Dangerous Liaisons: Ambassadors and Embassies in French Art, 1661-1789

This dissertation critically analyzes the tensions and anxieties presented by French representations of diplomatic encounters during the “long” eighteenth century. Between 1661 and 1789, French kings exchanged an unprecedented number of ambassadors and embassies with lands across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These diplomatic figures and events appeared in prints, paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects. “Dangerous Liaisons” challenges past treatments of such works of art as faithful documentation or rote propaganda by exploring the ways in which diplomatic imagery denies any singular or straightforward narrative of early modern diplomacy. The project highlights the diversity and multivalence of the genre, which reinforced, complicated, and contested French systems of power and categories of identity. The theme of negotiation frames the dissertation, with each chapter examining how diplomatic imagery negotiated the cultural, religious, and political identities of those represented. Despite close ties to their king and state, diplomats were conceived as shape-shifters adapting to diverse situations. While embassies relied on the protean abilities of ambassadors, these official missions also required them to display national character and princely magnificence. As a result, diplomatic actors were depicted in complex and conflicting manners that betrayed the ambivalence surrounding their unruly nature. Chapter 1 analyzes interiors at Versailles that portrayed French and foreign diplomats as idealized archetypes forming a global diplomatic network centered around the French king. The second chapter considers how the Siamese ambassadors who visited France in the 1680s were visualized as willing converts to Catholicism. Chapter 3 examines depictions of French and Ottoman ambassadors adopting the customs and manners of their host courts. The fourth chapter assesses how portraits of Benjamin Franklin situated the American ambassador to France within European frameworks that validated his precarious political status. These case studies demonstrate how French representations of diplomacy exposed ambassadors and embassies as dangerous liaisons capable of not only asserting but also upsetting the supposedly stable boundaries between “French” and “foreign.” Such disruptive potential was especially disquieting in the context of early modern diplomacy, a realm associated with the person of the king, the sovereignty of the state, and the identity of the nation.Doctor of Philosoph