A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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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