A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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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 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 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 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 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