A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France by Ellen R. Welch (review)

To the present day, diplomacy (or lack thereof) takes shape through performance. A Theater of Diplomacy traces the history of political stagings of international relations, particularly from the French perspective, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Over the course of a succinct methodological introduction and eight chapters, Ellen Welch examines a number of events that were designed to represent nations onstage and to give shape to a constantly changing idea of Europe. The focus is both on performance practices and on spectatorship, as the latter concept evolves from a concern for the sovereign's point of view to an appeal to the public. The starting point is the "series of entertainments staged by the French royal family at Bayonne in June 1565 as part of a diplomatic summit" (11). Although the ostensible purpose of these events was to promote common cause among neighboring kingdoms, the polysemous forms and reception of the performances left lingering doubts as to the balance of power. In the early seventeenth century, French diplomat Antoine Le Fèvre de la Boderie was left out of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Beauty in London. This prompted the French court to stage its own masque, which created an opportunity for King James to mollify the French ambassador in ways that influenced both nations' relations with Spain. In the 1620s and 1630s, ballets staged characters representing nations in ironic ways that reflected on diplomatic practices based on préséance, while raising fundamental questions about the nature of political and cultural representation. Under Richelieu and during the Thirty Years' War, the Ballet de la prospérité des armes, the Ballet de la félicité, and a machine play entitled Europe, comédie héroïque staged allegorical characters such as Peace and Harmony to give a Francocentric vision of a personified Europe. At mid-century during the Congress of Westphalia, the French delegation organized a Ballet de la paix that gave a vision of international cooperation. As Welch explains, ballet's "iconographical, poetic, and choreographic vocabulary performed this cultural work more readily than any amount of legal theorizing" (130). In the early years of the reign of Louis XIV, the French court developed a "theater of hospitality," as ballets and theatrical performances absorbed international talent to promote the imperialistic agenda of the emerging absolutist monarchy in the gardens of Versailles. At the turn of the century, Charles Dufresny, sieur de La Rivière created a fictional Siamese visitor's observations of court and city entitled the Amusemens sérieux et comiques. Welch focuses the reading of this text on spectatorship at the Paris Opera, arguing convincingly that moving toward the eighteenth century the ambassador performed his functions not only for court and sovereign but for an emerging public, "which functioned as a new kind of synecdoche for European society" (195). The stakes of these processes of performance and spectatorship were high: far more than mere divertissements, diplomatic entertainments from the Valois monarchs to the early eighteenth century played a critical role in defining practices of diplomacy in an emerging early modern Europe.