the source for the artist Antoine Caron, whose sketches of the events later served as the model for the Flemish tapestry makers. At the same time, several cheaper, pamphlet-­size publications advertised the entertainments to an even wider reading public. One Italian-­language description of the multiday festivities was printed in Milan. A journal of the events kept by Abel Jouan, a sommelier de cuisine or high-­level kitchen servant in Charles’s entourage, appeared as a small book in 1566.4 Beyond these published accounts, written descriptions proliferated in private correspondence, especially through diplomatic networks. Spanish, English, and Italian envoys transcribed their impressions of the ceremonies for their masters back at home. Meanwhile, the royal family sent their version of the events to French diplomats abroad, along with instructions to spread the word of their magnificence. Within a few months of the Bayonne summit, every politician in western Europe would have heard about the entertainments staged there. The diffusion of verbal reports (and a few images) of the festivities demonstrates their importance—and ambivalent utility—as a tool of international relations. It also reveals the complexity of their reception. Their audience was diverse: international, made up of different social ranks and genders, composed of some eyewitnesses and many more vicarious spectators who relied on second-­ or even thirdhand knowledge of the events. Catherine de’ Medici played an active role in managing the publicity surrounding Bayonne, working to ensure that particular sectors of the audience interpreted the events in an advantageous way. Over the last century, scholars have tried to ascribe a particular political intent to the festivities, to find a clear message they were meant to send to foreign or French observers. Frances Yates, for example, argues that that the Bayonne entertainments, like other festivities staged by the Valois, made up a strategy of “appeasement.”5 Other scholars characterize the spectacles as a kind of propaganda,6 an expression of Franco-­Spanish rivalry,7 or even “a military exercise preparatory to war.”8 All of these interpretations, although partially valid, overestimate the efficacy and clarity of the performances. As eyewitness accounts and the proliferation of texts created by the hosts to document the entertainments make clear, the Bayonne entertainments were polysemous and equivocal—perhaps intentionally so—and led to multiple readings by different sectors of their fractured audience. In fact, such equivocation was central to the entertainments’ diplomatic function. Creators, sponsors, and reporters used several different approaches

14

Chapter 1

to make the entertainment serve their political ends. The concept that unites and underpins these diverse techniques is the Renaissance notion of “concordia discors” or discordant harmony.9 This idea traces its origins to the philosopher Heraclitus, who described the cosmos as a fluid system whose unity was assured by active tension between opposing elements. The dynamic equilibrium between fire and water, earth and air, held the universe together. Adopted and adapted by thinkers of subsequent generations, this vision of the natural world reached Rome and was handed down from Latin authors to Humanist readers in sixteenth-­century Europe.10 There, “concordia discors” became a master trope for poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, and politicians—a key term to account for differences, disagreements, or tensions in nature and society. Struggle was an inevitable part of the universe. Opposing forces just needed to be put in balance, harmonized in some way, for order to be achieved. The Bayonne entertainments realized this ideal by creating a powerful aesthetic experience that united its diverse audiences while also allowing spectators sufficient freedom of interpretation to accommodate competing political agendas. The case of the Bayonne entertainments exemplifies how the forms and practices of court spectacle allowed for such a diplomatic orchestration of spectator experiences. Festive concord provided a superficial gloss under which statesmen attempted—though not always successfully—to manage political discord.

The Road to Bayonne Europe in the early 1560s was certainly a discordant place with intensifying conflicts between Protestant and Catholic factions. France’s troubles were especially dire. Following Henri II’s sudden death in 1559, noble families conspired against each other to seize power and fighting between sectarian factions plagued many French cities. Religious strife led international alliances to crumble, too. Peace between France and Spain was briefly established with the ratification of the Treaty of Cateau-­Cambrésis in 1559, but by the following year the rise of Protestantism in France alarmed the Spanish monarch.11 Spain and the Italian states blocked French proposals for ecclesiastical reforms at the Council of Trent, prompting the radicalization of Huguenots in their opposition to the Catholic state, while England considered aiding Protestant rebels against the French monarch.12 Although the French government ultimately chose to reaffirm the Spanish alliance by violently suppressing Protestant dissent, in the 1560s diplomatic tactics were still preferred. Catherine took several

Orchestrating Dissonant Concord 15

political and symbolic measures to restore stability to the kingdom, including enacting the Edict of Amboise to grant limited religious freedom to French Protestants and declaring her thirteen-­year-­old son Charles old enough to reign.13 She then planned a grand tour of the kingdom to introduce the king to his subjects. The court set off from Paris in January 1564 and spent the next 829 days traveling throughout the provinces, making pompous royal entries with richly symbolic parades and processions in over one hundred cities and towns.14 At a time when, at least theoretically, the monarch’s authority was underwritten by divine right, the king’s physical presence among his people served as a powerful ritual to confirm and reinforce his rule.15 In the middle of the royal voyage, the court stopped in Bayonne near the French border with Spain.16 Like the shorter stops on the tour, this two-­ week sojourn brought Charles and the court into contact with the local populace. Yet the focus turned briefly away from domestic politics to international diplomacy as Catherine and Charles attempted to heal relations with their European neighbors, particularly Spain.17 France’s specific objectives for the summit, however, were not very clear. Even as Catherine assured the Spaniards that restoring relations with Philip II was her top priority, she explored a potential marriage between Charles and Elizabeth I of England. She invited a Turkish ambassador to a nearby village for private talks with the king about trade relations between France and the Ottoman Empire.18 In short, France had several diplomatic irons in the fire at Bayonne, and many of their tentative projects for alliance were incompatible with one another. Negotiations were carried out privately, sometimes secretly, in one-­on-­one meetings and through letter exchanges.19 Once foreign diplomats attached to the French court registered the ambiguity of Catherine’s intentions, they stopped engaging in serious dialogue. Insufficiently convinced of the French monarchy’s will to contain Protestantism and troubled by French interest in American territories claimed by Spain, Philip II declined even to attend, sending only his queen to accompany the Spanish delegates. The fuzziness of the diplomatic aims of the Bayonne Interview contrasts with the outwardly brilliant splendor of its theatrical entertainments. As the centerpiece of the series of festivities that made up the royal tour, the Bayonne entertainments honored their foreign spectators by greeting them with the pomp and lavishness suited to their regal station.20 Despite financial pressures on the beleaguered French state, the organizers spared no expense.21 As the chronicler Jacques-­Auguste de Thou wrote in his Histoire universelle, “Never had the French nobility made such a beautiful expenditure, the queen wishing

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it so; never had one spent so much on feasts, spectacles, and tournaments, on balls and all sorts of entertainments.”22 There were elaborate set designs, theatrical machines, costumes, original music, choreography, and poetry by France’s best literary talents, including Jean-­Antoine de Baïf, founder of the Académie de poésie et de musique, and the renowned sonneteer Pierre Ronsard. Why did the French court go to such lengths to entertain dignitaries at a summit whose outcomes were only ever tenuous at best? Catherine de’ Medici certainly valued court spectacle as an instrument of politics. Margaret McGowan credits her with making balls, ballets, and other festivities a regular feature of the courtly calendar in France.23 The Florentine queen explained her promotion of such entertainments as a tactic to distract and appease the nobility in a 1563 letter to Charles IX in which Catherine outlined a lifestyle beneficial to the health of the young king and his state. As part of a routine of public audiences, hunting parties, and private study, she recommended that he “hold a ball twice a week, for I heard your grandfather the king say that two things were necessary to live in peace with the French . . . keep them joyous, and busy them with some exercise.”24 Entertainments also served as a form of conspicuous consumption—a grand expense to show foreign princes that France had the financial wherewithal to “waste” money on lavish pleasures. As Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme wrote: “I know that many in France condemn this expense as too extravagant; but the Queen always said that she did it to show foreigners that France was not as completely ruined and impoverished by the recent wars as was thought.”25 Seen in this light, court spectacles count as an example of what Georges Bataille calls “unproductive expenditure”: a sacrificial destruction of wealth for the sake of display.26 Both of these explanations of entertainments’ political uses bypass the content of the spectacles: their imagery, the quality of their music and dance, the meaning of their poetry. The mere existence of festivities is sufficient to accomplish these political goals. Not surprisingly, the artists who produced the festivities espoused a very different perspective on their work’s effectiveness. Many belonged to or were associated with La Pléiade, a group of poets devoted to renovating French versification. The most important for this discussion, Jean-­Antoine de Baïf (the son of an ambassador to Venice), founded his academy with the purpose of bringing music and poetry into closer harmony. Words had a “sonic power,” Baïf believed, and this force could be intensified by setting words to rhythmic music.27 In fact, for the poets and composers in Baïf ’s circle, the special power of measured music was at the root of all other arts and sciences. They

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subscribed to what Georgia Cowart dubs the “harmonia mundi” model of understanding music’s effects.28 Influenced by Plato and Pythagorus as filtered through Boethius and Ficino, they believed that sweet melodies allowed audiences to experience a physical manifestation of divine accord. Music, in this view, especially when accompanied by measured verses and the well-­ordered visual spectacle of dance, had a therapeutic effect, balancing the humors and replicating celestial harmony within the listener’s mind and body.29 The moral and, by extension, political value of these theories was articulated in the Lettres patentes that justified the founding of the Académie de poésie et de musique: “And as the opinion of several great personages, legislators as well as ancient philosophers, is not to be disdained, let it be known that it is of the utmost importance for the morals of a city’s citizens that the music commonly used in the land be restrained under certain laws, all the more so because the minds of most men are shaped and behave according to how that music is; such that where music is disordered, there morals are also depraved, and where it is well ordered, there are the men well-­formed and instructed in morality.”30 The document implies a causal relationship between music and morality. Reforming music will reform men’s souls, which will in turn restore order to the polity. A closer look at the theory that informed the Academicians’ understanding of music’s powers, however, shows that the relation between music and political order was not one of linear causality but rather one of hierarchal correspondences. If a particular piece of music succeeded in replicating celestial harmonies in a worldly form, it would act as a mediator between the earthly and heavenly realms, bringing listeners’ bodies and minds into concord with the music of the spheres. As Pontus de Tyard wrote in his Solitaire second, it was possible to achieve “the elevation of the soul through music.”31 Music, in other words, had an anagogical function. It lifted listeners up, oriented them toward a spiritual ideal. The poets who studied and collaborated with Baïf understood not only music but all the artistic facets of court entertainment in similarly vertical terms. Their poetry was richly metaphoric. Their themes were usually allegorical. The total spectacle of a court entertainment directed viewers’ minds to higher, more abstract thoughts. In the case of multimedia entertainments, this vertical orientation functioned in two ways, each with its own diplomatic implications. As sensory and aesthetic experiences, spectacles transported their audiences to a higher state of harmony, peace, and spiritual contemplation. Perhaps, as theorists suggested, they allowed for a momentary experience of utopia in which mortal cares and political divisions could be transcended. Seen in this light, entertainments

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worked as a kind of diplomatic ritual creating a sacred (if temporary) aesthetic meeting ground where worldly differences could be overcome. As series of texts and icons to be interpreted, on the other hand, the entertainments directed their spectators toward increasingly abstract concepts through an allegorical process. In a diplomatic context, this movement toward abstraction created space for the coexistence of competing interpretations. Allegories only produce stable meanings when the reading community agrees on the interpretative master code that should unlock them. The international audience for a diplomatic entertainment did not necessarily share such a coherent code. Through the separate but complementary dimensions of aesthetic power and invitation to reading, the entertainments may have fostered a superficial unity (of feeling) while in fact promoting diversity (of interpretation) among its various spectators.

Staging Concord The mise-­en-­scène of harmonious unity at Bayonne began with the choice of setting. The incontestably Catholic, border city of Bayonne was charged with diplomatic meaning as well as providing a geographically convenient meeting place for a summit whose chief participants were France and Spain.32 Its proximity to the frontier allowed Charles and Catherine to greet the Spanish queen on her own territory, when she arrived by boat sailing down the Bidasoa river that served as the natural dividing line between the two countries. Several observers remarked on Bayonne’s status as an equal meeting ground. Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, third duke of Alba, Philip II’s trusted delegate at the summit, gave a detailed account of the queen’s reception in a letter to the king: “Yesterday her majesty departed at noon, went down to the river, where the king and queen awaited her; they [the queen and her entourage] got into boats . . . and they crossed from the Spanish side; they alighted on land, where they were received with much love.”33 The English ambassador in Madrid, who likely heard about the meeting from both Spanish and English sources, reported that “the King of France received the Queen in the boat, having one foot in Spain,” a slight exaggeration of conciliatory gestures witnessed by the Duke of Alba.34 A French eyewitness described Elisabeth’s procession into the city, noting that she passed below a painting of herself with a coat of arms “half French, half Spanish,”35 and that her route was lit by flaming torches in a nod to the “Spanish style.”36

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The blending of French and Spanish aesthetics announced a program of artistic conciliation that continued throughout the conference. The transformation of the Franco-­Spanish borderland into a utopian space governed by love and friendship rather than politics was a recurring theme of the entertainments. A poem recited as part of the allegorical “assault” on the enchanted castle succinctly illustrates this artistic move: Between the high ramparts of the Pyrenees’ points Is enclosed a country of fortunate lands, Delicious country, where happy sojourn makes A peaceful people under the reign of Love.37 Although modern readers might dismiss the poem’s facile erasure of political difference as naive or propagandistic, the creators of the entertainment deployed a number of tools and techniques to reinforce its sense of unity and commonality among diverse spectators. First, the artists relied on a program of imagery and a vocabulary of performance behaviors common to a noble audience in despite of cultural and linguistic differences. Iconography drawn from Classical mythology provided one important, shared lexicon. Several of the ethnicities represented in the masquerade tournament hailed from the Classical Mediterranean world. Charles IX came as a Trojan—a founder of Rome—accompanied by his brother, who was dressed as an Amazon queen.38 On the second day of festivities, Philip II’s chief delegate, the Duke of Alba, inducted Charles into the Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric society that took its name from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, often associated with themes of royal or imperial power. Jupiter, Venus, and Cupid played key roles in the allegorical enchanted castle play, and Neptune sang during the water pageant. French, Spanish, and Italian eyewitnesses could more or less accurately identify these figures on sight and immediately grasp what concepts they were meant to represent. In addition to offering a high degree of legibility, Greek and Roman references allowed viewers to commune with a time and place considered to be the common origin of European cultures according to the prevalent discourse of translatio imperii. As Aby Warburg puts it, the frequent appearance of Classical figures in early modern court festivals “afforded a unique opportunity for members of the public to see the revered figures of antiquity standing before them in flesh and blood.”39 The presence of ancient personages in performance collapsed the

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temporal distance between spectators and their idealized past, allowing them to dwell within that shared vision of Greco-­Roman antiquity. Theatrical performance always, in some sense, transfers audiences to another time and place. Samuel Weber calls theater a “medium” precisely because it serves as an agent of mediation between the space of the performance and an imagined “elsewhere” that space represents.40 The Bayonne festivals used this capacity of performance to convey participants not only to a shared vision of Classical antiquity but also to another idealized historical landscape: that associated with chivalry. Poetry, set design, and costumes asked spectators to transport themselves to a legendary feudal landscape borrowed from popular romances. Festive rehearsals of chivalric practices such as jousts and tournaments were a regular feature of Renaissance court culture.41 Even in this context, though, the events at Bayonne stood out both for the concentration of chivalric activities and for the sustained use of Arthurian themes.42 This mythical chivalric imagery effectively transformed the ground on which the festivities took place. For the duration of the entertainments, the French courtiers, foreign royals, and diplomats who made up the group of participants and spectators no longer found themselves on the western edge of the French kingdom. Instead, they occupied a fictional landscape that belonged equally to all their national cultural traditions. The tilt-­yard, the enchanted castle, and the tournament field represented the natural habitat for the European aristocracy, spaces where they could practice the arts of war that constituted “the true activity of Nobles.”43 The entertainments highlighted the easy translatability of codes of chivalry across national traditions by having participants dress themselves in diverse national costumes. According to the official account, actors in the ring-­tilt joust performed as “several knights and ladies of diverse nations.”44 As the account discloses, the “Knight and Ladies” were in fact played by French and Spanish noblemen, costumed as French, Moorish, Spanish, and Scottish warriors and their female companions as well as figures from antiquity.45 Although eyewitnesses failed to accurately identify the nationalities the players were supposed to represent, they did pick up on the international theme. A French observer noted: “The knights who ran the joust were not armed but were masked, some dressed in the Spanish style, some in the Italian. . . . The others were dressed magnificently and diversely.”46 An anonymous Spanish spectator simply stated that each knight was “dressed in the clothes of all the nations that are known.”47 The visual theme of national diversity in this entertainment amplified or called attention to the joust’s role in uniting the various nationalities

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represented by its participants. Because both countries shared a tradition of chivalric performance, all spectators were able to comment on the event with competence and authority. The Spanish reporter, for example, declared that “all ran very well and on good horse[s].”48 While international spectators could all appreciate the equestrians’ demonstration of skill, other French and Spanish noblemen and women were brought together by performing side by side in the tournament.49 The Duke of Alba even had the honor of serving as one of twelve Masters of the Camp (a fact noted by the Spanish eyewitness).50 The men—including, it seems, those costumed as women—ran the joust.51 The queens and the ladies in their entourages played an equally important role as privileged spectators, seated in viewing stands high above the field. Although seemingly passive, the women completed the chivalric tableau by providing the feminine gaze required to approve the knights’ skillful exploits. One Spanish lady (Madalena Giron) played a particularly critical role. When a French gentleman of the king’s chamber won the joust, he bestowed his prize upon her—a classic knightly gesture from the tradition of courtly romance.52 Courtliness mapped onto the relationship between the two countries, with France figured as the chivalric hero full of prowess, Spain as the revered object of his loyalty and idealized love. Although the aristocrats who played in the joust have not left firsthand accounts of their experience, the resources of performance theory provide a way to speculate about the entertainment’s effects on them. The tournament invited the actors—French and Spanish, male and female, royals and delegates—to imagine themselves as belonging to the same courtly community. This fictional conceit is established in the textual apparatus of the performance as recorded in the Recueil des choses notables: “Their Majesties were informed that there had arrived several Knights and Ladies of diverse nations, who desired the king’s protection: and before receiving this honor, they wanted to test their skill and valor in his Majesty’s presence: and taking their leave they begged him to give them safe haven at his Court, and freedom to make a camp, where they might perform those tests in presence of their Majesties and the Knights and Ladies of their Courts.”53 Functioning as a speech act, this request from the “Knights and Ladies” effectively transformed the summit site into a medieval court and chivalric “camp.” In this fictional scenario, the knights and ladies, despite hailing from “diverse nations,” pledge their loyalty to a single lord and engage in a common performance of chivalric prowess to impress him. In this respect, the performance took place in what Victor Turner terms the “subjunctive mood” of culture, a mode of thinking and behaving “as

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if ” other social rules applied.54 Courtliness, in many ways, is inherently “subjunctive.”55 By definition, it demands an enactment of a predetermined code, a set of idealized behaviors. The European tradition always figured these ideal behaviors as belonging to an earlier age. If Renaissance jousting tournaments repeated celebrations associated with medieval court life, romances in turn encouraged their audiences to discover their models of comportment in the legendary past of Arthur’s round table. The rituals of courtliness were overlaid with nostalgia for a perfect court society situated in a lost time and place. In the Bayonne entertainment, chivalric imagery united participants in an enactment of this nostalgia and in performance of a shared aristocratic ideal. The poetry woven into the performance enhances this experience of nostalgia. After the entry procession of costumed knights and ladies, six women present a “cartel” or inscribed card to Charles: Who will ever believe it, who will ever be able to believe Such a rare event? O Goddess of Memory Engrave with your blade in the century to come The rare memory of such a rare event.56 The poem plays with tenses to project its listeners into an imagined future time in which the present moment belongs to a wondrous past. The verses ask the audience to look back on themselves and the tournament as a spectacle, joining them together as a new kind of public. Through these multiple rhetorical and performance strategies, the chivalric display and its texts momentarily unite the diverse actors as a community occupying a single, utopian cultural space. A somewhat different form of ideal, shared world was evoked by the use of pastoral tropes during the queen mother’s banquet. Following Neptune’s recital and the mock hunt of the artificial whale, guests disembarked from their pleasure boats to a bucolic setting. They were welcomed by courtiers dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses who performed rustic dances to music played on bagpipes and musettes and bestowed gifts of silk flowers and little toy sheep made from silver embroidery thread. Such pastoral imagery— inspired by the Eclogues of Virgil, Ovid’s retelling of the Orpheus myth, and other classical antecedents—was a commonplace of court festivities throughout the early modern period.57 As Louis Auld notes, “Various writers have seen in pastoral the representation of a basic mode of human existence in idealized and generalized form, one with which all may identify.”58 The pastoral

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celebrates love, friendship, and being in nature stripped of all the trappings of culture and politics. Yet, in practice, the deceptively simple aesthetic could serve as a powerful agent of symbolic power. As Meredith Martin observes, Catherine de’ Medici had long favored pastoral stylings in her ceremonies as a way to associate herself with iconographies of fertility and maternity, enhancing her status as a figurative mother to the French nation.59 The evocation of regional cultures in pastoral music and dance also helped to stage the royal family’s claim to French territory. Marguerite de Valois (the king’s younger sister) recalled in her memoirs that the shepherds in this entertainment represented “all the provinces of France” and that each troupe of performers “danced in its regional style” from Poitevin to Provençal to Breton.60 For French observers, Marguerite’s account suggests, the spectacle amounted to a synoptic pageant of provincial identities, a tour of France through its folk dances. Foreign viewers, however, seem not to have picked up on this nationalistic dimension. The Spanish viewer describes the show as a generic pastoral affair.61 While the regional connotations of particular costumes and dances were invisible to foreign guests, they could still appreciate the global significance of the pastoral mode, whose evocations of the simple charms of rural life epitomized aristocratic otium and pleasure. The poems sung by several performers dressed as nymphs underscore this theme: I no longer fear the return of your troubles, Since I see the French and the Iberian Joined and united, not as foreigners, But as two sibling shepherds.62 The poem attempts to replace political alliance with a simpler, more natural form of relationship evoked with the image of “sibling shepherds.” The contrast implies that shepherds are too naive to understand the political conflicts and divisions experienced by subjects of particular states. By playing at shepherds, the guests will naturally forget their differences as well. In the environment of “this river and wood,” participants are free “to feel your joy reaching toward the heavens.”63 Pleasure itself cannot be underestimated as a means to create a sense of unity among those who attended these entertainments. Banquets, late-­night suppers, and elegant collations punctuated the program festivities at Bayonne. Abel Jouan pays particular attention to the food served during the festivities, conveying the copious nature of one feast by listing its dishes: “Magency hams,

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tongues of beef . . . all sorts of candied fruit, salads, jellies, and a great abundance of wine.”64 These gustatory events appealed to all guests regardless of rank or nationality. Perhaps for this reason, the anonymous Spanish spectator lavished special attention on meals. He remarks on the “saroo” enjoyed after the joust and the dinner served before the enchanted-­castle masquerade, and gives a detailed account of the seafood-­laden menu consumed after the water pageant. The obvious convivial nature of feasting was reinforced in the traditionally Catholic societies of France and Spain where the act of breaking bread had an especially deep connection to concepts of fellowship and communion. Sonic pleasures similarly appear in witness accounts as agents of connection. The theme of harmony prevails in references to music. The Spanish author, for example, describes how knights in the masquerade were fêted “with the best musical harmony and with all the kinds of instruments that are known” and how guests at the queen’s banquet were serenaded “with much harmony from the music of many instruments.”65 His phrasing perfectly reflects the ideal of concordia discors—harmony emerging from the sounds of myriad different instruments. An Italian account of the Sirens’ song at Catherine’s banquet noted that it “exceeded every sweetness.”66 The same author described the reaction to a song performed during the allegorical tournament: it “left the souls of everyone rather desirous that such a song would last forever.”67 These references to harmony indicate that audiences broadly accepted the view of music’s effects espoused by the court artists who were responsible for creating the entertainments. As discussed previously, Jean-­Antoine de Baïf, Pierre Ronsard, and their collaborators worked under the philosophical assumption that art really did have the power to remake its audience as a harmonious body. The notion that spectacle can unify its audience into an ideal community has an echo in some recent work in performance studies. Most notably, Jill Dolan has explored the “utopian” possibilities opened up by performances that unite viewers, however temporarily, through a common emotional and aesthetic experience.68 In the moment of performance, spectators feel connected to each other by their awareness of shared feeling. To some degree, eyewitness accounts of the Bayonne entertainments bear out this hypothesis. Observers depict the spectacles as a rich, absorbing, visual experience. Ekphrastic passages elaborating costumes, decor, and theatrical machines give way to expressions of amazement and marveling. The anonymous Spanish writer, for example, describes the enchanted-­castle entertainment in admiring terms, lauding their “most beautiful invention” and “most beautiful

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artifice that has ever been seen,” especially the sight of “all the flowers that could be imagined made from silk.”69 The density of superlative constructions conveys the viewer’s sense of wonderment. Moreover, the author’s insistence that the spectacle surpassed all imagining implies that all audience members shared this response. This entertainment, he tells us, was objectively amazing. In this respect, he describes a “utopian” audience response in which a sublime aesthetic experience obliterates individuality and joins the assembly in a common feeling. Finally, this experience of audience communion was not always the direct result of the artists’ efforts. Many spectators of live performance have had the experience of witnessing a mistake—a flubbed line in a play, a false note in a concert, an acrobat’s misstep. These errors remind us of the “liveness” of performance. A perfect show may be repeated, but an accident is unique, sharpening spectators’ awareness of the performance’s ephemerality. It transforms them into witnesses of a one-­time event, and therefore into a community.70 This seems to be what happened at the end of the island banquet. This entertainment, which began with a theatrical pageant on the water and continued with the pastoral dance recital, ended with a grand feast that lasted until one in the morning. In the dark (and probably tipsy), the guests returned to their residences the way they arrived—by boat. The disembarkment was eventful. As the Spanish chronicler wrote, “There were great disgraces and falls of ladies and women and individuals.”71 Marguerite de Valois attributed the “confusion of the retreat” to a storm that broke during the return trip. The disorder was redeemed because it “supplied as many good tales to laugh over the next day as the magnificent feast had supplied pleasures.”72 The scene of confusion on the night of the banquet had an afterlife as an event that spurred continued interactions among its witnesses. As these various eyewitness accounts illustrate, the entertainments succeeded, at least to some extent, in creating an atmosphere of harmony and commonality. In the case of Bayonne, this convivial atmosphere failed to translate into any kind of real political accord. But the entertainments proved themselves politically useful as a focal point for a campaign of mediation and interpretation in their wake.

Discordant Accounts Previous scholarship on the political significance of the Bayonne festivities has tended to assimilate them to a domestic French politics of spectacle.73 Like entertainments staged for a predominantly French courtly audience (such as

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the court’s going-­away party at Fontainebleau in 1564), the Bayonne festivities centered in large part around King Charles. In the opening tournament, the knights and ladies “of diverse nations” paid tribute to him alone. He had the honor of liberating Peace from the enchanted castle. Throughout the festivities, encomiastic poetry fêted the French king as the most noble, courageous, powerful sovereign. Neptune’s Tritons declared their obedience to him.74 A personified Heroic Virtue declared, “I have my seat and dwelling place / In the royal heart of Charles King of France.”75 Although valid with respect to French spectators, this reading leaves out the experience of foreign viewers loyal to sovereigns other than Charles. How were they supposed to react to such enactments of his singular power? Eyewitness accounts suggest that, for some spectators, the most blatant affirmations of the French king’s supremacy simply did not register. It is important to recall that in the mid-­sixteenth century the French language did not yet hold a privileged stature in Europe. Although French was becoming a “second lingua franca” after Latin, it was far from universally spoken.76 Even the Duke of Alba, Spain’s foremost diplomat, had a poor command of French.77 By choosing to feature exclusively French-­language poetry and song lyrics, therefore, the creators of the Bayonne festivities excluded a significant part of its audience from full comprehension.78 This fact becomes obvious in a Milanese account of the entertainments whose author claimed that the canto sung by Heroic Virtue (cited above) lauded Philip rather than Charles.79 While the language barrier caused some misunderstandings, nationally specific iconologies obscured other politically charged meanings from foreigners’ view. The fact that Charles participated in the first joust dressed as a Trojan, for instance, had a particular resonance for French courtly viewers: a commonplace in royal imagery, the reference to Troy evoked a specifically French version of translatio imperii that traced the monarch’s ancestry to the founders of ancient Rome. Not primed to look for this allusion, foreign observers only noted that the king wore an “ancient” or “ornate” costume, while the visual assertion of French supremacy apparently passed them by. In this way, the Bayonne festivities navigated between imageries and sensory pleasures accessible to all its guests with specific verbal and visual signs legible only to a restricted portion of its audience. The entertainments revealed content to some while concealing it from others—and often they did not even realize they were missing something. This “something for everyone” quality of the festivities made them ripe for manipulation in post-­event mediation by politicians.

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Before the French court could pack up their affairs and move on from Bayonne to the next stop on their tour, Catherine de’ Medici and her son began writing letters reporting on the recently completed summit. Their correspondence dispersed an array of slightly varying images of the event to sovereigns and diplomats all over Europe. Catherine herself took charge of authoring the version of the festivities presented to Philip II of Spain. In a July 6 letter, she profusely thanked her son-­in-­law for allowing Elisabeth to come to Bayonne and further assured him that her reception was evidence of the “will and zeal that we have for our religion.”80 The letter’s highly idiosyncratic spelling and grammar bolster the impression that this was a personal missive issued directly from the hand of the Florentine queen without the intervention of secretaries. Her personal authority as organizer of the summit and its festivities guarantees the interpretation given to Philip. Through this document, in other words, Catherine rhetorically links her actions at Bayonne to her own deep desire and “zeal” to join Philip in defending the Catholic faith. She projected a different version of events, however, to other audiences. On the same day that she wrote her letter to Philip, Catherine also wrote to François de Montmorency, Marshal of France and governor of Paris and Ile de France. In this document, she attested: “During our interview we spoke of nothing but caresses, festivities, and good feasting, and in general terms of our mutual desire to continue the friendship between their Majesties and to conserve peace between their subjects, also in truth the chief reason and occasion for the interview was simply to have this consolation of seeing the queen my daughter while we were close to the border and not to lose such a chance.”81 Here Catherine understates the political alliance highlighted in her letter to Philip, figuring it as mere “continued friendship” construed in only the most “general terms.” Meanwhile, she buries the summit’s diplomatic goals in an abundance of references to family life and intimate affections. Bayonne was not so much an international event as a family reunion. Its festivities represented so many “caresses,” demonstrations of a mother’s love and joy at seeing her daughter again. Montmorency, a moderate Catholic and supporter of Catherine’s conciliatory policies toward French Protestants, may have been receptive to this vision of the Bayonne events. More important, this interpretation was suitable for circulation within Montmorency’s Parisian jurisdiction. The idea that the conference was a nothing more than a party for the queen’s daughter would reassure Protestants and supporters of toleration who feared the consequences of a closer alliance with militantly Catholic Spain. The three separate pamphlets

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on Elisabeth’s reception and entry into Bayonne published in France reinforce this image of the meeting, narrating events as gestures of familial hospitality saturated in motherly love. One pamphlet, for example, depicts Catherine de’ Medici greeting her daughter with “much joy and caresses”: “The aforementioned lady grandly honored the queen her mother, and bowed deeply to kiss her hands, which the queen mother would not allow or stand for, and raising her up kissed her and embraced her, feeling her fondness redoubled, as a mother.”82 Building on ubiquitous portrayals of Catherine de’ Medici as a maternal figure, the intensely emotional language of this account of her reunion with her daughter leads its readers to see the Bayonne festivities as a personal rather than political meeting. The images of generosity, concord, joy, and affection that abounded in the live ceremony acquired new importance in these textual re-­creations of the royal encounter. The French and Spanish governments both projected an image of personal affection and harmony to their wider European audience.83 In a June 21 letter to Philip, the Duke of Alba explained that he worked to publicize the “good relations” between the two monarchs “such that everyone understood it and no one could doubt it.”84 Philip aided this effort in an August 24 letter to Cardinal Pacheco in which he explained: “The interviews . . . aimed to satisfy the desires of Catherine and Elisabeth to see each other and to enjoy the affectionate tenderness that must exist and that is ordinarily found between a daughter and a mother.”85 On the French side, Charles wrote to Arnaud du Ferrier, the French ambassador in Venice, that the “pleasures and recreations” given to his sister constituted a lavish display of affection which will serve to strengthen more and more the perfect friendship already established by this alliance between us and the Catholic king her husband and to conserve and perpetuate the good peace of the neighborliness of our States and subjects which is in truth the chief reason and occasion for which we have sought this interview from one and the other side. . . . Throughout the entire interview one spoke only of caresses, pleasures, and good feasting and nothing more than the continuation of our mutual friendship in those general terms customarily used between friends who have nothing to demand of one another.86 The uncanny echoes between this letter and Catherine’s missive to Montmorency suggest that they both resulted from a coherent diplomatic strategy

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devised by the royal family and their advisors. Both documents downplay the conference’s political import in favor of a narrative of familial affection.87 The obvious rhetoric of understatement in Charles’s letter to his ambassador—particularly in phrases such as “nothing more than”—paradoxically awakens the reader to the very possibilities it denies. What might constitute that elusive “more than”? What kind of “demands” are being forsworn? In his instructions to Du Ferrier, Charles anticipated that his account of the Bayonne events would give rise to such speculation: “We mustn’t doubt that there will be many false rumors conceived and produced about it, or suspicions and denials that anyone could have taken the interview lightly.”88 He implies that his ambassador should work to counter suspicious rumors with a reassuring portrait of the Bayonne meeting as a joyous family occasion. This exchange exemplifies the politics of “incertitude” masterfully analyzed by Denis Crouzet as a defining feature of the Valois style of rule.89 The untenable conjunction of utopianism and realism in Catherine de’ Medici’s program of conciliatory measures led observers to presuppose that all public displays of royal intent were designed to deceive or conceal a hidden agenda.90 If France’s diplomatic partners throughout Europe seemed to harbor doubts about the aims of the entertainments, Protestant subjects of the crown expressed even greater suspicions. Crouzet’s work on Valois entertainments designed to heal domestic sectarian conflicts reveals how, in the context of a political culture that presumed a disjuncture between appearance and intent, such spectacular gestures of conciliation only served to encourage paranoid interpretations of the concealed agendas that lay beneath them. Similarly, for adversaries of the crown, the image of Bayonne as a friendly, family affair prompted speculation about the political dealings hidden behind the curtain of “caresses and pleasures.” Protestant chronicler Jacques-­Auguste de Thou claimed that the Duke of Alba came to Bayonne with the Order of the Golden Fleece “in order to better cover up the secret plans that he had to convey to the king and queen.”91 He further interpreted Catherine’s expressions of joy and love toward her daughter as a distraction technique: “It seemed that the king had only invited his sister Elisabeth to offer her all sorts of pleasures. The queen mother was at ease with everyone having this idea.”92 In fact, Protestant commentators saw the entire royal tour as a “voyage to Bayonne,” an excuse to conspire with Spain for the eradication of the reformed faith in Europe.93 Although Protestant observers expressed the most virulently suspicious interpretations of the entertainments’ meaning, France’s Catholic diplomatic rivals also displayed an apprehensive, mistrustful approach to reading the events.

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The exuberant visuality of the entertainments and of their subsequent descriptions provoked anxiety about what could not be seen. Observers had good reason to wonder about what was being hidden from view: according to the conference’s highest-­level participants, the most meaningful negotiations took place behind closed doors. As the Duke of Alba reported in an undated letter written at Bayonne, Catherine de’ Medici would only speak to him about religious matters in her house, where presumably she had most control over who could listen to their conversations.94 In one letter to Philip, he complained that he tried to engage the queen mother in a discussion about religious policy one evening but could not continue because they were in a small room and “we couldn’t speak without being heard as there was a crowd of people in it to go out to the celebration in the plaza.”95 Charles conducted several meetings in private, including some at a convent located a few miles outside the city. These secret interviews did not escape the notice of other guests. The anonymous Spanish chronicler, for example, remarked: “The king of France made many people jealous because he invited them to dine one by one at his house each night.”96 In the context of the highly public, theatrical culture of the court, privacy and intimacy were powerful alternative forms of performance. Exclusive proximity to a monarch conferred favor on an individual.97 For those excluded, the private meetings constructed restricted, forbidden spaces and an attendant desire to penetrate them. Finding out what happened behind closed doors was a major part of diplomats’ jobs.98 Diplomatic correspondence reveals that secrets at the Bayonne conference did not last long. Charles’s meeting with the Ottoman envoy, for example, was not officially disclosed to the Spanish delegation. The royal family reserved lodgings for the envoy under a false name and Charles met with him at some distance from the site of the summit. Nevertheless, Spanish envoys learned of the meeting and the Spanish ambassador in London confirmed it to Philip in a June 25 letter.99 From a diplomat’s perspective, a secret’s importance lies not only in the information being withheld but also in the information implied by choices regarding its concealment and discreet revelation. The measures taken to hide the Ottoman envoy from Spanish attendees constituted another kind of performance to be interpreted. Diplomats and nondiplomatic commentators occupied space on a “continuum of suspicion” with regard to their interpretations of the events at Bayonne. French Protestants, situated on the extreme edge of this spectrum, remained deeply mistrustful of the Catholic monarchs’ motives and fixated on signs of secrecy and concealment. Protestant historian De Thou described

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the architecture of Bayonne, especially the royal family’s dwelling arrangements, as a mise-­en-­scène of secrecy. He explains that Catherine took over the bishop’s palace and had a new wooden house built “in haste” (à la hâte) right next door and richly furnished for her daughter. A gallery connected the two dwellings such that “the queen mother often went to see the queen her daughter during the nights . . . and she was only seen by those in her confidence. There, she conferred in secret with Elisabeth and the Duke of Alba who had the full powers of the king of Spain.”100 Immediately after this description, he recounts Protestant suspicions that at Bayonne the French and Spanish monarchs pledged mutual support in suppressing Huguenots in France and the Low Countries, respectively. Those speculations appear authorized by the analysis of invisibility and concealment that precedes them. The Protestant discourse on Bayonne demonstrates—albeit in extreme form—how the very ambiguity that ensured the festivities’ utility for diplomatic purposes ultimately escaped French monarchal control. The capacity of the entertainments to restrict particular interpretations to particular viewers was to some degree canceled out by the abundance of other possible forms of reception. In other cases, it gave rise to speculation and a degree of paranoia that ran counter to the French agenda. The performance of concord, in other words, not only glossed over discord but in fact allowed discord to proliferate through suspicious interpretations of the polysemous event.

Conclusion: Analyzing Concordant Discord This fragmented reception of the Bayonne festivities is itself concealed from the most famous traces of the event: the spectacular tapestries discussed at the beginning of the chapter. Created several years after the Bayonne meeting, years even after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre that its most paranoid commentators saw as its ultimate result, the tapestries present a remarkably unified portrait of the entertainments. The composition draws all eyes to the wondrous spectacles at their center, testaments to the Valois family’s splendor.101 As Roy Strong suggests, they also serve as “tangible monuments” to the culture of court spectacle itself.102 In monumentalizing court entertainments, the tapestries depict them as singular, experienced in the same way by all observers. As this discussion reveals, this retrospective image does not completely correspond to the complex practices of observation, mediation, and interpretation mobilized by the entertainments in their own time.

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The Bayonne festivities and their publication across Europe illustrate some of the diplomatic uses of the performing arts in the political and aesthetic contexts of the mid-­sixteenth century. The strong cultural and familial ties among the aristocracies of western European countries, the continued importance of Catholic traditions, and the predominance of neo-­Platonic theories and belief in the universality of the arts all conspired to make performances a powerful ritual affirming the unity of neighboring kingdoms despite their political differences. Yet alongside this feeling and image of community, spectators hailing from different countries and different social positions, armed with different linguistic and cultural competencies, could derive varying political interpretations from the festivities’ pompous displays. These diverse interpretations gained solidity and force in post-­event accounts, particularly those distributed by the French royal family, carefully tailored to enhance political relations with each reader. The staging and mediation of the entertainments involved a complex balancing act of concealing and revealing, consolidation and dispersal. Analyzing performance in a diplomatic context requires a similar balancing act, as well as a level of comfort with uncertainty, obscurity, and multiplicity of meanings. Ambiguity is not (or not only) an assumed quality of art but a pragmatic strategy and a complement to diplomatic negotiation. Recognizing the diplomatic multiplicity of entertainments such as those staged at Bayonne also entails imagining a more active role for spectators. Diplomats in the audience made strategic choices in interpreting entertainments and in recounting them to their sovereigns and secretaries. They exercised discretion even in the way they attended or participated in performances, conscious of the symbolism inherent in each act of sociability. The specificity of the diplomatic spectator’s point of view and the possibility of theorizing an active, “diplomatic” mode of spectatorship are the focus of the next chapter.

Chapter 2

The Ambassador’s Point of View, from London to Paris (1608–9)

In 1611, the French ambassador in Venice, Léon Brulart, wrote to a colleague: “Let ceremonial rules and compliments be exactly observed, and our charges devoted and obliged to maintain them, for he who sins in one single point ruins everything.”1 For want of an appropriate salutation to a foreign dignitary, a treaty negotiation could fall apart. Consequently, the ceremonies surrounding even the most routine diplomatic encounters required an intense attention to detail. Outside observers might dismiss diplomatic fights over purely ceremonial favors as so much preening. How petty, we might think, to let a mistake in etiquette or a slight to an individual’s dignity disrupt meaningful political proceedings. From the diplomat’s point of view, though, there was nothing inconsequential about a breach of protocol. If a delegate paid a visit to the other resident ambassadors at his new posting in the wrong order, or if a host seated his diplomat guest in the wrong place at the dinner table, that small faux pas destabilized the symbolic order that governed relations among European states. The chief principle underlying European diplomatic protocol in the early modern period was known as the rule of precedence (préséance). Established by Pope Julius II in 1504, the rule of precedence ranked European kingdoms and principalities into a hierarchy that determined the degree of favor to be shown toward each country’s delegates. Ambassadors, in their roles as representatives of their sovereigns, had to keep up the appearance of formality and dignity that signified their kingdom’s place in the European order. This was particularly true in Rome, where the rules of precedence were most strictly observed. As the French ambassador in Venice wrote to his colleague d’Estrées

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in Rome in October 1640, “Rome is a veritable theater on which the dignity of his Majesty’s name must be highly maintained, and as such it is important to alter nothing.”2 Full-­throated defenses of the monarch’s dignity and commands to “alter nothing” in ceremonial practice reflected not that precedence was a fixed and rigid ranking but conversely that the accepted hierarchy of states was under constant revision in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Julius II’s official rankings were not updated to include the new political entities that emerged over the period, so statesmen from those countries had to negotiate for their place in the diplomatic order. The question of precedence proved particularly difficult to resolve when the United Provinces broke away from the Spanish-­controlled Netherlands and officially became a republic in 1581, as general rules about the relative rank of duchies and elected and hereditary monarchies did not apply to this new type of polity.3 These kinds of challenges to the established order, combined with the fact that some Protestant countries discounted the authority of the pope in underwriting the legitimacy of precedence rules, rendered Julius’s ranking increasingly irrelevant. No longer codified or inscribed in any legal framework, precedence became contingent, a matter of continual negotiation. The result of this situation “was bitter, often unedifying, sometimes comic battles over precedence.”4 Different European courts observed different rankings, depending on the state of their relations with particular countries. At the start of a treaty negotiation, representatives would deliberate to establish rules of precedence for the duration of the conference. Europe’s most powerful monarchies, especially France and Spain, competed for precedence on these multiple diplomatic stages.5 In this way, the fluidity of the hierarchy allowed individual ambassadors the possibility of distinguishing themselves professionally by achieving a higher rank for their states. To adapt the metaphor used by diplomats themselves, ambassadors functioned not only as actors in the “theater” of diplomacy, enacting the prestige and dignity of the political entities they represented. They were also, to some extent, its authors, helping to determine the “script” of precedence that regulated diplomatic relations. Given the highly theatrical quality of diplomatic life in early modern European courts, the spectacles performed on courtly stages for audiences including visiting and resident ambassadors might appear superfluous. Yet entertainments remained important social events for the diplomatic community, where any favor or honor bestowed upon an individual ambassador was sure to be witnessed by the assembled public. Centered on a theatrical

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spectacle, diplomats’ behavior in the viewing stands constituted a second level of dramatic performance in meta-­theatrical relation to the event onstage.

Performing in the Theater of Diplomacy When an ambassador took his seat for a court entertainment, he was every bit as much a part of the spectacle as were the dancers on the stage. As spectator accounts suggest, the host court took care to choreograph the arrangement of the audience to signal the relative importance of its attendees. Each spot in the spectators’ gallery carried significance. Viewers could interpret the composition of the audience space as a spectacle in its own right. Spectators were also conscious of their own position as objects of fellow audience members’ gaze, a fact that transformed their experience of watching the entertainment into a kind of performance as well. Courtly spaces of all kinds were of course highly theatrical. Works on courtiership, such as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, urged aristocrats to present themselves in society in such a way as to appeal to the eyes of fellow nobles. Courtiers experienced their mode of being in society as a form of acting, as inhabiting a role.6 For those who also worked as diplomats, self-­ presentation took on an additional layer of complexity. As Timothy Hampton has observed: “The courtier dissimulates in order to represent himself effectively at court. The ambassador, by contrast, represents himself while representing another.”7 The doubled representation carried out by ambassadors “elicited new types of self-­presentation and a necessary rethinking of traditional modes of acting.”8 The theatrical dimension of diplomatic work remained a constant theme of literature on diplomacy throughout the early modern period. In fact, the conception of the diplomatic arts as a form of public theatrical performance marks even the earliest treatises and manuals for ambassadors, such as Bernard du Rosier’s Short Treatise About Ambassadors (Ambaxiator brevilogus, 1436).9 The demands on an ambassador’s performance skills grew increasingly exigent—and more complex—with the emergence of “permanent diplomacy,” or the practice of maintaining resident ambassadors in foreign courts.10 As Europe’s society of diplomats expanded to fill these new permanent roles, the number of ambassador’s manuals also burgeoned. Often echoing the courtier handbooks that proliferated in the same time period, these works advised the ambassador on his self-­presentation at the host court. The portrait of the

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perfect ambassador that emerged from this corpus of texts emphasized external qualities: physical beauty, eloquence, the ability to dance, sing, and ride.11 He should have a personal fortune sufficient to furnish his embassy in accordance with the prestige of his sovereign (and to keep him free from the temptation of bribes).12 The manuals also argue for the importance of less tangible virtues such as prudence, knowledge, and noble blood, though even these interior traits are justified by their contribution to the successful outer performance of diplomacy. Juan Antonio de Vera’s treatise on the “perfect ambassador,” for example, explains how good verbal skills can make up for a lack of knowledge, allowing the ambassador to “divert [the conversation] as dexterously as possible away from subjects that he does not know well.”13 Even the requirement that an ambassador be of noble rank was explained by a pragmatic concern for his ability to perform his role as representative of his sovereign in a convincing manner, as when Alberico Gentili concludes that “it is scarcely probable that a man of ignoble station could assume the personality of one of noble rank, much less that of a prince.”14 This more elaborate external enactment of pleasing behaviors served not only to project a positive image of the ambassador’s sovereign but also to conceal or deflect attention away from the resident ambassador’s primary activities: gathering and disseminating information. The most contentious virtue ascribed to the ambassador was that of prudence, described by most authors as the talent to hide anything that might be detrimental to his country’s image and political objectives. In other words, the diplomat had to excel at dissimulation.15 The nature of the ambassador’s work was understood as inherently duplicitous. In De officio legati (c. 1490), the first text to expound upon the duties of a resident ambassador, humanist author and translator Ermolao Barbaro described the diplomat as the perfect embodiment of moderation and discretion.16 Fully assuming the role of his state’s representative, he was simply “to do, say, advise, and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state,” while secretly gathering intelligence for his monarch.17 This early conception of the resident ambassador’s work recalls Henry Wotton’s often quoted line: “The ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”18 In this view, a sovereign and his ambassador and delegates acted in concert to work toward a shared goal. As such, they behaved as what Erving Goffman has labeled a “performance team,” or a group of individuals who coordinate their roles to project an agreed-­upon

Ambassador’s Point of View 37

image to an unsuspecting public.19 By contrast, in the decades following Barbaro’s work, other writers characterized the ambassador as a free, independent performer not bound to such close cooperation with his master or the other members of his delegation. Niccolò Machiavelli’s letter of “Advice to Raffaello Girolami” (1522), for example, suggested that the ambassador might work for his own private interests as well as for his monarch’s. To this end, it was doubly important that he “acquire great consideration” in his host court, which he could do “by acting on every occasion like a good and just man; to have the reputation of being generous and sincere, and to avoid that of being mean and dissembling, and not to be regarded as a man who believes one thing and says another.”20 This quintessentially Machiavellian piece of advice highlights the paradoxical nature of diplomatic performance in which the ambassador dissimulates in order to maintain his reputation as an honest person. In a book of maxims titled Ricordi (1530), Florentine jurist and diplomat Francesco Guicciardini echoed this idea. He wrote that, although “frank sincerity is a quality much extolled,” deception is sometimes necessary and thanks to a good ambassador’s “reputation for plain dealing,” “his artifice will blind men more.”21 In the diplomatic scenario, Guicciardini reminds us, it is not only the ambassador who can deceive. Some sovereigns conceal their true political intentions from the agents they dispatch to enact them, “judg[ing] it better only to impart what they would have the foreign prince persuaded of, thinking they can hardly deceive him unless they first deceive the ambassador who is the instrument and agent for treating with him.”22 The extreme theatricality of diplomatic practice as described in these texts conjures a scenario in which all men—even those supposed to be on the same political “team”—are in reality acting for their own self-­interest, professional prestige, and even financial gain in the form of gifts. In this context, the comparison of ambassadors to actors no longer simply described the diplomat’s protean adaptability and charisma but highlighted his capacity for dissembling, his essential untrustworthiness. This aura of suspicion led diplomatic thinkers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to reject the theatrical metaphor in favor of more limited conceptions of the ambassador’s freedom to perform. Torquato Tasso imagined the possibility that the ambassador might manipulate but only in the interests of his sovereign.23 In his De legationibus libri tres (1585), Alberico Gentili put much stricter limits on the ambassador’s agency, casting him as an actor who carried out his sovereign’s script: “Why should the ambassador have the right to attempt anything apart from his instructions? . . . The ambassador

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is an interpreter. . . . [I]n a case where definite instructions have been given, ambassadors should not be allowed to diverge even a finger’s breadth from them.”24 Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that ambassadors should “assume” the personality of the princes they represented when delivering orations.25 As Ellen McClure observes, Gentili leaves behind a language of theater, opting instead for a vocabulary of the sacred to strengthen the connection between the monarch and his legate.26 The ambassador is like an angel, Gentili writes, carrying messages “in the interest of the state or sacred person by whom he has been sent.” For Gentili, fidelity—not prudence or discretion—is the most prized quality in an ambassador.27 The anti-­theatrical bias of diplomatic manuals was expressed in more strident terms in the early part of the seventeenth century. In his L’ambassadeur (1603), Jean Hotman declared, “An embassy and theater are dissimilar things.”28 Although he described the ambassador’s work as entailing the “representation” of his monarch and the manipulation of speech to persuade his foreign interlocutors, Hotman insisted that the theatrical metaphor was insufficient to depict diplomacy because the ambassador could never change roles.29 Juan de Vera figured the diplomat’s relationship to his prince through a biological metaphor: “The Ambassador is called by some the organ by which the thoughts and ideas of absent people are communicated, and the embassy the art of keeping two princes in friendship.”30 The ambassador in this view is not an actor giving voice and movement to the sovereign’s script. He is a prosthetic extension of the monarch’s body: his eyes and ears abroad. Hotman’s and Vera’s outright rejection of the theatrical metaphor demonstrates the persistent force of that trope: they found it necessary to address the analogy of ambassadorship to acting even as they discounted the utility of the comparison. By the end of the seventeenth century, texts on diplomacy recuperated theatrical terms, as Abraham de Wicquefort declared in his summa work L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions: “There is no personage more actor-­like than the ambassador.”31 Despite theorists’ qualms, moreover, individual ambassadors continued to rely heavily on a theatrical vocabulary in their own correspondence throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again and again, they attested to their efforts to represent, to demonstrate, to make visible an intention, emotion, or quality of their sovereign. They described their role as that of actors playing out by proxy, in a virtual way, interaction among their princes. It is clear that a profound sense of theatricality characterized diplomats’ daily life, self-­understanding, and world­ view. Whether motivated by personal honor, professional duty, or material

Ambassador’s Point of View 39

self-­interest, ambassadors were keenly attuned to the performative dimension of their work and put significant effort into making sure that they played their parts well.

Court Entertainment as Diplomatic Meta-­theater: The “Incident” of the Masque of Beauty Diplomats’ keen awareness of their self-­presentation manifested itself particularly acutely in their participation in lavish celebrations including spectacular court entertainments. On one hand, an ambassador’s presence as a spectator at a ballet, masque, or other festive occasion signaled his prestige and that of his sovereign in the eyes of his hosts. Prime occasions to see and be seen, entertainments provided a key stage on which ambassadors enacted their own professional skill and their prince’s “dignity.” In dispatches recounting these events, moreover, ambassadors shrewdly narrated their own performance as spectators in order to burnish their own image and reputation. Sometimes this entailed giving a detailed description or penetrating analysis of the performance onstage, a demonstration of the diplomat’s talent for observation. More often, ambassadors limited their accounts to their own efforts to represent their sovereigns in the best possible way. Examples of both strategies show how the “act” of courtly spectatorship was a dynamic theatrical practice rather than a passive state. A rich example of the stakes of diplomatic spectatorship comes from the correspondence of Antoine Le Fèvre de la Boderie (1555–1615), who headed an extraordinary embassy to London from April 1606 until December 1609. Already a seasoned diplomat when he was first sent to England in April 1606, he had begun his political career as a secretary to the French ambassador in Rome in 1592 and then became an ambassador in his own right serving in Brussels after the Treaty of Vervins (1598), then in Turin in 1605. His stint in England occurred in a relatively peaceful decade, the period of “armed neutrality” leading up to the Thirty Years’ War.32 Accordingly, the embassy had only limited political goals. Henri IV’s instructions charged the ambassador with three primary tasks: making headway on a trade agreement, confirming an alliance against Mediterranean piracy, and keeping an eye on religious conflicts. The ambassador reported on all these matters in his missives back to France, addressed to state secretaries Nicolas de Neufville, marquis de Villeroy, or Pierre Brulart de Sillery, vicomte de Puisieux. He also devoted significant

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space to recording and commenting on the spectacle of statecraft in England. In these passages of his dispatches, Le Fèvre de la Boderie works to distinguish himself as an astute observer of political theater. After witnessing James I’s appearance at Parliament, for example, he concluded a detailed description of his clothes, the throne, and the setting by remarking: “The ceremony was in truth very beautiful and felt of its ancientness.”33 He signaled the close alliance between England and Denmark by detailing the feasts, fireworks, and other entertainments lavished on the Danish king during his visit to London in summer 1606, noting that the preparations served as “a testament to their good neighborliness and friendship.”34 Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s descriptions of events at court are nearly always accompanied by such conjectures about their hidden significance. As Hampton points out, many early modern diplomats styled their dispatches on the model of the relazione penned by Venetian ambassadors for the doge and senate. A relazione writer would highlight his skills “as a reader of signs, as an interpreter,” often by foregrounding his own expert gaze through extensive first-­person narration.35 Venetian diplomats—or, more precisely, their professional secretaries who polished the ambassadors’ notes—practiced the form of the relazione as a finely honed craft.36 French ambassadors, by contrast, exhibited widely varying styles in their reports. For example, the volume of hand-­copied letters from France’s ambassadors in Venice in the 1630s features an abrupt change in tone when du Houssay took over for the ailing De La Thuillerie in 1638, as the cool professionalism of the older diplomat gives way to panicked queries about protocol, flurries of postscripts, and complaints about the weather.37 Le Fèvre de la Boderie more closely sticks to the Venetian example. Compared to his colleagues from La Serenissima, though, he downplays the first person. The ambassador’s own point of view appears more frequently as an object of someone else’s action (“they tell me”) than as the subject of an independent action or observation. The ambassador’s personal subjectivity becomes more prominent, however, in the passages devoted to court entertainments. In a December 20, 1607, letter outlining the preparations for a holiday dance, for example, he asserted his interpretation of particular casting choices in the first person: “I also take as a sign of their attempts to display less ill will toward the Catholics that the King, as he left for the hunt, asked the queen to prepare a ball for the Christmas festivities, and took personal responsibility for the expenses which, it is said, must be more than six or seven thousand écus (for they don’t know how to do anything for less here). They remark that almost all the ladies the queen

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has called to be in the ball are Catholics.”38 The ambassador foregrounds his subjectivity, performing his interpretation in the first person before authorizing his viewpoint with corroborating hearsay. He continues: “What assures me more is that this interpretation is given and publicized by the servants of their Majesties.”39 Mixing direct observation, analysis, and opinion gathered on the ground, the passage exemplifies the “dialectic of testimony and judgment” that, according to Andrea Frisch, characterized eyewitnessing at the turn of the sixteenth to seventeenth century.40 At a time when personal testimony was not automatically regarded as authoritative, first-­person accounts gained credence through a rhetoric of “intersubjectivity” including cross-­reference.41 Le Fèvre de la Boderie cites English informants to bolster and give context to his own judgments. At the same time, he establishes his bona fides as a credible witness, faithful interpreter, and good spy for the French king. The ambassador’s self-­representation in the course of conveying intelligence constituted a kind of performance in writing through which he embellished his own image for the benefit of his masters back in France. Dispatches recounting the ambassador’s participation as an invited guest at court entertainment heightened the stakes of self-­portrayal. His presence and positioning in the dancing hall were an index of his monarch’s “dignity” in the eyes of the host, a sign of estimation displayed for all the other courtiers and diplomats to see. After the entertainment was over, the ambassador’s account of the entertainment represented a second opportunity for performance as he portrayed himself in retrospective narrative as the perfect embodiment of his master’s prestige. The ambassador’s performance-­as-­spectator had ramifications both for the international status of his state and for his own professional esteem. The significance of the diplomat’s role as spectator of court performances comes into relief in the texts documenting the diplomatic uproar caused by the failure of the English court to invite Le Fèvre de la Boderie to a masque—Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty—organized by Queen Anna in the Carnival season of 1608. As recounted by Le Fèvre de la Boderie in his correspondence, the incident began in early January 1608 when an ally at the English court, the Duke of Lennox,42 warned him that the queen had invited the Spanish ambassador but not him to attend a performance of her new masque.43 This information was shocking because, at least since 1603, it had been customary at the English court to “feast” all the resident and extraordinary ambassadors during the Christmas and Carnival season, including inviting them to select performances of masques or revels.44 The news infuriated the French because

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through her choice of guests Queen Anna displayed a preference for Spain. The London masque hall had become another stage on which the fight for international precedence between the two countries could be played out.45 The consequences of the invitation affair unfolded over a yearlong period and took a toll on the morale and energy of its participants. Venetian ambassador Marc’ Antonio Correr reported in a February 20, 1609, dispatch that Queen Anna “says she is resolved to trouble herself no more with Masques.”46 Le Fèvre de la Boderie, for his part, was recalled to France soon after his attendance at the Masque of Queens.47 Viewed in the light of its prolonged effects, Anna’s action in excluding the French ambassador from The Masque of Beauty could be characterized as a “diplomatic incident.” Historian Lucien Bély usefully defines the diplomatic incident as an event that breaches the usually impenetrable barrier between diplomacy’s external ceremony and the secret play of diplomatic relationships and strategies,48 revealing the “underground tensions” that invisibly structure the day-­to-­day culture of diplomacy.49 This is certainly true of the incident surrounding Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the queen’s masques. In disrupting the normal diplomatic protocol and etiquette around entertainments at the English court (in which ambassadors were traditionally included on a routine basis), the event produced a spate of texts in which ambassadors, secretaries, and monarchs were forced to articulate the significance of court entertainment in relation to issues of prestige, visibility, and political reciprocity. The correspondence exposes a virtual space of preparation and planning that Goffman designates the “back region or backstage” of social performance: the space in which “illusions and impressions are openly constructed” and thus “the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course.”50 In this way, the incident and its aftermath disclosed the masque’s role in maintaining, representing, and publicizing international relationships. Diplomatic correspondence relating to the invitation incident provides one source of insight into the importance of the masque as an arena for performing political relations. In his letters to Villeroy and Puisieux, Le Fèvre de la Boderie becomes both lead actor in and author of the drama he describes. He uses the first person liberally, focalizing events through his own limited perspective. Yet he also incorporates multiple perspectives through a dramatic narrativization of his encounters with various players in the incident. For example, the ambassador portrays himself first learning about the invitations from his friend and informant the Duke of Lennox, who relays the information by recounting a conversation between Anna and James: “The King

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remained somewhat astonished and responded to her only: but what will the French ambassador say about the Spanish ambassador being there while the French one is not?”51 Through the mouthpiece of Lennox, Le Fèvre de la Boderie attributed the diplomatic scandal to a domestic dispute between the king and queen. The irrational, hispanophilic queen caused the problem; the king supported the French. In the ambassador’s telling, this version gained credence a few days later, when the king proposed a private dinner and entertainment for the French ambassador as recompense for his exclusion from the masque. In correspondence to his masters back in France, Le Fèvre de la Boderie supposed that James’s failure to stand up to his wife illustrated Anna’s power over him and thus displayed his weakness as both a husband and a king.52 The French ambassador’s portrayal of the incident as a domestic matter appears strategic. It certainly stands in contrast to the interpretation provided by his diplomatic peers. Venetian ambassador Zorzi Giustinian, for example, emphasized the political motivations for French and English actions. He described the French ambassador’s offense as related to “this undecided question of precedence.”53 Meanwhile, his dispatches from that January suggest covert political agendas that might explain the dis-­invitation. As he noted in a relation to the Venetian senate, the English were trying to engineer an alliance with Spain, sealed through a marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta.54 As was characteristic for Venetian ambassadors, Giustinian depicts himself through these interpretations as a skilled analyst of the political scene, providing rich context and a broad angle from which his vicarious audience in the senate could view and interpret events. In contrast, Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s mapping of the political onto the domestic may be read as a (conscious or unconscious) interpretive strategy to negate the suspicion that any deeper political cause—or any fault of his own—lay at the root of his non-­invitation. He cast himself as wronged victim of Anna’s caprice and James’s weakness. The ambassador’s emphasis on the conjugal nature of the dispute also calls attention to the importance of both public and private stages for diplomatic representation. Ambassadors’ deductions about the emotional and affective life of the sovereign had an important place in diplomatic practice. As Lucien Bély notes, “In political systems where power was incarnated by men and women chosen by God—hereditary monarchy—it was above all necessary to be informed as to their personality, health, and will.”55 Part of diplomats’ task as “honorable spies” was to hunt for clues about the sovereign’s state of mind and relationships. No clear boundary divided personal from political relationships.

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Yet ambassadors’ writings show that an important distinction remained between public and private representation of those relationships. Diplomats’ understanding of this distinction is illustrated by Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s reaction to James’s proposal to hold a private dinner for the French ambassador as a way to compensate him for missing the ballet. Le Fèvre de la Boderie protested: “There was no proportion between a dinner the King would give me and the honor the ambassador would receive by intervention in the ballet; for one is a private action, and the other a spectacle and public solemnity. . . . All the spectators would be the judges of this action and would publish it throughout the whole of Christendom.”56 The key difference between a “private action” (une action privée) and a “public solemnity” (une solemnité publique) pertains to the question of who is watching. James offered the private dinner to reassure the French ambassador of his personal commitment to their relationship and to the relationship between their kingdoms. Historian William Roosen borrows the sociopsychological term “stroking” to characterize these gestures of intimacy and political “friendship” of a monarch toward a particular ambassador.57 The underlying assumption was that the king’s personal touch represented the highest kind of favor an ambassador could desire. But that reasoning was incomplete, as Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s rejection of the invitation reveals. A demonstration of the king’s favor only mattered insofar as it took place before an audience. Indeed, as Le Fèvre de la Boderie describes it, the public sign of friendship conferred by an invitation to the masque had two audiences: the public of other dignitaries at the London court who would “judge” it and the larger audience of “the whole of Christendom” who would hear about it through dispatches and correspondence. The ambassador’s focus on the spectators of his relations with the king makes it unclear, when he uses the word “spectacle,” whether he refers to the masque itself or to the display occasioned by his presence in the audience. Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s masters back in France shared his view that the public display of his relationship with the English king was paramount. In fact, they took an even more radical approach to analyzing the theatrical dimension of diplomatic relations with the English court, interpreting the non-­invitation itself as a kind of theater. Secretary Villeroy echoed the king in warning Le Fèvre de la Boderie that the affair may not have been as straightforward as he seemed to believe. The whole scandal, he suggested, may have been a “ruse”; he advised that “they sought an argument with us.”58 Henri IV himself chimed into the discussion, advising his ambassador that while

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he approved of his efforts to defend the public dignity of the French state, it was also important to moderate his displays of displeasure. He wrote that it was necessary to “demonstrate” the correct amount of offense in response: “I esteem that you should show that I shall have just occasion to be offended, but without stirring this up any more than that, or making any more of a fuss, which is perhaps what they want.”59 Neither Henri IV nor Villeroy explained any political motives for a potential quarrel between France and England, adopting a strategy of concealment such as Francesco Guicciarini described in the Ricordi. Effectively, they were asking Le Fèvre de la Boderie to perform a role without knowledge of the script. Lacking access to such “backstage” insights, the ambassador improvised within the sphere of political representation provided by the public occasion of the masques to maintain at least the appearance of good relations between the French and English crowns. The awkward rhetorical and performative contortions required to keep up appearances become clear in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s accounts of the (temporary) resolution to the non-­invitation incident. Rather than host the French ambassador at a private dinner, James instead invited him to a different semipublic event: a masque organized by the king himself in celebration of the marriage of his favorite courtier, John Ramsay, Viscount Haddington (a Scot), to Elizabeth Radcliffe (an Englishwoman). The Haddington Masque was performed on February 9, 1608, with a script by Ben Jonson, designs by Inigo Jones, and music by Alfonso Ferrabosco.60 The performance celebrated the marriage and optimistically projected an image of Anglo-­Scottish political union through vibrant depictions of love and fertility.61 The printed “Description of the Masque” vividly evokes the opening set design featuring a “high, steep, red cliff, advancing itself into the clouds,” upon which were “erected two pilasters, charged with the spoils and trophies of Love . . . and overhead two personages, Triumph and Victory, in flying postures and twice so big as the life.”62 The action begins “on the sudden, with a solemn music, a bright sky breaking forth, . . . two doves, then two swans with silver gears, drawing forth a triumphant chariot in which Venus sat,” while Graces toss garlands into the audience.63 The reader of the pamphlet imagines a pompous spectacle that first draws the eye upward to be dazzled by ingenious machines, then down to the ground to witness mythological figures declaiming high verse and masquers in silver and carnation costumes, feathers and jewels on their heads, dancing with “elegancy and curious device.”64 None of this magnificence appears in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s dispatch recounting the event. He described it simply as “meager.” In his report to

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Secretary Villeroy after the performance, Le Fèvre de la Boderie declined to comment on the content of the masque or his experience of it: “I tell you nothing of the quality of the ballet, nor of those who danced it, because it seems to me that one is not so anxious to know it.”65 Presumed lack of interest on the part of an ambiguous “one”—the king, perhaps?—rhetorically sanctioned his choice to remain silent about the masque itself. He wrote: “I shall assure you merely that they won’t play me again like this last time, and that is what I must principally desire.”66 The language of “play” and trickery here operates in a similar way to the ambiguous “spectacle” in his earlier correspondence. The diplomatic theatrics take center stage, supplanting the real entertainment in the ambassador’s discourse.

Renegotiating Intimacy and Publicity Through the Queens’ Entertainments Le Fèvre de la Boderie was incorrect in thinking that the London court would avoid replaying the same drama in the future. The following year, as the Christmas season approached, the court again scrambled to address thorny problems of precedence in distributing invitations to the masque organized by the queen for the festive season. As Sillery de Puisieux wrote to Le Fèvre de la Boderie: “It appears from the discourses and conversation of the King of Great Britain, his Council and Treasurer, that there is at present no greater or more important affair on the table than this beautiful ballet that puts everyone in such discomfort.”67 The new Venetian ambassador, Marc’ Antonio Correr, described how each diplomat struggled to secure an invitation to the masque, and the implicit recognition that went along with it, in a January 9, 1609, dispatch to the doge and senate: “The Spanish and Flemish Ambassadors are now maneuvering to be invited to the Masque. They declare it would be a slight to the Embassy-­Extraordinary if it is left out. On the other hand the French Ambassador, who was omitted last year, which produced some sharp words from his Most Christian Majesty, now declares that he will withdraw from Court if he is not invited.”68 The French ambassador objected to the requirement to play this game at all. As he reported to Secretary Villeroy in a January 1609 letter, he sent a message to James via Lord Salisbury to the effect that “the favors that ambassadors receive from the princes in whose courts they serve should be purely free, and received rather than requested.”69

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To move beyond this diplomatic impasse, the French court stepped in with an appropriately theatrical gesture: they staged their own ballet, organized by the queen and hosted by finance minister Maximilien Béthune, duc de Sully, and his wife at their private dance hall in the Arsenal in Paris, and particularly invited the English ambassador George Carew, his wife, and the vice-­count of Cranbourne to view it as honored guests.70 (Other ambassadors enjoyed a less prestigious, second performance of the ballet in Marguerite de Valois’s palace.)71 This invitation placed the English court in the French one’s debt, more or less forcing the royals to reciprocate by hosting Le Fèvre de la Boderie at the Masque of Queens a few weeks later. The diplomatic exchange of entertainments between the French and English courts set in motion another frenzied exchange of correspondence. The discourse generated by this second phase of the “incident” shines a more focused light on issues of intimacy and publicity in relations between diplomats and sovereigns, due to the dynamics of reciprocity, the centrality of women as patrons and hosts, and the participation of the ambassadors’ families as honored guests. Although Le Fèvre de la Boderie previously dismissed the rhetoric of personal or “private” favor, this new wave of correspondence recuperated it and reconciled it to the public, theatrical orientation of the diplomatic struggle for prestige. The queen’s ballet seems tailor-­made to resolve Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s predicament. Very likely, though, the ballet would have taken place even if the French ambassador in London was not being threatened with exclusion from the masque there. Ballets regularly featured in Carnival festivities in Paris. Moreover, the French court, like the English one, habitually signaled favor to ambassadors by inviting them to ballets. Even if the court did not specifically plan the ballet to address the masque incident, however, its performance had a tangible effect on French diplomatic relations with Britain and transformed the language used to discuss and publicize that relationship. In the days leading up to the ballet’s performance, Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his correspondents continued to discuss the event as an occasion for a highly public, formal, theatrical display of French favor toward the English. On January 23, Secretary Villeroy informed the ambassador about the queen’s preparations for her ballet at the Arsenal: They have told me that the Queen had Madame de Sully ask Madame the English Ambassador’s wife to see the aforementioned ballet at the Arsenal, where one talks of inviting her husband also,

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and even the Venetian Ambassador. The King will be there. We hear tell that Queen Marguerite will ask the Nuncio, Don Pedro de Toledo, and the Flemish Ambassador with his wife, where his Majesty may also resolve himself to go, after he has been to the Arsenal. It is not their Majesties who issue this invitation, since there is no dancing at their palace. The English Ambassador, who will be accompanied by Viscount Cranborne, will have the first viewing in the presence of the king, while the others will have to wait to see it at Queen Marguerite’s. . . . I do not yet know whether the whole mystery will go as planned; but I wanted to forewarn you.72 Villeroy presents himself as a passive observer in the planning of the entertainment. He relays what “they have told me” and what “we hear tell.” He takes pains, though, to show the ambassador that the court is making every effort to single out the English ambassador for special attention. Not only will he see the ballet “in the presence of the king” before the other ambassadors, he will also view it in a more prestigious space, overseen by the real queen and not Marguerite, “another queen of lesser rank,” as Villeroy calls her.73 Finally, the secretary rhetorically distances himself from the arrangements by characterizing them, a bit flippantly, as “the whole mystery”—a choice of terms that simultaneously underscores their enigmatic quality and their theatrical nature (evoking a medieval mystery play). By the time the French court reported back to Le Fèvre de la Boderie on the performance, the language used to discuss its diplomatic function had changed. In a letter dated February 6, Sillery de Puisieux wrote: “This message is merely . . . to give you word of the good time and contentment had by the English Ambassador at the ballet of our Queen, which was danced this past Sunday, and which he had been invited to attend by the King, and his wife by the Queen. They had their places and seats right behind their Majesties’ chairs. The King, beyond that, favored their presence with another special grace, which is the wearing of the Order of the Garter, about which the Ambassador felt very honored.”74 Whereas Villeroy’s earlier letter stressed the prestige of the invitation to the English in contrast to the less splendid entertainment offered to the other ambassadors, Puisieux here focuses on the ambassador’s personal satisfaction of the event, without regard to others’ experiences. An affective vocabulary prevails: he notes the visitors’ enjoyment of the occasion and the ambassador’s “feeling” of honor in being allowed to wear the very English courtly mark of distinction.75 In addition, he illustrates the intimate relation

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between the French royals and their English guests. He underlines, for example, the proximity of their seats in the dancing hall. He also indicates that the couple received their invitations directly from the king and queen. This contradicts Villeroy’s earlier assertion that the royals would not themselves extend invitations for an event taking place outside the Louvre but strengthens the portrayal of the ballet as a special treat offered personally by the monarchs to the ambassador and his party. Puisieux, in other words, portrays the ballet as an effective means of “stroking” the foreign diplomat, of assuring him of the desire to maintain friendly relations. Although Puisieux’s emphasis on the power of intimate signs of favor rather than public displays of prestige represented a significant departure from Villeroy and Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s rhetoric, it reflected longstanding practices toward foreign representatives at the French court. As far back as the 1580s, for example, the secretary to Venetian delegate Girolamo Lippomano remarked on the court’s lovingly familiar treatment of the “dear ambassador.”76 More recently, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, an unofficial English envoy who had just left Paris in January 1609, described the favors he received from Marguerite de Valois: “I went sometimes also to the court of Queen Margaret . . . and here I saw many balls or masks, in all which it pleased that Queen publicly to place me next to her chair, not without the wonder of some, and the envy of another, who were wont to have that favor.”77 Lord Herbert’s account hints at the way gestures of intimacy could also take on “public” importance when viewed by even a small group of envious onlookers. By reinserting the discourse of intimacy into the unfolding narrative of the affair of the queens’ entertainments, Puisieux opened up the possibility for such a recuperation of “private” displays of royal affection in the more publicity-­oriented and theatricalized diplomatic culture of his day. Puisieux’s emphasis on intimacy and personal favor echoes the content and arrangement of the ballet itself, which featured as its theme romantic love, particularly women’s power over their suitors. Composed by Chevalier78 with verses by François de Malherbe and de Lingendes,79 the ballet survives in a partial score, a few eyewitness accounts, and an incomplete transcription of the poetry written for the dance published by Toussainct du Bray under the title Recueil des vers du balet de la Reyne. As reconstructed through these various sources, the entertainment featured a set design depicting a mountain in the background. It began with a procession or dance by twelve pages, accompanied by viol music, as a prelude to a majestic recitative song for a singer representing Renommée or Fame. A dance by eight “shades” followed,

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and then the “mountain” opened to reveal an aquatic backdrop and a theater machine in the shape of a dolphin. Perched on the dolphin’s back, the singer Angélique de Paulet, scantily costumed as a naiad, performed a second récit. Her song paints a portrait of court life dominated by women in their role as tyrannical mistresses of men’s hearts.80 Invoking Petrarchan commonplaces, her verses recount the suffering of lovers and recommend that courtiers “adore them without loving them.”81 At the conclusion of her performance, a final set change revealed a garden scene from which emerged Marie de’ Medici herself and several ladies dressed as nymphs who performed a ballet. The verses penned to accompany this dance continue the Petrarchan theme of the naiad’s song. The dancers “speak” in the collective first person (“nous”) about their disregard for Cupid. By spurning the god of Eros, the dancers maintain erotic power: “For the snow in our breast / Impedes his plans so well.”82 The celebration of chastity casts the female courtiers in a position of authority relative to male spectators and provides an enticing prelude to the social dancing that followed the spectacle.83 Gender distinctions also characterized the royal family’s interactions with their diplomatic guests. As Puisieux remarked, the king invited Carew, while the queen hosted his wife. The king bestowed the honor of the Garter on Carew, while the queen directed particular courtesies toward the “ambassadrice.”84 In their accounts, Puisieux and Carew describe parallel, “his and hers” gestures of cordiality, symmetrical like the moves of a courtly dance. The women’s participation in the ritual serves as a critical supplement to the relationship between the king and the ambassador. Their presence marks the occasion as social as well as political, an act of personal hospitality in addition to a public ceremony. By inscribing the ballet in a discourse of hospitality, Puisieux also argued that the intimate favors bestowed on the English ambassador effectively guaranteed better treatment for Le Fèvre de la Boderie in London. He continued: “[The ambassador] made several admiring remarks as much about the nobility [gentillesse] of the ballet as about its magnificence; and he won’t have neglected, I rest assured, to give a very good account of it to his master: which will not worsen your position regarding the one to be danced over there, so Mr. Carew has reassured us a little while ago that you will be well treated there and welcomed to your content.”85 Conjecturing about Carew’s account of the ballet in his correspondence with his “master” back in London, Puisieux reminded his reader that the monarch was the ultimate spectator and judge of such events. Although Le Fèvre de la Boderie concerned himself mainly with the

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live and present audience of fellow ambassadors (and the “whole of Christendom” they synecdochically represented), here Puisieux shifted the attention to the exclusive channels of publicity produced by the ambassador’s writing after the entertainment was over. He implied, moreover, that this way of signifying diplomatic relationships would be more effective in eliciting reciprocal treatment and therefore ensuring French precedence in Britain. Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s reports on his invitation to the Masque of Queens confirm that the English court reciprocated French gestures of hospitality toward their ambassador. According to the ambassador’s letters, James and Anna mirrored the French king and queen in their displays of intimate affection toward Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his family. They all dined together in the royal family’s private chambers before the entertainment. At the masque, the ambassador was seated next to the king, who assured him “it was in the intention to reserve all the honor for me,” and they talked all the way through the performance.86 In the interludes between acts, Queen Anna sought out the ambassador’s wife, “making a thousand gestures of familiarity toward her” (lui faisant mille demonstrations de privauté).87 The Duke of York invited the ambassador’s young daughter to dance.88 The language of intimacy and familiarity is, if anything, stronger in this letter than in Puisieux’s account of the ballet in Paris.89 Themes of private and familial affections between the French and English dominate the narrative. His wife and “little daughter”—rarely mentioned in his correspondence—here play important supporting roles in a scene of hospitality and friendship between the French family and the English royal clan. The ambassador’s choices in narrating the event imply that such personal attentions were the greatest privileges an ambassador could enjoy.90 This privileging of private favors would seem to contradict the French ambassador’s claim the previous year that there was “no proportion” between a demonstration of friendship behind closed doors and a vastly preferable invitation to a “public solemnity.” The important distinction at the Masque of Queens was that this display of intimacy took place on a public stage. The ambassador wrote that “the king and the Count of Salisbury have declared and made as public that this festivity was mainly being created only for the love of me.”91 The diplomatic success of the event hinged on its synthesis of exclusivity and publicity, its status as a private gesture “made as public” for all the world to observe. Le Fèvre de la Boderie revealed his continued obsession with the wider audience for his treatment at the London court toward the end of his report on the masque. He concluded his account by tallying up the honors paid to

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him against those shown to the Spanish ambassador the previous year: “There was nothing similar in the favor received by the Spanish ambassador last year, for he was not feasted by the king and did not eat with him but in a room where not even a single councilor accompanied him. Neither the king nor the queen was ever seen to say a word to him while the ballet took place.”92 By comparing his experience to that of the Spanish ambassador a year before, Le Fèvre de la Boderie reconstructed these private displays of diplomatic hospitality as another arena for public struggles for precedence.93 In fact, the attentions lavished on the French ambassador at the Masque of Queens set in motion another round of mediation of the event among the diplomatic community. Le Fèvre de la Boderie observed that the masque’s advertisement as an exclusive gift to him allowed the English monarch to smooth over the fact that other ambassadors, including the representative from Venice with whom the crown had a favored relationship, were excluded from the entertainment. Indeed, the Venetian ambassador reported that he had been told: “His Majesty never conceived that this could bring any prejudice to the Republic. The French Ambassador was invited alone as a special mark of regard; his Majesty designed still greater honours for me. No one had a right to claim invitation to another’s house.”94 By framing the masque as a personal “invitation to another’s house,” the English court attempted to dodge causing offense to an ally even as their ambassador was excluded from what had previously been considered a public court event. Similar to the way in which Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX disseminated conflicting accounts of the Bayonne festivity to different European audiences, in the publicization of the Masque of Queens French and English actors manipulated both public and private registers of representation to reassure different sectors of the diplomatic community in London. Diplomatic correspondence provides a window onto the political “backstage” space of court entertainments. Before, during, and after the theatrical event, political actors maneuvered to spin gestures of hospitality in ways most favorable to their own agendas. Seen through the eyes of diplomats, court masques and ballets appear as highly complex theatrical events possessed of a double layer of theatricality. The performance onstage was surrounded by a second level of performance in which diplomatic spectators made a spectacle of their presence and its implications for the prestige of their monarch. This mise en abyme was encircled by a further level of performance in the discourse that interpreted, publicized, and mediated the political significance of favors bestowed on various ambassadors through the entertainment.

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Diplomacy and Authority in the Masque of Queens With good reason, ambassadors placed the matter of their own maneuvering and posturing around this series of masques and ballets at the center of their correspondence about them. But what of the content of the Masque of Queens itself? As he had for the Haddington Masque, Le Fèvre de la Boderie declined to describe or comment on the spectacle of the Masque of Queens, focusing instead on the personal attentions lavished upon him by the royal family. In this way, the ambassador exemplified a form of diplomatic spectatorship that willfully marginalized the content of lavish court spectacles. The diplomat’s point of view thus offers a fascinating corrective to scholarly accounts of court entertainment that characterize these pompous displays as oppressive tools of monarchal propaganda. In fact, the Masque of Queens has galvanized a great deal of critical attention around the question of its relationship between patronage and political authority at court. As its title implies, this masque foregrounded Anna’s role as primary sponsor. In the preface to the printed libretto, Ben Jonson underlined Anna’s particular authority as patron and collaborator. Noting that the masque represented “the third time of my being used in these services to Her Majesty’s personal presentations,” Jonson observed that this necessitated a great attention to the “nobility” and “variety” of the spectacle.95 He attributed the masque’s main innovation—the “foil or false masque” that preceded the queen’s own entry onto the stage—to Anna herself.96 Jonson also highlighted Anna’s role as primary object of the masque’s encomiastic function, in describing the parade of queens that composed the centerpiece: “The twelfth, and worthy sovereign of all I make BEL-­ANNA royal Queen of the Ocean, of whose dignity and person the whole scope of the invention doth speak throughout.”97 As Leeds Barroll, Clare McManus, and others have explored, the masque thematized feminine authority of all kinds.98 The opening antimasque featured a parade of “hags” or witches calling for their leader or “Dame.” Finally, a personification of Heroic Virtue descended to clear away the hell-­scape and make way for a pageant of noble queens from antiquity: from Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, to Bodicea and finally Anna herself, embodying the culmination and epitome of their glory. As described by McManus, the Masque of Queens staged “the empowering specularity of the female body,” a body that was “expressive despite and because of the physical definition of femininity.”99 Despite this focus on the nature and limits of feminine authority in the themes, imagery, and text of the spectacle, scholars recall that representations

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of masculine monarchal power remained a crucial feature of this feminocentric spectacle. The figure who banishes the witches from the stage is described as embodying a “heroic and masculine virtue.”100 The penultimate dance honors young Prince Charles by having the masquers form the letters of his name.101 In an essay on the Masque of Queens, Stephen Orgel goes further in asserting the primacy of the king’s authority as signaled by his privileged viewing perspective in the audience: “Outside the fiction but at the center of the courtly spectacle, sits the monarch, declaring by his presence that in this masque of queens, heroism may be personified in the royal consort, but the highest virtue is that of the Rex Pacificus, scholar and poet.”102 Jonson may have organized the spectacle at Anna’s command, but monarchal politics confers final authority to the king. Orgel’s argument here recalls earlier New Historicist arguments that the pompous spectacles of court always refer back to the ultimate monarchal authority that they help realize.103 More recent scholarship adopts the nuanced view that spectacles such as the Masque of Queens demonstrate the “polymorphic” nature of the English body politic and played a role in negotiating a fractured, “chaotic and frequently confusing” political structure at the English court.104 The diplomatic setting adds an extra layer of chaos and confusion to our understanding of the masque’s political context, as it asks us to consider the perspectives of viewers only tangentially interested in power struggles within the English court. Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s account of the masque places himself and the matter of Britain’s diplomatic relations with France at the center of the event. Although it might be tempting to dismiss his perspective as narcissistic or as biased by professional self-­fashioning, this is surely not the whole story. His letter exchanges with Villeroy and Puisieux reveal how much time and attention were invested to ensure that the masque accomplished its diplomatic goals. Moreover, since the French ambassador sat alongside the king at the performance, any argument about the significance of James’s privileged vantage point on the dance must apply to Le Fèvre de la Boderie as well. Given his particular set of preoccupations and expectations, what might he have seen from his seat of honor next to the king, and how might he have interpreted it?105 The discourses mobilized by the diplomatic correspondence draw attention to features of the masque’s text and imagery that may have spoken to the French ambassador in particular. Much of the scholarship on this masque has focused on the elegant, triumphant second part, the parade of queens. But for a contemporary audience, it was the first, grotesque part of the masque (called the “antimasque” by modern critics)106 that deserved most

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attention. The dialogue between the witches and their Dame allows for a scene of exposition in which the hags announce their names and identities. They expound on the vices they represent—Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, Falsehood, Murmur, Malice, Impudence, Slander, Execration, Bitterness, and Rage Mischief—all characterized as “faithful opposites / To Fame and Glory.”107 As Barbara Ravelhofer points out, many Britons—including King James— believed in witches and demons; this scene would have had a “creepy impact” on this sector of the audience in particular.108 The moral content represented by the witches also takes on special resonance when viewed in the context of the affair over the French ambassador. As Jonson remarks in his marginal notes on the libretto, he gave a great deal of thought to the presentation of the witches in order to make this scene plausible and appealing to spectators. He explains, for example, that he delayed the witches’ proclamation of their identities until the Dame arrived onstage to avoid boring “narrations” directed at the audience rather than another character.109 Moreover, he had the hags reveal their names in a natural order: “In the chaining of these vices I make as if one link produced another. . . . Nor will it appear much violenced if their series be considered, when the opposition to all virtue begins out of Ignorance.”110 Jonson aims to produce moral reflection in spectators. The sequence of the witches’ speeches should provoke a consideration of how moral errors accumulate: from ignorance to suspicion to credulity to falsehood to murmur and so forth. It is noteworthy that the “vices” personified in the masque pertain to the circulation of information and discourse. In part, this foreshadows the triumph of “Good Fame” at the end of the masque.111 From Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s perspective, however, a more pointed interpretation leaps to mind, in which the hags embody—and mark as “vices”— some of the behaviors and emotional responses produced by the recent diplomatic incident. The sequence of witches onstage echoes the way the French ambassador’s reaction to his non-­invitation escalated from “ignorance” and “suspicion” of its political justifications through the spread of “murmur” and “malice” in correspondence, and all the way into “execration,” “bitterness,” and (a mild form of ) “rage mischief ” in the demands he reportedly transmitted to James. Could the honor of his invitation to the masque have also provided the occasion for a subtle rebuke of his behavior in dance form? Because Le Fèvre de la Boderie never recorded his impressions of the masque for posterity, what he glimpsed from his ambassador’s oblique gaze and how he interpreted the witches and queens he saw onstage at Whitehall remain unrecoverable. Yet the fact that he neglected the content of the

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performance in his reports reveals something important about his mode of spectatorship. For the ambassador, attending a masque was less about watching than about acting and interacting. Moreover, the present event paled in significance as compared to the diplomat’s own performance, destined for publication through letters to a wider—and often more prestigious—audience in the masque’s aftermath. The masque provided the centerpiece for these peripheral performances directed at ever-­widening circles of audiences, but it was subsumed by the everyday theatrics that surrounded it.

Conclusion The story of Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the “incident” surrounding his attendance at court masques in London shows that if court entertainments provided a center of gravity for diplomatic relations, they did not function as an exclusive focal point. For ambassadors at the French and English courts, entertainments were a normal part of their annual calendar of duties. They offered an important but routine occasion at which to participate in the life of the host court as a part of its diplomatic community. As such, they allowed individual ambassadors to jockey for little signs of favor that would be noticed by their peers and appreciated by their masters when relayed in correspondence. Court entertainments operated simultaneously as a “public” stage on which diplomats could distinguish themselves before others and as a “private” event in which monarchs bestowed hospitality and gestures of intimate friendliness upon resident foreigners at their court. In this way, entertainments challenged diplomatic spectators to attend both to bilateral personal and political relations with their hosts and to the broader matter of their sovereign’s position on the European stage. In the midst of crafting his own performance for these distinct audiences, the ambassador, understandably, had little attention left over to focus on the entertainment on the masque or ballet stage. This active form of diplomatic spectatorship revealed in Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s incident complicates the standard narrative of court spectacle as effective propaganda for their sponsors. Those responsible for creating and hosting a ballet or masque had to think of the diplomatic audience as a privileged and highly sensitive sector of the audience and had to try to predict the international consequences of small choices about seating and staging. The norms of diplomatic culture limited the freedom of artists and sponsors to depict and to invite whom they wished. Moreover, however pompous their

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aesthetic, court spectacles were just one form of representation in a broader theatrical field in which multiple actors continually performed and witnessed others’ performances. The experience of diplomatic spectators might not differ very much from that of other courtiers, who also competed for marks of royal favor before an audience of fellow nobles.112 When court performance is considered not as a uniquely captivating spectacle but as the centerpiece around which other, individual performances took place, we see it not as a blunt instrument of power but rather as a space for negotiation. All of this portrays the audience for court entertainments as radically fragmented. The fractured audience of early seventeenth-­century spectacle represents a significant departure from the courtly entertainments staged by the Valois monarchs (discussed in Chapter 1) that incorporated music, movement, and poetry thought to unite spectators in a shared experience, and whose observer accounts confirm that they succeeded at least partially in configuring their viewers as members of a community. In contrast, the ballets and masques attended by Le Fèvre de la Boderie and his counterparts offered not a common experience but rather a common space in which viewers worked to distinguish themselves. Although diversity reigned over concord in these events, the idea of a united European public haunted the entertainment in the form of the imagined “whole of Christendom” whose gaze Le Fèvre de la Boderie wished to command. However spectral, this ultimate audience for the diplomat’s performance-­as-­spectator construed diplomacy itself as one big theater. The conception of Europe as a “fictive public” made it theoretically possible for creators and sponsors of court entertainments to attempt to capture that collective vision through forceful performances on international themes.113 Some of these are the focus of Chapters 3 and 4.

Chapter 3

National Actors on the Ballet Stage (1620s–30s)

Court entertainments may have appeared as strangely obscured focal points in most ambassadors’ writings.1 This scarcity of commentary, however, only means that diplomatic spectators rarely recorded their observations, not that they completely discounted entertainments’ content. After all, many spectacles concentrated on themes of professional interest to diplomats, including sovereignty, war, and peace. Although diplomats who witnessed entertainments had little to say about their subjects, the creators of court spectacles insisted on the power of ballets to communicate. Theorists stressed that engaging subject matter was the most important element of a successful entertainment. One of the first ballet manuals, designer Nicolas Saint-­Hubert’s La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (The Way of Composing and Successfully Producing Ballets, 1641), began: “I will start with the subject, upon which depends all the rest.”2 The music, choreography, and all other elements of the spectacle must “accommodate” or “subject themselves” to the representation of the thematic content.3 Describing ballet as a kind of “mute theater,” Saint-­Hubert insisted that its primary goal was to transmit meaning to its audience.4 In the following decades, Michel de Pure echoed the comparison of ballet to a “mute drama” while Claude-­François Ménestrier preferred the analogy of the “speaking painting” to evoke ballet’s particular communicative power.5 In fact, ballet offered artists a unique set of representational resources well suited to the depiction of political ideas. Characterization—perhaps the key artistic building block of pageant-­like early modern ballets—lent itself to reflections on autonomy, sovereignty, and (political) action. This was especially true of ballets that depicted characters invested with national traits. Figures

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marked as Spanish or Italian, as Turks or Moors, populated the earliest court entertainments. The Roman, Greek, Moorish, Spanish, and Scottish costumes worn by participants in the jousting tournament at the Bayonne Conference (discussed in Chapter 1) suggest some of the traditional uses of national masquerade, adding visual interest to chivalric sports. In the thematically focused setting of court ballets, dancers in national garb allowed for the depiction of political events and relations. As early as 1580, for example, Henri III commissioned an informal chamber ballet in which performers in Spanish and Portuguese dress enacted France’s vision of the crisis of Portuguese succession.6 Whether used for visual appeal or political commentary, the representation of national figures remained a staple of court performance throughout the early modern period.7 In the early decades of the seventeenth century, ballets that featured national characters among their dramatis personae also began to comment on the representational techniques that constituted nationality. The dominant form of the ballet à entrées—a series of independent solo or small-­group performances, loosely linked by an overarching theme—lent itself to a critical engagement with processes of characterization and differentiation. In ballets with national themes and figures, this investigation addressed political matters. What did it mean to embody, and thereby represent, a collective entity such as a nation or country? This question resonated beyond the confines of the dancing hall. Dramatic representation provided models for political thought in relation to a variety of problems. As discussed in Chapter 2, thinkers on diplomacy used the analogy of the relationship between author and actor to characterize the sovereign’s delegation of authority to the ambassador. The conditions of sovereignty itself were described by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes as a form of impersonation through which the absolute monarch assumed the capacity to act on behalf of his subjects. In addition to these well-­known and well-­studied appropriations of the theatrical lexicon for political theory, other thinkers including Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, and Emeric Crucé considered how representatives of different states might come together in a confederative governing body to ensure peace. Dramatic metaphors (if metaphor is a sufficient term to describe theorists’ reliance on theatrical concepts) did not simply emerge from the ether. Most political theorists and all the practitioners of monarchal and diplomatic politics inhabited a culture rich in dramatic performances, particularly ballets. Sully, a renowned amateur of dance, not only performed in ballets but commissioned the construction of a state-­of-­the-­art

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dance hall in his residence at the Arsenal, where he hosted several entertainments for the royal family.8 Even Hobbes absorbed the traditions of court performance through his role as tutor to the Devonshire Cavendish family of English aristocrats.9 In other words, the same individuals who theorized the means by which nations or commonwealths were represented on the political stage also had the experience of witnessing or participating in the playful embodiment of national characters on the ballet stage. How might ballet have reflected on—or even helped generate—models for understanding political representation?

Ballets of Nations Performances by national characters became a ubiquitous feature of ballets in the 1620s and 1630s.10 An international pageant in dance form, these “ballets of nations” featured a series of performers each costumed in the characteristic garb of his or her particular “nation,” performing a dance conventionally associated with that country (an allemande for a German, a passacaille for an Italian, a sarabande for a Spaniard, etc.). Verses sung or declaimed during the dance referenced popular stereotypes about the character’s ethnicity. Some entire ballets were devoted to such a parade of national types, as in the Ballet des nations scripted by Guillaume Colletet and performed at Louis XIII’s court around 1622.11 More often, a series of performances by national characters made up part of a larger, more diverse entertainment. Ballets of nations fit perfectly into the dominant form and aesthetic of ballets composed for Louis XIII’s court. The “burlesque” ballets of the period focused attention on the visual: set design, costumes, and virtuosic dance.12 To maximize spectacular variety, most ballets eschewed complex plots, taking instead a disconnected structure as “parades of disparate figures” that relied on characterization to provide most of their effect.13 Seventeenth-­century ballet commentators approved of national ballets because audiences could easily recognize the figures they depicted. In this, they followed Aristotle’s contention in part 4 of the Poetics that the greatest pleasure to be derived from contemplation of an image lies in the satisfaction of recognition.14 Jesuit composer Claude-­François Ménestrier, for example, remarked in his Des ballets anciens et modernes (Of Ballets Ancient and Modern, 1682) that ballets should “speak to the eyes” with clearly legible imageries.15 Ethnic or national figures rated highly by this measure, for “the diverse Nations have their proper costumes

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that distinguish them. The Turk has the jacket and turban, the Moor the color black, and the Americans their outfit of feathers.”16 Simply by using the costume traditionally associated with the Moor or the American, the composer could effortlessly and unambiguously convey the identity of the personage to his audience. Of course, recognizability was not the only factor driving the popularity of ballets of nations in the 1620s and 1630s. National figures appealed to contemporary French aesthetic interest in the exotic.17 In addition, national characters lent themselves to the comic spirit of Carnival ballets with exaggerated costumes and movements and humorous verses that mocked national stereotypes. Although the national ballet’s depiction of foreign countries certainly depended on well-­worn types and trite exoticism, the conceit of embodying and performing national identities on the ballet stage deserves deeper consideration as a material artifact of the way some French artists perceived the category of the nation in the seventeenth century.18 In French in this period, the term “nation” designated an ensemble of characteristics presumed to be exhibited by individuals hailing from a particular country. French dictionaries defined the word “nation” as a collective term referring to “all the inhabitants of the same State, of the same country, who live under the same laws, speak the same language, etc.”19 The meaning and usage of the term pertained chiefly to shared cultural traits, or what we might call ethnicity. Nationality had to do with language and with characteristics tied to region and climate. A “nation” could be bellicose or barbarous, refined or rustic. Each nation had its characteristic “genius” that manifested itself in the poetry, art, and music of its progeny. Although primarily geographical and cultural, the category of the nation also had political connotations. Long before the “nation-­state” as such came into existence, dictionary definitions suggested the political relevance of nationality in their observations that the people who constitute a nation live “in the same State” or “under a common rule” and “under the same laws.”20 Discourses about nationality certainly played a role in international politics—for example, in the heated national rivalries that often accompanied struggles over territory or political power. Questions of nationality, moreover, influenced the delineation of frontiers. As Peter Sahlins has shown in his work on the creation of the boundary between France and Spain in the mid-­ seventeenth century, “both state formation and nation building were two-­way processes. . . . States did not simply impose their values and boundaries on local society. Rather, local society was a motive force in the formation and

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consolidation of nationhood and the territorial state.”21 Despite the immense cultural and linguistic diversity within both kingdoms, claims that the ethnicity or “nation” of a particular region was more French or more Spanish helped determine on which side of the border it would lie. In this context, the performance of nationality on the ballet stage enacted, and asked spectators to reflect upon, assumptions about national differentiation. Across the 1620s and 1630s, French court artists experimented with different approaches to characterizing national identities in ballets: earlier examples of the form presented essentially human characters exhibiting national traits, while later versions employed allegorical embodiments of nations in the abstract. The depiction of national characters frequently served to elaborate national rivalries. Particularly during wartime or on the eve of conflict, the performance of ridiculous national stereotypes permitted the denigration of the countries they represented.22 More fundamentally, though, personifications of nations helped bridge the divide between purely cultural and political conceptualizations of nationality. The materialization of geographical and cultural entities as balletic personas participated in the construction of a political fiction whereby a country personified as an abstract idea or collectivity—rather than in the form of its monarch—might be thought to behave as a sovereign “actor” on the world stage. In this way, ballet modeled ways of thinking about political representation in European diplomacy.

Dances of Delegation The clearest evidence that ballets engaged with already existing understandings of political representation on the world stage comes from entertainments that featured ambassadors and envoys as their characters. Several ballets of nations use a fictional framework in which characters from distant corners of the globe have traveled to Paris to pay homage to the French monarch on behalf of their countrymen. A few entertainments put greater emphasis on the characters’ identity as ambassadors through verses and staging techniques that invited viewers to reflect on the dynamics of diplomatic representation and delegation. One example is the comic ballet the Ballet du grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Ballet of the Grand Ball of the Dowager of Bilbao), staged twice during the Carnival season in 1626, first at the Louvre and then at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.23 Margaret McGowan has pointed to this ballet as the epitome

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of burlesque style, as reflected in Daniel Rabel’s engrossing drawings of the costumes and major props. The grotesque figure of the Dowager, in particular—played by a male performer inside a “machine” by court sculptor Bourdin—ridiculed the aging Marguerite de Valois for an in-­group of courtly spectators.24 Although critics have examined this ballet’s commentary on the court and its engagement with the Parisian populace, the entertainment’s international theme has received less attention, even though global imagery makes up the majority of the spectacle.25 The ballet featured a series of performances by delegations from the “Four Parts of the World” who, according to the fictional scenario, had come to visit the queen of the ballet’s title. Their exotic garb and accoutrements (including “machine” animals representing the distinctive fauna of each region) surely appealed to the eye and the imaginations of spectators. But the foreign contingents also alluded to diplomatic delegations. As depicted in Rabel’s drawings, each entrée showcased a small cluster of performers with one lead figure surrounded by an entourage of countrymen: Atabalipa, king of Cusco, led a group of Americans; Mahommet was accompanied by various “peoples of Asia”; the Great Turk ushered in the eunuchs and ladies of his harem; the “peoples of the North” entered behind two Bailiffs of Greenland and Friesland; the Grand Cacique took the stage along with African men and women. Only the “entrée of the Europeans”—a joyfully chaotic performance of Grenadine dancers and guitarists—diverged from the format. The configuration of the continental performances echoed the extraordinary embassies consisting of an official ambassador and several lesser envoys that would be sent to congratulate monarchs on political successes, marriages, or royal births. The published description and verses for the entertainment further amplified the ballet’s resonances with diplomatic representation. It took as its central conceit that the ballet depicted a kind of courtly summit arranged by the Dowager in celebration of her love for her ridiculous suitor, Fanfan de Sotteville. As the opening pages of the libretto explain: “The rumors which carry on their wings the secrets of the smallest schools as well as the evil plots of the greatest Monarchs, spared not their diligence in spreading among the diverse parts of the World the merits of the DOWAGER of BILBAO; who in order to welcome the virtuous suit of FANFAN de SOTTEVILLE, assembles a great Ball in the manner of her Ancestors, to acknowledge the gestures of her Gallant, and to maintain order among the Foreigners who arrive from every coast.”26 The theme of international renown echoes throughout René Bordier’s libretto in both descriptive passages and verses. Foreign leaders trumpet

Figure 2. Daniel Rabel, design for the entrée of the “Grand Can” and his entourage, from the Ballet du Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, 1626. BnF.

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their own ambition and might: “I make all the Earth tremble, / And constrain the Ocean to revere my Laws,” crows the Great Turk.27 “The earth which burns with passion for me / Gives carte blanche to my ambitions,” boasts the Cacique.28 Armed with hyperbole, they verbally spar for global prestige before praising the supreme merit of their host. While nominally honoring the Dowager, the characters exploit this world stage to enhance their own images and announce their imperial drives, much in the way that the pomp of an extraordinary embassy was designed to burnish the reputation of the monarch who sent it more than the prince who received its tribute. At the same time the ballet’s structure mocks diplomatic competition for prestige, it also satirizes the tradition of praise for the host sovereign. The delegates’ fawning addresses to the Dowager work as a parody of contemporary encomiastic ballets that vaunted the renown of the real French king. But the parody grows more complex when verses spoken in the foreign characters’ voices reference Louis XIII’s own glory. Verses written by Claude de l­’Estoille for the Great Turk, for example, declare: “It’s only you, Louis the Great, whose weapons shall one day / Fell the Crescent.”29 Explicitly or implicitly, the parade of foreign princes pays homage to two addressees: the ridiculous figure of the Dowager and the real French sovereign, present in the audience. The entertainment simultaneously rehearses and derides the trope of ballets of nations that ventriloquized praise for the king through foreign personas. In this respect, the Grand bal fits Mark Franko’s characterization of burlesque ballet as “a purposive ideological distortion of court ballet’s traditional aims: glorification of the sovereign.”30 At the same time that it embellishes Louis XIII’s stature, it ridicules the forms through which that exaltation takes place. If the Grand bal resembled a grotesque exaggeration of the competitive representation of prestige occasioned by international summits, the national ballet that formed part of the 1635 Ballet de la Marine (Ballet of the Navy) staged a more direct and profound critique of diplomatic representation. Most of its characters—all of the nationally marked ones—are identified as “ambassadors” in the libretto. The performances of these diplomatic figures bring complexity to an otherwise sycophantic entertainment as the ballet’s script unpacks the political pitfalls of delegation. As the opening pages of the libretto explain, the ballet took as its “subject” the king’s recent political triumphs including the squashing of Huguenot dissent, the clearing away of pirates from the coasts, and the reopening of maritime commerce. Although not explicitly referenced in the preface, France’s new transatlantic settlements in Québec and the Caribbean also helped reinforce France’s reputation for

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seafaring prowess in this year. This spectacle’s naval theme, moreover, called attention to the accomplishments of its patron, Cardinal Richelieu, who organized the reinforcement of the French fleet and prompted a renewed focus on maritime commerce, particularly in the Levant.31 It also signaled French expansionist ambitions to an international audience through the conduit of the ambassadors in attendance.32 It was France’s recent successes, the ballet text explains, that inspired its characters, in their role as foreign ambassadors, to come Paris to pay tribute to Louis XIII. A brief headnote to the ballet’s libretto explains how its content celebrates French triumph: “The opening of the first part is made up of a song by the Nereids and Marine Gods who come to announce to France the return of her glorious vessels, and the second [part] is drawn from the esteem of foreign Princes who, delighted by the marvels of the greatest Monarch of the world, send to his Majesty, via the mouth of their Ambassadors, assurances of an affection which they swear must be inviolable.”33 Repeating the tributary dynamics of the Grand bal in a serious register, the ballet redirects praise for the king through the foreign mouths of its fictional ambassadors. This intention is repeated in the “récit,” or song that opened the ballet’s second act, performed by the personification of Renommée (Reputation or Fame). Addressing Louis XIII, the figure sings: Great King, marvel of the world, I come from the ends of the Universe, But in all the diverse climates Of land and of the waves, I never saw anything that could compare To the grand actions that make you adored.34 The ten entrées that follow feature dancers playing the part of ambassadors and subjects from foreign nations: Muscovites, Laplanders, Persians, Chinese, and Moors, and at last, following a concert of lute music, pygmies, Giants, “Unknown People” (Incogneues), Amazons, and Americans (specifically, Topinambous, the Brazilian tribe allied with French settlers in Brazil in the mid-­sixteenth century). Each ambassador in turn pays versified homage to the French king or to the ladies of the court. The ballet transparently discloses and follows through on its encomiastic design. Despite its clichéd monarchal praise, the ballet takes a novel, sophisticated approach to presenting its foreign characters. The fact that the figures

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are identified as ambassadors (rather than simply as Russians, Laplanders, Persians, or Chinese) marks them not as direct embodiments of national characters but as mediators and representatives of political authority. This indirect, and potentially unfaithful, mode of representation comes into focus thanks to the reuse of particular dancers in multiple roles throughout the ballet. The comte de Brion, for example, had already danced as a sailor and as a fisherman when he took the stage as a member of the Moorish delegation. His verses playfully refer to this fact: O gods! What a sudden change, What a miracle! What an adventure! Against the order of nature I become a Moor in but a moment.35 Similarly, Monsieur de la Trousse, representing a Moor after his prior performances as a sailor and a cannoneer, suggests his newly darkened skin “is but smoke” caused by the flames of love.36 The libretto rhetorically lifts its characters’ masks—or wipes off their blackface—to reveal the dancers beneath the costumes. The verses’ ironic deconstruction of character breaks theatrical illusion and privileges the identity of the performer over the role.37 This staging of performers’ infidelity to their onstage personas carries particular significance in the context of a ballet about ambassadors. As discussed in Chapter 2, the theatrical metaphor for describing an ambassador’s work was controversial in the early decades of the seventeenth century precisely because it called into question a diplomat’s loyalty to his sovereign. For Hotman in particular, what set an ambassador apart from an actor was the fact that an ambassador could not change roles: when one is a diplomat, “one cannot play different characters under different costumes.”38 This anxiety occupies center stage in the Ballet de la Marine as representatives of distant countries declare their readiness to abandon their homes and missions. The Persian ambassador, for example, discloses that he has not undertaken his journeys because the shah ordered him to do so; instead, “I follow all the pleasures where my age conveys me . . . and if I seem to adore the sun, / It’s because under this beautiful name I revere Sylvie” (that is, his mistress).39 Later in the ballet, the Amazon rhetorically forswears her countrywomen, declaring, “I prefer the Seine to the waters of Thermodon. . . . and announce here that the love of Alexander / never pleased me so much as that of Louis.”40 In the guise of trite rehearsals of praise for the French monarch, verses such as these give expression to the fictional

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ambassadors’ individual subjectivity, their private motivations and sentiments, in a way that troubles the conception of diplomats as perfect representatives of their monarchs’ wishes. In the lighthearted ballet, assertions of diplomatic agency pertain to romance rather than Machiavellian political ambition. Still, the ballet discloses the possibility that although ambassadors profess to represent the wishes and intentions of a head of state, they may be performing according to a different script, one of their own or another prince’s devising. Both the Grand bal and the Ballet de la Marine play with modes of diplomatic representation by ridiculing the kinds of posturing that occurs at international summits or, more deeply, by referencing the problems of fidelity that arise when ambassadors are charged with acting as surrogates for their masters. In both cases, ballet easily appropriated forms of political representation for artistic purposes. The comic resources of the form—particularly burlesque aesthetics—exposed the ridiculous or unstable underside of these types of representationality on which diplomatic practices relied.

Personifying the Body Politic The Grand bal and the Ballet de la Marine’s critical engagement with concepts of diplomatic representation raises the question of how else the ballet form might have dialogued with theories of political representation. Important studies of Louis XIV’s participation in court entertainments have analyzed how the dancing body of the king reaffirmed royal authority through its charismatic presence (a topic to be taken up in Chapter 6). If monarchal sovereignty is understood to derive from quasi-­feudal relationships between the monarch and his nobles (as for Jean Bodin, for example), ballet reflects and reinforces the nature of those ties through stylized reenactments of gestures of subjection. If, however, the monarch functions as a stand-­in for his subjects, as a physical incarnation of the body politic, the stakes of his performance change. Famously explicated by Ernst Kantorowicz and based largely on a study of ceremonial practices, this theological view of sovereignty ensured permanent, stable rule through an “uninterrupted line of bodies natural” giving physical form to the mystical “body politic” in perpetuity.41 Distinct from the feudal model of sovereignty, this theory conceives of the king as a personification of the otherwise unrepresentable whole of the polity. Paul Friedland helpfully clarifies: “Political bodies in pre-­modern France were not the ultimate objects of the re-­presentative process; political bodies were themselves

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re-­presentations. Even for the most die-­hard absolutists, the political body of the king was not so much the object of re-­presentation as it was a kind of conceptual way station between the political actor and the true object of political re-­presentation: the mystical body of the nation or the corpus mysticum.”42 For this reason, in her pioneering work on forms of political representation, Hanna Pitkin groups monarchal representation under the rubric of “symbolic representation” wherein “a political representative is to be understood on the model of a flag representing the nation.”43 As the (mystical) personification of the state, the king also comes to function as a kind of emblem or icon of it. Turning away from political ceremonies and toward French legal history for insights about the nature of royal power, Tyler Lange suggests that the “juridical fiction” of the king’s two bodies “never emerged quite so clearly in France as in England.”44 In particular, a 1607 edict “prescribed the necessary reunion of the king’s personal and dynastic property with the royal domain,” insisting on “the irrevocable marriage or union of the individual king and his office rather than the distinction between them.”45 Meanwhile, judicial practices before the eighteenth century usually treated courts as “part of the Prince’s body” such that “the inescapably unitary, simple royal person could only either incarnate or be opposed to the nation.”46 Alain Boureau affirms the simplicity and unity of the royal body in France, highlighting both the centrality of the king’s natural body to political rituals and the ubiquity of representations of monarchs as fallible individuals.47 These insights suggest the inadequacy of monarchal representation as a stand-­in for the polity as a whole. In this context, ballets of nations produced new ideas and concepts for theories of political representation. The figures who playfully represent their nations (that is, their people, those who share their ethnicity and territorial roots) do not, of course, have legitimate political power. Yet they do “speak for” their countrymen within the fictional world conjured on the stage. More important, they serve as emblems of their nation, embodying traits stereotypically associated with their compatriots. Those stylized traits take on a symbolic status through performance and re-­performance on the stage. In this way, the ballets develop an iconicity of the nation separate from the logic of monarchal representation, making available a new way to envision a collective (geographical, political) entity. The representability of nationalities emerged and gained iconic force across repeated performances of national stereotypes in different entertainments. Gradually, and with reinforcement from other visual and discursive cultural productions, a repertoire of traits and imagery developed that could

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instantly indicate the identity of any nationally marked performer: as Ménestrier described, the Turk has his vest, the Americans their costume of feathers. One early example of such national typecasting occurs in the Ballet de Monseigneur le Prince, likely danced in December 1621 in Bourges (perhaps by Henri II de Bourbon-­Condé, a prince of the blood residing in Berry).48 The ribald ballet features a series of dances by lovesick “madmen” (fous) who hail from different countries: France, Flanders, the Indies, England, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, and Turkey. The costumes and music for this ballet have not survived, but the poetry preserved in the libretto suggests how the figures differentiated themselves according to national traits. Each dancer is assigned a different phallic joke evocative of his national character. The predictably drunken German declares: “I always loved wine above all else, / And a sausage was my God.”49 The Polish fool promises the “Dames” of the audience that his cold humor will not impede their potential courtship: “The cold that reigns in Poland / Moves far away from my members / . . . Touch my ivory pipe: / All my fires rise from there.”50 Although the characters possess a specific identity (as fools), they distinguish themselves through these national traits and come to stand for a national group by way of iconic resemblance. The same principle of differentiation structures the first so-­titled Ballet des nations scripted by Guillaume Colletet and likely performed in the Carnival season of 1622, before Louis XIII’s departure to suppress Huguenot revolt in La Rochelle.51 This ballet’s characters are all identified as fishermen. But they, too, distinguish themselves from each other by alluding to traits stereotypically associated with their nations: braggadocio for the Spaniard, dancing ability for the Italian, a sturdy build for the German, familiarity with cold weather for the Pole. Distinctive bodily performances reinforced these verbal articulations of difference. Although the music and choreography for this ballet have not survived, clues in the libretto suggest that each figure performed a dance style associated with his nation. The Venetian Pantalone’s reference to the “movement in my buttocks,”52 for example, describes the kind of lively passacaille often used in Italian entrées of ballets of nations, while the German’s allusion to his “strength in the middle of the body” evokes a sturdy allemande dance.53 Distinctive ways of moving and gesturing as well as costume and character traits constituted a performance of nationality that would be recognizable whether embodied by a fool or a fisherman, a king or a clown. In this way, the ballet form allowed a nation—in the sense of a people—to be personified by actors other than the sovereign himself.

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Comic, festive, and frivolous, national ballets seem distant from the legal erudition of political theory. Yet theatrical performance offered an important vocabulary for early modern thinkers analyzing and reflecting on modes of political representation. The theatrical metaphor has been most famously used to describe sovereign power in chapter 16 of Hobbes’s Leviathan, “Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated.” Hobbes here traces the origins of the legal category of personhood to the Latin concept of persona defined as “disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage . . . and from the stage, hath been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals, as in theatres. So that a person, is the same as that an actor is.”54 Although historians of political representation often point to his deployment of theatrical vocabulary as original, in fact Hobbes drew from a long tradition that conceived of political power in theatrical terms. Quentin Skinner, for example, shows that Leviathan employed an understanding of political representation as “speaking for” or “acting for” that reached back to patristic authors such as Saint Ambrose and Gregory the Great who, in turn, relied on Cicero’s account of the “role” of public officials in representing the interests of the people.55 Hobbes was not at all alone in understanding that political action only took place through the intermediary of representation. He did, however, provide the most iconic image of representative power in the form of the engraving that served as the frontispiece for Leviathan. Indeed, it has become nearly impossible to address Hobbes’s political theory without reference to this illustration of a large, imperious king whose body is composed of the many, tiny faces of the subjects he represents. The image supports Hobbes’s characterization of the sovereign as a “feigned or artificial person” who gives voice to another’s “words or actions” through surrogation.56 This “artificial person” represents—in the sense of acting for—the will of the multitude.57 One ballet explicitly depicting sovereign representation also elaborates how “artifice” might permit a monarch to represent the will of a people. The Ballet des quatre monarchies chrétiennes (Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies) resembles a typical ballet of nations except for the fact that each national performance is headed by a “monarch” in the form of a mythological persona. Performed at the Louvre on February 27 and March 6, 1635, the ballet was presented as a thank-­you gift from eight-­year-­old Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans (known as “Mademoiselle”) to Louis XIII after he pardoned her father (the king’s brother), Gaston d’Orléans, for his secret treaty with Spain the previous

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year.58 As described in a commemorative in-­quarto pamphlet, the ballet’s “admirable subject” depicted “Italy conducted by Orpheus, Spain by Juno, Germany by Bacchus, and France by Minerva; each of these Kingdoms having some relationship to the qualities of these four nations that all came to the feet of the noblest king on earth.”59 The librettist draws an interesting distinction between “kingdom” and “nation” in this initial description of the ballet’s conceit. The term “kingdom” (royaume) generally referred to the “governed state,” that is, the territory and people under the command of a monarch. In this instance, however, the word appears in an older and less common usage, as a vernacular equivalent of “regnum” or ruling power. Understood in this sense, “kingdom” refers to the gods and goddesses leading each troupe of dancers, a reading that explains why Germany and Italy are labeled “Monarchies” centuries before those countries existed as unified political entities. Although the mythological figureheads do not belong to or hail from their nations, the librettist takes care to indicate that they share characteristics with the people they represent. Italy, for example, follows Orpheus, deity of music and poetry. Accompanied by lutenists and singers, the god delivers an opening récit in praise of Louis XIII. In the last verse, he introduces his “subjects,” promising they will pay the king their compliments “in a style as sweet as my voice.”60 The series of performances that follow develops the parallel between Orpheus and Italy by showcasing the nation’s association with music, dance, laughter, and frivolity. “Pleasingly dressed” chestnut roasters dance with such liveliness it seems they “fricasseed their legs” as well as their delicacies.61 Neapolitan “buffoons” and harlequins perform acrobatics and boast about their comedic prowess. Similarly, in the third part of the ballet, Bacchus declares in his récit: “One sees an eternal proof of my power on the banks of the Rhine.”62 The dancers in his entourage incarnate stereotypically inebriated Germans, gamboling joyfully but clumsily in such a way that “they make you burst with laughter.”63 These performances rehearse common French depictions of the Italian and German national characters familiar from countless ballets. In the Ballet des quatre monarchies, though, national traits provide the justification for their representation by a particular mythological ruler. An essential similitude connects the “monarchs” to their subjects. The role of resemblance in the ballet’s assignment of mythological monarchs to the four Christian nations troubles the assumption that nationality had no relevance to early modern political sovereignty. Often retained within a family and underwritten by divine authority, sovereignty was most often understood as “jurisdictional,” requiring no natural connection between the

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sovereign and the territory or people he ruled.64 For a thinker such as Jean Bodin, a prince’s usurpation of new territory posed no problem, as sovereignty demonstrated by conquest was sufficient to justify dominion.65 For this reason, on the international stage, monarchs and princes interacted as individuals rather than as “heads of state” understood to be representing the interests, will, or character of their people.66 The Ballet des quatre monarchies, however, challenges the idea that heads of state have a purely imperial relationship to their peoples. Instead, the entertainment plays with the idea that characteristic resemblance strengthens bonds between a sovereign and his or her subjects. The entrées of Italy, Spain, and Germany rely on symbolism, stereotype, and metonymy to make this claim. The entrée of France presents the most structurally complex version of this vision of sovereignty owing to the identity of the ballet’s performers and spectators. The French subjects need not be represented through the performance of French stereotypes because actual French subjects attended and danced, effectively representing themselves. In the fourth and final part of the ballet, Mademoiselle herself takes the stage as Minerva, France’s own figurehead. The libretto describes her as the epitome of the noble community: “This young marvel . . . begins to appear in the sparkle and luster of the whole court.”67 The synecdochal connection between the figurehead and the larger group becomes concrete as the entertainment concludes with a ball in which the whole assembly participates. Throughout the final scenes devoted to the Monarchy of France, the ballet’s framing conceit breaks down to accommodate French political reality. This is especially true in the way the ballet addresses Louis XIII, who participated as a privileged spectator and dedicatee. As Minerva first enters the stage, she rhetorically cedes her authority as fictional “monarch” of France to the true French sovereign off stage. Her entrance is accompanied by the “most beautiful voices and best lutenists of Europe”68 and Mercury, who sings: Great King, I traverse the skies As quick as lightning Carrying the commands of my sovereign Master: But you know how to imitate him so well That I can no longer recognize Which of the two of you is the real Jupiter.69 Mercury’s confusion recalls myths about Jupiter (perhaps especially the story of Amphitryon) that depict him as a shape-­shifter who enjoys masquerading

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as mortal creatures. In a reversal of those tales, though, Mercury represents Louis XIII as the imitator of the god. The verses highlight the French king’s divine right to rule and his supreme power. The comparison to Jupiter lifts him above the lesser mythological “monarchs” whose entrées preceded this part of the ballet. The staging and rhetoric of these scenes clearly transfer sovereignty from the mythological figure leading the performances of France to the extradiegetic French king. Yet the principle of similitude between the divine head of the entrée and the character of the people she leads remains in place. Although Minerva has been associated with wisdom, music, and the arts, this ballet stresses her relationship to war. She presents a sword and pike to the king as symbols of his valor, as underscored by the accompanying récit: Most glorious Monarch Who ever walked the earth, Just and victorious Prince, Supporter of laws and honor of war, The Gods, oh worthy king, Have they more divine qualities than you?70 Echoing Mercury’s assertion of Louis XIII’s divinity, these verses imbue the king with the virtues Minerva herself embodies. Although conceived to respond to the delicate reconciliation of Louis XIII and Gaston d’Orléans, the Ballet des quatre monarchies chrétiennes performs additional, more subtle political work in the way it figures sovereignty. It rehearses the reflection on national character typical of the ballet of nations genre, but it also extends that reflection to the person of the monarch, positing that the most appropriate leader or figurehead for a people is one who shares that people’s traits. The ballet implies that embodying the state entails not simply a contractual authorization to “speak for” the populace but also an essential resemblance to it, an ability to incarnate and do justice to its national character.

Staging Interaction How national cultural traits (such as language or religion) should affect the government of states was a matter of debate in early modern political theory. In particular, early works on international relations considered national character

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an important concern in organizing the political landscape of Europe. Emeric Crucé’s Le nouveau Cynée (The New Cineas), published in 1623, Sully’s “Grand Design,” published in his Les œconomies royales, ou mémoires d’État (Royal Economy, or, Memoirs of State) in 1638 but circulated in manuscript form as early as the 1610s, and Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (The Rights of War and Peace), published in Latin in 1625 delved into questions of nationality and sovereignty as they pertained to international cooperation. Most often read as providing the theoretical undergirding for an emergent “society of states” in early modern Europe (a concept to be discussed further in Chapter 5), these texts also challenge the presumption that sovereignty did not necessarily have to respect natural or linguistic borders. Crucé, for example, argued that ambitious sovereigns trumped up cultural or ethnic rivalries between their subjects and those of their neighbors in order to fuel violent competition for territory. Such antagonism would cease, he contended, if everyone would recognize the meaninglessness of cultural differences between “nations”: “I say that such enmities are merely political, and cannot take away the conjunction that is and must be between men. . . . Why should I who is French wish ill upon an Englishman, Spaniard, or Indian? I cannot when I consider that they are men like me.”71 If sovereigns would only see the unfoundedness of regional and cultural enmities, perhaps they would limit the extent of their ambitions, content themselves within the borders of their existing dominions, and all of Europe could benefit from the peace and prosperity that would follow.72 Although he also sought to establish universal peace, Sully adopted a diametrically opposed approach to understanding the significance of nationality. His project for a confederation of European states took into account the “humors, natural complexions and inclinations” of different peoples in what commentators later called the “principle of nationalities.”73 He maintained that, in general, the boundaries of a state should reflect linguistic borders and be as geographically and culturally coherent as possible.74 Spain provided a cautionary tale about the toll of too much diversity within a single kingdom. “A true work of marquetry” with its patchwork of humors, customs, and cultural practices, Spain had to expend so many resources to keep peace that were it not for infusions of gold and silver from its American colonies the state would surely have fallen into financial ruin.75 States work best, Sully contended, when the monarch’s dominion limited itself to a relatively homogeneous territory. Grotius drew on similar logic when he echoed a recommendation by the Roman lawgiver Numa that “nothing more contributed to a

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firm Peace than to live contentedly within our own Bounds.”76 If a sovereign does pursue empire, he should take measures to ensure that his new subjects retain “their own Laws,” including cultural customs and religion.77 In this way, although they held different interpretations of the importance of national differences, Sully, Crucé, and Grotius recognized the part that nationality or local culture played in the distribution of sovereignty and balance of power across Europe. For Sully and Grotius in particular, lasting peace would be assured by sovereigns’ acknowledgment of national borders and by their cooperation through confederate governing bodies (in the case of Sully) or “alliances” formed under conventionally accepted laws or droits des gens (for Grotius).78 Ballets contributed to this debate by depicting interactions among national personas. How characters cooperated or competed onstage could be viewed as an allegory for the ideal organization of international society. In Colletet’s Ballet des nations, for example, the performance of the multicultural band of fishermen constructs a vision of harmony. Before the solo dances that distinguish each national figure, the ballet begins with a récit that identifies the performers as fishermen setting off for a night of trawling. The fishermen sing these lyrics in unison, evoking the dangers of sea voyages and imploring Triton to fill their nets with fish.79 Through these verses, the audience understands that, despite their different origins, the characters literally work together on the seas and experience the same hardships. Moreover, they “speak” as one. The choral performance of the récit is a striking departure from custom: virtually all ballet récits in this period were delivered by a solitary figure such as a mythological god or goddess or by an allegory for some lofty concept such as Fame or Peace. Colletet further underlines his use of the collective voice in this poem by repeating the first-­person plural pronoun (“nous”).80 Together, the staging, performance, and content of the opening song all foreground collective action as a major motif. The theme of cooperation resurfaces in the “grand ballet” toward the end of the entertainment. After each character has taken his solo and differentiated himself from the group through distinctive, national imagery and movement, all the performers take the stage together once again. As they dance in unison, their differences dissolve into a tableau of harmony. In this fictional scenario, national distinctions pose no obstacle to the figures’ cooperation. The vision prefigures the “concert of nations” metaphor employed by subsequent generations of international theorists. It also recalls the ideal of concordia discors to which a previous generation of ballet creators aspired. Colletet himself drew on this earlier, Renaissance conception of the power of music and dance

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to bring about concord in the libretto to his 1632 Ballet de l’Harmonie.81 He explained that music and dance fused together in ballet were “the most charming of our pleasures” and “not the least of the gifts that divine bounty communicates to our spirits.”82 Ballet helped achieve “a conformity of the body to the soul, and the soul to music,”83 and, as his description of the final grand ballet put it, “harmony perfectly unites all things.”84 Displaying national characters working in concert while asserting their distinctiveness, shifting between the collective and the singular voice, the structure of the ballet as a whole constructs something of an ideal model for European cooperation. Although the ballet’s characters act as sovereign figures who nonetheless choose to cooperate and speak together on occasion, they are clearly not equal. The ballet repeatedly depicts the Frenchman—both as a concept and as his personification onstage—as superior. In the solo performances, the dancers praise the “incomparable” French prince and declare that the French “surpass all other peoples in whatever they do.”85 Indeed, national figures differentiate themselves through their deferral to the French. The verses “for a Spaniard,” for example, refer to French prejudices about their neighbors: “I would act toward everyone with bravado, / with arrogance, and saber-­rattling, / And thought myself already the vanquisher of all.”86 But, the verses continue, he learned that the French possessed the bravery he only performed: “I see that the Frenchman who always crosses me, / Has not so much discourse, but more heart.”87 The French figure stands out from the other characters not only for his superiority but also for his lack of proper characteristics. Although the Spaniard, Italian, German, and Pole each have a defining trait, the Frenchman simply appropriates and reenacts the others’ distinctive styles. This becomes particularly clear in the performance of the French fisherman. The libretto describes the character as “a Frenchman who represents all the foreigners, one after the other.”88 The verses to accompany his performance declare: “Although I am French, when I want to I pass / As well for a Spaniard as for a Scotsman.”89 The cultural inconstancy and performative omnipotence of the Frenchman troubles the vision of independent actors choosing to work in concert, as suggested by the rest of the ballet’s structure. In the other characters’ performances, dance and poetry were directed toward self-­distinction. The Frenchman’s ability to perform as other national types implies he can perform and speak for them as well. The two different modes of national representation in the Ballet des nations—separate, distinctive solos by independent performers on one hand, omnipotent mimicry on the other—dialogue with contemporary metaphors

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of political representation. The international cast of fishermen parallels the collective, representative body of delegates from European countries imagined by Sully in his “Grand Design.” The polymorphous figure of the Frenchman, on the other hand, qualifies as a Hobbesian “feigned or artificial person.” Unlike a “natural” person who acts only on his own behalf, the artificial person has the capacity to represent others.90 The theatrical metaphors deployed in Leviathan famously construe political personhood as a form of dramatic representation. The theatrical analogy allows for one person to represent another, to usurp (through means of a “covenant”) another’s authority.91 Hobbes uses this model of “artificial” impersonation to theorize the Leviathan, the singular persona who represents the multitude.92 The Frenchman in the Ballet des nations does not quite embody such sovereign authority. Unlike the iconic depiction of the Leviathan published as a frontispiece to Hobbes’s work, the dancer cannot comprise all of the figures he represents simultaneously. Rather, he impersonates them sequentially—as the libretto indicates, “one after the other.” The national types, moreover, do not consent to the Frenchman’s representation. His virtuosic performance comes across as bold and imposing. He surpasses the others by passing for them.93 The usurping implications of the Frenchman’s performance come into focus in the ballet’s final two entrées, depicting a Scythian and some Moors, respectively. Although these peoples are not encompassed in the Frenchman’s polymorphous performance, their scenes explore the imperial dimension of his display of representational skill at a safe remove from Europe. Known in early modern Europe mainly through the writings of Herodotus and Strabo, the Scythians, nomadic tribes dwelling on the steppes of Central Asia, were considered a barbaric people, off the map of civilization. The ballet libretto makes this radical difference felt through verses composed in the second person rather than in the first. While all the other national types got to “speak” for themselves, the Scythian is “spoken to.” Moreover, the verses reference the Scythians’ nomadic reputation: “You no longer feel within yourself this vagabond humor / That made you run all over the world. . . . Now, poor Scythian, you must stay / Where you are here and now, forever arrested.”94 Without music or choreography, it is difficult to imagine this performance’s effect on the audience. On one hand, the verses imply triumph: the conquest and “civilization” of the nomadic outsider. At the same time, though, the verses evoke a certain pathos for the “sad” figure, who formerly “lived in complete liberty” but now finds himself “arrested.”95 The juxtaposition of the humiliated Scythian and the virtuosic Frenchman who immediately preceded him in the order

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of the ballet’s entrées suggests a link between their performances. The rhetoric of the conquered retrospectively places the triumphant boasts of the Frenchman in an imperial frame. The conquering implications of the ballet become most obvious in a final entrée included in some versions of the libretto: a récit sung by an allegorical personification of Fame, who is described as “conducting some Moors.”96 Her song announces: I come from the source of the light of day, Noble climate, where I am adored, To announce to the whole Court That I bring along a troop of Moors As brilliant as the Dawn; Consult their oracle, oh young Potentate, And you will know the riches promised to your State.97 Moors appeared with great regularity in international ballets at the French court. Inspired by maurophilic romances from Spain (such as the legend of the Abencerrajes and Zigris), representations of Moors in court spectacle tended to emphasize the nobility, gallantry, and chivalry, as well as the exoticism, of the North African people.98 The Moors evoked by Renommée’s song reflect this tradition. They hail from a “noble” climate and have the power to prophesy greatness. Unlike other Moorish displays in court spectacle, though, this entrée associates the Moors with the East (rather than the South). The Moors also have an ambiguous relationship to time. Placed at the site of the dawn, at the “source” of light, yet also capable of announcing the future, the Moors appear at once antique and timeless. They help to construct a narrative of translatio imperii, electing the young Louis XIII as rightful inheritor of their noble virtue and as a truly global monarch in the making. Although it appears at first as a straightforward parade of national types, the Ballet des nations stages two competing visions of political representation on an international stage. In the first part, representatives of nations alternatively exercise the right to act and speak for themselves and as part of an international collective. Even if each figure admits the superiority of the French, he does it on his own terms, in his own voice, in his own national character. In the second part, the amphibious Frenchman asserts his status as a universal representer, capable of performing as, and therefore ruling over, all other peoples of the earth. Taken as a whole, the ballet uses dramatic representation

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and evocative dance steps to present a stylized, idealized vision of international relations in which both French supremacy and cooperation among equals coexisted on the stage.

Conclusion Across the 1620s and 1630s, ballets exhibited a wide range of approaches to representing national entities. Despite relying on clichéd content—hauling out the same old jokes about haughty Spaniards and drunken Germans—the ballets drew sophisticated spectators’ attention toward the unique modes of dramatic representation they used to reimagine national characters. Their approaches to presenting national entities in embodied form provided a creative supplement to contemporary political theories that took recourse to a vocabulary of representation, impersonation, and incorporation. A ballet’s fictional scenario could portray nationally marked figures as more or less “naturally” connected to their ethnicities. Characters’ connections to imagined power structures could also vary—from embodying “monarchy” (in the Ballet des quatre monarchies) to serving as “ambassadors” charged with the duty of representing their princes’ wishes (in the Ballet de la Marine) to standing in synecdochically for their countrymen, just one fisherman or fool out of a nation of ordinary folk (as in the Ballet des nations and Ballet de Monseigneur le Prince). These diverse modes of representing the nation onstage prompt reflection on what it means to belong to, or to speak for, a larger “body” of individuals connected by a shared culture, language, land, and laws: How might national character inform political dominion? How can a single person come to “represent” and “act for” the state? How should heads of state conduct their interactions with each other in the absence of guidance from a higher authority (such as the pope)? How might national distinctions pose obstacles to European cooperation? Artistic representations facilitate abstract thinking, as when the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan made concrete the idea of a One representing a Multitude.99 The creative work of representation consists in forming concepts, through figures, that in turn shape the way people think and behave. If ballets possibly made “shapes” or “forms” for thinking about national entities, state sovereignty, and international interaction, they also critiqued or ridiculed modes of political representation. The exaggerated costumes of the Grand bal de la Douairière, stereotypical dances of the fishermen in the Ballet des nations, bawdy jokes of the Ballet de Monseigneur le Prince, and ironic

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poetry of the Ballet de la Marine exemplify what Mark Franko has characterized as the “self-­reflective and self-­critical” quality of burlesque ballet.100 Franko’s analysis treats grotesque or satirical performances as an outgrowth of court culture displaying “the corrosive underside of heroic self-­absorption” and the frustration of courtiers through “the affirmation of pure dissent.”101 By taking on international themes, these ballets direct the force of burlesque critique toward the modes of representations used in diplomatic practices or political discourses. Their focus on libidinal desire and bodily humor expose the person underneath the costume of national or diplomatic personification, calling attention to their own artifice. Moreover, the pomp of international competition for prestige appears in a risibly exaggerated form. The ambassador or monarch watching one of these ballets may well have recognized the parallel between the performances he observed and the performance he gave in everyday life. When, at the end of the spectacle, he folded himself into the performance by joining the communal dance, the distance between real national actors and their avatars onstage all but disappeared. A ballet or masque provided the occasion for the monarch and foreign ambassadors at his court to negotiate the terms of their relationships, to establish—however provisionally—the relative degree of esteem conferred by the king on each envoy. The quality and configuration of relationships preoccupied diplomatic spectators and the court officials charged with their care. This concern for relationships was also reflected onstage, through the interactions of dancers performing as national representatives. Performers enacted modes of relating to each other, of co-­inhabiting space, that repeated in idealized form the work of negotiation occurring around and beyond the dancing hall. The next chapter will address how these relationships were allegorized on the ballet stage. Ballets’ spatial, visual, and musical dimensions added depth to an emerging secular conception of European society and contributed a rich symbolic vocabulary for imagining a peaceful continent of sovereign states.

Chapter 4

Richelieu’s Allegories of War (1639–42)

Beneath the majestic arch of the proscenium, snow-­capped peaks recede into the distance. A rocky edifice occupies center stage. Perched on top, a figure personifying Italy begins to sing: “Oh, come to my aid, monarch of the French, a hard tyrant wants to violate my liberty.”1 This dreamlike vision enacts an eroticized political fantasy. Feminine Italy calls for her Gallic knight in shining armor to rescue her from violation at the hands of menacing Hapsburgs. French noblemen in the audience—destined to brandish their swords and follow their generals east with the spring thaw—hear Italy’s plaintive song, see her graceful presence, and perhaps feel moved to respond to her cries. Allegory has a tangible force in this scene, the ninth entrée of the Ballet de la prospérité des armes de la France, staged in February 1641 to commemorate French participation in the still ongoing Thirty Years’ War. The ballet reprises the older tradition of personifying national figures but in a different way from the early, burlesque court entertainments that featured national characters in a sequence of loosely connected solo performances. Instead, the Prospérité des armes and other entertainments of the late 1630s and early 1640s used personifications of countries to stage allegorized versions of recent history. They reenacted events—particularly events of the war—in stylized form while infusing them with drama and emotion. In the waning years of the war, First Minister Armand-­Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, commissioned three allegorical entertainments that dramatized the international conflict: the Ballet de la félicité (1639), the Prospérité des armes, and the machine-­enhanced drama Europe, comédie héroïque (1642) constitute a series of reflections on the war and on Europe’s future. Figures for Peace, Fame, and Harmony collaborate with mythological characters and personified nations to reenact a particular narrative of the war up to the moment

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of performance and to project a vision of its aftermath. All three works offer a predictably jingoistic and Francocentric view of world affairs, as France personified by one or another figure manages to save all of Europe, often with divine help. Allegory serves to commemorate a history of French triumph, to present it as the natural fulfillment of destiny. But it also performs the creative work of imagining new political configurations, especially in the portions of the entertainments that extend beyond the stylized depiction of real events and into a hypothetical postwar period. Critics such as Gordon Teskey have considered allegory a coercive or even violent poetic mode.2 Teskey stresses: “At the root of the motives for allegorical expression is . . . instrumental meaning, meaning not as a representation of what already is but as the creative exertion of force.”3 The poetics of allegory entail a forceful “yoking” of two things necessarily alien to each other. As such, the act of creating an allegory is itself an act of (poetic) violence. Allegory’s coercive force also operates at the hermeneutic level. More than any other form of artistic production, allegory leads its reader or viewer toward a single valid interpretation, the revelation of a higher truth. The unidirectionality of allegory made it useful for religious dramatic forms (such as mystery plays) as well as for rituals of monarchy (such as royal entries). In the case of Richelieu’s ballets, the use of allegory would seem to support the entertainments’ characterization as propaganda designed to enforce a vision of the war on French terms. This quality would seem to limit allegory’s usefulness for diplomacy, which requires nuance, prudence, and conciliation rather than pure force. Yet allegory’s orientation toward transcendence opens up the possibility for a different kind of artistic diplomacy. Capacious visions of European community and inspiring tableaux of peace direct attentions away from the historical realities of wartime and toward higher, abstract values that all parties might share. Moreover, with its capacity to give material form to intangible concepts, allegory represents modes of alliance and visions of political collectivities that might work to secure future peace. Depicting potentialities and aspirations as well as historical events and predetermined political ideologies, the allegorical spectacles offer themselves as an imaginative aid for an international community in crisis.

The Force of Allegory Although the spectacles of the late Thirty Years’ War period make particularly rich use of the mode, allegory had long played a role in court entertainments.

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Renaissance ballet especially relied on deeply allegorical structures of meaning. These dramatic uses of allegory did not aim at transparency, however, but rather disguised meaning beneath rich imageries that proved an impenetrable barrier to the uninitiated and a pleasurable challenge to members of an elite interpretive community, namely the court. The 1581 Ballet comique de la Royne exemplifies this approach to dramatic allegory. Its libretto included two separate, erudite explications of the allegorical significance of the fable of Circé on which the ballet was based.4 Platonic allegory translated the mystical energies and patterns of the universe into material form and demonstrated how the royal patron fit into the cosmos, elevating the court community to a celestial plane.5 The seventeenth century marked a shift in court entertainments’ approach to allegory, with poets favoring legibility over artful concealment. Following Aristotle’s advice to dramatists, ballet theorists stipulated that music, lyrics, gesture, and visual cues should all serve to render the “subject” of representation more recognizable to the public.6 For commentator Claude-­Françoise Ménestrier, the imperative for a ballet to make its meaning clear extended to the structure of the whole work. He noted that “great and serious” musical entertainments often took the form of “allegories on the present state of things such as the King’s military campaigns, his conquests, his enterprises in the middle of winter, peace.”7 In these entertainments, recitative prologues and libretti usually helped to clarify an allegorical sense that might play out over “the whole entire piece.”8 This investment in the legibility of allegorical entertainments recalls how Jesuits such as Ménestrier used ballet in their colleges to instruct schoolboys in moral and theological matters at the same time as they acquired the dancing skills obligatory for young noblemen. Since many of the artists and dancers who went on to participate in the creation of court entertainments had their first exposure to ballet in this pedagogical context, it is not surprising to see similar approaches to allegory used at court as well. Whether meant to illuminate or to obscure, allegory directs viewers’ attention from the physical performance “toward a system of non-­fictional ideas,” often religious truths or, in the case of court entertainments, political ideologies.9 The cultural, social, and institutional import of the ultimate referent suggests that allegorical works leave little room for interpretative play. As Angus Fletcher emphasizes, allegory presumes a fixed hierarchical order.10 Artists might have the freedom to exercise their creativity in encoding lofty meanings, but viewers, in essence, already know the answers to the riddles allegories pose.11 In the case of the Platonic allegories of Renaissance entertainments, spectators did not even need to engage in interpretation to experience

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translation to a higher realm. Artists and theorists of the period argued that signs enacted onstage affected viewers through an “occult network of sympathies” that did not depend on intellectual understanding.12 However beautiful or mystical they may appear, allegorical performances, in this view, effectively forced spectators to accept a particular vision of ultimate reality. This language of force adheres strongly to accounts of Richelieu’s allegorical entertainments. Hugh Gaston Hall characterizes the artists in his employ— particularly the playwright Jean Desmarets de Saint-­ Sorlin, who penned most of the theatrical entertainments commissioned by the cardinal—as his “creatures,” bound to act according to his will.13 The private theaters in the Palais-­Cardinal appear as metaphorical staging grounds for political schemes, providing, in Christa Williford Elefterion’s words, “a site where Richelieu could stage his vision for France more perfectly than he could in the world outside.”14 Sylvie Taussig also sees the cardinal’s entertainments as contiguous with his political vision, citing a contemporary observer (Montchal, the archbishop of Toulouse) who eulogized the cardinal shortly after his death by claiming that Richelieu had “played all Europe in reality as he had it played out on the stage.”15 Finally, several accounts remark on the fact that Richelieu invited prisoners of war to take an outing from their jail at the Bois de Vincennes to attend the performances at his residence.16 These spectators’ condition, chroniclers imply, represent a literalized version of the coercion all viewers experienced. All these accounts are informed to some extent by Richelieu’s reputation as a singular manager of power, a behind-­the-­scenes actor or director of statecraft, always in command of the images of government.17 The Palais-­Cardinal’s proscenium stage further strengthens this suggestion of control. In contrast to traditionally open spaces of court entertainment, this theater cordoned off its spectators from the performance, leaving them to bear passive witness to the single-­perspective representation sealed behind the arch.18 The characterization of ballets and plays performed at Richelieu’s personal theater as a form of propaganda is convincing to a large degree.19 This label becomes problematic, however, when considered in light of the diplomatic audience for the entertainments. As the court Gazette and eyewitness accounts reveal, resident ambassadors and visiting foreign dignitaries attended these performances at the cardinal’s palace. Although some of the foreign spectators represented countries closely allied with France (such as Sweden), others were delegates of official mediator states (Rome, Venice) or of polities whose friendship rested on shakier ground (England, Lorraine). Throughout France’s active involvement in the war, Richelieu advocated for maintaining strong

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diplomatic alliances.20 One chapter of his Testament politique expounded on the value of such partnerships. Titled “Continual Negotiation Contributes Not a Little to Good Success in Affairs,” the chapter declares: “Negotiating without cease openly or secretly in all places, even if one does not receive an immediate reward, and even if what the future holds is not apparent, is a thing necessary to the health of States.”21 Richelieu portrays alliances as beneficial but fragile, subject to break apart as external circumstances change or according to the whim of sovereigns.22 Thus maintenance of international relationships through negotiation requires constant work. “It is necessary to act,” he urges: “one must act in all places, near and far.”23 If Richelieu understood diplomacy as an all-­consuming and omnipresent activity, it stands to reason that entertainments staged in his own palace before a captive audience of foreign delegates would constitute one of these “places” in which negotiation should occur.24 In fact, the term “negotiation”—conferring among parties to reach a compromise or resolution—applies as well to the work of interpreting an allegorical representation. By its nature, allegory holds literal and figural senses at a distance from each other. As Brenda Machosky observes in her phenomenological study of the mode, “allegory freely admits having this gap” between form and meaning.25 Even the most transparent and pedagogical of allegories requires its reader or viewer to act as an intermediary between these levels and ultimately resolve their differences—in other words, to negotiate. Allegorical entertainments spark the work of negotiation internally, within each spectator’s mind. Negotiation perhaps also serves as an apt metaphor for the reconciliation of the individual spectator to the point of view presented onstage. However apparently forceful the images of French triumph presented by the patron Richelieu and his artists, they only have force in as much as they engage the spectators and bring them into some agreement about the greater truth they represent.

Anticipating Alliance: The Ballet de la félicité Closely associated with Christian hermeneutics, allegory relies on a logic of transcendence. In the traditional fourfold structure of allegorical interpretation, the ultimate level of meaning—the anagogical—expresses “what to hope for,” which in the Christian context designates salvation.26 This anticipatory, aspirational dimension of allegory prevails in the first ballet organized by

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Richelieu. Ballet de la félicité, sur le sujet de l’heureuse naissance de Monseigneur le Dauphin debuted in March 1639, a commission by Richelieu as a belated celebration of the arrival of the future Louis XIV the previous September. The ballet was performed at least three times, both at Saint-­Germain and at Richelieu’s own palace.27 The performances occurred while the court was teeming with ambassadors and envoys paying official compliments to the French royal family on the occasion of the dauphin’s birth. Visitors included papal nuncio Giorgio Bolognetti, Hugo Grotius in his role as ambassador from Sweden, Venetian ambassador Cornaro, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and Grand Duke of Lithuania Boguslaw Radziwill, Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester, extraordinary ambassador from England, and many others.28 Beyond these likely diplomatic attendees, the ballet reached a wider vicarious audience throughout Europe via circulation of its printed libretto and transcription in the court Gazette. With the festivities surrounding the dauphin’s birth providing the backdrop for its joyous figurations of European peace and unity, the ballet constituted one French reply to well-­wishers across the continent, as well as a statement of intention for the new era inaugurated by the prince’s birth. According to the ballet, this new epoch would be peaceful. Yet the “felicity” promised in the title stands as a promise rather than a fait accompli. The ballet is a future-­oriented work, focused on imagining a peaceful international society after war’s end. The ballet’s structure foregrounds this preoccupation with the future. In a headnote to the libretto, Desmarets explains that he plotted the ballet “in imitation of the beautiful tragicomedies” that occupied the Parisian stage.29 Like a tragicomic play, the entertainment begins in darkness and peril but ends happily thanks to a sudden change of fortune—namely, the prince’s nativity. The first seven entrées evoke the war through depictions of imperial greed and international conflict orchestrated by the figure of Discord. Relief arrives in the eighth entrée when a “Chariot of Felicity” arrives onstage, bearing the dauphin (or, more likely, a representation of him) and leading a troupe of musicians. Out of the darkness of war, the “princeps ex machina” symbolizing the dauphin’s birth halts the violence in a dazzling plot twist that saves France and indeed all of Europe from destruction.30 The royal child plays the role of symbolic savior in the tragicomic (and Christian-­influenced) narrative of redemption. As threatening images of conflict and discordant music give way abruptly to flowers, cupids, and harmonious strains, a sense of relief washes over the audience. Yet this all happens within the first third of the ballet, spanning only

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eight of the entertainment’s twenty-­seven entrées. The rest of the entertainment is given over to a prolongation of the first act’s happy ending. All of these scenes depict an imagined future time, a state of peaceful elation “to be hoped for.” Although some of the entrées in this portion of the work depict straightforward scenes of rejoicing—fireworks and dancing children; personifications of Pleasure, the Hunt, Games, Good Food, and Masquerades frolicking and jumping; a “fountain of wine” around which performers join their voices in a drinking song—the most innovative performances are devoted to envisaging alliance among European powers. The ballet’s immediate political context highlighted the importance of international alliance for the French state at a turning point in the war.31 Despite France’s mixed success on the battlefield, its negotiating position relative to Spain was strengthening in 1638.32 Richelieu, however, put off bilateral peace talks in order to claim a larger role in determining Europe’s future by gaining support from as many countries as possible.33 Political historians have long discussed Richelieu’s privileging of alliance. Some see in Richelieu’s writings a “conception of Christian unity” that prefigured modern concepts of “balance of power.”34 Others stress the strategic role of national rivalry in Richelieu’s ideal, secularized revision of Christendom, wherein small conflicts would keep individual countries’ ambitions in check.35 Both of these readings anticipate the kind of states system that, according to a traditional narrative of European relations, was “born” with the Treaty of Westphalia. In fact, Richelieu’s ideas about alliance as discussed in the Testament politique are both less idealistic and more flexible. He stresses the “utility” of forming leagues with other states when in a position of strength. Alliances are “uncertain,” Richelieu warns, and the best time to unite with “colleagues” is when your own state is strong enough to carry out a particular action on its own.36 Formed in such circumstances, a league holds allies in a position of dependency. In the best-­ case scenario, alliances ensure preeminence at the same time as they constitute a source of strength. Like the Testament politique, the Ballet de la félicité hedges its bets when it comes to figuring the ideal form of political alliance. Four distinct approaches to envisaging international unity emerge over several scenes. Through personification and choreography, augmented by creative costume and set designs, the ballet proposes vivid material forms to express different kinds of cooperation. The first approach, in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh entrées, blends chivalric imagery with natural geography. A personification of France receives tribute from “valorous Saxon,” allegorizing Bernard of Saxe-­Weimar’s defeat of

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imperial forces at Breisach on behalf of the French.37 The two figures’ gracious dance depicts the relationship between the general and France as one of feudal loyalty.38 Finally, a personification of Spain along with a “knight of honor” join their French and German analogues: “They all dance together, and take each other’s hands.”39 The patterns of social dance complement the symmetry implied by the identity of the figures (France and Spain each backed by a knight of honor and dancers representing the “principal rivers” of France and Spain). The resulting tableau stresses the equal status of France and Spain. In the background, it also suggests the naturalness of an alliance between the neighboring countries as their personified rivers “flow” into each other via the dancers’ touches. A more pragmatic vision of alliance occurs in the nineteenth through twenty-­first entrées, which construct a drama illustrating the necessity of European cooperation to defeat its Ottoman rival. The sequence of dances begins with the appearance of the Great Turk, a Janissary, and three Bashas. Through dance and gesture, they “menace everyone with fire and blood, believing that they are tired of war.”40 Although the Ottomans had adopted a policy of official neutrality in the Thirty Years’ War, the threat of Turkish invasion frequently appeared in court entertainments as a justification for Christian unity.41 The Ballet de la félicité, however, provides the most visually striking demonstration of the force of Christian alliance against the Turk. Four dancers in hybrid costumes, or what the libretto calls “hommes my-­parties,” appear onstage: two are half French, half Spanish; one is half Swedish, half German; and the last half Flemish, half Dutch. Such half-­and-­half costumes featured in other ballets, for example to depict androgynous figures. This ballet provides the earliest extant example of bifurcated costumes used to depict national characters, transposing the most fraught borders of Europe onto dancers’ bodies. The image recalls Desmarets’s declaration in the libretto that young L ­ ouis’s destiny as an agent of harmony is foreshadowed by his joint French and Spanish heritage, “since already the blood of two great Kings is united in his body.”42 The dance further illuminates the power of alliance through action. Each brandishing swords in both right and left hands, the dancers perform a choreographed combat, first facing to the left (as one national character) and then to the right (as the other). The Turks “considering the union . . . retreat, and Europe remains assured.”43 More than a simple argument in favor of alliance, this performance makes visible the effective power of collective action. This bellicose scene gives way immediately to a gentler image of international harmony. In the twenty-­second entrée, “eight little cupids in brown,

Figure 3. An example of a “half-and-half ” costume. Daniel Rabel, costume design for an androgynous figure, Ballet du Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, court ballet of Louis XIII, 1626. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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white, and other diverse colors representing the Loves of Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, Flanders, and Holland, dance together and embrace each other.”44 Together with the God of Marriage, they oversee the wedding of “three Spanish men” and “three young French ladies,” a classic metaphor for political union.45 This sequence anticipating a reconciliation of France with its fiercest rival recalls the traditional way of cementing alliances among royal families in Europe (through dynastic marriage). It perhaps also reminds viewers that France and Spain had previously allied themselves through royal weddings: the current queen, Anna of Austria, belonged to the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty. Of course, as Richelieu pointed out in his Testament politique, and as the ongoing war made clear, alliance by marriage did not necessarily assure lasting political union between states.46 The onstage performance of nuptial alliance further complicates the apparent allegorical sense through its mapping of gender onto national identities. The Spanish men are paired with “French demoiselles” played by cross-­dressed male dancers. During Louis XIII’s reign, cross-­casting was most often deployed in ballets for humor. Here, a broadly comic interpretation of the scene’s gender-­ bending would pose too jarring a challenge to the overall tone of the work. More likely the dancers—boys rather than men—wore their bridal costumes with grace. Yet even a subtle performance would work to feminize the ballet’s presentation of France and of Frenchness, a striking choice in the context of such a martial ballet. From one sequence of dances to the next, France trades its sword for the feminine accoutrements of courtliness, warrior prowess for seductive gentility. After martial and amorous scenes of alliance, a last sequence of entrées (the twenty-­fifth through twenty-­seventh) performs a refreshingly pedestrian vision of Franco-­Spanish unity. Rather than depict personifications of abstract concepts or countries, this scene features “realistic” characters standing in for social and regional types. Moreover, it takes place on a stage representing a real geographical space: the border of France and Spain, the site of ongoing fighting and the scene of some of France’s most humiliating defeats.47 Despite the literalness of the representation, however, these scenes echo the more obvious allegories in directing the viewer toward contemplation of a higher truth: the desirability of peace. The first entrée suggests that international harmony derives from shared commitment to religious faith, as two French pilgrims (presumably on their way to Compostella) meet two Spanish invalids traveling to France for treatment. By dancing together, the libretto indicates, these figures “mark a beginning of commerce & communication

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between the two States.”48 Next, three “Biscayan” couples emerge on a theatrical machine representing the Pyrenees. Led by a “Biscayan shepherd,” they sing a “dancing song”: From the high mountains, From which we see the Spains [sic] And the State of the French people; Let’s dance, push our voices, My gentle companions, In honor of the Dauphin who shall unite the Kings.49 The presence of the shepherd, the centrality of song and dance, and the hailing of “gentle companions” evoke the pastoral mode. Here, fictional shepherds live in simplicity and noble otium, dwelling in harmony with (idealized) nature. The utopian character of this entrée derives as well from the dancers’ literal position above the fray of politics. The performers’ identification as Biscayans emphasizes their distance from political categories. Allied with neither France nor Spain, they straddle a border made by nature rather than by kings. From their mountain perch, they gaze down upon the lands below, describing the territories in terms of the diversity they contain (“the Spains,” “State of the French people”) rather than as monoliths. As the ballet draws to a close, humble figures with little investment in lines of sovereign demarcation call on the audience to support peace and union, to usher in a state of affairs in which common people can move across boundaries with ease. Each of the four allegories of peace staged in the second and third parts of the Ballet de la félicité presents a slightly different vision of political alliance: chivalric parity, pragmatic concerted action, courtly union, pastoral transcendence of politics. Although all scenes point toward peace, they do so provisionally, proposing multiple forms of international reconciliation without insisting on any one solution to the war, without even ordering the diverse scenes into the neat arc of a Classical plot. Throwing one image after the other up onstage, the ballet performs the frenetic effort entailed in continual negotiation, the imperative to “act everywhere at all times,” by proposing several options for its audience’s consideration. Rather than enforce a unitary vision of peace, the ballet opens a potential dialogue with the viewer and extends an invitation to choose the most compelling denouement. The open, plural nature of the ballet’s ending retrospectively undermines the more forceful, propagandistic effects of its plotting as announced in the

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libretto. The ballet’s hodgepodge multiplication of ways to materialize peace simply serves to underscore the fact that peace has not yet been achieved. In this way, the jubilant ending of Desmarets’s promised tragicomedy marks its own peripeteia (the arrival of the chariot of felicity in the eighth entrée) as premature. The ballet as a whole leaves its audience longing for Europe’s redemption rather than celebrating it. Its diplomatic force lies in its ability to generate a sense of anticipation, to mobilize its audience toward futurity, without dictating exactly what the future will be.

Staging History in the Ballet de la prospérité des armes A diplomatic manipulation of theatrical time similarly characterizes the second entertainment to reflect on the Thirty Years’ War, the 1641 Ballet de la prospérité des armes. Scripted by Desmarets like its predecessor, this entertainment adheres more faithfully to an account of recent history. Although it contains allegorical scenes featuring interactions among personifications of abstract concepts, many of its entrées are devoted to depicting the battles of Casale, Arras, and Cadiz, as well as other developments in the previous twelve months of the war. The ballet’s orchestration of its dual temporalities—the universal time of allegory on the one hand, historical time on the other—constitutes its most striking poetic feature. Mediating between these two qualities of time and the theories of action that undergird them, the ballet rewrites the story of the war into a narrative of transcendence that resolves divergent interpretations of its events. Like the Ballet de la félicité, this explicitly political entertainment was commanded and staged to commemorate a familial occasion and took place during the winter months traditionally reserved for such festivities. Richelieu offered the entertainment in celebration of the wedding of his niece to the duc d’Enghien, future prince of Condé. Immediately following the marriage ceremony held at the Louvre on February 7, 1641, the couple, the royal family, courtiers, the papal nuncio, and “all the ambassadors of Princes and States” headed over to the cardinal’s palace to witness the ballet in its newly renovated theater.50 As was typical for court entertainments, the ballet was performed again one week later for a more exclusive audience including the king and Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine, who was brokering a reconciliation with France.51 Although staged at the Palais-­Cardinal rather than one of the king’s residences, in all other respects this ballet echoed countless other

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Carnival-­season courtly entertainments of the recent past, connecting its actors and spectators to the seemingly timeless, endlessly repeatable calendar of existence at court. In fact, Desmarets justified the entertainment in his preface to the libretto as a natural fixture of the rituals and rhythms of aristocratic life. He writes: “This winter must be like a long feast after long labors. Not only the King and his great Minister, who have supervised and worked for the aggrandizement of the State, and all the valiant warriors who have valorously executed their noble designs, must take some rest and entertainment; but all the people must also rejoice.”52 The poet places entertainment in essential relation to war and statecraft, as a “complement to arms.”53 Characterizing the ballet as a response to a basic human need for repose and to the seasons of the year, Desmarets situates the entertainment in festival time, at once cyclical and transcendent, “above the flow” of the linear march of mortal history.54 This performance temporality faces a challenge in the form of the entertainment’s subject matter: a reenactment of war rather than a respite from it. As Desmarets writes in the preface to the libretto, the ballet “represents the prosperities of this year by sea and by land: at least in part: for it would be difficult to represent in an evening, what occupied for so many months the cares and labors of so many men, and the attention of all Europe.”55 The poet describes his representation of events as a temporal synecdoche: part of the year standing for the whole. This explanation reflects a larger dramaturgical debate about temporality that raged among Desmarets’s colleagues in the Académie française. Jean Chapelain’s “Letter on the 24-­Hours Rule” written to Antoine Godeau in November 1630 insisted that imaginations could accept the condensation of a “natural day” into a three-­hour spectacle but that the attempt to represent a longer period of time would destroy dramatic illusion.56 Although Desmarets does not respect this “rule” or the more general principle of dramatic unity in the ballet, it is clear that he grappled with the fundamental questions raised by contemporary neo-­Aristotelian discourses about theater. He assimilates ballet to dramaturgy in the libretto’s preface, rehearsing the well-­worn topos that “ballets are mute comedies” but drawing the unexpected conclusion that they therefore “must be divided as such into Acts and Scenes” and punctuated with recitative poetry similar to choral interventions.57 Commenting on both the reduction of historical time to fit performance time and the partition of performance time into discrete units, Desmarets shares his contemporaries’ preoccupation with the dramatic effects produced in an audience by temporal manipulations.58

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The theatrical reshaping of history for dramatic effect occurs most clearly in the ballet’s second and third acts, which reenact battles between French and Spanish forces in the Alps and Flanders. In its intention to distill several months of a complex and constantly changing political landscape, this act has a necessarily episodic structure. As Marie-­Claude Canova-­Green remarks, the ballet stands out for its “sudden changes of direction, or péripéties,” which seem to belong “within the irregular aesthetics of tragicomedy.”59 In addition to infusing the performance with the drama produced by sudden twists and turns, this dramaturgical choice points toward a theory of history, specifically regarding the role of human and divine action. Battles end suddenly, often through supernatural intervention. The goddess Pallas, for example, ceases the fighting in Arras in the ninth entrée. Yet, unlike a traditional deus ex machina, she accomplishes this feat not through the force of her presence but by rallying allies to the French side. Similarly, in the fourth entrée, a personification of Fortune tips the balance in favor of the French by delivering weapons. The ballet marks these peripeties as examples of divine intercession or as manifestations of the whims of chance. Yet they also rationalize and humanize them, stressing the role of the humble resources of arms and men in turning the tides of battle. Act III continues and deepens this reflection on human and divine agency through spectacular machine effects. This sequence shows off the technologies incorporated into the newly renovated theater at the Palais-­Cardinal. The proscenium stage had been designed by Bernini, Giovan Maria Mariani, Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, and other artists brought to Paris through a long-­negotiated agreement with their patrons, the powerful Barberini family in Rome.60 The Prospérité des armes was only the second spectacle, after Desmarets’s play Mirame earlier in 1641, to make use of the new stage and its design effects.61 In Act III, these technologies bring a sense of terror to the ballet’s depiction of war. The stage set first represents “the Sea, surrounded by rocks,” introducing a reenactment of the maritime battle of Cadiz. Three Sirens deliver the opening récit, predicting that French action will bring peace and glory: On the waves enclosed by land, And on the vast sea that encircles the earth, We have seen the French up in arms Showing a valor whose excess astonishes us. LOUIS in pushing back war Will fill the sea and the earth with his deeds.62

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Figure 4. Michael von Lochon, Le Soir, depicting the proscenium theater at the Palais-Cardinal. BnF.

The first lines’ evocation of the vast seas enhances the praise of the French king’s valor in the next verses. His might is equal to the grandeur of nature. The “excess” of French valor appears more striking through the “astonishment” of the Sirens who (as they remind us in the first stanza) once saw the likes of Ulysses and Aeneas, ancient references that make Louis’s heroism appear timeless. The sublimity of the scene’s rhetoric is matched by its stage effects. The maritime war comes to life for spectators in the centerpiece of the act, which features combat between French and Spanish forces on theater machines representing galleons. The battle reaches a climax when the French set the Spanish vessels on fire, signaling their victory.63 The combination of a watery set design, hulking galleon stage props, and pyrotechnics creates an overwhelming

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visual spectacle. The terror of the battle depicted onstage finds its corollary in spectators’ real-­time fear for the safety of the performers interacting with the stage machinery. A sense of peril links the historical time of the representation with the present moment of performance and brings the audience emotionally closer to the war. In this way, the scene engages with what Jan Mieszkowski has called the “spectatorial dynamics” of war.64 Examining narrative accounts and panoramic representations of the Napoleonic Wars, he analyzes how the war’s mediation transformed it into a virtual phenomenon and blurred the distinction between active participants and vicarious witnesses of the violence. The Prospérité des armes confuses that boundary even more profoundly in that some of the ballet’s spectators and performers did in fact participate in the war as its military officers. For an audience consisting of warriors, nonfighting courtiers including women, and foreign dignitaries, the ballet re-­created and overwrote the battle with a powerfully emotional, visually impressive spectacle of destruction—at once horrific and sublime. As the reenactment of battles in the second and third acts mediates between the present time of performance and the historical time they depict, the opening and closing portions of the ballet frame historical time within another temporality. The first, fourth, and fifth acts make use of mythological and allegorical figures to stage abstract reflection on the concepts of war and peace. In these parts of the ballet, allegory transposes military conflict into higher, transcendent phenomena. Juxtaposed scenes of historical reenactment, these sequences reflect on allegory’s engagement with and sublimation of history. Allegory’s evasion of history is illustrated by the structure of the mode: the “literal” or basest level at which an allegory may be interpreted is sometimes called the “historical” level, meant to be superseded by allegorical, moral, and ultimately anagogical meanings. For this reason, Gordon Teskey characterizes allegory as a reaction against the chaos of material life, a poetic move through which the messiness of historical reality is resolved as a manifestation of an unchanging higher truth.65 Construed as evasive or reactionary, allegory’s relationship to historical time also contains the potential to resolve diverse perspectives on events into a universally acceptable abstraction. The opening scenes of the Prospérité des armes frame the rest of the ballet in terms of universal, timeless values. A canvas painted to look like a palace—a worldly, everyday space—slowly rises to reveal “the Earth decorated with woods.”66 In this pastoral landscape, a figure representing Harmony appears in a machine “supported by a quantity of clouds, accompanied by birds.”67 Harmony’s récit connects her to the rhythms of the cosmos: “It is I

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who maintain all the world / By the beautiful order of the seasons,” “by my divers accords, / An infinite joy / Spreads across the universe.”68 As the idyllic prologue transitions to the first entrée, the ballet depicts conflict as an equally enduring force. The last stanza of Harmony’s song warns: Those who wear diadems Break my laws to their misfortune; And wanting to make other kings lose, Lose themselves. All rule when everyone follows me: He who abandons me destroys himself.69 Speaking as a quasi-­divinity, Harmony obliges monarchs to pledge their fidelity to her, to set aside rivalry and ambition to ensure a universal peace. Harmony presents herself as sovereign over the monarchs who must obey her laws or suffer the consequences. The values she represents transcend the laws and ambitions of mortal kings. In this way, the figure of Harmony stands in for emerging theories, articulated most notably by Grotius, of the fixed and eternal laws of nature and nations that should underpin international relations (a topic to be explored in Chapter 5). In fact, Harmony’s verses transpose the story of the war depicted up to this moment to a higher, abstract realm in which timeless forces struggle through mortal avatars. Singing “it is I who maintain the whole world,” Harmony implies that the real contest governing the state of affairs exists not between kings but between the overriding principles of order and destruction. To illustrate this timeless conflict, as her song ends the set changes to represent Hell, in which “demons” embodying the vices of Pride, Artifice, Murder, Desire to Reign, Tyranny, and Disorder perform a frightful dance. Taken together, the opening scenes portray harmony and discord as eternal forces in permanent dialectical tension over which mortals have only limited control. The battles that rage between French and Spanish troops in the following scenes appear in this light as simply one material manifestation of a universal conflict that surpasses worldly politics. This view of history returns in the fourth act, which assimilates the French king’s triumph to the achievement of divine peace. “The nine Muses,” descending from the ceiling, effectuate the shift in their récit. Addressing the king, they declare that “since April of your years your arm has subjugated / your rebel subjects and your proud Enemies.”70 They continue: “Our writings

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which will live on in spite of Envy, / Will never speak of such a beautiful life.”71 The verses make the shift in temporality explicit as the pointed reference to “April of your years” gives way to the Muses’ own concern with the eternal life of kingly glory through their writings. Finally, the stage transforms in Act V to depict peacetime as a utopian, unchanging landscape of abundance. The decor represents “the Earth full of fruits and flowers.” Concord arrives on a chariot which, according to Michel de Marolles, “moved by [itself ], without being pulled by anything,” a stage feat that transcends history by rejecting the logic of causation.72 Like the Muses’ song, Concord’s récit describes how mortal actors fit into the lofty tableau evoked onstage. She commands: “Spaniards and Frenchmen / Organize yourselves under my laws.”73 The last two acts of the ballet rhetorically knit historical events and personages back into the transcendent sphere of the opening scenes. By resolving the war, Spaniards and Frenchmen will also submit to the higher authority of the forces of peace and harmony and resolve themselves into an expression of these higher values. The concluding moments of the ballet enact this temporal, allegorical, and political resolution. In the last scenes, personifications of high and low ideas dance and play across the stage: Abundance, Feasting, Games, Pleasures, Rejoicing, Glory.74 This jubilant allegorical pageant gives way to celebration among the ballet’s spectators. As the libretto recounts: “The large canvas at the front of the stage lowers bit by bit and covers it. After a short while, they raise the canvas again, and instead of the sets that had appeared, there can be seen a great room, gilded and ornamented with all sorts of paintings and embellishments, lit with a number of crystal chandeliers, at the back of which is a throne for the King and for the Queen.”75 An “imperceptible” bridge emerges from the stage, connecting the king and queen’s platform to the ballroom and piercing the fourth wall constructed by the proscenium. Stage and theater merge into a single space where “all the spectators can see to their pleasure their Majesties, the Princes and Princesses, the Lords and Ladies; and there the beauties, riches, and dances in all their pomp, fill eyes with pleasure and astonishment.”76 As spectators take to the dance floor, the physical boundary between the space of fiction and the space of reality, between the time of allegory and historical time, also dissolves. The audience participates in an enactment of the utopian resolution rehearsed in the ballet. As ambassadors and courtiers dance together, the Prospérité des armes, like the Ballet de la félicité before it, anticipates a postwar peacetime. But it also assimilates that anticipated future moment to a phase in a timeless cycle that alternates between war and rejoicing. The play of temporalities is made

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manifest in the culminating social dance, performed in a liminal space that is not the proscenium theater or the ballroom but made up of both at once. The ball that marks the end of the ballet takes place between theatricality and reality, fictive time and real time. In this way, the entertainment hearkens back to Renaissance festivities, constructing resonances between the worldly and the transcendent. A harmonious community at once timeless (Concord in the abstract) and hoped for (the postwar political community represented by the dancers) takes form.

Inventing Europe What would a postwar international community look like? How could that kind of collective entity be understood, represented, and discussed? The last allegorical entertainment produced at Richelieu’s behest, Europe, comédie héroïque, addresses these questions most directly. Throughout the period in which the court prepared and enjoyed the Ballet de la félicité and Prospérité des armes, Desmarets, Richelieu, and perhaps others labored to create “an allegorical play on the great quarrel agitating Europe.”77 The long writing process and the script’s partial review by the Académie française suggest that the play’s creators invested it with particular gravity.78 The play finally debuted in the theater of the Palais-­Cardinal in November 1642. A couple of weeks later, Richelieu died following a short illness. By happenstance, the play marked the culmination of Richelieu’s involvement in the theater, although of course its authors could not have anticipated its status as such. Still, commentators mined the irony of the coincidence of the cardinal’s death and his staging of a grand vision of the European political landscape. Critic Mathieu de Morgues, for example, wrote: “A few days before the final scene of his tragic life, he wanted to stage with royal magnificence a play he had dreamed up and that he called Europe triumphant; but he could not see it performed. . . . Divine justice rotted and stiffened the right arm that he had so often stiffened against the heavens.”79 This play also seems to have inspired Bishop Montchal’s quip, cited above, that Richelieu had “played all Europe” onstage as in life. Modern commentators have also drawn a direct connection between this play and its patron’s politics. Sylvie Taussig, for example, presents the content of the play as a transparent reflection of the “truth” of Richelieu’s thinking.80 He chose to stage his political vision as a response to the outpouring of polemical brochures attacking his approach to the war, which made the

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play the dramatic equivalent of a political pamphlet.81 Cécile Albis calls it a “manifesto-­work” representing France’s plans for Europe at a moment when it had the upper hand in the war.82 Hugh Gaston Hall similarly subordinates drama to politics, asserting that “a main interest of the allegory lies in the new ideas it airs for an honourable settlement of the Thirty Years’ War, for which Spanish imperialism is blamed.”83 The play’s allegorical dimension certainly encourages such readings. A list of dramatis personae in the published work, transparently keying each character to the European state or principality he or she incarnates, suggests a particularly didactic approach to allegory. The play arrives already deciphered, with little room for the reader’s or spectator’s autonomous interpretation. A few aspects of the play, however, resist easy decoding. Most striking of these is the identity of the title character. While the other characters embody particular kingdoms and principalities, and thus their actions are limited by historical fact, Europe is an artificial construction whose personal drama gives shape to the shifting relations among other figures. In personifying Europe, the entertainment’s creators followed a longstanding iconographic tradition. Cesare Ripa’s Iconology included an emblematic depiction of Europe alongside the other “Parts of the World.” Regal Europe appears as a “royally dressed” woman wearing a crown and surrounded by material evidence of the continents’ cultural triumphs: cornucopias to signify abundance, a temple, weaponry, books, globes, compasses, paintbrushes, and musical instruments.84 Figures of Europe only rarely appeared in court entertainments. In the “Four Parts of the World” pageant in the 1626 Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, Europe is represented by Grenadines, while an entrée of “Peoples of the North” is squeezed in between the ballets of Asia and Africa, as if Greenland represented a fifth part of the world. The festivities to celebrate the marriage of Margerita di Toscana to Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma, in 1629, also featured allegorical representations of the Four Parts of the World, as part of a more elaborate “Ballet of Love.” Europe led the series of continents, dressed in a “royal outfit of many colors, embellished with diverse flowers, fruits, and food” that referenced the couple’s family crests.85 She appeared riding on a white bull, a reference to the shape Zeus took when kidnapping the princess Europa.86 The mythological allusion sets Europe apart from the other continents, whose accoutrements metonymically refer to the natural flora and fauna of the lands they represent.87 Europe represents a radical departure from these previous attempts to embody the European continent on the stage.88 Far from a static icon, this

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Figure 5. Henry Legras, frontispiece to Europe, comédie héroïque, 1643. BnF.

version of Europe is a dynamic character invested with emotions and a capacity for strategic thinking. In the drama, Europe is the “Queen of Kings,” the center of a fictional courtly universe.89 She is attended by Ausonie, Austrasie, Mélanie, and Parthénope, ladies of the court who represent Italy, Lorraine, Milan, and Naples, respectively. The plot revolves around a love triangle.

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Male courtiers Ibère (Spain) and Francion (France) vie for Europe’s affections, goaded by Germanique (Germany). Sylvie Taussig reads the play’s romantic focus as part of its “realism”; because dynastic marriage often sealed political alliances, the play’s transposition of international relations to the affective realm of interpersonal relationships makes use of a metaphor that had real-­ world currency.90 This reading would work if Francion and Ibère sparred for the attentions of one of the ladies-­in-­waiting, corresponding to a potential alliance between Spain or France and one or more of the small principalities whose allegiance was at stake in the war. The romance plot breaks down as an allegory, however, because Europe has no literal referent in political reality. Neither Spain nor France could in reality “marry” the European continent, so what does Francion or Ibère hope to espouse in seducing the character of Europe? From one point of view, Europe in the play represents territorial empire and political influence on the continent. Francion and Ibère’s rivalry for Europe’s affections parallels France and Spain’s contest for precedence in the hierarchy of European states. This reading, though, only accounts for Europe’s role as object of her courtiers’ desire. In the play, Europe is also a subject who reflects, feels, and makes decisions. The character has interiority and autonomy but does not correspond to a particular political actor in the world. The play therefore poses a hermeneutical challenge to its reader or spectator: What does Europe represent? What does it mean to attend to Europe’s desires? While other figures in the play enact the alliances, ruptures, and reconciliations of the previous ten years of war, Europe stands apart in embodying an idea: a concept rather than a polity. As an imagined entity whose sovereignty transcends that of individual kingdoms and principalities, Europe lends form to an idea that might substitute for the pope or Christendom—a higher authority to whom states will submit and for whom they will sacrifice some measure of autonomy. The drama plays out a vision of European interactions under this kind of imagined authority while also making that authority tangible. The substance of the ideal of Europe appears most clearly in Europe’s soliloquy in Act III: I, who of the four sisters who share the earth, Have the part most noble and proper to war, The most fecund in arts, people, and cities, In ports in the two seas, in fruits on all sides, Who holds the most illustrious part of all the Universe.91

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Europe’s language echoes the vision of abundance, busy ports, and delightful cultural achievements evoked in Peace’s opening song in the play’s prologue as well as in Ripa’s emblematic representation of the continent. Europe embodies a vision of superiority, of potential imperium, a destiny to be fulfilled if its constituent parts work in harmony. Europe’s status as the incarnation of an idea affects the plotting of the drama in that her ability to act is limited. The problem of Europe’s restricted capacity for action shapes her relationships with the members of her court. Although Europe is the sovereign, she struggles to keep her noble subjects in check. Ibère, the biggest troublemaker in the kingdom, has seduced Mélanie and Parthénope and dallied with Amérique. Now he aggressively pursues Europe’s own affections, despite her adamant refusals. She has no desire to enter into any romantic relationship that will constrain her sovereignty: I live without desire, as I live without fear. Stop all your scheming and leave me in peace; For I wish to remain virginal and forever free. I cannot suffer that one of my own might master me.92 Francion, although he cuts a nobler figure, proves almost as vexing as his rival. Rejecting his advances yet again and reproaching him for his legerity, Europe assures him, “If I were looking for a lover worthy of my desire, / Only Francion would I wish to choose.”93 She urges him to act as her “Knight” in shining armor rather than as her suitor.94 In rebuffing her courtiers’ romantic advances, Europe adopts a strategy similar to that of Elizabeth I of England, who rejected marriage in order to maintain political independence.95 Yet, however resolute in refusing would-­be suitors, Europe remains a sentimental figure. Through chorus-­like commentary and emotional confessions, she reveals her affective ties to various courtiers. Despite her rejection of marriage, she freely admits to a romantic attachment to Francion that makes her partial to his concerns: “As the Gods are my witnesses / My heart recognizes your love and care.”96 In dialogue with her confidant Ausonie, she admits to doubts and indecision about how to deal with her wayward subjects. Her uncertainty and blindness allow members of her court to scheme against her. The nefarious Germanique, for example, succeeds in manipulating Austrasie to ally with Ibère. Finally, the play depicts Europe as a passive force in the reestablishment of order in her kingdom. In the last stanza of the play, the queen herself credits Francion with bringing about peace: “May the Heavens always

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favor you, Francion, / And your dear allies, authors of my freedom.”97 She pardons Ibère, a classic demonstration of sovereignty in that only the monarch has the authority to do it. Yet this speech act takes a conditional form that defers the royal gesture of clemency: “If he snuffs out his flame / I reserve for him still a place in my heart.”98 Throughout the play, in other words, Europe embodies a weak form of sovereignty, supreme in title but hesitant in her actions. This very weakness, however, makes Europe powerful in the dramatic structure of the play. By constructing Europe as a romantic figure, the dramatists cast her at once as sovereign, as object of desire, and as damsel in distress in a way that shapes the reactions of other characters. She arouses chivalrous emotions in the same way as did Italy in the third act of the Prospérité des armes. She motivates the negotiations and conflicts that revolve around her even if she does not play an active role. The characters’ responses to Europe’s needs and wishes, as well as her own expressions of feeling, create a fictional scenario in which political actors can align their behavior with the best interests of this supreme, abstract entity. Despite the didactic appearance of the play’s allegorical form and the flattering portrayal of its personification of France, Europe resists categorization as propaganda because of the ambiguity surrounding its title character. Europe stands for an abstraction, an ideal that comprises but transcends the various polities of the continent. In the play’s dramatic structure, she represents a strangely empty nodal point around which other characters’ relationships take shape. The play as a whole urges its readers and spectators to imagine what is best for “Europe.” In this way, the play engages with the “grand designs” for perpetual peace on the continent as theorized by Sully, Crucé, and Grotius in the 1620s. Like these theorists, the play imagines a greater good toward which European states should direct their efforts. Instead of describing a confederation of states or positing an abstract legal authority (such as the laws of nations) to which individual interests should defer, the play figures Europe as a seductive, sympathetic icon, harnessing the emotional power of theater to persuade its audiences toward diplomatic alliance.

Conclusion In all three of the entertainments that depict the Thirty Years’ War, allegory serves to direct viewers toward a shared aspiration or desire. In the ballets, reenactment of recent historical events within an allegorical structure reframes

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political rivalry, imperial ambition, and generalized suffering into a typology oriented toward peace. Finally, with Europe, the pedagogical dimension of allegory teaches spectators to want above all else the well-­being of this abstract entity who bears the continent’s name. Figured as peace, joy, concord, and the good of Europe, the hope toward which the entertainments point represents nothing less than salvation from the horrors of war. The fact that France and its avatars play the savior role in the entertainments’ particular fictions about the achievement of peace justifies to an extent their traditional characterization as propaganda, an expression of raison d’état in theatrical form. Yet in the hierarchical structure of allegory, even the glorification of the state defers to loftier images of peace and harmony invoking natural law. Allegory provides an architecture capable of containing both a forceful assertion of French supremacy and the apotheosis of Europe as a collective ideal. Reflecting on the diplomatic value of allegory, this chapter has taken up negotiation as a diplomatic metaphor transferred to the poetic realm to describe the interpretive activity provoked by allegorical structures. As the cases studied throughout this book suggest, however, the metaphor also operates in the other direction. The personification of Europe as a sentimental “Queen of Kings” is a strikingly concrete example of how the theatrical arts nourish the discourse of diplomacy with figural language. On the eve of the congress to negotiate an end to the war, the ability to talk about, think about, and imagine this collective entity played a crucial role in forging a path to peace. In a more abstract way, the multivalent form of allegorical ballet stands itself as a metaphor for the dance of agreement and disagreement—the celebration of common purpose amid difference—that diplomacy requires. The formal parallels between the disciplines of performance and diplomacy may underpin statesmen’s choices to use theatrical entertainments as an instrument of negotiation at the French court and, as the next chapter will show, at the century’s most momentous international congress.

Chapter 5

Ballet Diplomacy at the Congress of Westphalia (1645–49)

By winter 1645, delegates from much of western and central Europe had gathered to negotiate an end to the war that had embroiled the continent for nearly three decades.1 As they assembled in the cities of Münster (for Catholic states) and Osnabruck (for the Protestant ones), the negotiators already grumbled with impatience over various delays. Embassies from some key states and principalities had yet to arrive. Talks had to be halted during the conclave to select a new pope following Urban VIII’s death. In the meantime, diplomats struggled to agree on the basic matters of protocol that would structure more substantive talks. The multisectarian congress could not rely on the Roman procedures that served as a ceremonial lingua franca for earlier international summits. Instead, negotiators had to agree on a new set of ground rules on the spot. They quarreled over questions of precedence, problematic clauses in ambassadors’ accreditation letters, and even the languages in which discussions would take place.2 In the midst of these tense opening months of the Congress of Westphalia, diplomats took a break from their work to celebrate the last days of the Carnival season before the onset of Lent. As a culmination of the festivities, during Mardi Gras week, members of the French delegation danced a ballet organized and scripted by their clergyman François Ogier (1597–1670). Titled the Ballet de la Paix (Ballet of Peace), the entertainment exhorted the diplomats to hasten their efforts to end the war and restore the continent to tranquility. “Hurry up, you mortals!” one of its lyrics commanded. Of all the entertainments considered in this book, the Ballet de la Paix performed during the Congress of Westphalia represents the most pointed

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use of the performing arts for diplomatic ends. As such, it also presents the clearest evidence of the period’s faith in the diplomatic value of theatrical entertainments. The timing and context of the performance, the imagery and poetry recorded in its libretto, and eyewitness accounts convey the multiple ways in which the ballet intervened in the negotiators’ work. As a festive event, it provided respite to the assembled diplomats and their entourages, unifying them through a shared experience of pleasure. At the same time, its content—particularly as expressed through onstage incarnations of national types—proposed a particular vision of the international community gathered at the congress, ordering relations among European countries. The French delegation’s performance effectively put a French stamp on an internationally shared cultural practice and aesthetic tradition, while also reinventing ballet as a diplomatic lingua franca for the post-­Westphalian era.

Westphalian Recreations The Ballet de la Paix took place within a larger context of aristocratic festivity during the Westphalian congress. France’s delegation in particular placed a high value on pleasure and on the outward signs of noble civility. The highest-­ ranking ambassadors—first Claude de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux (1595–1650), then, after June 1645, Henri II d’Orléans, duc de Longueville (1595–1663)— were well-­born aristocrats who had spent time at the French court and, in d’Avaux’s case, at foreign ones.3 D’Avaux began the embassy in high style with a ceremonial entry into Münster on March 17, 1644. His personal entourage numbered over two hundred attendants and servants including cooks, tailors, guards, and grooms.4 This large staff not only kept d’Avaux in the comfort to which he was accustomed but also impressed foreign negotiators with France’s wealth and dignity, bolstering the French claim to precedence.5 D’Avaux used his resources to ply other negotiators with good dinners, private viewings of his art collection, and witty conversation in German, Dutch, Italian, and Swedish as well as French.6 D’Avaux’s efforts to charm were reinforced by the activities of his almoner or spiritual attaché, the clergyman François Ogier, who had frequented literary circles in Paris before entering the ambassador’s service.7 Tightly woven into both literary and diplomatic networks, Ogier possessed the skills to transform his religious duties into occasions for what might today be called “cultural” or “public diplomacy.” In his role as spiritual advisor to d’Avaux and the rest

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of the French embassy, Ogier said masses, heard confessions, and led prayers open to all of the negotiators as well as to the Westphalian population. His eloquent sermons attracted a significant audience at the Catholic negotiating site in Münster. As a result, Ogier performed something of a public relations function on the French statesman’s behalf. Contemporaries recognized his contribution to the French diplomatic mission, as one observer gave him the moniker “the Evangelist of Peace.”8 In his Journal of the Westphalian Congress, Ogier describes his role at the summit as providing respite and recreation for the negotiators. By February 1645, it certainly seems that negotiators needed the kind of succor Ogier was meant to offer. Delegates suffered from culture shock and from a lack of the kinds of creature comforts they were accustomed to in France, in spite of the huge staff they had brought along with them. For example, Nicolas L’Escalopier, almoner of the duc de Longueville, complained about the poor quality of the wine, beer, and water in Münster as well as the incessant rain, drafty lodgings, and bare furnishings.9 Another delegate lamented the poor quality of the locals’ conversational skills and worried about a lack of security at the city gates.10 Finally, the diplomats were demoralized by the stalling of productive discussions during the fall and winter of 1644–45. Nonetheless, in his journal, Ogier describes this time as a period of celebration designed to set the stage for the commencement of negotiations. Religious solemnities, processions, a jubilee for the new pope (Innocent X), and events to welcome the newly arrived delegation from Bavaria marked the months between Christmas and Lent. The value placed on such festivities in the midst of negotiations reflected commonplace endorsements of “recreation” as an essential source of consolation, mental refreshment, and spiritual renewal, especially from the Catholic perspective that dominated in Münster. In monastic communities in this period, the term “recreation” designated the short period of rest after mealtime, an essential fixture of the daily routine that allowed brothers to restore their energies before returning to work and prayer.11 Laymen also viewed recreation as the indispensable corollary of productive work or study.12 Viewed in this context, Ogier’s ballet, like the other festive and ceremonial occasions he oversaw, made an important contribution to the negotiations. They punctuated lengthy stretches of labor and revived the spirits of haggard negotiators. Entertainments also provided a means through which individual delegations could advertise the cultural assets of their nations. During the congress, the Spanish embassy hosted theatrical performances by actors from the famous playhouses of Madrid. Other delegations hired traveling troupes

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of players from England and Holland who visited both Münster and Osnabruck to entertain the negotiators.13 The French delegation expended the most energy of all on entertainments. In addition to the Ballet de la Paix, they staged a ballet to mark the birth of the duc de Longueville’s son in 1647. They performed plays including Corneille’s Le Menteur, Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin’s Les Visionnaires, and Mairet’s La Sophonisbe. Longueville hired a trainer and his elephant to demonstrate circus-­like tricks in December 1646.14 A taste for diversion became an important mark of distinction for the French. As an eighteenth-­century historian of the congress, Guillaume-­Hyacinth Bougeant, wrote: “Above all the French who had arrived with a reputation for being proud and querulous folk, quickly acquired that of being the most polite and gallant through the ingenious ballets they staged and the parties they threw for the ladies, in this way mixing according to the genius of their nation the most agreeable entertainments with the most serious kind of work.”15 The French delegates’ residences in Münster served as an extension of the French court, a theater on which to demonstrate the superlative civility of their nation and stake a claim to a more prominent role in the negotiations. The Ballet de la Paix certainly contributed to this project. Its form recalls the kind of ballets routinely staged at court, whose stated aim was to glorify the French monarch and his kingdom. At fourteen scenes or entrées, the Ballet de la Paix qualifies as what ballet composer Nicolas Saint-­Hubert called “a handsome ballet,” less magnificent than a “grand ballet” of thirty entrées but slightly more elaborate than a “little ballet” of ten or twelve.16 It features the kind of allegorical figures and personifications of abstract concepts that also appeared in ballets performed at the French court in the early seventeenth century. Moreover, the order and arrangement of entrées, alternating sequences of serious and comic representations, mixing the mythological with the grotesque, conform to the dominant courtly aesthetic of the mid-­seventeenth century. Finally, eyewitness accounts suggest that the Ballet de la Paix resembled courtly antecedents in serving as the prelude to a more participatory form of recreation: generalized feasting and dancing that brought performers and witnesses together in communal celebration. Of course, the performance conditions of the ballet distinguished it sharply from its courtly models. As Ogier remarked in his Journal, the ballet struck a portion of the ballet’s local audience, the burghers of Westphalia, as a novelty.17 Meanwhile, even the part of the audience that likely would have had some familiarity with the court ballet genre—noble ambassadors from western European kingdoms as well as the non-­aristocratic professional diplomats

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who spent time in various courts—would have reason to be unsettled by this performance. Although most court ballets illustrated the magnificence of the sovereign who hosted them and the splendor of the courtly community he oversaw, the Ballet de la Paix was unmoored from that traditional logic of royal patronage and display. The script never mentions Louis XIV or the regent Anne of Austria at all and excludes figures, such as Hercules and Apollo, traditionally associated with the French monarch. Instead of lauding a single monarch, the Ballet de la Paix addressed itself to a complex, collective community. In this it resembled the other ceremonies and celebrations that brought negotiators together in the winter of 1645. The ballet served as an apt conclusion to these festivities, danced on the last week of merriment before Lent. Pinned to the liturgical calendar and to an essential human need for repose and release, the ballet along with the other ceremonies led by Ogier took on the status of ritual. Thinking about the Ballet de la Paix as a form of ritual provides one way to understand its diplomatic function. As anthropologist Victor Turner has shown, societies throughout the world have traditionally used ritualistic performances or “social dramas” to resolve breaches in community identity. For Turner, these performances operate as a rite of passage for societies in a state of transition or (as he terms it) “liminality.” The drama ushers its spectators through a process of “redress.” Marked by self-­reflexivity, performance serves as “a way of showing ourselves to ourselves,” displaying an idealized vision of the community’s identity for observation and contemplation.18 At last, the act of performing the drama “resolves” or reintegrates the formerly fractured society. Although somewhat schematic, Turner’s framework offers a useful starting place from which to analyze a particular performance’s redressive action upon a particular community.19 In the case of the ballet at Münster, the community undergoing transition was that of Europe itself, represented synecdochically by the assembled delegates from different states and principalities who danced and feasted together after the ballet’s final scene. The Congress of Westphalia has traditionally represented a turning point in the history of European diplomatic relations. Historians continue to debate the negotiations’ significance in this regard. According to realist proponents of the “states system” model for understanding modern international affairs, the treaties ratified in Münster and Osnabruck instituted the legal basis for states’ mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty and the establishment of a “balance of power” on the continent.20 In this view, Westphalia marks a “Great Divide” between the permeable sovereignty of medieval polities and the supposed stability of autonomous modern

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states.21 This narrative exaggerates the treaties’ political and legal significance, neglecting the complex forms of sovereignty implied by imperial expansion beyond Europe as well as the fractured or partial sovereignty that existed in territories held by the empire after the treaties’ ratification.22 Accounts characterizing Westphalia as the beginning of a purely secular form of European international relations also overstate the case.23 The historiographical “myth” positing Westphalia as a radical rupture with prior modes of international relations and the foundation of a modern order stems from the frequent use of terms such as the “Westphalian concept” in international relations theory to designate an ideal version of the modern states system rather than an accurate reflection of seventeenth-­century political interactions.24 Although the political, legal, and religious ramifications of the treaties have been overestimated, the Congress of Westphalia remains significant as a turning point for European diplomatic culture. Seventeenth-­century documents suggest that the participants in Westphalia themselves perceived the congress as innovative, representing a break with previous traditions for negotiating peace. Since not all participants accepted the political authority of the Vatican, for example, they also rejected Rome’s customary diplomatic ceremonial practices, necessitating a months-­long “preliminary” negotiation to establish unique protocols for formal matters including precedence rules.25 Before the smaller, bilateral conferences that took place continually throughout the negotiations, participants would draw up provisional agreements about matters of precedence and the languages used both in talks and for transcriptions.26 Finally, diplomats and thinkers on international relations throughout the rest of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries continually cited Westphalia when establishing rules for subsequent negotiations. Publishers marketed editions of the letters and memoirs of Westphalian delegates as exemplary cases to help train the next generation of diplomats.27 References to the congress, moreover, filled the pages of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’ most influential works on ambassadorship by Abraham de Wicquefort and François de Callières. Although historians of international relations rightly dispute the congress’s status as an absolute rupture in political theory, its reputation as such began in the contemporary documentation of the practices invented and employed during the talks. Such a profound cultural shift in the way diplomats and sovereigns negotiated relationships among European states required an equally major evolution in the way these relationships were signified. The texts produced around Westphalia drew on multiple symbolic languages to describe relations among

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the participating states. Diplomats and their correspondents often invoked the traditional rhetoric of a Christian community united by shared faith. At the same time, they developed a legalistic rhetoric to describe and publicize their goals. Both ways of imagining the conceptual underpinning of the community of Europe comingled throughout the congress. The French delegation certainly made use of both old and new languages for figuring the pursuit of peace. This duality appeared in Mazarin’s writings: in public documents about Westphalia, the cardinal relied on the notion of a Res publica Christiana to argue that the eventual peace agreement should strengthen Christendom.28 Meanwhile, his private instructions to the French delegation appealed to the legalistic moral high ground, positing and objecting to the House of Austria’s ambitions for universal monarchy. He declared that their unjustified usurpations had to be stopped, an argument based on the ethical implications of ius gentium, or the conventional body of “laws of nations.”29 It is unclear whether these mixed registers resulted from a self-­ conscious rhetorical strategy or the residual cultural force of the idea of Christendom. Either way, the transitional nature of the congress provided a rich symbolic lexicon for signifying international accord. The Ballet de la Paix reflects these multiple, shifting languages for imagining the reestablishment of a harmonious European community. Over the course of its fourteen scenes, the ballet appealed variously to shared European traditions such as Classical mythology, the Christian identity of nations in opposition to the Ottoman Turk, and the values of the professional diplomat. Throughout the spectacle, different forms of comedy, especially burlesque and carnivalesque modes, also played an important, complicated role, often seeming to undermine the elevated pursuit of peace by ridiculing types of people implicated in the war. The representational modes of ballet—particularly allegory, cultural masquerade, and burlesque, as well as an aesthetic that privileged novelty and variety—allowed for the presentation of multiple identities and competing values in a way that impeded the spectator’s search for a vision of an integrated, whole community. In contrast to Turner’s schematic conception of social dramas that postulates that the object of such performances is communal self-­recognition and the restoration of social order, the Ballet de la Paix fails to achieve such stable closure. The social, national, and political identities and relationships figured onstage often reveal themselves as contradictory or incompatible. Without proposing a clear vision of European concord, the ballet nonetheless provided a common space, language, and performative practice as tools for reinventing the international community.

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Redressing Europe Considering the ballet’s diplomatic uses requires a certain amount of speculation. The archival remains of the Ballet de la Paix are frustratingly scarce. No visual or musical documentation exists. In addition to the script of verses declaimed alongside the dance performances, only a couple of letters from lower-­level members of the French delegation outlining the content of the ballet have survived.30 These accounts do not directly address how the ballet’s creators perceived its function with respect to the congress. In his journal, Ogier neglects to mention who initially commanded the entertainment and for what purpose. His brief paragraphs on the ballet merely record basic facts about its performance. According to Ogier, the ballet had three or four repetitions, each for a very different audience. The first took place on February 26 at the lodging of Abel Servien, second French plenipotentiary and fierce rival of the comte d’Avaux.31 Viewers here likely included other members of the French delegation as well as select guests. Papal mediator Fabio Chigi, for example, reported that he attended this performance after dining with Servien’s wife.32 The dancers reprised their roles the following day at the residence of imperial ambassador Count Johann Ludwig von Nassau and at the home of Francis William von Wartemberg, bishop of Osnabruck, a pro-­Catholic delegate representing the Elector of Cologne. The final performance, hosted by d’Avaux, occurred on February 28 at city hall, “where all the bourgeoisie of Münster were assembled.”33 In addition to the eyewitnesses, other negotiators in Westphalia consumed the ballet through its printed verses alone, as Ogier reports that he had copies of his libretto sent to Antoine Brun, a Spanish plenipotentiary.34 Another copy of the libretto made its way back to France, where it reached a vicarious audience through publication in the court Gazette.35 Although the ballet reached a diverse audience, its libretto addressed a public united by a common cause and shared diplomatic culture. Two of the ballet’s characters in particular—Time, who opens the performance, and Mercury, who acts as its stage manager—evoke diplomatic values in the lyrics that accompany their performances. In the first entrée, for example, the dancer Le Vacher36 in the role of Time advises the audience: “If you want to obtain the goal in your sights / You must govern yourself with prudence.”37 The key word “prudence” holds special resonance for the diplomats in the audience. Manuals and treatises on the ambassador’s art expounded on this virtue: a combination of wisdom and discretion, usually considered the most important quality a diplomat should possess. A few scenes later, Mercury’s performance again

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reminds spectators of their shared professional cause. His verses identify him as a mythological patron saint of the diplomatic arts: Over treaties, sermons, and contracts I preside; Of the greatest arguments I am mediator You’ll have no Peace if I am not its author; I am its messenger and its guide.38 In verses that alternately offer encouragement and grave warnings to the mortal spectators, he commands they respect his “just laws.” Taken together, the entrées of Time and Mercury speak directly to the negotiators in the assembly, remind them of their shared professional identity and shared task, and make the argument that speedy work constitutes a professional duty. By hailing diplomats as diplomats, these entrées forge a unified community bound by a vocational credo that transcends politics or culture. Despite their shared professional ethos, different sectors of the ballet’s culturally and socially mixed audience would certainly have interpreted the performance in different ways. As the libretto demonstrates, however, Ogier used especially legible visual vocabularies and straightforward verses to ensure that as many spectators as possible understood its content. Some of his characters, for example, had corollaries in Cesare Ripa’s Iconology, a compendium of allegorical personifications that circulated throughout Europe in translated editions. Others were well-­known mythological figures. As discussed in Chapter 3, artistic practices of the mid-­seventeenth century entailed relying on widely circulated, conventional imageries to construct dancers’ costumes. In the case of Ogier’s ballet, the characters listed in the libretto each had well-­ known, conventional costumes and accoutrements that would make this task easy. Non-­French viewers, possibly even including the burghers who witnessed the final performance, would have no difficulty grasping the identity of the roles. Ogier’s verses, moreover, eschew the kinds of insider references that ornamented court ballets in Paris, thereby ensuring that they could be appreciated by any French speaker regardless of cultural background.39 Ogier’s reliance on clear imagery supported by poetry follows the recommendations of contemporary aesthetic treatises that characterized ballet as a form of “mute theater.” The urgency of Ogier’s subject and the diversity of his audience made this advice all the more pertinent. The ballet’s primary content or “message” could be summarized in that line from Mercury’s verses commanding diplomats in the audience to “Hurry

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up!” Four interlocking scenes develop the ballet’s advocacy for a speedy peace. Time’s performance in the first entrée begins the series. As earlier chapters have shown, at the French court, ballets that took matters of war and peace as their theme most often opened with a récit by a personification of Harmony, Concord, Peace, or Fame or Renown. Any of those allegorical figures might have seemed a logical, straightforward choice for the Ballet de la Paix. By choosing to begin the entertainment with Time rather than one of those feminine personas, however, Ogier made sure that his first performer would appear in masculine guise, thus avoiding a cross-­dressed performance that might have confused the naive German audience or made the serious opening scene appear comical.40 Time, moreover, was a widely recognizable figure, depicted in paintings and engravings that circulated throughout Europe: An elderly figure with wings and a trumpet, this typical personification reminds viewers that time flies—that they too will age and be called away from the earthly realm. More important, the identity of the character indicates the aims of the ballet as a whole, as explained through the advice conveyed in the accompanying verses. Spoken in the voice of the figure, the verses counsel: “In matters of love as well as dance . . . the greatest secret is to mind the time.”41 Reminding the audience that he “slips between the fingers . . . more sudden than lightning, faster than the wind,” Time urges the delegates to seize the moment and achieve a swift end to the fighting.42 Ogier here evokes multiple kinds or qualities of time: the incessant stream of time ever slipping from the grasp— chronos—dominates the second part of the verses. This kind of time brings to mind the events of the war, the forward march of troops, the duration of suffering. The sense of timing crucial to both love and dance mentioned in the first part of the verses belongs to kairos, “the brief, decisive moment which marks a turning point in the life of human beings or in the development of the universe.”43 As developed particularly in Classical rhetorical theory, kairos is associated with propriety, proportionality, and a measured quality; it represents order in contrast to the chaotic unspooling of events in chronological time.44 This meditation on kairotic time gains depth from its setting in a ballet performance. The measured verses, rhythmic music, and perfectly controlled steps that constitute the ballet represent an ideal materialization of the qualities of order and timeliness. As a seasonal practice, moreover, the Mardi Gras dance takes place in “ritual time,” steeped in memories of past festivities and thoughts of anticipated future carnival celebrations.45 Finally, Time’s verses also describe the time of the congress: the opportune, decisive moment in

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which delegates will determine Europe’s future. The ballet, like the congress as a whole, gains meaning from its anticipated end: the joyful stasis of peacetime. The ballet visualizes this promise of stability in the seventh and eighth entrées as Mercury ushers onto the stage La Chesnaye dressed as a personification of Peace. He performs a noble récit lauding the ideal of harmony. At last, he summons four performers representing the “Nations” of France, Spain, Italy, and Germany, who, through dance and gesture, “signed their accord.”46 Although temporarily scattered by Discord, these figures reassemble onstage in the final, grand ballet to confirm their alliance by dancing all together. The most literal expression of the ballet’s theme takes the form of this wordless pantomime of nations. Its meaning could not be misconstrued even by non-­French-­speaking audience members.47 Language posed no barrier to any sector of the audience. More than any other scene, this entrée hailed its diverse spectators as members of a common viewing community. At the same time, the appearance of the four Nations constituted an ideal representation of a European political society, coexisting in concerted action despite their differences. The theme of unity is reinforced by the récit of Peace, which narrates the construction of a temple in her honor: Spaniards, French, and Germans, Follow the work of my hands. That each of you embellishes it And with some new ornament Renders more perfect and beautiful This new edifice.48 Perhaps enacted through dance as well as recounted in song, this image of the collective enhancement of the “edifice” of peace serves as a powerful metaphor for international delegates’ cooperation to make a treaty. The lyrics suggest that the work is superior—“more perfect and beautiful”—because of the unique contribution of each party. This portion of the ballet speaks most pertinently to the political context of the congress. The image of a “perfect edifice” echoes French rhetoric in favor of measures to ensure a stable peace.49 The French delegation’s advocacy of a “durable peace” was controversial. The Holy Roman Empire’s delegate Isaac Volmar, for example, mocked French plans for a universal peace as overly utopian.50 In this context, the performance of the Nations guided by Peace operates as a pointed bit of propaganda for the French proposals. For audiences

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beyond Westphalia, the figure of Peace as incarnated by a French performer built France’s reputation as the only major European power devoted to peace, having supposedly rejected the imperial ambitions of its Hapsburg rivals.51 The image of a harmonious Europe gains strength toward the end of Peace’s verses. Turning the negotiators’ eyes toward a more distant, common enemy, the figure declares: “Triumph, Christians, the Crescent / Is running off white with fear.”52 In this climactic moment, the ballet imagines a coherent religious identity for the four nations, hearkening back to an older rhetoric of Christendom that sectarian fighting would seem to have rendered obsolete. Frank Lestringant suggests that “d’Avaux was a nostalgic for the Christian unity of the West.”53 The “nostalgic” vision of united Christendom works here only because of the invocation of the Ottoman Empire as shared antagonist. In fact, in early 1645, rumors circulated about a planned Ottoman attack on Hapsburg territory in the Balkans, raising fears that Christian-­held lands would fall to the Islamic polity.54 Even in the absence of such an immanent peril, though, rhetorical evocations of the Turk had often served in French court entertainments as a radically alien Other juxtaposed against which the European nations’ commonalities became more apparent. However real or imagined the Ottoman threat, the specter of the Turk provided a strong incentive for Europeans to ally in spite of their rivalries. The powerful enactment of European unity onstage through dance and poetry carries out the reflexive function of social drama as Turner defines it. These scenes “show Europe to itself ” through their stylized portrayal of the peace-­making process. Yet even this idealized vision could not occlude the profound social and national fissures dividing the continent.

Performing Aristocracy Throughout the ballet, the sense of unity created through addresses to the audience, through performance strategies, and through an inspiring vision of European cooperation was reinforced through appeals to the spectators’ shared sense of social privilege. The form of ballet itself served as a powerful social and cultural ritual for the European nobility in the early modern period. Although dance styles varied from country to country, dance occupied a central role in all the courts of Europe, as a cultural practice that expressed and perpetuated the distinction of social rank.55 Dance lessons featured prominently in the education of young nobles across early modern

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Europe, ensuring that their bodies would acquire the posture and carriage characteristic of aristocratic grace.56 It also guaranteed that the performer’s nobility would be recognizable to other members of the European elite. The movements and bearing of ballet constituted the outward signs of hereditary privilege. Graceful ballet steps, in other words, functioned as “restored behavior,” a symbolic and reflective repetition of moves and gestures that signified the distinction of aristocracy.57 As enacted onstage during festive seasons, ballet celebrated noble identity, commemorated the traits and values that bound nobles into a cultural community, and reiterated the social relationships that underpinned the political configuration of most European states. In diplomatic contexts, this socioculturally ritualistic quality of ballet symbolically unified the community of envoys chosen from among the aristocratic ranks of various kingdoms. In the Ballet de la Paix, the noble community sanctified through dance gained clarity through the dramatic representation of the effects of war on different social types: gentlemen and merchants, soldiers and peasants. Based on their verses alone, these entrées seem to aim to arouse spectators’ pity and to propel them to the negotiating rooms to put an end to the characters’ suffering. In the second entrée, for example, two local villagers played by Fontenella and Préfontaine lament their treatment at the hands of looting soldiers:58 After the very bloody acts The pitiless soldier carries out in my village, I await only death or hard servitude. . . . In such extremity, What support will I find, where will be my refuge?59 Similarly, in the fifth entrée, two gentlemen and two merchants “ruined” by war lament their losses. The verses spoken in the voice of the merchants appeal directly to the audience: Overwhelmed by the miseries of such a long war That has ravished us, without our deserving it, We come to your feet and, knees to the earth, We beg for charity.60 This pathetic spectacle should arouse the audience’s pity, should unite them in a shared emotional experience that should also spur them to action.

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The live performance, however, undercuts the scenes’ pathos. The dances of the lower-­order characters in particular made use of burlesque aesthetics that used exaggeration, grotesque imagery, and irony to make spectators laugh. The performance of the villagers in the second entrée exemplifies the workings of the burlesque. In fact, peasant characters regularly appeared in burlesque court ballets in Paris throughout the seventeenth century. These roles allowed noble performers to display their dancing talent through challenging, off-­kilter choreography.61 Clumsy steps enhanced characterization. As Saint-­Hubert advised: “One must subject the dancing and the steps to the music and the entrées, and not have a wine-­grower or a water-­carrier dance like a knight or a musician, and you should want that each dances according to what he represents.”62 In addition, because moving awkwardly on purpose required greater physical control and more perfect mastery of the elements of ballet than a straightforwardly elegant performance, these dances paradoxically illustrated the superior grace of the dancers. These entrées’ humor derived in part from this mismatch between the evident nobility of the dancer and the baseness of the character he impersonated. Through ironic performance, the ballet distanced noble dancers and spectators from the impoverished villagers they simultaneously pitied and ridiculed. In the Ballet de la Paix, the costumes and props further exaggerated the peasant figures’ rusticity for comic effect. As Doulceur, an attaché to the comte d’Avaux and eyewitness of the February 28 performance, wrote: “Two villagers [entered] with sticks and baskets: two little pigs in one, and in the other a fat goose, who stuck his neck a Parisian half-­yard out of his basket; and they screeched and grunted marvelously.”63 Reliance on props such as baskets and walking sticks to clarify characters’ identity was condemned by Saint-­Hubert, who noted that once the dancers were obliged to set their objects down, “one would have to put a label on their backs to make them recognizable.”64 Given that it would have been easy to convey the villagers’ identity through clothes and movement, the dancers did not need to carry farm animals for the purposes of characterization. Rather, the spectacle of live, grunting pigs and a squawking goose provided cheap laughs. The scene echoed the foreign dignitaries’ common complaints about Westphalia: it recalled an Austrian delegate’s sarcastic return address on a letter situating himself in “Münster, behind the pigsty,”65 or Doulceur’s vivid description of the “parade of boars” that roamed Münster each night, inspiring him to call it “the city of pigs.”66 Even as the entrée’s verses implored diplomats to help ruined peasants by ending the war, the performance reminded elite spectators of their contempt for this group of lowborn souls.

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Comic depictions of contemptible social types were standard features of court ballets in the first half of the seventeenth century. They created opportunities for virtuosically awkward star-­turns by strong dancers, leavened portentous allegorical ballets with humor, and fed into the festive spirit of the Carnival season. Most important, they allowed for the creation of an aesthetic of novelty and diversity highly prized across most art forms in the seventeenth century. Saint-­Hubert made clear the aesthetic utility of base content as he declared that a stately and beautiful ballet could have both “serious and grotesque” entrées, provided that “one does not see two Grotesque ones in a row”: “If they can be mixed in among the serious ones, they will be much more entertaining and one will have more leisure to admire some and laugh at the others.”67 The serious seems more admirable, the grotesque more humorous, when contrasted with the tone of the preceding entrée. If Ogier clearly appreciated the value of the low register, in the Ballet de la Paix he failed to observe Saint-­Hubert’s recommendation for strict alternation of serious and grotesque. In fact, it is difficult to place some entrées definitively in one category or the other. The entrées of Time, Mercury, Peace, the Nations, and Discord (first, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth) are obviously serious, featuring allegorical personifications and mythological figures. Others, like the peasant entrée (second), the dance of two amorous soldiers (third), a corrupt village judge (fourth), a debauched man (eleventh), and a drunkard (thirteenth), clearly belong to the grotesque aesthetic. Rather than alternate styles between each entrée, Ogier seems to have broken the ballet into three or four alternating blocks or sequences of entrées in a similar register. This more fluid approach to incorporating serious and grotesque scenes means that some performances can remain aesthetically ambiguous. The fifth entrée, for example, featuring the two ruined gentlemen and two ruined merchants, combines both registers. Although the ­second half of the scene features desperate merchants pleading for charity, the first half focuses on a gentleman distracting himself from his woes by chasing after women: May one give me a bit of leisure, Lovely ladies, you will have some pleasure, None of you will go wrong here: I can say it with certainty He who has but cape and sword Can well dance lightly.68

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Possessed of nothing “but cape and sword,” this gentleman has lost everything except the outward signs of his privilege. Rather than cry about it like the merchants, he boasts that his financial losses feel like unburdening himself of a weight. The “lightness” of his dancing—a description that recalls the airborne movements of grotesque or basse danse—enhances the tone of frivolity.69 Against the grave historical context and juxtaposed with the pathetic merchants who dance in the same entrée, this typically comic performance transforms nonchalance into an almost heroic defense of the noble way of life. War may devastate everyone else, but gentlemen will continue to dance. Ogier’s complex orchestration of high and low, comic and tragic, serious and grotesque allows the ballet to perform the intricate cultural work of re-­ forming the diverse delegates in its audience as members of a coherent community bound by shared professional values, Christianity, and nobility. Of course, the sanctification of this community occurred at the expense of other social types—peasants, soldiers, even wealthy merchants. This approach may have worked well for the ballet’s first performances, which took place in the exclusive spaces of ambassadors’ residences. It is more difficult to imagine how these representations may have struck the broader audience who viewed the ballet’s final reprise at city hall.

Noble Community Versus National Communities The ballet’s ridicule of non-­aristocratic types becomes particularly problematic in the last sequence that supposedly pays tribute to the host Westphalian population. In the tenth entrée, two gentlemen and their pages appear as two Münster burghers and their wives. In the twelfth, one lord and his page perform as local servant girls. Finally, in the grand ballet, dancers identified as “French Gentlemen” serenade Westphalian women. Throughout these performances, cross-­dressing, stereotypical costumes, and ironic verses map the social divisions of the earlier entrées onto national or cultural distinctions. Embodiments of nobility marked as French stand juxtaposed as grotesque and clumsy, definitely non-­noble figures marked as rustic Germans. The representation of national and regional identities introduces cultural rivalries into the image of European cooperation created in earlier parts of the ballet. Although it is possible that spectators would have interpreted the peasants, soldier, or judge of earlier scenes as representations of Westphalian folk, the first characters explicitly identified as hailing from the region are the

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bourgeois men and women depicted in the tenth entrée. The spotlight focuses on the female characters, incarnated by cross-­cast male dancers (La Chesnaye and a page), as the entrée’s verses speak in the women’s voice: What do you say, lovely Frenchwomen, Your minds are they not jealous To see two bourgeois women triumph? . . . What served as the butt of your jokes Our clothes so heavy and ugly, Are the most captivating machine And the most beautiful ornament of your pleasant ballets. If we remove from our heads These big portable pavilions, We’ll make as many conquests As you’ve made captives.70 In the absence of a visual record of the performance, these lines offer a suggestion of the kind of costume that the performers might have worn for their role: “heavy,” “ugly” clothes acknowledged as an object of French ridicule and, above all, the Fellkenhaube or traditional Westphalian headdress, thought to have developed to protect women’s hair and faces from the region’s continual drizzle.71 Although women throughout Europe wore similar headpieces on occasion (to attend church, for example), the comparison of the headdress to “portable pavilions” and the equation of their clothes to a theatrical “machine” indicate just how grotesquely the costumes must have exaggerated the typical Münster women’s dress. As the sarcastic viewer Doulceur sniped, the figures appeared “dressed in their best clothes.”72 The vision of the male dancers dressed in outsized versions of regional garb renders the initial address to “lovely Frenchwomen” completely ironic. If any French women attended a performance of the ballet, they surely did not regard these characters with jealousy. Instead, the aesthetics of this scene link it to mocking depictions of lower-­order, foreign, often older female figures in many French court ballets, including examples such as the Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut analyzed in Chapter 3. Any viewer familiar with this tradition would readily perceive the ridiculing aims of these depictions of Westphalian denizens. The spirit of ridicule and rivalry continues into the final Grand Ballet, which gathered together again onstage many of the ballet’s characters. According to the French eyewitness, Mercury, Peace, and the Nations were among

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those who reassembled to dance in harmony in the pompous conclusion to the work. The reunion of figures in the Grand Ballet typified court ballets of the period. These finales could generate powerful images of unity and reconciliation even after the divisive mockery of burlesque ballets. Jürgen Grimm posits that the final dance of the Ballet de la Paix performed a similar function: “The Grand Ballet reunites everyone in an atmosphere of peace and gaiety—almost a utopian feeling.”73 The concluding verses of the ballet, however, undermine this interpretation. An address by “French gentlemen” to “the women of Münster,” the text declares: Though France and Italy Are the countries of beauty We love the simplicity Of the Bourgeois women of Westphalia Their face is not so pretty Or their discourse so witty But naïveté always Allies itself with sweetness. Goodbye, then, Ladies of the Court, We clearly see that your love Is nothing but makeup and paint: We seek our fortune elsewhere.74 Grimm takes this address at face value, concluding: “The wives and burghers of Westphalia who were at the performance on 28 February 1645 were doubtless charmed by the gallant tone and extremely flattered to be preferred to the Beauties of the French Court.”75 But, even taken in isolation, these lines offer faint praise at best. In the context of the larger performance, they remind audience members of the ridiculous performance of cross-­dressed dancers in exaggerated tent-­like headdresses. Simplicity and naiveté no longer appear as virtues but as thinly veiled insults, calling attention to the plainness and rusticity of the women they supposedly praise. Records fail to clarify whether the “French gentlemen” addressed themselves to real women in the audience or to the bourgeoises of the tenth entrée, reemerged onstage for the Grand Ballet, or both. These verses diverge from typical speeches directed “to the Ladies” of ballet audiences. They establish a different kind of courtly rapport between the gentlemen and the objects of their praise. The language is more gallant, and less erotically charged, than

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the verses of the “ruined gentleman” earlier in the ballet, for example. Never stooping to beg for the bourgeois women’s attentions, the speakers remain in control of the relationship constructed through their address. The ironic courtship of Münster bourgeois women reaffirms the superiority of gentlemen and “ladies of the court”—especially French ones. Given the Westphalian burghers’ lack of familiarity with the ballet form and their presumed ignorance of the French language, perhaps the viewers of the final performance at city hall did not appreciate that these scenes mocked them. (Though, on the other hand, the ridiculing aim of the exaggerated costumes and cross-­cast performances may well have translated across cultures.) Like the earlier scenes that poked fun at generic bourgeois and peasant characters, perhaps these entrées functioned primarily to create solidarity among noble delegates united by shared disdain for their rustic surroundings. The explicit praise for Frenchness, however, undermines this aristocratic cohesion. Echoing longstanding tropes of French court ballet, the performance of the “French gentlemen” and the poetic encomium of French court ladies assimilate the perfect expression of nobility to Frenchness itself.76 In this international context, the assertion of Frenchmen’s superior nobility engaged in debates about precedence: the contested ranking of states that governed both ceremonial occasions and more important matters such as which delegates led negotiations or the order in which delegations submitted their proposals for peace. Precedence borrowed from the language of social rank to determine the hierarchy of European states. Kingdoms ranked above principalities, which out-­classed duchies, for example. Among kingdoms and empires, rivalry for precedence took place in the political arena through shows of force in war or territorial conquests. As the ballet suggests, however, contests for international authority also played out in the arena of cultural expression, through matters related to language, artistic achievement, and grace. At an international gathering devoid of a clear leader or organizing presence to proclaim order among the participants, the ballet presented itself as an attempt to fill this vacuum of authority through art.

Reprisals The afterlife of the Ballet de la Paix illustrates the tension between the form’s role in underpinning diplomatic society and its part in burnishing a particular kingdom’s claim to supremacy. The ballet was presented to a vicarious public

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of French readers as evidence of their country’s superiority. The court Gazette published the text of the libretto in an extraordinary number issued just a month after the entertainment’s performance. The libretto appeared in the same issue as the reproduction of a formal denunciation of the Turkish incursion into Venice by the Knights of Malta. The editor explained his choice to pair these seemingly disparate documents in a single issue: It is not only the chance to fill the empty space left over by this denunciation, whose publication is so important to all of Christendom, that obliges me to divert your minds from a hateful object by the recreation of another one. The Ballet danced but a moment ago in Münster is not out of place here: although it begins and ends with love, according to the noble grace of our nation: whose magnificence also made itself admired in the expense incurred for this apparatus; made all the more willingly as it was on the subject and good augur of peace.77 The editor’s presentation justifies the ballet in terms that echo the discourse of recreation surrounding the live performance of the ballet. Here, readers wearied by bad news may delight in an imaginary or virtual rehearsal of the entertainment as a form of salutary diversion. Moreover, they will discover in the ballet the “noble grace of our nation,” expressed not only in the content of the entrées but also in the willingness of the French delegation to outlay resources for the genteel entertainment that stands symbolically for the much-­ anticipated peace. The periodic sentence structure accumulates implied praise for the French delegation to the point that the possibility of peace seems, through enthymemic effect, to result directly from the dance. Elsewhere in Europe, however, the ballet was received not as evidence of French superiority but as inspiration. As Croxton points out, the ragged end to the Congress of Westphalia meant that by the time the last piece was ratified in June 1651 most delegates had left the region, so the peace was “celebrated in the same scattered method that it was implemented.”78 Several European courts staged their own festivities highlighting their own delegates’ role in bringing about the agreement. At the Swedish court, for example, Queen Christina commissioned a ballet to celebrate her country’s success in the recently concluded negotiations. Christina’s ambassadors’ role as lead negotiators in Osnabruck gave Sweden a basis for rivaling France’s cultural

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prestige and political dominance on the European stage. The ballet performed at Stockholm certainly made this case. Ironically, it did so using the form and idiom of Ogier’s entertainments. Conceived for an audience consisting principally of Swedish courtiers along with resident ambassadors and other select foreigners, La Naissance de la Paix (The Birth of Peace), like Ogier’s ballet, blends a rhetoric of international harmony and communion with a more jingoistic language of Swedish national superiority. Performed in December 1649 to commemorate both the peace and Christina’s twenty-­third birthday, Naissance de la Paix has received attention by modern scholars mainly because of suggestions that it was partly authored by Descartes, who lived at the Swedish court at the time of its creation. Although this attribution now seems highly unlikely, it is indisputable that this French-­language court ballet structured in the French style represents a larger strategy of cultural appropriation, particularly from France. In addition to Descartes, Christina’s court welcomed Hélie Poirier (the likely author of the ballet according to Richard Watson)79 and other French poets fleeing religious or political persecution, including Saint Amant, Marigny, and Cérisantes.80 As early as 1647, Christina ordered the construction of a salle de ballet that mimicked the dimensions of French ballet stages.81 Throughout the 1640s, ballets penned in French played an important role at the Swedish court. The Ballet des phantaisies de ce temps (Ballet of the Fantasies of Our Time, 1643) celebrated then Princess Christina’s beauty and virtue as a force for unity within the kingdom. Les passions victorieuses et vaincues (The Passions Victorious and Vanquished, 1649) staged an allegory of the triumph of virtue and duty over erotic passion. Finally, later that year, Christina commemorated her decision to forgo marriage by performing the role of the chaste goddess in Le vaincu de Diane (Diana’s Conquest).82 Four years prior to Louis XIV’s first appearance as the Rising Sun on the French ballet stage, in other words, Christina used allegorical dances to fashion her own monarchal image. By December 1649, then, Swedish courtiers were accustomed to witnessing ballets that showcased the political symbolism of their monarch. La Naissance de la Paix continued the project of the queen’s self-­fashioning through spectacle, allegory, and mythological allusions staged for an audience of Swedish and foreign courtiers.83 But this ballet resituated Christina’s power in an international European context as the queen, performing the role of Pallas Athena, restored peace to the entire world.84 In the opening récit, the audience is asked to “revere the presence / Of the divinity who presides over these

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premises, / She wishes to draw us from the perils of war.”85 The verses declare that “she”—a pronoun that usefully conflates Christina and Pallas Athena— effectively brought an end to the war by her “prudence / and by the secret influence,” as well as through her wisdom in leading the country in successful combat.86 Indeed, throughout its twenty entrées, the ballet reworks the essential features of the Ballet de la Paix, giving credit for the peace to Pallas and therefore, symbolically, to Christina and Sweden. Among the strategies used in La Naissance de la Paix to attribute the congress’s success to Christina, the most important is its elaboration of the contrast between Athena, goddess of wisdom in battle, and her more bellicose brother Mars. In the first entry, Mars boasts about how he terrifies the earth with cannon-­fire as loud and bright as thunder and lightning.87 A few scenes later, the entrée of the Earth echoes the dynamic, fiery imagery of Mars’s verses. Accompanied by figures representing the elements of fire and water, Earth takes the stage to describe vividly the ravages of battles at sea. She complains that the fire of war “rends me and makes fly / Several of my limbs into the sky. . . . I fear that soon the world so tossed / Will either perish or be lost.”88 The richly evoked violence of these entrées contrasts with the calm, measured verses for Pallas Athena. When the goddess’s own army takes the stage in the second entrée, for example, the cavalrymen praise their divine leader: “She is therefore in our corps / The head without which it could not stir. . . . Without her this body divided / Would be by all despised.”89 Watson notes the seemingly “Cartesian” theme in this image of an army corps led by its wise, rational “head” as represented by Athena.90 The import of the cavalrymen’s appeal to Pallas is more striking when compared with the appearance of soldiers in the La Naissance de la Paix. Structurally, the soldiers’ performances serve a similar function, taking the stage rather early in the ballet to help portray the miseries of war that will later be assuaged by the restoration of peace. Christina’s ballet, though, does not establish such a sharp distinction between the work of the cavalrymen and the rewards of peacetime. Instead, these troops, under the command of the wise warrior Pallas, are explicitly figured as playing an active role in the eventual return to calm. Because they execute the will of Athena/Christina, they appear as a remedy for rather than a symptom of war. At the end of the ballet, Pallas accompanied by Justice and Peace restores order. The other gods, still “deliberating” the Peace—perhaps a gibe at the drawn-­out Congress of Westphalia—ultimately submit to Pallas’s wisdom:

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Pallas alone is one and the same, On peace and war best. Therefore none of us should dare to claim To check or control her judgment.91 Playing on Pallas Athena’s identity as a “wise warrior,” these verses stress the dual nature of her talents: equally adept at managing war and peace. This omnipotence earns the respect of the other gods, expressed here in terms of independence and authority: no one dares to “check or control” her actions. Because it is articulated by peer gods (stand-­ins for fellow European states), the unchecked agency of Pallas (or by extension Sweden) both represents the theory of state sovereignty affirmed by Westphalia and exceeds it, hinting that her monarchy is somehow more powerful or more absolute than that of the other divinities. Finally, the Muses and the Graces celebrate peacetime while aligning themselves with the goddess Pallas and the monarch, who share their gender. The concluding récit explains one last time the ballet’s imagery: By Pallas we meant eternal wisdom; to be plain, PALLAS rules here. Justice and Peace with her reign, Yet we have but one Queen and one god.92 As reaffirmed in these verses, the universal imperatives of international law and the notion of Res publica Christiana are put to use here in the ballet to consolidate and assert Christina’s power beyond the confines of her own kingdom. She symbolically becomes a European leader in this ballet, the representative of wise warfare in a pantheon of sovereigns motivated by bloodlust and jealousy. In this way, La Naissance de la Paix examined alongside the Ballet de la Paix demonstrates ballet’s particular currency for diplomatic relations at midcentury. The form of ballet—poetry, dance, music, and imagery—connected a group of performers and spectators to a shared European culture. It also provided the artistic tools to assert the supremacy of whoever sponsored the performance. Ballet made visible the cultural fabric that held European diplomatic society together while also serving as the arena in which battles for control over the new order of European society could be fought.

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Conclusion Two decades after the Peace of Westphalia, during another Carnival season, noblemen in The Hague danced yet another Ballet de la paix. The “handsome ballet” of twenty-­two entrées featured William of Orange in a leading role as Mercury.93 Through interlaced rhyming verses, penned in French, his persona claimed credit for securing peace between Holland and England at the end of the second Anglo-­Dutch War. Although not directly inspired by Ogier’s work, William’s ballet affirmed the legacy of the Westphalian performance in establishing French-­style ballet in the French language as the idiom for European diplomatic celebrations. In Stockholm or The Hague, these ballets functioned as a kind of “restored behavior,” embodied rehearsals of cultural models that represented international ideals. As manifestations of a cultural common ground, the Ballet de la Paix and its imitators recall Hedley Bull’s point that international societies (of which post-­Westphalian Europe often serves as a prime example) rest on the foundation of “a common culture or civilization.”94 A shared language, epistemology, religion, ethics, even “a common aesthetic or artistic tradition” facilitate communication among states and make it easier to identify the kinds of “common interests” that lay the groundwork for international cooperation.95 Interpreted one way, peace-­themed ballets document the aristocratic cultural norms that underpinned—or were the precondition for—seventeenth-­ century diplomatic relations. At the same time, though, the ballets challenge the conservatism of Bull’s definition of international society by demonstrating that the “common culture or civilization” of European society was above all a performative category. The image and implied order of the international community were simultaneously reaffirmed and reinvented with each reenactment. Ballet, in this sense, carried out the important diplomatic task of representing the form of the international community. Its iconographical, poetic, and choreographic vocabulary performed this cultural work more readily than any amount of legal theorizing. In this context, the dance of diplomacy was more than a metaphor; it was a concrete expression of relationships within the evolving European community.

Chapter 6

Entertaining Personalities at Louis XIV’s Court (1653–69)

The years immediately following the Congress of Westphalia were a period of domestic upheaval in France. Nobles irate at new taxes levied to pay for the war and the sale of offices that diluted their power in Parlement revolted against the regency of the queen mother Anne of Austria and the First Minister Jules Mazarin. The nearly five-­year-­long insurrection known as the Fronde ended in defeat for the nobles. Shortly thereafter, the court staged a monumental entertainment, the Ballet royal de la nuit, that celebrated the end of the conflict.1 The four-­part ballet, consisting of forty-­three entrées, gave viewers a virtual tour of the pleasures and mischief that take place in the kingdom at night: twilight shopping in Parisian boutiques, the “court of miracles” when “crippled” mendicants come out to play under cover of darkness, evening entertainments, moon rise, occult activities, and the illusions of dreams. Finally, a song by Aurora announced the appearance of young Louis XIV in the emblematic role of the Rising Sun and order is restored. The allegory of order’s triumph over disorder gained clarity in the verses declaimed in accompaniment to the king’s dance, proclaiming his destiny to “dissipate the shadows from France” and “go victorious into Byzantium to erase the Crescent.”2 Inaugurating the celestial imagery that prevailed throughout the “Sun King’s” reign, the ballet conscripted nobles to perform their submission to the king by dancing in his orbit. Because of such powerful royal imagery, scholarship on the famously lavish entertainments of Louis XIV’s reign has rightly emphasized how they impressed the monarch’s might on his own subjects.3 Seventeenth-­century commentators, however, stressed entertainments’ instrumentality for international rather than

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domestic politics. At the height of the king’s reign, playwright and impresario Samuel Chappuzeau declared that the main purpose of theatrical entertainments staged at court or in town was to “show foreigners what a king of France can do in his kingdom.”4 Diplomats were well aware of their crucial role in disseminating images of the French king’s power across Europe. In a relation to the Venetian senate, for example, Marco Antonio Giustinian, ambassador in France from 1665 to 1668, remarked that the king, “by frequent entertainments of balls, plays, [and] feasts, for which no expense is ever spared if it confers splendor and magnificence, offers happiness to the ladies, relaxation to himself, and it greatly pleases his Majesty that the ministers of [foreign] princes also attend, that they might spread the news of these royal ostentations abroad.”5 In these accounts, court entertainments appear as a form of “soft power,” designed to appeal to a foreign public in the space of performance and beyond.6 Ensuring the regard of foreign powers had always been an important function of court entertainments, as previous chapters of this book have shown. It became even more crucial in the post-­Westphalian era. The treaties signed in Münster and Osnabruck formally articulated a model for European international relations based on princes’ reciprocal acknowledgment of each other’s autonomy and relative power in Europe. Rather than seek legitimacy from a higher authority (such as the pope), rulers assured their sovereignty by brokering associations with each other. Maintaining diplomatic relations, therefore, was an important sign of sovereign autonomy. As Abraham de Wicquefort explained: “There is no more illustrious mark of sovereignty than the right to send and receive ambassadors” because this practice entails sovereigns’ mutual “obligation to protect” the rights and safety of each other’s envoys.7 The practices involved in ambassador exchange demonstrate rulers’ reciprocal acknowledgment of each other’s authority, and therefore “the right of embassy is inseparable from Sovereignty.”8 This system of international relations limited the autonomy of any single prince by stressing his dependency on others’ recognition of and respect for his dominion. Increasingly over the course of Louis XIV’s reign, French thinkers and statesmen seemed less willing to accept that the monarch’s power owed anything to foreign sovereigns. In her masterful study of theories of mediation in seventeenth-­century political discourses Ellen McClure observes: “If the rest of Europe was proceeding toward a secularized view of diplomacy based on droit des gens, French theory and practice was somewhat different,” in that French thinkers “established the monarch as not merely another secular leader but as a divine right sovereign uniquely legitimized through the divine.”9

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According to McClure, French political thinkers figured Louis XIV as a direct earthly incarnation of God’s might and ambassadors as equally direct executors of the king’s personal authority. French theorists’ insistence that their monarch’s power derived immediately and essentially from the divine rendered the role of other monarchs in recognizing and authorizing French sovereignty theoretically irrelevant. This French mode of sovereignty “admitted no comparison” and, in principle at least, was hard to reconcile with the practice of diplomacy.10 Diplomatic entertainments under Louis XIV staged this tension at the heart of theoretical writing about the king’s sovereignty in relation to other European powers. Performances under Louis XIV distinguished themselves from earlier events through their focus on the personal and on personalities— especially the king’s own persona—rather than on the court community as a whole. Yet even as they shined a brighter spotlight on the king in his roles as performer and patron, court entertainments remained a fixture of diplomatic culture and continued to play a role in mediating France’s relationships with other countries. Examining Louis XIV-­era entertainments as diplomatic encounters slightly displaces the Sun King’s person from the center of the courtly universe, revealing a more interdependent and dynamic symbolism of sovereignty. In the international context, the charisma of the royal person does not act simply as an agent of domination or subjection. Rather, it performs in relation to other sovereign personages and their delegates to negotiate an ever-­shifting network of alliances and rivalries. The figure of hospitality provides one way to conceptualize this dynamic between assertions of absolute power over the domestic domain and gestures of belonging to a diplomatic community. Ancient discourses on the laws of hospitality simultaneously—and somewhat paradoxically—affirmed the sovereignty of the host over his property while defending the right of foreigners to seek lodging within it.11 Building on these ancient models, early modern legal thinkers discussed hospitality in their elucidations of natural law and conventional international law known as “laws of nations.”12 Most notably, Samuel Pufendorf ’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1672) proposed a restricted version of the right to hospitality, extended only to those who travel out of necessity, in order to strengthen the sovereignty of the property holder.13 The practice of diplomacy, particularly after the Congress of Westphalia, raised new questions about hospitality in international relations. The right of embassy was an important mark of sovereignty. Yet the reception of ambassadors could impinge on the monarch’s authority, for example when

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diplomatic immunity prevented the punishment of an ambassador who had trespassed against domestic law.14 In this context, the French court’s acts of spectacular hospitality toward ambassadors and especially toward visiting royals and other high-­profile foreign dignitaries represent stylized reflections on this tension between absolute monarchy and international relations. Staging France’s relations with foreign powers, these events construct a “theater of hospitality,” making visible the dynamics of reciprocity and rivalry that undergirded the society of states.15 Over the course of the reign, evolving strategies of diplomatic entertainment chart how the French state increasingly privileged monarchy over international society, sometimes damaging diplomatic relations in the process.

Staging English Refuge A singular example of French hospitality toward foreign dignitaries occurred in the 1650s when the court played host to English royals in exile. Early modern sovereigns seldom traveled outside their kingdoms. The potential danger and certain expense of moving across borders kept monarchs at home. More important, as Anna Keay observes, travel provoked crises of ceremony and symbolism.16 The performance of kingly authority was more difficult to stage at a distance from royal subjects and, perhaps, in the company of a foreign sovereign who might be a rival for precedence. A prince relying on the hospitality of another ruler, moreover, in some sense accepted a position of subjection, his status as a guest reaffirming the host’s mastery of his domain. During the English Civil War, Charles II had no choice but to travel abroad to seek refuge from the anti-­royalist Commonwealth government. He and his family spent three periods of their exile in France. The first occurred while he was still Prince of Wales, from summer 1646 to summer 1648.17 The second took place right after the execution of Charles I, in 1649, and the third after his coronation, from the autumn of 1651 until 1654. This last sojourn posed a diplomatic and symbolic challenge both to the English royals in exile and to the French court that hosted them. As a crowned king, Charles worked to maintain outward signs of sovereignty. For example, he traveled with a tailor and shoemaker and spent up to 10 percent of his household budget on outfitting his own person to ensure a regal appearance.18 From the French perspective, Charles’s status was more ambivalent. Louis XIV officially recognized Charles II as king of England in 1649.19 Moreover, the government treated

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him like royalty, lodging him in the palace at Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye (where Louis XIV had himself taken refuge at the outbreak of the Fronde) and giving him a pension, albeit on an irregular payment schedule.20 These acts of regal hospitality derived in part from the fact that the French and English kings were cousins, linked by blood through Charles’s mother, Henrietta Maria of France. To an international audience, they signified France’s political support for the English monarchy. Despite these public gestures, France also engaged in diplomatic relations with the English government in power. Louis recognized the Commonwealth in December 1652 in order to carry out negotiations with Oliver Cromwell’s government.21 On account of such mixed signals as well as the precariousness of his own position, Charles stood in France as an equivocal figure—a king without a legitimate kingdom. Despite the ambiguity of the English royals’ official or diplomatic status in France, they played a full role in French ceremonies and entertainments throughout their stay. They participated in Louis XIV’s solemn reentry into Paris after the Fronde in October 1652,22 and members of the English royal entourage received the rare honor of dancing roles in three court ballets: the Ballet de la nuit as well as the Nopces de Pélée et de Thetis (Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, 1654) and the Ballet des Plaisirs (Ballet of Pleasures, 1655). In the content of the entertainments as well as in their poetic structure, the inclusion of English performers provoked an artistic reflection on the nature of hospitality, sovereignty, and the mutual dependence of powers. On first consideration, English participation in the ballets suggests two opposite diplomatic readings. In her exhaustive study of the reflection of Anglo-­French relations in court spectacles, Marie-­Claude Canova-­Green characterizes these events as honors bestowed on the English and signs of support for their cause.23 As disseminated in the printed libretti (above all in their lists of dramatis personae) and in Gazette accounts, the fact of English courtiers’ inclusion in ballets represented public displays of solidarity with the exiles. The diplomatic significance of the performances appears more complex, however, if considered not only as political “messaging” but as a very particular form of hospitality. Judith Still identifies a subtype of hospitality that she calls “invitation without reciprocity”—the form of hospitality offered to those who lack the means to return the favor. This kind of hospitality derives from charity or from pity, and may serve to assert or affirm “hierarchical difference” between the giver (who flaunts resources and status) and the impoverished receiver.24 In this light, the act of conscripting English subjects into a French court ritual might appear as humbling gesture, a theatrical display of Stuart dependency.

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In fact, both favor and pity, recognition of English sovereignty and symbolic abasement of the exiles, are at play in the Ballet de la nuit. Organized by Louis Hesselin just months after the official conclusion to the rebellions of the Fronde, the ballet marked the reunification of France under monarchal authority. The performances by the two English courtiers—Charles’s brother, the Duke of York (the future James II), and his favorite, George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham—played a supporting part in this narrative arc. Their presence served to remind French viewers of the extreme threat posed by revolt. As the verses declaimed in accompaniment to one of the Duke of York’s dances affirm: “Revolution is a common enough thing,” but “it is necessary to punish this great outrage / by force and courage.”25 The Englishmen’s inclusion in the ballet set up a parallel between the French and English cases: two royal houses under threat, one triumphant and the other in exile. The significance of English participation in the French ballet, however, went beyond bland assertions of unity against challenges to monarchal authority. It was a deeply personalized form of politics, focused on the individual courtiers and offering a space for intimate interactions between them and their French counterparts. Moreover, casting the English dancers required a certain amount of give-­and-­take between the two courts in the artistic matter of creating the dancers’ roles. In ballet, character creation always entails a kind of collaboration between the performer and the artists who scripted his part. The performer’s physical appearance and dancing ability informed the kinds of roles he or she could realistically play. In addition, the librettist Isaac de Benserade elaborated characters through verses that referred simultaneously to the fictional persona and the characteristics of the performer through allusions that served as in-­jokes for the exclusive court community.26 Although noble performers had their roles scripted for them by artists patronized by the king, they nonetheless exerted a degree of influence on the parts they played through the social performance of personality. The character parts assigned to the English performers attest to the fact that, despite their dependence on the French court for shelter and protection, they exercised a certain amount of autonomy and made enough of an impression at court to shape their ballet roles accordingly. As John Callow has shown, during his exile in France, James began deliberately fashioning his image as a capable soldier and evidently succeeded in convincing French generals of his stalwart valiance.27 His nascent reputation left its mark on his role as a “bashful lover” consulting an oracle in the seventh entrée of the fourth part of the Ballet de la nuit. The character-­defining verses assigned to his performance

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in the ballet underline warrior traits. Although he is identified as a “bashful lover,” his verses declare “glory is my only Mistress,” “I want to make coups worthy of her and of me.”28 A similar portrait of dedication and competence is sketched by the verses to accompany his performance as a coral fisher in the Nopces de Pélée, where his character swears, “I apply myself as an expert man / to fish anything that serves / to remake a crown.”29 Meanwhile, Buckingham’s three performances in the Ballet de la nuit echo court gossip about his tricky, mercurial, charming personality. He, too, appeared as a bashful lover alongside James but also performed as a bandit in the sixth entrée of the ballet’s first part, as a fire demon in the first entrée of the fourth part, and as a “Genius of Peace” in the conclusion. His role as a “Demon of Fire,” for example, references—and exaggerates for comic effect—his reputation as an ardent ladies’ man: “Beauties, defrost yourselves at this great fire,” the verses invite.30 For the French audience, the aptness of the fiery costume is further validated by a winking reference to his deceased father (his “feu père”), the first duke of Buckingham, notorious at the court of Louis XIII for his contentious relationship with Cardinal Richelieu and rumored romance with Anne of Austria.31 The ballet performances borrow from the duke’s persona and from French memory of his family to construct the characters, which, in turn, presumably, affected Buckingham’s reputation at court.32 The Englishman’s theatrical introduction to the court represents a collaborative fashioning of self, pointing toward a more complex dynamics of hospitality than the initial scenario of English dependence on French magnanimity. The ballet stage represents a space of welcome, including English performers among the domestic noble community. In turn, the English dancers exert pressure on the creative process through the subtle force of their social personas. At last their bodies become “host” to the inventions of the French artists. Through performance, a degree of autonomy is regained. The characterization of female performers worked differently, emphasizing an emotional connection between foreigners onstage and the French audience. Princess Henriette and her lady-­in-­waiting, the Scots noblewoman Henriette Gordon-­Huntley, danced as Muses in the opening ballet to the Nopces de Pélée.33 Like the previous year’s ballet, this one also foregrounds the Fronde in its content. The poetry for the king’s first appearance as Apollo even references that conflict by name.34 The English performers’ roles serve to underscore the tragic consequences of rebellion against the monarchy by figuring the women as objects of pity. The verses for Princess Henriette’s dance as Erato, muse of lyric poetry, underline her “pure blood” and “royal aspect” and

Figure 6. Attributed to Henri Gissey, costume design for a timid lover, fourth watch, 7th entrée: Ballet de la Nuit, 1653. Pen, gouache, and watercolor, 342 x 243mm. Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection (The National Trust). Bequest of James de Rothschild, 1957, acc. no. 3666.3.123. Photo: Imaging Services Bodleian Library. © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor.

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allude to the “pitiable tenderness” that she arouses in others.35 The first-­person lines assigned to Gordon-­Huntley’s role as Polyhymnia construct a more elaborate fiction of loss. Through the libretto, her persona “speaks”: “I have a fair complexion and soft eyes, / And I have the air of my [place of ] origin, / The difference between us.”36 The second line uses the ambiguous verb “sentir,” which can mean “to have the air or characteristics of ” or “to feel.” The verses mark the performer as “other,” rhetorically inscribing difference on her body by characterizing her fairness as unusual, indicative of her foreign origins. At the same time, they ascribe to the performer a profound nostalgia for the home she has lost, “feeling” her origins and a sense of “difference” in her current place. Through poetic text, the ballet activates the audience’s empathy for the foreign women. In so doing, it stages the court’s hospitality toward the performers in terms of nonreciprocal benevolence, reaffirming a hierarchical relationship between the monarchs they represent. In the Nopces de Pélée, this image of benevolent welcome for English performers is complicated by the important participation of professional actors and singers from Italy. The ballet interludes featuring aristocratic dancers served as punctuation to the main event of the entertainment, an operatic enactment of the myth of Peleus and Thetis with an Italian-­language libretto by Francesco Buti and music by Carlo Caprioli.37 It also featured sets and machines designed by Giacomo Torelli and Gaspare Vigarani that dazzled the spectators with feats of engineering.38 In fact, several entertainments produced under the patronage of Neapolitan-­born Mazarin featured Italian performers and took place in the Italian language.39 The Italianate nature of the entertainment showed off the French court’s ability to bring in artistic talent from abroad. It also demonstrated Mazarin’s Italian connections, especially his links to the Barberini family of art patrons in Rome, as well as his ability to negotiate to obtain the artists from their original patrons.40 As a group, the Italian performers, composers, and designers had multiple relationships to the French state: “guest workers” of a kind, imported with effort and expense to provide services; objects of gift exchange in networks of diplomacy and clientelism; and (potential) subjects, through naturalization. Their foreignness, foregrounded through the language of performance, represented a desirable quality. Yet it also suggested a threat to French sovereignty. As Jérôme La Gorce observes, the entertainment’s Parisian spectators balked at this linguistic reminder of the minister’s Italian roots, which had symbolized his untrustworthiness and illegitimacy during the Fronde.41 Although the Italian artists’ contributions to the entertainment triumphantly displayed the

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French court’s capacity to integrate foreign cultural influences, they also reactivated a discourse that imagined the erosion of French sovereignty through usurpation by insidious foreigners. In various ways, the ballets of the post-­Fronde years and period of the English royal exile constitute a “theater of hospitality” par excellence, staging the ambiguities of the politics of welcome. They demonstrate France’s sovereign ability to open its doors to outsiders. By ceding voice and dance floor to foreign performers invested with a degree of autonomy, they also reflect on the threat of such openness to political and cultural integrity. These complex dynamics, moreover, took place before an audience that included the diplomatic representatives of many European states whose presence in itself enacted the particular form of reciprocal hospitality that underpinned international society. Relations of mutual obligation and dependence animated the space of entertainment—both on the stage and in the viewing area.

Foreign Personalities in the French Image The gesture to include English royals in the cast of French court ballets constituted an exemplary act of hospitality in a setting where nobility expressed its privilege through dance.42 Even when visiting dignitaries did not receive this supreme honor, their entertainment by the French court created impressive spectacles of international hospitality. While resident ambassadors received invitations to the festivities that made up the regular calendar of court life, more high-­profile visitors merited specially designed programs of entertainments. Through extravagant displays of welcome and personalized theatrical performances, the French court enacted—and publicized—diplomatic relationships with the countries represented by their guests. This function of diplomatic entertainments is exemplified by a reception in September 1656 for Christina, former queen of Sweden (who had abdicated her throne in 1654). Councillor and royal maître d’hôtel Louis Hesselin welcomed Christina at his residence in Essaune.43 Upon her arrival, he ushered her into a grand space “decorated with Doric columns” where suddenly, through the ingenuity of Giacomo Torelli, “a flamboyant cloud, full of thunder and lightning,” descended from the ceiling and “the ruins of a city all aflame” were revealed at the room’s far end.44 A personification of Renown emerged from a chariot hidden in the cloud and sang of the “rare virtues” and “great actions” of the honored guest. The city disappeared to reveal “a row of

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doors to several apartments” before which the “Genius of France” danced in courtly submission to the queen. Two Swiss guards “emerged from the walls” followed by bourgeois figures, a gypsy girl, Moors, shepherds, pygmies, an old gentleman accompanied by a “Gallic demoiselle,” Amazons, and a Spaniard, each performing a compliment to the Swedish dignitary. At the end of the Spanish sarabande accompanied by guitar music, “a grotto of extraordinary depth appeared, above which was a cypress-­covered mountain from the top of which fell two effective rivers, making cascades with spurts of water of extreme height and width.” Violinists played as the queen and other guests were greeted with a buffet and “pyramid of fruits.” A comedy, fireworks spelling out the queen’s motto, and more music completed the “diversity of spectacles” in which “all that was counterfeited appeared so natural,” testifying to the “magnificence” both of the host and of the king his master.45 Brimming with superlatives, this account of Christina’s entertainment penned by royal preacher Nicolas L’Escalopier matches the register of many published descriptions of court festivities published during Louis XIV’s reign.46 Pamphlets broadcast the “magnificence” of pompous entertainments to an audience beyond the confines of the court. Their aims could reasonably, if anachronistically, be called propagandistic. Yet this chronicle built its praise for the court’s splendid hospitality on an even greater encomium for the foreign guest. Along with a separate account of Christina’s entry into Paris and several Gazette reports, it extolled Christina’s virtues in the same hyperbolic register often reserved for the French monarch, despite the fact that she no longer occupied the Swedish throne. In part, this rhetorical choice reflected her status as a celebrity and object of public curiosity following her rejection of marriage, abdication, and conversion to Catholicism.47 In fact, the account of her reception in France was published in the context of an intense flurry of print produced around her scandalous acts.48 Yet it sidesteps any mention of these controversial events, treating Christina as if she remained a sovereign. This “as if ” quality of the entertainment compensated for the fragility of France’s real relations with Sweden at the time of Christina’s visit. The countries remained official allies following their collaboration at the Congress of Westphalia. By 1656, they were at odds over policy toward eastern Europe. Mazarin urged King Gustavus Adolphus and the Stockholm Privy Council to make peace with Poland to stabilize eastern Europe and avoid giving the Hapsburgs an excuse to resume expansionism. Although Sweden accepted Mazarin’s political reasoning, the king put off making a formal agreement

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and avoided accepting the French subsidies that secured their diplomatic alliance.49 Against this political backdrop, Christina’s visit and the elaborate staging of intimate relations between French and (former) Swedish royals appears as an act of wishful thinking, an enactment by proxy of a relationship desired but not yet attained. Christina’s status as a virtual queen takes on greater significance in the parts of the relation that describe her interactions with the royal family. She enjoyed Hesselin’s entertainment in the company of the king’s cousin Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans. “Mademoiselle,” as she was known, “came to greet her Majesty, who received her with much civility, giving her an armchair right next to her so that she could take part in the entertainments prepared for her, and treating her always as a daughter of France.”50 This scene of courtesy and intimacy between two royal women, staged against the theatrical backdrop of the entertainment, describes a relationship of equality, reciprocity, and intimacy between the French royal family and the former queen of Sweden. The mise-­en-­scène of foreign approval for the French crown was reprised in Jean Loret’s periodical Muse historique, which reported, after Christina’s attendance at the Ballet d’Alcidiane that winter, that she took the performance as evidence that “without doubt the French court is the first of the universe in pomp and diverse charms.”51 The entertainment offered to Christina and its media representations staged a vision of international relations that bolstered France’s status through a mise-­en-­scène of foreign regard. In a sense, the Christina depicted in printed accounts of the festivities represented a collaboratively created character, not so different from the roles scripted for English performers in French ballets. Christina’s reputation preceded her, but the court shaped her persona to suit the construction of a particular self-­image. Foreign dignitaries’ desire to spend time at the French court burnished its reputation as a cultural capital and epitome of aristocratic civilization. This dynamic appears most clearly in various accounts of a visit by young prince Christian of Demark from December 1662 to the summer of the following year. Sixteen-­year-­old Christian traveled in an unofficial capacity, to complete his education rather than to carry out a diplomatic mission. As the introducteur des ambassadeurs Bonneuil put it, Christian traveled purely out of “curiosity to see the court of France.”52 In this, he resembled countless other young, foreign noblemen who embarked on a Grand Tour and who valued a stay in France as a means to master the French codes and manners that would later serve them as a lingua franca in dealings with negotiators from across Europe.

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Despite the ostensibly personal nature of Christian’s visit, the French court treated it as a diplomatic opportunity. The king put Bonneuil in charge of the prince’s care, as if the guest were an official ambassador or envoy. Bonneuil’s unusually detailed memoir account of the visit suggests, moreover, that he worked to foster a lasting bond between the heir to the Danish throne and the young French king, as though to ensure good diplomatic relations between the countries in the future. In fact, a genuinely friendly rapport seems to have been forged by the visit. Christian’s youth, royal status, and charming naiveté made a strong impression at court. Bonneuil himself seemed especially affected by the prince. In his memoirs, he recounted how Christian “received me with much civility, and so much frankness that from that moment I found myself engaged to take care of his person during his sojourn here.”53 Bonneuil was clearly disarmed by the prince’s freshness. Even his flaws—his stumbling French, his imperfect mastery of courtly graces—strengthened feelings of tenderness toward him.54 The king, too, took a special interest in Christian. As Bonneuil recounted: “The King by his natural and obliging manner forgot nothing to entertain the Prince during his stay in Paris. Every evening he found himself at plays, balls, and entertainments at the Royal Palace.”55 The festive evenings allowed the two young royals to spend time in each other’s company and to develop a degree of intimacy between them. In addition to crafting a relationship between the royals, Bonneuil and other officials made sure that French cultural values made a lasting impression on Christian. In accordance with the educational goals of the journey, they helped him improve his spoken French and instructed him on matters of etiquette and style. Moreover, Bonneuil remained attentive to Christian’s public profile throughout his stay. Toward the end of the prince’s half-­year sojourn, Louis arranged a ball in his honor, “to which all the ambassadors would be invited.” The introducteur advised Christian to avoid dancing at the ball. All eyes would be on him and “I represented to him through the confidence that he had in me that he did not dance well enough for a formal ball.” Bonneuil wished to protect Christian’s royal image by preventing him from humiliating himself in front of the court with an imperfect performance of noble grace. The prince took his advice and “remained seated on the raised dais with the Queens,” in dignified stillness.56 In this way, Bonneuil played a key role in creating Christian’s public persona, in shaping his self-­presentation. The version of Christian displayed before the court was in many respects a fabrication, a Danish prince re-­formed in France’s image.

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This creation of an appropriate persona for Christian and the cultivation of a personal rapport between him and the French king through live entertainment coexisted with a media campaign that crafted a version of that relationship for the public. Throughout Prince Christian of Denmark’s visit, the Gazette regularly devoted space to chronicling the court’s hospitality toward him. A short article reported on his arrival in France, including the fact that he was staying with the Danish ambassador, that he had “wanted no ceremony” in his meetings with the king and royal family but had been “very favorably received” by them all the same.57 It catalogued his entertainments, including a performance by the Comédie Française in the queen’s apartments on January 20, an invitation to a ball given by the king’s brother on the twenty-­first (which had “charmed” the prince), and a performance of the Ballet des Arts on January 22.58 On February 28, “his Majesty treated the Prince of Denmark magnificently” with a promenade at Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye after which he also enjoyed “the entertainment of a deer hunt.”59 On March 18, a group of courtiers invited the prince to Vincennes where they toured the park and went on a hunt along with the recently returned French ambassador to Sweden, and in the evening they toured the château and dined in the company of the Danish ambassador and his wife and enjoyed the “Combat of the Lion and the Ox.”60 Another issue described the ball given in Christian’s honor on January 31. The journalist lavished attention on the “unparalleled magnificence” of the event: the room decorated in “very rich tapestries, lit with an infinity of the most beautiful chandeliers.” The court was “decked out with such care that nothing more magnificent or more gallant has ever been seen” with so many jewels that “it seemed they had exhausted the riches of India.” The king danced with his sister-­in-­law, his brother with Mademoiselle d’Alençon, the duc d’Enghien with Mademoiselle de Valois, and then “all the other lords with the other ladies” including the daughter of the Danish ambassador.61 Throughout these accounts, however detailed, the prince himself remained a blank: a boldface name among others, devoid of personal qualities. The foreign dignitary was not a focal point in his own right but rather a lens through which the Gazette painted the superlative magnificence of the French court at its hospitable best. The Gazette’s final words on Christian’s visit confirm the self-­reflexive function of its coverage: a May 12 article reporting on the prince’s departure from Paris remarks that he left “no less charmed by the galanterie as by the politesse of this Court.”62 Through its depiction of the prince’s visit, the Gazette constructs a Francocentric vision of Europe in which all eyes and desires are fixed on Louis XIV’s domain.

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The hospitality extended to both Christina and Christian project—or perhaps imagine—France’s robust position in European society. They also illustrate a defining tension in diplomatic culture at the French court under Louis XIV: between intimacy and publicity, between the personal and the public. In one sense, this tension had long animated diplomatic entertainments: like for Le Fèvre de la Boderie at the beginning of the century (see Chapter 2), the gestures of friendship between sovereigns and foreign dignitaries, performed around ballets and balls, carried most significance when projected toward a larger audience. Yet Louis XIV’s court renovated the tradition of spectacular diplomatic hospitality by engaging with an emerging celebrity culture at court and in its print representations. Foreign dignitaries no longer only embodied the state or held the place of a sovereign but were personalities in their own right. In Christina’s case, preexisting public fascination with the former Swedish queen gave the French court a ready market for the print accounts of her entertainment in Essaune. Her star gave luster to that of the French royal family. For Christian, an inexperienced actor on the public stage, French officials played a significant role in crafting his public persona. The image of Paris or the French court as a necessary destination for young European royals emerged symbiotically with the prince’s public appearances and their narration in the periodical press. In this way, their visits reveal how the triumphalist representations of Louis XIV’s glory in the first decades of his reign depended not only on forceful representations of the king’s own persona but also on his publicized relationships to other European luminaries.

Performing Universalism By the late 1660s, with the emergence of the French court’s image as a cultural capital, a bolder style of depicting the French sovereign’s relation to other countries emerged on the court stage, whereby the persona of the king himself played host to foreign idioms. Some of the last ballets in which Louis XIV danced prefigured notions of universal monarchy through their thematization of his performance as foreign characters. For example, in the Ballet des Muses, performed several times in the winter 1666–67 season, Louis XIV appeared in multiple guises, including that of Persian conqueror Cyrus, a noble shepherd, a nymph, a Spaniard, and a Moor.63 Benserade’s verses to accompany the final Moorish-­themed dance reminded the audience of all the king’s previous incarnations that evening:

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When he plays a shepherd, he is incomparable. Representing Cyrus he flies even higher, When disguised as a nymph, he has an admirable air. It is with the same pride that he dances in Spanish costume. In African dress, he surpasses himself. But after all these diverse plays, when he must returnTo his true, serious, and natural post, Where no one equals him and no one seconds him, No one in the world Plays so well the part of King.64 Enumerating the various roles the king has danced, the verses emphasize his talent as a performer, affirming a reputation already strong at the court. (Indeed, during the ballet, the marquis de La Fuentes reportedly remarked to the Venetian ambassador that Louis played the castanets as well as any Spaniard.)65 Finally they affirm that his excellence in mimicking shepherds, nymphs, Spaniards, and Moors translates into his ability to perform well as a monarch. As Julia Prest astutely points out, this verse “subtly (and probably inadvertently) suggests that Louis the king was as much a creative and created performance as Louis playing a Moor or Louis playing an Egyptian.”66 It troublingly implies that monarchy itself is a performative category, just another role to be incarnated. From another perspective, however, the verse construes performance as a form of mastery. The ability to act as another implies the ability to dominate that other as well. The linking of performance and domination has a history in French court ballet. As discussed in Chapter 3, the “Frenchman” in Colletet’s Louis XIII-­era Ballet des nations was distinguished by his ability to imitate the performance styles of all the other nations depicted onstage, suggesting the universalism of French culture. As the Ballet des Nations juxtaposed the “Frenchman’s” performance prowess with imperial rhetoric (depicting the subjugation of Scythians), the Ballet des Muses also associates Louis’s triumph onstage with potential conquest. The verses trumpet that: This famous Moor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Of brilliant merit and singular rank Could put at his feet all the pride of the Earth.67

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Although it resonates with the earlier ballet, the Ballet des Muses presents a significantly updated version of the move to demonstrate imperial ambition through mastery of international roles. Rather than a generic “Frenchman” it is Louis himself who demonstrates this talent. Benserade’s verses, as usual, play with the different levels of characterization present in the performance. By referencing all the roles incarnated by Louis throughout the evening, his appearance as “this Moor” gives way to reveal “the king” beneath the costume. This singular individual, not any one of the characters he plays, is the one who is capable of dominating the world stage. This kind of imperialist and universalist rhetoric recurs in the 1669 Ballet de la Flore (Flora’s Ballet). The entertainment ends with performances by dancers representing the four parts of the world who have come to feast and celebrate with the goddess of the ballet’s title. Each “continent” dances a quadrille and then all perform a lively Canary dance together in an image of global harmony.68 Yet the verses assigned to Louis’s performance as a “European” assert his personal superiority above the rest: In every age, Europe appeared the most fecund In illustrious heroes than the rest of the world. Glory, grandeur, exacting firmness, Courage, wit, and profound wisdom In different subjects have lived there And Cesar and Cato shared them in Rome; All these qualities joined in the same place On the French throne accompany a man Who in Antiquity one would have taken for a god.69 The verses first concentrate heroic virtues in one continent, then in one “throne,” then finally in the body of the one man dancing onstage. The king’s star turn takes on political significance in the last moments of the “four parts of the world” scene, as all the dancers “recognize the Empire of the Lys as the first in the Universe.”70 This rhetorical bravado paralleled developments in the form and function of ballets and other spectacles. Court entertainment had always served to show off the wealth and talent assembled by the royal family and to fuel artistic rivalries between countries. By the 1660s in France entertainments served as an opportunity to crow about the court’s unrivaled artistic power,

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including the contributions of foreign composers and designers by then completely assimilated to an ideal of Frenchness. In the 1660s and 1670s, several foreign court artists received letters of naturality from the king. This rare honor, bestowed only on individuals who had provided significant service to the French state, effectively transformed the recipients into French subjects, exempting them from taxes otherwise levied on foreigners residing in the kingdom.71 The political domestication of foreign artists accompanied the assimilation of their idioms as France’s own. French-­naturalized Italian composer Jean-­Baptiste Lully in particular achieved a style of music trumpeted as superlatively elegant and graceful and branded as French—even though, as Rose Pruiksma has shown, it integrated musical features long associated with Italian composition.72 Absorbing techniques, styles, and even artists from across the continent, assimilating and fashioning them as explicitly “French,” the practices involved in the production of court entertainment performed in miniature the imperialist, universalist tendencies announced in the poetic content of the spectacles. The establishment of the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 and the Académie Royale de Musique in 1669 further concentrated the state’s resources on perfecting the performing arts as a matter of national pride.73 In contrast to the use of Italian artists in the entertainments of Mazarin’s lifetime, after the 1660s the foreignness of foreign artists was elided in performance, their contributions absorbed and fully reinvented as products of Louis XIV’s domain. In these ways, performance heralded the imperialist ambitions of the French monarchy starting in the 1660s.74 The king expressed his capacity to rule over vast territories by incarnating diverse cultural identities on the ballet stage. Meanwhile, the state quite literally absorbed the talents of foreign artists and assimilated them to the project of glorifying the state. The performing arts vividly articulated the notion that the French monarchy “admitted no comparison” to its peers and rivals in international society.

Failures of Hospitality In describing the form and content of these entertainments of the height of Louis XIV’s reign, it is difficult to avoid painting them as displays of force and pieces of effective propaganda, as forceful exertions of “soft power.” But were they effective with respect to a diplomatic audience? Joseph Nye’s theory of soft power characterizes its techniques as highly effective but also acknowledges

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that “soft power is a dance that requires partners.”75 Unlike military or economic measures, soft power depends on positive reception. In this sense, it creates relationships that mirror in their structure the relationship between a producer of an entertainment and its audience. Those putting on the show may “spare no expense” to convey their prestige and powers of attraction, but their efforts work only if the spectator participates by receiving the desired message. The audience wields its own form of power in this relationship, subtly influencing the spectacle through the creators’ anticipation of its tastes and expectations. In this sense, the theatrical metaphor illuminates a dimension of soft power left unexplored in Nye’s discussion: the “soft” in soft power not only opposes the “hardness” of arms and money but also evokes the productive openness and receptivity needed for its exertion. Ideally, to employ soft power means privileging, or at least attending to, the viewpoint of the other. This attention to the audience often appears to be missing in the most pompous entertainments of the Sun King. The lavish divertissements of the late 1660s and 1670s commemorated France’s treaties and international conquests with long evenings of feasting, theater, dancing, and fireworks. Nominally, these events counted as diplomatic entertainments, but they reframed diplomatic discourse as univocal encomia to the king. Temporally and rhetorically tied to France’s international “successes,” the multifaceted divertissements also attested to the kingdom’s wealth, its creative resources, and above all its ability to coordinate the labor of hundreds of individuals with quasi-­military precision. As a result, the work of reaffirming the aristocratic and diplomatic community was all but evacuated from these entertainments.76 Changes in the form, structure, and function of entertainments in the life of the court had important ramifications for spectacles’ role in diplomatic culture. Resident ambassadors continued to receive highly coveted invitations to the events and had special seating provisioned for them, as attested in André Félibien’s official Relations of the major fêtes.77 To this extent, the memorable entertainments of the height of Louis XIV’s reign would seem to perform the same diplomatic function as more traditional, more modest ballets and equestrian spectacles. They gathered the diplomatic corps into one space, to see and be seen, to receive favor and to be shown signs of the French state’s flourishing to transmit to their monarchs. Yet there was a subtle but important shift in emphasis. Rather than represent foreign members of an aristocratic community seen as participants in the festivities, ambassadors were now figured as privileged—but ultimately passive—spectators. The emphasis on projecting the monarch’s glory to the foreign audience, along with the size and ambition

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of these courtly entertainments, led to the marginalization of diplomatic spectators in spite of formal provisions for their care. They provided a far less intimate experience. They instead operated as assembly-­line entertainments in which spectators were conveyed with little regard for their particular dignity or situation. A key example of this shift can be seen in the documentary traces of the Divertissement royal de Versailles of July 1668. The entertainment marked the end of the War of Devolution, which had concluded with the Treaty of Aix-­la-­ Chapelle in May of that year. It engaged the French court and all its resident and extraordinary ambassadors in a celebration of the peace. Although the victory was mixed for the French—the kingdom gained some territories but had to relinquish others—the libretto for the fête presented the gala as a celebration of an illustrious international triumph: Nothing can limit the French Prince’s glory, It extends to all, and in the Nations The truths of his Story Will surpass all the old-­time fictions.78 Depicting the king as a “hero” and a “demi-­god,” the text praises the festivities as “miracles and wonders” equal to those recently performed on the battlefield. The poem’s universalist accent—its allusion to the king’s all-­extensive glory, its evocation of the “Nations” in his thrall—was typical of French court entertainments in the period. Yet it sat uncomfortably with the event’s relationship to diplomatic matters, casting foreign dignitaries as passive witnesses to French superiority rather than as valuable partners in an exchange of mutual regard and respect for sovereignty.79 More alienating than the entertainment’s universalist rhetoric, however, was its impersonal form. In contrast to most ballets and carousels, this fête offered almost no opportunities for the court to participate in the performance. Noble attendees only rose from their seats for the ball.80 Moreover, the king himself did not really perform. The rhetorical apotheosis of the king substituted for his physical presence on the stage. In fact, Louis XIV remained invisible to most of his guests throughout the evening, as he entertained a relatively small group of “ladies” at a table of honor.81 The monarch’s absence would have struck attendees as unusual. In 1668, Louis XIV was still performing in court ballets. The Divertissement’s novel occlusion of the king’s body made it a keystone of Jean-­Marie Apostolidès’s influential account of the

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“mechanization” of power over the course of Louis’s reign—its displacement from the monarch’s person into a host of representations and technologies of power. Of the 1668 fête, Apostolidès writes: “in one night, the nation, stupefied and mystified, attends a demonstration of Louis XIV’s superpower. The whole is understood as a grandiose machination.”82 The majority of the spectators were supposed to see the monarch’s authority and glory as immanent in the splendor of the event itself. The diplomatic corps, however, did not see it this way, as illustrated by an account of the fête by Thomas-­François Chabod, marquis de Saint-­Maurice, ambassador from Savoy. Saint-­Maurice had arrived in Paris in 1667 to request French support in Savoy’s conflict with Geneva and more broadly to maintain good relations with his country’s most powerful neighbor. From a high-­status family, Saint-­Maurice fit into court life. His correspondence indicates he got along well with Louis. Yet the ambassador suffered through court festivities. Soon after his arrival in Paris, and before his official first audience confirming his “ambassadorial character,” he wrote to the Grand Duke, “I am not going to all these little balls that happen during carnival. Your Royal Highness knows that these are not my amusements.”83 Presenting himself as serious and impatient with frivolity, Saint-­Maurice is often critical of the festivities in which he was required to participate. Even in this temperamental context, Saint-­ Maurice’s account of the Divertissement of 1668 stands out for its harsh judgment, representing perhaps the most condemnatory account of an entertainment by a diplomat at the French court. Although the ambassador conveys the beauty and grandeur of the entertainment and notes that it cost more than 500,000 livres, he spends most of his account bemoaning the “disorder” experienced by the attendees:84 We found ourselves there, the Venetian ambassador, me, the resident ambassadors of the Emperor, of Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, and Mantua, and an entourage of more than a hundred gentlemen. As Your Royal Highness will see elsewhere the relations of this fête which was pompous, I only engage myself here to inform him about what happened from the point of view of the foreign ministers. There has never been such a great affluence of people and never such great disorder, all that joined together with the paucity of care and precautions that Mister Bonneuil takes in such encounters and with the minimal experience of the officers and bodyguards who any longer only know how to make war, such that the foreign ministers were

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pushed, deterred, beaten, and badly seated and saw only the comedy and the fireworks but nothing of the treats that were in the alleys nor the superb machines in the place where the king gave a supper and ball to the ladies. The envoys of the Emperor, Sweden, and Portugal drew away with their entourages after being pushed and mistreated at the entrance to the comedy. The Venetian ambassador came in and complained loudly of the shoves he received while being conducted there by Mister Bonneuil.85 Similar complaints about mistreatment appear in earlier ambassadors’ accounts. In his account of an October 1581 ballet, for example, English ambassador Henry Cobham deplores his and the other ambassadors’ rude treatment by their hosts and lack of food at the performance.86 Saint-­Maurice’s account rehearses Cobham’s rhetoric but amplifies it by several degrees. Like the sixteenth-­century writer, Saint-­Maurice depicts himself in solidarity with his fellow ambassadors, presenting his experience as common to the whole diplomatic corps. The theme of “disorder,” repeated several times throughout the letter, condemns the organization of the court and counters the image of military precision often thought to be the goal of Versailles entertainments. Despite these common themes, Saint-­Maurice’s description of the fête is qualitatively different from earlier ambassadors’ complaints about subpar entertainments. In his telling, the ambassadors were not merely neglected or bored but actively pushed and shoved. Canova-­Green interprets the mistreatment of which Saint-­Maurice and others complained as an unavoidable side effect of the size of the event.87 Amid the crowd of spectators, the foreign ministers’ dignity and privilege as representatives of foreign powers were invisible. They appeared instead as anonymous rivals for space at the entertainment. The more delicate and attentive treatment afforded to the ambassadors’ wives and daughters in the intimate context of the king’s table might confirm this interpretation. The court meant no harm to the ambassadors. The press and crush of bodies simply prevented them from observing the regular courtesies. Yet the indifference to the ambassadors’ treatment reflects a more profound shift in the way entertainments functioned in diplomatic culture. The fête had become disconnected from a larger set of practices devoted to the maintenance of orderly hierarchies, noble values, and civility. Saint-­Maurice’s comment that the entertainment’s officers and bodyguards had freshly returned from the battlefield and therefore “only knew how to make war” vividly illustrates the erosion of courtliness from the festive space. Even at the king’s own

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table, as Saint-­Maurice explained, the formalities of rank and hierarchy were abandoned in favor of an atmosphere of relaxation and friendship.88 (In fact, when the king’s special guests joined the audience for the comedy, they suffered the same indignities as their husbands.) Unlike more traditional court ballets, the Divertissement did not commemorate—or even respect—the cultural routines that bound international aristocratic society together. The abandonment of aristocratic privilege in the form of the entertainment was echoed in its content. Although in many ways the 1668 Divertissement reprised the form of previous fêtes, particularly the 1664 Plaisirs de l’Ile enchantée, it left out the chivalric element that dominated those earlier celebrations.89 This omission distanced the new entertainment from traditional consecrations of nobility through the nostalgic enactment of chivalry. The changed status of traditionally aristocratic aesthetics came into sharper focus in the fête’s main attraction, Molière’s comedy-­ballet George Dandin. Like many of Molière’s works, this play ironizes the conventions of court entertainment along with codes of courtly behavior. Verbal mockery is reinforced by the play’s parody of noble entertainment’s traditional view of the countryside. The farce’s rural setting undermines the aesthetic of the pastoral ballet with which it is juxtaposed, as the elegant shepherds of the dance—metaphorical embodiments of aristocratic otium—share a stage set with comic country bumpkins who represent a somewhat more down-­to-­earth vision of rural life. Molière’s subversion of courtly tropes might be seen as a natural progression of the genre’s aesthetic. As audiences grew accustomed to conventional forms such as the pastoral, ironic winking at those conventions offered freshness and novelty. At the same time, though, Molière’s manipulation of generic forms demystified their function as “redressive” agents capable of reaffirming the noble community’s ideal image of itself.90 Molière’s deconstruction of the myths of noble identity complements the critiques of the noble guests’ behavior recorded by Saint-­Maurice. He describes how their interactions amplify the reigning disorder: “The persons of quality make the chaos themselves, and are the first to register slights, lose their feathers, fire their cannons, and appear after the ball creased and crumpled by their lack of conduct.”91 Like the Sotenvilles who fuel Molière’s farce by clinging to silly formalities, the spectators evoked in Saint-­Maurice’s letter make a mockery of the pompous fête with their ostentatious defense of their dignity and propensity for upset. Presenting himself as an aloof observer rather than as a member of a coherent courtly community, the ambassador describes himself veering off from the crowd to appreciate the beauty and magnificence of the royal display.

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The fireworks, he writes, counted as “the most beautiful I’ve ever seen,”92 and he was able to enjoy a walk in the gardens lit by “vases full of flame.”93 Through such bifocal narration, Saint-­Maurice accounts for both the impressiveness of the fête and its disorder, the spectacle and the experience. This sets him apart from the complaining diplomatic spectators examined in Chapter 2 who obsessed about their treatment while neglecting the entertainment itself. The Savoyard ambassador thereby calls attention to the gap between the monarchy’s majesty and power on the one hand and the disarrayed state of the court on the other. The community-­ forming power seen in earlier court entertainments has completely vanished from this grand fête of the height of Louis XIV’s reign. Anomie and conflict displace the harmony purportedly generated by valorizing common noble values. The obscured, fractured view of the diverse aspects of the entertainment undermines its ability to galvanize spectators as witnesses of a single event. The only shared experience that comes through in Saint-­Maurice’s text is one of bitter regret. Reflecting on the extravagance of festivities, the ambassador ruefully adds that he and his family had to outlay four thousand livres to participate. Alas, he concludes: “One must be a fool among the foolish.”94 The fête may appear as an act of hospitality toward the court and its ambassadors, but in Saint-­Maurice’s account at least it works to alienate rather than embrace its guests.

Conclusion: From Collaboration to Coercion Throughout Louis XIV’s reign, entertainments remained an important fixture of diplomatic culture at the French court and continued to function as stylized enactments of the French state’s vision of international society. Increasingly, though, the vision of international society projected by the entertainments served to alienate the representatives of foreign powers assembled in the audience. Performance strategies and iconography onstage, as well as the treatment of the diplomatic corps off stage, signaled the diplomatic ramifications of the French monarch’s absolutist approach to theorizing sovereignty. They also announced the imperial and universalist ambitions that posed a challenge to the model of international relations based on sovereigns’ mutual respect and regard. One final example of the international and domestic consequences of this style of rule appears in an entertainment titled Le temple de la paix (The

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Temple of Peace), performed at Fontainebleau in October 1685 and several more times that winter. The operatic ballet—the last composed by Lully, with libretto by Philippe Quinault—celebrated an eventful year for France. La Salle established Fort Saint Louis near the Gulf of Mexico. The Code Noir was established to regulate the Antilles slave system. Finally, the event temporally closest to the entertainment, Louis signed the Edict of Fontainebleau revoking the Edict of Nantes and depriving his Protestant subjects of the freedom to practice their religion. These events were referenced in the imperial imagery of the ballet, which featured Americans and Africans, incarnated by noble dancers such as the Princesse de Conti, supplicating themselves in dance and lyric verses to the king’s global authority. In the fifth entrée, “Savages from the Provinces of America that belong to France make known, through their songs and by their dance, the pleasure they have in being under the empire of a so powerful and glorious King.”95 They sing: “Oh! How sweet it is to live under his law!”96 In the following entrée, Africans “come to the Temple of Peace to testify the joy they feel in experiencing the Conqueror’s clemency and in enjoying the peace he has given them.”97 Their song declares: “Let us keep ourselves from attracting his anger / Let us dream only of pleasing him from now on. / His Thunder has left on our African shores / A terrible example for the rest of humankind.”98 Their exemplary warning extends to France’s own subjects as they remind the audience: “What happiness for France / To live under the power / Of such a renowned King!”99 Global empire illustrates monarchal might for the benefit of local spectators.100 Celebrating the king’s empire over both domestic and far-­flung imperial spaces, the Temple de la paix neglects or subsumes Europe as a space and as a community. This gesture, seen clearly in this entertainment but also implicit in the staging of entertainments such as the Divertissement of 1668, implies not so much a rejection of diplomacy as an attempt to redefine the conduct of diplomatic relations and the scope of the international community. The next chapter will explore how performance mediated France’s attempts to enlarge their diplomatic community to a global scale.

Chapter 7

Exotic Audiences (1668–1715)

During Louis XIV’s reign, a vivid depiction of the value placed on cultural recognition in diplomatic encounters was literally inscribed into the architecture of Versailles. Above the landing of the grand Ambassadors’ Staircase, four trompe-­l’oeil paintings by Charles Le Brun and Adam François van der Meulen mimicked windows cut into the walls. Over the balustrades peered figures in various national costumes all gazing in wondrous admiration at the magnificent space. When a foreign dignitary traversed the staircase on his way to an audience with the king, he passed right under the image of these other, fictional foreigners who modeled appropriate admiration for the surroundings. One remarkable feature of the set of paintings is that while one of them portrayed the Italians, Spaniards, and Dutchmen who frequented the French court, decked in court finery or clerical garb, the others displayed men in turbans and sumptuous robes. At least in Le Brun and Van der Meulen’s imagined world, the “Nations” of Asia, Africa, and America joined the “Nations of Europe” in recognizing the grandeur of Versailles.1 A certain economy of regard played an important role in early modern European diplomacy. Particularly after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, state sovereignty depended primarily on recognition and respect on the part of other sovereigns. Day-­to-­day diplomatic culture theatricalized the dynamic of mutual esteem through ceremonies such as official “audiences” between ambassadors and their host monarchs, where each formally recognized the other’s status. It also played out in less formal cultural spaces such as at court entertainments or palace tours, where resident ambassadors performed their admiration for the host court’s achievements. In this sense, Le Brun and Van der Meulen’s painting of the “Nations of Europe” depicted a routine—even ritualized—facet of diplomatic culture at Versailles. The companion paintings,

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Figure 7. Louis de Surugue de Surgis, engraving after paintings by Charles Le Brun and Adam van der Meulen, Les différentes nations de l’Asie and Les différentes nations de l’Afriques, originally located above the Escalier des Ambassadeurs, 1720. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, N.Y.

if more fanciful, also referred to contemporary practices. At the time of this mural’s creation, Louis XIV was working to raise his stakes in a global economy of regard by intensifying diplomatic relations with countries beyond the traditional boundaries of Europe. In the 1660s, high-­profile embassies from the Moscovite and Ottoman realms visited Paris. Later, the court played host to a series of embassies from distant kingdoms including one from the king of Morocco in winter 1682, one from the dey of Algiers in summer 1684,2 two from the king of Siam in 1684–85 and 1686–87, and, perhaps the most famous, the one from the shah of Persia in 1715, which is said to have inspired Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. The French court went out of its way to create opportunities for these diplomats to perform their recognition of the hosts’ worldly stature. In practice, of course, it proved difficult to engineer such admiration from representatives of foreign countries, particularly those coming from beyond Europe. Within the European community, similar aesthetic traditions,

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brought closer together by frequent exchanges between courts, meant that diplomats usually possessed the cultural competence to be connoisseurs in foreign postings. Moreover, notions of precedence and the legal requirement that states recognize each other’s sovereignty encouraged diplomats to perform their esteem for their host country’s cultural achievements regardless of their personal aesthetic judgment. When it came to the rich and powerful kingdoms of Asia and Africa, however, the difference in artistic traditions and the relative infrequency of diplomatic travel rendered ambassadors’ reception of French cultural objects less predictable. As discussed in earlier chapters, Hedley Bull initially defined international society not only as a group of states bound by legal and institutional frameworks for interaction but also by “a common culture or civilization” to facilitate mediation.3 For this reason, as Bull acknowledges, establishing an international society entails the “difficult problems of the tracing of boundaries,” including cultural boundaries.4 To the extent that shared artistic and cultural traditions facilitated diplomatic relations within Europe, the lack of cultural common ground shaped France’s dealings with non-­European countries. Historian and theorist of international relations Edward Keene makes a compelling case that the mercantilist motives for interactions between European and Asian, African, and American territories in the early modern period produced a “dualist order in world politics” that has persisted to the present day: Within Europe, the international order aimed to keep peace “through the toleration of other political systems, cultures and ways of life. . . . Beyond Europe, however, international order was dedicated to a quite different purpose: the promotion of civilization.”5 Keene’s characterization of the two orders evokes nineteenth-­ and twentieth-­century discourses rather than early modern ones. An ideal of civilization also underpinned the norms of intra-­European diplomatic society in the early modern period. Political actors behaved as though the virtues of civility were unevenly distributed across the continent and had to defend and promote—in fact, to perform—their right to be respected by the others. The extent to which European statesmen saw non-­European polities as coterminous with the civilization that defined the diplomatic community is also a complex question. The way they incorporated entertainments and other “civilized” festivities into their reception of embassies, and the way ambassadors reacted to those events, played an important role in mediating their relationships and redrawing the boundaries of diplomatic society. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the French court adopted several different approaches to entertaining dignitaries from regions beyond

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the borders of Christian Europe. At least until the second half of Louis XIV’s reign, statesmen exhibited a certain wariness about using the performing arts in encounters with peoples beyond the perimeter of European society. Non-­ European diplomats tended to be excluded from court celebrations in Paris. Starting in the 1680s, however, embassies from Algeria, Morocco, Siam, and Persia enjoyed (or were subjected to) visits to the gardens at Versailles, concerts prepared in their honor, operas, and plays. Music, dance, and theater helped to mediate these global relationships just as much as intra-­European relations. In the absence of shared aesthetic traditions, however, festive entertainments worked not to celebrate a preexisting political community but to measure the distance between cultures, or to stage scenes of cultural recognition and appreciation. In these encounters, spectatorship operated as a crucial diplomatic practice that indicated regard and recognition or, conversely, irreconcilable difference between countries.

Questioning the Universality of the Performing Arts While statesmen sought to impress foreign visitors with French cultural accomplishments, theorists of the performing arts questioned the degree to which artistic tastes had fixed boundaries. Over the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, writers explored the extent of the performing arts’ cross-­cultural legibility. Many portrayed the nonverbal arts of spectacle as a truly global aesthetic tradition, a cultural impulse shared across all of humanity. Claude-­ François Ménestrier defended the universality of the performing arts through a diplomatic anecdote in which the king of ancient Pontus hired a Roman court dancer “to serve him as an interpreter everywhere, having no need for languages to explain himself and to make himself understood to everyone.”6 Yet when Ménestrier published ths tale in his book on ballet in 1682, the question of whether music and dance could in fact serve as universal interpreters was a matter of implicit questioning if not outright debate.7 Renaissance-­era neo-­Platonic theories that cast the performing arts as earthly manifestations of divine harmony had long since been abandoned. Theorists including Ménestrier adopted a rhetorical model for understanding music and dance’s effects founded on a Cartesian understanding of how sound and movement stimulate the body. Composers and choreographers acted as “orators,” orchestrating tones, rhythms, and movements thought to leave particular emotional impressions on audience members’ nervous systems. According to this theory, the

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languages of music and dance translated in generally predictable ways but— importantly—were not universal. Physical variation meant that individual bodies might respond differently to the same set of stimuli. As Ménestrier himself admitted, the contingency of reception was particularly evident across different regions of the globe. In Des représentations en musique, he writes: Each people has its own manners and customs, even though they are all naturally subject to the same movements of the soul, and to the same passions. As such, although nature is the same everywhere, the diverse climates differentiate it so strongly, that ways of life are not the same in all countries. What agitates a Turk to vengeance will not agitate a German, because a German is not upset by the same things that upset a Turk. Thus, although the passions are always the same everywhere, the same things do not serve equally everywhere to agitate [the audience’s passions].8 Climate and culture, in other words, tune the bodily instrument such that it resonates in a particular way when struck by particular stimuli. The idea that tastes in music and dance varied according to nationality had circulated at least since the mid-­seventeenth century. As early as 1623, François de Lauze noted the existence of national or regional dance styles, declaring that “in every age, in every country or province, they have had their own affected dance, such as measures and contra-­dances for the English, Scottish bransles for the Scots.”9 As the key adjective “affected” could refer either to something artificially “put on” or to something attached by natural affinity, it is unclear whether de Lauze meant that dance preferences are shaped primarily by nature or nurture.10 Both opinions coexisted across the second half of the seventeenth century. Writing in 1668, Michel de Pure suggested that national music tastes arose from custom and habit: “I saw Italians so accustomed to the guitar that they couldn’t conceive of the cadence [i.e., measure or rhythm] of our violins.”11 By the early eighteenth century, however, thinkers such as the brothers Jacques Bonnet and Pierre Bonnet-­Bourdelot, sometimes called the first music historians, gravitated toward climatological explanations for variations in music and dance styles: “Each nation also has its own character in song and composition, as well as public feasts that depend on the differences of climates, customs, mores, and the genius of the people.”12 Even though “many historians and travel accounts teach us that music is practiced by the whole

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universe,” particular musical practices and styles were not guaranteed to travel smoothly across cultural borders.13 The Bonnet-­Bourdelots illustrated the radical alterity of foreign music and dance styles by exploiting the rich library of ethnographic information provided by the previous century’s travel literature. They drew from the accounts of colonial explorer Samuel Champlain, for example, to portray North American musical culture: “The Americans have a furious and ill-­ tempered music, which they use to stun their sick in order to cure them; they also use music to ease their labor while they work the earth with pickaxes.”14 Not only does American music sound savagely alien (“furious and ill-­ tempered”) in this passage, but it takes place against the exotic backdrop of “primitive” medical and agricultural practices. The sections on Chinese music paint a more flattering portrait of that civilization: “China is known as the most extensive and as one of the oldest Empires of the world, the Chinese are known as universal in the sciences and arts, and as the most ingenious people of the earth; it even appears that they had, before Europeans, the practice of music, printing, and perhaps knowledge of mathematics, and of a hundred other things that are the envy of other nations.”15 Yet their music seems just as bizarre as the Americans’. China’s political isolationism meant that “we could not be instructed in their [culture] except by the accounts of travelers who have entered the Empire as ambassadors during the past five or six years.”16 When finally granted access to this mysterious musical culture, Europeans learned that the Chinese have twenty different types of musical instruments, all “unknown” in the West.17 A persistent tension between demonstrations of the cultural specificity of music and dance cultures and assertions of the universal human impulse to indulge in these art forms animated treatises from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Thinkers such as the Bonnet-­Bourdelots suggested that the performing arts were diverse but analogous around the globe. For example, immediately following their exoticizing description of Chinese music, the authors went on to describe Chinese musical entertainments in terms highly recognizable to his European readers. Their masquerade festival known as “The Feast of the Laborers” resembles “the magnificent pomp” of European court revels,18 while the public spectacles called “hostelleries” mirror similar events held in Venice.19 The comparative mode of these passages implies that although the meaning or emotional effect of particular performances might not translate across cultures, the significance of the performing arts in general might be universally shared. The capacity to enjoy music

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and dance and visual spectacle might compose one key facet of a truly global human culture and, perhaps, the basis for a universal international society.

Diplomacy and Performance at the Edges of Europe Even the limited role that cautious theorists such as the Bonnet-­Bourdelots eventually ascribed to the performing arts for diplomatic practice could go awry in certain international political situations. They recount one incident from diplomatic history as a kind of warning against overestimating music’s power as an agent of peace. The anecdote, drawn from the Memoirs of Monsieur de la Forêt, ambassador to Constantinople, recounts how the French king François I attempted to use music as an element of his diplomatic gift exchange with Suleiman I. In 1543, François “sent a corps of the most accomplished musicians” to Constantinople for the sultan’s enjoyment. At first the emperor was pleased with the gift, but “having noticed that this Music softened his warlike soul, he judged for himself that it could make an even stronger impression upon the souls of his courtiers.” He smashed the instruments and sent the musicians home, convinced they were a trick rather than a gesture of political friendship. He told the ambassador: “He believed that his master had sent this entertainment to turn his attentions away from War.”20 It is no accident that this anecdote of failed cultural diplomacy pertains to relations between France and the Ottoman Empire. French theorists and statesmen expressed hesitations about the diplomatic use of the performing arts most explicitly in the documentation of embassies from territories at the edges of Europe, namely Turkey and Russia. For seventeenth-­century French politicians, both the Ottoman Empire and Czardom of Muscovy represented liminal spaces, contiguous with but not entirely part of the community of European states. Geographical proximity, patterns of trade, and territorial disputes ensured that European powers maintained diplomatic relations with these polities throughout the early modern period. In the case of France, eastern Mediterranean trade provided the impetus for negotiations with the Ottoman Empire beginning in the sixteenth century. France’s engagements with Russia were less direct, arising when disputes with allies such as Sweden and Poland erupted into international incidents. Despite the tradition of diplomatic dealing with Turkey and Russia, the political and cultural discourses about them distanced them from the imagined society of European states. Of course, religion was a major factor in this

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differentiation. The Ottoman Empire tolerated the Christian population residing within it but was understood in Europe as a distinctively Islamic power. Russia, although a Christian country, did not historically submit to the authority of the Roman Catholic pope and thus did not belong to the notional community of Res publica Christiana. In the second half of the seventeenth century, legal and diplomatic differences played a larger role in explanations of these countries’ exclusion from European society. Wicquefort placed them in a different political and legal universe than the polities of western Europe: “The Emperor of the Turks and the Czar of Moscovy are not merely Sovereigns but they are so absolute and rule so despotically that there is no difference between their subjects and slaves. They also send their ambassadors and ministers to other princes, but they do not have them resident there.”21 He offered the Turks as an example of those “barbarians who do not respect the laws of nations.”22 Not only did the Ottomans and Muscovites reject the legal basis for European international relations, but they ignored diplomatic cultural practices as well. Wicquefort remarked that although ambassadors in Europe should and did dress in the manner of the country in which they resided, “Muscovites, Poles, and others who dress themselves in the Asiatic manner” did not adapt their clothes to “the French style, or something approaching it” when on extraordinary missions to the French court. This practice persisted in part because these countries “do not have ordinary Ministers in the courts of Christian princes.”23 Indeed, although France kept ambassadors in Constantinople throughout most of the seventeenth century to protect the interests of French traders in the region, the Ottomans returned envoys to Paris only for occasional negotiations. These legal and diplomatic distinctions between western European powers and their neighbors to the east were also reflected in the ceremonial practices accompanying extraordinary embassies from those regions. Russia and Turkey had no customary place in the hierarchy of precedence. As a result, there was no set program of ceremony for their ambassadorial visits. In his brief Mémoires sur les introductions des ambassadors, Etienne Chabenat de Bonneuil, who occupied the post of introducteur des ambassadeurs from 1659 to 1680, prescribed simply: “There are ambassadors or envoys such as those from Moscow and Turkey[;] when they are ambassadors we treat them like the other ambassadors [discussed] above.”24 In an annotation, Bonneuil’s successor, Louis-­Nicolas Le Tonnelier, sieur de Breteuil, complained about the vagueness of this instruction. Apart from the ambiguous syntax, it is unclear whether Bonneuil meant that Turkish and Russian ambassadors merited the same treatment as those from monarchies, duchies, or republics. In his own

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memoirs, Breteuil penned a separate section on the receptions of ambassadors from Russia, Turkey, Siam, and Morocco, to begin to establish a protocol for this exceptional group of states.25 In the meantime he, like his predecessors, had to adopt an improvisational approach to staging diplomatic encounters with envoys from just beyond the border of European society. Part of this improvisation entailed decisions about how to entertain the ambassadors. The choice to include or exclude these embassies from court entertainments, the kinds of performances offered to them, and especially the ways these events were narrated by contemporary observers reveal much about how French statesmen understood their political and cultural relationship with these countries. In both cases, theatrical entertainments held Russian and Turkish diplomats apart from French elite culture. The court seldom invited them to court festivities, at least before the mid-­eighteenth century. Meanwhile, theatrical representations of Russia and Turkey enforced their cultural distance from Europe through strategies of irony and ridicule. Because of their exclusionary uses, the artistic performances surrounding embassies from Europe’s near neighbors show the importance of the arts for drawing and maintaining the boundaries of political communities. Despite its geographical proximity to Europe and its shared Christian faith, in the eyes of many French elites the Czardom of Muscovy lay beyond the limits of the civilized world. An eloquent expression of French snobbery toward their Russian counterparts appears in a missive from Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador in Sweden, to the secretary of state, Brienne, in which he describes an audience between Queen Christina and three ambassadors from Muscovy. He recounts how the “grotesquely dressed” ambassadors ineptly performed the ritual address to the queen, as they “held their harangue in a roll of paper in their hands, which they read line by line. . . . All their rude and barbarous ways would entertain you if I didn’t know that your time is destined for better occupations.”26 Chanut’s scathing language effectively reanimates the event for his superior back in Paris, a fact he underlines through an extended theatrical metaphor: “If I had, milord, described to you the particularities of this spectacle, I would make you a pleasant comedy, and the scene would even have something agreeable about it.”27 Rhetorically transforming the anecdote into a “scene,” a “spectacle,” a way to “entertain” his correspondent, Chanut built a “fourth wall” between the unwitting Russian comedians and the French spectators who cast an ironic and ridiculing gaze upon them. The structure of theater perfectly expressed the distance Chanut perceived between the Russian ambassadors and the rest of his diplomatic society.

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A quarter century later, Chanut’s metaphor became reality in Raymond Poisson’s short comic play Les Faux Moscovites. The play debuted at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in October 1668, just days after the departure from Paris of a Russian embassy led by Petr Ivanovich Potemkin.28 The diplomats had visited Spain as well as France on behalf of Czar Alexei to publicize the Treaty of Andrusovo, which ended the Russo-­Polish War and redrew the boundary between Russia and the Polish-­Lithuanian commonwealth in the czardom’s favor. As a secondary objective, the ambassadors were charged with strengthening Russian ties with western European powers in preparation for a potential territorial conflict with the Ottoman Empire.29 If Poisson’s play is any indication, the embassy failed in this latter mission. The comedy satirizes the ambassadors by staging Parisians’ disdainful image of them. In the play, two swindlers capitalize on the ambassadors’ renown in order to scam a bourgeois innkeeper by masquerading as official interpreters who need to secure lodgings for their “Great Lord” from Russia. Declaring they need to pull off their charade well enough to fool not only the innkeeper but also the onlookers who will surely flock to the hotel, they prevail upon a local drunk, the blackening seller Lubin, to play the role of ambassador. When Lubin doubts that he will be able to perform his part, the con men reassure him: “Have you not seen those Muscovites eat? Why, you’ll be just like them.”30 Lubin dons the costume and succeeds in fooling the innkeeper by “jargoning” in nonsense phrases (“yo, yo, yo”) and drinking wine and eau-­de-­vie “with extreme rigor.”31 Although the play does not directly depict the Russian visitors, its farcical portrayal of their impersonators points toward those aspects of the ambassadors’ comportment that struck Parisian observers as ripe for ridicule. Lubin’s uncouth behavior echoes the caricature of the Russian ambassadors conveyed in a manuscript report on their visit by the Sieur de Catheux, a cavalry Master of Camp and ordinary gentleman of the king who was charged with accompanying Potemkin and his colleagues during their journey to and sojourn in Paris. From the beginning of his account, Catheux maligns the envoys’ competence. He remarks that they “had saved a lot” during their stay in Madrid “since Moscovites love good meat much less than they love money, which is very rare in their country.”32 Implying that they hoarded the per diem granted them as a diplomatic courtesy by the Spanish crown, Catheux paints the envoys as rubes unconcerned with maintaining the dignity of their role. Their Courlandian (Latvian) translator, moreover, “only spoke Russian and German” and was “the only member of the embassy to know Latin” though he “spoke it badly.”33 Along the route to Paris, Catheux engaged a Dominican

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friar of Russian extraction (“un Moscovite Jacobin”) residing in Ambroise to serve as interpreter.34 In Catheux’s account, the Russian ambassadors effectively excluded themselves from European diplomatic culture because they performed the basic functions of their role so poorly. Once the embassy arrived at court, they received the same treatment as ambassadors from European crowns with regard to official audiences.35 Yet they were apparently not invited to the court festivities taking place at Versailles during their stay. (The Gazette described an evening promenade, supper, and firework display at the palace on September 17, attended only by the royal family and “a great number of Lords and Ladies of the court.”)36 Nonetheless, the court provided lavishly for the visitors’ entertainment in Paris. The ambassadors toured the Gobelins with Charles Le Brun on September 11 and visited the grottoes and menagerie of Versailles on the fifteenth.37 The next day they enjoyed a comedy “with changes of scenery and ballet interludes” performed by the Marais theatrical troupe.38 Two days later, Molière’s troupe performed Amphitryon for them, “with machines and ballet interludes,” and “the ambassadors were presented with two great basins of sweets and fruits in the amphitheater where they sat.”39 Although the performances pleased the Russians, they were more delighted by the refreshments that followed the entertainments. They “asked for wine” after the first comedy and ignored the edible treats in favor of more libations after the second. The French made a gesture toward including the Russian ambassadors in the delights of refined, metropolitan culture. From Catheux’s perspective, however, their failure to appreciate the entertainments properly condemned them to remain outside “civilized” society. The 1668 Russian embassy and its afterlife in Poisson’s comedy has several parallels with the Paris visit of an Ottoman envoy the following year. Like Potemkin and his colleagues, Suleiman Ferraca Aga also drew the ire of French officials (though for different reasons), fascinated the Parisian public, and inspired a comic play performed shortly after his departure: Molière and Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, staged in October 1670. Yet there were also key differences between the French approach to managing Russian and Turkish theatrical spectatorship and representation. These differences emerged from France’s unique history of diplomatic interactions with the Ottoman Empire. But they also indicate the distinct kinds of cultural and political barriers that cordoned Turkey off from European diplomatic society. The 1669 embassy occurred at a particularly difficult time in the history of Franco-­Ottoman relations. For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries, the countries were vital partners. France contracted its first capitulations or trade agreements with the Ottoman Empire in 1536 and maintained a diplomatic presence at the Porte almost continuously thereafter.40 Political agreements with the Ottomans secured important trading privileges for French merchants in the Levant. In addition, at least until the Peace of Westphalia, Ottoman expansionism provided a useful check on the ambitions of the Hapsburg Empire. After the mid-­seventeenth century, shifting configurations of power within Europe as well as the decline of the empire under the reigns of the feeble Ibrahim I and the young Mehmet IV led to a weakening of relations. The strain reached a crisis point in 1668 when an Ottoman trade agreement with Genoa and the Porte’s failure to adequately recognize France’s precedence over Spain prompted the French government to withdraw its ambassador from Constantinople.41 Mehmet IV sent Suleiman Aga as an extraordinary envoy to Paris in 1669 to try to repair the damaged relationship. In the early parts of his embassy, Suleiman Aga received all the favors accorded to extraordinary ambassadors of kingdoms (“têtes couronnées”), as was customary for Turkish embassies in France by this point in the century. During his journey to Paris, Suleiman Aga had enjoyed lavish hospitality including several entertainments with music and social dancing. At Marseille, the aldermen had “publicly treated him for two days with much magnificence. They even gave him the entertainment of a ball, which a great number of persons of quality, of one and the other sex, attended in their finest trappings.”42 Once he arrived in Paris, however, Suleiman Aga received fewer invitations to festive and social events. Documents suggest that he was not invited to an entertainment at Chambord in October that included the debut of Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac. The only social event he attended with other diplomats was a visit to Versailles and tour of the “Chateau Neuf ” in the company of Prince Casimir of Poland and all the ladies of the court—a meager entertainment in such a culturally rich year in Paris.43 In part, the French court’s standoffishness toward Suleiman Aga reflected the tense state of relations between France and the Ottoman Empire. In part, it derived from the French court’s outrage at discovering that the Turkish visitor was a low-­ranking official at the Ottoman court, the equivalent of a French “gentilhomme ordinaire du roi,” and therefore not of sufficiently noble rank to qualify as a full-­fledged ambassador. The French perceived the embassy headed by a mere envoy as a diplomatic slight and as a refusal to recognize the equal sovereignty of the French king (although it is not clear that the Ottoman court shared this unwritten rule of diplomatic culture). Suleiman exacerbated the

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insult of his rank by behaving in a way considered “haughty, melancholy, and contrary” by French officials.44 Beyond these specific issues, the court’s relative coldness toward Suleiman Aga reflected a long-­exhibited pattern of excluding Ottoman emissaries from celebrations and entertainments.45 French envoys in Constantinople did, on occasion, invite their Turkish neighbors to attend amateur theatrical performances at the embassy.46 Closer to home, however, Turkish diplomats were kept at arm’s length from court festivities, often to appease France’s European allies. Charles IX’s secret meeting with an Ottoman envoy a few miles from Bayonne while his court regally entertained a Spanish delegation exemplifies this possibility. As shown in Chapter 1, even as Charles renewed a trade agreement with the Ottomans, the Bayonne entertainments evoked the Turk as a common enemy against whom the Christian rulers of France and Spain should unite. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, court entertainments imagined a looming Turkish threat to urge rival European powers to reconcile. The choreographed combat of the “mi-­parti” European figures against janissaries in the Ballet de la félicité and the allusion to the retreating Crescent in Peace’s récit in the Ballet de la Paix at Westphalia are two examples of this strategic invocation of the Turk on the ballet stage. Even when France maintained friendly relations with the Ottoman Empire, hollow rhetoric demonizing Turks provided a useful foil against which a collective European identity could come into focus. Although Franco-­Ottoman political relations remained important throughout the early modern period, this diplomatic relationship was not celebrated publicly through festive entertainments. In fact it often could not be, particularly when entertainments were charged with commemorating intra-­European political communities. Indeed, the text and staging of entertainments sometimes drew attention to the emptiness of their anti-­Turkish bluster.47 The famous turquerie in Molière and Lully’s Bourgeois gentilhomme represents one compelling instance of a theatrical reflection on the unrealistic stereotypes that held the Turk in a position of otherness. The comedy-­ballet took to the stage a few months after Suleiman Aga’s departure from Paris. The performance’s temporal proximity to the envoy’s visit and the diplomat Laurent d’Arvieux’s role as a cultural consultant to its authors have prompted many scholars to view the play as a direct response to the international debacle, though they disagree about the nature of its response. Michèle Longino, for example, has suggested that the ridiculing turquerie functions as a “compensatory exercise in which the French indulged to console themselves for their inability to manage the Ottomans to their

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advantage.”48 Other scholars see the scene as a veiled satire of French officials involved in the Turkish embassy.49 As the diversity of interpretations attests, the play plausibly points a ridiculing finger at both Ottoman and French pretensions. At the same time, however, the Bourgeois gentilhomme also constructs a self-­reflexive parody of the tradition of grotesque Turkish representations onstage. In other words, it satirizes the theatrical forms used to depict France’s relations with the Turk as much as the relations themselves. In the play, the servant Covielle uses the exotic tropes of court ballet to trick the bourgeois Monsieur Jourdain into believing that a “Mufti” has elevated him to the ranks of the Turkish nobility (“mamamouchi”) in preparation for the betrothal of his daughter to the son of the Great Turk. Although the gullible Jourdain is completely taken in by the performance, the audience and the other characters in the drama are fully aware that the “Mufti” is merely a Frenchman in an extravagant masquerade turban. As Jourdain is mocked, so are the over-­the-­ top stereotypes commonly used to depict Turkishness in court performance: voluminous robes, grimaces, scimitars, and martial dances. For spectators who had recently witnessed a real Ottoman subject in their midst, these outsized caricatures would appear all the more grotesque. The turquerie serves, finally, only to underscore the absence of authentic Turks from the stage. Much more than the political content of the diplomatic exchange or even the ceremonial trappings of the embassy, theater revealed the outsider status of the Russian and Turkish diplomats in 1668–69. Their segregation from court celebrations marked them as extrinsic to the European aristocratic community. Comedic representations of Russian and Turkish figures further reinforced their cultural distance from French elite society. At least for the Russians, however, the cultural barrier excluding them from European diplomatic society broke down over time. Looking back on this 1668 Russian embassy as a possible precedent for the visit of a Persian ambassador decades later, Breteuil wrote, “We regarded Russia at that time as an almost barbarous nation, with whom the other nations of Europe had no commerce.”50 Breteuil’s use of the past imperfect tense implies that the French court had changed its view of Russians by the early eighteenth century. Indeed, an almanac print for 1699 includes Russian figures in an image of “L”Europe en Paix par la réunion des Prince Chrétiens.” The shift in perspective certainly stemmed from political configurations on the continent. But these developments were accompanied by a kind of “civilizing process” through which Russian diplomats learned to appreciate western court manners, including the culture of entertainment. As Claudia Jensen and John Powell have shown, Czar Alexei sponsored a

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“fledgling” theater at court in the years immediately following Potemkin’s first embassy to Spain and France. A Courlandian observer, Jacob Reutenfels, attributed this innovation to advice from the czar’s ambassadors who reported that “in order to pass the time and disperse boredom, theatrical presentations were often given for European monarchs.”51 When Potemkin returned to France in 1682, he took pains to praise the sites the court showed him, such as the Versailles waterworks and paintings by Le Brun. As diplomatic historian Gaëtan Flassan summarized: “Everything the ambassador said announced good sense and breeding and showed his nation to its advantage, though it had been seen as barbarous.”52 In the early years of the eighteenth century, the Moscovite court frequently entertained French ambassador Jean-­Casimir Baluze with theatrical performances.53 Increasingly, the Russian aristocrats selected to fill high-­ranking diplomatic posts in Paris or Vienna were so enamored with western European culture that they neglected professional duties to collect books and art; they sometimes requested permission to remain in their host cities rather than returning to Russia upon retirement.54 Over a long period of time, Russia was able to join European diplomatic society by training ambassadors and other dignitaries to perform western European cultural norms, part of which entailed appreciating elite forms of entertainment. The performing arts acted as a broker in this process, mediating Russia’s entry into the European community. Turkey’s relationship to European society remained much more ambiguous throughout the early modern period and arguably continues to be so today, as reflected in debates over Turkey’s proposed candidacy to join the European Union. In his broad-­ strokes history, The Evolution of International Society, Adam Watson notes that in the sixteenth century “the Ottoman Empire became, and for some centuries continued to be, an integral and major component of the European states system” because it supported the constraint of Hapsburg imperial power; “yet it regarded itself, and was regarded, as too different from the Christian family of states to become a member of their evolving international society.”55 The Ottomans and European powers “formed an international society of a looser kind” based on a limited number of shared rules and institutions.56 Despite the long tradition of a French presence in the Turkish capital, as late as 1670 French ministers articulated the difficulty in representing “the reputation of the power of His Majesty” in such a “faraway place.”57 Geographical distance heightened the more significant cultural gulf between the countries that impeded the development of a common ceremonial language in which to conduct negotiations.

Figure 8. L’Europe en Paix par la réunion des Princes Chrétiens: Almanac pour l’année 1699. BnF.

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At times, statesmen attempted to “translate” courtly and diplomatic traditions or to imitate each other’s ceremonies. But strategies of translation and imitation could be conscripted into posturing for precedence rather than forming a stable basis for a lasting diplomatic society. Moreover, for both the French and the Ottomans, disdainful misrepresentations of the other could be used for advantage with rival diplomatic partners. Perhaps especially for the French, Turkey’s status as a cultural foil, often in contradiction to political realities, made it convenient to keep the empire at a remove from the social and aesthetic aspects of diplomacy. Theatrical entertainments proved a useful tool for drawing the frontiers of diplomatic society.

Spectacles of Asian and African Encounter Potemkin and Suleiman Aga frustrated French officials in charge of their care in part because they failed to properly appreciate the entertainments and other displays of French magnificence placed before them. The Russians seemed more interested in drinking than in applauding Molière and his company. The Turkish envoy appeared “haughty” in response to Versailles’s architectural riches. Even if these behaviors were not the most significant factor in the cultural estrangement between the diplomats and their French hosts, they surely did not help matters. Their ability to irritate French officials demonstrates the importance of spectatorship as a form of cultural recognition—an acknowledgment of artistic accomplishment and refinement. Embassies from more distant regions of Asia and North Africa only heightened the French court’s preoccupation with the dynamics of regard. The recognition of Asian and African sovereigns was especially important for the French monarchy toward the end of the seventeenth century, not only because it facilitated diplomatic relations with valuable trading partners but also because it reflected France’s status as a truly global power, thus enhancing its claim to precedence within Europe. Yet the lack of shared cultural traditions made it all the more difficult to stage-­manage demonstrations of their admiration for French achievements. One apparent space of convergence between French and African and Asian diplomats took the form of public or courtly political spectacle. Although ceremonial protocol differed around the globe, its elements constituted what Sanjay Subrahmanyam would call a “commensurable” language, one that lent itself to transcultural translation and that was open to alteration

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through intercultural contact.58 A foreign ambassador such as Abdallah bin Aisha of Morocco, who traveled to Paris in 1698 and 1699, could recognize the pomp of Versailles and understand the political significance of its magnificent showiness even if it diverged from Moroccan court ritual in its details. In a letter written after his return home, he assured his French hosts that he told his king “about Sultan Louis, his court, his reign, his fame, his gracious manners and honor, his kindness to his people, and his power over all the kings of the Christians.”59 Meanwhile, French diplomats posted in distant countries detailed the courtly ceremonies that they witnessed and in which they sometimes took part. A French ambassador to Morocco in 1690, François Pidou de Saint-­Olon, easily translated into French terms the customary “Ceremonial” employed by the Moroccan king for audiences of reception. Only two things distinguished a diplomatic audience in Morocco from one in France. First, ambassadors had to remove their shoes (a fact that had outraged an English diplomat).60 Second, there was an “obligation of gifts” and an “essential article” of the ceremony in which the king ritually questioned the diplomat about the presents he had brought.61 The commensurability of ceremonial allowed diplomats to negotiate over specific aspects of the staging of audiences or to tailor protocol to particular embassies. Alexandre de Chaumont, leader of a 1685 French embassy to Siam, for example, made careful note of the rituals exercised for their reception at Phra Narai’s court. As historian Ronald Love has shown, French officials used that information to adapt their own ceremonial for the subsequent Siamese embassy to France in 1686.62 For the ambassadors’ arrival at Brest, for instance, they staged an aquatic welcome ceremony by a fleet of boats to echo the solemn river journey the French ambassadors made to travel to the capital at Ayutthaya. Such acts of borrowing and bricolage between ceremonial idioms show that statesmen employed the relative legibility of the outward theatricality of diplomacy to facilitate encounters. At the same time, the translatability of ceremonial protocol also allowed it to facilitate diplomatic posturing and the enactment of rivalry. During the 1685 French embassy to Siam, for example, Chaumont jeopardized the emerging alliance by refusing to prostrate himself before Phra Narai to deliver Louis XIV’s letter to the Asian sovereign. (The Siamese court set up a balcony so that the ambassador could remain standing while passing the letter to the king in a window above him.) The visit to Paris in 1715 of the Persian envoy Mohammed Reza Beg provides another case in point. Having sent diplomats to Isfahan on several occasions since the 1660s to negotiate trading privileges

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and protections for missionaries, French officials were familiar with Safavid court practices and knew to stage their most elaborate version of the audience of introduction.63 The ceremony took place in the Hall of Mirrors, where the ambassador was received by Louis XIV, decked out in a diamond-­covered outfit and seated on a raised, diamond-­covered throne. The spectacle was marred, however, by the beg’s resistance to certain aspects of French protocol. He demanded that the date of the audience be changed in accordance with his astrologer’s recommendations. He refused to stand in the presence of lesser French officials including the introducteur des ambassadeurs and the high-­ranking aristocrat charged with accompanying him to Versailles for the audience. As Susan Mokhberi convincingly argues, these disputes show that French and Persian actors operated under a similar set of assumptions about how to perform the dignity of their respective countries.64 Although these countries practiced different traditions and rituals of diplomatic encounter, they could for the most part comprehend the logic behind them—in many cases, the symbolism of verticality, the prestige accrued by towering over an interlocutor. The similarity of gestures allowed the parties to negotiate and reach a compromise about the ceremonies they would perform together. Yet this shared understanding sometimes resulted in conflict and rivalry rather than serving as a basis for smooth diplomatic relations. Although French and foreign statesmen could negotiate over the staging of diplomatic ceremonies, other important aspects of ambassadors’ visits exceeded the capacity of French hosts to influence them. Visitors’ reactions to French ceremonies and other displays of hospitality constituted an important, but unscripted and perhaps unscriptable, dimension of diplomatic theater. The French court often created opportunities for foreign diplomats to perform their recognition of their hosts’ worldly stature beyond the confines of official ceremony, in public and semipublic venues where visitors could affirm French cultural achievements. As Robert Berger and Thomas Hedin have shown, after 1682 a programmatic tour of Versailles was a feature of special ambassadorial visits. The introducteur des ambassadeurs accompanied by a person of rank led foreign visitors through the highlights of the château before conveying them through the gardens, taking them through “a sequence of spaces guaranteed to instill wonder and awe.”65 Although conducted as private parties, these tours were transformed into public spectacle in the pages of the Mercure Galant, where the journalist Jean Donneau de Visé gave emphatic accounts of the ambassadors’ appreciation for the gardens’ marvels.

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In 1684, for example, the gazette reported on the Algerian embassy’s visit to the gardens. After taking a joy ride on one of the boats in the Grand Canal, one of the ambassadors purportedly commented that “the sea of Versailles was the sea of the Emperor of the world.”66 This kind of too-­good-­to-­be-­true remark stages a scene of recognition for a French and European reading public in which a delegate from a distant country acknowledges the global scale of Louis XIV’s magnificence. Such scenes were harder to stage as unmediated, live, public events such as a visit to the Opera or playhouse. The presence of other spectators, including French subjects and the European ambassadors who regularly enjoyed musical and theatrical entertainments in Paris, meant that the reactions of the foreign guests would be observed firsthand, without the intervention of a journalist’s retouching pen. Relatively few Asian and African ambassadors made trips to these high-­profile spaces of entertainment before the eighteenth century.67 In February 1682, Moroccan ambassador Hadji Mehemet Thummim attended a performance of the opera Prosperpine at the invitation of Jean-­Baptiste Lully, though it is not clear whether this performance was also open to the Parisian public.68 Occasionally they enjoyed intimate entertainments at the palace, as when the same Moroccan ambassador joined Louis XIV for a performance of the opera Atys.69 But these private performances were only very sparsely publicized in gazettes or other venues.70 One well-­documented instance of an attempt to entertain ambassadors in public occurred during the first embassy from Siam in winter 1684–85, when a performance of Lully and Philippe Quinault’s opera Roland nearly caused a diplomatic incident. According to Jesuit seminarian Bénigne Vachet, who was charged with accompanying the delegation throughout their stay, the idea to bring the ambassadors to the opera originated with Louis XIV himself. Vachet learned through his superior at the seminary that the king personally desired that the ambassadors Phichai Walit and Phichit Maitri should see the entertainment at Versailles. Vachet expressed reservations about this plan, but ultimately his superior, high-­profile Parisian Jesuit Father Tronson, superior of Saint-­Sulpice, convinced him that the king’s wishes must be followed.71 Vachet did not explain the reasons for his uneasiness about the opera outing.72 The opera visit was problematic for several reasons, though, most notably the differences in French and Siamese cultures of musical entertainment and the role of the Parisian public in creating extra confusion at the event. On the appointed day, Vachet took the Siamese to Versailles where the

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opera was being staged in the Grand Stables, outfitted for the occasion with two sets of risers forming an amphitheater. Naval Secretary Jean Baptiste de Seignelay had instructed that the ambassadors should sit with the king, down in the front row. In French court and diplomatic culture, these were seats of the highest honor, highly coveted by European ambassadors invested in hierarchies of precedence. They not only offered the best view of the performers onstage but also assured the ambassadors’ visibility to other spectators in the auditorium. Several factors prevented the Siamese ambassadors from appreciating this privilege. Chaos reigned in the performance space as audience members jostled to take their seats. As Vachet explained, news that the exotic visitors would attend the opera “attracted an infinity of people to Paris.” The unruly mob of spectators, more eager for a glimpse at the ambassadors than for the opera itself, overwhelmed the court staff in charge of welcoming the dignitaries: “The guards, who struggled to seat the crowds that found themselves there, passed off among themselves the responsibility to take us to our places, such that they left us waiting on the pavement a quarter of an hour. My Siamese began to get disgusted and were ready to turn back if I hadn’t stopped them.” When they at last gained access to the stable, “the Siamese, who didn’t know that the row on the bottom was the noblest and the most comfortable, went to seat themselves in the highest row in order to have no one over their heads. Barely were we seated when the guards noticed their error and put themselves to the task of letting us pass further up.” The mistake enraged the ambassadors, who “believed that an affront had been made toward them” and stormed back to their carriages.73 As David Irving, Ronald Love, and others have discussed, the opera incident illustrates the incommensurability of certain cultural practices between the French and Siamese courts. The Siamese ambassadors were forced to leave the theater because in their court culture dignity was expressed through the relative debasement or elevation of individuals in space. Because the orchestra seats placed the diplomats physically below spectators in the rafters, viewing the performance from that vantage point would constitute an insult to them and their country.74 Of course, the French did understand the significance placed on verticality in Siamese court ceremonial. Not only could Jesuits such as Vachet explain Siamese customs with respect to the relative elevation of bodies, but court officials had already negotiated the orchestration of the ambassadors’ audience with the king—the height of the throne, the prostrations performed by the envoys, and the conveyance of the Siamese sovereign’s letter.75 The opera incident resulted less from French ignorance of Siamese

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practices as from a failure to translate those practices from an official courtly setting to the space of entertainment. French officials did not expect—indeed, did not imagine—that the ambassadors would insist on the same protocol for the opera hall as for the palace. Although court ceremonial often served as a site of intercultural dialogue and commensurability, the role of entertainment in diplomatic encounters exposed fundamental differences between French and Siamese cultures. On the one hand, opera was becoming a cultural touchstone and matter of state pride for the French. Pierre Perrin, the “father” of the French incarnation of the genre, championed the art form as a means to bring French culture international acclaim, as he explained in the dedicatory epistle to the published account of the “first French comedy in music,” the 1659 Pastoral d’Issy, addressed to the abbé de la Rovere, Savoyard ambassador in France.76 Although opera had been most associated with Italian music, Lully adapted the form to French versification, creating an emblematically French style of “musical tragedy.” The prologues to Lully’s operas, moreover, usually began with a prologue featuring an explicit encomium to the king. Loaded with political significance, it is little surprise that the court would choose to feature opera in its interactions with foreign powers in the 1680s. On the other hand, the Siamese ambassadors seemed to lack a frame of reference for conceiving of the diplomatic importance of the performing arts. Other French commentators remarked on the ambassadors’ reluctance to participate in the festive occasions peripheral to their mission. During the second Siamese embassy in 1686–87, for example, the abbé François-­Timoléon de Choisy noted that the visitors declined to attend a ball given in celebration of the birth of the dauphin’s son. They excused themselves by saying that they had not yet completed their official duties.77 Court chronicler Philippe de Courcillon, marquis de Dangeau, observed that they refused an invitation to a party for the erection of a statue of the king for similar reasons.78 French travelers to the Siamese court did not report being included in any entertainments comparable to an opera or a ball, although some of their official processions had musical accompaniment.79 Whereas European statesmen wrote about their participation in festive events as part and parcel of their diplomatic work, the Siamese ambassadors appear to have viewed these two kinds of activities as separate and distinct. In fact, French accounts suggest that the opera visit ended badly because the ambassadors mistakenly viewed it as another form of official court ceremony. As Vachet describes, the ambassadors appeared uncomfortable and

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unhappy during a second performance of Roland organized as an apology for the first botched event. The French had rectified the seating problem by constructing a special balcony from which the guests had a perfect view of the stage while still maintaining their elevation above other spectators. Vachet wondered what else could be bothering his guests. Through the translator, he learned that the ambassadors believed the performance constituted their audience of departure and complained that the ceremony did not conform to their expectations for a private ceremony with the king. Vachet was obliged to explain that the audience would take place the following day.80 The idea that ambassadors would attend a public spectacle apart from official ceremonies did not translate across these two cultures of diplomacy. The Siamese ambassadors also expressed discomfort with their own status as a kind of public spectacle. Vachet describes how the Siamese grew fatigued with constant visits to their lodgings by members of the court who considered it an “honor”—and a spectator sport—to attend their meals.81 At the opera, they literally kept their heads down against the gaze of other spectators. Moreover, they did not participate in the see-­and-­be-­seen atmosphere of the auditorium. Vachet writes: “One will not easily believe that, throughout the spectacle, they did not lay their eyes on the king or on the actors in stage, keeping them lowered except to glance at the door from time to time. Whatever desire they may have had to leave, they dared not tell me, and had to wait until the end.”82 Whether inspired by modesty, embarrassment, or displeasure, the ambassadors’ shoe-­gazing response to the opera struck the French observer as incomprehensible. Vachet’s remark shows how ingrained and naturalized were French expectations for the modes of spectatorship that took place within a Parisian theater, where action on the stage or the reactions of celebrated audience members were compelling and appropriate focal points. The first Siamese embassy to France confounded the French desire for foreign recognition of their country’s cultural achievements. During the second visit of Siamese delegates, the court stage-­managed the visitors’ reactions and their dissemination to the public more carefully. The Mercure Galant devoted four full, special issues to covering every detail of the diplomats’ journey through France and visit in Paris. As for other “exotic” embassies, the Mercure reported on the ambassadors’ approving responses to their tour of Versailles and its gardens.83 The gazette’s account of their trip to the opera is even more illuminating about the significance of foreign appreciation for French cultural delights. According to the journalist, the ambassadors spent an entire day in

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preparation for the outing as French courtiers spoke with them about the meaning and importance of opera in Parisian cultural life. In the morning, they welcomed the composer Jean-­Baptiste Lully at their residence for the midday meal whereby “they learned of the esteem with which the king honors him [Lully] on account of the beauty of his Genius for everything regarding Music.”84 A little later, Secretary of State Colbert de Croissy also paid the ambassadors a visit and further whet their appetite for the performance, “saying to the ambassadors that seeing as this day was a day of entertainment for them, since they were going to the Opera, he did not want to push their conversation any further, so as not to delay their pleasure.”85 At last, they made their way to the Académie de Musique, where Lully greeted them at the door to usher them to their seats. The gazette reported that the ambassadors were impressed by the performance of Acis et Galatée. One said “that the spectacle to which he was witness along with what everyone said about other operas, made him imagine great things about those he hadn’t seen.” His remarks during and after the performance, moreover, indicated “that he understood its subject, and [he] said very witty things about it.”86 Similar comments of appreciation and understanding marked the gazette’s shorter report on the ambassadors’ second trip to the Opera, to see Armide, in January 1687.87 As in the reports on various ambassadorial visits to Versailles, the journalist stressed the foreigners’ appreciation for the French cultural achievement. The accounts of the opera visits also emphasized the ambassadors’ comprehension of the performance, portraying the form as universally legible. As described in the gazette’s pages, the operas—along with the comic plays, garden visits, and salon evenings the ambassadors enjoyed—worked as an effective form of cultural diplomacy. At least in the Mercure’s narrative, these pleasant occasions strengthened connections between the ambassadors and their French hosts, gave them a topic for sociable discussion, and enhanced the image of French culture in the ambassadors’ eyes. In his work on musical exchanges between the French and Siamese courts, David Irving concludes that diplomats on both sides of this encounter “identified and took advantage of crucial points of cultural convergence” and “aimed—often through music and sound—to construct a framework in which they could engage in intercultural exchange and negotiation.”88 In addition to hosting the Siamese visitors at performances in Paris, the French arranged for their music to be brought to Ayutthaya as a kind of gift for Phra Narai. During the 1687 French embassy to Siam, the travelers brought European musical instruments and sheet music of Lully’s operas, along with

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samples of merchandise that the French hoped to trade, and had some airs performed for the king.89 It may be that the French intended their performance to increase friendship between the countries and pave the way for smoother negotiations. In practice, though, these exchanges reflected the ambivalence about the transcultural legibility of the performing arts seen in the period’s theoretical texts. Simon de La Loubère, one of the French travelers to Siam in 1687, used this musical encounter to think more broadly about differences in the countries’ musical cultures. He noted that the Siamese “compose their tunes in their heads and do not know how to notate.” Unlike French music, theirs has “no rhythm nor tremolo”; but, like the French, they sometimes sang nonsense syllables instead of words. La Loubère fashions himself as a proto-­ ethnomusicologist, offering the reader a detailed description and engravings of Siamese instruments as well as a transcription of a Siamese tune in Western notation. The detailed descriptions La Loubère provides and his impulse to make comparisons between musical cultures echo the work of writers such as the Bonnet-­Bourdelots who questioned assumptions about the universality of nonverbal art forms. In the end, the differences in musical style and practice between the French and Siamese did not perform any diplomatic magic. Instead, Phra Narai reportedly remarked upon hearing some operatic airs played on a violin that the tunes “were not grave enough.”90 Despite the Mercure Galant’s glowing reports, it is possible that the Siamese ambassadors who visited France in 1686 shared their sovereign’s critical assessments of Lully’s compositions. Although they kept detailed notes throughout their stay in the country, all but a fragment of these were later destroyed by fire during a siege of Ayutthaya by Burmese forces.91 The only “record” of their responses to the opera is found in the writings of Donneau de Visé, and, of course, the ventriloquized reactions in the gazette’s pages cannot be taken as evidence of their true feelings. Rather, they attest to the French court’s need to create an appealing mise-­en-­scène of the ambassadors’ appreciation for the local entertainment and perhaps to compensate for the failure of the 1684 event. The staging of Siamese spectatorship performed an alchemy through which the French public’s fascination with the exotic ambassadors was transformed into a flattering, narcissistic gaze on their own culture and government. In the preface to the first special issue devoted to the Siamese visit, the editor acknowledges the extent of the public’s curiosity and their appetite for information about the strangers. Then he asks the reader to imagine what France must look like through the foreign visitors’ point of view: “If distance makes us see the peoples separated from us by large oceans as barbarous, then

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we can seem no less barbarous in their eyes.”92 Across the hundreds of pages of coverage that follow, the reader learns that the ambassadors viewed the French as anything but barbarous, and in fact admired their supreme civility and many cultural achievements. Through masterful manipulation of the public gaze, the media accounts of the diplomatic encounter polished France’s reputation as an object of global esteem. The public gaze played an important role in many of the “exotic” embassies of Louis XIV’s reign. Court officials frequently remarked on the hordes that jostled to glimpse these ambassadors in Paris, and many learned to turn popular interest to the monarch’s advantage. During a time when the French court opted to welcome European embassies with a minimum of ceremony, they threw out all the stops to mark the visits of African and especially Asian dignitaries.93 The diplomats’ outings to court and town received ample coverage in the Gazette and Mercure Galant. In some cases the government commissioned almanac prints and public statues as visual commemorations of the embassies. Highly stage-­ managed public performances of diplomatic encounter and their print representations burnished the image of the French government by displaying it as equal to the richest kingdoms of the globe. Meanwhile, these foreign visitors sometimes also capitalized on the Parisian populace’s fascination with them to bolster the prestige of their own country. A case in point is the visit of Mohammed Reza Beg in 1715. His embassy, organized to negotiate a trade agreement, was plagued by turmoil due in part to the fact that the beg replaced an envoy approved by French agents in Persia at the last minute. The substitution, along with the fact that he was selected by the khan of Erivan rather than the shah himself, led some French observers to suspect he was an impostor.94 The confusion surrounding the diplomat’s identity contributed to a general feeling of disorder throughout his visit, which was in turn exacerbated by the beg’s manipulation of the French public. Unlike the second Siamese embassy, when the French court fully controlled the curious public’s reception of the ambassadors, the Persian visit shows that foreign diplomats could also turn public fascination with exotic embassies to their own advantage. In addition to refusing to perform diplomatic ceremony according to a French script, the beg failed to comply with the unspoken requirement that he acknowledge the magnificence of the French court. Breteuil complained in his memoirs that the Persian ambassador remained stubbornly unimpressed by French attempts to delight him with entertainments and tours of the city: “It’s hard to believe that a man who came to visit a country so far away and so different from Persia in every way as ours, might spend five months in Paris

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without having any curiosity to see what he can of the attractions in the city and its environs. . . . Mehemet Riza expressed no desire to see the magnificence of Versailles or other royal houses.” Breteuil concluded: “He had great intelligence, but I believe that his vanity made him believe that it was enough to glance at those whose curiosity brought them to see him, and to stroll a few times in the streets of Paris on his horse, to get to know” everything about France.95 Mokhberi suggests that Breteuil’s depiction of the beg’s haughty and indifferent attitude was a strategic citation of “Orientalist” assumptions about Persian pride and incuriosity: “Breteuil’s description of the Beg seems ‘Orientalist,’ but, instead, it was a device consciously employed by Breteuil to win the competition for grandeur between the two countries.”96 Cultural difference provided a convenient “excuse” for the beg’s behavior when in fact he was simply winning the battle for diplomatic optics.97 The court’s and the ambassador’s use of pomp and ritual, spectacle of majesty and theatrical spectatorship of it, was further complicated by the attentive gaze of the French public. As a printed book recounting the ambassador’s visit related, “There is not a single curious man or woman in Paris who has not gone to see him at Charenton and take part in the feasts, music, and cordials with which he treated everyone.”98 In his memoirs, Breteuil expressed dismay about the degree of public attention attracted by the beg. He seemed shocked that it was “not only the common people” but also “men and women of the best quality” who “had the same curiosity” to see the foreigner: “I saw such a huge crowd there that there were often more than forty women in his rooms” enjoying coffee, tea, sherbet, and shisha pipes. The ambassador “loved music, had violins every day after lunch, and made the women and girls, who were most willing, dance before him.” The beg’s actions to transform himself into a spectacle were condemned by Breteuil as an “impertinent desire to please.”99 The French also used the public fascination with the Persian ambassador to try to create a magnificent tableau of the court’s splendor. The first audience occurred while the ambassador was still incognito, that is, before he delivered his letter of credence. But while European ambassadors in this state often came “without public character” (sans caractère public) to Versailles for a quiet meeting with the monarch and his ministers, this visit was public in fact if not in name. The king asked the ladies of the court to attend the audience, but to wear the casual dresses they sported at Marly rather than the more formal attire that would connote an official court event.100 Breteuil comments: “One can be assured that if these plans had been followed, the audience would

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have been not only the most magnificent spectacle, but also the most ornate.” However, “the crowd troubled the order and also the spectacle.”101 Through force of curiosity, the courtiers charged with performing as stately ornaments transformed themselves into an unruly “crowd.” The French court lost the competition for its own public’s attention and admiration. The theatricality of France’s diplomatic relations with Asian and African countries shows that, far from considering these territories as uncivilized and unworthy of membership in a shared diplomatic society, the French viewed them as desirable partners and as valuable spectators of French magnificence. In collaboration with each other, French and foreign diplomats and court officials often succeeded in establishing a shared gestural and visual language for interaction through ceremonial practices. Yet the stronger form of diplomatic sociability forged through shared artistic and festive practices proved more difficult to manufacture, except perhaps as imagined in publications designed for a French audience. At times, the spectacle of truly global diplomatic society substituted for its achievement in reality.

Conclusion The hyperbolic Mercure Galant accounts of exotic embassies, the frescos ornamenting the Ambassadors’ Staircase, the awed stare of a Moroccan ambassador at the opera in a painting by Coypel—these cultural artifacts testify to the French court’s urgent desire to construct an image of France as an object of foreign admiration.102 Fictional avatars of ambassadors served as ready spectators of French magnificence, demonstrating worthiness to participate in a global diplomatic community. Some of these representations appear as burnished versions of real ambassadors’ esteem. Others stand as improbable or generic fantasies of foreign regard. All vividly demonstrate the centrality of spectatorship to the construction of diplomatic relations. Flattering depictions of France’s interactions with exotic diplomats also point to the importance of another form of spectatorship: that of the public. Images of admiring foreigners were aimed at a secondary audience that included European ambassadors touring the king’s paintings but also the French reading public. Official mediations of diplomatic encounters indexed a growing public eagerness to witness the events and ceremonies of international affairs. Media accounts attempted to control the image received by this emerging audience. As the first Siamese embassy and the Persian beg’s visit to

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Figure 9. Print after Antoine Coypel, The Ambassadors of the Emperor of Morocco at the Comédie Italienne. Photo by Franck Raux. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, N.Y.

Paris reveal, however, live encounters between the public and ambassadors— often in spaces of entertainment—led to less predictable scenes of international relations. The allure of exotic embassies aroused the French appetite for information about their state’s diplomatic affairs, but a concern for this increasingly unruly public gaze characterized diplomatic culture more generally at the French court at the turn of the century. This is the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 8

Diplomacy on the Public Stage (1697–1714)

A decade after the last Siamese embassy to Paris, Charles Dufresny, sieur de La Rivière, comic dramatist and future editor of the Mercure Galant, narrated a fictional promenade around the French capital with an imagined Siamese visitor. A work of light social satire, the Amusemens sérieux et comiques (1699) takes the form of twelve essays transcribing the narrator’s witty commentary on aspects of metropolitan life (the court, university, marriage, gambling, etc.) as he guides his foreign guest. From time to time, the Siamese tourist interjects a naive comment that reveals the silliness of fashionable Parisian practices. Dufresny draws inspiration from the official media coverage of the real Siamese embassy of 1686 but inverts its goals, using the foreign gaze as an instrument of ridicule rather than a means to inflate the French self-­image. Despite this inversion, though, Dufresny’s text shares with the Mercure accounts of the ambassadors’ visit a preoccupation with the gaze of the public. The essay devoted to the Opera, for example, foregrounds not the beautiful music and sumptuous spectacle to be enjoyed there but the overwhelming popularity of this Parisian attraction: “Four o’clock sounds, let’s go to the Opera; we’ll need at least an hour to get through the crowd laying siege to its door.”1 Once the narrator and his companion enter the Palais Royal, they play out an uncannily familiar scene of cultural confusion: “Let’s seat ourselves on the stage,” the narrator suggests: “On the stage, replied my Siamese, you’re joking; we don’t have to put on the show, we’re coming to see it. No matter, I said to him, let’s go show ourselves off there: you see nothing and hear badly from there; but it’s the most expensive seat, and consequently the most honorable.”2 Dufresny takes liberties with the truth in this passage: no spectators could sit on the

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stage at the Opera, although some of the loges did jut into the performance space.3 The ingenuous protests of the Siamese guest allow Dufresny to mock the see-­and-­be-­seen culture that reigned in the Paris opera house, where the joy of “showing off” oneself constituted a “pleasure that compensates for the loss of the spectacle.”4 Commentaries on the role of the public gaze in public life proliferated at the turn of the century. In the last chapter of his book, for example, Dufresny reflects on the public’s status as a kind of tyrant, characterizing the collective as “a sovereign that rules over all who work for reputation or profit.”5 He continues: “Kings build superb edifices for it and leave it beautiful monuments so it will remember them. All Historians work on its history; for it one labors, sows and harvests; it’s to find comforts for it that one cultivates the fine arts. How many honest men shorten their days to furnish it with good examples and wise instructions? How many poets and musicians beat their heads to make it rejoice? In a word, one sacrifices the life and worldly goods of every private person for its use.”6 In an astute analysis of this passage, Hélène Merlin-­Kajman underlines Dufresny’s characterization of the public as a corpus mysticum, a body politic that transcends its “particular” members and even survives its own kings.7 More sovereign than the sovereign, the public described by Dufresny reigns over matters of art and politics alike. The requirement to obey, or at least acknowledge, the powerful public also appears in the writings of ambassadors, secretaries of state, and the court officials charged with maintaining the smooth operations of diplomacy at court in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. If the high-­profile embassies from Asia and Africa discussed in Chapter 7 demonstrated the public appetite for the spectacles involved in France’s international relations, both the court and the diplomatic corps rapidly learned to exploit this hunger for foreign personalities. The imaginary space that constituted the “theater of diplomacy” expanded beyond the courts to encompass the broader public. Spectatorship—as practice and as metaphor—underpinned emergent concepts of the public as a social and political entity in the early modern period. As Merlin-­Kajman has shown, with the establishment of the Académie française in 1635, discourses on belles lettres in general, and on theater in particular, effectively ennobled the literary arts by figuring their audience as a “public.”8 Spectators, when understood as members of the public, transformed a theatrical performance into a res publica or “public thing” through their collective gaze and judgment.9 The theatrical model in turn lent itself to describing the public’s role in political events, as Christian Jouhaud has stressed in

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his analysis of polemical writing during the Fronde, which turned the civil revolt into a dramatic “scene.”10 The diplomatic scene of the turn of the century exhibits an even more dynamic interplay between politics and spectacle. Diplomats and statesmen required a public to authorize their actions in reconfiguring European relations throughout a period of war and crisis. Through its reflection in the arts offered for its hungry gaze, the public for international relations comes into focus as an entity—frivolous and novelty seeking but also a constituent of European society and the beneficiary of any peacetime rewards that might result from diplomatic work. This shift in the figurative theater of diplomacy was mediated in part by a displacement of diplomatic entertainment from the exclusive space of the court to the more public stages of Paris, in particular the Opera, that landmark of public culture’s appeal. The emergence of an elaborate bureaucracy for managing foreign affairs, stricter protocol governing the day-­to-­day lives of the diplomatic corps, and a diminished festive culture at court deprived ambassadors of opportunities to exercise much autonomy. At the same time, the magnetism of the public gaze pulled diplomatic culture toward less tightly controlled urban spaces. In the haunts of elite Parisian society, enterprising foreign ministers could gain favor through the force of their charisma. As diplomatic sociability spread beyond the court into the city, writers and artists responded by addressing international affairs in the subject matter of their work. The opera-­ballet Europe galante (1697), for example, was prepared to commemorate the Treaty of Rijswijk and was the first diplomatic entertainment to debut at the Paris Opera rather than at court. Print accounts of diplomatic galanterie, moreover, proliferated in gazettes and in books such as a notorious roman à clef about negotiators’ adventures at the Congress of Utrecht (1713). These works helped to create a “public” for topics related to diplomacy and to imagine an international community encompassing not only sovereigns and noblemen but a broader range of reading and viewing audiences.

A Theater of Bureaucracy: Diplomatic Culture at Versailles The quotidian theatrics of court life hardened into an elaborate routine of ceremonies once the court moved to Versailles in 1682, the renovated palace containing bespoke backdrops for rituals marking the king’s waking, meals, and other daily activities.11 This routinization extended to the occupations of resident diplomats. The Ambassadors’ Staircase fixed the itinerary for ceremonial

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audiences with the king. At other times, diplomats were corralled in the designated Ambassadors’ Room (salle des ambassadeurs), relatively segregated from the rest of the court and dependent on intermediaries to transmit messages and field requests. This spatial constriction limited diplomats’ ability to act at court to pursue their interests and those of their sovereigns. The professional management of the diplomatic corps, its sequestering from the heart of the court, posed new obstacles for an ambassador who wished to establish a more personal relationship with the king. Louis XIV rarely granted audiences with ambassadors beyond the formal rituals of arrival and departure.12 Ceremonies with the king remained important symbolic events. But negotiations and the transmission of information occurred in private meetings between ambassadors and the secretary of state. Moreover, the secretary had to preapprove any letter or document handed to the king in a ceremony.13 As an envoy of Grand Elector of Brandenburg Ezechiel Spanheim observed in 1690, envoys and resident ambassadors found it difficult to have an audience with anyone other than him. The king and other high-­ranking ministers were kept off-­limits: “Whereby, I note here in passing, there is a great disadvantage in foreign ministers’ negotiations at the French court, for there they are excluded from giving to other ministers of state the information required by their commissions and the interests of their princes, either on important occasions or according to need.”14 Ambassadors found their performances at court constrained by the scripts of an increasingly bureaucratic diplomatic culture. These procedures for managing the diplomatic corps emerged out of the French state’s efforts to bureaucratize international relations starting in the 1680s. John Rule and Ben Trotter have charted the Foreign Office’s growth into a massive administrative department, particularly under the leadership of Jean-­Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, who served as secretary of state for foreign affairs from 1696 to 1715. Overseeing ambassadors, envoys, and their secretaries abroad as well as an ample staff of commissioners and clerks in Paris, the Foreign Office ensured that the king’s decisions about international matters were reflected at all levels of the bureaucracy and by all delegates. The impressive administration produced a more “unitary” French foreign policy than that in other kingdoms.15 Paperwork quickly subsumed face-­ to-­ face interaction as the primary medium for diplomacy at the French court. It is tempting to join Spanheim and his fellow foreign ministers in characterizing the new bureaucratic style of conducting international relations as degraded, impersonal, and frustrating, as marking a kind of loss. As Ben Kafka writes in his exploration of the

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“psychic life of paperwork,” political philosophy “has always preferred the voice of power over its written traces, the great discourses of kings and legislators over the obscure scrivenings of functionaries and clerks.”16 Mediating action through abstruse procedures and forms, paperwork “makes everyone, no matter how powerful they may be in reality, feel so powerless.”17 Still, the bureaucracy of international relations at Versailles entailed its own ceremonies and performances designed to imbue its work with the authority of presence. The spatial configuration of bureaucratic authorities turned paper—in the form of notes and missives—into a new kind of ambassador, allowing secretaries and clerks to communicate between offices without moving themselves.18 The delivery of documents, the application of the royal seal or signature, all the little gestures surrounding the production and preservation of paper were infused with ceremony, so as to present the results of bureaucratic work as the authentic expression of the king’s will.19 Moreover, paperwork informed more traditional forms of performance and interaction. The notes housed in the Foreign Office’s extensive bureaucratic archive “were no longer primarily documents, proof to be produced when verifying a right or claim, but instead were records of past negotiations to be ransacked for information and precedents . . . to drive and shape current negotiations.”20 Bureaucratic paper did not completely erase the theatrical dimension of diplomacy at the French court but regulated and scripted live negotiation. The archives kept by the officials known as introducteurs des ambassadeurs and their secretaries vividly illustrate the scripted nature of diplomatic culture at Versailles. These officers served as the primary intermediaries between ambassadors and the king and his secretaries, fulfilling requests, arranging meetings, and even taking charge of the diplomats’ entertainment. Introducteurs had taken responsibility for managing the resident diplomatic corps since the late sixteenth century. The office was created in 1585 and throughout the seventeenth century had usually been shared by two individuals each working for one “semester” of the year, while a permanent secrétaire à la conduite aided them in their task and assured continuity.21 Despite the post’s long standing, the job changed in the late seventeenth century. In earlier decades, introducteurs were chosen from the ranks of former ambassadors or were the sons of previous officeholders.22 Deep personal knowledge of diplomatic culture informed their professional practice. In the 1680s, the government determined that the introducteurs’ protocol should be codified and preserved for posterity, paralleling the archival impulse within the Foreign Office. Chabenat de Bonneuil fils, who occupied the post from 1680 to 1698, and especially

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Louis-­Nicolas Le Tonnelier, sieur de Breteuil, who served during the last seventeen years of Louis XIV’s reign, kept copious journals of the ceremonial observed for each ambassador as models for future officials.23 The authority of historical practice, as transcribed and preserved in the introducteurs’ memoirs, trumped a more ingrained and responsive, personalized practice. A set script governed an ambassador’s welcome at court. As the detailed memoirs of the introducteurs des ambassadeurs and secrétaires à la conduite who served in this era reveal, the day-­to-­day ceremonies of diplomatic culture in the French capital settled into a mind-­numbing routine of identical ceremonial entries, audiences of introduction, and departure. This routinization extended to the manner of entertaining ambassadors. As Bonneuil noted in his memoirs in the 1670s, “When ambassadors attend a play at the king’s residence, we always place them in the first row on the second bench, and the envoys on the bench behind them.”24 When a large number of ambassadors were in residence, even fairly normal festive occasions such as a Carnival ball required court officials to work like a well-­oiled machine. In January 1700, for example, secrétaire à la conduite Villeras described in his memoirs a bucket-­brigade-­style method for shuttling foreign dignitaries between a reception room and the dancing hall at one Versailles party: he led ambassadors and their wives small group by small group according to their rank from one apartment to another, where they met Breteuil, who in turn ushered them to their seats.25 The choreography of diplomatic hospitality grew more elaborate and time-­consuming as it became more codified. The highly controlled script for diplomacy at the French court effectively transformed resident foreign ambassadors from actors into automatons. Wicquefort’s magisterial L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions acknowledges the emptiness of ceremonial in its analysis of diplomatic representation. As Maurice Keens-­ Soper observes, Wicquefort demonstrates both a subtle understanding of the importance of representation and considerable impatience with ceremony.26 On the one hand, Wicquefort recuperated the theatrical metaphor dismissed by an earlier generation of writers on diplomacy to describe the “representative character” of the ambassador: “I have said elsewhere that [the ambassador] has to be a bit of an actor, and I add here that perhaps in all the world’s affairs, there is no personage more actor-­like than the ambassador. There is no more illustrious theater than the court: there is no play where the actors appear less like what they are in reality than what Ambassadors do while negotiating, and no one plays more important characters.”27 The theater of negotiation requires talented actors, and the roles they play are “important” and serious. On the

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other hand, Wicquefort finds less important the empty pomp of ceremonial. He dismisses “these pretentious Ambassadors who are only good for the theater, and who are hauled out like mute characters in a play or a farce.”28 After disparagingly comparing this kind of diplomatic theater to Jesuitical pomp, he explains that in extraordinary embassies or “embassies of obedience” sent for ceremonial purposes, “the Ambassador cuts the same figure as a mute character in a play. His Orator speaks for him, and as long as he knows how to bow and curtsy properly, he is but too able to perform this function.”29 Wicquefort’s obvious contempt for the “bowing and curtsying” aspect of diplomacy suggests that ceremonial has been stripped of its significance and that the real work of negotiation occured in some other scene. The growth of diplomatic bureaucracy and the codification of ceremony were also entangled with broader shifts in political and social life having to do with the status and role of the nobility. Throughout the seventeenth century, France filled its diplomatic ranks from the aristocracy. Sending a high-­born nobleman on a diplomatic mission signaled French respect and esteem for the host country. Aristocrats, moreover, were more likely to possess the material resources to sustain an embassy in dignified style. Important domestic posts in the Foreign Office, meanwhile, rewarded courtiers who had performed valuable service to the state (in war, for example) or cemented ties between noble families.30 At the same time, however, the formalization of tasks and the ascendant place of law in international negotiations transformed diplomacy into a profession that required extensive training. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many European governments had created schools to train a diplomatic corps, such as the Académie Politique established by Louis XIV and Colbert de Torcy in 1712.31 In this new context, the idea that nobility trumped other qualities as the primary qualification for would-­be diplomats came under scrutiny. Some commentators implied that noble ambassadors lacked the knowledge and training to understand the legal dimension of matters under negotiation. In Wicquefort’s words, the distinction of nobility could be an “ornament” to an embassy but was not necessary. “Great lords” might serve well for ceremonial occasions such as marriages, baptisms, and funerals, where “it is necessary to appear rather than to negotiate.”32 Instead, men with training would perform best in negotiating roles. François de Callières proposed that “gentlemen of the robe are usually more learned, of greater application, and of a more orderly and less dissolute life than warriors or courtiers” and therefore should be entrusted with negotiations and treaty making.33 He stressed that “a

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man who is born with the qualities that are appropriate for conducting public affairs, and who feels an inclination to apply himself to them, ought to begin by learning about the present state of affairs of Europe.”34 Whereas writers in previous decades explored the virtues and character traits that an ambassador should possess, this new generation emphasized knowledge and training as essential qualifications. Callières wished to “establish it as a firm and lasting maxim in France to employ as negotiators only those who would have done this kind of apprenticeship and these sorts of studies.”35 The qualities required of the diplomat for this generation of thinkers were largely incompatible with the talents of the well-­born nobles still charged with the highest offices in permanent and extraordinary embassies. Tensions between statesmen enmeshed in the new bureaucratic structures of diplomacy and the noblemen charged with representing their sovereigns animated diplomatic culture at the French court. Expressing a prejudice common among French and foreign aristocrats, Saint-­Simon denigrated secretaries of state as “parvenus.” He recounted how Torcy—whose marquisate was only a couple of decades old—provoked a precedence dispute with the ambassadors from Venice and Savoy when, during formal processions of entry to Versailles, he allowed his carriage to nudge in front of those of the diplomats. The memoirist gleefully reported that the ambassadors protested and Torcy henceforth took the penultimate place in entry parades, followed only by the introducteur des ambassadeurs.36 This small misstep and symbolic defeat for Torcy was a satisfying anecdote for Saint-­Simon—and apparently for the ambassadors who spread it around at court—because it went against the grain of the secretary’s otherwise relentless rise. Under his watch, ambassadors had little hope of making these kinds of symbolic scores as they were increasingly constrained by the ceremonial and bureaucratic rules he helped to codify.

Creating a Public Stage The primacy of protocol, script, and professionalism in court culture and in diplomacy as practiced at court diminished the autonomy of foreign ambassadors. It reduced their ability to distinguish themselves and act freely in their own interests. But the need to perform—to self-­differentiate, to make one’s mark—remained. Ambassadors seeking a stage for their own distinctive performances found it not at court but in more public spaces of entertainment in Paris, particularly the Opera.

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From its establishment, the Opera had functioned as an urban extension of the culture of court spectacle. As Lucien Bély underlines, Pierre Perrin, the “father” of the opera in France, had served as introducteur des ambassadeurs for the household of the duc d’Orléans and championed the art form as a means to bring French culture international acclaim.37 Under Lully’s direction, the Académie de Musique mounted tragédies en musique every bit as lavish as court ballets that featured explicit encomia to the king in their prologues. After Lully’s death in 1687, the connections between the crown and the Opera loosened, or at least became more complicated. The Académie de Musique maintained its state charter and continued to occupy the Palais Royal but no longer received significant financial support from the crown and only very rarely put on performances at court.38 Despite the evaporation of royal sponsorship, the Opera thrived in these years, in part because of its popularity with ticket-­buying spectators, in part thanks to the support of other noble patrons. The dauphin, his cousin Philippe (duc de Chartres, later the duc d’Orléans), and Marie-­Anne, princesse de Conti, took an interest in opera. They cultivated several composers and librettists whose works eventually took to the Opera’s stage, and the dauphin even gave direct support to the Opera’s director, Jean-­Nicolas de Francine.39 Music historians have debated the significance of patronage practiced by this younger generation of the extended royal family. Robert Isherwood, Georgia Cowart, and others characterize their support for the arts as constituting “satellite courts” or “shadow courts,” rivals to the increasingly dreary culture of Versailles.40 Don Fader, however, describes the relationship between the two spheres of royal patronage as more interconnected and dynamic. The dauphin and his cousins acquired their interest in music and theater from the court culture in which they spent their childhood. The king encouraged his progeny to take over his role as host of evening gatherings in the apartements.41 Finally, Louis XIV briefly revived musical productions at court in the late 1690s to appease the younger royals.42 Still, it is clear that the artists whose works were performed at the Opera had a different, less direct relationship to monarchal authority than had court artists in previous decades. Their noble patrons were less committed to using their influence to praise the king; indeed they sometimes supported satirical gibes at the king’s decrees. In addition, they were more attuned to the demands of their other “master”: the paying public. As Dufresny’s vignette in the Amusemens sérieux et comiques cited at the beginning of this chapter attests, the Opera in these years became synonymous with the idea of the “public.” The Palais Royal opened its doors to a

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paying public every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. All week, it attracted an elite audience eager to be seen and to hobnob with other socialites.43 On Sunday, a more “popular” group of Parisian spectators joined the fray.44 Often characterized as a heterogeneous “crowd,” Opera spectators gained a reputation for behaving every bit as boisterously as the parterre at Parisian playhouses.45 Arguments about the quality of the singers regularly broke out during performances. One altercation reportedly deteriorated into a wig-­throwing match.46 The unpredictability of the Opera scene seems to have been one of its main draws. The real spectacle occurred not onstage but among the spectators. As Dufresny’s fictional anecdote evoked, opera attendance meant participating in Parisian society, seeing and being seen. For this reason, the Opera offered an attractive space for diplomats where they could interact with other envoys and Parisians free from the court’s strict protocol. As Lucien Bély has discussed, sociability played a key role in diplomacy because it permitted informal exchanges of information, beyond official communiqués.47 The possibility that the chaotic space of the Opera might facilitate such back-­channel transmissions of intelligence clearly unsettled French officials. At the end of the seventeenth century, Matthew Prior, secretary to the British ambassador, complained to a correspondent that French officials “will not let a man make a step but it must be some politique account; one cannot go to the opera, but they imagine that it is rather to mind who are in the boxes than what is upon the theatre; and if you visit a lady, it is certainly to meet some spy or visitor there.”48 The popularity of the Opera was such that even Cardinal Delfini, the papal nuncio to France at the end of the seventeenth century, frequented its performances, a fact that reportedly “scandalized” the king, who maintained that “it was not the custom for bishops or priests to go to spectacles.”49 In addition to functioning as a space of informal gathering and (possibly) covert information exchange, the Opera offered a valuable stage for foreign dignitaries who sought to capture the public eye. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, diplomats began to exploit the sociable mode of spectatorship practiced at the Opera to create their public identities and exercise their charisma. In May 1704, for example, Charles III Ferdinand Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, came to Paris to secure his alliance with France through marriage.50 According to Breteuil’s memoirs, however, the duke’s campaign to cement his friendship with France entailed public relations as much as dynastic strategy. While still “incognito”—that is, before his presence was officially recognized by the king—Mantua attended plays and especially operas assiduously,

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cultivating a “crowd” of followers eager to catch a glimpse of his charismatic persona. “The crowd of spectators was innumerable,” recounted Breteuil, and even the “lowest people of Paris” could observe “this prince’s loyalty and affection for France.”51 By summer, Paris’s enthusiasm for the duke had infected the court. When he made an appearance at Versailles, the court was “filled with people who ran in a crowd to see him.”52 The “crowd” mediated the foreigner’s relationship to the court and eventually to the king, who approved the duke’s marriage to Suzanne Henriette de Lorraine later that year. Attracting foreign dignitaries and Parisians eager to catch a glimpse of them, the Opera became a social stage for the kinds of posturing and jockeying for prestige that a stable bureaucracy had mostly eliminated from court. Introducteur des ambassadeurs Nicolas de Sainctot recorded an incident in January 1697 that transpired when the Portuguese ambassador and the French secretary of state for war nearly came to blows over the placement of their carriages at the entry to the Opera.53 In form, the conflict echoed the previous generation’s disputes over precedence. Yet it posed a greater challenge to officials as it took place beyond the confines of the court, where they were powerless to stage-­manage interactions. Sainctot and his colleagues could only try to repair damaged relationships after the fact. Anecdotes about foreign dignitaries’ appearance at the Opera indicate a displacement of the space of diplomatic theatricality. The ambassador now not only performed his charge for an “audience” of the host court and other diplomats; he also concerned himself with the public’s gaze. The approbation of an anonymous “crowd” or “public” of spectators became a valuable tool for members of the diplomatic corps in Paris. Whereas at the beginning of the century an ambassador like Antoine Le Fèvre de la Boderie aimed his enactment of the dignity of his monarch at the “whole of Christendom” represented by the diplomatic corps at court, at the turn of the century ambitious diplomats in Paris directed their performances toward this public audience, which functioned as a new kind of synecdoche for European society.

L’Europe galante The idea that the insatiable, pleasure-­and novelty-­seeking public of the Paris Opera might represent international society is a not-­so-­subtle implication of the opera-­ballet L’Europe galante. Composed by André Campra with a libretto by poet Antoine Houdar de la Motte, the entertainment took to the stage in

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October 1697, just a few weeks after the ratification of the Treaty of Rijswijk by France, Spain, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and England. It was presented as a celebration of the peace. Yet unlike the other diplomatic entertainments examined in this book, this opera-­ballet was not performed for a courtly audience at the command of the king. Rather, it debuted on the stage of the Paris Opera at the Palais Royal, where any Parisian in possession of a spare louis d’or could enjoy the spectacle alongside nobles, foreign travelers, and ambassadors. Like many operas produced in the 1690s, L’Europe galante had a complicated relationship to the system of royal patronage. Its score and lyrics were published by Christophe Ballard, official royal printer for music, with a privilege from the king. Yet no evidence suggests that state officials had a hand in shaping the entertainment’s content. Opera director Jean-­Nicolas de Francine commissioned the work from La Motte and Campra, who may have been recommended by Philippe, duc de Chartres, or one of his intimates whose patronage both artists had enjoyed.54 Neither the Gazette nor the Mercure Galant made any mention of the spectacle, despite the ample pages dedicated to other celebrations of the peace such as Te Deums and firework displays.55 L’Europe galante is unusual in that it purports to commemorate an affair of state and yet had very little state support or attention. The form and content of the entertainment also indicate an ambivalent relationship to the state and court culture. A fully sung and fully danced spectacle, L’Europe galante distinguished itself from the tragédies en musique with minimal dancing that had previously occupied the Palais Royal stage. Moreover, as Jérôme La Gorce points out, the work’s contemporary, international settings and episodic structure distanced it from the unified mise-­en-­scènes of Classical myths that dominated in Lully’s time.56 For these reasons, Maurice Barthélemy declares the ballet “a manifesto for a change in taste.”57 Its light, pleasing music exemplified the “gallant style,” which Daniel Heartz characterizes as “elegant, new, and fashionable,” opposed to the formal precision of earlier composition.58 Shaped by artists and audiences who traveled among capital cities, the gallant style was also “an international style that merged French and Italian currents, along with German ones” to reflect a cosmopolitan European aesthetic.59 In fact, the work’s status as a novelty and harbinger of a new style was established in the eighteenth century by commentators such as Louis de Cahusac, who declared that La Motte and Campra had created “a wholly new genre” that “tossed out the grand opera’s success.”60 The “gallant, tender, original” style of L’Europe galante stood in contrast to the “cold, insipid,

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languorous” character of Quinault’s works.61 Yet L’Europe galante seems much less innovative when compared with court ballets enjoyed by previous generations. Indeed, Georgia Cowart remarks that it “reconfigur[ed] the conventions of the old court ballet to reflect the identity of a new social elite.”62 Similarly noticing a self-­conscious revival of past forms in the ballet, Jennifer Homans characterizes it as having a “wispy, retrospective air.”63 L’Europe galante’s citation of older forms draws attention to the important way in which it departs from the courtly tradition. Most notably, it replaces a royalist discourse with encomia for love and gallantry, emblems of elite society associated with the Opera itself.64 The ballet opens, for example, with a first act that would seem fit as a prologue to either a court ballet or a Lullian tragédie en musique. Mythological and allegorical figures dance together on a stage that represents “a gallant furnace.” Venus commands a team of Graces, Pleasures, and Laughs who labor at the fire to forge arrows for Cupid. Their anvils clank out a jaunty rhythm for a call-­and-­response song led by the goddess, who cheers them on: “Strike, strike, never grow weary, / You work for the happiness of the world.”65 Suddenly, “terrible noises” interrupt their joyful toil to signal the arrival of Discord, who picks a fight with Venus by mocking Love: “With what impotent arrows does he threaten the earth. . . . I have destroyed and broken his Altars and his fires: / I have at least pulled Europe from his power / If not the whole Universe.”66 But Venus corrects the interloper: “You applaud yourself of a false Victory, / Love has a new Glory in Europe. . . . It is he who has brought Peace back to Europe, / His Peoples will sing of his attractions to his eyes, / You’ll see that in their hearts Love alone is the Master.”67 Only Love—not the monarch or any of his mythological avatars—receives the credit for chasing away Discord and restoring peace to the world. This argument frames the four acts of the ballet that follow. Presented as mise en abymes conjured onstage by Venus for Discord’s viewing, each part of the entertainment depicts Cupid’s victory in France, Spain, Venice, and Turkey, respectively. Throughout, Eros haunts the stage as a universal actor, motivating the dramas that unfold. The forces of music, poetry, and dance also play an important role. Each act contains at its heart an embedded divertissement that facilitates the characters’ courtship and adds exotic variety to the ballet as a whole. In the second act, French “shepherds” pursue love affairs in a bucolic setting. Silvandre, the typically inconstant pastoral hero, has tired of his sweetheart Doris and instead courts his new beloved Cephise by organizing a party for her. In the Spanish act, Don Pedro and Don Carlos serenade

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the objects of their affections below a balcony in a “public place” by night. The women never appear onstage, in accordance with their “severe” national character, but a chorus, led by a female musician who sings in Spanish, commends the men for their constancy and patience. The Italian act takes place at a masked ball, where lovers Olimpia and Octavio debate whether jealousy has any place in romance. A forlane dance performed with masks illustrates jealousy’s effects by allowing the lovers to change partners. The final, Turkish section of the ballet is set in a harem garden, where the sultan Zuliman has turned his affections away from his previous favorite, Roxane, and toward Zayde. A troupe of Bostangis or Turkish gardeners help the new couple celebrate their love with a march-­inspired dance and a song performed in lingua franca (the same language that stood in for Turkish in Molière and Lully’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme). Offering four variations on a common theme, the opera-­ballet as a whole mounts a spectacular argument for the universality of music, dance, pleasure, and above all love. Explicit political commentary is in fact strangely absent from the entire opera-­ballet. The only possible reference to the monarch occurs toward the end of the libretto, in a translation of the chorus to the last scene of the final, Turkish-­themed act. According to the text, the “meaning of the Frankish lyrics” begin: “Long live the Sovereign who gives us Laws, / Let us sing, let us sing, let us repeat it a thousand times.”68 A reader accustomed to the encomiastic function of court entertainments (or Lullian opera) might interpret these verses as a reference to the French monarch. A spectator in the theater, however, would have a different experience of the scene. The lyrics sung by the chorus exclaim instead: “Vivir, vivir gran Sultana. / Unir, unir li cantara. / Mille volte exclamara.”69 Speakers of any Romance language would have no trouble deciphering these lines without the libretto’s translation. But they would understand: “Long live the great Sultana. / Let us unite, unite to sing it, / A thousand times exclaim it.” The song admits no “sovereign” except the queen who reigns over the character Zuliman’s heart. Divorced from the cult of the king, the work figures international harmony as a matter of love, pleasure, and galanterie, the domains of elite Parisian society.70 In its themes and poetic content, L’Europe galante appears as a kind of politically secularized comment on the recent peace. The term “galante” in the work’s title foregrounds this shift. A famously slippery word, hard to define and impossible to translate, galanterie evokes courtliness, refinement, romance, and pleasure. As Delphine Denis and Alain Viala have shown, the gallant aesthetic emerged after the Fronde and served as an agent of social harmony,

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uniting elites at court and in town through an emphasis on agreeable concord.71 The galanterie depicted and celebrated in L’Europe galante maintains continuity with these court traditions. But by the last years of the seventeenth century and with the diminishment of the court’s festive atmosphere, galanterie adhered more strongly to utopian spaces outside of the court, beyond reference to politics: the masquerade ball in the Venetian manner, the bucolic fête galante. Campra and La Motte’s work exemplifies this tendency to willfully ignore the power structures that earlier gallant pieces served to applaud. In addition to omitting any mention of the king, the ballet aggressively aestheticizes its celebration of a peaceful continent. In a headnote to the libretto, La Motte explains that he “chose from the Nations of Europe, those whose characters contrast the most and promise more dramatic interest [jeu] on the stage.”72 Announcing the opera-­ ballet’s presentation of the hyperconventionalized “characters” of different countries, the libretto recalls the older courtly tradition of ballets des nations. Authors of those ballets had always privileged diversity and visual interest in their selection of entrées, yet they never had to explain this choice in their libretti. The poet’s note here calls attention to the seemingly arbitrary selection of countries with no connection to the recent treaty the entertainment claims to celebrate.73 Although the choice of nations derives from aesthetic rather than political concerns, it results in an intriguing vision of “Europe.” The inclusion of Turkey alongside the traditional trio of France, Spain, and Italy expands the border of the European community beyond its usual limits. Whereas earlier entertainments treated the Ottoman Empire as a foil against which to define and unite Christendom, here sultans and sultanas take their place in a secularized Europe. As Alain Niderst points out, this may reflect France’s controversial support for ongoing Ottoman attacks on the Hapsburgs in the eastern part of the continent.74 If the Turkish act is taken as a reference to the international political landscape, however, its significance is highly ambivalent. Around the Siege of Vienna (1683), the Franco-­Turkish alliance fueled Protestant pamphleteers in England and Germany who characterized Louis XIV as an Oriental despot and betrayer of Christian Europe.75 In this context, the inclusion of Turkey and the librettist’s placement of a royalist “translation” in the finale of the Turkish act could just as easily be read as an echo of that anti-­louis-­quatorzian discourse. A more convincing interpretation stems from La Motte’s own insistence on the artistic justification for his choice of nations. The habitual performance of turqueries in French entertainment produced an

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agreeably exotic set of musical, visual, and dance conventions associated with Turkishness. This, combined with a seventeenth-­century literary tradition of passionate romances set in the Ottoman harem, formed a topos of Turkish gallantry that was useful and appealing to the opera-­ballet’s creators.76 Gallantry itself served as a passport of admission to the kind of European community they envisaged on the stage. In this artistic vision, a model of civility focused on courtship and pleasure displaced religious or political bases for the formation of an imagined international community. The will to transcend politics in the fabrication of “gallant Europe” is likewise evident in the opera-­ballet’s characterization of each nation’s modes of courtship. Alain Viala suggests that the opera-­ballet rehearses a longstanding equation of galanterie and Frenchness by demonstrating the French characters’ superiority in love and in entertainment.77 According to this interpretation, Campra and La Motte’s work asserted French preeminence in Europe by means of syllogism: if galanterie is French, then Europe galante might as well be Europe française. In the text of the ballet, however, the value assigned to national approaches to love is not so clear-­cut. None of the acts presents a fully resolved romance. The French part ends with Doris performing a lovesick song but resolving to wait patiently until Silvandre’s inconstancy turns his attentions inevitably back to her. Light, harmonious music and lively rhythms undercut the threat of pathos, and Doris sings her final lament in the “joyful” and “rousing” D-­major key.78 Despite the upbeat tone, however, the story depicted onstage lacks a satisfying romantic ending. Similarly, the caballeros in the Spanish act receive plaudits for their fidelity but never even lay eyes on their beloveds, while the Venetian act ends with the lovers’ breakup when Olimpia can no longer stand Octavio’s jealously. The final, Turkish act includes the most painful scene, as the rejected Roxane reproaches Zayde: “You, too cruel Rival, / Take this unfaithful iron to my just wrath; / Bring mortal ravages to my heart; / You have already brought me more hurtful blows.”79 Disgusted by her anger and desperation, Zuliman orders her removed from the garden before the final divertissement. As the charming Turkish gardeners’ dance erases the memory of Roxane’s desperate rage, this final act exhibits a pattern of pain and relief, pathos and pleasure, which repeats throughout the opera-­ballet. The incomplete, complicated romances in the four main acts of the ballet make the triumphant conclusion of the performance seem sweeter, as Discord admits defeat and Venus declares: “At last, Discord cedes victory to Love, / You, charming Games,

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tender Pleasures, / Fly all over to serve his desires; / Go, and help his Empire and his Glory grow.”80 The joy, love, and galanterie celebrated in the last scene are definitively universal, transcending any particular nation. These pleasures belong—explicitly—to everyone. Contemporary viewers appreciated the cosmopolitan thrust of L’Europe galante, as its reception history testifies. By all accounts, the entertainment was tremendously popular with the heterogeneous opera-­going public. English traveler Martin Lister remarked that when he attended some of his fellow audience members knew the lyrics so well from previous viewing that they sang along.81 The opera-­ballet also enjoyed enduring popularity, reprised multiple times across the early decades of the eighteenth century, including at court under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour. Yet the opera-­ballet also attracted controversy at the time of its first performance, particularly from critics who believed that French art should glorify the state. A short-­ lived cultural periodical, François Gacon’s Le secrétaire de Parnasse , for example, savaged the performance.82 Acknowledging that it “attracted all Paris by the singularity of the spectacle,” the author went on to examine the libretto and comment that: “One found nothing there except mediocrity, and each [of us] wished that another Quinault or a second Lully could reappear to celebrate the peace with dignity. . . . If you ask me therefore why this Opera has such a great run, I will respond that I am as surprised as you; what will increase your astonishment is that Roland has fallen before such a feeble rival. Can one not say that it is Paris who slays Achilles?”83 The condemnation of La Motte’s lyrics is consistent with the periodical’s advocacy for the Ancient camp in the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns. Here, though, the author implicates not only the poet’s faults but also public taste in his portrait of cultural degradation. Observing that L’Europe galante eclipsed a revival of Lully and Quinault’s opera Roland at the box office, he invokes a Classical reference to depict the Parisian public as murderers of an august literary tradition. Throughout the volume, the author repeatedly laments the passing of Quinault, Lully, and other literary greats of the height of Louis XIV’s reign. His critical pessimism undermines the overtly pro-­monarchist rhetoric that dominates remarks on the state of political affairs. However he might claim that “the Peace that LOUIS THE GREAT has just given to Europe . . . will make flourish the Arts and Sciences,” his discussion of contemporary literary and musical achievements argues to the contrary.84 Not only does the author object to the triumph of modern art and literature over works more closely

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based on Classical models. He laments that the new generation of artists no longer dedicate their art to the glory of the state. La Motte and Campra exemplify what is for him a degradation of national culture by privileging the approbation of Paris over service to the king. Unlike court entertainments that fused the relief of peacetime to gratitude for the monarch’s accomplishments, L’Europe galante presented the joys of tranquility as universal, unattached to political events or state institutions. Peace itself appears as a consequence of galanterie, as a domain of the opera, as a public good. If this vision of international harmony ruffled some feathers among traditionalist critics, it complemented larger trends in diplomatic culture that acknowledged the growing importance of the public point of view.

Publicizing the Theater of Diplomacy Statesmen and theorists of diplomacy also began to incorporate concern for the public in their writings in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Wicquefort, for example, emphasized the “public quality” of the diplomat, defining the ambassador as one to whom is given “the character of public representative.”85 The adjective “public” was a famously slippery term in the early modern period. Late seventeenth-­century discourse frequently attached it to any state official without necessarily implicating “the public” as an imagined constituency.86 Wicquefort, however, suggested a more profound relationship between the ambassador and the public. Unlike earlier authors who described diplomats’ power as bestowed exclusively by the sovereign, he declared that the ambassador derived his authority from two sources: the laws of nations and “public faith.”87 The idea that public faith or approval should ratify diplomatic matters also punctuates Secretary Colbert de Torcy’s Mémoires, published in the mid-­eighteenth century after their author’s death. Throughout his chronicle of the negotiations regarding the Spanish Succession, Torcy repeatedly invokes the “public” or the “people” as important arbiters whose assent was necessary to a successful outcome or whose opinion sanctioned certain actions on the part of the state. He writes, for example, that “the Public decided” that the late queen’s renunciation of the Spanish throne imposed no obligation on her children.88 Later, the ambassador in Madrid, the Marquis d’Harcourt, reports to him that “the general sentiment of the people is very much brought to favor France.”89 In the language of the Mémoires, the

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public (of France, of Spain, of Europe in general) functions as a diplomatic actor in that it judges and lends authority to the state’s positions. The posthumous publication of Torcy’s Mémoires throws into doubt whether the secretary indeed cared about public sentiment during the Spanish Succession crisis or whether he or an editor inserted these appeals to public authority retrospectively. Certainly, the authorizing force of public sentiment had long played a role in politicians’ actions and discourse, as J. A. W. Gunn discusses in his work on the “importance of reputation” among early seventeenth-­century statesmen.90 Even as they privately portrayed the masses as vulgar and fickle, politicians enhanced their images by publicizing accounts of the people’s admiration of them.91 Clearly, though, public sentiment gained importance over the century. Keith Michael Baker has traced the French state’s concern for public opinion to the 1750s (the decade of the Mémoires’ publication), when a longstanding but increasingly heated “politics of contestation” forced the government into making more explicit efforts to persuade the public to accept and approve government actions, gestures visible, for example, in the preambles to published edicts.92 In these discourses, “the notion of the ‘public’ came to function as the foundation for a new system of authority, the abstract source of legitimacy in a transformed political culture.”93 Yet the figure of the public appeared in a broader range of persuasive and polemical texts during the War of Spanish Succession. Pedro Losa Serrano and Rosa Maria López Campillo have demonstrated how Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and other pamphleteers swayed British public opinion, which in turn shaped the country’s foreign policy on this issue.94 In France, books and “libelles,” often issued under the fictitious imprint of Pierre Marteau, debated the right to the throne.95 This public discussion in print followed decades of state-­sponsored dissemination of international politics through official periodicals: the Mercure Galant blended triumphalist coverage of foreign wars with flattering portraits of the elite men and women who served the state as ambassadors abroad, while the Journal des Sçavans summarized developments in international law and theories of ambassadorship for an educated lay public.96 Introducteurs des ambassadeurs noted in their memoirs that they played a role in managing the accounts of diplomatic encounters in the court Gazette and monitoring coverage in rival news outlets. The public could also consume seemingly specialist texts such as Wicquefort’s L’ambassadeur et ses functions and Callières’s De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, whose multiple reprintings in the early

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eighteenth century, including in counterfeit editions, suggest a wide readership.97 Print coverage of diplomacy allowed French readers to inform themselves about the conduct of international relations and prepared them to react critically to the controversial campaigns of the end of Louis XIV’s reign and the peace proposals to resolve them. To an extent, foreign policy engendered an early version of a “public sphere” in which, through the medium of print, French—or perhaps European—readers “came together as a public” to consume (if not to debate) information about war and peace.98 They formed at least a “weak public” who had no direct power to affect political affairs but whose perceived opinion could influence the decisions of policymakers.99 The market for print about diplomatic events and practices serves as an index of the public interest in international relations. It is worth noting, though, that the appetites reflected in published materials do not always conjure the image of a reasoned public interested in political debate. The celebrity culture of ambassadors and foreign dignitaries, a focus on sociability and scandal, characterized many published accounts of international relations. One example of this “gallant” diplomatic output is a novel titled Histoire amoureuse et badine du congrès et de la ville d’Utrecht (The Playful and Amorous History of the Congress and City of Utrecht). Published in Liège shortly after the ratification of the Treaty of Utrecht, the anonymous work (attributed variously to Casimir or Augustus Freschot) compares itself to Bussy Rabutin’s scandalous roman-­à-­clef, the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, and proposes to disclose the salacious activities of ministers at the “joyous congress.”100 The novel focuses on the entertainments of the delegates in a town where, the narrator explains, everyone drinks more wine than in France and the young women are freer with their affections. Against this backdrop, shenanigans rather than negotiations occupy the diplomats’ attention and the bulk of the book. Although it is a narrative work, the novel relies heavily on theatrical themes and metaphors—masking, acting, and spectatorship—to depict the atmosphere of the congress. The engagement with theatricality manifests most concretely in the novel’s settings, which privilege spaces of theatrical entertainment. Much of the action takes place around a plaza called “Saint Marie Two Theaters,” established to host three troupes of traveling players from France and Flanders. Other ambassadors promenade on the Boulevard—“city-­dwellers’ nightly nook”—until the crowds there become so overwhelming that they begin to frequent the cabarets instead to meet and talk away from the official negotiating rooms.101 The wives and female

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relatives of the ambassadors host assemblies, parties, and particularly masked balls. The narrator advises that although “one might have reason to suppose” that plenipotentiaries would avoid such gatherings, “their character seeming incompatible with dance,” in fact luminaries such as “the bishop of Bristol, the abbé of Polignac, and Colonel Passionnei missed nary a one.”102 Dressing up in masquerade, viewing theatrical entertainments of various kinds, and hobnobbing with professional actors take up a significant portion of all the diplomatic characters’ time, and even their serious negotiation takes place in part in spaces of entertainment. Lucien Bély uses the Histoire amoureuse et badine as a document of the Utrecht negotiations to illustrate the importance of sociability and festivity in early modern diplomacy as well as to fill out the cultural background of the Congress of Utrecht in particular—its architecture, ambassadors’ entourages, and other aspects of day-­to-­day life.103 The novel may indeed provide glimpses into the reality of contemporary diplomatic culture. But these insights appear through the filter of an overarching satirical commentary on the place of entertainment in diplomats’ lives. The narrator explains the function of various entertainments as helping to increase the affective ties at the congress, eventually serving the cause of peace: “A peace treaty often giving occasion to speak of what contributes to a meeting of minds, it will doubtless strike you that love which is the link of this union must often be on the tongues of these brokers [entremetteurs] of peace.”104 Like much of the narration, this line is spiced with double entendres. Entremetteur echoes the French term for a pimp or brothel owner, and of course “love” and “union” often refer to carnal rather than strictly political relations throughout the novel.105 The lascivious subtext in the novel’s accounts of the role of entertainment at the congress reflects a broader cultural aesthetic of the early eighteenth century when aristocratic galanterie went hand in hand with sexual freedom. It also satirizes diplomatic society, perhaps especially its highest-­ranking sector, bringing down to earth the lofty goals of the congress by focusing on the baser activities that may have occupied delegates’ evenings. For example, the narrator reports that although the dramatic troupes had trouble filling the seats of their theaters, the actresses “would amuse the most curious [spectators] behind the scenes, by acting (playing) with their small hands.”106 The illustrious personalities of Utrecht, the pompous bishops and abbots, marquises and colonels, appear as empty figureheads more concerned with their own pleasure than statecraft. In this respect, the Histoire amoureuse et badine participates in a larger category of novels published in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth

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centuries and that provided disillusioning, intimate if fictional portraits of the powerful. The subgenre sometimes called pseudo-­memoirs, also analyzed by Bély, tantalized readers with otherwise restricted information about the personalities and love lives of the rulers.107 Like other “pseudo-­factual” fictions gaining popularity in the eighteenth century, these novels keep the reader “poised on a skeptical knife-­edge between acceptance [of the stories] as real and awareness that they are fictions.”108 The pleasure of (possible) disclosure is augmented by the pleasure of decoding and discernment. In the Histoire amoureuse et badine, the pleasure of discernment is achieved through techniques of literary masking. Throughout the book, passages on theater and masquerade entertainments develop a critical discourse on the aesthetic value of hiding truth beneath a veil of dissimulation. In one letter, for example, diplomats assemble at the Count of Tarouca’s residence to enjoy a private performance of Montfleury’s La femme juge et partie. After the play, “those of a speculative mind-­set believed there was something behind the choice, some hidden mystery.” They wondered whether the title character was meant to represent the queen of England, whose early agreement with the French meant that she acted as “judge” and arbiter of subsequent bilateral pacts reached at the congress.109 The suggestion that an entertainment could contain a disguised, quasi-­allegorical political commentary also works as a metafictional wink at readers straining to glimpse an authentic account of the congress through the “playful and amorous” narration. Advertising its status as a roman-­à-­clef, the novel begins with an avowal that possession of the key to decode characters’ identities is not necessary to ensure the reader’s enjoyment: “What is lacking in this edition is the key to recognize the people of whom are spoken,” admits the editorial voice who introduces the epistolary text, but since the names would not be familiar to those outside of aristocratic and courtly circles, this is of little consequence.110 Besides, the narrator claims, it is no more necessary to know the names of the real people exposed under pseudonyms than it is to “know actors by the names they bear outside of the theater.”111 The substance of the narrator’s claim is disingenuous: not only do the poetics of the satirical roman à clef rely on the desire to uncover the “true” identity of pseudonymous characters, but in fact at least one key to the Histoire amoureuse et badine was published shortly after the novel’s appearance, under the Pierre Marteau imprint.112 By comparing the diplomats to actors who wear their narrative disguises like character roles, the narrator constructs a relationship between the novel’s satirical pseudonymity

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and the theatrical theme that pervades the story. As in the Utrecht of the novel, what goes on behind the scenes—be it the ministrations of coquettish actresses toward lecherous foreign ministers in dressing rooms or political commentary veiled beneath a fictional story—is far more interesting than what plays upon the stage. The theatrical metaphor also fashions the novel’s readers as vicarious spectators—but as particularly active, critical spectators. It opens the possibility for discussion and debate among its readers about the identities of the statesmen depicted in its pages, the truth value of the novel’s sometimes scandalous accounts of their behavior, and (occasionally) the wisdom of the congress’s decisions about the European crisis. In fact, sequels published in the wake of the novel’s first appearance—including not only the key but also a “refutation” of its decoding—replicate in print the kind of critical discussion that the novel might have fostered.113 Whatever the reality of its consumption by real readers, the novel creates a scenario in which its audience might “come together as a public” to debate the congress.

Conclusion At the turn of the eighteenth century, diplomatic entertainments such as L’Europe galante and the Histoire amoureuse et badine as well as the writings of diplomats and theorists raised fundamental questions about the composition of the “audience” for international relations. Who has a stake in matters of war and peace? Who can participate in negotiations? Who is allowed to judge them? These implicit questions marked a major turning point in a diplomatic culture that had been rooted in notions of aristocratic exclusivity throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contrast to a tradition that had figured international society as a club for princes, interacting through the mediation of their noble ambassadors, these representations begin to imagine an international society that also encompasses those sovereigns’ reading and viewing subjects. Those outside state administration had little access to or influence on diplomatic affairs. Yet the public for diplomacy existed and exerted a subtle force, as Michael Warner puts it, “by virtue of being addressed.”114 Addresses to a “public” audience changed the terms of the implicit analogy between theater and diplomacy. Foreign princes through the mediation

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of their delegates once constituted the primary audience for diplomatic posturing. The engagement of the public, however amorphous, meant that the majority of the imagined spectators for diplomacy were no longer also the lead actors in the drama of international relations. A fourth wall, so to speak, emerged between the performers of and public for diplomatic affairs, anticipating modern formulations of “diplomatic theater” as so much meaningless pomp.

Conclusion

One hundred years after the Congress of Utrecht, ambassadors from across the European continent gathered once again, this time in Vienna, to reestablish a framework for lasting peace after the Napoleonic Wars. Amid negotiations, these delegates, like their counterparts a century before, participated in pageants, dances, masquerades, comedies, and concerts. Beethoven conducted his seventh symphony as well as a cantata composed specifically for the congress. Delegates promenaded through illuminations constructed in imitation of Europe’s most famous military monuments. Guests danced and feasted while wearing characteristically national dress. Aristocrats from Vienna joined visitors in a medievalist tournament performed with Lipizzaner stallions. The elaborate program of festivities recalled Old Regime diplomatic entertainments in their form and lavishness. Yet, as Brian Vick writes, they were “presented with a rather self-­conscious historicism and at times a slightly postmodern staginess as if everyone was in on the joke that, however grand and entertaining, this was not the real thing or the past brought back to life.”1 After the Revolution, the old aristocratic forms of sociability had lost much of their relevance for international political affairs. Although they gave an air of grandeur to the congress, contemporaries did not see them as intervening in negotiations or affecting relations among the delegates. Such festivities’ status as an empty “joke” is most visible in published satire of the congress, as in one print that poked fun at fey, pompous chief negotiators, depicting them as dancing diplomats whose favorite steps in the ballroom reflected their political moves in the negotiating room. The idea that diplomatic entertainments might constitute an ironic or purely decorative accoutrement to negotiations indicates how much diplomatic culture had changed since the Bayonne Conference or the Congress of Westphalia. Earlier spectacles’ contribution to diplomatic work might be understood in terms of the three primary activities of diplomacy as identified by Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne: representation, mediation,

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Figure 10. The Dancing Congress, 1815. BPK, Berlin. Art Resource, N.Y.

and negotiation.2 The representative capacity of diplomatic spectacles is clear. Understood as examples of a mimetic art form (“mute comedies,” “speaking paintings”), they used characterization, poetry, and allegory to depict ideas about war and peace. More fundamentally, entertainments projected the wealth, grandeur, and cultural capital of their patrons for the benefit of an international audience. At the same time, the audience took part in a symbolic representation of the order of international society by respecting rules of precedence in their seating arrangements and performance of courtesies. The event of a diplomatic entertainment produced an occasion for the enactment of mutual recognition and regard among sovereigns and their representatives. Within this politically charged performance environment, belief in the performing arts’ universality justified their use as an agent of mediation. The presence of Mercury in ballets such as the one performed at the Congress of Westphalia highlighted the entertainments’ presumed intermediary ­function. Joining the nonverbal languages of music, dance, and visual icono­ graphy to stylized rehearsals of the behaviors associated with the transnational

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aristocratic community, they offered a common ground, a neutral medium for playing out rivalries, disputes, and reasons for concord. On a practical level, theatrical entertainments provided space and time for sociable interactions among statesmen and diplomats, facilitating the kinds of intimate, back-­channel communications that informed official negotiations. Finally, the artistic complexity of multimedia entertainments—which layered several, often conflicting values in word, image, sound, and gesture—demanded that each viewer take part in the work of negotiating meaning. Encompassing the possibility of multiple interpretations suitable for different sectors of the audience, diplomatic entertainments served as a locus for negotiation about the nature of alliance and the form of international community. In the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, proliferating media representations of international affairs and changing demographics within the diplomatic corps displaced this kind of cultural work away from aristocratic forms of theatrical pageantry toward public spectacle and especially published imagery. These broadly diffused public reflections on diplomatic matters had little to do with real negotiations carried out by an increasingly professionalized class of diplomats. The evacuation of purpose from residual or retrograde diplomatic entertainments such as those performed at the Congress of Vienna allowed the notion of “diplomatic theater” to become a metaphor and to gain currency as a figure of abuse to characterize any kind of stylized, ceremonial display in international encounters. International relations specialist Sasson Sofer protests against such dismissals of diplomatic pomp and ceremony. He writes: “Diplomatic conventions have purpose and meaning. The protocol persists because it is an integral part of the diplomatic encounter.”3 His defense is rooted in an idealistic view of diplomacy that figures the diplomat as “the courtier of civilization” who acts as “a symbol of peace, a custodian of public virtues, and the flag bearer of the practices of a functional and civilized international society.”4 The nostalgic vocabulary of courtiership in his account of the diplomat’s function conjures Old Regime ideals of an embodiment of civility understood as an aesthetic construct as much as a set of virtues. It is a difficult model to reconcile with contemporary acts of diplomatic theatricality, such as John Kerry’s staging of an impromptu James Taylor concert to assure French counterparts that “they’ve got a friend” in the United States.5 Courtly sprezzatura and the je ne sais quoi are hard to realize through the kinds of transparently symbolic gestures engineered to travel across cultural boundaries and to appeal to a broad public audience.

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The modern form of cultural diplomacy that constitutes the legacy of earlier practices of diplomatic entertainment points toward a somewhat different theory of the instrumentality of theater and the performing arts than that espoused in previous centuries. Although the idea of soft power derives from an older logic of prestigious display and the rhetoric surrounding cultural diplomacy projects often echoes ancient assertions of the arts’ universality, economic and structural rationales underpin more recent policies. In the preface to a 2014 book outlining the implementation of a new cultural diplomacy program by the French state, for example, Laurent Fabius describes the ambition to build on “the legacy of a long tradition of cultural and scientific outreach beyond the borders of France” by constructing “a network of influence” through cultural, educational, and academic means.6 Called by Anne Gazeau-­Secret a “soft power à la française,” the “Cultures France” plan aims to maintain or strengthen France’s global influence through institutions and financial support for cultural and scientific international collaborations.7 With a cooperative framework, such a program acknowledges the diversity of the global international community and avoids positing a normative vision of cultural accomplishment that should serve as a new lingua franca.8 This means that the “influence” policymakers hope to produce is understood to derive from the creation of durable institutions for collaboration and above all from flows of funding rather than from any power supposedly inherent in artistic or intellectual endeavors shared across borders. The contrast between early modern and modern approaches to using the performing arts in diplomatic relations illustrates how and to what degree understandings of the arts’ efficacy are specific to particular historical and cultural contexts. Accordingly, this book offers no grand theory of theater and the performing arts’ effectiveness for international politics. Still, comparisons across time sometimes illuminate the unarticulated assumptions that underlie our own, contemporary practices. In a lecture titled Drama in a Dramatised Society, Raymond Williams compared the pomp of old monarchal displays of power to the preening of politicians in the age of mass media: “It is often genuinely difficult to believe in any part of this pervasive dramatisation. If we see it in another period or from another place, it visibly struts and frets, its machinery starts audibly creaking. In moments of crisis, we sometimes leave this social theatre or, as easily, fall asleep in it. But these are not only roles and scenarios; they are conventions.”9 The conduct of political life relies on conventions that all but beg to be dismissed as mere theater. Yet, Williams

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remarks, “these conventions are not abstract. They are profoundly worked and reworked in our actual living relationships. They are our ways of seeing and knowing, which every day we put into practice.”10 As long as practices of performance and spectatorship continue to structure modes of relation within and between polities, theater and the performing arts remain vitally linked to political life.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Recent LexisNexis searches yielded 1,010 results for “diplomatic theater” or “theater of diplomacy,” 1,598 results for “diplomatic dance,” and 362 occurrences of the phrase “concert of nations.” For a history of the “concert of nations” expression, see Frédéric Ramel, “Perpetual Peace and the Idea of ‘Concert’ in Eighteenth-­Century Thought,” in Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, ed. Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 125–45. 2. Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, ed. Ernest Nys, trans. Gordon Jennings Laing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 2:147. 3. “Dans tout le commerce du Monde, il n’y a pas un personnage plus Comique que l’Ambassadeur.” Abraham de Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, dernière édition, augmentée des réflexions sur les mémoires pour les ambassadeurs (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1690), 2:3. 4. “Un ambassadeur ressemble en quelque manière à un comédien exposé sur le théâtre aux yeux du public pour y jouer de grands rôles.” François de Callières, François de Callières: L’art de négocier en France sous Louis XIV, ed. Jean-­Claude Waquet (Paris: Éd. Rue d’Ulm, 2005), 189. 5. For different accounts of the emergence of resident ambassadors in the Italian states, see Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), 55–100; Daniela Frigo, Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory, and Administration, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 37–60. 6. J. G. A. Pocock, “Some Europes and Their History,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center and Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66. See also Hamish Scott, “Diplomatic Culture in Old Regime Europe,” in Cultures of Power in Europe During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58–85. Scott, however, contends that “the diplomatic old regime” did not truly end until World War I. 7. Roy C. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 6, 74. 8. See, for example, Stephen Orgel, Spectacular Performances: Essays on Theatre, Imagery, Books, and Selves in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Jean-­Marie Apostolidès, Le roi-­machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981); Kate Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago

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Press, 2005); Marie-­Claude Canova-­Green, La politique-­spectacle au Grand Siècle: Les rapports franco-­anglais (Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1993); Elizabeth Gold­ ring and J. R. Mulryne, Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics, and Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); and J. R. Mulryne and Helen Watanabe-­O’Kelly, eds., Europa ­Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 9. “Un seul des Spectacles que le Roy donne à la Cour . . . fait voir à ces memes Estrangers ce qu’un Roy de France peut faire dans son Royaume.” Samuel Chappuzeau, Le théâtre françois, ed. Christopher J. Gossip (Tübingen: Narr, 2009), 205. 10. Arne Spohr, “Concealed Music in Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial,” in Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, ed. Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 19–43. 11. Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), x. 12. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, ed. Richard Schechner (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), 34–35. 13. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-­Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 96. 14. Ibid. 15. He approvingly quotes Jean Desmarets’s preface to the Ballet de la prospérité des armes to affirm that a people “doit se réjouir . . . après des inquiétudes.” Claude-­François Ménestrier, Des ballets anciens et modernes selon les règles du théâtre (Paris: René Guignard, 1682), sig. ẽiiiv. 16. Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center and Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33, 45. See also Andreas Osiander, Before the State: Systemic Political Change in the West from the Greeks to the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 17. Martin Wight calls the religious wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the “first fracture in the states-­system.” Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), 36. 18. Robert Jackson, Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations: From Anarchy to Cosmopolis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 83. 19. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 13. 20. “Une conformité du corps à l’ame, et de l’ame à la Musique.” “L’Harmonie unit parfaictement toutes choses.” Guillaume Colletet, “Le Ballet de l’harmonie,” in Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri III à Louis XIV (1581–1652) recueillis et publiés, d’après les éditions originales, ed. Paul Lacroix (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), 4:209, 219. 21. Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2–3. 22. Ibid., 5. 23. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24. Richard Watson, Descartes’s Ballet: His Doctrine of the Will and His Political Philosophy (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), 42. 25. Pierre-­Yves Beaurepaire, Le mythe de l’Europe française au XVIIIe siècle: Diplomatie, culture et sociabilités au temps des Lumières (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2007). 26. Scott, “Diplomatic Culture,” 70.

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27. John Watkins, “Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 1. 28. To cite just a few examples: Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox, Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Hampton, Fictions of Embassy; Michael Auwers, “The Gift of Rubens: Rethinking the Concept of Gift-­Giving in Early Modern Diplomacy,” European History Quarterly 43, no. 3 (July 1, 2013): 421–41; John Walton, “The Era of Louis XIV: A Turning Point in the History of Diplomatic Gifts,” in Versailles: French Court Style and Its Influences (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 199–213; Michael Levin, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-­Century Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 183–99; Maria Petrova, “The Diplomats of Catherine II as Cultural Intermediaries: The Case of the Princes Golitsyn,” in Intermédiaires culturels = Cultural Intermediaries. Séminaire international des jeunes dix-­huitiémistes: 2010, Belfast, ed. Vanessa Alayrac-­Fielding and Ellen R. Welch, Études Internationales sur le Dix-­Huitième Siècle 15 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015), 83–100; Nancy Um and Leah Clark, “The Art of Embassy: Situating Objects and Images in the Early Modern Diplomatic Encounter,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 3–18.

Chapter 1 1. For different accounts of the tapestries’ provenance, see Frances Yates, The Valois Tapestries (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1959), 41–45; R. Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici (London: Longman, 1998), 244; and Pascal-­François Bertrand, “A New Method of Interpreting the Valois Tapestries, Through a History of Catherine de Médicis,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 1 (2006–2007): 37. 2. Yates, The Valois Tapestries, 120–21. 3. Recueil des choses notables, qui ont esté faites à Bayonne, à l’entrevue du Roy Très Chrestien Charles neufieme de ce nom, de la Roine sa Très Honorée Mere, avec la Roine Catholique sa Sœur (Paris: Vascosan, 1566). A letter from French official Bourdin to the mareschal de Montmorency back in Paris testifies: “We have put an end to all our triumphs and festivities, which were sumptuous, magnificent as never before. The details will become widely known, because as I understand the Queen has had them put into a script [into writing] which she will have published.” Catherine de’ Medici, Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, ed. Hector De la Ferrière (Paris: Imp. nationale, 1885), 2:298. 4. Abel Jouan, Recueil et discours du voyage du Roy Charles IX . . . faict & recueilly par Abel Jouan l’un des serviteurs de sa Majesté (Paris: Jean Bonfons, 1566). On the book’s publication, see Victor Graham and W. McAllister Johnson, The Royal Tour of France by Charles IX and Catherine de’ Medici: Festivals and Entries, 1564–6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 5. Subsequent citations of Jouan’s text refer to the edition provided in Graham and Johnson’s book. 5. Yates, The Valois Tapestries, 52. 6. Strong, Art and Power, 98–109. 7. Laurent Odde, “Politic Magnificence: Deciphering the Performance of the French and Spanish Rivalry During the Entrevue at Bayonne,” Sixteenth Century Journal 46, no. 1 (2015): 29–52. 8. Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 249. 9. The phrase “concordia discors” comes from one of Horace’s epistles: “Quae mare compescant causae, quid temperet annum, / Stellae sponte sua iussaene vagentur et errent, /

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Quid premat obscurum lunae, quid proferat orbem, / Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors . . . ?” (What causes hold the sea in check, what rules the year, whether stars roam at large of their own will or by law, what hides the moon’s disk in darkness, what brings it into light, what is the meaning and what the effects of Nature’s jarring harmony?; epistle 12, vv. 16–19). Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, with an English Translation, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 328–29. 10. On the sixteenth-­ century reception of Heroclitus’s ideas through translations of Plutarch, pseudo-­Plutarch, Aristotle, Cicero, and other commentators, see Françoise Joukovsky, Le feu et le fleuve: Héraclite et la Renaissance française (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), 14–24. Henri Estienne included fragments thought to be written by Heraclitus in his anthology of pre-­Socratic writings, Poesis philosophica, in 1573. Ibid., 10–11. 11. Historians consider this treaty to have consolidated Spanish dominance in Europe. Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 4th ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 63. 12. John O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 232–35; Alain Tallon, La France et le Concile de Trente (1518– 1563) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1997), 337–85. 13. Traditionally the age of majority for French kings was fourteen. 14. For full accounts of the tour as a whole, see Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France; Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe, and Daniel Nordman, Un tour de France royal: Le voyage de Charles IX, 1564–1566 (Paris: Aubier, 1984); Pierre Champion, Catherine de Médicis présente à Charles IX son royaume, 1564–1566 (Paris: B. Grasset, 1937); and Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici, 101–10. 15. Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 11. 16. For a history of the negotiations leading up to the summit, see Jean-­Michel Ribera, Diplomatie et espionnage: Les ambassadeurs du roi de France auprès de Philippe II du Traité du Cateau-­Cambrésis (1559) à la mort d’Henri III (1589) (Paris: Honoré-­Champion, 2007), 411–34. The dispatches of the French ambassador to Spain, Jean Ébrard, seigneur de Saint-­Sulpice, related to those negotiations may be found in Edmond Cabié, Ambassade en Espagne de Jean Ébrard, seigneur de Saint-­Sulpice de 1562 à 1565 et mission de ce diplomate dans le même pays en 1566 (Albi: Nouguiès, 1903), 337–89 17. Bernerd C. Weber, “The Conference of Bayonne, 1565: An Episode in Franco-­Spanish Diplomacy,” Journal of Modern History 11, no. 1 (1939): 7. 18. For a summary of correspondence from envoy Don Francès de Alava to Philip relating to his discovery of the talks with the Ottomans, see Joseph Marie Bruno Constantin Kervyn de Lettenhove, La Conférence de Bayonne en 1565 (Brussels: Imprimeur de l’Académie Royale de Belgique, 1883), 5–7. It seems that the English envoy knew about the Turkish visitor sooner. He noted in his “Journal of Affairs in France—June and July 1565” on June 12 (No. 1279): “The Ambassadors of the Turk, the Pope, and the Venetians have arrived,” and on June 18: “The King dined with the Turkish Ambassador at a nunnery called S. Bernard, near Bayonne.” Joseph Stevenson, ed., Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1870), 394–401, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​/foreign​/vol7​/pp394​-­­401. 19. In a June 7, 1565, letter, the English ambassador Sir Thomas Smith, reporting on his conversation with Catherine regarding a potential marriage between Elizabeth I and Charles, took care to note in his dispatch: “The chamber was full of princes of the blood and other nobles; but none stood so near as to understand anything that was said, saving the Duke of Orleans, and he gave no great ear to it.” Ibid., 378–94, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​ /foreign​/vol7​/pp378​-­­394.

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20. Champion, Catherine de Médicis présente à Charles IX son royaume, 286. 21. The accounts for the entertainment are listed in “Deux Volumes de L’argenterie Du Roy MVcLXV,” n.d., KK 130, Archive Nationale, Paris. 22. “Jamais la Noblesse Françoise ne fit une plus belle dépense, la Reine le souhaitant ainsi: jamais on ne dépensa tant en festins, en spectacles, en tournois, en bals & en toutes ces sortes de divertissemens.” He continues to explain this all occurred “afin de faire voir les richesses & la puissance de la France à une nation superbe, & d’opposer la vanité Françoise à l’ostentation Espagnolle.” Jacques-­Auguste de Thou, Histoire universelle, de Jacques Auguste de Thou (London [Paris], 1734), 5:34. 23. Margaret McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 32. See also Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici, 220–45; David Buch, Dance Music from the Ballets de Cour, 1575–1651: Historical Commentary, Source Study, and Transcriptions from the Philidor Manuscripts (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon, 1993), xiv 24. “Deux fois la sepmaine, tenir la salle du bal, car j’ay ouy dire au Roi vostre grand-­père qu’il falloit deux choses pour vivre en repos avec les François et qu’ils aimassent leur Roy: les tenir joyeux, et occuper à quelque exercise.” Medici, Lettres, 2:92. 25. “Je sçay que plusieurs en France blasmarent ceste despance par trop superflue; mais la Reyne disoit qu’elle le faisoit pour monstrer à l’Estranger que la France n’estoit si totalement ruinée et pauvre, à cause des guerres passées, comme il estimoit.” Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Recueil des dames, poésies et tombeaux, ed. Étienne Vaucheret (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 53. 26. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29. 27. François Rouget, “Jean-­Antoine de Baïf et l’Académie du Palais (1576),” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 109, no. 2 (2009): 385–402. See also Frances Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1947), 46. 28. Georgia Cowart, French Musical Thought, 1600–1800 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), 1. 29. For a comprehensive overview of this tradition of music theory from antiquity through the Renaissance, see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 67–100. See also Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 34. 30. “Et que l’opinion des plusieurs grands Personnages, tant Legislateurs que Philosophes anciens ne soit à mépriser, à sçavoir qu’il importe grandement pour les mœurs des Citoyens d’une Ville que la Musique courante & usitée au Pays soit retenuë sous certaines loix, dautant que la pluspart des esprits des hommes se conforment & comportent, selon qu’elle est; de façon que où la Musique est desordonnée, là volontiers les moeurs sont dépravez, & où elle est bien ordonnée, la sont les hommes bien moriginez [sic].” Transcribed as appendix 1 in Yates, The French Academies, 319. See pp. 14–35 for a thorough account of the academy’s founding and ratification by the French Parlement and the University of Paris. 31. “L’elevation d’ame par la musique.” Pontus de Tyard, Solitaire second, ed. Cathy M. Yandell (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 74. 32. Boutier, Dewerpe, and Nordman, Un tour de France royal, 96. The absence of Protestants was clearly important to the Spanish delegation. For example, Catherine was going to invite Jeanne d’Albret and the prince of Condé to the celebrations but changed her plans because of vociferous objections from Spanish diplomats in negotiations prior to the event. Bertrand Haan, L’amitié entre princes: Une alliance franco-­espagnole au temps des Guerres de Religion, 1560– 1570 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 111.

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33. “Ayer partió S.M. á las 12 dadas, llegó á la ria, donde estavan aguardándola el rey y reyna; metiéronse en unas barcas . . . y passáron de la parte d’España; apeáron en tierra, donde se reciviéron con grande amor.” Duke of Alba to Philip II, June 15, 1565, reprinted in Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Papiers d’État du Cardinal de Granvelle, d’après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Besançon, ed. Charles Weiss (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1852), 9:282–83. 34. Phayre to Cecil, Madrid, June 22, 1565, no. 1262, in Stevenson, Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 394–401. 35. “Moytié de France et moytié d’Espagne.” Anonymous account titled “L’entrée du Roy Charles neufieme qu’il fist en sa ville de Bayonne le dimanche troisieme jour de juin l’an mil cinq cens soixante et quatre,” reproduced in appendix XIII in Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 285. 36. “A la mode d’Espagne.” Ibid., 286. 37. “Entre les hauts rempars des pointes Pyrénées / Est enclos un païs de terres fortunées, / Païs delicieux, où fait heureux sejour / Une paisible gent sous le regne d’Amour.” Ibid., 349. 38. Ibid., 335. 39. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 369. 40. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 13. 41. Helen Watanabe-­O’Kelly, “Tournaments in Europe,” in Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe (1580–1750) = Histoire du spectacle en Europe (1580–1750), ed. Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe-­O’Kelly (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 593–639. 42. As Victor Graham and W. M. Johnson point out, the Bayonne festivities reprised many of the features of the Fontainebleau entertainments but replaced mythological themes with chivalric ones. Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 29. 43. “Le vray exercice des Nobles.” Brief discours de la joyeuse Entrevue de Tres-­Haute et Tres-­ Excellente Elizabeth de France, Royne Catholique d’Espaigne, ès environs de la ville de Bayonne (Paris: Guillaume Nyverd, 1565). This pamphlet consists of just six leaves and ends with an advertisement for more on the interview. Reproduced as appendix 14 in Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 291. 44. “Plusieurs Chevaliers et Dames de diverses nations.” Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 333. 45. Ibid., 336. 46. “Lesdictz chevaliers quy couroyent la bague n’estoyent armés mais bien masqués, les uns habillez à l’espagnolle, les autres à l’italienne. . . . Les autres estoyent vestuz fort magnifiquement et diversement.” Ibid., 286. 47. “Bestido al traje de las naciones que se saben.” The writer begins his account by noting that he writes “con dos frayles de la Victoria, que venian de tener capitulo” (with two Minim friars who came to establish a chapter), which might suggest that he was a cleric of some kind. In his account, he was able to identify several Spanish and French aristocrats by name, which implies he traveled in elite circles. Reprinted in ibid., 314. 48. “Todos corrieron muy bien y en cavallo muy buenos.” This writer describes the horsemen as wielding “cañas” (canes) rather than lances (ibid.). His choice of words indicates that he was assimilating the ring-­tilt joust to the juego de cañas (game of canes), which was the most popular form of equestrian performance practiced at the Spanish court in this time. For a discussion of the juego de cañas and its significance for Spanish identity in this period, see Barbara Fuchs, Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of

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Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 94–102. See also Teofilo Ruiz, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp. 210–45. 49. Although all of the named participants could be classified as either French or Spanish, some had ties to other European states. For example, Ludovico Gonzaga, identified in French accounts by his French title, the duc de Nevers, was also the “brother of the Duke of Mantua” (Guglielmo Gonzaga) as the Spanish account reminds us. 50. “El duque de Alba, apadrino al rey, salio vestido con calças blancas y jubon de rraso blanco betados de oro y plata y casaca de tela de oro encarnado y sombrero de terciopelo encarnado y muchas plumas blancas salieron con el otros siete grandes del reyno vestidos de la misma manera que el duque hasiendo el oficio de maestre de campo” (The Duke of Alba, supporter of the king, came out dressed in white hose and a doublet of white satin threaded with gold and silver and a coat of red-­gold cloth and a red velvet hat with many white feathers. With him came out the seven other greats of the kingdom dressed in the same way as the duke, having the title of Master of the Camp). Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 314. 51. “La quatriesme [course] feut la course des Dames.” Ibid., 286. The ring-­tilt offered equestrians a difficult challenge by which to prove their mastery of the discipline. Each in turn took his horse galloping down the track at high speed while aiming to spear his lance through a small ring suspended from a scaffold. 52. “Si tost qu’il l’eust pris et receu, il l’alla presenter et donner à une Demoyselle Hespaignole, qui est fille de la Duchesse d’Essyma, et des plus favorites de la Royne Catholique.” “Ample discours de l’arrivee de la Royne catholique soeur du Roy à sainct Jehan de Lus” (Paris: Jean Dallier, 1565), in ibid., 308. 53. “Leurs Majestez furent adverties qu’il estoit arrivé plusieurs Chevaliers et Dames de diverses nations, qui desiroyent Chevalerie du Roy: et avant que d’avoir cest honneur, vouloyent faire preuves de leur adresse de leur valeur en la presence de sa Majesté: et partant qu’ils la supplioyent leur donner seur acces en sa Cour, et camp franc et libre, où ils peussent faire lesdites preuves en presence de leursdites Majestez et des Chevaliers et des Dames de leurs Cours.” Ibid., 333. 54. For Turner, this “subjunctive mood” characterizes “most cultural performances.” His understanding of performance’s subjunctivity is related to his earlier explanation of its liminality. Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, 101. 55. In fact, Turner’s introduction of this concept occurs in the context of his analysis of Japanese courtly performance genres (tea ceremony, Noh drama, the daily rituals of court life as imagined in Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji). 56. “Qui le croira jamais, qui pourra jamais croire / Un si estrange cas? O Deesse Memoire / Grave de ton cizeau dans le siecle à venir / D’un si estrange cas l’estrange souvenir.” Recueil des choses notables, 13r. Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 338. 57. For an overview of the “pastoral-­spectacle” from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, see Daniel Paquette, “Histoire de la pastorale en musique,” in Le genre pastoral en Europe du XVe au XVIIe siècle, ed. Claude Longeon (Saint-­Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­ Étienne, 1980), 363–70. 58. Louis E. Auld, “ ‘Dealing in Shepherds’: The Pastoral Ploy in Nascent French Opera,” in French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989), 55. 59. Linking the pastoral banquet to entertainments staged by Catherine at her pleasure dairy in Mi-­voie, in the gardens of Fontainebleau, Martin concludes: “Although courtiers may have resented the queen mother’s influence on other occasions, in these moments they were willing to suspend disbelief, participate in the ritual, and embody or imbibe—literally, in the

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form of milk—her soothing message.” Meredith Martin, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-­Antoinette (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 63. 60. “Toutes ces tables servies par troupes de diverses bergères habillées de toilles d’or et de satin, diversement, selon les habits divers de toutes les provinces de France. Lesquelles bergères, à la descente de magnifiques batteaux . . . s’estoient trouvé chaque trouppe en un pré . . . chaque troupe dansant à la façon de son pays.” Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires de Marguerite de Valois (Toulouse: Éditions Ombres, 1994), 15–16. 61. He notes the performers were “vestidas . . . á la pastoril,” “bailando al modo pastoril,” and that the waiters at the banquet were also “bestidos de abito pastoril.” Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 317. 62. “Je ne crain plus le retour de vos maux, / Puis je voy le François et l’Ibere / Joincts et unis, non point comme estrangiers, / Mais tout ainsi que deux freres Bergiers.” Ibid., 377. 63. “Ce fleuve et bois. . . . jusqu’au ciel vostre joye sentir.” Ibid., 378. 64. “Jambons de Magence, et langues de Boeuf, Servelar, Pastez de toutes sortes de Fruicts, Salades, confitures, et grande abondance de bon vin.” Reprinted in Ibid., 115. 65. “Con la mayor armonia de musica y con todos los generos de ynstrumentis que se saben. . . . con mucha armonia de musica de muchos instrumentos.” Ibid., 316–17. 66. “Che avanzò ogni dolcezza.” Ibid., 323. I am grateful to Maureen Melita for help with the translation of this text. 67. “Lasciò gli animi de ogn’uno più tosto desiderosi che tal canto durasse sempre.” Ibid., 325. 68. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 15. 69. “La mas linda ynbincion que asta oy sea visto . . . el mas lindo artificio que sea viso . . . todas las flores que se pudieron imaginar hechas de seda.” Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 315. 70. Paul Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 11–13. 71. “Ubo grandes desgracias y caydas de damas y señoras y de particulares.” Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 318. 72. “La confusion de la retraite . . . apporta le lendemain autant de bons contes pour rire que ce magnifique appareil de festin avait apporté de contentements.” Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires, 16. 73. “The emphasis is seen to be clearly focused on the concept of the pre-­eminence of Charles IX and his court” (Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 32). “En effet, Bayonne a été tout autant une opération de politique intérieure qu’un événement diplomatique.” Boutier, Dewerpe, and Nordman, Un tour de France royal, 316. 74. Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 373. 75. “J’ay mon siege et demeurance / Au royal cueur de Charles Roy de France.” Ibid., 364. 76. Latin remained the customary diplomatic language, but, as a practical matter, diplomats and sovereigns used whichever language in which they shared sufficient proficiency. Joycelyne Russell, Diplomats at Work: Three Renaissance Studies (Gloucestershire, N.H.: A. Sutton, 1992), 23–41. 77. Henry Kamen, The Duke of Alba (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 63. In Alba’s case, his lack of French-­language skills may have stemmed from his distaste for French culture. Kamen writes: “Throughout his life he allowed himself the liberty of making disparaging

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remarks about anyone who was not Castilian. His favorite targets were the French, the Italians, and the English.” Ibid., 159. 78. As a counterexample, spectators at the ballet staged for the visit of Polish ambassadors to Paris in 1573 received a libretto with Latin translations of the poetry and song lyrics included in the performance. See Ellen R. Welch, “Rethinking the Politics of Court Spectacle: Performance and Diplomacy Under the Valois,” in French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory, ed. Michael Meere (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015), 101–16. 79. Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 324. 80. “La volanté et zèle que avons à nostre religion.” Medici, Lettres, 2:297. 81. “Nous n’avons parlé durant nostredicte enterveue que de caresses, festoyemens et bonnes chères et en termes généraulx du désir que chascun a à la continuation de la bonne amitié d’entre Leurs Majestez et à la conservation de la paix dentre leurs subjectz, comme aussi à la vérité le principal fondement et occasion de ladicte entreveue n’a esté que pour avoir ceste consolation pendant que nous estions prochains de ces frontières de veoir ladicte royne ma fille et de n’en perdre une si bonne occasion.” Ibid., 2:298. 82. “Grandes caresses et allegresses. . . . Ladicte Dame honora la Royne sa mere grandement, et se baissa fort bas pour luy baiser les mains, ce que la Royne mere ne voulut permettre ne souffrir, et la relevant la baisa et embrassa, par redoublemens affectionnez, comme d’une mere.” Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 291. 83. On the ubiquity of the language of friendship in early modern diplomatic discourse, see Haan, L’amitié entre princes, 169. 84. “La buena correspondencia entre V. M. y él [Charles IX], y que esta fuesse de manera que todo el mundo la entiendiese, y de aquí quedasse tan firme que nadie pudiese dudar della, y que se atajassen cosas que, aunque eran pequeñas, davan que pensar al mundo.” Granvelle, Papiers d’État du Cardinal de Granvelle, 9:302. 85. “Les entreveues . . . avaient pour but de satisfaire au désir qu’éprouvaient toutes deux de se voir et de jouir de l’affectueuse tendresse qu’il doit y avoir et qu’il y a d’ordinaire entre une fille et une mère” (Medici, Lettres, 2:301). Jean-­Michel Ribera affirms: “L’entrevue qui devait rendre un témoignage éclatant de l’amitié entre les deux couronnes fit ressentir aux différentes protagonistes combien les liens étaient superficiels entre ces deux pays. . . . La paix que l’on voulait tant mettre en évidence grâce à la rencontre royale apparut comme une paix de circonstance et non comme l’expression sincère de relations fraternelles.” Ribera, Diplomatie et espionnage, 441. 86. “Servira à fortiffier de plus en plus la parfaicte amitié jà establie par ceste alliance entre nous et le roy catholicque son mary et à conserver et perpétuer la bonne paix du voysineance de noz Estatz et subjecttz, qui est à la vérité le principal fondement et occasion pour laquelle nous avons d’ung cousté et d’aultre recherché cette entreveue. . . . Durant tout le temps de ladicte entreveue il ne s’est parlé que de caresses, plaisirs, et bonnes chères et rien plus avant que la continuation de nostre mutuelle amytié en termes généraulx et accoustumés entre amys qui n’ont rien à rechercher les ungs des aultres.” Medici, Lettres, 2:300–301. 87. See also Haan, L’amitié entre princes, 118. 88. “Il ne faut point doubter qu’il ne se fera, là-­dessus, beaucoup de faulx bruitz, conceuz et produictz, ou des soupsons et déffiance que aulcuns peuvent avoir légèrement prins de ladicte entrevue.” Medici, Lettres, 2:300. 89. Denis Crouzet, La nuit de la Saint-­Barthélemy: Un rêve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 10. 90. Ibid., 339.

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91. “Afin de mieux couvrir les desseins secrets qu’il devoit communiquer au Roi et à la Reine.” Thou, Histoire universelle, 5:34. 92. “Il sembloit que le Roi n’avoit fait venir Elisabeth sa sœur que pour lui procurer toute sorte de plaisirs. La Reine mère étoit bien aise qu’on eût cette idée.” Ibid., 5:35. 93. They show that several Protestant chroniclers referred to the tour with the expression “voyage de Bayonne.” Boutier, Dewerpe, and Nordman, Un tour de France royal, 61–62. 94. Granvelle, Papiers d’État du Cardinal de Granvelle, 9:309–11. 95. “No se podía hablar sin que se oyese y estaba el mundo de gente en ella para salir a la fiesta que se hacía en la plaza.” Fernando Álvarez de Toledo Duque de Alba, Epistolario del III Duque de Alba, ed. Jacobo duque de Berwick de Alba (Madrid, 1952), 1:599. 96. “El rey de Francia á hecho grandes celosos porque los ha conbidado á cenar uno á uno cada noche á su mesa.” Graham and Johnson, The Royal Tour of France, 319. 97. For a discussion of Queen Elizabeth I of England’s use of intimacy in her relations with ambassadors, see Janette Dillon, The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96–100. 98. Lucien Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Fayard, 1990), 55–84. 99. See Guzman De Silva to Philip II, in Calendar of State Papers Spain (Simancas), vol. 1, 1558–1567, ed. Martin Hume (London, 1892), 1:432–42, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​ -­­state​-­­papers​/simancas​/vol1​/pp432​-­­442​.a 100. “La Reine mère alloit souvent trouver la Reine sa fille pendant la nuit . . . et elle n’étoit vûë que de ceux qui étoient dans sa confidence. Là, elle conféroit en secret avec Elizabeth et avec le duc d’Albe, qui avoit de pleins pouvoirs du Roi d’Espagne.” Thou, Histoire universelle, 5:35. 101. Bertrand, “A New Method of Interpreting the Valois Tapestries.” 102. Strong, Art and Power, 102.

Chapter 2 1. “Que ces regles de Ceremonies, et de Complimens sont si exactement observées, et nos Charges si attachées et obligées à les entretenir que qui peche en un seul Point, il manque au tout.” “Extrait d’une Lettre de Monsieur de Leon Brulart, de Venise du 23 Decembre 1611,” in Divers Memoirs de Rangs & Séances, Ceremonies Diverses, fol. 7v, Dupuy 478, BnF, Paris. 2. “Rome veritablement est un theatre sur lequel il faut maintenir hautement la dignité du nom de sa Majesté et ainsy il est important de n’y rien alterer, mais a l’egard des autres Ambassadeurs, il n’y devroit avoir aucune difficulté.” “Lettres de M. Du Houssay, Ambassadeur à Venise En 1638, 1639, 1640 Ecrites a M Le Marechal d’Estrées à Rome,” fol. 404v, Ms Français 4068, BnF, Paris. 3. William Roosen, “Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach,” Journal of Modern History 52 (1980): 461. 4. Hamilton and Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy, 70. 5. Michael J. Levin, “A New World Order: The Spanish Campaign for Precedence in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History 6, no. 3 (2002): 233–64. 6. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 7. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 9. 8. Ibid., 17. 9. V. Ė. Grabar, De legatis et legationibus tractatus varii. Bernardi de Rosergio Ambaxiatorum Brevilogus, Hermolai Barbari De Officio Legati, Martini Garrati Laudensis De legatis maxime

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principum. Ex aliis excerpta qui eadem de re usque ad annum MDCXXV scripserunt (Dorpat: Mattiesen, 1906), esp. 10–12. 10. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 55. 11. “I have found by experience that these gifts and the knack of doing everything well confer honour and reputation even upon men of good birth.” Translation by Ninian Hill Thomason, reprinted in Geoff Berridge, Diplomatic Classics: Selected Texts from Commynes to Vattel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 49–50. 12. Juan Antonio de Vera y Zuñiga y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, divisé en 3 parties, trans. Nicolas Lancelot (Paris: Augustin Courbe, 1643), 353; Vera, El Enbaxador (1620; reprint, Madrid: Cuatrocientos Ejemplares, 1947), 1:126. 13. “Essayant de divertir le plus dextrement qu’il pourra les matieres & les discours qui ne seront pas bien de son intelligence” (Vera, Le parfait ambassadeur, 438). “Procurando divertir las materias i platicas de que no mui dueño.” Vera, El Enbaxador, 2, 8. 14. Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, 2:143. See also Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 187–88. 15. Hamilton and Langhorne explicitly link the ambassador’s need to lie and conceal to the emergence of the system of resident ambassador. Hamilton and Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy, 43. 16. See also Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 108–20. 17. “Ut ea faciant, dicant, consulant et cogitent quae ad optimum suae civitatis statum et retinendum et amplificandum pertinere posse judicent” (Grabar, De legatis et legationibus tractatus varii, 66). See also the summary in Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 108–18. 18. The bon mot was inscribed in the album of Christopher Fleckmore in 1604, quoted in Izaak Walton, “The Life of Henry Wotton,” in Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, or, A Collection of Lives, Letters, Poems; with Characters of Sundry Personages: And Other Incomparable Pieces of Language and Art. By the Curious Pensil of the Ever Memorable Sr Henry Wotton Kt, Late, Provost of Eton Colledg. (London: Printed by Thomas Maxey, for R. Marriot, G. Bedel, and T. Garthwait, 1651), sig. C1v. It is telling that this quote circulates in English, where the verb “to lie” has an evocative double meaning. In his Latin sentence, Wotton used the verb “mendare,” to tell lies. 19. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 79. Of course, Goffman’s examples come from everyday, modern life and entail all the members of the “team” performing in the same space and the same time. In diplomacy, the team’s most important member—the prince—is absent during the live performance but has provided the instructions for it. The analogy is still useful, I think, because it allows us to see clearly the nature of the cooperation between ambassador and sovereign and their sharp self-­distinction from the “audience” at the foreign court. 20. Translation by Christian E. Detmold, reprinted in Berridge, Diplomatic Classics, 41. 21. Ibid., 52. 22. Ibid., 50. Jean Hotman cited Guicciardini on this point in his 1603 work L’ambassadeur (Paris: s.n., 1603), 47. 23. “He is absolutely obligated to his lord the prince” (Assolutamente al prencipe suo signore è obligato; la volonté de son Maistre est absoluë). Torquato Tasso, Prose, ed. Ettore Mazzali (Milano: R. Ricciardi, 1959), 66; Tasso, L’esprit, ou l’ambassadeur, le secrétaire et le père de famille: Traittez excellens de Torquato Tasso, mis en nostre langue Par I. Baudoin, trans. Jean Baudoin (Paris: A. Courbé, 1632), 310. Moreover, all the ambassador’s words and deeds should be motivated for a desire for peace—an idealizing view that echoes Du Rosier’s portrait from a

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century and a half earlier. See the whole section on ambassadorship, Tasso, Prose, 56–73; Tasso, L’esprit, ou l’ambassadeur, 267–356. See also Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 54–62. 24. Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, 2:175–76. 25. Ibid., 2:147. 26. Ellen McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King: Sovereignty and Mediation in Seventeenth-­ Century France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 111. 27. Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, 2:180. 28. “L’Ambassade & la Comedie sont choses dissemblables.” Hotman, L’ambassadeur, 61. 29. “On n’y peut pas joüer, divers personnages sous divers accoustremens.” Ibid. 30. “L’Ambassadeur est appellé de quelques uns, l’organe par laquelle les pensées et les conceptions des absents se communiquent et l’Ambassade l’Art de conserver deux Princes en amitié” (Vera, Le parfait ambassadeur, 36). “Otros disinen assi Organo; por el qual se comunica el conceto de los ausentes; i a la enbaxada, arte de conservar dos Principes en Amistad.” Vera, El Embaxador, 15. 31. “Dans tout le commerce du Monde, il n’y a pas de personnage plus Comique que l’Ambassadeur.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 2:3. 32. Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 82. 33. “La cérémonie à la vérité fut tres-­belle, & bien ressentant son antiquité.” Letter of June 7, 1606. Antoine Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades de Monsieur de La Boderie en Angleterre 1606–1611 ([Paris]: s.n., 1750), 1:94. 34. “Un témoignage de bonne voisinance & d’amitié.” Ibid., 1:59. 35. Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 26. 36. Giovanni Comisso, ed., Les ambassadeurs vénitiens, 1525–1792: Relations de voyages et de missions (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1989), 9. 37. “Lettres de M. Du Houssay, Ambassadeur à Venise.” 38. “Un autre indice que je prens encore, qu’on tâche de faire paroître moins de mauvaise volonté envers lesdits Catholiques, est que le Roi en partant pour sa chasse, ayant ordonné à la Reine de préparer un bal pour ces fêtes de Noël, & s’étant chargé de la dépense, laquelle on dit devoir être de plus de six ou sept mille écus, (car on ne sçaurait rien faire ici pour peu) on remarque que presque toutes les Dames que la Reine a appellées pour en être sont Catholiques.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 2:490. 39. “A quoi me confirme encore, c’est que cette interprétation y est donnée et publiée par les serviteurs de leurs Majestés.” Ibid., 2:490–91. 40. Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 107. 41. Ibid., 179. 42. Ludovic Stewart, second duke of Lennox (1574–1624), was a favorite of James’s while he was in Scotland. 43. For a summary of the incident, see Mary Sullivan, “Court Masques of James I: Their Influence on Shakespeare and Public Theatres” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 1913), 34–46. 44. Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 79–80. 45. In a forthcoming book, Melinda Gough shows how rivalries between France and Spain inflected masque performances at the English court as far back as the 1605 Masque of Blackness. I am grateful to Gough for sharing her prepublication work with me. 46. Horatio Brown, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), 11:226–38, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​ .uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​/venice​/vol11​/pp226​-­­238.

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47. This affair is also briefly outlined in Canova-­Green, La politique-­spectacle au Grand Siècle, 54–61. 48. Lucien Bély, “Anatomie de l’incident diplomatique,” in L’incident diplomatique (XVIe– XVIIIe siècle), ed. Géraud Poumarède and Lucien Bély (Paris: Pedone, 2010), 451. 49. “L’incident révèle bien les tensions souterraines et tenaces qui parcourent le corps social et le monde politique.” Ibid., 457–58. 50. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 112. 51. “Le Roi étoit demeuré un peu étonné, & lui avait répondu seulement: mais que dira l’Ambassadeur de France. . . . [que] l’Ambassadeur d’Espagne s’y trouva, et celui de France s’y trouva point.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 3:9. 52. “Le pouvoir qu’elle avoit sur son mari.” Ibid., 3:17. 53. Dispatch of January 17, no. 148, in Brown, Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 11:77–90, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​ /venice​/vol11​/pp77​-­­90. 54. Zorzi Giustinian, Venetian ambassador in England, to the doge and senate, January 10, 1608, in ibid. 55. Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs, 209. 56. “Il n’avoit point de proportion entre un diner que me donneroit le Roi & l’honneur que recevroit ledit Ambassadeur par l’intervention audit ballet; que l’un étoit une action privée, & l’autre un spectacle & une solemnité publique. . . . [T]ous les spectateurs seroient les juges de cette action, & ceux qui la publieroient par toute la Chrétienté.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 3:14–15. 57. Roosen, “Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial,” 469–70. 58. “Ils cherchoient querelle avec nous.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 3:55. 59. “J’estime que vous devez faire démonstration que j’aurai occasion juste d’être offensé, sans toutesfois vous en remuer davantage, ni en faire plus grand bruit, qui est peut-­être ce qu’ils désirent.” Ibid., 3:32–33. 60. See David Lindley’s introduction to the masque in Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David M. Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3:253. 61. Kevin Curran, Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 75–87. 62. Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 3:259–60. 63. Ibid., 3:260. 64. Ibid., 3:270. 65. “Je ne vous dis rien de la qualité du ballet, ni de ceux qui le danserent, parce qu’on ne se souciera guére, à mon avis, de le sçavoir.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 3:126. 66. “Seulement vous assurerai-­je qu’ils ne se joueront plus de me faire de pareils traits que ce dernier, ce qui est ce que principalement je dois desirer.” Ibid. 67. “Il semble à voir les discours & conférences au Roi de la Grande Bretagne, de son Conseil & du Grand Trésorier, qu’il n’y ait à présent autre plus grande & importante affaire sur le tapis que celle de ce beau ballet qui met ainsi tout le monde en peine.” Sillery de Puisieux to Le Fèvre de la Boderie, January 23, 1609, in Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 4:202. 68. Brown, Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 11:208–26, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​/venice​/vol11​/pp208​-­­226. See also his dispatch of January 15.

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69. “Les faveurs que reçoivent les Ambassadeurs des Princes auprès desquels ils servoient, devoient être purement gratuites, & plutôt reçues que demandées.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 4:146. 70. Letter of January 23, 1609 from Villeroy to Le Fèvre de la Boderie in ibid., 4:197. On contemporary ballets given by the queen Marie de’ Medici, see Melinda J. Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 Ballet de La Reine: New Evidence and Analysis,” Early Theatre 15, no. 1 (2012): 109–44; and Melinda J. Gough, “Marie de Medici’s 1605 Ballet de La Reine and the Virtuosic Female Voice,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2012): 127–56. 71. This performance resulted in another diplomatic “incident,” this one between the Spanish and Venetian ambassadors. 72. “On m’a dit que la Reine a fait prier par Madame de Sully Madame l’Ambassadrice d’Angleterre de voir ledit ballet à l’Arsenal, où l’on parle de semondre encore son mari, & même l’Ambassadeur de Venise. Le Roi s’y trouvera. Nous avons opinion que la Reine Marguerite priera le Nonce, Don Pedro de Tolede, & l’Ambassadeur de Flandre avec sa femme, où S.M. pourra aussi bien se résoudre d’aller, après qu’elle aura été à l’Arsenal. Ce ne sont point leurs Majestés qui font cette semonce, puisqu’aussi bien on ne danse point dans leur Palais. L’Ambassadeur d’Angleterre qui sera accompagné du Vicomte de Crambourn en aura le premier la vue en présence du Roi; & il faudra que les autres veillent plus tard pour le voir chez ladite Reine Marguerite. . . . Je ne sçais pas encore si tout le mystere passera ainsi; mais j’ai voulu vous en avertir par avance.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 4:196–97. William Cecil, viscount Cranborne, reported to the Earl of Salisbury that he “sat up somewhat late at the ballet of the Queen.” Letter of February 15/25, 1609, in G. Dyfnallt Owen, ed., Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire; Part XXI (1609–1612) (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970), 19. 73. “Une autre Reine de moindre qualité.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 4:197. 74. “Ce mot n’est . . . que pour vous donner avis de la bonne part & contentement qu’a eu l’Ambassadeur d’Angleterre au ballet de notre Reine, qui fut dansé Dimanche dernier, auquel il fut convié par le Roi d’assister, & sa femme par la Reine. Ils eurent leurs places & séances derriere les chaises de leurs Majestés. Le Roi, outre cela, favorisa d’une autre grace particuliere leur présence, qui est du port de l’ordre de la Jarretiere, dont ledit Ambassador se sentit très-­honoré.” Ibid., 4:211. 75. On the Order of the Garter, see Stephanie Trigg, Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 76. 76. “Comme ambassadeur de Venise, il était appelé de toute la cour l’ambassadeur chéri; et comme Jérôme Lippano, en qualité d’homme agréable et adroit dans les affaires, il était invité par le roi et par la reine à toutes les joutes, à la chasse, aux tournois, aux fêtes publiques. On n’en a jamais fait autant envers aucun autre ambassadeur, ni de Venise, ni de nulle autre puissance.” Niccolò Tommaseo, Relations des ambassadeurs vénitiens sur les affaires de France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1838), 2:459–61. 77. Edward Herbert of Cherbury, Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London: William Gibbings, 1892), 105. 78. Gabriel Bataille, Airs de différents autheurs, mis en tablature de luth par Gabriel Bataille: Second livre (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1609). 79. Margaret McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643 (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1963), 66–67. 80. Recueil des vers du balet de la Reyne (Paris: Toussaincts du Bray, 1609), 3–5. 81. “Adorez-­les sans les aymer.” Ibid., 5.

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82. “Car la neige de nostre sein / Empesche si bien son dessein.” Ibid., 7. 83. For this account of the performance, I am immensely grateful to Melinda Gough, who shared transcriptions of two eyewitness accounts by Florentine observers: Traiano Guiscardi, secretary to the Mantuan ambassador in France, who described the ballet in a letter to Vincenzo I de Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, and Traiano’s wife, Vittoria Dalla Valle Guiscardi, who depicted the entertainment in a missive to the Duchess of Mantua Eleanora de Medici, Marie de Medici’s sister. The letters are located in Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, busta 667. These documents provide the most comprehensive description of the entertainment and completely revise previous scholarly reconstructions based on very partial and faulty French sources (for example, the volume of verses published in 1609 misrepresents the order of the different parts of the ballet). See also chapter 4 of Gough’s The Political Dance of Queenship in Early Seventeenth-­ Century France: Marie de Medici’s Ballets at the Court of Henri IV (in preparation). 84. Carew quoted in Sullivan, “Court Masques of James I.” 85. “Fit plusieurs admirations, tant de la gentillesse du ballet que la magnificence d’icelui; & il n’aura manqué, je m’assure, à en rendre très-­bon compte à son maître: ce qui n’empirera votre condition en celui qui se doit danser par-­delà, ainsi que depuis peu M. Carrew nous a assurés de nouveau que vous y seriez traité & accuelli à votre contentement.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 4:212. 86. “Ce fut en intention de m’en réserver tout l’honneur.” Letter of February 8, 1609, in ibid., 4:230–31. 87. Ibid., 4:234. 88. “Ma petite fille même eut part en ces caresses; car le Duc d’Yorck ayant été pris à danser par une des Dames du ballet, il vint aussitôt chercher madite fille où elle étoit, & l’y mena.” Ibid. 89. Carew’s own letter describing the entertainment, however, does place a strong emphasis on gestures of hospitality and intimacy paid to him by Henri IV. See Gough, Political Dance of Queenship, chap. 4. 90. See also Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, 113. 91. “Ledit Roi & le Comte de Salisbury ont déclaré & rendu comme public que cette fête ne se faisoit principalement que pour l’amour de moi.” Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Ambassades, 4:235. 92. “En la faveur que reçut l’Ambassadeur d’Espagne l’an passé, il n’eut rien de semblable; il ne fut point convié du Roi, & ne mangea point avec lui, mais en une chambre ou pas un du Conseil seulement ne l’accompagna. Le Roi ni la Reine ne furent jamais vus lui dire un mot tant que le bal dura.” Ibid. 93. James mocked Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s tendency to compare his treatment to that of the Spanish ambassadors in a letter to the Earl of Salisbury shortly before the French ambassador’s departure from the court in August 1609. Owen, Calendar of the Manuscripts of Salisbury, 124. 94. Dispatch of February 13, 1609, in Brown, Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 11:226–38, http://​www​.british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​ /venice​/vol11​/pp226​-­­238. 95. Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 3:305. 96. “Her Majesty, best knowing that a principal part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety, had commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil or a false masque.” Ibid. 97. Ibid., 3:328. See also Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, 113. 98. Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, 112; Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

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Notes to Pages 53–58

99. McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 134. 100. Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 3:317. 101. “Their third dance . . . graphically disposed into letters, and honouring the name of the most sweet and ingenious Prince, Charles, Duke of York” (ibid., 3:330). See also Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 196–97; McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage, 42. 102. Orgel, Spectacular Performances, 73. 103. See, for example, Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 56–57. 104. Quotations from Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, 2–3; Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 19. 105. Here I am taking up Susan Bennett’s call to develop “a more animated practice of speculation” for studies of spectatorship in order to incorporate perspectives that have been excluded from the archive. Susan Bennett, “Making Up the Audience: Spectatorship in Historical Context,” Theatre Symposium 20, no. 1 (2012): 20. 106. See, for example, Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 72. 107. Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 3:309. 108. Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque, 193. 109. Jonson, in his stage directions, notes that this approach struck him as most “natural”: “For to have made themselves their own decipherers, and each one to have told upon their entrance what they were and whether they would, had been a most piteous hearing. . . . [A] writer should always trust somewhat to the capacity of the spectator, especially at these spectacles, where men, beside inquiring eyes, are understood to bring quick ears . . . that must be bored through at every act with narrations.” Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 3:308. 110. Ibid., 3:337. 111. Ibid., 3:331. 112. It is also worth remembering that spectators in public theaters in Paris and London at this time were also often distracted from the fictional spectacle. See Christian Biet, “Séance, performance, assemblée et représentation: Les jeux de regards au théâtre (XVIIe–XXIe siècle),” Littératures classiques 82, no. 3 (2013): 83. 113. I borrow the term “public fictif ” from Hélène Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Belle lettres, 1994).

Chapter 3 1. “Tous les mémoires, toutes les lettres et toutes les histoires de l’époque mentionnent les représentations de ballets; mais d’une façon si générale!” McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 51. 2. “Je commenceray par le subjet, duquel depend tout le reste.” [Nicolas] Saint-­Hubert, La manière de composer et de faire réussir les ballets, ed. Marie-­Françoise Christout (Geneva: Minkoff, 1993), 6. Christout deduces that Saint-­Hubert was not a dancing master or poet or musician but may have worked as a painter or decorator for court ballets under Louis XIII (see the introduction to her translation of the text, 28–30). 3. “Il faut asubjetir la dance & les pas aux Airs, aux entrées. . . . & voudrois que chacun dancast suivant ce qu’il represente.” Saint-­Hubert, La manière de composer et de faire réussir les ballets, 12.

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4. “Le Ballet estant une Comedie, muette.” Ibid., 16. 5. Michel de Pure defined ballet as “a mute representation in which gestures and movements signify that which could be expressed by words” (une representation muette, où les gestes & les mouvemens signifient ce qu’on pourroit exprimer par des paroles). Michel de Pure, Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1972), 210. Ménestrier wrote: “Ballet, which is according to Plutarch a mute dance, is a speaking painting, that is to say something which expresses itself through figures, gestures, and movements” (le Ballet qui est selon Plutarque une danse muette, est une peinture parlante, c’est à dire, qui s’exprime par les figures, les gestes, & les mouvemens). Ménestrier, Des ballets anciens et modernes, 138. 6. Cobham to Secretaries, February 21, 1580, in Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, ed. Arthur John Butler (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), 14:160–76, http://​www​ .british​-­­history​.ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​/foreign​/vol14​/pp160​-­­176. 7. For a survey of national types in French court entertainments, see Marcel Paquot, Les étrangers dans les divertissements de la cour, de Beaujoyeulx à Molière (1581–1673): Contribution à l’étude de l’opinion publique et du théâtre en France (Paris: Palais des Académies, 1932). Pageants representing various nations were popular across Europe. For example, a “Rappresentazione in onore dei santi Ignazio da Loyola e Francesco Saverio” performed at the Collegio Romano in March 1622 featured entries by Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, the Indies, and China. (China was represented by performers inside a miniature “Great Wall.”) See de Greuter’s engraving reproduced in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, La festa barocca (Rome: De Luca, 1997), 245–46. 8. Maximilien de Béthune Sully, Mémoires du duc de Sully (Paris: Etienne Ledoux, 1827), 3:177. 9. In a letter dated January 26/February 5, 1634, to William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, Hobbes notes that his “lord,” the earl’s son, was one of the masquers in Thomas Carew and Inigo Jones’s Coelum Britannicum. “There is no newes at Court but of Maskes,” Hobbes adds. Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1:19. See also Aloysius Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 88–89. Hobbes traveled to Paris with young Lord Devonshire October 1634 to August 1635. Ibid., 90. 10. For helpful, descriptive overviews of the form, see Paquot, Les étrangers dans les divertissements de la cour; Danièle Becker, “Images de l’Europe, de la France et de l’Espagne dans le ballet de cour français et dans le théâtre espagnol de la première moitié du dix-­septième siècle,” in Le théâtre et l’opéra sous le signe de l’histoire, ed. Irène Mamczarz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 60–72. 11. Marcel Paquot, “Les vers du Balet des nations de Guillaume Colletet,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 10, no. 1 (1931): 53–68. 12. McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 138–39. 13. Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 78. 14. For Aristotle, the instinct that drives humans to represent nature derives in part from the pleasure of “inferring” or recognizing an object from its representation. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 39. 15. “Parler aux yeux.” Ménestrier, Des ballets anciens et modernes, 154. 16. “Les diverses Nations ont leurs habits particuliers qui les distinguent. Le Turc a la veste et le turban, le More la couleur noire, les Americains leurs habits de plumes.” Ibid., 143. 17. Paquot, Les étrangers dans les divertissements de la cour, esp. 16–17. 18. See Ellen R. Welch, “National Characters: Playing Against Type in the Ballet des muses (1666–67),” Seventeenth-­Century French Studies 32, no. 2 (2010): 191–205.

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Notes to Pages 61–66

19. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 1st ed. (Paris: Coignard, 1694), http://​artfl​ -­­project​.uchicago​.edu​/content​/dictionnaires​-­­dautrefois, defines it as “Terme collectif. Tous les habitants d’un mesme Estat, d’un mese pays, qui vivent sous meses loix, & usent de mesme langage &c.” The usage examples include: “Nation puissante. nation belliqueuse, guerrière. nation civilisée . . . chaque nation a ses coustumes, a ses vertus & ses vices . . . la nation Française. la nation Espagnole. c’est l’humeur, l’esprit, le genie de la nation.” Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, 2 vols. (La Haye: A. and R. Leers, 1690), employs a similar definition: “Nom collectif, qui se dit d’un grand peuple habitant une certaine étenduë de terre, renfermée en certaines limites ou sous une même domination.” He illustrates: “Les François, les Romains, sont des nations fort belliqueuses. Les Cannibales sont des nations farouches & barbares. . . . Chaque nation a son caractère particulier.” 20. See the definitions in note 19 21. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 8. 22. Marie-­Claude Canova-­Green stresses how the ballets of nations “reinforce the audience’s prejudices and their innate sense of superiority.” Marie-­Claude Canova-­Green, “Dance and Ritual: The Ballet des nations at the Court of Louis XIII,” Renaissance Studies 9, no. 4 (1995): 395. 23. On the preparations for the second performance at City Hall, see Michel Félibien, Histoire de la ville de Paris: Tome 5, ed. Guy-­Alexis Lobineau (Paris: G. Desprez, 1725), 568–70. 24. McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 151. 25. On the ballet’s role as an “urban ceremony” similar to royal entries, see Fabien Cavaillé, “Spectacle public, munificence royale et politique de la joie: Le cas du ballet de cour à la ville dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Le Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut),” in Spectacles et pouvoirs dans l’Europe de l’Ancien Regime (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. Charles Mazouer, Anne Surgers, and Marie-­Bernadette Dufourcet (Tübingen: Narr, 2011), 37. 26. “Les bruits qui portent esgallement sur leurs aisles les secrets des plus petites escholles, aussi-­bien que les manigances des plus grands Monarques, n’ont pas espargné leur diligence à répandre parmy les diverses parties du Monde les merites de la DOUAIRIERE de BILLEBAHAUT; laquelle pour accueillir les honnestes recherches du FANFAN de SOTTE-­VILLE, assemble le grand Bal à la maniere de ses Ancestres, pour recognoistre les gestes de son Galand, & controller le maintien des Estrangers qui arrivent de tous costez.” René Bordier, Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, ballet dansé par sa Majesté (S.l.: s.n., 1626), 1–2. 27. “Je fais trembler toute la Terre, / Et constrains l’Ocean de reverer mes Loix.” Ibid., 18. 28. “La terre qui pour moy brusle de passion, / Donne la carte blanche à mon ambition.” Ibid., 42. 29. “C’est toy seul, Grand LOUIS, dont les armes un jour / Abbatront son Croissant.” Ibid., 25. 30. Franko, Dance as Text, 77. 31. Alan James, The Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 1572–1661 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, Boydell Press, 2004), 55–76. The précis of the ballet’s theme at the start of the libretto lauds Richelieu as the “greatest mind ever to be called to the first Ministry of France” (plus grand Esprit qui fut jamais appellé au premier Ministere de la France). Le ballet de la Marine, dansé devant leurs Majestez à l’Arsenac [sic], le 25 fevrier, 1635 (Paris: Antoine Sommaville, 1635), 3. 32. For example, Adriaan Pauw, Grand Pensionary of Holland and Frederick Henry of Orange’s ambassador to France, witnessed the performance as reported in a letter to the Estates

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General on March 2, 1635. Cited in G. Fagniez, “Le père Joseph et Richelieu (suite),” Revue historique 38 (1888): 70. 33. “L’Ouverture de la premiere partie se fait par un recit de Nereïdes & de Dieux / Marins qui viennent annoncer à la France le retour de ses vaisseaux glorieux, & la seconde est tirée de l’estime des Princes estrangers qui ravis des merveilles du plus grand Monarque du monde, envoyent porter à sa Majesté par la bouche de leurs Ambassadeurs, les asseurances, d’une affection qu’ils protestent devoir estre inviolable.” Le ballet de la Marine, 3–4. 34. “GRAND ROY, la merveille du monde, / Je viens des bouts de l’Univers, / Mais dans tous les Climats divers / De la terre & de l’onde; / Je n’ay rien veu qu’on puisse comparer / Aux grandes actions qui te font adorer.” Ibid., 18. 35. “O Dieux! quel subit changement! / Quel prodige! quelle aventure / Contre l’ordre de la Nature / Je deviens More en un moment.” Ibid., 21. 36. “Je nourris un brasier au profond de mon ame, / Qui fait voir au dehors des signes de sa flâme: . . . . Ma noirceur n’est que la fumée.” Ibid., 21–22. 37. Ironic verses calling attention to the identity of the performer became more common later in the seventeenth century in ballets scripted by Isaac de Benserade for Louis XIV. See Chapter 6. 38. “On n’y peut pas joüer, divers personnages sous divers accoustremens.” Hotman, L’ambassadeur, 61. 39. “Je suy tous les plaisirs où l’aage me convie / . . . Et si visiblement j’adore le Soleil, / C’est que sous son beau nom je revere Sylvie.” Le ballet de la Marine, 20. 40. “Je prefere la Seine aux eaux de Thermodon, / . . . Et publier icy que l’amour d’Alexandre / Ne me plut jamais tant que celle de LOUIS.” Ibid., 23. 41. “The perpetuity of the head of the realm . . . depended mainly on the interplay of three factors: the perpetuity of the Dynasty, the corporate character of the Crown, and the immortality of the royal Dignity.” Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 316. 42. Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 30. 43. Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 92. Pitkin opposes symbolic representation to “descriptive representation,” which occurs, for example, when a legislature mirrors the views and composition of the public. 44. Tyler Lange, “Constitutional Thought and Practice in Early Sixteenth-­Century France: Revisiting the Legacy of Ernst Kantorowicz,” Sixteenth Century Journal 42, no. 4 (2011): 1006. 45. Ibid., 1006–7. 46. Ibid., 1022. 47. Alain Boureau, Le simple corps du roi: L’impossible sacralité des souverains français, XVe– XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1988), 23, 47. 48. The prince’s biographer notes that he spent much of his time in the early 1620s in Bourges attending to the duties of his governorship. Caroline Bitsch, Vie et carrière d’Henri II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, 1588–1646: Exemple de comportement et d’idées politiques au début du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2008), 361. 49. “J’aimois le vin sur toute chose, / Une saucisse estoit mon Dieu.” Paul Lacroix, ed., Ballets et mascarades de cour, de Henri III à Louis XIV (1581–1652) recueillis et publies, d’après les éditions originales (Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), 2:265. 50. “Le froid qui regne en la Pologne / Bien loin de mes membres s’esloigne, / . . . touchez mon tuyau d’ivoire: / Par là s’exhalent tous mes feux.” Ibid., 2, 264–65.

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51. Almost nothing is known about the performance of this ballet; only its verses have survived, as an undated in-­quarto pamphlet and reproduced in Colletet’s collected volume of Divertissements (1631, 1633). For dating of the ballet, see Paquot, “Les vers du Balet des nations de Guillaume Colletet,” 58–61. 52. “J’ay beaucoup plus de souplesses, / Et de mouvement dans mes fesses, / Que vous n’en avez dans les yeux.” Guillaume Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet (Paris: Rob. Etienne, 1631), 229; Guillaume Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition (A Paris: chez J. Dugast, 1633), 225–26. 53. “Je suis de taille haute & droite, . . . L’Allemand pour son partage / A la beauté sur le visage, / Et la force au milieu du corps.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 228–29; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 225. On the allemande, see Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesography (New York: Dover, 1967), 125; and Buch and Philidor, Dance Music from the Ballets de Cour, 24–25. See also Ellen R. Welch, “Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-­ Century Ballets des nations,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 12. 54. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. John Charles Addison Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106. 55. Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005): 155–84. 56. Hobbes, Leviathan, 106. 57. “A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented. . . . for it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one.” Ibid., 109. 58. A pamphlet on the “Sujet du ballet” recounted: “MADAMOISELLE ayant un passionné desir de témoigner au Roy la joye qu’elle ressentoit du bien-­heureux retour de Monsieur, fait dessein de danser un Ballet pour plaire à sa Majesté & à son Altesse.” Sujet du ballet des quatre monarchies chrétiennes, dansé au Louvre devant le Roi, la Reine, Monsieur et toute la cour, le 27 février et le 6 mars 1635, par Mademoiselle (Paris: J. Martin, 1635), 3. 59. “L’Italie conduite par Orphee: L’Espagne par Junon: L’Allemagne par Bachus [sic]: Et la France par Minerve; Tous ses [sic] Royaumes ayant quelque rapport aux qualitez de ses [sic] quatre Nations qui venoient tous aux pieds du plus genereux Roy de la terre.” Ibid. 60. “D’un stille aussi doux que ma voix.” Vers du ballet des quatre monarchies chrestiennes, dancé par Madamoiselle (S.l.: s.n., 1635), 4. 61. “Les vingt-­quatre violons du Roy commençoient à sonner l’air des Caldarostes, representant des Fricasseurs de Chastagnes, fort plaisamment vestus, & faisant merveille de bien danser. Monsieur le Prince de Talmont, & Monsieur le Marquis de Brezé, estoient ceux qui fricassoient si bien des jambes.” Sujet du ballet des quatre monarchies, 8. 62. “De mon pouvoir aux bords du Rhin / On void une eternelle preuve.” Vers du ballet des quatre monarchies, 12. 63. “Ils vous font crever de rire.” Sujet du ballet des quatre monarchies, 7. 64. See also Sahlins, Boundaries, 28. 65. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. Julian H. Franklin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48–50, book 1, chapter 10, paragraphs 481–83. 66. Osiander, Before the State, 337. 67. “En cet endroit cette jeune Merveille, de qui toute la France admire la beauté aussi bien que l’esprit, commence à paroistre dans l’esclat & le lustre de toute la Cour.” Sujet du ballet des quatre monarchies, 20.

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68. “Accompagnez des plus belles voix & des meilleurs joueurs de luts [sic] de l’Europe.” Ibid., 19. 69. “Grand Roy, je traverse les airs / Aussi viste que les esclairs / Portant les mandemens de mon souverain Maistre: / Mais tu le sçais si bien imiter / Que je ne puis plus recognoistre / Qui de vous deux est le vray JUPITER.” Vers du ballet des quatre monarchies, 14. 70. “MONARQUE le plus glorieux / Qui fut jamais sur la Terre, / Prince juste & victorieux / L’apuy des Loix & l’honneur de la Guerre, / Les Dieux, ô digne Roy / Ont-­ils des qualitez plus divines que toy?” Ibid., 15. 71. “Je dis que telles inimitiés ne sont que politiques & ne peuvent ôter la conjonction qui est & doit être entre les hommes. . . . Pourquoi moi qui suis Français voudrais-­je du mal à un Anglais, Espagnol & Indien? Je ne le puis quand je considère qu’ils sont hommes comme moi.” Emeric Crucé, Le nouveau Cynée ou Discours d’État, ed. Astrid Guillaume and Michel Bouvier, Textes rares (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 81–82. 72. “La vraie grandeur d’un Souverain gît en la prompte obéissance de ses sujets & ferme jouissance de son État, ce qui ne lui peut arriver tant qu’il s’engagera en une guerre” (ibid., 71). The title of Crucé’s work refers to a story in Plutarch’s The Life of Pyrrhus in which the ambassador Cineas, a man renowned for his eloquence, tries to persuade Pyrrhus to limit the scope of his conquering ambitions. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, vol. 9, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 385–89 (chap. 14). 73. André Puharré, L’Europe vue par Henri IV et Sully: D’après le “grand Dessein” des Économies royales (Oloron-­Sainte-­Marie, France: Editions Mon Hélios, 2002), 28. For an account of the gestation of Sully’s “Grand Dessein,” see John O’Connor, “Politique et utopie au début du XVIIe siècle: Le Grand Dessein de Henri IV et de Sully,” Dix-­Septième Siècle, no. 174 (1992): 33–42. 74. Puharré, L’Europe vue par Henri IV et Sully, 30. 75. “Un vrai ouvrage de marqueterie.” Quoted in ibid., 146. 76. Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 3:1504. 77. Ibid., 3:1508. 78. “So it also may happen, that several States may be linked together in a most strict Alliance, and make a Compound, as Strabo more than once calls it; and yet each of them continue to be a perfect State.” Ibid., 1:260. 79. “O vous qui présidez sur ces rives icy; / Triton, Glauque, Nerée, & vous Nymphes aussi, . . . Faites qu’en nos filets, & dans nos hameçons, / Tombent à cette fois tout autant de poissons.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 225; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 222. 80. The pronoun “nous” and its possessive forms are repeated twenty-­five times in eight stanzas. Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 224–26; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 221–23. 81. McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 158–61. 82. “C’est elle qu’on peut nommer à bon droit le plus charmant de tous nos plaisirs, et qui n’est pas un des moindres dons que la divine bonté communique à nos esprits.” Lacroix, Ballets et mascarades de cour, 4:208. 83. “Une conformité du corps à l’ame, et de l’ame à la Musique.” Ibid., 4:209. 84. “L’Harmonie unit parfaictement toutes choses.” Ibid., 4:219. 85. The verses “for an Englishman” praise the “Prince nompareil.” The Italian’s verses declare: “Le François en quoy qu’il fasse / Tous les autres Peuples surpasse.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 227–28; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 223–24.

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Notes to Pages 77–79

86. “Je faisois à tous des bravades, / Des morgues, des Rodomantades, / Et me pensois desia de tout autre vainqueur.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 227; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 224. 87. “Je voy que le François qui tousjours me traverse, / N’a pas tant de discours, mais qu’il a plus de cœur.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 227; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 224. 88. “Un François qui represente tous ces Estrangers les uns apres les autres.” Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 227. 89. “Je passe quand je veux, bien que je sois François, / Tantost pour Espagnol, tantost pour Ecossois.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 231; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 227. 90. Hobbes, Leviathan, 106. 91. Ibid., 107. 92. “And because the multitude naturally is not one, but many; they cannot be understood for one; but many authors . . . every man giving their common represented, authority from himself in particular.” The requirement that individuals cede authority to the persona representing a “multitude” thus prepares the way for the fabrication of the Leviathan, the absolutely sovereign political actor who exercises the right to speak and act for all the others. Ibid., 109. 93. “As the Body is the common Subject of Sight, the Eye the proper; so the common Subject of Supreme Power is the State; which I have before called a perfect Society of Men. We then exclude Nations, who are brought under the Power of another People, as were the Roman Provinces; for those Nations are no longer a State, as we now use the Word, but the less considerable Members of a great State, as Slaves are the Members of a Family.” Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, 1:259. 94. “Tu ne sens plus en toy ceste humeur vagabonde / Qui te sollicitoit de courrir par le monde / Alors que tu vivois en pleine liberté: / Tu n’as que trop changé de lieux & de demeures; / Il faut que maintenant, pauvre Scythe, tu meures, / Ou que tu sois icy pour jamais arresté.” Colletet, Les divertissements de Colletet, 232; Colletet, Les divertissements du sieur Colletet, seconde édition, 228. 95. This reading particularly suggests itself in the libretto’s first print context, in a volume of collected “Entertainments” penned by Guillaume Colletet. Often characterized as a libertine writer who collaborated with cabaret poets such as Théophile de Viau, Colletet was condemned and exiled in July 1623 for his contributions to the censored poetry collection Le Parnasse Satyrique. For biography, see Josephine De Boer, “Colletet’s Exile After His Condemnation in 1623,” Modern Language Notes 47, no. 3 (1932): 159–62; Gilles Banderier, “Note biographique sur Guillaume Colletet,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 80, no. 3 (2002): 945–58. 96. “Récit de la Renommée qui conduit des Mores.” This entrée does not appear in the 1631 or 1633 edition of Colletet’s work but apparently did appear in the version Paul Lacroix used to prepare his modern edition. 97. “Je viens de la source du jour, / Noble climat où l’on m’adore, / Annoncer à toute la Cour / Que j’amene une troupe More / Aussi brillante que l’Aurore; / Consultez leur oracle, ô jeune Potentat, / Et vous sçaurez les biens promis à vostre Estat.” Lacroix, Ballets et mascarades de cour, 6, 237. 98. On maurophilic influences in French court entertainment, see Lucien Clare, “Le tournoi de bague des Guerras Civiles de Granada (1595) et Le carrousel d’Almahide (1660),” in Mélanges María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti I–II, ed. Abd al-­Jelil al-­Tamini (Zaghouan, Tunisia: Fondation Temimi pour la Recherche Scientifique et l’Information, 1999), 1:283–316.

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99. Brito Vieira observes that a major implication of Hobbes’s contributions to political theory is the tacit acknowledgment of the fact that “political theatre, even more than stage theatre, is not merely mimetic of the world around it: it is constitutive of it.” Mónica Brito Vieira, The Elements of Representation in Hobbes: Aesthetics, Theatre, Law, and Theology in the Construction of Hobbes’s Theory of the State (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 121. 100. Franko, Dance as Text, 77. 101. Ibid., 106.

Chapter 4 1. “A mon secours, Monarque des François, / Un dur Tyran veut ravir ma franchise.” François de Chancy and Jean Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Ballet de la prosperité des armes de la France, ed. Vincent Bernhardt et al. (Versailles: Éditions du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, 2009), 7. 2. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). See also Jeffrey Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 117. 3. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 5. 4. Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx, Balet comique de la Royne, faict aux nopces de Monsieur le duc de Joyeuse & Mademoyselle de Vaudemont sa sœur (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1582), 74–76. 5. McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 24–27. 6. See Chapter 3. 7. “Des Allegories sur l’état present des choses, comme les campagnes du Roi, ses conquêtes, ses entreprises au milieu de l’Hyver, la Paix.” Claude-­François Ménestrier, Des représentations en musique anciennes et modernes (Paris: Robert Pipie, 1685), 215. 8. “Non seulement le Prologue des actions en Musique peut étre une Allegorie, mais toute la piece entiere.” Ibid., 219. 9. Blair Hoxby, “Allegorical Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 192. 10. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), 22–23. 11. Allegory “contains instructions for its own interpretation.” Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 3. 12. Hoxby, “Allegorical Drama,” 197. 13. Hugh Gaston Hall’s bio-­bibliographical study of Desmarets outlines the playwright’s long collaboration with Richelieu but declines to theorize the nature of the patronage relationship beyond characterizing Desmarets as a “creature” of Richelieu. Hugh Gaston Hall, Richelieu’s Desmarets and the Century of Louis XIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 350–51. 14. Christa Williford Elefterion, “Modeling Historic Theatre Spaces: A Computer Reconstruction of the Palais Cardinal Theatre, 1641” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2000), 116. 15. “[Il] jouait toute l’Europe en vérité, comme il la faisait jouait en représentation sur le théâtre.” Quoted in Sylvie Taussig, introduction to Jean Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin and Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu, Europe, comédie héroïque, ed. Sylvie Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 14. See also Timothy C. Murray, “Richelieu’s Theater: The Mirror of a Prince,” Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 275–98. 16. See, for example, an article dated January 19 in the Gazette, no. 7 (1641): 35–36.

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17. Christian Jouhaud, “Richelieu, or ‘Baroque’ Power in Action,” trans. Suzanne Toczyski, Yale French Studies, no. 80 (1991): 183–201. 18. On Richelieu’s ballet patronage, see McGowan, L’art du ballet de cour en France, 176–78. 19. For an overview of heavy-­handed royal praise in ballets of this era, see Georgie Durosoir, “L’allégorie de la Renommée royale dans les airs de ballet au temps de Louis XIII,” in Le chant, acteur de l’histoire, ed. Jean Quéniart (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 77–88. 20. He recommended against the 1630 Treaty of Regensburg on the grounds that it would require France to abandon its Mantuan allies. Later, he strongly supported the Treaty of Compiège pledging support to Sweden and the States of the Netherlands. Lucien Bély, “France and the Thirty Years’ War,” in Olaf Asbach and Peter Schröder, The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years’ War (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 87–99. 21. “Qui fait voir qu’une Négociation continuelle ne contribue pas peu au bon succès des affaires”: “Négocier sans cesse, ouvertement ou secrètement, en tous lieux, encore mesme qu’on ne reçoive pas un fruit présent et que celuy qu’on peut attendre à l’avenir ne soit pas apparent, est chose tout à fait nécessaire pour le bien des Estats.” Armand Richelieu, Testament politique de Richelieu, ed. Françoise Hildesheimer (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995), 265. 22. “Deux raisons me font avancer cette proposition. La 1ère tire son origine de la force de la foiblesse des unions, qui ne sont jamais trop asseurées entre diverses testes souveraines.” Ibid., 270. 23. “Il faut agir partout, prez et loin.” Ibid., 266. 24. On Richelieu’s investment in “continual negotiation,” see also Madeleine Haehl, Les affaires étrangères au temps de Richelieu: Le secrétariat d’État, les agents diplomatiques, 1624–1642 (Brussels: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes, 2006), 10–11. 25. Brenda Machosky, Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 16. 26. A commonplace thirteenth-­century Latin rhyme summarizes the steps of biblical exegesis: “Littera gesta docet, / quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, / quid speres [alt. quo tendas] anagogia” (The literal level teaches what happened, / the allegorical what to believe, / the moral how to act, / the anagogical what to hope for [where to aim for]). 27. According to the Gazette, the ballet was danced March 6 at Saint-­Germain, March 8 at the cardinal’s residence, and March 17 at an unspecified location. See Gazette, no. 24 (1639): 164 and no. 36 (1639): 172. A partial transcription of the libretto appears in Gazette, no. 30 (1639): 137–47. 28. See an article dated October 16 in the Gazette, no. 142 (1638): 591–92; an article dated March 12 in Gazette, no. 32 (1639): 156; and an article dated March 26 in Gazette, no. 36 (1639): 172. The name of the papal nuncio is identified in Alberto Ghisalberti, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960), 11:324. 29. “A l’imitation des belles Tragicomedies.” Jean Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Ballet de la félicité, sur le sujet de l’heureuse naissance de Monseigneur le Dauphin (Paris: s.n., 1639), 2. 30. See also Marie-­Claude Canova-­Green, “From Tragicomedy to Epic: The Court Ballets of Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 25, no. 2 (2007): 156–66. 31. Lucien Bély, Les relations internationales en Europe: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 128. 32. Parker, Europe in Crisis, 185. 33. Talks with Don Miguel de Salamanca in spring 1638 indicated that a separate peace between France and Spain would be easy to achieve; yet “France steadfastly refused to make peace without its Dutch and Swedish allies.” Ibid., 184.

Notes to Pages 88–94

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34. Hermann Weber, “ ‘Une bonne paix’: Richelieu’s Foreign Policy and the Peace of Christendom,” in Richelieu and His Age, ed. Laurence Brockliss and Joseph Bergin, trans. Robert Vilain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 48–49. 35. Françoise Hildesheimer, Richelieu, une certaine idée de l’état (Paris: Publisud, 1985), 117. 36. Richelieu, Testament politique de Richelieu, 270–71. 37. The role of France was danced by Gaston Jean Baptiste de Cominges, whose father died in the 1630 siege of Pignerol and who himself later served as French ambassador to England. Jean Jules Jusserand, A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles the Second: Le comte de Cominges (London: T. F. Unwin, 1895), 33–41. 38. On France’s treaty with Saxe-­Weimar, see David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government, and Society in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129–31. 39. “Dancent tous ensemble, & se touchent dans la main.” Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Ballet de la félicité, 6. 40. “Menassent tout de feu & de sang, croyant qu’on est las de la guerre” Ibid., 9. 41. It could be argued that the Ottoman Empire nevertheless exerted influence on the war through its support for vassal states such as Transylvania. See Maria Baramova, “Non-­splendid Isolation: The Ottoman Empire and the Thirty Years’ War,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years’ War, ed. Olaf Asbach and Peter Schröder (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 115–24. 42. “Puisque desia le sang de deux grands Roys est uny en sa personne.” Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Ballet de la félicité, 1. 43. “Les Turcs considerans cette union . . . se retirent, & l’Europe demeure garentie.” Ibid., 9. 44. “Huict petits Amours bruns, blancs, & d’autres couleurs diverses representans les Amours d’Espagne, de France, d’Allemagne, de Suede, de Flandre & de Hollande, dancent ensemble & s’embrassent.” Ibid. 45. Ibid., 10. 46. The Testament contends that although alliance assured through marriage “is often one of the most important subjects for negotiation” (est souvent une des plus importantes matières de négotiations), such alliances “do not always produce the desired fruit” (ne produisent pas toujours le fruit qu’on en peut désirer). Richelieu, Testament politique de Richelieu, 270. 47. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, 136. 48. “Marquent un commencement de commerce & de communication entre les deux Estats.” Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Ballet de la félicité, 10. 49. “Sur les hautes montagnes, / D’où l’on voit les Espagnes / Et l’Estat des François; / Dançons, poussons nos voix, / Mes gentilles compagnes, / En l’honneur du Dauphin qui doit unir les Roys.” Ibid. 50. According to the Gazette, after the wedding ceremony at the Louvre, “the assembly made its way to the Palace of the Cardinal, where was danced the most magnificent ballet in memory. . . . The subject was the successes of France’s arms, so well represented that their Majesties and all the court were marvelously satisfied by it; as were also his Holiness’s nuncio, and all the ambassadors of Princes and States who attended.” Article dated February 9, Gazette (1641): 68. On the theater, see Sophie Wilma Deierkauf-­Holsboer, L’histoire de la mise en scène dans le théatre français à Paris de 1600 à 1673 (Paris: A. Nizet, 1960), 29–32. 51. These negotiations brought about the Treaty of Saint-­Germain-­en-­Laye in April 1641, which made Lorraine a French protectorate. The peace was short-­lived, however. 52. “Cet hyver doit estre comme une longue feste apres de longs travaux. Non seulement le Roy et son grand Ministre, qui ont tant veillé et travaillé pour l’aggrandissement de l’Estat, et

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Notes to Pages 94–99

tous les vaillans guerriers qui ont si valeureusement executé ses nobles desseins, doivent prendre de repos et du divertissement; mais encore tout le peuple se doit rejoüir.” Chancy and Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Prosperité des armes, 6. 53. Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 103. 54. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 60. 55. “Represente les prosperitez de cette année par mer et par terre: au moins une partie: car il seroit difficile de representer en un soir, ce qui a occupé durant tant de mois les veilles et les travaux de tant d’hommes, et l’attention de toute l’Europe.” Chancy and Desmarets de Saint-­ Sorlin, Prosperité des armes, 6. 56. Jean Chapelain, Opuscules critiques, ed. Alfred C. Hunter and Anne Duprat (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2007), 222–34. 57. “Les Ballets sont des Comedies muettes, et doivent estre divisez de mesme par Actes et par Scenes.” Chancy and Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Prosperité des armes, 6. 58. In this respect, he engages in a reflection on what Rebecca Schneider calls the “theatricality of time.” Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 6. 59. Canova-­Green, “From Tragicomedy to Epic,” 160–61. 60. Anne Le Pas de Secheval, “Le Cardinal de Richelieu, le théâtre et les décorateurs italiens: Nouveaux documents sur Mirame et le Ballet de la prospérité des armes de France (1641),” XVIIe Siècle 186 (1995): 135–45. See also Madeleine Laurain-­Portemer, Études mazarines (Paris: de Boccard, 1981), 1:197–201. 61. Theater historian Agne Beijer uncovered a maquette of one scene and established that the engraving Le Soir depicts this performance. Agne Beijer, “Une maquette de décor récemment retrouvée pour le ‘Ballet de la prospérité des armes de France,’ dansé à Paris, le 7 février 1641,” in Le lieu théâtral à la Renaissance, Royaumont, 22–27 mars, 1963, ed. Jean Jacquot, Elie Konigson, and Marcel Oddon (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1964), 381. 62. “Sur les flots de terre enfermez, / Et sur la vaste mer qui la terre environne, / Nous avons veu leurs [les François] bras armez / Monstrer une valeur dont l’excez nous estonne. / LOUIS en repoussant la guerre / Va remplir de ses faits et la mer et la terre.” Chancy and Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Prosperité des armes, 9. 63. Ibid. 64. Jan Mieszkowski, Watching War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6. 65. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, esp. 76. 66. “La Terre ornée de boccages.” Chancy and Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin, Prosperité des armes, 6. 67. “L’Harmonie paroist sur un siege soustenu par quantité de nuages, accompagnez d’oyseaux.” Ibid. 68. “C’est moy qui maintiens tout le monde / Par le bel ordre des saisons.” “Par mes accords divers / Respandre par tout l’Univers / Une joye infinie.” Ibid. 69. “Ceux qui portent les diadesmes / A leur malheur rompent mes loix; / Et voulant perdre d’autres Rois, / Ils se perdent eux mesmes. / Tous regnent quand chacun me suit: / Qui m’abandonne se destruit.” Ibid. 70. “Dés l’Avril de vos ans vostre bras a soûmis / Vos rebelles sujets et vos fiers Ennemis.” Ibid., 10. 71. “Nos escrits qui vivront en dépit de l’Envie, / Ne parleront jamais d’une si belle vie.” Ibid.

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72. Marolles notes that both Concord’s chariot and Harmony’s chariot in the first act “moved by themselves,” which he found an affront to verisimilitude. “Ceux de l’Harmonie et de la Concorde dans le Ballet de la Prosperité des Armes de la France, où ils se mouvoient d’eux-­ mêmes, sans être tirés de quoi que ce fût, ce qui n’est nullement vraisemblable, parce qu’un Chariot doit être attelé.” Michel de Marolles, Mémoires de Michel de Marolles, abbé de Villeloin, ed. Claude Pierre Goujet (Amsterdam, 1755), 3:115. Beijer explained this criticism by the fact that “Marolles was a fanatic partisan of the old style” of ballet (“Une maquette de décor,” 385). The effort to hide the mechanisms that made chariots for parades and spectacles move had a long tradition. See Lucien Clare, “La fonction des chars dans les fêtes ibériques du XVIIe siècle: Événements historiques et spectacle,” in Le théâtre et l’opéra sous le signe de l’histoire, ed. Irène Mamczarz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 14. 73. “Espagnols et François / Rangez-­vous sous mes lois.” Chancy and Desmarets de Saint-­ Sorlin, Prosperité des armes, 10. 74. Ibid., 11. 75. “La grande toile du devant du Theatre se rabaisse peu à peu et le cache. Quelque temps apres on rehausse la toile, et au lieu des Theatres qui avoient paru, il se void une grande salle dorée et ornée de toutes sortes de peintures et d’embellissemens, esclairée de quantité de chandeliers de cristal, au fonds de laquelle est un trosne pour le Roy et pour la Reyne.” Ibid. 76. “Du dessous du Theatre il sort un pont imperceptiblement, qui va s’appuyer sur l’eschaffaut du Roy et de la Reyne, pour les faire passer dans la salle du Bal: Ou tous les spectateurs peuvent voir à plaisir leurs Majestez, les Princes et les Princesses, les Seigneurs et les Dames; et là les beautez, les richesses et les danses en leur pompe, remplissant tous les yeux de plaisirs et d’estonnement.” Ibid. 77. “Une pièce allégorique de la grande querelle qui agit l’Europe.” Jean Chapelain to Godeau, December 24, 1638, quoted in Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin and Richelieu, Europe, 12. 78. According to Taussig, Pellison reported that the prologue was submitted for the academy’s review on January 31, 1639. Ibid., 13. 79. Mathieu de Morgues, Joannis Armandi Plessaei Richelii S.R.E. cardinalis eminentissimi, Franciae ducis potentissimi, et regis christianissimi Ludovici XIII. ministri famosissimi vitae synopsis inscribenda tumulo (Anvers, 1643), 6. 80. “Elle [la pièce] sort en tout cas du cabinet de travail du cardinal-­ministre et déploie l’ensemble des préoccupations qui l’agitent jusqu’à la veille de sa mort; elle dit la vérité de sa pensée, au-­delà de l’homme.” Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin and Richelieu, Europe, 11. 81. Borrowing terms from Christian Jouhaud’s work, Taussig asserts that the play “représente un point d’équilibre entre ‘politicisation de la littérature’ et littéraisation du pouvoir.” Ibid., 29. 82. “Une œuvre-­manifeste” staged “dans un moment stratégique où la France est en position de force pour négocier la paix.” Cécile Albis, Richelieu: L’essor d’un nouvel équilibre européen (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), 159. 83. Hall, Desmarets, 195. 84. See also the French edition by Jean Baudoin: Cesare Ripa, Iconologie, ou, Explication nouvelle de plusieurs images, emblemes, et autres figures hyerogliphiques des vertus, des vices, des arts, des sciences, des causes naturelles, des humeurs differentes & des passions humaines, œuvre augmentée d’une seconde partie, trans. Jean Baudoin (reprint, Dijon: Éd. Faton, 1999), 2, 8–9. 85. Marcello Buttiglii, Descrizione delle feste celebrate in Parma per le nozze di Margerita di Toscana col duca Odoardo Farnese (Parma, 1629), 231. 86. For an overview of other representations of Europe in Italian spectacle, see Irène Mamczarz, “La représentation des peuples européens dans le théâtre italien: De La ‘commedia

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dell’arte’ à Goldoni,” in Le théâtre et l’opéra sous le signe de l’histoire, ed. Irène Mamczarz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 39–40. 87. Asia rides a crocodile and wears a costume with gold, fruits, and flowers. Africa comes to the stage on a lion and is decorated with scorpions and serpents. America wears silver and is barefoot, riding a tortoise. 88. The closest comparison might be in a pamphlet titled “Ballo di Principi d’Europa,” a satirical dialogue written between 1635 and 1645 in which talking Roman statues Pasquino and Marforio comment on the fortunes of European states through the conceit of a dance at “Lady Europe’s” house. Described in Toby Osborne, “1629–1635,” in Asbach and Schröder, The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years’ War, 139. Osborne cites the National Archives, Kew SP 85/7/279–280. 89. “Cette Reine des Rois.” Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin and Richelieu, Europe, 200 (line 60). 90. Ibid., 52. 91. “Moi qui des quatre sœurs qui partagent la terre, / Ai la part la plus noble & plus propre à la guerre, / La plus féconde en arts, en peuples, en cités, / En ports dans les deux mers, en fruits de tous côtés, / Qui tiens de l’Univers cette illustre partie.” Ibid., 236 (lines 699–703). 92. “Je vis sans désir, comme je vis sans crainte. / Quittez tous vos desseins & me laissez en paix: / Car je veux demeurer vierge & libre à jamais. / Je ne puis pas souffrir qu’un des miens me maîtrise.” Ibid., 203 (lines 111–14). 93. “Recherchant un Amant digne de mon désir, / C’est le seul Francion que je voudrais choisir.” Ibid., 206 (lines 186–87). 94. Europe asks Francion to be her “Chevalier” rather than her “Amant.” Ibid., 208 (line 223). 95. “By not marrying, Elizabeth moved toward a more abstract foreign policy shielded against biology and family psychodynamics.” In this way she “came closest to achieving the independence that would become a hallmark of Westphalian sovereignty.” John Watkins, “The 1559 Peace of Cateau-­Cambrésis: Print, Marriages of State, and the Expansion of Diplomatic Literacy,” in Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare, ed. Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter, Transculturalisms, 1400–1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 159–60. 96. “Les Dieux me sont témoins / Que non cœur reconnaît votre amour & vos soins.” Desmarets de Saint-­Sorlin and Richelieu, Europe, 206 (lines 182–83). 97. “Que le Ciel, Francion, toujours vous favorise, / Et vos chers alliés auteurs de ma franchise.” Ibid., 297 (lines 1898–99). 98. “S’il étouffe sa flamme / Je lui réserve encore une place dans mon âme.” Ibid., 297 (lines 1902–3).

Chapter 5 1. The official “opening ceremony” of the congress took place in April 1644 when papal nuncio Fabio Chigi led a solemn procession through Münster. However, few negotiators had arrived at that time. See François Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, ed. Auguste Boppe (Paris: Plon, 1893), 52–62. See also Derek Croxton, Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 184. 2. The diplomats never settled on a single language but produced official documents and carried out discussions in Latin, Italian, and French. Croxton, Westphalia, 164–66.

Notes to Pages 108–110

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3. D’Avaux was the lead negotiator until June 1645 when Mazarin sent a third delegate, the duc de Longueville, who outranked him. Accounts suggest, however, that d’Avaux continued to work as the most active French ambassador even after Longueville’s arrival. Ibid., 107. 4. When Longueville arrived with his own staff, this number almost doubled. Ibid., 135–36. 5. Frank Lestringant, “Claude de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, et la diplomatie de l’esprit,” in L’Europe des Traités de Westphalie: Esprit de la diplomatie et diplomatie de l’esprit, by Lucien Bély and Isabelle Richefort (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), 440. 6. Tallemant des Réaux’s portrait of him called him “the wittiest man of the robe, and the one who wrote the best in French.” Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2:197. 7. He was a particular friend of Guillaume Colletet and Guez de Balzac and had taken part in the “Illustres Bergers” circle of poets in the 1620s. Ogier’s brother Charles was a career diplomat who had served as d’Avaux’s secretary on missions to Sweden and Poland. 8. “L’Evangeliste de la Paix.” M. Joly, Voyage fait à Munster en Westphalie en 1646 et 1647, avec quelques lettres de M. Ogier, prêtre et prédicateur et autres choses mentionnées en la page suivante (Paris: Pierre Aubouin, 1670), sig. ãiiv. 9. Cited in Ludovic Lalande, ed., “Deux pièces extraites de la Collection Godefroy: II. Ballet dansé à Munster, 1645,” in Notices et documents publiés pour la Société de l’Histoire de France à l’occasion du cinquantième anniversaire de sa fondation, by Charles Jourdain (Paris: Renouard, 1884), 333–34. 10. “Les sorties de la ville sont dangereuses et incommodes, mais l’air est beaucoup meilleur qu’en Hollande, les Rües de la ville sont tres salles, presque toutes remplies de pourceaux et de fumiers, malpavées, les maisons tres desagreables, peu de conversation avec les habitans; mais la consolation est le sujet de la Porte qui fait prendre tout cela a gré, et ainsy l’entretien avec les Estrangers qui y sont en grand nombre.” Unsigned letter in A.A.E., C.P., Allemagne 20, fol. 266v. 11. Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (Paris, 1694), entry for “recreation.” 12. See, for example, Montaigne’s essay “De la diversion,” in Michel Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 871–81. See also Jacques Amyot’s preface to his translation of the Histoire éthiopique in which he defends fiction by arguing that it provides “quelque refreschissement” (some refreshment) for a mind fatigued by hard work. Heliodorus, L’histoire æthiopique, ed. Laurence Plazenet, trans. Jacques Amyot (Paris: Champion, 2008), 158. The first definition of the term in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française highlights this connection to work: “Diversion to relax from some work” (Divertissement pour se delasser de quelque travail). It also cites a common axiom: “Recreation restores the strength to work better” (La recreation redonne des forces pour mieux travailler). 13. Croxton, Westphalia, 139. 14. Ibid. 15. “Les François surtout qui y étoient entrés avec la réputation de gens fiers & querelleurs, s’y acquirent bientôt celle du peuple le plus poli & le plus galant par les ballets ingenieux qu’ils représenterent, & les fêtes qu’ils donnerent aux Dames, mêlant ainsi selon le génie de la nation, les plus agréables divertissemens aux occupations les plus sérieuses.” Guillaume-­Hyacinth Bougeant, Histoire du Traité de Westphalie et des négociations qui se firent à Munster et à Osnabrug pour établir la paix entre toutes les Puissances de l’Europe, composée principalement sur les mémoires de la cour, et des plénipotentaires de France (Paris: Pierre-­Jean Mariette, 1744), 2:175. 16. Saint-­Hubert, La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets, 5.

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17. Ogier reported that the bourgeoisie of Westphalia invited to the final performance of the ballet was “delighted in admiration of a spectacle so new in this country” (ravie en admiration d’un spectacle si nouveau en ce pays). Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 105. 18. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 75. 19. Turner’s model has been taken up and revised most recently by Jill Dolan, who refigures performance’s community-­forming power as a fleeting one. “Utopian performatives,” she writes, create “a processual, momentary feeling of affinity, in which spectators experience themselves as part of a congenial public constituted by the performance’s address.” Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 14. 20. Wight, Systems of States, 113–14. For an “English school” (as opposed to a realist) perspective, see Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 186–89. For a contemporary view, see Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003), 3. 21. John Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 42. 22. Diverse critiques of this “myth” include Peter Haggenmacher, “La paix dans la pensée de Grotius,” in L’Europe des Traités de Westphalie: Esprit de la diplomatie et diplomatie de l’esprit, ed. Lucien Bély and Isabelle Richefort (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), 67–79; Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 5–6; and Teschke, The Myth of 1648, esp. 13–27. 23. Jane O. Newman, “Perpetual Oblivion? Remembering Westphalia in a Post-­Secular Age,” in Forgetting Faith? ed. Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein, and Inga Mai Groote (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 261–78. 24. Sebastian Schmidt, “To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature,” International Studies Quarterly 55 (2011): 601–23. 25. See especially the correspondence in Acta Pacis Westphalicae: Serie II, Abt. B, Die Französischen Korrespondenzen (Münster, Westfalen: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1979). 26. One example of such an agreement is a document titled “Accord entre les Plenipotentaires du Roy d’Espagne, et ceux de la Republique des Provinces Unies des Pays Bas Pour le regard des Conferences alternativement en leurs hostels. La main droicte és Visites Et mettre la Negotiation par escript, En Langue Francoise, et Flamende, A Munster l’an 1646 le 5. May.” In it, the Spanish and Dutch delegations agree that “tousjours celuy qui à son tour donnera la visite pour la Conference aura la main En la Seance, Entrée et Sortie. . . . Et les Conferences et Discours de bouche se feront indiferemment [sic] en Langue Françoise, Flamende, ou Latine.” A.A.E., C.P., Munster 1, fol. 21r-­v. 27. See the avertissement of Jean Le Clerc, ed., Négociations secrètes touchant la paix de Munster et d’Osnabrug; ou Recueil général des préliminaires, instructions, lettres, mémoires, etc. concernant ces négociations, depuis 1642 jusqu’à 1648 (La Haye: J. Neaulme, 1725), vol. 1, n.p. 28. Derek Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe: Cardinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643–1648 (Selinsgrove, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1999), 270; Bély, Les relations internationales en Europe, 158. 29. Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe, 51.

Notes to Pages 114–116

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30. The libretto has been preserved in “Négociation de Munster, volume II des préliminaires,” A.A.E., C.P., Allemagne 20, fols. 256r–261v, as well as in a printed copy published by the Münster printing house Raesfeld. Throughout I will be quoting from Boppe’s edition of the libretto published in an appendix to Ogier’s Journal. 31. Ogier specified that d’Avaux did not attend the performance on account of the personal enmity between the two negotiators. Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 1045. 32. See Chigi’s diary for February 26, 1645, in Konrad Repgen, Acta Pacis Westphalicae: Serie III, Abt. C, Diarien (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1984), 252. 33. Ogier devotes only a couple of paragraphs to the ballet. He writes: “I composed its verses which were printed up, and sent a copy of it to M. Brun, plenipotentiary for Spain, Comtois by origin and general procurer for the Parlement of Dole, a man expert in belles-­lettres. The 27th, the same ballet was danced at M. the Count of Nassau’s residence and at M. the Prince of Bishop of Osnabruck’s residence, where I was. The 28th, Mardi Gras, it was danced in the city hall, where all the bourgeoisie of Munster attended” (J’en composai les vers qui furent imprimés, et en envoyai un exemplaire à M. Brun, plénipotentiaire d’Espagne, Comtois de nation et procureur général du parlement de Dôle, homme qui se connoît aux belles-­lettres. Le 27, le même ballet fut dansé chez M. le comte de Nassau et chez M. le prince évêque d’Onsabrug, où ju fus. Le 28, jour de carême prenant, il fut dansé dans l’hôtel de ville, où étoit toute la bourgeoisie de Munster). Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 105. Both Ogier and Godefroy mention that d’Avaux treated the bourgeois spectators to dinner during the ballet. Godefroy details the sweets and the performance of a juggler (“joueur de gobelets”) that followed the performance. 34. According to Grimm, a Dutch-­language version was printed in Amsterdam in 1645. On the sources of the ballet, see Jürgen Grimm, “Ballets Danced in Munster: François Ogier, Dramatist,” trans. Margaret M. McGowan, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 20, no. 2 (2002): 27–37. Antoine Brun was born in Franche-­Comté and spoke and wrote French but had authored several anti-­French pamphlets. Derek Croxton and Anuschka Tischer, The Peace of Westphalia: A Historical Dictionary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), 39. 35. “Le Ballet de la paix dansé par les Français à Munster le 26 du passé.” Gazette, extraordinaire, no. 31 (March 22, 1645): 216–20. 36. The identity of the performers is not very well documented. Ogier simply calls them “nos gentilhommes,” implying that they were noble attendants in the French entourage (Journal du Congrès de Munster, 104). Le Vacher may have been Thomas Le Vacher, who later danced in ballets at Louis XIV’s court throughout the 1650s. The Le Vacher family had served as musicians in the French king’s employ since the early seventeenth century. See Madeleine Jurgens, Documents du Minutier Central concernant l’histoire de la musique (1600–1650) (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1974), 2:774. 37. “Si tu veux obtenir le but que tu pretans / Il se faut gouverner avec de la prudence.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 214. 38. “Aux traittés, aux sermens, aux contracts je préside; / Des plus grands differens je suis médiateur; / Vous n’aurés point de Paix si je n’en suis l’auteur; / Je suis son courrier et son guide.” Ibid., 216. 39. Ogier did not, apparently, have his libretto translated into other languages, although there was a precedent for making libretti available in Latin for international spectators. 40. Although women performed in court entertainments under the Valois monarchs, Henri IV, and, later, Louis XIV, during Louis XIII’s reign entertainments tended to be performed by male-­only casts, with some exceptions.

246

Notes to Pages 116–118

41. “En matiére d’amour aussi bien qu’en la dance, / . . . le plus grand secret est de marquer son tems.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 214. 42. “Il part de la main . . . / Plus soudain qu’un éclair, plus viste que le vent.” Ibid. 43. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 71–72. Panofsky also notes that in Classical iconology kairos was often depicted by the figure commonly known as Opportunity. 44. James Baumlin and Phillip Sipiora, Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1–2. 45. Joseph Roach, “Performance: The Blunders of Orpheus,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 1083 46. They “faisoient signe de s’accorder,” according to a letter of March 19, 1645, Ms. Godefroy 20, fol. 98, reprinted in Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 212. One of the performers in this entrée, Joseph Fontanella, was a Catalan envoy attached to the French delegation as an advisor on Catalan affairs. For a brief biography, see Croxton and Tischer, The Peace of Westphalia, 90. 47. It was so unusual for ballet entrées to lack any kind of verse accompaniment that philologist Jürgen Grimm supposed the libretto must have been materially defective. Grimm complains that the eighth entrée and others are “missing” from Ogier’s libretto and concludes that “obviously, the programme has been damaged” (Grimm, “Ballets Danced in Munster,” 29). All of the extant copies of the libretto in France, however (including the Gazette reprint and a manuscript copy in the A.A.E., C.P., Allemagne 20, fols. 276r–281v), match the version Grimm consulted. A more logical conclusion is that these entrées had no poetry associated with them, that Ogier allowed dance and gesture to do the work of conveying the significance of these performances to the multilingual audience. 48. “Espagnols, François, et Germains, / Suivés l’ouvrage de mes mains. / Que chacun de vous l’embellise / Et de quelque ornement nouveau / Rende plus parfait et plus beau / Ce nouvel Edifice.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 217. 49. Preliminary instructions for future French negotiators drawn up by Richelieu before his death in 1642 recommended that the diplomats should strive to achieve a lasting peace (Weber, “ ‘Une bonne paix’ ”). In January 1646, d’Avaux and Servien reported that they had proposed “a general league” of interested states, designed to serve as “the foundation of the peace and tranquility of the people, and to put a sturdy bridle on the kinds of ambitious plans that have troubled Europe’s repose for so long.” Quoted in Klaus Malettke, “Les Traités de Westphalie (24 octobre 1648) et l’idée de ‘l’ordre européen’: Mythe ou réalité?” in 350e anniversaire des Traités de Westphalie, 1648–1998, ed. Georges Livet and Jean-­Pierre Kintz (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1999), 168. 50. Croxton, Westphalia, 101. 51. A clandestinely published text presented as d’Avaux’s memoirs—but more likely written by Henri de la Court, French resident in Onsabruck—conveys this idea: “All of Europe knows that France has always sincerely wished for peace and public tranquility, and that the Empire and Spaniards are always opposed to it.” Mémoires de Monsieur d[’Avaux], touchans les negotiations du traite de paix fait a Munster (Cologne, 1674), 22. On this text, see Paul Sonnino, Mazarin’s Quest: The Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 8. 52. “Triomfé, chrestiens, le croissant / S’en va de crainte pâlissant.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 217. 53. Lestringant, “Claude de Mesmes,” 447. 54. Ottoman forces in fact invaded Venetian territory in Crete in June 1645. Géraud Poumarède, “La question d’Orient au temps de Westphalie,” in L’Europe des Traités de Westphalie:

Notes to Pages 118–121

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Esprit de la diplomatie et diplomatie de l’esprit, ed. Lucien Bély and Isabelle Richefort (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), 363–90. See also Croxton, Westphalia, 208. 55. Before the development of the choreographic notation systems that disseminated French ballet steps throughout the continent in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, dancing manuals and dancing masters helped to cross-­fertilize national dancing traditions. François de Lauze, for example, worked as a dancing master in England. See François de Lauze, Apologie de la danse et de la parfaite méthode de l’enseigner tant aux cavaliers qu’aux dames (Geneva: Minkoff, 1977). As Lynn Matluck Brooks discusses, dancing manuals, including some French and Italian ones, influenced dancing practices in seventeenth-­century Spain. Lynn Matluck Brooks, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-­Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 70–81. 56. Sarah Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 14–18. 57. “Restored behavior” is the definition of performance given in Richard Schechner, Between Theater & Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35–37. 58. Préfontaine served as a secretary to the ambassador. See d’Avaux to Richelieu, August 6, 1644, A.A.E., C.P., Allemagne 22, fol. 738r. 59. “Après des actes si sanglans / Que l’impitieux soldat exerce en mon village, / Je n’attens que la mort ou le dur esclavage / . . . Dans une telle extrémité, / Quel support trouverai-­je, où sera mon asile?” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 214. 60. “Accablés des malheurs d’une si longue guerre / Qui nous a tout ravi sans l’avoir mérité, / Nous venons à vos pieds et, les genoux en terre, / Nous demandons la charité.” Ibid., 215–16. 61. The use of “unusual timing” and purposeful missteps in peasant roles is described in the choreographic notation for Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos, a burlesque dance from Louis XIV’s reign. See Rebecca Harris-­Warrick and Carol G. Marsh, Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de La Grosse Cathos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 139. Although this work is much later than the Ballet de la Paix, it likely reflects a longstanding approach to the performance of rusticity. 62. “Il faut asubjetir la dance & les pas aux Airs, aux entrées, & ne pas faire dancer un Vigneron ou un porteur d’eau, en Cavalier ou en Magicien, & voudrois que chacun dancast suivant ce qu’il represente.” Saint-­Hubert, La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets, 12. 63. “Deux villageois avec bastons et panniers: dans l’un deux petits cochons, et dans l’autre un gros oyson, qui sortoit son col hors du pannier d’une demi-­olne de Paris; et croyoient et grognoyent à merveilles.” Letter to Godefroy, March 19, 1645, MS Godefroy, vol. 20, fol. 98, Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris, and reprinted in Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 212; Lalande, “Deux pieces,” 335. Local women’s penchant for treating piglets like pets, carrying them around and holding them in their laps, was one of the things that irked le sieur d’Escalopier. Ibid., 334. 64. “On auroit besoin de leurs mettre un escriteau sur le dos pour les faire recognoistre.” Saint-­Hubert, La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets, 15. 65. “ ‘Münster, behind the pigsty,’ [count] Trauttmansdorff [of Austria] addressed his first letter back to Vienna.” Croxton, Westphalia, 127. 66. “On voit des processions de porceaux comme on voit des matous à Paris. . . . Je la nommai la ville du Cochon.” Letter to Godefroy, March 23, 1645. Ms. Godefroy t. 20, fol. 98v. Reprinted in Lalande, “Deux pieces,” 334. 67. “S’il y a du serieux & du Grotesque, l’on n’en voye pas deux Grotesques de suitte, s’il se peut quelles soient meslées parmy les serieuses, elles en seront bien plus divertissantes & l’on

248

Notes to Pages 121–127

aura plus de loisir de’admirer les unes & de rire des autres.” Saint-­Hubert, La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets, 7. 68. “Qu’on me donne un peu de loisir, / Belles, vous aurés du plaisir, / Aucune n’y sera trompée: / Je le puis dire assurément, / Qui n’a que la cape et l’espée / Peut bien danser légèrement.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 215. 69. On the recuperation of Renaissance basse danse in seventeenth-­century burlesque performance, see Franko, Dance as Text, 65–66. 70. “Qu’en dittes vous, belles Françoises, / Vos esprits sont-­ils point jaloux / De veoir triomfer deux Bourgeoises. . . ? / Ce qui vous servoit de risée, / Nos habit si lourds et si laids, / Sont la machine plus prisée / Et l’ornement plus beau de vos plaisans ballets. / Que si nous ôtons de nos testes / Ces grands pavillons portatifs, / Nous ferons autant de conquestes / Que vous avez fait de captifs.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 217–18. 71. Croxton, Westphalia, 129. 72. “Parez de leur plus beaux habits.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 212. 73. Grimm, “Ballets Danced in Munster,” 30. 74. “Quoy que la France et l’Italie / Soit le païs de la beauté, / Nous aimons la simplicité, / Des Bourgeoises de Westphalie. / Leur mine n’est pas si jolie, / Ni leur discours fort affetté; / Mais tousjours la naïveté / Avecque la douceur s’allie. / Adieu, donc. Beautés de la Cour, / Nous voions bien que vostre amour / N’est rien que fard et que peinture: / Nous cherchons fortune autre part.” Ogier, Journal du Congrès de Munster, 218. 75. Grimm, “Ballets Danced in Munster,” 30. 76. On this tradition, see Welch, “Dancing the Nation.” 77. “Ce n’est pas la seule occasion de remplir le vuide que nous laisseroit cette citation, dont la publication est si importante à toute la Chrestienté, qui m’oblige à divertir vos esprits d’un si facheux objet par la récréation d’un autre. Le Balet n’aguéres dansé à Munster n’est pas entiérement hors de propos en ce lieu: bien que tout y commance & finisse par l’amour, selon la gentillesse de nostre nation: dont la magnificence s’est aussi fait admirer dans la dépense de cet appareil: faite d’autant plus volontiers que ça esté sur le sujet & bon augure de la paix.” Untitled preface to the Gazette, extraordinare, no. 31 (March 22, 1645), 213. 78. The closest the congress had to a closing celebration was the Carnival feast hosted by Peñarda in 1648. Croxton, Westphalia, 328. 79. Watson, Descartes’s Ballet, 51–54. R. Darren Gobert accepts the earlier attribution to Descartes in his recent reading of the ballet libretto as a reflection of a Cartesian theory of the passions. See his The Mind-­Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), 19. 80. Susanna Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-­Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 37. Cérisantes, in fact, was one of Christina’s plenipotentiary ambassadors at Westphalia. 81. Watson, Descartes’s Ballet, 42. 82. Gunilla Dahlberg, “The Theatre Around Queen Christina,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 2 (2009): 170–72. 83. The French resident Chanut was present at the ballet. In a letter dated January 1, 1650, to Christina’s hopeful suitor, Prince Charles Palatin, generalissimo of the Swedish army, he wrote: “I have not yet seen the Queen of Sweden except in the ceremony for my first audience and in a ballet in which her Majesty danced” (Je n’ay encore veu la Reine de Suede que dans la ceremonie de la premiere audience & dans un ballet ou sa Majesté a dansé). He makes no comment on the content of the ballet. A.A.E., C.P. Suède 16, fol. 194v.

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84. Christina returned to this image of herself as international peacemaker in Le parnasse triumphant (1651). See Dahlberg, “The Theatre Around Queen Christina,” 173–74. 85. “Revere[r] la présence / De la divinité qui préside en ces lieux, / Elle nous veut tirer des perils de la guerre.” La Naissance de la Paix, in Watson, Descartes’s Ballet, 2–3. All subsequent references are to this edition. Translations of this ballet’s verses are Watson’s. 86. “Par sa prudence / et par la secrète influence.” Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. “Me déchire et fait voler / Plusieurs de mes membres en l’air. . . . Je crains qu’en peu de tems le monde / Ne perisse ou ne se confonde.” Ibid., 14–15. 89. “Aussy elle est en nostre corps / Le chef sans quoy il ne peut vivre. . . . Sans elle ce cors divisé / Seroit d’un chascun méprisé.” Ibid., 4–5. 90. Ibid., 54. 91. “Pallas seule est egalement / Et belliqueuse, & pacifique, / Qu’aucun de nous donc ne se picque / De controler son jugement.” Ibid., 18–19. 92. “Par PALLAS on entend la sagesse eternelle; / C’est PALLAS qui regne en ce lieu. / La justice & la Paix y regnent avec elle. / Et pourtant nous n’avons qu’une Reine, & un Dieu.” Ibid., 26–27. According to Watson, “Throughout the ballet, there is disapproval of the destruction and disruption of war, but no disdain for the wealth and power that come from winning.” Ibid., 29. 93. Ballet de la paix, dansé par le Prince d’Orange, à La Haye, au mois de février 1668 (La Haye: Hillebrant van Wouw, 1668). On the performance and recent efforts to restage the ballet, see Imre Bésanger, “Ballet de la Paix: Staging a Seventeenth-­Century Theatre Performance,” in Drama, Performance and Debate: Theatre and Public Opinion in the Early Modern Period, ed. Jan Bloemendal, Peter G. F. Eversmann, and Elsa Strietman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 333–46. 94. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 15. 95. Ibid.

Chapter 6 1. As Michael Burden rightly points out, the ballet’s rhetoric does not affirm that the conflict is definitively over but alludes to the “lurking shadows” that remain despite the end of outright fighting. Michael Burden, “A Spectacle for the King,” in Ballet de la nuit: Rothschild B1/16/6, ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2009), 3–8. 2. “Dissip[er] les Ombres de la France,” “Ira victorieuse au milieu de Byzance / Effacer le Croissant.” Isaac de Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuict, divisé en quatre parties, ou quatre veilles, et dansé par sa Majesté le 23 fevrier 1653 (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1653), 67. 3. See, for example, Van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms, 284; Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 65–69; Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), esp. 134–203. 4. “Un seul des Spectacles que le Roy donne à la Cour et dont il permet aussi le veüe à ses Peuples, soit dans la pompe Royale qui les accompagne, doit dans la richesse du lieu où ils sont representez, efface la beauté de tous les spectacles de la Ville ensemble, et des spectacles des anciens Romains, et fait voir à ces memes Etrangers ce qu’un Roy de France peut faire dans son Royaume, apres avoir veu avec plus d’étonnement ce qu’il peut faire au dehors.” Chappuzeau, Le théâtre françois, 205.

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Notes to Pages 132–136

5. “Par de fréquents divertissements de bals, de comédies, de festins, pour lesquels rien n’est jamais épargné de ce qui confère splendeur et magnificence, offre du contentement aux dames, du délassement à lui-­même, et il plaît grandement à Sa Majesté qu’y assistant aussi les ministres des princes, afin qu’ils répandent à l’étranger le bruit des fastes royaux.” Comisso, Les ambassadeurs vénitiens, 278. 6. Joseph Nye defines soft power as an “intangible attraction” that draws foreign actors to accept a country’s positions “without any explicit threat or exchange taking place.” Nye, Soft Power, 7. 7. “Il n’y a point de plus illustre marque de la Souvraineté que le Droit d’envoyer & de recevoir des Ambassadeurs.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 1:9. 8. “Le droit de l’Ambassade estant inseparable de la Souveraineté.” Ibid., 1:69. 9. McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King, 152. 10. Ibid., 175–76. She is citing Wicquefort here. 11. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 41. 12. Gideon Baker, “Right of Entry or Right of Refusal? Hospitality in the Law of Nature and Nations,” in Hospitality and World Politics, ed. Gideon Baker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 41–68. 13. Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (Oxford: Lichfield, 1703), 192–93. See also Baker, “Right of Entry or Right of Refusal?” 50. 14. For a discussion of debates about diplomatic immunity and extraterritoriality, see McClure, Sunspots and the Sun King, 132–41. 15. The expression “theater of hospitality” comes from Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 109. 16. Anna Keay, The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (London: Continuum, 2008), 45. 17. His mother, Henrietta Maria, Louis XIII’s sister, had arrived in France in 1644 and stayed until the Restoration. 18. Keay, The Magnificent Monarch, 47. 19. Ibid., 73. 20. Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 74. 21. Ibid., 84. France’s relations with the Commonwealth eventually led to the expulsion of Charles from France in late 1654. The Duke of York stayed in France for another year and Princess Henriette even longer. 22. Canova-­Green, La politique-­spectacle au Grand Siècle, 67. 23. Ibid., 65–69. 24. Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 17. 25. “La revolution est chose assez commune,” but “il faut punir ce grand outrage / par la force & par le courage” (Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuict, 59). For an analysis of other lines of the libretto that specifically reference the English Civil War, see Canova-­Green, La politique-­ spectacle au Grand Siècle, 106. 26. In his foundational work on Benserade, Charles Silin observed the poet’s “peculiar talent for writing verses which apply to the character represented but which, at the same time, betray the idiosyncrasies, ambitions, intrigues, and weaknesses of the person dancing.” Charles Silin, Benserade and His Ballets de Cour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 222.

Notes to Pages 136–139

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27. John Callow, The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 63–64. 28. “La gloire seule est ma Maistresse. . . . Je veux faire des coups dignes d’elle & de moy.” Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuict, 58. 29. “Je m’applique en homme expert / A pescher tout ce qui sert / A refaire une Couronne.” Isaac de Benserade, Les Nopces de Pélée et de Thétis, comédie italienne en musique, entre-­mêlée d’un ballet sur le même sujet, dansé par sa Majesté (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1654), 18. 30. “Dégelez-­vous à ce grand feu, / Les Belles.” Benserade, Ballet royal de la nuict, 51. 31. “Ce feu qui fait bien du bruit / N’en fait pas tant que son feu Pere.” Ibid. 32. For an expanded reading of Buckingham’s performace, see Ellen R. Welch, “The Poetics of Persona: Fictions of the Courtly Self in Seventeenth-­Century Ballet,” Early Modern French Studies 39, no. 2 (2017). 33. Nathalie Lecomte, “Les danseurs des Noces de Pélée et de Thétis,” in Marie-­Thérèse Bouquet-­Boyer, ed., Les Noces de Pélée et Thétis, Venise, 1639–Paris, 1654 = Le Nozze di Teti e di Peleo, Venezia, 1639–Parigi, 1654, actes du Colloque International de Chambéry et de Turin, 3–7 novembre 1999 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 261. Gordon-­Huntley is listed as “Mademoiselle Gourdon” in the libretto. 34. “J’ay vaincu ce Python qui desoloit le monde, / Ce terrible Serpent que l’Enfer, & la Fronde / D’un venin dangereux avoient assaisonné” (Benserade, Les Nopces de Pélée et de Thétis, 6). The version of the myth depicted in the dramatic scenes of the entertainment may also be read as a reference to the Fronde. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Peleus obtains his shape-­shifting bride by force; on Proteus’s advice, he shackles Thetis to her bed until she cycles through “a hundred lying shapes” (Book XI, lines 313–77, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin [New York: W. W. Norton, 2005], 378–80). In the stage version, Proteus does not appear. Instead, Chiron the centaur advises Peleus on how to seduce Thetis. He never shackles her but persuades her to love him with song as she changes form. She happily submits: “Je consens de suivre tes Loix.” Benserade, Les Nopces de Pélée et de Thétis, 53. 35. “Ma race est du plus pur sang. . . . Mon jeune & Royal aspect / Inspire avec le respect / La pitoyable Tendresse.” Benserade, Les Nopces de Pélée et de Thétis, 7. 36. “J’ay le teint beau, les yeux doux, / Et je sens mon origine, / La difference entre nous.” Ibid., 12. 37. Performed multiple times throughout April and May 1654, it drew an audience that included French and English courtiers as well as ambassadors from Genoa, Modena, Venice, Rome, Florence, and Savoy, the Spanish diplomat Antonio Pimentel de Herrera on his way home to Madrid from a posting in Sweden, and hundreds of Parisian bourgeois who crowded into the Louvre. Jérôme La Gorce, “Les Noces de Pélée et de Thétis d’après les relations des contemporains,” in Les Noces de Pélée et Thétis, Venise, 1639–Paris, 1654 = Le Nozze di Teti e di Peleo, Venezia, 1639–Parigi, 1654, actes du Colloque International de Chambéry et de Turin, 3–7 Novembre 1999, ed. Marie-­Thérèse Bouquet-­Boyer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001), 33–49. 38. For a detailed description of the entertainment based on a variety of sources, see Marie Christout, Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 1643–1672: Mises en scène, nouv. éd. (Paris: Centre national de la danse, 2005), 75–80. 39. La Finto Pazza (1645), Orfeo (1647), Xerse (1660), and Ercole amante (1662). 40. Laurain-­Portemer, Études mazarines, 1:175–399; David Parrott, “Art, Ceremony, and Performance: Cardinal Mazarin and Cultural Patronage at the Court of Louis XIV,” in Ballet de la nuit: Rothschild B1/16/6, ed. Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 2009), 9–18.

252

Notes to Pages 139–143

41. La Gorce, “Les Noces de Pélée et de Thétis d’après les relations des contemporains,” 48. See also Françoise Dartois-­Lapeyre, “Le chant en langue étrangère et régionale dans l’opéra aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Le chant, acteur de l’histoire, ed. Jean Quéniart (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 101–2. 42. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime, 13–14. 43. According to Marie-­Françoise Christout, this visit allowed Mazarin to assess Christina’s state of mind before she met with the king in Compiège a few days later. Christout, Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 88. See also her “Réception offerte le 6 septembre 1636 à Essonnes à la Reine Christine de Suède,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études francaises 9, no. 1 (1957): 22–43. 44. Nicolas L’Escalopier, Relation de ce qui s’est passé à l’arrivée de la reine Christine de Suède à Essaune, en la maison de M. Hesselin, ensemble la description particulière du ballet qui y a esté dansé le 6 septembre 1656 (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1656), 3–4. On the machines, see Christout, Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 88. See also “Reception en personne de la Reine de Suede en France,” in “Les Memoires Des Sieurs de Bonneuil,” fols. 103r–189v, A.A.E., M.D. 1835. 45. L’Escalopier, Relation de l’arrivée de la reine Christine de Suède, 6. 46. The author is likely the same L’Escalopier who accompanied the French delegation to the Congress of Westphalia in the role of almoner to the Duke of Longueville (see Chapter 5). 47. As Susanna Åkerman shows, Christina’s abdication “generated a belief . . . that her sudden break with the Divine covenant involved in kingship had altered the normal pattern of Providence.” Moreover, Christina’s “secret diplomacy” during her European travels after abdication “aimed to act out popular millenarian expectations” by “ ‘threaten[ing] the world with great calm.’ ” Susanna Åkerman, “On the Impossibility of Abdicating: Queen Christina of Sweden and the Spiritual Crown,” in Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise Olga Fradenburg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 215–16. 48. On news and libels produced about Christina in the years following her abdication, see Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, “Writing Life—Writing News: Representations of Queen Christina of Sweden in Early Modern Literature,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 2 (2009): 221–39. The accounts turned in a more slanderous direction after Christina ordered the execution of her equerry at Fontainebleau later during her visit in France. 49. Peter Lindström and Svante Norrhem, Flattering Alliances: Scandinavia, Diplomacy and the Austrian-­French Balance of Power, 1648–1740, trans. Charlotte Merton (Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 2013), 117–22. 50. “Elle vint saluä sa Majesté, qui la receu avec beaucoup de Civilité, lui faisant donna un fauteüil aupres d’elle afin quelle prit part aux divertissements qui lui etoit preparé, la traitant toujours en fille de France.” Nicolas Auteur du texte L’Escalopier, “Ballet: Relation de ce qui c’est [sic] passé a l’arrivée de la Reine Christine de Suede, a Essaune en la Maison de Monsieur Hesselin avec un Panegyrique latin sur l’entrée de cette Princesse,” Ms Français 1705, 18–19, BnF, Paris. 51. Muse historique (March 1658), quoted in Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 141. 52. “Ayant la curiosité de voir la cour de France.” “Mémoires de M. de Bonneuil Sur Le Cérémonial, 1639–1663,” fol. 166r, Ms Arsenal 4230, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris. 53. “Me receut avec beaucoup de Civilité, et tant de franchise que des lors je me trouvé [sic] engagé de prendre soin de sa personne pendant le sejour qu’il a fait icy.” Ibid., fol. 166v. 54. When first received in the king’s chamber, Christian “fit son compliment en françois, quoy quil [sic] ne parla pas fort bien la langue.” Ibid., fol. 167r.

Notes to Pages 143–148

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55. “Le Roy par sa maniere obligeante et naturelle n’oublioit rien pour faire divertir ce Prince pendant son sejour a Paris. Tous les soirs ils se trouvoit aux Comedies, Bals et divertissements au Palais Royal.” Ibid., fol. 167v. 56. “Sa Majesté mesme desira de luy faire voir un grand bal auquel les ambassadeurs furent invitez. Le Prince n’y voulut pas danser, sur ce que je luy representay par la Confiance qu’il avoit en moy qu’il ne dansoit pas assez bien pour un bal reglé. Il me crut, et demeura assis sur le haut dais aupres des Reines.” Ibid., fols. 167v–168r. 57. Article dated January 27, Gazette, no. 12 (1663): 95. 58. Ibid., 96. 59. Article dated March 3, Gazette, no. 27 (1663): 196. 60. Article dated March 31, Gazette, no. 39 (1663): 292. 61. Article dated February 3, Gazette, no. 15 (1663): 119–20. 62. Article dated May 12, Gazette, no. 57 (1663): 442. 63. Georgia Cowart observes that this “ballet as a whole demonstrates Louis XIV’s rule over an empire of the arts as a natural corollary to his rule over the political empire of Europe and the Indies.” Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV & the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 76. 64. “Lors qu’il fait le Berger il est incomparable, / Representant Cyrus il prend un plus haut vol, / Qu’il se déguise en Nymphe il a l’air admirable, / C’est la mesme fierté s’il dance en Espagnol, / Sous l’habit Afriquain lui mesme il se surmonte, / Mais de ces jeux divers quand il faut qu’il remonte, / A son vrai, naturel, & serieux emploi, / Ou pas un ne l’égale, ou Nul ne le seconde, / Personne dans le Monde, / Ne fait si bien le ROY.” Isaac de Benserade, Ballet des Muses, dansé par Sa Majesté à son chasteau de S. Germain en Laye, le 2 décembre 1666 (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1666), 57. 65. Christout, Le ballet de cour de Louis XIV, 118. 66. Julia Prest, “Dancing King: Louis XIV’s Roles in Molière’s Comédies-­Ballets, from Court to Town,” Seventeenth Century 16, no. 2 (2001): 289. 67. “Ce Maure si fameux, . . . / D’un merite éclatant, & d’un rang singulier, / Pouroit mettre à ses piez tout l’orgueil de la Terre.” Benserade, Ballet des Muses, 57. 68. Ballet royale de Flore, dansé par sa Majesté le mois de février 1669 (Paris: Robert Ballard, 1669), 34. 69. “L’Europe de tout temps a paru plus féconde / En Illustres Héros que le reste du monde, / La gloire, la grandeur, l’exacte fermeté, / Le courage, l’esprit, la sagesse profonde / En sujets differens ont chez elle habité, / Et César, & Caton les partagoient dans Romme; / Toutes ces qualitez jointes en mesme lieu / Sur le Throne François accompagnent un Homme / Que dans l’Antiquité l’ont [sic] eut pris pour un Dieu.” Ibid., 55. 70. “Les Nations . . . reconnoissent l’Empire des Lys pour le premier de l’Univers.” Ibid., 35. 71. Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 99. 72. Rose A. Pruiksma, “ ‘Dansé par le Roi’: Constructions of French Identity in the Court Ballets of Louis XIV” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999), esp. 46–78. 73. As Robert Isherwood writes, “There is little doubt that Colbert conceived of the academic and artistic system put together by the crown in the 1660’s as a piece of mercantilism. . . . He stressed the development of native talent and aimed for the exportation of French art.” Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 151.

254

Notes to Pages 148–152

74. Lucien Bély stresses that Louis XIV observed France’s relative strength in Europe and other kingdoms’ inability to initiate war as early as 1661. Bély, Les relations internationales en Europe, 204–5. 75. Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 84. 76. As Georgia Cowart has asked: “Would [entertainment] serve a nobility who used pleasure as an icon of its identity? Or would it serve the king, who, as first of the nobility and both purveyor and participant in the pleasures of the court, also perceived them as an instrument of control?” Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 48. 77. André Félibien, Jean Lepautre, and François Chauveau, Relation de la feste de Versailles du 18e juillet 1668 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1679), 44. 78. “Du Prince des François rien ne borne la Gloire, / A tout elle s’estend, & chez les Nations / Les veritez de son Histoire / Vont passer des vieux temps toutes les fictions.” André Félibien, Jean Lepautre, and François Chauveau, Relation de la feste de Versailles du 18e juillet 1668 (Paris: Impr. royale, 1679), 3. 79. Hedley Bull lists “the France of Louis XIV” as a historical threat to international society because it “seemed capable of overthrowing the system and society of states and transforming it into a universal empire” (The Anarchical Society, 16). International relations theorists disagree about the nature of that threat. Bull himself sees it as not too serious, since “the preservation of the independence of particular states [is] a goal that is subordinate to the preservation of the society” (ibid., 17). Keens-­Soper and Schweizer, on the other hand, claim that in the early modern period universal monarchy was seen as “an alternative to Europe’s constitution, and incompatible with continuous diplomacy.” H. M. A. Keens-­Soper and Karl W. Schweizer, François Callières: The Art of Diplomacy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 29. 80. Orest Ranum, “Islands of the Self in a Ludovician Fête,” in Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV, ed. David Lee Rubin (Washington, D.C.: Folger Books, 1992), 28. 81. “The prince’s fête compensates for the king’s absence,” notes Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 199. 82. “En une seule nuit, la nation, stupéfaite et mystifiée, assiste aux manifestations du surpouvoir de Louis XIV. L’ensemble est conçu comme une grandiose machination.” Apostolidès, Le roi-­machine, 110. 83. “Je ne vais pas à tous ces petits bals qui se font ce carnaval; je les verrai assez. Votre Altesse Royale sait que ce ne sont plus mes amusements.” Thomas-­François Chabod, marquis de Saint-­Maurice, Lettres sur la cour de Louis XIV, 1667–1670, ed. Jean Lemoine (Paris: Calmann-­ Lévy, 1910), 164. 84. “L’appareil en était beau et pompeux par la quantité des édifices, par leur grandeur, par leur richesse et architecture; jamais il n’y eut de si belles eaux ni de si beaux feux; il en coûte au Roi plus de 500,000 livres. Tout le monde dit qu’il aurait mieux fait de donner cet argent aux soldats réformés.” Ibid., 208. 85. “Nous nous y trouvâmes, l’ambassadeur de Venise, moi, les résidents de l’Empereur, de Suède, de Danemark, de Portugal, et de Mantoue et une suite de plus de cent gentilhommes. Votre Altesse Royale verra ailleurs les relations de cette fête qui était pompeuse, m’attachcant seulement ici à l’instruire de ce qui s’y passa à l’égard des ministres étrangers. Il n’y a jamais eu si grande affluence de peuple et jamais de si grands désordres, tout cela joint au peu de soins et de précautions que prend en semblables rencontres le sieur de Bonneuil et au peu d’expérience des officiers et gardes du corps qui ne savent plus que faire la guerre, si bien que les ministres étrangers furent poussés, rebutés, battus et mal placés et ne virent que la comédie et les feux

Notes to Pages 152–156

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et point la collation qui était dans les allées ni les machines superbes du lieu oû le Roi donna à souper et le bal aux dames. Les envoyés de l’Empereur, de Suède, et de Portugal se retirèrent avec leur suite, après avoir été repoussés et maltraités à l’entrée de la comédie. L’ambassadeur de Venise y entra et se plaignit fort des poussées qu’il reçut quoiqu’il fût conduit par le sieur de Bonneuil.” Ibid., 201–2. 86. Butler, Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 15:325–41, http://​www​.british​-­­history​ .ac​.uk​/cal​-­­state​-­­papers​/foreign​/vol15​/pp325​-­­341. 87. Canova-­Green, La politique-­spectacle au Grand Siècle, 54n61. 88. “Où il n’y aurait point de rang pour empêcher les disputes et que lui se mettrait auprès des personnes qui lui étaient familères.” Saint-­Maurice, Lettres sur la cour de Louis XIV, 1667–1670, 205. 89. For a comparison of the two entertainments, see Ranum, “Islands of the Self in a Ludovician Fête,” 22. 90. See Roger Chartier, “George Dandin, ou le social en représentation,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 49, no. 2 (1994): 277–309. 91. “Les personnes de qualité font elles-­mêmes la confusion et en ressentent les premières les fâcheries, y perdent leurs plumes, se font déchirer leurs canons, et paraissent après le bal chiffonnées par leur peu de conduite.” Saint-­Maurice, Lettres sur la cour de Louis XIV, 1667–1670, 208. 92. “Les feux qui furent les plus beaux que j’aie jamais vus.” Ibid., 203. 93. “Je m’allai promener dans les jardins qui étaient merveilleusement bien éclairés par de grandes statues et des vases en feu.” Ibid., 203–4. 94. “Pour moi, ma femme, ma fille, et mes enfants, il m’en coûte près de 4000 livres, et à mon gré, je n’ai jamais fait une dépense si mal à propos; je m’en console parce qu’avec les fous il faut être fol.” Ibid., 209. 95. “Les Sauvages des Provinces de l’Amérique qui dependent de la France . . . font connoistre par leurs chansons, & par leurs danses, le plaisir qu’ils ont d’estre sous l’empire d’un Roy puissant & glorieux qui les fait joüir d’une heureuse tranquilité.” Philippe Quinault, Le temple de la paix, ballet dansé devant S. M., à Fontainebleau, le 15 d’octobre 1685 (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1685), 27. 96. “Il prefere au bonheur d’estre Vainqueur du Monde / La gloire de tenir dans une paix profonde / Ses Ennemis vaincus cent & cent fois, / Son Nom est reveré des Nations sauvages; / Jusqu’au plus réculez Rivages / Tout retentit du bruit de ses Exploits. / Ah! Qu’il est doux de vivre sous ses loix.” Ibid., 28. 97. “Les Peuples d’Afrique qui se souviennent encore des malheurs que la guerre leur a causez, viennent au Temple de la Paix tesmoigner la joye qu’ils ressentent d’esprouver la clemence du Vainqueur, & de joüir du repos qu’il leur a donné.” Ibid., 34. 98. “Gardons-­nous d’attirer sa colere / Ne songeons desormais qu’à luy plaire / Son Tonnerre a laissé sur les Bords Afriquains / Un exemple terrible au reste des Humains.” Ibid., 35. 99. “Quel bonheur pour la France / D’estre sous la Puissance / D’un Roy si renommé!” Ibid. 100. See also Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 279–80.

Chapter 7 1. On the creation of the staircase, which was destroyed in the course of renovations in the mid-­eighteenth century, see Jacques Thuillier et al., Charles Le Brun, 1619–1690, célébration

256

Notes to Pages 157–161

du tricentenaire de la mort de l’artiste: Le décor de l’escalier des ambassadeurs à Versailles: Musée national du château de Versailles, 19 novembre 1990–10 février 1991 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990), esp. 30–38. 2. Although the Regency of Algeria was under Ottoman rule, the dey negotiated independently with the French government on matters related to Mediterranean policy, particularly piracy. The Ottoman connection was not mentioned in most textual representations of the embassy and the ambassador was treated more like the Moroccan ambassador who visited France in 1681–82 than like any Turkish emissary. 3. Bull, The Anarchical Society, 15. 4. Ibid. 5. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 98. 6. “Lui servir d’Interprete par tout, n’ayant nul besoin des langues pour s’expliquer, & pour se faire entendre à tout le monde.” Ménestrier, Des ballets anciens et modernes, 42. 7. I offer a more detailed version of this history of ideas about the universal legibility of music and dance in “Constructing Universality in Early Modern French Treatises on Music and Dance,” in Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, ed. Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 103–23. I am grateful to Rebekah Ahrendt for a dialogue that sharpened my thinking about this subject. 8. “Chaque peuple a ses manieres, & ses usages differens, quoi qu’ils soient naturellement sujets aux mémes mouvemens de l’ame, & aux mémes passions. Ainsi, quoi que la nature soient la éeme par tout, les divers climats la diversifient si fort, que les mœurs ne sont pas les mémes dans tous les païs. Ce qui excite un Turc à la vangeance, ny exciteroit pas un Alleman, parce qu’un Alleman ne se pique pas des mémes choses dont un Turc peut étre piqué. Ainsi quoi que les Passions soient toûjours les mémes par tout, les mémes choses ne servent pas par tout à les exciter également.” Ménestrier, Des représentations en musique anciennes et modernes, 138–39. 9. “De tout temps en chaque contree ou Province on a eu une danse affectee, comme les Anglois les mesures & contredanses, les Ecossois les Bransles d’Ecosse.” Lauze, Apologie de la danse, 9. 10. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (Paris, 1694) explains of the verb “affecter” that “it is used to mark the inclination through which one wants one thing or person rather than another” (Il se dit aussi pour marquer l’inclination par laquelle on veut une chose, une personne plustost qu’une autre) and that “it is used also to mark ambition” (Il se dit encore pour marquer l’ambition) in the sense of “affecting” dignities or honors. 11. “J’ay veu des Italiens si habituez à la Guitarre . . . qu’ils ne pouvoient concevoir la cadence de nos Violons.” Pure, Idée des spectacles anciens et nouveaux, 272. 12. “Chaque nation a encore son caractere pour le chant & pour la composition, comme pour les Fêtes publiques qui dépendent de la difference des climats, des usages, des coûtumes, des mœurs, & du génie des Peuples.” Jacques Bonnet and Pierre Bonnet-­Bourdelot, Histoire de la musique, et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusquä present (Paris: J. Cochart, 1715), 32. 13. “Je ne traite pas seulement de l’Origine & des progrès de la Musique Françoise, mais aussi de celle des Nations les plus considerables de toutes les parties du monde. Quantité d’Historiens & de Relations de Voyageurs, nous apprenent que la Musique est en usage par tout l’Univers.” Ibid., 2. 14. “Les Amériquains ont encore une Musique furieuse & emportée, dont ils étourdissent leurs malades pour leur procurer de la guérison; ils se servent aussi de la Musique pour adoucir leurs travaux pendant qu’ils labourent la terre avec des pioches.” Ibid., 48.

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15. “La Chine passe pour être l’Empire le plus étendu, & des plus anciens du Monde; & les Chinois pour être universels dans les Sciences & les Arts, & les plus ingenieux Peuples de la Terre; il y a même apparence qu’ils ont eu avant les Européens, l’usage de la Musique, de ­l’Imprimerie, & peut-­être la connaissance des Mathematiques, & de cent autres choses qui ont fait l’admiration de toutes les autres Nations.” Ibid., 169. 16. “Nous n’avons pû en être instruits, que par les relations des voyageurs qui ont trouvé le moyen d’entrer dans cet Empire sous la figure d’Ambassadeurs, environ depuis cinq ou six ans.” Ibid., 171. 17. Ibid., 174. 18. “Pompe magnifique.” Ibid., 176–77. 19. Ibid., 184. 20. “On trouve dans les Mémoires de M. de la Forest, Ambassadeur de François I à Constantinople, pour le Traité fait avec Solyman II [sic], l’an 1543, que le Roi croyant faire plaisir à son nouvel Allié, lui envoya un corps des Musiciens des plus accomplis. . . . Ayant remarqué que cette Musique amolissoit son âme guerrière, il jugea par lui-­même qu’elle pouvoit faire encore plus d’impression dans celle de ses Courtisans. . . . Solyman crut encore que c’étoit un trait de politique de François I, car il dit à l’Ambassadeur de France, qu’il croyoit que son Maître avoit envoyé ce divertissement pour le détourner des occupations de la Guerre.” Ibid., 308–10. 21. “L’Empereur des Turcs & le Czar des Moscovites ne sont pas seulement Souverains, mais ils sont si absolus, & regnent si despotiquement, qu’il n’y a point de difference entre leurs Sujets & des esclaves. Ils envoyent aussi leurs Ambassadeurs & leurs Ministres aux autres Princes, mais ils ne les y font point resider.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 1:16. 22. “Des Barbares, qui n’ont point de respect pour le droit des gens.” Ibid., 2:71. 23. “Les Moscovites, les Polonois, & les autres Peuples qui s’habillent à l’Asiatique, n’ont point de Ministres ordinaires dans les Cours des autres Princes de la Chrestienté. Tous les autres s’habillent ou à la Françoise, ou d’une mode fort approchante.” Ibid., 1:314. 24. “Il y a des ambassadeurs ou des envoyez comme de Moscovie et Turquie quand ils sont ambassadeurs on les traitte comme les autres ambassadeurs cy dessus.” The fragmentary memoir is copied in a manuscript collection of similar texts appended to the Mémoires du Baron de Breteuil, tome premier, 439, Arsenal Ms. 3859, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris. 25. “Memoire des ambassadeurs que le Roy a receu de Moscovie, Turquie, Siam, et Maroc, et les ceremonies que sa Majesté a ordonné etre faites pour leur Reception.” Mémoires du Baron de Breteuil, tome VII (1714–15), 331–41, Arsenal Ms. 3865, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris. 26. “Ambassadeurs crotesquement vestus . . . , tenans en main leur harangues dans un rouleau de papier, quils lisoient ligne apres autre. . . . et en fin toutes ces formes grossieres, et barbares, vous divertiroient, si je ne scaurois que votre temps est destiné a de meilleures occupations.” Letter from Chanut to Brienne, May 26, 1646, A.A.E., C.P. Suède 9, fol. 60r. 27. “Si j’avois, Monseigneur, vous descrit les particularitez de ce spectacle, je vous ferois une comedie plaisante, et la scene mesme auroit quelque chose d’agreable.” Ibid. 28. The other members of the embassy included Potemkin’s son Stéphane and diak (diplomatic clerk) Siméon Roumiantsof. Alfred Rambaud, Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France, vol. 8: Russie, tome premier (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1890), 54. 29. The embassy concluded in a trade treaty between France and Russia. Ibid., 56–58. The first French embassy to Russia occurred in 1586 with the visit of François de Carle to Moscow to conclude a trade treaty. The first documented Russian embassy to France arrived in 1615. The two courts exchanged only a handful of envoys in the first half of the seventeenth century. Ibid., 13–38.

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Notes to Pages 165–167

30. “Comment, n’as-­tu pas veu disner les Moscovites? / Tu seras tout comme eux.” Raymond Poisson, Les œuvres de monsieur Poisson (Paris: J. Ribou, 1679), 179. 31. Ibid., 186–87. 32. “Ils avoit beaucoup epargné, parce que les Moscovites aiment beaucoup moins la bonne chere [sic] que l’argent qui est fot rare en leur païs.” Journal Du Sieur de Catheux, Mestre de Camp d’un regiment de cavalerie et Gentilhomme ordinaire du Roy, touchant les Moscovites arrivez en France en l’année 1668, A.A.E., C.P. Russie 1 (1660–86), fol. 44r. 33. “Ne parloit que Moscovite et Allemand & ce translateur étoit le seul de toute l’ambassade qui savoit a langue latine.” Ibid., fol. 44v. 34. Ibid., fol. 47r. 35. For a description of their formal audience of introduction with the king on August 30, see an article dated September 7 in the Gazette, no. 105 (1668): 937–38. Their audience of departure on September 23 is recounted in an article dated September 29, Gazette, no. 114 (1668): 1010. 36. “Le 17, Leurs Majestez, avec lesquelles estoit grand nombre de Seigneurs & de Dames de la Cour, allerent au Chasteau de Versailles.” Article dated September 22, Gazette, no. 111 (1668): 985. 37. Journal Du Sieur de Catheux, fol. 51v. 38. “Le seizieme on donna a l’Ambassadeur, a son fils, au chevalier, et a toute leur suite le divertissement de la comedie des coups de l’Amour et de la fortune, representé par la troupe du marais, avec des changemens de theatre et des entrées de balets qui les rejouirent fort, et ils demanderent du vin qu’on leur fit aporter.” Ibid., fol. 52r. 39. “Le dix-­huitieme la troupe du sieur de Moliere representa l’Amphitrion avec des machines et des entrées de balets qui plurent extremement a l’Ambassadeur, et a son fils, a qui on presenta sur l’amphitheatre où ils étoient deux grands bassins, l’un de confitures seiches et l’autre de fruits dont ils mangerent point, mais ils burent, et remercierent les comediens.” Ibid. 40. Christine Isom-­Verhaaren, Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 32–33; Ina McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism, and the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 37–43. 41. “En l’année 1668 le roy prit la résolution de faire venir en France le sieur de La Haye Vantelet, son ambassadeur à la Porte ottomane. . . . Deux raisons principales obligèrent Sa Majesté à prendre cette résolution: l’une qu’elle avoit recognu par plusieurs expériences que non seulement la présence d’un ambassadeur de sa Majesté à la Porte n’estoit d’aucune utilité au service de Sa Majesté et au bien du commerce de ses sujets et au renouvellement des capitulations, mais qu’elle estoit plutost nuisible à l’un et à l’autre, parce que les Turcs considéroient la personne dudit ambassadeur comme un gage qu’ils avoient toujours entre leurs mains, qui leur donnoit lieu de continuer plus impunément et sans en craindre aucun inconvénient les vexations et avanies qu’ils exerceoient tous les jours sur les François et sur les vaisseaux de la nation qui traffiquent en Levant; la seconde, qe Sa Majesté ayant dessein alors de faire un grand effort à la réquisition du pape pour le secours de la Candie, la prudence de sadite Majesté luy fit juger qu’elle ne devoit pas laisser son ambassadeur exposé aux ressentiments qu’en pourroient faire les Turcs par quelques mauvais traitemens à sa personne où l’honneur de Sa Majesté se fût trouvé interessé. “Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’instruction au sieur de Nointel, allant ambassadeur à Constantinople,” in Recueil des instructions données aux ambassadeurs et ministres de France, ed. Pierre Duparc, vol. 29: Turquie (Paris: CNRS, 1969), 50–51. 42. “Il en partit le 21 septembre, pour se rendre à Marseille, ou les Echevins l’ayans complimenté & regalé des presens ordinaires le traitterent deux jours en public, avec beaucoup de

Notes to Pages 167–170

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Magnificence. Ils luy donnerent méme le Divertissement du Bal, auquel grand nombre de personnes de qualité de l’un & l’autre sexe, retrouvérent.” A.A.E., C.P., Turquie 3 (1669–71), fol. 224. 43. Ibid., fol. 226r. 44. “Il est superflu de dire icy audit sieur de Nointel quelle a esté la conduite de cet employé et la manière de traiter les affaires, hautaine, chagrine, et pleine de contretemps.” Duparc, Recueil des instructions, 52. 45. This changed in the eighteenth century, as evidenced by Poulain de Saint-­Foix’s one-­act comedy Les Veuves Turques, commissioned by an anonymous duchess for the private entertainment of the Ottoman ambassador Mehemed Said Effendi on the occasion of his Paris embassy of 1741–42. See Jenny Mander, “Turkish Delight?: Confecting Entertainment for Ottoman Guests in Eighteenth-­Century France,” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 4 (2013): 139–51. 46. Antoine Galland described performing in amateur versions of favorite French comedies at the embassy. Most of the guests at these events were other European ambassadors and members of the expatriate community, although a few “Turkish women” also attended. Michèle Longino, French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseille to Constantinople, 1650–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 149–50. 47. Ellen R. Welch, “The Specter of the Turk in Early Modern French Court Entertainments,” L’Esprit Créateur 53, no. 4 (2013): 84–97. 48. Michèle Longino, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145. 49. Daren Hodson, “A Would-­ Be Turk: Louis XIV in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” Seventeenth-­Century French Studies 32, no. 1 (2010): 93, 101. 50. “On regardait pour lors les Moscovites comme une nation presque barbare et avec qui les autres nations de l’Europe n’avaient quasi point de commerce.” Louis Nicolas (baron) de Breteuil, Mémoires, ed. Evelyne Lever (Paris: François Bourin, 1992), 111. 51. Claudia R. Jensen and John Powell, “ ‘A Mess of Russians Left Us But of Late’: Diplomatic Blunder, Literary Satire, and the Muscovite Ambassador’s 1668 Visit to Paris Theatres,” Theatre Research International 24, no. 2 (1999): 131. Guy Miège, undersecretary to Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, during his extraordinary embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark in 1663, noted they enjoyed a theater performance in their residence. It is not clear who organized it. Guy Miège, La relation de trois ambassades de Monseigneur le Comte de Carlisle de la part du Prince Charles II, Roi de la Grande-­Bretagne, vers leurs Majestés Alexey Michailovitz, Czar et Grand Duc de Moscovie, Charles, Roi de Suède, et Frédéric III, Roi de Danemark et de Norvège, commencées en l’an 1663 et finies sur la fin de 1664, ed. Avgustin Petrovich Golit͡syn (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1973), 76–77. 52. “Tout ce que dit l’ambassadeur annonçait du sens et de l’éducation, et fit connaître avantageusement sa nation, qu’on regardait comme barbare.” Quoted in Rambaud, Recueil des instruction, 73. Peter the Great did not visit France during his 1697 incognito tour of Europe, partly because of political differences with France over Ottoman policy and partly because “Peter was not yet great and illustrious enough for Louis XIV.” Ibid., 91. 53. Baluze did not comment on the content of the plays except to note that they were performed in German as well as Russian and that the court theater was large and deep and constructed out of wood. Ibid., 93–105. 54. Petrova, “The Diplomats of Catherine II,” 90. 55. Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 177. 56. Ibid., 217.

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Notes to Pages 170–175

57. “Il est besoin de soutenir les affaires par la réputation de puissance de Sa Majesté, avec cette considération néanmoins qu’il seroit très difficile d’en faire paroître les effets en des pays si éloignés.” Instructions to Nointel. Duparc, Recueil des instructions, 65. 58. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 155–56. 59. Nabil Matar, In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 208. 60. François Pidou de Saint-­Olon, Relation de l’empire de Maroc où l’on voit la situation du pays, les moeurs, coutumes, gouvernement, religion et politique des habitans, par M. de S. Olon (Paris: Veuve Marbre-­Cramoisy, 1695), 72. 61. Ibid., 70–71. 62. Ronald S. Love, “Rituals of Majesty: France, Siam, and Court Spectacle in Royal Image-­Building at Versailles,” Canadian Journal of History 31, no. 2 (1996): 173. 63. For an overview of the history of French diplomatic and missionary relations with Persia in the late seventeenth century, see Anne Kroell, Louis XIV, la Perse et Mascate (Paris: Société d’histoire de l’Orient, 1977), 2–17. 64. Susan Mokhberi, “Finding Common Ground Between Europe and Asia: Understanding and Conflict During the Persian Embassy to France in 1715,” Journal of Early Modern History 16, no. 1 (2012): 53–80. 65. Robert Berger and Thomas F. Hedin, Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 24. 66. Quoted in ibid., 28. 67. On a high-­profile, late eighteenth-­century case of ambassadors attending the opera, see Meredith Martin, “Tipu Sultan’s Ambassadors at Saint-­Cloud: Indomania and Anglophobia in Pre-­Revolutionary Paris,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History & Material Culture 21, no. 1 (2014): 37–68. 68. According to the Mercure Galant, Lully issued the invitation “to give him [the ambassador] a grand notion of the Entertainments of France before he left” (afin de luy laisser en partant une grande idée des Divertissements de France). The brief report of the opera visit appears at the end of a long account of the ambassador’s tour of monuments and antiquaries in and around Paris. In contrast to the narration of his admiration for other cultural attractions, the Mercure says nothing about the ambassador’s response to the opera. It concludes simply: “He left very charmed by all he had seen there” (Il est party fort charmé de toutes les choses qu’il y a veuës). Mercure Galant (February 1682): 331. 69. “Le soir [de sa conférence avec les secretaires] il fut conduit à la salle des ballets et vit l’Opéra d’Atys qu’on représentait devant sa Majesté.” “Traitement fait en France à l’ambassadeur de Maroc en 1682,” A.A.E., M.D., Maroc, 2 (1629–1810), fol. 118r. 70. “Le jour précedent, il avoit vû une seconde Représentation d’Atis,” Mercure Galant (February 1682): 300. 71. Adrien Launay, ed., Histoire de la mission de Siam, 1662–1811, Documents Historiques (Paris: Missions étrangères de Paris/Les Indes Savantes, 2000), 1:143. 72. His self-­professed reluctance reflects the defensive tone of his record as a whole. He frequently protests that errors and misunderstandings were not his fault but resulted from the Siamese envoys’ failure to heed his advice or from a lack of support from court officials. It must be noted that Vachet lacked experience in diplomatic matters but was chosen for this task because of his cultural knowledge (having himself traveled to Siam) and because of the Jesuit mission’s key role in brokering the diplomatic visit.

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73. “Les Siamois qui ne savaient pas que le rang d’en bas fut le plus noble et le plus commode furent se placer au plus haut pour n’avoir personne sur leur tête. A peine fûmes-­nous assis, que les gardes s’aperçurent de leur erreur, et se mirent en devoir de nous faire passer plus haut. Les Siamois crurent qu’on leur faisait affront, et sans vouloir m’écouter, ils furent à pied comme des brutaux à l’hôtellerie où les carosses nous attendaient, et revinrent à Paris, malgré toutes les remonstrances, et les avis, et les menaces que je leur fis.” Launay, Histoire de la mission de Siam, 1:144. The incident is also summarized in rather purple prose in Dirk Cruysse, Siam and the West, 1500–1700 (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2002), 252–53. 74. David R. M. Irving, “Lully in Siam: Music and Diplomacy in French–Siamese Cultural Exchanges, 1680–1690,” Early Music 40, no. 3 (2012): 396; Ronald S. Love, “The Making of an Oriental Despot: Louis XIV and the Siamese Embassy of 1686,” Journal of the Siam Society 82, no. 1 (1994): 59; and Love, “Rituals of Majesty,” 177–78. 75. See the description of the audience in Launay, Histoire de la mission de Siam, 142–43. 76. Jérôme La Gorce, L’opéra à Paris au temps de Louis XIV: Histoire d’un théâtre (Paris: Desjonquères, 1992), 13. 77. “Il y eut le soir un grand bal à l’Hôtel de Ville, où les Ambassadeurs de Siam ne voulurent point aller, disant qu’il n’avoient pas encore fait toutes les visites de la Maison Royale, & que leur devoir devoit marcher devant leurs plaisirs.” François-­Timoléon (abbé de) Choisy, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Louis XIV (Utrecht: Van de Water, 1727), 2:59 78. “Il y eut un feu d’artifice devant l’hôtel-­de-­ville et des feux dans toutes les rues. Monsieur alla à l’hôtel-­de-­ville voir le feu et ne demeura pas au festin qui fut magnifique. Le prévôt des marchands y avoit convié les ambassadeurs de Siam; ils s’en excusèrent, en disant qu’ils n’avoient pas achevé toute [sic] les visites de la maison royale, et qu’il ne falloit pas que leurs plaisirs marchassent devant leur devoir.” Philippe de Courcillon Dangeau, Journal du Marquis de Dangeau, ed. Eudoxe Soulie (Paris: Firmin Didot freres, 1854), 1:315. 79. Although the archives documenting musical practices at the Ayutthaya court are very thin, musicologists describe the musical culture at court as consisting largely of solo or small ensemble performances in private settings. Music in the context of dance or theatrical performances is considered part of popular musical culture. David Morton, The Traditional Music of Thailand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 15–16. 80. Launay, Histoire de la mission de Siam, 148. 81. Ibid., 140. 82. “L’on ne croira pas aisément que, pendant toute l’action, ils ne jetèrent les yeux ni sur le roi ni sur les acteurs, les tenant baissés, si ce n’est pour les tourner de temps en temps vers la porte. Quelque envie qu’ils eussent de sortir, ils n’osèrent jamais me la témoigner, et il fallut rester jusqu’à la fin.” Ibid., 148. 83. In addition to the Mercure Galant accounts, a series of almanac prints also mediated the 1686 embassy for a French public gaze. See Meredith Martin, “Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): 652–67; Rebecca Zorach, “An Idolatry of the Letter: Time, Devotion, and Siam in the Almanacs of the Sun King,” in Ut Pictura Meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, ed. Walter Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agnes Guiderdoni-­Bruslé (Brussels: Brepols, 2012), 447–79. 84. “Ils eurent appris l’estime dont le Roy l’honore, à cause de la beauté de son Genie pour tout ce qui regarde la Musique.” Mercure Galant (November 1686): 28–29. 85. “Il finit en disant aux Ambassadeurs, Que ce jour là estant un jour de divertissement pour eux, puis qu’ils devoient aller à l’Opera, il ne vouloit pas pousser plus loin la Conversation, de crainte de reculer leurs plaisirs.” Ibid., 28.

262

Notes to Pages 179–182

86. “Il marqua pendant la representation qu’il en comprenoit le Sujet, & dit des choses fort galantes là-­dessus. Ce qu’il dit à Mademoiselle Rochoir, qui l’alla voir aprés l’Opera à l’Hostel des Ambassadeurs, fait bien connoistre qu’il l’avoit compris. Il la fit asseoir, & luy dit, Qu’ils ne pouvoient faire trop d’honneur à la Fille du Dieu de la Mer, & qu’ils avoient besoin d’elle, afin qu’elle calmast les flots à leur retour, & leur fist faire une Navigation heureuse.” Ibid., 30–31. 87. Mercure Galant (January 1687): 186–87. 88. Irving, “Lully in Siam,” 413–14. 89. Ibid., 406, 410. 90. “Il font les airs par génie, & ils ne savent pas noter. Ils n’ont ny cadence, ny tremblement non plus que les Castillans: mais ils chantent quelquefois comme nous sans paroles, ce que les Castillans trouvent fort étrange; & la place des paroles, ils ne disent que nóï, nóï, comme nous disons lan-­là-­la-­ri. Je n’y ay pas remarqué un seul air, dont la mesure fût à trois temps, au lieu que ceux-­là sont sans comparaison les plus familiers aux Espagnols. Le Roy de Siam entendit sans se montrer plusieurs airs de violon de nos Opera, & l’on nous dit qu’il ne les avoit pas trouvez d’un mouvement assez grave: néanmoins le Peuple Siamois n’a rien de fort grave dans ses chants; & tout ce qu’ils joüent sur leurs instrumens, mesme dans la marche de leur Roy, est assex vif.” Simon de La Loubère, Du royaume de Siam (Paris: Veuve de Jean-­Baptiste Coignard et Jean-­Baptiste Coignard, 1691), 1:261–62. 91. A fragment of ambassador Kosa Pan’s journal recounts the embassy’s arrival in France and stay in Brest. He lavishes attention on meals, furnishings, and fabrics. Čhaophrayā Kōsāthibōdī (Pān), The Diary of Kosa Pan (Ok-­Phra Wisut Sunthon): Thai Ambassador to France, June–July 1686, ed. Dirk van der Cruysse and Michael Smithies, trans. Visudh Busyakul (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2002). 92. “Si l’éloignement des lieux nous faisoit regarder comme Barbares des Peuples que de vastes Mers separent de nous, nous ne devrions pas l’estre moins à leur égard.” Mercure Galant (September 1686): 2–3. 93. According to Susan Mokhberi, Asian and other exotic embassies “diverged from European visits and standard diplomatic practice in their emphasis on spectacle.” Although I do not concur that European visits “were not ceremonial events at all,” I follow Mokhberi in asserting that the “Oriental” visits to France were far more theatrical. Susan Mokhberi, “Finding Common Ground Between Europe and Asia,” 58–59. 94. See the correspondence in A.A.E., M.D., Perse, 1 (1707–1805) and A.A.E., C.P., Perse, 2 (1708–1711). See also Kroell, Louis XIV, la Perse et Mascate, 50–59. 95. “Il en est difficile de croire qu’un homme qui vint d’un Pays aussy eloigné, et aussy different en toutes choses que la Perse l’est du nôtre, passe cinq mois dans Paris sans avoir n’y [sic] la Curiosité de voir ce qu’il peut y avoir de rare dans la ville et aux Environs, . . . Mehemet Riza n’a temoigné aucun empressement pour voir les magnificences de Versailles n’y des autres maisons Royales, n’y de celles des particuliers dont plusieurs a Paris meritent la curiosité des etrangers. . . . Cependant qu’il s comme je l’ay deja dit beaucoup d’esprit mais je crois que sa vanité luy fait croire qu’il luy suffit d’avoir jetté es yeux sur les personnes que la Curiosité a attiré chez luy pour le voir, et de s’être quelquefois promené par les rües de Paris a cheval pour connoitre nôtre gouvernement, nos moeurs, et les magnificence de nos palais, et de nos jardins, car il ma [sic] dit plusieurs fois qu’un coup d’oeil luy suffit pour voir tout ce qu’il y a voir.” Mémoires du Baron de Breteuil, tome VII (1714–15), 287, Arsenal Ms. 3865. 96. Mokhberi, “Finding Common Ground Between Europe and Asia,” 75. 97. Ibid., 80.

Notes to Pages 182–186

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98. “Il n’y a ni Curieux ni Curieuse à Paris qui n’ait été le voir à Charenton, et prendre part des fêtes, de la musique, et des liqueurs dont il y regalait le monde.” Lefèvre de Fontenay, Journal historique du voyage de l’ambassadeur de Perse en France, février 1715 (Paris: D. Jollet and J. Lamesle, 1715), 259. 99. “Dames and hommes de la premiere qualité” and “pas seulement le peuple” “ont eu la même curiosité et j’y ay veu la foule si grande qu’il y avoit souvent plus de quarante femmes dans sa chambre et autant qui attendoient pour y entrer. . . . il aimoit la musique, avoit des Violons toute l’aprés dinée, et faisoit danser devant luy toutes les femmes et filles qui avoient assez bonne volonté pour le faire”—“impertinente complaisance.” Mémoires du Baron de Breteuil, tome VII (1714–15), 214–16, Arsenal Ms. 3865. 100. “Sa Majesté pour maintenir cet incognito avoit ordonné quells [sic—the ladies of court] ne seroient point en grand habit de Cour qu’on appelle communement être en robbe detroussée, et a queüe trainantem et seulement en robbe de chambre comme a Marly mais que les robes de chambre seroient magnifiques, et que les dames auroient beaucoup de pierrieres a la teste.” Ibid., 227. 101. “L’on peu assurer que si projet [sic] eut eté suivy l’audience eut eté non seulement le plus magnifique spectacle, mais en même tems [sic] le plus agreable, et le plus orné par les spectateurs qu’on puisse jamais voir dans un Cour, mais la foule troubla l’ordre et aussi le spectacle.” Ibid., 247. 102. For a discussion of the Coypel painting, see Barbara Selmeci Castioni, “De la loge de l’ambassadeur à l’éloge paradoxal: Naissance de la critique dramatique illustrée dans le Mercure galant (1682),” Littératures Classiques, special issue, “Naissance de la critique dramatique,” ed. Lise Michel and Claude Bourqui, 89 (2016): 159–74.

Chapter 8 1. “Quatre heures sonnent, allons à l’Opera; il nous faut au moins une heure pour traverser la foule qui en assiege la porte.” Charles Dufresny, Amusemens sérieux et comiques (Amsterdam: Henri Desbordes, 1699), 29. 2. “Plaçons-­nous sur le Theatre. Sur le Theatre, repartit mon Siamois, vous vous moquez; ce n’est pas nous qui devons nous donner en spectacle nous venons pour le voir. N’importe, luy dis-­je, allons nous y étaler: on n’y voit rien, on y entend mal; mais c’est la place la plus chere, & par consequent la plus honorable.” Ibid., 30. 3. Mary Cyr, “The Dramatic Role of the Chorus in French Opera: Evidence for the Use of Gesture, 1670–1770,” in Opera and the Enlightenment, ed. Thomas Bauman and Marita P. McClymonds (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 106. 4. “Cette sorte de plaisir qui dédommage de la perte du spectacle.” Du Fresny, Amusemens sérieux et comiques, 30. 5. “Le Public est un souverain, duquel relevent tous ceux qui travaillent pour la reputation, ou pour le gain.” Ibid., 126. 6. “Les Rois luy font bâtir de superbes édifices & luy laisse de beaux monumens, afin qu’il se souvienne d’eux. Tous les Historiens travaillent à son Histoire: c’est pour luy qu’on laboure, qu’on seme & qu’on recueille; c’es pour lui chercher des commoditez qu’on approfondit les beaux Arts. Combien d’honnêtes gens abregent leurs jours pour luy fournir de beaux exemples & de fçavantes instructions! Combien de Poëtes & de Musiciens se creusent le cerveau pour le réjouïr! En un mot, on sacrifie à son utilité la vie & les biens de chaque particulier.” Ibid., 130.

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Notes to Pages 186–189

7. Merlin-­Kajman, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle, 381–82. 8. Ibid., 385. See also Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 33–34. 9. Merlin-­Kajman has slightly revised her argument to insist on the private nature of the ties that bind together a theatrical public as a public: “Je ne crois plus que le public noué ensemble par une œuvre comme Le Cid obéisse au modèle de l’universitas. Le public est un ensemble mélangeant, en chacun des individus qui le composent, privé et public; ou même, qui noue chacun en public mais par le secret du privé: le cœur, le for intérieur, l’émotion, etc.” See her “Corneille: Ronge-­maille ou nœud public?” in Networks, Interconnection, Connectivity: Selected Essays from the 44th North American Society for Seventeenth-­Century French Literature Conference, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill & Duke University, May 15–17, 2014, ed. Michèle Longino and Ellen R. Welch (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2015), 33. 10. Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985), 240–41. 11. Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 90–91. 12. William Roosen, The Age of Louis XIV: The Rise of Modern Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1976), 37. 13. John Rule and Ben S. Trotter, A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2014), 355. 14. “En quoi, pour le dire ici en passant, il se trouve un grand désavantage dans la négociation des ministres étrangers à la cour de France, puisqu’ils sont exclus par là de donner, aux occasions et suivant le besoin, les informations requises de leurs commissions et des intérêts de leurs princes aux autres ministres d’Etat.” Ezechiel Spanheim, Relation de la cour de France en 1690, ed. Émile Bourgeois (Paris: Mercure de France, 1973), 165. A native speaker of both German and French, Spanheim wrote this memoir as well as his diplomatic dispatches in French. See Michel Richard’s introduction to the modern edition, ibid., 11. 15. Roosen, The Age of Louis XIV, 34. Rule and Trotter are careful to point out, however, that officials earned their place in the Foreign Office through family connections, military service, clientelism, and personal relationships—in other words, through the courtly merit system. Lower-­ranking officers could exercise more personal discretion if they outranked their superiors according to the aristocratic hierarchy. Authority was therefore more unevenly distributed and more negotiable than in an ideal modern bureaucracy. Rule and Trotter, A World of Paper, esp. 170, 460–61. 16. Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 11. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Rule and Trotter, A World of Paper, 158. 19. Hobbes, Jean Bodin, and Jacob-­Nicolas Moreau justified the use of bureaucracies by absolute rulers in this way. See Kafka, The Demon of Writing, 32–33. 20. Rule and Trotter, A World of Paper, 321. Staring in the 1680s, Croissy built the archive by charging his librarian Clément with tracking down documents from the time of Brienne (ibid., 323). A “Dépôt des archives” for the Foreign Office was created in 1709. Jean Baillou, Charles Lucet, and Jacques Vimont, Les affaires étrangères et le corps diplomatique français (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1984), 1:109. 21. Auguste Boppe, Les introducteurs des ambassadeurs, 1585–1900 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1901), 2. 22. Charles Faye, chevalier d’Espeisses, who served from 1620 until 1631, had previously held the title of France’s ambassador to Holland. His successor, Jean de Rechignevoisin, sieur de

Notes to Pages 190–193

265

Guron, was a former extraordinary ambassador to Lorraine. The Gondi and Bonneuil families occupied the introducteur post for multiple generations. See ibid., 45–50. 23. Memoirist Saint-­Simon describes Breteuil as “mad” for court hierarchies and etiquette: “C’était un homme . . . qui avait la rage de la cour. . . . On le souffrait et on s’en moquait.” Louis Saint-­Simon, Mémoires, ed. Yves Coirault (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 1:569. 24. “Quand les ambassadeurs vont a la Commedie chez le Roy on les met au premier rang au deuxieme# [sic] banc, et les Envoyez derriere le d. banc.” “Mémoires tirés du cabinet de M. de Bonneuil, prédécesseur du baron de Breteuil dans la charge d’introducteur des ambassadeurs,” Mémoires du Baron de Breteuil, tome premier, 289, Arsenal Ms. 3859, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris. 25. Journal de Villeras secretaire du Roy a la conduite des ambassadeurs, depuis le 21e novembre 1669 jusqu’au pr janvier 1700 et depuis 1700 jusqua dernier decembre de la presente année, Ms NAF 312, 375–78, BnF. 26. Maurice Keens-­Soper, “Abraham De Wicquefort and Diplomatic Theory,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 8, no. 2 (1997): 22–23. 27. “J’ai dit ailleurs qu’il doit estre un peu Comedien, & j’y ajouste ici, que peut-­estre dans tout le commerce du Monde, il n’y a pas un personnage plus Cominque que l’Ambassadeur. Il n’y a point de theatre plus illustre que la Cour: il n’y a point de comedie, où les acteurs paroissent moins ce qu’il sont en effet, que les Ambassadeurs font dans la negociation, & il n’y en a point qui y representent de plus importants personnages.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 2:3. 28. “Ces pretendus Ambassadeurs, qui ne sont propres que pour le theatre, & que l’on produit comme des personnages muets dans une comedie ou une farce.” Ibid., 2:5. 29. “Dans les Ambassades d’obedience, l’Ambassadeur fait la mesme figure, qu’un personnage müet fait dans la comedie. Son Orateur parle pour lui; & pourveu que l’Ambasadeur sçache bien faire ses reverences & ses inclinations à propos, il n’est que trop habile pour cette fonction.” Ibid. 30. Rule and Trotter, A World of Paper, 361. See also Haehl, Les affaires étrangères au temps de Richelieu, 188. 31. Roosen, The Age of Louis XIV, 74; Rule and Trotter, A World of Paper, 365–70. 32. “Il faut plus paroistre que negocier.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 1:74. 33. “Les gens de robe sont d’ordinaire plus sçavans, plus appliquez, et d’une vie plus réglée et moins dissipée que les gens de guerre et de la cour.” Callières, François de Callières, 253. 34. “Un homme qui est né avec les qualitez propres à traiter les affaires publiques et qui se sent de l’inclination à s’y apliquer doit commencer par s’instruire de l’état où se trouvent les affaires de l’Europe.” Ibid., 197. 35. “établir pour maxime ferme et durable de ne donner en France aucun employ de négociation qu’à ceux qui auroient fait cette espèce d’apprentissage et ces sortes d’études.” Ibid., 201. 36. Saint-­Simon, Mémoires, 1:688. 37. Lucien Bély, “L’opéra et cérémonie politique: La vision du pere Ménestrier,” in D’un opéra l’autre: Hommage à Jean Mongrédien, ed. Jean Gribenski et al. (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-­Sorbonne, 1996), 318. See also Bénédicte Louvat, Théâtre et musique: Dramaturgie de l’insertion musicale dans le théâtre français, 1550–1680 (Paris: Champion, 2002), 466. 38. Lois Rosow, “Opera in Paris from Campra to Rameau,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-­Century Music, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 272.

266

Notes to Pages 193–196

39. Don Fader, “The ‘Cabale Du Dauphin,’ Campra, and Italian Comedy: The Courtly Politics of French Musical Patronage Around 1700,” Music & Letters 86, no. 3 (2005): 391. 40. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King, 312; Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 162. On the decline of Versailles as a space of musical entertainment, see James Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, rev. and expanded ed. (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1997), 166. 41. Fader, “The ‘Cabale Du Dauphin,’ Campra, and Italian Comedy,” 389–90. 42. Ibid., 382. 43. James Johnson contends that “attending the opera was a proud display of identity in the Old Regime. It announced privilege” and “seemed, of the three royal theaters, most exclusively the pastime of the Parisian aristocracy.” See his Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 10. Yet most late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century accounts describe a more socially mixed audience. See La Gorce, L’opéra à Paris, 39. 44. La Gorce, L’opéra à Paris, 39. 45. Beginning in 1699, ordonnances forbidding spectators from disturbing the players on the Opera stage testify to the difficulty of policing the audience’s behavior. Johnson, Listening in Paris, 27. 46. La Gorce, L’opéra à Paris, 86. 47. Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs, 386–87. 48. Letter to Portland from Paris, November 3, 1698, quoted in L. Legg, Matthew Prior: A Study of His Public Career and Correspondence (London: The University Press, 1921), 89. 49. “Le Roi . . . en fut scandalisé, et lui fit insinuer avec adresse que ce n’était pas l’usage ici que les évêques ni les prêtres allassent aux spectacles.” Saint-­Simon, Mémoires, 1:684. 50. Ibid., 2:454–46, 500–510. 51. “La foule des spectateurs fut innombrable . . . jusques au plus bas peuple de Paris. . . . [I]l connoissoit la fidelité et l’attachement de ce Prince pour la France.” Mémoires du Baron de Breteuil, tome IV (1701–1704), 233–34, Arsenal Ms. 3862, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris. 52. “A la cour remplie de peuple qui accouroit en foule pour le voir.” Ibid., 234. 53. Journal du sieur DE SAINCTOT, introducteur des ambassadeurs, 1690–1706, 290–91, Ms. Français 6679, BnF. 54. Lois Rosow, “Le jeu de l’ironie dans L’Europe Galante,” in Itinéraires d’André Campra (1660–1744): D’Aix à Versailles, de l’église à l’opéra, ed. Catherine Cessac (Wavre, Belgique: Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2012), 246. 55. It was mentioned before its debut in the September 1697 issue, in a reference to “l’Auteur de l’Europe Galante, qui est un Balet que l’on propose pour cet hiver, & dont on dit beaucoup de bien dans le monde.” Mercure Galant (1697): 228–29. 56. La Gorce, L’opéra à Paris, 102. 57. Maurice Barthélemy, André Campra, sa vie et son œuvre (1660–1744) (Paris: A. and J. Picard, 1957), 46. 58. Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 19. 59. Ibid., 23. 60. “Un genre tout neuf. . . . Ce genre, dans sa nouveauté, balança le succès du grand opéra.” Louis de Cahusac, La danse ancienne et moderne, ou, Traité historique de la danse, ed. Nathalie Lecomte, Laura Naudeix, and Jean-­Noël Laurenti, Collection XVIIIe siècle; Nouvelle librairie de la danse (Paris: Desjonquères Centre national de la danse, 2004), 219. See also Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, 170–73.

Notes to Pages 197–200

267

61. “Il est galant, tendre, original. . . . [Quinault] est froid, insipide, languissant.” Cahusac, La danse ancienne et moderne, 220. 62. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure, 167. 63. Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), 47. 64. La Motte expounded on the primacy of love, pleasure, and art in the preface to Le Triomphe des arts (1703). See Janice E. Mercurio, “Staging Alliances: Redefining Painting and Music in Early Eighteenth-­Century France” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006), 109–10. 65. “Frappez, frappez, ne vous lassez jamais, / Vous travaillez pour le bonheur du monde.” André Campra and Antoine Houdar de La Motte, L’Europe galante, ballet en musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1697), 2. 66. “Terribles bruits!” Ibid., 3. “De quels traits impuissans menace-­t’il la terre? . . . J’ay détruit, j’ay brisé ses Autels & ses fers: / J’ay du moins arraché l’Europe à sa puissance, / Si ce n’est pas tout l’Univers.” Ibid., 3–4. 67. “Tu t’applaudis d’une fausse Victoire, / L’Amour a dans Europe une nouvelle gloire . . . C’est luy qui dans l’Europe a ramené la Paix, / Ses Peuples à tes yeux vont chanter les attraits, / Tu vas voir que des cœurs l’Amour seul est le Maître.” Ibid., 4. 68. “Vive le Souverain qui nous donne des Loix.” Ibid., 45. 69. Ibid., 44. 70. See also James Anthony, “The Opera-­Ballets of Andre Campra: A Study of the First Period French Opera-­Ballet” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1964), 1:206. 71. Delphine Denis, La muse galante: Poétique de la conversation dans l’œuvre de Madeleine de Scudéry (Paris: H. Champion, 1997), esp. 330–42; Alain Viala, La France galante: Essai historique sur une catégorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’à la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). 72. “On a choisi des Nations de l’Europe, celles dont les caractéres se contrastent davantage & promettent plus de jeu pour le Théatre.” Campra and La Motte, L’Europe galante, 8. 73. Alain Niderst makes a rather tortured attempt to uncover a commentary on international politics in the presentation of the nations, proposing, for example, that the opera-­ballet depicts the French and Turkish characters as “rational” in love in contrast to the irrationality of the Spanish and Italian lovers, thereby signaling France’s alliance with the Ottomans. But the text doesn’t support this reading. The main French character is irrationally inconstant, whereas the Turkish sultan is cruel toward the woman he has abandoned. Neither seems particularly “rational.” More convincing is Niderst’s argument that audiences enjoyed a “somewhat ironic pleasure” on account of the highly conventionalized nature of the national representations. Alain Niderst, “L’Europe Galante de La Motte et Campra,” in Le théâtre et l’opéra sous le signe de ­l’histoire, ed. Irène Mamczarz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994), 78. 74. Ibid., 75–76. 75. See, for example, La cour de France turbanisée, et les trahisons démasquées, en trois parties, par M. L. B. D. E. D. E. (Cologne: P. Marteau, 1686). 76. Examples of Ottoman-­set romances included Scudéry’s Ibrahim ou l’Illustre bassa (1641) and Desmarets’s Roxane, tragi-­comédie (1640). 77. Viala, La France galante, 319. 78. André Campra, Symphonies de l’Europe galante (Versailles: Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2010), 28–29. For a gloss of early modern theories of the tone or emotion associated with the D-­major key, see Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2nd ed. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 238–39.

268

Notes to Pages 200–203

79. “Mais toy, Rivale trop cruelle, / Prens ce fer infidele à mon juste courroux; / Portes-­en à mon cœur une atteinte mortelle; / Tu m’as déja porté de plus sensibles coups.” Campra and La Motte, L’Europe galante, 42. 80. “La Discorde à l’Amour céde enfin la victoire. / Vous, Jeux charmans, tendres Plaisirs, / Volez de toutes parts pour servir ses désirs; / Allez, accroître encore son Empire & sa Glore.” Ibid., 46. 81. Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1698), 170. 82. On the Secrétaire, see Hervé Guénot’s articles in Jean-­Daniel Candaux and Jean Sgard, eds., Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789 (Paris: Universitas, 1991), 2:1088–89. 83. “On tomba sur l’Opera de l’Europe Galante, qui attiroit tout Paris par la singularité du spectacle. Une personne qui l’avoit sur soi, en lut le Prologue, & quelques autres endroits. On n’y trouva rien que de tres mediocre, & chacun souhaitta qu’un autre Quinaut & un second Lully pussent reparoître pour celebrer dignement la Paix. . . . Si vous me demandez d’où vient donc que cet Opera a un si grand cours, je vous repondray, que j’en suis surpris comme vous; ce qui augmentera vôtre étonnement, c’est que le redoutable Roland est tombé devant un si lâche rival, Ne peut-­on pas dire, que c’est Pâris qui tuë Achille?” François Gacon, Le secrétaire du Parnasse (Paris: F. and P. Delaulne, 1698), 17–18. 84. “La Paix que LOUIS LE GRAND vient de donner à toute l’Europe, sera le sujet de cette premiere Lettre, & me fournira dans la suite assez de quoy vous entretenir, puisqu’elle va faire refleurir les Arts & les Sciences.” Ibid., 1–2. 85. “Qualité publique. . . . le caractère de representant public.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 1:2. 86. Definition in the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694): “PUBLIC. adj. Commun, qui appartient à tout un peuple, qui concerne tout un peuple. L’interest public. L’authorité publique. l’utilité publique. le thresor public. les revenus publics. il est de l’avantage public que cela soit. il est du bien public. toutes les revoltes sont ordinairement pretextées du bien public. la guerre civile sous Louis XI. fut appellée la guerre du bien public. la voix publique est pour luy. ceux qui ont esté dans les emplois publics, dans les charges publiques. place publique. avoir soin des chemins publics. administrer les revenus publics. édifices publics. On appelle, Personnes publiques, Les personnes qui sont revestues de l’authorité publique, qui exercent quelque charge, quelque magistrature sous l’authorité du Prince.” 87. “La Foy publique.” Wicquefort, L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 1:3. 88. “Le Public décidoit.” Jean-­Baptiste Torcy, Mémoires de Monsieur de Torcy, pour servir à l’histoire des negociations depuis le Traité de Ryswyck jusqu’à la Paix d’Utrecht (Paris: La Haye, 1756), 1:21. 89. “Le general des Peuples est tellement porté en la faveur de la France.” Ibid., 1:104. 90. J. A. W. Gunn, Queen of the World: Opinion in the Public Life of France from the Renaissance to the Revolution (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 18. 91. Ibid., 46–47. 92. Keith Michael Baker, “Politics and Public Opinion Under the Old Regime: Some Reflections,” in Press and Politics in Pre-­Revolutionary France, ed. Jack Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 212. 93. Ibid., 231. 94. Pedro Losa Serrano and Rosa Maria López Campillo, “La Guerra de Sucesion Española: Swift, Defoe, y La Campaña para la paz,” Estudios 33 (2007): 175–92. 95. François Paul de Lisola, Défense du droit de la maison d’Autriche à la Succession d’Espagne, et la verification du partage du lion de la fable dans les conséquences de l’intrusion du duc d’Anjou

Notes to Pages 203–206

269

(Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1704); Gatien Courtilz de Sandras, La politique du Cardinal Portocarero decouverte, suivie de Trois entretiens de Mr. Colbert avec Bouin sur le partage de la Monarchie d’Espagne (Madrid: Pierre Marteau, 1709). 96. See Ellen R. Welch, “Intermediaries and the Media: Diplomacy in the Early Eighteenth-­ Century French Periodical Press,” in Intermédiaires culturels = Cultural Intermediaries. Séminaire International Des Jeunes Dix-­Huitiémistes: 2010, Belfast, ed. Vanessa Alayrac-­Fielding and Ellen R. Welch, Études Internationales Sur Le Dix-­Huitième Siècle 15 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015), 237–56. 97. On Wicquefort, see also Charles H. Carter, “Wicquefort on the Ambassador and His Functions,” Studies in History & Politics 2, no. 2 (1981): 37–59; Keens-­Soper, “Abraham De Wicquefort and Diplomatic Theory.” On the reception history of Callières’s text, see Callières, François de Callières, 30–36. 98. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 1st pbk. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), esp. 27–30. 99. I borrow the term “weak public” from Nancy Fraser, who defines them as “publics whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion formation and does not also encompass decision making.” See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 24. 100. On the attribution of the novel, see the introduction to Erik Tigelaar, ed., Amoureuze en pikante geschiedenis van het congres en de stad Utrecht: Augustinus Freschots verhaal achter de Vrede van Utrecht by Augustinus Freschot (Hilversum: Verloren, 2013). 101. “Les Ambassadeurs ayant, pour eviter la foule, quitté la promenade ordinaire du Mail qui est le reduit de tout [sic] les soirs pour ceux de la Ville, afin de se voir & conferer entre eux aux heures même du divertissement.” Casimir Freschot, Histoire amoureuse et badine du congrès et de la ville d’Utrecht, en plusieurs lettres, écrites par le domestique d’un des plénipotentiaires à un de ses amis (Liège: Jacob Le Doux, 1714), 140. 102. “On peut croire & on à [sic] raison même de supposer que tous les Plenipotentaires & ceux la mêmés, dont le caractere paroissoit incompatible avec la Dance, ne laisserent pas de se trouver à ces Bals. En effet l’Eveque de Bristol, l’Abbé de Polignac & le Co. Passionnei, ne manquerent à aucun.” Ibid., 30. 103. Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs, esp. 382–84. 104. “Un Traité de Paix donnant lieu de parler souvent de ce qui contribue à la reunion des esprits, ils vons [sic; vous] semblera sans doute que l’amour qui est le lien de cette union devroit souvent étre sur la langue des Entremetteurs de la Paix.” Freschot, Histoire amoreuse et badine, 43. 105. “On ne s’en sert guere au feminin qu’en mauvaise part, & en parlant d’une personne qui se mesle de quelque commerce illicite.” Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1694). 106. “Amusoient derriere les scenes les spectateurs les plus curieux du j’eu [sic] de leurs petites mains.” Freschot, Histoire amoreuse et badine, 15. 107. Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs, 209. 108. John Bender, Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 31. 109. “Les speculatifs crûrent qu’il avoit sous ce choix quelque mistere caché, & qu’on avoit eû quelque vûe sur la Reyne d’Angleterre qui s’étant trouvée la premiere d’accord avec les François, & pressant par le moyen de ses Plenipotentaires les Alliez de s’accommoder avec eux, sembloit faire la Femme Juge & partie dans le proces des Alliez avec la France.” Freschot, Histoire amoreuse et badine, 29.

270

Notes to Pages 206–213

110. “Ce qui manque en cette publication est la Clef pour reconnoitre les personnes, dont il est parlé,” but since most of them won’t be known outside court circles, that’s of little interest. Ibid., sig. *3v. 111. “Pas plus qu’à ceux qui voyent la Comedie de connoitre les Acteurs par les noms qu’ils portent hors du theatre.” Ibid., 76. 112. Casimir Freschot, Véritable clef par laquelle on peut avoir l’intelligence parfaite de l’ “Histoire amoureuse et badine du congrès et de la ville d’Utrecht” (Cologne: P. Marteau, 1714). 113. Entretiens des barques d’Hollande, pour servir de réfutation et de clef à l’histoire amoureuse et badine du congrès et de la ville d’Utrecht (Utrecht: Jacques le Ferme, 1714). 114. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 1st pbk. ed. (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 67.

Conclusion 1. Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 53. 2. Hamilton and Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy, 1. See also Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet, eds., Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8. 3. Sasson Sofer, The Courtiers of Civilization: A Study of Diplomacy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 23. 4. Ibid., 55. 5. Anne T. Donahue, “US to France: You’ve Got a Placating, Condescending Friend in Us: A Tone-­Deaf Performance by James Taylor During John Kerry’s Visit Makes One Wonder Who Thought Up This Hokey and Unapologetically American Idea,” The Guardian (January 16, 2015), http://​www​.theguardian​.com​/music​/2015​/jan​/16​/james​-­­taylor​-­­youve​-­­got​-­­a​-­­friend​-­­john​ -­­kerry​-­­france. 6. Philippe Lane and Laurent Fabius, French Scientific and Cultural Diplomacy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), xi. 7. Anne Gazeau-­Secret, “Renforcer le soft power à la française en valorisant notre diversité,” Revue internationale et stratégique 73, no. 1 (2009): 127–30. 8. On the challenge of reimagining models of diplomatic society in response to “increased cultural heterogeneity” in international affairs, see Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell, introduction to Hedley Bull on International Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 13–14. 9. Raymond Williams, Drama in a Dramatised Society: An Inaugural Lecture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 14–15. 10. Ibid., 15–16.

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Index

actors, ambassadors as, 1–2, 34–39, 190, 206 “Advice to Raffaello Girolami” (Machiavelli), 37 Africa: embassies from, 156–58, 157, 172–83, 184, 186, 242 n.87; in Versailles paintings, 156, 157 Alba, Duke of (Fernando Álvarez de Toledo): at Bayonne entertainments, 18–19, 21, 26, 28–31 221 n.50; language barrier and, 26, 222 n.77 Albis, Cécile, 101 Alexei (czar), 165, 169–70 allegories: Christianity and, 86–87; force of, 83–86; peace, 4, 92, 116–18; Queen Christina’s, 127–28; role of, in diplomatic entertainments, 4, 76, 81–84, 106; war, 82–83, 85–89, 91–93, 97, 99–101, 103, 105–6 alliances, 235 n.78; anticipation of, 86–93, 90; Richelieu and, 88, 91, 238 n.20, 239 n.46; between Spain and France, 14–15, 18–19, 27–30, 91 Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando. See Alba, Duke of L’ambassadeur (Hotman), 38 L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions (Wicquefort), 1, 190–91, 203 ambassadors: as actors, 1–2, 34–39, 190, 206; as authors, 34, 42; masques and, 39–47, 51–56; as national characters, 62–63, 65–67; as passive spectators, 149–52; political authority of, 67; queens’ entertainments and, 46–52; rule of precedence and, 3, 33–34; self-representation of, 35, 39, 41; sovereign’s relationship with, 3, 36–38, 47, 67–68, 81, 133–34, 225 n.19, 225 n.23; at Versailles, 174–75, 187–92. See also exotic embassies; resident ambassadors America, 156, 158, 161, 242 n.87

Amusemens sérieux et comiques (Dufresny), 185–86, 193 Anglo-Dutch War, 130 Anna (queen), 41–43, 46, 51–53, 91 Anne of Austria (queen mother), 111, 131 Apostolidès, Jean-Marie, 150–51 aristocracy: diplomats from, 191; at Divertissement royal de Versailles, 152–53; performance of, 118–22; refuge offered to, 134–40, 138 Aristotle, 60, 231 n.14 Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650 (Strong), 3 Arthurian themes, 20–22 Asia: embassies from, 156–58, 157, 161, 172–83, 186, 242 n.87, 262 n.93; in Versailles paintings, 156, 157 audience, 225 n.19; fragmented, 57; of Louis XIV’s court, 149–54; participation of, 99. See also exotic embassies Auld, Louis, 22–23 authors, ambassadors as, 34, 42 Baïf, Jean-Antoine de, 16–17, 24 ballet, 47–51, 140, 231 n.5; burlesque, 60, 63, 65, 68, 81, 113, 120; at Congress of Westphalia, 110–11, 121, 127, 231 n.5; as dance of delegation, 62–68, 64; diplomatic task of, 8, 108, 130; national characters in, 58–62, 69–70, 76–81, 88–89; of nations, 4, 60–62, 69–74, 76–81, 199; personification of body politic in, 68–74; representation through, 58–59 ballet à entrées, 59 Ballet comique de la Royne, 84 Ballet de la félicité, 82–83, 86–93, 90, 168 Ballet de la Flore (Flora’s Ballet), 147 Ballet de la Marine (Ballet of the Navy), 65–68, 80–81, 232 n.31

292 Index Ballet de la Paix (Ballet of Peace) (Ogier), 107–8, 246 n.47; aristocracy performed in, 118–22; Europe redressed in, 114–18; non-aristocratic types ridiculed in, 120–25, 247 n.61; Ottoman Empire and, 126, 168; as recreation, 109–13; reprisals, 125–30; Sweden and, 126–29 Ballet de la prospérité des armes, 82–83, 93–100, 96, 216 n.15 Ballet de Monseigneur le Prince, 70, 80 Ballet des Muses, 145–47, 253 n.63 Ballet des nations (Colletet), 60, 70, 77–80, 146, 234 n.51 Ballet des phantaisies de ce temps (Ballet of the Fantasies of Our Time), 127 Ballet des Plaisirs (Ballet of Pleasures), 135 Ballet des quatre monarchies chrétiennes (Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies), 71–74, 80 Ballet du grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Ballet of the Grand Ball of the Dowager of Bilbao), 62–65, 64, 68, 90, 101 Ballet of Peace. See Ballet de la Paix Ballet of Pleasures (Ballet des Plaisirs), 135 Ballet of the Fantasies of Our Time (Ballet des phantaisies de ce temps), 127 Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies (Ballet des quatre monarchies chrétiennes), 71–74, 80 Ballet of the Grand Ball of the Dowager of Bilbao, 62–65, 64, 68, 90, 101 Ballet of the Navy (Ballet de la Marine), 65–68, 80–81, 232 n.31 Ballet royal de la nuit, 131, 135–39, 138, 249 n.1 “Ballo di Principi d’Europa,” 242 n.88 Baluze, Jean-Casimir, 170, 259 n.53 Barbaro, Ermolao, 36 Bataille, Georges, 16 Bayonne entertainments: Alba at, 18–19, 21, 26, 28–31 221 n.50; ambiguity of, 15, 31–32; Charles IX and, 12, 15–16, 18–19, 22, 26–30, 168, 222 n.73; diplomatic function of, 13–14, 16–17, 25–32; imagery at, 19–23, 220 n.42; jousting tournament at, 20–22, 59, 220 n.48, 221 n.51; language barrier at, 26, 222 n.77, 223 n.78; Medici and, 11–16, 18, 23–24, 27–31, 217 n.3, 221 n.59; music at, 16–17, 23–24; post-event mediation of, 26–28, 32; Spain and, 14–15, 18–21, 23–30, 219 n.32, 221 n.49; spectatorship of, 13–14, 21–22; tapestries of, 11–13, 12, 31; Valois court and, 9, 11–13, 12, 29, 31

Bély, Lucien, 42–43, 193–94, 205, 254 n.74 Benserade, Isaac de, 136, 145, 147, 233 n.37, 250 n.26 biblical exegesis, 238 n.26 The Birth of Peace (La Naissance de la Paix), 127–29 Bodin, Jean, 73 body politic, 68–74, 186 Bonnet, Jacques, 160–62, 180 Bonnet-Bourdelot, Pierre, 160–62, 180 Bonneuil, Etienne Chabenat de, 163–64 Bordier, René, 63 Bourdeille, Pierre de, 16 Boureau, Alain, 69 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Molière and Lully), 166, 168–69, 198 Breteuil, sieur de (Louis-Nicolas Le Tonnelier), 265n23; exotic embassies and, 163–64, 169, 181–83; journals kept by, 190 Brulart, Léon, 33 Buckingham, second duke of (George Villiers), 136–37 Bull, Hedley, 6, 130, 158, 254 n.79 bureaucracy, theater of, 187–92, 264 n.15 burlesque aesthetics: ballet, 60, 63, 65, 68, 81, 113, 120; visual focus of, 60 Buti, Francesco, 135, 137–40 Cahusac, Louis de, 196 Callières, François de, 1, 112, 191–92, 203 Callow, John, 136 Campra, André, 195–202, 207 Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, 95, 135, 152 Caprioli, Carlo, 135, 137–40 Carew, George, 47, 50 Carnival season, 41, 47, 62, 94, 107, 121 Catheux, Sieur de, 165–66 Catholicism: in England, 40–41; in France, 14–15, 27, 29–31 Chabod, Thomas-François. See Saint-Maurice, marquis de Chanut, Pierre, 164–65, 248 n.83 Chapelain, Jean, 94 Chappuzeau, Samuel, 4, 132 characters, national. See national characters Charles II (king), 134–35, 250 n.21 Charles IX (king), 218 n.19; Bayonne entertainments and, 12, 15–16, 18–19, 22, 26–30, 168, 222 n.73; secret meetings of, 30, 168 Chaumont, Alexandre de, 173 China, 161

Index 293 chivalric imagery, 20–22, 220 n.42 Christianity, 86–87, 113, 118, 163. See also Catholicism; Protestantism Christian of Denmark, Prince, 142–45 Christina (queen), 252 nn.47–48; allegories of, 127–28; court entertainments and, 126–29, 140–42, 145, 164, 248 n.83, 249 n.84, 252 n.43 Classical mythology: the Fronde and, 251 n.34; iconography from, 19–20, 22, 72, 114–15, 127–28, 137, 139, 196–97, 246 n.43, 251 n.34 Cobham, Henry, 152 Colbert de Torcy, Jean-Baptiste, 188, 191–92, 202–3, 253 n.73 Colletet, Guillaume, 76, 236 n.96; Ballet des nations, 60, 70, 77–80, 146, 234 n.51; exile of, 236 n.95 community: European, 6–7, 112–13, 130, 154–55, 157–58; noble vs. national, 120–25 Concord, 99–100, 241 n.72 concordia discors (discordant harmony), 14, 24, 217 n.9 Congress of Utrecht, 2, 187, 205, 209 Congress of Vienna, 209, 210, 211 Congress of Westphalia, 242 nn.1–2; ballet at, 4, 110–11, 121, 127, 231 n.5; d’Avaux and, 108, 114, 118, 243 n.3, 245 n.31, 246 n.51; diplomats at, 107–10, 112–15; as international relations turning point, 88, 111–12; Ogier and, 107–10, 114–16, 121–22, 243 n.7, 244 n.17, 245 n.31, 245 n.33, 245 n.36, 245 n.39, 246 n.46; recreations at, 108–13. See also Ballet de la Paix Correr, Marc’ Antonio, 42, 46 costumes, 89, 90, 120, 138 court entertainments: as diplomatic meta-theater, 35, 39–46; English refuge staged in, 134–40, 138; expense of, 15–16; as focal points, 56, 58; fragmented audience of, 57; Louis XIII and, 60, 65–66, 70–74, 79, 91, 245 n.40; Louis XIV and, 4, 8–9, 68, 127, 131–33, 147–48, 150–55; medium of, 20; Queen Christina and, 126–29, 140–42, 145, 164, 248 n.83, 249 n.84, 252 n.43; of queens, 46–56, 229 n.83; role of, 2–6, 34–35, 56, 149–50; soft power of, 4, 132. See also specific entertainments courtliness, 21–22, 152–53, 197 courtly political spectacle, exotic embassies and, 172–75, 182–83

Cowart, Georgia, 17, 197, 253 n.63, 254 n.76 cross-casting, 91, 123–25, 245 n.40 Croxton, Derek, 126 Crucé, Emeric, 75–76, 235 n.72 cultural diplomacy, 10, 162, 179, 212 culture: attractiveness of, 4; diplomatic, 112–13, 187–92; regional, 23; subjunctive mood of, 21–22, 221 nn.54–55; universality of performing arts and, 160 dance: aristocracy and, 118–19; of diplomacy, 130; manuals, 247 n.55. See also ballet d’Avaux, comte (Claude de Mesmes), 108, 114, 118, 243 n.3, 245 n.31, 246 n.51 De jure belli ac pacis (The Rights of War and Peace) (Grotius), 75–76 De legationibus libri tres (Gentili), 37–38 De officio legati (Barbaro), 36 Des ballets anciens et modernes (Of Ballets Ancient and Modern) (Ménestrier), 60, 231 n.5 descriptive representation, 233 n.43 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Jean, 85, 87, 89, 93–95, 237 n.13 Des représentations en musique (Ménestrier), 160 Diana’s Conquest (Le vaincu de Diane), 127 diplomacy: authority and, in masques, 51–56; ballet’s task in, 8, 108, 130; cultural, 10, 162, 179, 212; culture of, 112–13, 187–92; dance of, 130; economy of regard in, 156–57; at edges of Europe, 162–72, 171; gender and, 50; modern, 2–3, 5–6, 9–10, 212; permanent, 35; rule of precedence in, 3, 33–34, 125, 158; sovereignty and, 72–74, 132–33, 156, 158; spectatorship in, 32, 35, 39–41, 44, 52–53, 55–57. See also non-European diplomacy; public stage, diplomacy on; theater of diplomacy diplomatic entertainments: allegories’ role in, 4, 76, 81–84, 106; changes in, 9–10, 149–50, 209–10; exchange of, 47; as representation, 57, 209–10; role of, 2–5, 10, 34–35, 56, 149, 209–12; ubiquity of, 2. See also court entertainments; specific entertainments diplomatic incidents, 42, 47, 56 diplomats, 1–2, 6, 30, 32, 209; aristocratic, 191; from outside Europe, 157–59, 164–65, 167–69, 172–83; public stage and, 187–89, 191–92, 194–95, 204–7; training of, 9; at Westphalia, 107–10, 112–15. See also ambassadors

294 Index discordant harmony (concordia discors), 14, 24, 217 n.9 Divertissement royal de Versailles, 150–55 Donneau de Visé, Jean, 174–75, 180 Drama in a Dramatised Society (Williams), 212–13 Du Ferrier, Arnaud, 28–29 Dufresny, Charles, 185–86, 193 economy of regard, 156–57 Edict of Fontainebleau, 155 Elefterion, Christa Williford, 85 Elisabeth (queen of Spain), 12, 18, 27–31 Elizabeth I (queen), 104, 242 n.95 embodied representation, 3 England: in Anglo-Dutch War, 130; Catholicism in, 40–41; French refuge offered to, 134–40, 138; Le Fèvre de la Boderie as ambassador to, 39–57, 195, 229 n.93; monarch as body politic in, 69; school of international relations, 6; Spain and, 41–43, 52, 226 n.45 Europe: Ballet de la Paix redressing, 114–18; as community, 6–7, 112–13, 130, 154–55, 157–58; conceptual reintegration of, 6; edges of, 162–72, 171; as fictive public, 57; French, 8–9; invention of, 100–106, 102; New Diplomatic History of, 10; as performative category, 4–5; personified, 101–6; transition of, at Westphalia, 111–12 Europe, comédie héroïque, 82–83, 100–106, 102 L’Europe en Paix par la réunion des Princes Chrétiens, 169, 171 L’Europe galante (Campra and La Motte), 195–202, 207 The Evolution of International Society (Watson), 170 exotic embassies: from Africa, 156–58, 157, 172–83, 184, 186, 242 n.87; from America, 156, 158, 161, 242 n.87; from Asia, 156–58, 157, 161, 172–83, 186, 242 n.87, 262 n.93; Breteuil and, 163–64, 169, 181–83; courtly political spectacle and, 172–75, 182–83; diplomats as, 157–59, 164–65, 167–69, 172–83; at edges of Europe, 162–72, 171; Louis XIV and, 156–57, 157, 159, 173–75, 181; Opera and, 175–78, 260 n.68; Ottoman, 157, 162–72, 171, 256 n.2, 259 nn.45–46; public gaze and, 181–84, 186–87; Russian, 162–66, 169–70, 171, 172, 257 n.29, 259 nn.51–53; universality of performing arts and, 159–62

Les Faux Moscovites (Poisson), 165 feminine authority, in Masque of Queens, 51–56 fictive public, Europe as, 57 Flassan, Gaëtan, 170 Fletcher, Angus, 84 Flora’s Ballet (Ballet de la Flore), 147 France: in Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies, 72–74; Catholics in, 14–15, 27, 29–31; English refuge in, 134–40, 138; in Europe, comédie héroïque, 103; foreign personalities in image of, 140–45; the Fronde in, 131, 135–37, 139, 187, 251 n.34; imperialism of, 147–48, 155; Italy and, 82, 105, 139–40; Le Fèvre de la Boderie as ambassador of, 39–57, 195, 229 n.93; monarch as body politic in, 69–74; Protestants in, 14–15, 27, 29–31, 65, 70, 155, 219 n.32, 224 n.93; regional cultures of, 23; Spanish alliance with, 14–15, 18–19, 27–30, 91; in Thirty Years’ War, 82–83, 85–92, 95–99, 238 n.33; Valois court of, 9, 11–13, 12, 29, 31, 245 n.40; in War of Devolution, 150. See also Ballet de la Paix; Bayonne entertainments; exotic embassies; Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Franko, Mark, 65, 81 French Europe, trope of, 8–9 Friedland, Paul, 68–69 Frisch, Andrea, 41 Fronde, 131, 135–37, 139, 187, 251 n.34 gallant aesthetic, 195–202 Gazette, 85, 87, 114, 126, 144, 166 gender, diplomacy and, 50 Gentili, Alberico, 1, 36–38 George Dandin (Molière), 153 Germany, 72–73, 103 Giron, Madalena, 21 Giustinian, Marco Antonio, 132 Giustinian, Zorzi, 43 Goffman, Erving, 36, 42, 225 n.19 Gonzaga, Charles III Ferdinand. See Mantua, Duke of Gordon-Huntley, Henriette, 137, 139 “Grand Design” (Sully), 75 Grimm, Jürgen, 124, 245 n.34, 246 n.47 Grotius, Hugo, 75–76, 87, 98, 235 n.78, 236 n.93 Guicciardini, Francesco, 37, 45

Index 295 Haddington Masque (Jonson), 45, 53 half-and-half costumes, 89, 90 Hall, Hugh Gaston, 85, 101, 237 n.13 Hamilton, Keith, 209–10, 225 n.15 Hampton, Timothy, 7, 35, 40 harmony, 2, 24, 97–98, 117, 241 n.72 Henri II d’Orléans. See Longueville, duc de Henri IV (king), 39, 44–45 Heraclitus, 14 Herbert of Cherbury, Edward, 49 Hesselin, Louis, 136, 140, 142 Histoire amoureuse et badine du congrès et de la ville d’Utrecht (The Playful and Amorous History of the Congress and City of Utrecht), 204–7 Histoire universelle (Thou), 15–16 history, shaping of, 93–100, 96 Hobbes, Thomas: Leviathan, 71, 78, 80, 236 n.92; theater of diplomacy and, 60, 71, 80, 231 n.9, 234 n.57, 236 n.92, 237 n.99 hospitality, 50, 52; failures of, 148–54; invitation without reciprocity, 135; of Louis XIV, 133–35, 140–41, 144–45, 148–54; theater of, 134, 140 Hotman, Jean, 38, 67 Iconology (Ripa), 101, 115 imperialism: French, 147–48, 155; Spanish, 101 international relations: bureaucracy of, 187– 92; English school of, 6; national character important in, 74–75; Westphalia as turning point in, 88, 111–12. See also diplomacy intimacy, queens’ entertainments and, 46–52 introducteurs des ambassadeurs, 189–90, 192, 203 Irving, David, 179 Italy, 102–3; in Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies, 72–73; France and, 82, 105, 139–40 Jackson, Robert, 5 James I (king), 40, 42–46, 51, 54–55 James II (king), 136–37 Jonson, Ben: Haddington Masque, 45, 53; The Masque of Beauty, 39–47, 51–56, 229 n.96, 230 n.109; Masque of Queens, 46–47, 51–56, 229 n.96, 230 n.109 Jouan, Abel, 13, 23–24 Jouhaud, Christian, 186–87, 241 n.81 jousting tournament, 20–22, 59, 220 n.48, 221 n.51 Julius II (pope), 33–34 jurisdictional sovereignty, 72–73

Kafka, Ben, 188–89 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 68 Keay, Anna, 134 Keene, Edward, 158 La Gorce, Jérôme, 139, 196 La Loubère, Simon de, 180 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de, 195–202, 207, 267 n.64 Lange, Tyler, 69 Langhorne, Richard, 209–10, 225 n.15 language barrier, 26, 222 n.77, 223 n.78 Latin, 9, 26, 222 n.76 Lauze, François de, 160 laws of nations, 98, 134, 163 Le Brun, Charles, 156–57, 157, 166, 170 Le Fèvre de la Boderie, Antoine: as French ambassador to England, 39–57, 195, 229 n.93; masques and, 39–47, 51–56 Lennox, Duke of, 41–43 L’Escalopier, Nicolas, 141, 252 n.46 Lestringant, Frank, 118 Le Tonnelier, Louis-Nicolas. See Breteuil, sieur de “Letter on the 24-Hours Rule” (Chapelain), 94 Le Vacher, Thomas, 114, 245 n.36 Leviathan (Hobbes), 71, 78, 80, 236 n.92 Lippomano, Girolamo, 49 Longino, Michèle, 168–69 Longueville, duc de (Henri II d’Orléans), 108–10, 243 nn.3–4 Loret, Jean, 142 Louis XIII (king): burlesque aesthetic and, 60; court entertainments and, 60, 65–66, 70–74, 79, 91, 245 n.40 Louis XIV (king), 87, 254 n.74, 254 n.79; audience of, 149–54; Ballet de la Flore and, 147; Ballet des Muses and, 145–47, 253 n.63; Ballet des Plaisirs and, 135; Ballet royal de la nuit and, 131, 135–39, 138; court entertainments of, 4, 8–9, 68, 127, 131–33, 147–48, 150–55; exotic embassies and, 156–57, 157, 159, 173–75, 181; foreign personalities in French image and, 140–45; hospitality of, 133–35, 140–41, 144–45, 148–54; Nopces de Pélée et de Thetis and, 135, 137–40; public stage and, 193, 204; sovereignty of, 132–33, 140, 154; Le temple de la paix and, 154–55; universalism and, 145–48, 150 Love, Ronald, 173

296 Index Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 148, 179, 193, 260 n.68; Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, 166, 168–69, 198; Roland, 175–78, 201; Le temple de la paix, 154–55 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 37 Machosky, Brenda, 86 La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (The Way of Composing and Successfully Producing Ballets) (Saint-Hubert), 58 Mantua, Duke of (Charles III Ferdinand Gonzaga), 194–95 Marguerite (queen), 47–48 Marriage of Peleus and Thetis (Nopces de Pélée et de Thetis) (Buti and Caprioli), 135, 137–40 Martin, Meredith, 23, 221 n.59 The Masque of Beauty (Jonson), 39–47, 51–56, 229 n.96, 230 n.109 Masque of Queens (Jonson), 46–47, 51–56, 229 n.96, 230 n.109 masques, 226 n.45, 231 n.9; ambassadors and, 39–47, 51–56; diplomacy and authority in, 51–56; as diplomatic incident, 42, 47, 56; post-event mediation of, 52 Mazarin, Jules, cardinal, 113, 131, 139, 141, 252 n.43 McClure, Ellen, 38, 132–33 McGowan, Margaret, 16, 62–63 Medici, Catherine de’, 8, 218 n.19; Bayonne entertainments and, 11–16, 18, 23–24, 27–31, 217 n.3, 221 n.59; Elisabeth and, 12, 18, 27–31 Medici, Marie de’, 47–51, 228 n.70, 229 n.83 Mémoires sur les introductions des ambassadors (Bonneuil), 163–64 Ménestrier, Claude-François, 5, 58, 84, 159; Des ballets anciens et modernes, 60, 231 n.5; Des représentations en musique, 160 Mercure Galant, 174, 178–79, 183, 196, 203 Mercury, 73–74, 114–17, 130, 210 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, 186, 264 n.9 Mesmes, Claude de. See d’Avaux, comte meta-theater, court entertainment as, 35, 39–46 Mieszkowski, Jan, 97 modern diplomacy: emergence of, 2–3, 5–6, 9–10; soft power and, 212 Mohammed Reza Beg, 173–74, 181–82 Mokhberi, Susan, 174, 182, 262 n.93 Molière, 153, 166–69, 172, 198

monarchs: as body politic, 68–74; power of, 3–4, 53–54, 65–67, 127–29, 149–51 Montmorency, François de, 27–28 Morgues, Mathieu de, 100 Morocco, 173, 175, 184, 256 n.2 Muse historique (Loret), 142 music, 148, 261 n.79; at Bayonne entertainments, 16–17, 23–24; universality of, 160–61 mythology. See Classical mythology La Naissance de la Paix (The Birth of Peace), 127–29 Narai, Phra, 173, 179–80 nation: category of, 61–62, 232 n.19; laws of, 98, 134, 163 national characters, 231 n.7, 267 n.73; ambassadors, 62–63, 65–67; in ballet, 58–62, 69–70, 76–81, 88–89; characterization of, 58–59; in international relations, 74–75 national communities, noble community vs., 120–25 nationality: performance of, 61–62, 69–70, 80–81; principle of, 75 negotiation, 86, 106, 210 New Diplomatic History, of Europe, 10 Niderst, Alain, 199, 267 n.73 nobility. See aristocracy noble community, national communities vs., 120–25 non-European diplomacy, 158–59. See also exotic embassies Nopces de Pélée et de Thetis (Marriage of Peleus and Thetis) (Buti and Caprioli), 135, 137–40 Nye, Joseph, 4, 148–49, 250 n.6 Of Ballets Ancient and Modern (Des ballets anciens et modernes) (Ménestrier), 60, 231 n.5 Of the Law of Nature and Nations (Pufendorf ), 133 Ogier, François: Congress of Westphalia and, 107–10, 114–16, 121–22, 243 n.7, 244 n.17, 245 n.31, 245 n.33, 245 n.36, 245 n.39, 246 n.46; as spiritual advisor, 108–9. See also Ballet de la Paix Opera: exotic audiences and, 175–78, 260 n.68; public stage of, 175, 185–87, 192–202, 266 n.43 Orgel, Stephen, 54 Orléans, Anne Marie Louise d’, 71, 142

Index 297 Orléans, Gaston d’, 71–72, 74 Orléans, Henri II d’. See Longueville, duc de Ottoman Empire, 89, 118, 126, 239 n.41, 246 n.54; embassy from, 157, 162–72, 171, 256 n.2, 259 nn.45–46; in L’Europe galante, 199–200 Palais-Cardinal theaters, 85, 93, 95, 96, 100 paperwork, 188–89, 264n20 Les passions victorieuses et vaincues (The Passions Victorious and Vanquished), 127 pastoral tropes, 22–23, 92, 221 n.59 patronage, 193, 237 n.13 peace, 127–29, 225 n.23; allegories of, 4, 92, 116–18; Thirty Years’ War, 4, 83–84, 87–88, 91–93, 95, 97–99, 104–6, 239 n.51. See also Ballet de la Paix performance: of aristocracy, 118–22; domination linked with, 146–47; liveness of, 25; of nationality, 61–62, 69–70, 80–81; representation and, 7; team, 36–37; in theater of diplomacy, 3, 7–8, 35–39, 42, 145–48, 150, 162–72, 171, 213; of universalism, 145–48, 150 performative category, Europe as, 4–5 performing arts: in France, 8–9; metaphors, 1–2; patronage of, 193; power of, 9, 16–17, 24; in sociability norms, 6–7; universality of, 159–62 permanent diplomacy, 35 Perrin, Pierre, 177, 193 Persia, 173–74, 181–83 personal favors, 47, 49, 51, 53 Philip II (king), 12, 15, 18, 26–28, 30 Pitkin, Hanna, 69, 233 n.43 The Playful and Amorous History of the Congress and City of Utrecht (L’Histoire amoureuse et badine du congrès et de la ville d’Utrecht), 204–7 Poetics (Aristotle), 60, 231 n.14 Poirier, Hélie, 127 Poisson, Raymond, 165 political representation, in ballets of nations, 69–71 politics of incertitude, 29 post-event mediation: of Bayonne entertainments, 26–28, 32; of masques, 52 Potemkin, Petr Ivanovich, 165–66, 170, 172 precedence (préséance), 3, 33–34, 125, 158 Prest, Julia, 146 Prior, Matthew, 194

private favors, 47, 49, 51, 53 props, 120 Protestantism: Edict of Fontainebleau and, 155; in France, 14–15, 27, 29–31, 65, 70, 155, 219 n.32, 224 n.93 pseudo-memoirs, 206 public gaze, 181–84, 186–87 publicity, 46–52, 202–7 public stage, diplomacy on, 264 n.9; addresses to, 207–8; creation of, 10, 192–95, 211; diplomats and, 187–89, 191–92, 194–95, 204–7; L’Europe galante, 195–202, 207; Louis XIV and, 193, 204; Opera and, 175, 185–87, 192–202, 266 n.43 Pufendorf, Samuel, 133 Puisieux, Pierre Brulart de Sillery de, 39, 42, 46, 48–51, 54 Pure, Michel de, 58, 160, 231 n.5 queens: court entertainments of, 46–56, 229 n.83; monarchal power of, 127–29 Quinault, Philippe, 155, 175–78, 197, 201 Rabel, Daniel, 63, 64, 90 Ravelhofer, Barbara, 55 representation: through ballet, 58–59; descriptive, 233 n.43; diplomatic entertainments as form of, 57, 209–10; embodied, 3; of monarchal power, 3–4, 53–54, 65–67, 127–29, 149–51; performance and, 7; political, in ballets of nations, 69–71; self-representation, of ambassadors, 35, 39, 41; symbolic, 69, 233 n.43 resident ambassadors: dissimulation by, 36, 225 n.15; system of, 1–3, 5, 33–36, 132, 140, 149, 156, 188, 225 n.15 Reutenfels, Jacob, 170 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal, 66, 239 n.50; alliances and, 88, 91, 238 n.20, 239 n.46; Ballet de la félicité commissioned by, 82–83, 88–89, 90; Ballet de la prospérité des armes commissioned by, 82–83, 93–100, 96; Europe, comédie héroïque commissioned by, 82–83, 100–106, 102; Testament politique, 86, 88, 91, 239 n.46; Thirty Years’ War and, 82–83, 85–88, 232 n.31, 238 n.20, 246 n.49; war allegories and, 82–83, 85–89, 91–93, 97, 99–101, 103, 105–6 Ricordi (Guicciardini), 37, 45 The Rights of War and Peace (De jure belli ac pacis) (Grotius), 75–76

298 Index Ripa, Cesare, 101, 104, 115 Roland (Lully and Quinault), 175–78, 201 Ronsard, Pierre, 16, 24 rule of precedence (préséance), 3, 33–34, 125, 158 Russia: embassy from, 162–66, 169–70, 171, 172, 257 n.29, 259 nn.51–53; theater in, 169–70

subjunctive mood, of culture, 21–22, 221 nn.54–55 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 172 Suleiman Ferraca Aga, 166–68, 172 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, 47, 59–60, 75–76, 78 Sweden, 126–29, 140–42, 164 symbolic representation, 69, 233 n.43

Sahlins, Peter, 61–62 Saint-Hubert, Nicolas, 58, 110, 120–21, 230 n.2 Saint-Maurice, marquis de (Thomas-François Chabod), 151–54 Saint-Simon, Louis, 192 secrétaires à la conduite, 189–90 self-representation, of ambassadors, 35, 39, 41 shepherds, 22–23, 92 Siam, 173, 175–80, 185, 260 n.72, 262 n.91 Skinner, Quentin, 71 sociability norms, 6–7 social dramas, 5, 111 society of states, 6 Sofer, Sasson, 211 soft power, 4, 132, 148–49, 212, 250 n.6 sovereigns: ambassadors’ relationships with, 3, 36–38, 47, 67–68, 81, 133–34, 225 n.19, 225 n.23; personal life of, 43–44; power of, 71. See also monarchs sovereignty: diplomacy and, 72–74, 132–33, 156, 158; jurisdictional, 72–73; of Louis XIV, 132–33, 140, 154 Spain: in Ballet of the Four Christian Monarchies, 72–73; Bayonne entertainments and, 14–15, 18–21, 23–30, 219 n.32, 221 n.49; diversity of, 75; England and, 41–43, 52, 226 n.45; in Europe, comédie héroïque, 103; French alliance with, 14–15, 18–19, 27–30, 91; imperialism of, 101; in Thirty Years’ War, 88–92, 95–99, 101, 238 n.33; War of Spanish Succession and, 203 Spanheim, Ezechiel, 188, 264 n.14 spectatorship, 3, 7–8, 213, 230 n.105, 230 n.112; of Bayonne entertainments, 13–14, 21–22; diplomatic mode of, 32, 35, 39–41, 44, 52–53, 55–57; passive, 149–52; public gaze, 181–84, 186–87; utopian, 24–25, 29, 99, 244 n.19; war and, 85, 97. See also audience Still, Judith, 135 Strong, Roy, 3, 31

tapestries, of Bayonne entertainments, 11–13, 12, 31 Tasso, Torquato, 37 Taussig, Sylvie, 85, 100, 103, 241 n.81 technologies, theater, 95, 139 Le temple de la paix (The Temple of Peace) (Lully and Quinault), 154–55 Teskey, Gordon, 83, 97 Testament politique (Richelieu), 86, 88, 91, 239 n.46 theater: of bureaucracy, 187–92, 264 n.15; of hospitality, 134, 140; Palais-Cardinal, 85, 93, 95, 96, 100; Russian, 169–70; technologies, 95, 139 theater of diplomacy: actors in, 1–2, 34–39, 190, 206; authors in, 34, 42; as empty show, 9–10; Hobbes and, 60, 71, 80, 231 n.9, 234 n.57, 236 n.92, 237 n.99; metaphors, 1–3, 10, 37–38, 71, 207–8, 211; meta-theater, 35, 39–46; performance in, 3, 7–8, 35–39, 42, 145–48, 150, 162–72, 171, 213; publicized, 202–7; rejection of, 37–38; soft power and, 4, 132, 148–49, 212, 250 n.6. See also court entertainments; diplomatic entertainments; spectatorship; specific entertainments Thirty Years’ War: Ballet de la félicité and, 82–83, 86–93, 90; Europe, comédie héroïque and, 82–83, 100–106, 102; France in, 82–83, 85–92, 95–99, 238 n.33; peace, 4, 83–84, 87–88, 91–93, 95, 97–99, 104–6, 239 n.51; Richelieu and, 82–83, 85–88, 232 n.31, 238 n.20, 246 n.49; Spain in, 88–92, 95–99, 101, 238 n.33. See also Congress of Westphalia Thou, Jacques-Auguste de, 15–16, 29–31 time: as character, 114–16; staging of, 94 Torelli, Giacomo, 139–40 Turkey. See Ottoman Empire Turner, Victor, 5, 21, 111, 221 n.54, 244 n.19 Tyard, Pontus de, 17

Index 299 unity, theme of, 117–18 universalism, performance of, 145–48, 150 utopian spectatorship, 24–25, 29, 99, 244 n.19 Utrecht. See Congress of Utrecht Vachet, Bénigne, 175–78, 260 n.72 Le vaincu de Diane (Diana’s Conquest), 127 Valois, Marguerite de, 23, 25, 63 Valois court: Bayonne entertainments and, 9, 11–13, 12, 29, 31; gender and, 245 n.40 Van der Meulen, Adam François, 156–57, 157 Vera, Juan Antonio de, 36, 38 Versailles: ambassadors at, 174–75, 187–92; paintings, 156, 157 Viala, Alain, 198, 200 Vienna. See Congress of Vienna Villeroy, marquis de, 39, 42, 44–48, 54 Villiers, George. See Buckingham, second duke of

war: allegories, 82–83, 85–89, 91–93, 97, 99–101, 103, 105–6; spectatorship and, 85, 97 War of Devolution, 150 War of Spanish Succession, 203 Watkins, John, 10 Watson, Adam, 170 The Way of Composing and Successfully Producing Ballets (La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets) (Saint-Hubert), 58 weak public, 204, 269 n.99 Westphalia. See Congress of Westphalia Wicquefort, Abraham de, 112, 132, 163; L’ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 1, 190–91, 203; public stage and, 202 Williams, Raymond, 212–13 Wotton, Henry, 36, 225 n.18 Yates, Frances, 13

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Acknowledgments

This project began as a simple thought experiment in taking metaphors seriously. It took me on an intellectual adventure exploring histories and disciplines far beyond my home fields of early modern French literature and theater. This journey would not have been possible without the generous help of several institutions and individuals to whom I am now happy to be able to express my gratitude. Financial support and the most precious resource— time—were provided by an American Council of Learned Societies Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship, a Josephus Daniels Fellowship from the Research Triangle Foundation, and an R. J. Reynolds Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. The National Humanities Center provided the ideal environment for much of the writing process. The center’s expert librarians—Eliza Robertson, Brooke Andrade, Jean Houston, and Sarah Harris—tracked down the most obscure materials seemingly by magic, while Cassie Mansfield and Lois Whittington extended the warmest and most thoughtful of welcomes. Above all, my cohort of fellows provided the best kind of intellectual companionship. For reading draft chapters and indulging me in lunchtime conversations about myriad topics from early modern allegory to the historiographical value of images to the challenges of describing music in prose, I am especially thankful to Christian De Pee, Heather Hyde Minor, Anna Krylova, Marixa Lasso, Lee Manion, Charlie McGovern, Vernon Minor, Michael Puri, Louise Rice, Jane Sharp, and Carol Symes. Nora Fisher-­Onar deserves special credit for introducing me to the “English school” of international relations and for convincing me that the book needed to look beyond Europe. Throughout the long process of researching and writing, I had the pleasure of sharing ideas with and benefiting from the advice of many colleagues: historians, anthropologists, musicologists, and art historians, as well as the specialists of theater, literature, and culture who make up my habitual scholarly tribe. All of these individuals have enriched the book as well as the experience of researching and writing it. I especially want to thank Rebekah

302 Acknowledgments

Ahrendt, Vanessa Alayrac-­Fielding, Ashley Bruckbauer, Simon Davies, Melissa Deininger, Mark Ferraguto, Melinda Gough, Marcus Keller, Damien Mahiet, Meredith Martin, Jane O. Newman, Peter Shoemaker, and Andrew Weaver; Christine Haynes, Trish Tilberg, and the Charlotte Area French Studies Workshop; and members of the Triangle French History and Culture seminar: Lloyd Kramer, Don Reid, Jim Winders, Keith Luria, Thomas Parker, Jessica Tanner, Jodi Bilinkoff, and Kirsten Cooper. I am grateful to Michael Meere, whose invitation to think about Renaissance performance stretched the temporal boundaries of this project, and to Sylvaine Guyot for an insightful question about “fractured spectatorship” that provided inspiration at just the right moment. My summer 2013 Chapel Hill writing group—Anna Agbe-­Davis, Tori Ekstrand, Tim McMillan, and Margaret Weiner—provided support and feedback at the start of the writing process. Countless librarians and archivists at the University of North Carolina, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Archives des Affaires Étrangères (La Courneuve) helped me efficiently access prodigious quantities of documents. Maureen Melita offered expert assistance with Italian translations. Finally and especially, I am indebted to Joan DeJean, Claire Goldstein, and Michèle Longino—exemplars of scholarly generosity—for their faith in the project at its earliest stages. Several others assisted with the book’s final steps. In particular, I thank Penn Press’s two anonymous readers for their generous and astute feedback. I hope they find their excellent advice reflected in the preceding pages. I am also grateful to Jerry Singerman, Hannah Blake, Erica Ginsburg, Jennifer Backer, and Robert Swanson for transforming the manuscript into readable form.