Although primarily geographical and cultural, the category of the nation also had political connotations. Long before the “nation-state” as such came into existence, dictionary definitions suggested the political relevance of nationality in their observations that the people who constitute a nation live “in the same State” or “under a common rule” and “under the same laws.”20 Discourses about nationality certainly played a role in international politics—for example, in the heated national rivalries that often accompanied struggles over territory or political power. Questions of nationality, moreover, influenced the delineation of frontiers. As Peter Sahlins has shown in his work on the creation of the boundary between France and Spain in the mid-seventeenth century, “both state formation and nation building were two-way processes…. States did not simply impose their values and boundaries on local society. Rather, local society was a motive force in the formation and consolidation of nationhood and the territorial state.”21 Despite the immense cultural and linguistic diversity within both kingdoms, claims that the ethnicity or “nation” of a particular region was more French or more Spanish helped determine on which side of the border it would lie.
In this context, the performance of nationality on the ballet stage enacted, and asked spectators to reflect upon, assumptions about national differentiation. Across the 1620s and 1630s, French court artists experimented with different approaches to characterizing national identities in ballets: earlier examples of the form presented essentially human characters exhibiting national traits, while later versions employed allegorical embodiments of nations in the abstract. The depiction of national characters frequently served to elaborate national rivalries. Particularly during wartime or on the eve of conflict, the performance of ridiculous national stereotypes permitted the denigration of the countries they represented.22 More fundamentally, though, personifications of nations helped bridge the divide between purely cultural and political conceptualizations of nationality. The materialization of geographical and cultural entities as balletic personas participated in the construction of a political fiction whereby a country personified as an abstract idea or collectivity—rather than in the form of its monarch—might be thought to behave as a sovereign “actor” on the world stage. In this way, ballet modeled ways of thinking about political representation in European diplomacy.
Dances of Delegation
The clearest evidence that ballets engaged with already existing understandings of political representation on the world stage comes from entertainments that featured ambassadors and envoys as their characters. Several ballets of nations use a fictional framework in which characters from distant corners of the globe have traveled to Paris to pay homage to the French monarch on behalf of their countrymen. A few entertainments put greater emphasis on the characters’ identity as ambassadors through verses and staging techniques that invited viewers to reflect on the dynamics of diplomatic representation and delegation.
One example is the comic ballet the Ballet du grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Ballet of the Grand Ball of the Dowager of Bilbao), staged twice during the Carnival season in 1626, first at the Louvre and then at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.23 Margaret McGowan has pointed to this ballet as the epitome of burlesque style, as reflected in Daniel Rabel’s engrossing drawings of the costumes and major props. The grotesque figure of the Dowager, in particular—played by a male performer inside a “machine” by court sculptor Bourdin—ridiculed the aging Marguerite de Valois for an in-group of courtly spectators.24 Although critics have examined this ballet’s commentary on the court and its engagement with the Parisian populace, the entertainment’s international theme has received less attention, even though global imagery makes up the majority of the spectacle.25 The ballet featured a series of performances by delegations from the “Four Parts of the World” who, according to the fictional scenario, had come to visit the queen of the ballet’s title. Their exotic garb and accoutrements (including “machine” animals representing the distinctive fauna of each region) surely appealed to the eye and the imaginations of spectators.
But the foreign contingents also alluded to diplomatic delegations. As depicted in Rabel’s drawings, each entrée showcased a small cluster of performers with one lead figure surrounded by an entourage of countrymen: Atabalipa, king of Cusco, led a group of Americans; Mahommet was accompanied by various “peoples of Asia”; the Great Turk ushered in the eunuchs and ladies of his harem; the “peoples of the North” entered behind two Bailiffs of Greenland and Friesland; the Grand Cacique took the stage along with African men and women. Only the “entrée of the Europeans”—a joyfully chaotic performance of Grenadine dancers and guitarists—diverged from the format. The configuration of the continental performances echoed the extraordinary embassies consisting of an official ambassador and several lesser envoys that would be sent to congratulate monarchs on political successes, marriages, or royal births.
The published description and verses for the entertainment further amplified the ballet’s resonances with diplomatic representation. It took as its central conceit that the ballet depicted a kind of courtly summit arranged by the Dowager in celebration of her love for her ridiculous suitor, Fanfan de Sotteville. As the opening pages of the libretto explain: “The rumors which carry on their wings the secrets of the smallest schools as well as the evil plots of the greatest Monarchs, spared not their diligence in spreading among the diverse parts of the World the merits of the DOWAGER of BILBAO; who in order to welcome the virtuous suit of FANFAN de SOTTEVILLE, assembles a great Ball in the manner of her Ancestors, to acknowledge the gestures of her Gallant, and to maintain order among the Foreigners who arrive from every coast.”26 The theme of international renown echoes throughout René Bordier’s libretto in both descriptive passages and verses. Foreign leaders trumpet their own ambition and might: “I make all the Earth tremble, / And constrain the Ocean to revere my Laws,” crows the Great Turk.27 “The earth which burns with passion for me / Gives carte blanche to my ambitions,” boasts the Cacique.28 Armed with hyperbole, they verbally spar for global prestige before praising the supreme merit of their host. While nominally honoring the Dowager, the characters exploit this world stage to enhance their own images and announce their imperial drives, much in the way that the pomp of an extraordinary embassy was designed to burnish the reputation of the monarch who sent it more than the prince who received its tribute.
Figure 2. Daniel Rabel, design for the entrée of the “Grand Can” and his entourage, from the Ballet du Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut, 1626. BnF.
At the same time the ballet’s structure mocks diplomatic competition for prestige, it also satirizes the tradition of praise for the host sovereign. The delegates’ fawning addresses to the Dowager work as a parody of contemporary encomiastic ballets that vaunted the renown of the real French king. But the parody grows more complex when verses spoken in the foreign characters’ voices reference Louis XIII’s own glory. Verses written by Claude de l’Estoille for the Great Turk, for example, declare: “It’s only you, Louis the Great, whose weapons shall one day / Fell the Crescent.”29 Explicitly or implicitly, the parade of foreign princes pays homage to two addressees: the ridiculous figure of the Dowager and the real French sovereign, present in the audience. The entertainment simultaneously rehearses and derides the trope of ballets of nations that ventriloquized praise for the king through foreign personas. In this respect, the Grand bal fits Mark Franko’s characterization of burlesque ballet as “a purposive ideological distortion of court ballet’s traditional aims: glorification of the sovereign.”30 At the same time that it embellishes Louis XIII’s stature, it ridicules the forms through which that exaltation takes place.
If the Grand bal resembled a grotesque exaggeration of the competitive representation of prestige occasioned by international summits, the national ballet that formed part of the 1635 Ballet de la Marine (Ballet of the Navy) staged a more direct and profound critique of diplomatic representation. Most of its characters—all of the nationally marked ones—are identified as “ambassadors” in