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

By Ellen R. Welch

The seventeenth-century French diplomat François de Callières once wrote that "an ambassador resembles in some way an actor exposed on the stage to the eyes of the public in order to play great roles." The comparison of the diplomat to an actor became commonplace as the practice of diplomacy took hold in early modern Europe. More than an abstract metaphor, it reflected the rich culture of spectacular entertainment that was a backdrop to emissaries' day-to-day lives. Royal courts routinely honored visiting diplomats or celebrated treaty negotiations by staging grandiose performances incorporating dance, music, theater, poetry, and pageantry. These entertainments—allegorical ballets, masquerade balls, chivalric tournaments, operas, and comedies—often addressed pertinent themes such as war, peace, and international unity in their subject matter. In both practice and content, the extravagant exhibitions were fully intertwined with the culture of diplomacy. But exactly what kind of diplomatic work did these spectacles perform?

Ellen R. Welch contends that the theatrical and performing arts had a profound influence on the development of modern diplomatic practices in early modern Europe. Using France as a case study, Welch explores the interconnected histories of international relations and the theatrical and performing arts. Her book argues that theater served not merely as a decorative accompaniment to negotiations, but rather underpinned the practices of embodied representation, performance, and spectatorship that constituted the culture of diplomacy in this period. Through its examination of the early modern precursors to today's cultural diplomacy initiatives, her book investigates the various ways in which performance structures international politics still.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812293869

Book preview

A Theater of Diplomacy

A Theater of Diplomacy

International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France

Ellen R. Welch

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 7. Exotic Audiences (1668–1715)

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

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 miseen-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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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 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 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