On Neutral Grounds
Gerard Ter Borch’s The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648
p. 153-177
Texte intégral
1As objects, tables are often overlooked in two senses. On one hand, they are so commonplace that we scarcely take note of them. Of course they stand in the middle of a dining room, or kitchen, or on the side of a couch: They have become part of an everyday landscape in which their surfaces seem to effortlessly cater to our (unconscious) needs, silently carrying and sorting our ephemera and our food, while stoically waiting on guests, who gather around them, taking their level tops for granted. Unlike chairs, tables are not comfortable, nor are they “ingenious” like a good desk; they just sort of stand around. On the other hand, tables are literally overlooked in the sense that we generally look over and across them. In this regard, they provide a kind of contained cartographic landscape, since they separate that which is on or at the table from the spaces around, under, and above the tabletop. The table can, thus, serve to intensify the ways in which we perceive either the objects arranged upon it, or the faces seated around it since it isolates them and places them into sets of relationships that can be examined in a concentrated fashion. One may, therefore, say that a table offers a special kind of terrain, but one that often escapes notice precisely because it is so ubiquitous.
2This was not always the case. In the early modern era, tables were not everywhere. They did not form the focus of social life; in aristocratic contexts they seldom stood in the center of a room. Instead, they tended to be either sidelined (if they were heavy, like marble-topped consoles), or were part of a fleet of mobile furnishings that could be whisked in for special occasions. When this happened, the table became an occasional spatial fixture and an object of great importance, since the court would assemble around its surface and all attention would be directed to that which lay on the table, and the seating order of those invited to take part in the feast. In this manner, the table presented a map of courtly hierarchy.1 The table thereby became an explicitly political object that mediated between a potentially confusing “ground” by establishing a second “ground” above the floor around which an ideal order could make itself manifest. It became a medium of social articulation, as well as a matrix of social reproduction.2
3Around the middle of the seventeenth century, political tables took on a new dimension. They began to appear prominently in images at a new sort of political event: a peace congress.3 Tables had been used at peace conferences before, as surfaces for writing, or, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as sites of banquets that celebrated the closure of a peace through a convivium.4 But the kind of large-scale, multilateral peace conference that we associate today with bodies such as the United Nations did not yet exist in the early modern West until the peace negotiations that took place at Osnabrück and Münster in the mid-1640s. And while we readily associate a specific form of table with multilateral discussions today, the fabled “round table”, it was in images of Westphalia that the round table—indeed the table at all—first grounded itself in public consciousness as a fixture in conceptualizing the performance and process of making peace. This essay explores ways in which the table emerged at Westphalia as an important agent in seventeenth-century images, one that articulated the tenets of an emergent state system conceptualized as a horizontal framework of states, which were at once autonomous and conjoined in order to support a metaphoric concept of peace as a kind of balance of powers avant la lettre.5
4The table, I want to suggest, was more than an accessory to early modern peace-making. In images, and in actuality, it served as both a symbolic ground and a “cultural technique”6 for calling forth a new political groundwork in which state relationships shifted from a vertically hierarchical to a horizontal model. Historians have long argued over whether the Westphalian peace treaties truly laid a new legal foundation for modern Europe; yet, whether one agrees or not that Westphalia was truly “new” as a type of event, or whether it provided a legal order for Europe, one thing that we can say with certainty is that it generated new forms of representing peace-making in images.7 And in these images tables played a foundational role, just as Westphalia generated—and therefore grounded—new deliberations over how peace congresses should operate.
5Gerard Ter Borch’s 1648 The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster; 15 May 1648 provided a grounding template for nearly all subsequent images of western political diplomacy that adopted a reportage rather than an allegorical mode of representation.8 [PL. 15, see the colour plate section at the end of the book] Ter Borch’s The Swearing was an image that launched a thousand proverbial ships and one that dovetailed well with the historical construction of Westphalia as a grounding (and groundbreaking) historical event already in the seventeenth century. Ter Borch’s painting offered a means not only of bearing witness to the Spanish-Dutch peace ratified as part of the Westphalian agreements, but also provided a visual mode of conceiving of a “neutral” ground as both the result and the basis of making modern peace. In Ter Borch’s image multiple grounds can be observed to intersect. These overlapping conceptual and formal grounds present a surprising and powerful relay between instruments of pictorial and political mediation, translation, and representation. These wrap the figures in the image into a neat package that encapsulates nascent notions of a European state system comprised of interlocking, but autonomous units assembled on a horizontal, “neutral” ground. This foundation then furnishes a multifaceted terrain for future, collective action. And at the very center of this image stands a table—as joint and leveler, as separator, and as enduring basis for a new political imaginary.
Ter Borch’s Even Grounds: tables as joints and levelers
6Ter Borch’s painting is famous for the ways it defined a new mode of documentary representation of seventeenth-century political events, specifically peace congresses.9 For certain aspects of the image convince the viewer of its veracity by locating the beholder directly at the scene: Ter Borch himself stands on the far left side of a large group of darkly clad men assembled in a line behind a round table draped in green velvet. The artist “winks” at the viewer by gazing outward away from the oath-takers directly in our direction, as if we were present. This “eyewitness” effect is underscored by the insertion of the artist’s signature on a plaque mounted on the wall above him and in the consideration that the artist has given to local detail. He appears to have rendered the space of the so-called Friedensaal in the Münster town hall with great accuracy. As if in situ, we can make out the details of the woodwork and the large circular candelabrum poised above the table. Each face is also rendered with great attention to detail, offering a series of miniature portraits of recognizable figures, including seven Dutch delegates and the two leading Spanish envoys. Ter Borch’s masterful ability to render the materiality of surfaces makes each detail—from the figures’ facial features to the festive foliage behind them—come to life in a way that adapts the attention to minutiae characteristic of “eyewitness” seventeenth-century battle scenes and transposes it onto a diplomatic event. In both cases, the viewer is made to feel privy to all elements of the event; we can even see the details on the red velvet boxes and seals in which the treasured paper treaties will be safely stored for posterity.10
7In striving for such veracity in this context, Ter Borch renders the political act of making peace as an event proper—one with choreography, staging cues, and props—that could be followed and rehearsed in its specificities, rather than through an allegorical filter. Of course, Ter Borch also departed from fact: he shows the two delegations swearing the ratification oath simultaneously, whereas we know from reports that the Spanish had arrived first and took the oath prior to the Dutch.11 This unity of time finds a spatial echo in Ter Borch’s decision to arrange the figures in a balanced row behind the table, rather than around it as would have been the case. In doing so, he engineers an image that is accessible to the viewer who can clearly see all the actors from the front and is thereby “invited” both into the painting and to the table. It also creates a strategically balanced image in which a symmetry and, therefore, equal authoritative weight is allotted to both parties at once. For the Dutch delegation, this horizontality was arguably the most important aspect of the event: In terms of territorial changes, the treaty did little more than to ratify the status quo.12 What it did do, however, was to make manifest the Spanish crown’s acknowledgement of the Republic as a sovereign political entity on equal footing with the Iberian monarchy. This itself was a momentous development in European politics generally and for the United Provinces in particular.13
8This is the standard story of Ter Borch’s accomplishment. Yet, something is missing: the ground—the ground that serves in the image as the horizontal leveler, marking and staging the image of the figures’ representational and political parity. Ground, indeed, did not play second fiddle to diplomatic action either in Westphalia, or afterwards. Rather, the creation of an even playing field—of a “neutral ground”—was the condition of possibility for diplomatic action. But how was this ground to be crafted?
9Where do we begin looking for “ground” in Ter Borch’s Oath? The painting itself is rendered in the artist’s characteristically sleek fashion on a copper plate, a surface support that both enhances luminosity and smoothness, drawing painted elements together into a peaceful surface unity. The gray stone floor of the Münster town hall extends out toward the beholder, beckoning the viewer’s gaze to jump the threshold into the small image towards the table. Ter Borch has rendered this ground as a smooth surface, erasing the fissures between the flagstones one finds in subsequent renderings of the space in a manner that serves to highlight the unity of the group.14 Because the figures are arranged behind the table, the viewer is given unimpeded access to the tabletop, which appears as a raised parallel to the gray floor below. The floor contains the figures; they stand on it together sharing the space. The table, however, provides the means by which this unity has been created and is to be perpetuated, namely, a signed peace treaty. Seals, papers, contracts: these are the tools that solidify the unified gathering performed on the neutral gray ground by transferring that literal unity into the abstract space of the contractual obligation. The transfer of ineffable words and fleeting actions onto a ground of paper “fixed” them by extracting them from the worldly, impermanent bodies that spoke them and presenting them as an abstraction that could form the ground for future deliberation.15 The paper contract, or peace treaty, performed the task of representing the resolution of a contract, but also presenting grounds for potential future disagreement. It was a technique of conflict-resolution predicated upon the notion that there could be future conflicts. These would have to be resolved by returning to a foundational paper document that moved speech-acts into the abstract space of writing such that the earthly (literal) grounds of contention became less concrete than the word written on a paper support: the grounding act of a new legal order. As Ter Borch invites the viewer into the painting across the neutral floor towards the table, he draws us in as a participant to the transposition of terrestrial ground to the ground of this new order to come.
10At the same time, the round table itself is also a tool for producing conflict-resolution. It is a kulturtechnik—a technique which describes what objects do to those who use them.16 This can be described as follows: the table tables those around it and the objects on top of it. That would imply that the table gathers people around it and seats them at it. Its height creates a division between their lower and upper bodies, concentrating attention on faces and hands. In terms of the objects on it, the table places them on a horizontal plane. It equalizes them by offering them a shared base designed to minimize differences in relative position in space: an even field. A round table takes these qualities a step further, by specifying that the even playing field of the table top will find a complement in the even playing field of those seated around the table since they will all be equidistant from the table’s center. Whereas at a rectangular table one could sit at the object’s “head” in a position of hierarchical authority, a round table imposes a specifically even distribution. These qualities of horizontality, shared distance from a center, and a drive to closure and unity inhere in the form of a round table, regardless of the specificities in materiality, or history of a particular table. The table adds a dimension of potential repetition to the action because its qualities determine a configuration that can function with more than one specific group of people.
11The table, therefore, appears in the image as a “timeless” technology predicated upon a form of gathering that is horizontal and demands an even distribution of those beckoned to gather. And it does more: because in this instance we are specifically dealing with interstate relations, the weight of the table and its solid position raised above the ground conflate with the attributes of the paper treaties but lend them a gravitas that implies that the horizontal and equal relationship between Spain and the United Provinces is part of an ideal, abstract, and new form of political order. If the contract, however, is not directly and durably connected to the ground and can, therefore, also be either debated (or ripped up), the table is an object that not only serves a symbolic function, but also literally connects the ground to the contracts being written on its “top”. It is not only a symbol of agreement, but the mechanism by which agreement is produced and conflict resolved.
12Ter Borch’s compositional innovation in arranging the figures behind the table draws viewers’ attention to this translation process from one grounding element to another through the fulcrum of the round table. Lest we have any doubts about the fecundity of this process, a fold in the velvet green cloth at the right of the table’s lower edge moves the space of the floor “seamlessly” into the fabric swoop upwards to the flat plane of the table. This plane then finds its pendant in the contracts held in the hands of the respective heads of the two delegations. Because the table draped in green is coded with the color of both hope and spring, the viewer is subtly given to believe that the new political order leveraged by the table has already bore fruit: the peace contract. This will translate in the future to the festive bloom of a landscape connected to the terrestrial ground—recall the festive foliage in the background, which is drawn from the earth outside but already stands blossoming in the Münster Friedensaal.17
13The maintenance of this new stability is also formally foundational in Ter Borch’s painting. It interweaves three levels of ground through the repetition of interrelated levels of horizontal planes: the stone floor, the tabletop, and the paper contract in order to communicate ideas about the production of peace as a contractual obligation between “equal” (horizontal) partners who stand upon the same ground as the viewer, who also finds hirself offered a proverbial seat at the table. In this visual economy, the table serves to bridge various aspects of the image, conjoining a group around it and offering an associative plane in which political unity and the peaceful, productive cultivation of territory appear visually linked. Like the alchemical symbol of the Uroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail that also appeared in early modern peace imagery, the circle stood for completeness, with neither a leading “head” nor a following rear. The table can be seen as transferring this principle into the ground plane of the horizontal, where it is not only a symbol, but also a Latourian actant that assembles a social world around it through the technique of tabling. Because it can be understood to perform this operation on its own, it handily does away with the need of a human leader, who could be seen as establishing a vertical hierarchy of authority. It is in this sense that Ter Borch’s table flips the figure/ground orientation into a horizontal plane in which numerous heads appear as equals.
Worlds Apart: tables as separators
14If the horizontal plane in Ter Borch’s image operates as a type of connector, we must also note that it also serves as a separator. Even as the group gathers around it, the table ensures that each member of the group maintains a sense of autonomy. Writing in an era of similarly strained international relations (the Thirty Years War/the Cold War), Hannah Arendt pointed to the dual nature of the table in The Human Condition (1958) writing, “To live together in the world, means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time”.18 For Arendt, the table is a metaphor that constitutes the common, public realm and thereby also is an instrument for calling into being what she would refer to as a “space of appearance” that defines the political as a agonistic arena that is shared precisely because it preserves individual autonomy.19 Tables do this because they offer a tangible plane that prevents, to use Arendt’s words, “our falling over each other”.20 They provide a support that we can lean on and share as a common base, but one that also ensures a distance and autonomy from those seated across from us. For Arendt, the problem with mass society is that this base has disappeared: the world “between” people has lost its power to draw them together around a common ground predicated upon the preservation of autonomy and difference.
15There is something normative in Arendt’s metaphor, since it presumes that the shape of the table would be truly round if each member of a group is to maintain an equal status in an ideal and balanced conversation in which all participants are equidistant from one another.21 Yet however idealized, Arendt’s analysis nonetheless points to a curious aspect of the table and the notion of finding a common political base, which is that a common ground must be rendered materially present if it is to be shared, while simultaneously embodying an abstract neutrality that is per se neither here nor there.
16This is why when medieval and renaissance European rulers met to reach a political agreement, they often did so on bridges, islands, or open fields cleared of trees. Each of these situations erected a border zone in which the rulers could approach one another as equals, carefully measuring steps or the distance from one shore, or edge, to another. The establishment of a ground upon which parity could be staged was the prerequisite for coming together.22 Parity produced, however, not a complete merging, but rather an image of two figures, equal, but separate like in a mirror.23 The table took this curious form and flipped it into the horizontal. Instead of a vertical mirror, it offered a condensed version of the landscape plane, and gathered negotiators around it in a manner that simultaneously offered a common ground and also a barrier between parties in conflict. It provided a neutral ground that could stand in for the landscape. Furthermore, this neutral ground benefited from a process of abstraction that transformed a particular landscape into the generalized, geometrical form of the table. This transformation promised something akin Nikolas Luhmann’s concept of “symbolic generalization”.24 According to Luhmann, symbolic generalization is a process by which an object bridges differences in order to provide a common ground of action by stripping away excess complexities.25 The form of the round negotiating table, for instance, proposes itself as an instrument preordained for agreement since those gathered around it have already agreed to sit down together despite their differences—without compromising their autonomy.
17We ought to note that it was no accident that the table came to replace earlier modes of diplomatic encounters for over the course of the seventeenth century, the table assumed a heightened social importance. It emerged as a focal point of etiquette manuals defining new forms of civility that privileged fortifying a boundary between the bodies of individuals and the worlds around them—while at the same time, new seventeenth-century political experiments like the Westphalian congress attempted to shore up a state system in which polities assumed nascent bounded forms assembled along a horizontal, rather than a vertically hierarchical structure.26 Moreover, because the passions were thought to be located below the midriff in the unruly stomach and loins, the table offered a buffer not only between those seated across from one another, but also between the upper part of the body and the lower, animalistic half.27 As if to explicate the conjuncture between table etiquette and diplomatic procedure, François de Callières wrote in his diplomatic handbook De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (published 1716), “L’une des qualités la plus nécessaire à un bon négotiateur est de savoir écouter avec attention et avec réflexion tout ce qu’on lui veut dire, et de répondre juste et bien à propos aux choses qu’on lui représente, bien loin de s’empresser à déclarer tout ce qu’il sait et tout ce qu’il désire… Il n’expose d’abord le sujet de sa négociation que jusqu’au point qu’il faut pour fonder le terrain, il règle ses discours et sa conduite sur ce qu’il découvre tant par les réponses qu’on lui fait que par les mouvements du visage”.28 By submitting his behavior to rules, the diplomat keeps his desires in check. In doing so, he builds the foundation (fonder) for a ground of actions, a “terrain” that will be shared as a site of contention to be resolved through close observation and judicious strategic moves. Callières also draws attention to a further aspect of table interactions: proximity. Because the table brings users close to one another, they can attend assiduously to faces.
18In The Swearing protagonists are gathered around the table so close that their bodies overlap. Their garments form a shared dark ground, which sets their white faces into relief. Nonetheless, this is not an undifferentiated mass: Ter Borch’s attention to details in their clothing indicates national specificities, Spanish, Dutch, or German. They form a kind of cultural cartography, in which costumes define a territorial unit. Yet the painter draws our attention more specifically to the details in the diplomats’ faces, so that we can recognize them as individuals belonging to the larger delegation. If clothing forms a kind of cartographic terrain, diplomats’ faces emerge clearly in order to point to how these terrains were being formed by discrete players—the types whose faces Callières was interested in scrutinizing through the proximity of table negotiations.
19The recognition of these faces was key to the success of the negotiations. In order for negotiations to take place at all, let alone result in a binding agreement, the Dutch delegation needed to receive official recognition as a sovereign entity from the Spanish.29 If not, any agreement reached was liable to being voided by the Spanish crown, since the King would not have been obliged to respect a treaty agreed upon with “rebel subjects”.30 This recognition, however, would not be granted initially to the United Provinces as a sovereign state, but rather manifest itself in the recognition of its individual representatives as being imbued with the sovereign power to carry out negotiations. Their title was, therefore, of utmost importance.31 They could not simply be envoys if they were to have the authority to sign a binding contract. Instead, they needed to be invested with plena potestas.32 If the Spanish would not grant this recognition to the Dutch delegation, the Dutch refused to meet. Recognition of sovereignty through individual representatives, therefore, was the precondition of establishing a common ground upon which both sides could stand.
20The individual portraits, furthermore, find a distinct echo in the form of the contract itself. This document concludes with a page that has been signed by each of the plenipotentiaries. On the left side, the two Spanish representatives; on the right side, the eight Dutch representatives. On the even field of the paper page, each signature is accompanied by a round wax seal, two indexes of their authorization, one a name written by hand and the other, a visage-like (round) icon of the individuals’ authority on behalf of their state. These are separate “representative” bodies, conjoined through the vehicle of the flat page written on and impressed with wax on the solid table base. They have been inserted onto the neutral ground of the page, just as Ter Borch inserted faces derived from miniatures into the ground of his group portrait. The artist has even positioned the figures in the painting in a sequence fairly analogous to their position on the contract page.33 A remarkable synergy emerges between the representational ground of the painting and the foundational document that grounds a new relationship between the representative actors in Ter Borch’s rendering.
21The idea of the round table was, of course, hardly a seventeenth-century invention. The association of the round table with the mythical equality of King Arthur’s court was anchored in late medieval tradition, although in his history of medieval courts Joachim Bumke points out that this was most likely a poetic invention: as previously mentioned, courtly etiquette demanded that the sovereign occupy the highest position at table, flanked in descending order of status by his entourage.34 In the Arthurian myth, however, the round table could stand in for the idea of an ideal society inter pares. This itself was linked closely to an association with the Holy Grail and the commemoration of the last supper. Deeply buried within these Christian associations was a message of unity in difference. As Paul wrote in Corinthians, the Christian table hosted all who were “worthy”; the ritual of the Eucharist provided a symbolic round table at which all were welcome, “Jews or Greeks, freemen or slaves”, provided that they followed the teachings of Christ.35
22This concept of Christian inclusivity as a means of overcoming difference undergirded many of the nascent European ideas of international peace in the seventeenth century. The most famous of these was Richelieu’s notion that a “system of collective security”36 ought to be implemented in order to check Habsburg ambitions through the establishment of “leagues” of alliance among Christian nations.37 These alliances would bind a cross-confessional Christian community together into a multilateral structure of peace maintained through official arbitration.38 One of the achievements of the Westphalian congress was that it was able to, in some ways, lay the groundwork of this vision into place. Ter Borch’s image embodies this emergent implementation of a peace “system” held in check via contract across confessional lines. The round table serves as a potent reminder of this unification of difference under the umbrella of potential Christian unity. That, Ter Borch’s image suggests, is the “wonder” of the event.
23Gazing upward from the round table in Ter Borch’s representation of the Friedensaal, we thus conveniently find the round form of the table echoed visually in the circular candelabra, crowned with the wooden sculpture of the immaculate Virgin.39 Mary’s golden mandorla sheds light on the wonderous event below: the end of an eighty year war and the contractual establishment of an order that bridges Protestants and Catholics while recognizing their respective autonomy and the parity of their claims to sovereign representation. A circle has been built, one which existed “before” in the teaching of Christ, but which has been resurrected for a new, golden age in the form of the circular table that operationalizes early modern diplomacy.
24We may now return to consider the importance of Ter Borch’s use of a copper support. The surface not only produced a visual smoothness that dovetailed with the painting’s subject, but also prefigured the image’s distribution in print. Unlike his portrait miniatures, Ter Borch executed the Oath not on commission, but with the apparent intention of immediately turning it into an engraving for broad distribution. By 1650 reproductions of Ter Borch’s painting were ready thanks to the Haarlem engraver Jonas Suyderhof.40 The prints circulated widely and, through the process of circulation, they expanded upon the dynamics at work in the image: the print reached a large, multi-confessional audience who was invited visually to complete the image’s circularity by advancing into the painting’s ground as yet another figure present at the round table. [FIG. 1] A multi-national European audience eagerly purchased the print (which was exactly the same size as the painted model), as well as portraits of the individual diplomats that circulated in books like Anselmus van Hulle’s Pacis antesignani sive icons legatorum plena potestate instructorum in which readers could find likenesses of all of the envoys who had worked to produce the peace agreements at Westphalia. These portraits formed a kind of family album that purchasers could “join”. This family was the diverse but unified Christian family of Ter Borch’s round table, which had now completed its circle by extending its neutral ground to an ever-expanding reading community of autonomous bodies. These bodies may have been worlds apart, but they were bound together conceptually and materially through the horizontal ground of Ter Borch’s matrix for peace.
Ibi est firma pax, ubi sunt voluntarii pacati: an enduring ground41
25Through its wide distribution, Ter Borch’s deceptively straightforward image became an immediate success, a common ground upon which all subsequent Western images of peace congresses in the documentary mode would be based. The painting made peace appear to be so complete, so easy, so circular, and self-evident, perhaps in part through the ways in which its elements of historically accurate “reportage” subtly incorporated the symbolic elements analyzed above. Ter Borch’s table—like the peace it appears to facilitate and embody simultaneously—presented itself as a fait accompli, a balance achieved by coming “full circle”. It visually appeared to expunge conflict from its ground(s), persuasively arguing for its vision of non-hierarchical balance buttressed by the tethering of passions into a neutral middle ground. The signs of labor that went into producing both the physical table and the labor of peace that the table metaphorically represents simply do not appear.
26In the case of the early modern table of state, the metaphysical, mysterious quality of the object of the table is not that it appears as part of a commodity landscape (as the table is in Marx’s Capital) but instead grounds a new vision of a political landscape.42 It can perhaps be said to have prefigured a vision of a modern state system in which autonomous states are bound together in a common interest in peace through systems of nominally non-hierarchical alliances, overseen by the authority of a shared set of rules akin to modern international law.43 The table served as a visual embodiment for this idea, not only because it provided a center and a balanced plane that bridged and separated those seated around it simultaneously (performatively offering them “boundaries”), but also because the table as an object can only stand up and remain balanced if each of its individual legs work together. They only maintain an equilibrium above the ground if they are the same length and if each separate leg collaborates with the others, attaching itself firmly to the table’s top and, thereby, submitting itself to a common regime that both maintains and depends upon the uprightness of its individual parts. Moreover, the table as a metaphor for statecraft implied a nascent sense that states could exist as entities whose stability could be defined spatially through international rule-making, rather than temporally through genealogy: the “Dutch” or “French” seat at a table, as on a map, could be shored up not only by a hereditary monarch, but also by a rotating set of professional diplomats. These diplomats could change, but the horizontal table would remain to welcome their replacements.
27In terms of Ter Borch’s image and our table, one might note, however, that contrary to the enduring image provided in the painting, meetings between the Spanish and the Dutch delegates at Münster did not take place in formal, public setting like the Friedensaal. They also did not occur around tables. Instead, they were held in private lodgings. When the Dutch went to Peñaranda’s quarters, he did provide them with tables, but they were not used to negotiate with “the other side”. On the contrary, the delegations withdrew to private chambers outfitted with tables in order to discuss how they would proceed within the homogeneous circle of the delegation group.44 Prior to signing the treaty, the Spanish collated all of the documents (a process that took six hours) and placed them into tightly sealed envelopes, one for their party and one for the Dutch: the public openness of Ter Borch’s depiction stood in contrast to the covert and complex processes through which peace was actually fabricated in Münster and Osnabrück, even though the ratification ceremony we see in his image was re-performed for a larger public on a platform in front of the Münster Rathaus on the subsequent day so that everyone could see.45 Both painting and performance were, in a way, rehearsals for an idea of what peace could look like in the future.
28Indeed, Westphalia was so riddled by arguments over precedence—not least between the Dutch and their allies the French who found the Dutch insistence on equal status with Venice hard to swallow even though the Dutch alliance was a cornerstone of French foreign policy—that it did not facilitate communication, but actually augmented its complexity. The list of complaints, conflicts, and embarrassments is extensive.46 Ter Borch’s table can, thus, be seen as offering a happy alternative, one which could displace, or “table”, the individual interests and stakes of the delegations.
29A curious thing happened subsequently. Just as historians only fifty years after the ratifications of the Westphalian treaties were already regarding the congress as a new European foundation (“Grundgesetz”), so too did Ter Borch’s table reproduce itself in images of future peace congresses. In this manner, it truly offered a foundational medial ground that accompanied the enshrining of Westphalia as a conceptual ground for a new international “system” of peace (even though the Spanish-Dutch peace was, strictly speaking, not included in the official body of Westphalian treaties).47 Perhaps one can go so far as to suggest that Ter Borch’s image proved ultimately to be the stronger influence in establishing an idea of Westphalia as a grounding moment in the European political imagination. For the ground it offered was more easily graspable than the complexities of the legal and political developments that accompanied peace congresses that followed Westphalia—although the two aspects (legal and image) operated to a certain extent in tandem. Its table offered an image that could be built upon: the table in the image and the image itself served as a solid tabula rasa to build a new collective political imaginary.48
30Hence the image began to multiple rapidly. Suyderhoef’s print after Ter Borch’s “model” was just the tip of the iceberg. An anonymous print published by Rombout van den Hoeye, for instance, depicted the exchange of the ratifications in the same room on the same day as Ter Borch, but shifted the image in order to convey a different political point: the Dutch delegation now sits at the table, which has moved to the left (into “their” side of the room, if we orient ourselves through Ter Borch) while the Spanish delegates approach the table to the right. In terms of table etiquette, the Dutch thereby have gained the upper hand.49 Changes to the matrix were, however, not always necessary. Thirty years later, the Amsterdam publisher Johannes Stichter printed an image commemorating the signing of the treaty of Nijmegen between Spain, the Netherlands, and France (10 August 1678).50 [FIG. 2] Instead of designing a new image specifically tailored to Nijmegen, Sticher chose simply to have Ter Borch’s image reproduced as a cheap woodcut and added updated coats of arms in order to signify the new treaty partners. Because public expectations were already attuned to Ter Borch’s matrix, the specificities of Nijmegen and other treaties that directly referenced Westphalia mattered less than the “establishing shot” associated with peace negotiations writ large.
31Simultaneously, in Nijmegen, a number of the treaties concluded referred specifically to the Westphalian agreements as a foundation upon which the new treaties would be built. In the Nijmegen contracts, the treaty of Münster is named as a “solidissimum hujus mutuae amicitiae tranquillitatisque publicae fundamentum”, while the treaty of Osnabrück is described as a “firma basis ac omnimoda norma hujus Pacificationis” and a “lex fundamentalis”.51 These treaties performed the same task as the repetition of Ter Borch’s image in Stichter’s print. The foregrounding of the Westphalian treaties conflates with the writing surface of the table in the images. Both form a basis for a legal-political imaginary that builds upon the flat tabula (understood in terms of a legal tablet and a literal table) as a grounding site for an equilibrium between modern European states, a firma basis and a “norma”.52 Twenty years later at the Congress of Rijswijk, a similar operation was re-performed when the treaty mentioned for the first time not Münster and Osnabrück separately, but specifically the Pax Wesphalica. This new term was repeated at Utrecht (1713), where the peace treaties pointed to the Traitez de Westphalie.53 In this manner, a kind of grounding moment was collated together as a multi-media project.
32During this process tables crept slowly, but surely into the focus of how diplomatic events were staged and imagined. To a certain extent, the concern over making a neutral ground in the Medieval and Renaissance sense described previously remained a priority. During the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1658-59, for instance, the Spanish and the French found it difficult to decide upon an opportune site to meet in order to hammer out and seal the peace.54 To resolve the situation, they built a structure on the neutralized ground of the Île de la Conférence in the Bidassoa river. In the middle of the temporary structure stood a table, directly over the midpoint like a medieval bridge-barrier.55 At Rijswijk in 1697, commentators hailed the perfection of the grounds and the baroque Huis ter Nieuwburg where the peace congress took place. In his Actes et Mémoires des Négociations de la Paix de Ryswick (1707), Jacques Bernard extols that the location “a été faite exprès pour y traiter de la Paix” because of the way in which it was located halfway between Delft and The Hague and because its symmetry allowed the French to enter the building from one side and the Allies from the other: each party could approach the building through separately organized bridges and entrances erected in the garden.56 In prints celebrating the event, this interest in the ground made itself apparent through the inclusion of ground plans, elevations, and maps of the palace and its gardens. In Laurens Scherm’s 1687 print Gedenkteken van de Vrede van Rijswijk, elevations of Nieuwburg from front and back rest atop the collection of conference images assembled below. [FIG. 3] These location images ground the conference in a specific location before proceeding into the interiors depicted below where each room is shown having a table (Bernard listed these tables individually as well: a long table for the allies, an oval table for the mediators, etc.57) Bernard even reprinted images of the table used in Nijmegen to sign the peace, again using that precedent as a table-like basis for the peace which would return Europe to the ideal state set out by the Westphalian agreements in the same way that the treaties themselves built upon one another through their referential wording.
33The increasing focus on tables in such images can be explained by the growing desire to mitigate problems associated with precedence and ceremonial etiquette.58 The table ground would replace the ground outside as peace-making and diplomacy became increasingly interiorized, a process we observe in prints like Scherm’s. In Utrecht, even seating arrangements were to be simplified by following the rule of “pêle-mêle”.59 Without ceremony, the envoys would gather more freely and thereby embody the utopia of the round table, liberated from the problems of rank and the political wrangling, which, in fact, had produced the table and the congress in the first place.
34For some enlightenment thinkers, the pêle-mêle implied a natural equality and an ideal of communication unhindered by objects and bodies. Like the ceremonial ground, the diplomatic table was, for a philosopher such as Rousseau, not only a farce but a material hinderance to thought; it was part of an outmoded regime in which formalities and regulations inhibited the flow of ideas. He wrote acerbically: “Il se forme de temps en temps parmi nous des espèces de […] congrès […] où l’on s’assemble pour ne rien dire […] où l’on délibère en commun si la table sera ronde ou carrée […] et sur mille questions de pareille importance, inutilement agitées depuis trois siècles”.60 While tables offered a means of establishing a literal common ground (albeit a disputed one), Rousseau suggests that issues of organizational grounding (e. g. precedence) are secondary to human ideas; he argues that communication could and should proceed without them and that peace is possible without a material and performative machinery.
35In spite of Rousseau’s protests, however, tables are still with us. They seem to be part of a political “space of appearance” that indeed depends on objects to facilitate dialogue because they provide a tangible common ground—at least if both sides share a set of cultural assumptions about the nature of that ground and the objects that literally furnish it.61 [FIG. 4] In 2007, when Gary Adams, head of Sinn Féin and the Northern Irish Unionist Ian Paisley miraculously met, they did so through the mediating presence of a special table. This table was diamond-shaped, a form that ensured that they could share a common ground, but neither had to sit across from nor directly next to the other. In photographs, it even appeared as though they were sitting at a round table although they had steadfastly avoided each other for years (and there was no handshake at the meeting). Reconciliation was brokered and made visible thanks to the table’s shape, the troubles bridged by a connector-barrier.62
36More recently, when Boris Johnson met Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée Palace Brexit in August 2019, a scandal erupted: “tablegate”. Photographs of their meeting rapidly began to circulate that showed Johnson putting his foot on the low round table separating the two men. The image of this mis-use of the table seemed to speak volumes about the new British p. M. A brash lack of interest in pursuing serious Brexit negotiations with the EU was confirmed in the court of public opinion by this breach of table etiquette. How could Downing Street claim to want to make a deal when it walked all over the negotiating table? The images proved to be misleading: Macron himself had (ironically?) invited Johnson to use the table as a foot stool, suggesting that he lean back and relax.63 The visual effect, however, of Johnson abusing collective assumptions about the table’s proper function proved damning, as if the passions banished beneath the seventeenth-century table had suddenly crept out in the shape of boorish populism.
37That the image could scandalize indicates, perhaps, the enduring presence of Ter Borch’s matrix in a collective imaginary. We have seen here how (and why) both his image of the table and the table as an image had such a powerful grounding effect on visualizations of peace as part of a collective endeavor. Ter Borch’s common ground has proved to be fertile indeed. It also is a ground that ought to make us think generally about the power of images and material objects as agents in political processes that facilitate the production not only of fictions, but also new realities. Tables as grounds that gather people around them are not merely incidental accessories to human actors when it comes to mediating ideas about the nature of politics. They have, in fact, been carefully choreographed over centuries to hold bodies together in specific ways. Today, it seems increasingly difficult—as it also seemed during the Thirty Years War—to bring polarized political opponents together; the center as a meeting point is losing its pull. How can a common ground be found if there is literally no longer a stable base to stand upon; when the “ground” is displaced by an endless series of tablet windows, tabs, and echo chambers that purport to offer connection, but which simultaneously prioritize individuality enabled by disconnect? Is it even viable today to mobilize the center? Or is the constant threat of collapse to the round table today a reminder of the processes of exclusion that went into the construction of the table? The unhinging of the table’s metaphorical legs may be seen by some as a liberation from the tyranny of the table’s top. For others it might serve as a reminder to attend to Arendt’s warning that a world in which there is no common material basis to connect and separate us is one in which there is nothing to prevent “our falling over each other”.64 In either case, a world with no tables is one in which we may fail to recognize our own capacity for enacting political change. À table.
Notes de bas de page
1 On seventeenth-century tables see Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1978, p. 226-243.
2 Specifically, printed diagrams of seating arrangements. Thomas Rahn, “Herrschaft der Zeichen. Zum Zeremoniell als ‘Zeichensystem’”, in Hans Ottomeyer and Michaela Völkel (ed.), Die Öffentliche Tafel: Tafelzeremoniell in Europa 1300-1900, Wolfratshausen, Minerva/Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2002, p. 22-31.
3 For the term congress see Kenneth Colegrove, “Diplomatic Procedure Preliminary to the Congress of Westphalia” The American Journal of International Law, 13/3, 1919, p. 450-482.
4 See Gerd Althoff, “Rituelle Verhaltensmuster an der Tafel vom frühmittelalterlichen Gelage zum höfischen Fest”, in Ottomeyer and Völkel (ed.), Die öffentliche Tafel, op. cit., p. 32-38. Rituals at the table, like convivia, could take place when people and groups with animosity assembled to share a common goal, like a meal and conversation.
5 See Matthew S. Anderson, “Eighteenth-Century Theories of the Balance of Power”, in Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Studies in Diplomatic History: Essays in Memory of D.B. Horn, London, Longman, 1970, p. 183-198.
6 By cultural technique, I mean what German scholars of cultural studies would call a Kulturtechnik. See Bernhard Siegert, “Kulturtechnik”, in Harun Maye and Leander Scholz (ed.), Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft, Munich, Fink, 2011, p. 95-118.
7 The literature is vast. For overviews see Heinz Durchhardt, “Westfälische Friede und Internationales System im Ancien Régime”, Historische Zeitschrift, 249/3, 1989, p. 529-543; Heinhard Steiger, “Der Westfälische Frieden: Grundgesetzt für Europa?”, Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, 26, 1998, p. 33-80; Niels May, Zwischen Fürstlicher Repräsentation und Adliger Statuspolitik: Das Kongresszerenoniell bei den westfälischen Friedensverhandlungen, Ostfildern, Thobecke Verlag, 2016; Franz Dickmann, Der Westfälische Frieden, Münster, Aschendorff, 1985.
8 On Western peace iconography see Wolfgang Augustyn (ed.), PAX. Beiträge zu Idee und Darstellung des Friedens, Munich, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 2003.
9 Alison McNeil Kettering, Gerard Ter Borch and the Treaty of Münster, The Hague, Mauritshuis/Zwolle, Waanders Publishers, 1998.
10 On their storage, see Theo H.P.M. Thomassen, “Der Friede von Münster: Ein Nationales Symbol in Säuerfreiem Papier”, in Klaus Bussmann, David Allison and Heinz Schilling (ed.), 1648. War and Peace in Europe, Münster, Veranstaltungsgesellschaft Jahre Westfälischer Friede, 1998, vol. 1, p. 475-484.
11 Peñaranda provided a description in a letter to King Philip IV, cited in Kettering, Gerard Ter Borch…, op. cit., p. 14-15.
12 See Horst Lademacher, “Ein letzter Schritt zur Unabhängigkeit: Die Niederländer in Münster 1648”, Historische Zeitschrift. Beihefte, 26, 1998, p. 346.
13 Although the artist arrived at Münster with connections to the Amsterdam delegate Adriaen Pauw, Ter Borch made portraits for both Dutch and Spanish envoys, working for both sides.
14 Compare with Cornelius Schimmel’s ca. 1830 lithograph after A.-P. Friedrichs “Saal im Rathause zu Münster, worin die Berathungen bei dem westphälischen Friedenschlusse im Jahr 1648 gehalten wurden” in Cornelia Manegold, “Bilder Diplomatischer Rangordnungen, Gruppen, Versammlungen und Friedenskongresse in den Medien der frühen Neuzeit”, in Hans-Martin Kaulbach (ed.) Friedensbilder in Europa 1450-1815, Berlin, Deutscher Kunstverlag/Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2013, p. 48.
15 Lucien Bély writes of early modern diplomats: “l’acte d’écrire sacralisé parce qu’il transformait en droit ce qui n’était jusque-là que paroles. L’écriture, plus qu’un art, devenait une technique”. Lucien Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV, Paris, Fayard, 1990, p. 436.
16 Cornelia Vissman, “Kulturtechniken und Souveränität”, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 1/1, 2010, Kulturtechnik, p. 171-182.
17 Numerous allegorical images of peace in the early modern period highlighted tables as a means of conveying both the state of peace and a peaceful state: they often feature fields being plowed in the background, while the fruits of the land are served on clearly defined tables so that a visual relay is established between the horizontal lay of the land and the lay of the table, e. g. the broadsides “Scherzgedicht, Die Früchte deß Friedens Vorstellent” and “Tyllische Conect = Gesegung. So jhm…gesegnet worden” (1632) in Wolfgang Harms (ed.), Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Bd. 4: Die Sammlungen der Hessischen Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek in Darmstadt, Kommentierte Ausgabe. Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1987 [1632].
18 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958], p. 52.
19 Ibid.
20 She continues, “The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic seance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by each other by anything tangible”. Ibid., p. 52-53.
21 The same is true for Jürgen Habermas’ concept of egalitarian discourse, as emerging from the Enlightenment gatherings of eighteenth century coffee houses and occasions for social exchange frequently located around tables. See Francesca Rigotti, “Der runde Tisch und der Mythos der symmetrischen Kommunication”, in Andreas Dörner and Ludgera Vogt (ed.), Sprache des Parlaments und Semiotik der Demokratie: Studien zur politischen Kommunikation in der Moderne, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1995, p. 295; and also Niels Werber, “Runde Tische & eckige Tische. Technologien zur Herstellung von Übereinkunft”, in Hendrik Blumenrath et al. (ed.), Techniken der Übereinkunft: zur Medialität des Politischen, Berlin, Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005, p. 129.
22 Famous examples included the Field of the Cloth of Gold event in which Francis I met Henry VIII at a location halfway between Ardres and Guines in the Val Doré. Freed from trees, the ground became an abstract plane upon which the French and English sides approached one another, with the kings converging like mirror images. See Thomas Rahn, “Grenzsituation des Zeremoniells in der frühen Neuzeit”, in Markus Bauer and Thomas Rahn (ed.), Die Grenze: Begriff und Inszenierung, Berlin, Akademieverlag, 1997, p. 181. See also Xavier Le Person, “A Moment of ‘Resverie’: Charles V and Francis I’s Encounter at Aigues-Mortes, (July 1538)”, French History, 19/1, 2005, p. 1-27. Xavier Le Person writes, p. 10: “An encounter between two princes was organized within a measured world, conceived in terms of symmetry and equidistance, in order to render an equal amount of honour to the two sovereigns. All the preconditions had to be laid down in order to maximize the ideas of resemblance and similitude at this precise and unique moment so that neither sovereign could have the upper hand”.
23 In the medieval era when rivers were a favored meeting point between rulers, this dynamic of connection and separation manifested itself in diplomatic meeting spots built on specially constructed bridges. These had a fence in the middle to separate the sides, but openings so that two monarchs could embrace. Reinhard Schneider, “Mittelalterliche Verträge auf Brücken und Flüssen (und zur Problematik von Grenzgewässern)”, in Hermann Bannasch and Hans-Peter Lachmann (ed.), Aus Geschichte und ihren Hifswissenschaften. Festschrift für Walter Heinemeyer zum 65. Geburtstags, Marburg, Elwert, 1979, p. 15-16.
24 See Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1997, cited in Werber, “Runde Tische…”, art. cited, p. 113-132.
25 Ibid, p. 121. Money is an example of symbolic generalization, since all parties in a financial exchange can agree upon the use of money, in spite of differences that might otherwise prevent them from interacting.
26 A growing number of these manuals were published during the seventeenth century, often updating Erasmus’ On Civility in Children (1530), but placing a new premium on the use of utensils as a means of marking boundaries between individuals. Etiquette became a social glue to prevent bloody spasms of passionate emotion and sedition thanks to a shared agreement on cultural norms. Robert Muchembled, L’invention de l’homme moderne. Sensibilités, mœurs et comportements collectifs sous l’Ancien Régime, Paris, Fayard, 1988, p. 230-258.
27 According to Erasmus, as described in his Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1503). Felix Jaeger, “The Prince’s Prosthetic Body: Orthopedic Armor and Ethical Self-Fashioning in the Sixteenth Century”, in Line Cottegnies, Anne-Valérie Dulac and Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (ed.), Fashioning Masculinity: Engraved Objects in the Early Modern Period [accepted].
28 François de Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, Geneva, Droz, 2002 [1716], p. 162. Emphasis mine.
29 See Lademacher, “Ein letzter Schritt zur Unabhängigkeit…”, art. cited; Laura Manzano-Baena, “Negotiating Sovereignty: the Peace Treaty of Münster, 1648”, History of Political Thought, 28/4, Winter 2007, p. 617-641.
30 Ibid., p. 620.
31 On titles and rank at Münster and Osnabrück, see May, Zwischen Fürstlicher Repräsentation…, op. cit., p. 53-72.
32 Manzano-Baena, “Negotiating Sovereignty…”, art. cited, p. 619-620.
33 The exceptions here is the image of Johan de Knuyt from Zeeland and Godard van Reede, of Utrecht, whose signature was later added and is thus “out of line” in the treaty.
34 Werber, “Runde Tische…”, art. cited, p. 123.
35 Paul (1 Corinthians 12, 12-13) cited in ibid., p. 125 and “In Christus gilt weder Beschneidung noch Unbeschnittensein” (Galater, 6, 15), ibid., p. 123-125.
36 Klaus Malettke, “Richelieus Außenpolitik und sein System kollektiver Sicherheit”, in Peter Krüger (ed.), Kontinuität und Wandel in der Staatenordnung der Neuzeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte des internationalen Systems, Marburg, Lit Verlag, 1991, p. 47-68.
37 Rainer Babel, “L’assecuratio pacis avant Richelieu. Quelques repères”, Discussions, 4, 2010, unpaginated.
38 Ibid.
39 The sculpture was made in Malines ca. 1520. It has since been replaced. See Kettering, Gerard Ter Borch…, op. cit. p. 47.
40 Ibid., p. 37-39.
41 Justus Lipsius, cited in Derek Croxton, Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 384.
42 In Capital, Karl Marx used the table as an example of the mystical properties of the commodity: when the table “steps forth”, it presents itself transformed into “something transcendent” (Karl Marx, Capital, t. 1, online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1, last accessed September 19, 2019.
43 A truly modern notion of this constellation would include a regular time-table of peace conferences and congresses to ensure a continuity of the peaceful order, an imperative developped in the nineteenth century. Richard Langhorne, “The Development of International Conferences, 1648-1830”, Studies in History and Politics, 2, 1981/1982, Diplomatic Thought 1648-1815, p. 61-91.
44 Croxton, Westphalia…, op. cit., p. 167.
45 Jan Joesphus Poelhekke, De Vrede van Munster, ‘s-Gravenhage, Nijhoff, 1948, p. 533-4 and p. 538-39.
46 These issues were not resolved by neutralizing the congress grounds. The two Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück were freed of Imperial control for the duration of the negotiations, so that they technically formed a neutral zone. But this did not resolve problems of rank in a situation where there was no precedent upon which to base hierarchical claims. Allied parties sometimes experienced even more troubles in regard to meeting than did enemies. One of the reasons behind the double site of the congress was because allies France and Sweden couldn’t agree upon issues of ceremony. On conflicts over status see e.g. Michael Rohrschneider, Gescheiterte Frieden von Münster. Spaniens Ringen mit Frankreich auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongress, Munster, Schritenreihe der Vereinigung zur Erforschung der Neueren Geschichte e.V., 2007.
47 These concluded separate peace agreements between Spain, Austria, Sweden, the Holy Roman Empire states, and France as well as their confoederates et adhaerentes. On who was included in the treaties see Steiger, “Der Westfälische Frieden…”, art. cited, p. 36-48.
48 The treaties themselves enshrined the notion of a tabula rasa in the status quo of war through oblivion clauses. Jane O. Newman, “Perpetual Oblivion: Remembering Westphalia in a Post-Secular Age”, in Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein and Inga Mai-Groot (ed.), Forgetting Faith? Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2012, p. 261-278.
49 Manegold, “Bilder Diplomatischer Rangordnungen…”, art. cited, p. 55.
50 Anonymous published by Johannes Stichter (Amsterdam), “Waerachtigh Vreede ende Vreudge gesangh”, ibid. p. 53.
51 Steiger, “Der Westfälische Frieden…”, art. cited, p. 59-60. Emphasis mine.
52 Ibid, p. 60.
53 Ibid, p. 61.
54 Daniel Séré, La paix des Pyrénées. Vingt-quatre ans de négociations entre la France et l’Espagne (1635–1659), Paris, Champion, 2007, p. 444-446.
55 See Rahn, “Grenzsituation des Zeremoniells…”, art. cited, p. 182.
56 Jacques Bernard, Actes et Mémoires des Négociations de la Paix de Ryswick, The Hague, Adrian Moetjens, 1707, t. 2, p. ii.
57 Ibid., p. iii.
58 In Nijmegen the English mediators proposed, for example, to get rid of official public entries, May, Zwischen Fürstlicher Repräsentation…, op. cit., p. 215. By Rijskwijk, attempts were made to resolve protocol issues prior to the congress so as to progress swiftly to a resolution. Official entries, first visits, all of those subjects of struggle for preeminence on the ground outside of the negotiating room were to be removed. Ibid., p. 225.
59 “Toutes les conférences se tiendront sans cérémonie, en sorte que les plénipotentiaires s’assoiront du côté de leur entrée dans la salle, Où il n’y aura ni haut, ni bas bout, mais ils seront tous ensemble indistinctement et pêle-mêle”. Cited in Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs…, op. cit., p. 413.
60 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, Paris, Furne, 1839, t. 1, p. 612.
61 In a print published on the occasion of the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 the Ottoman delegation does not have a table in their private quarters, but in the common negotiating zone their sofa has been raised and pulled up to the shared round table.
62 Werber, “Runde Tische…”, art. cited, p. 113-114.
63 Oliver Georgi, “Fuß auf dem Tisch? Skandal!”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 23, 2019, online: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/boris-johnson-und-twitter-fuss-auf-dem-tisch-skandal-16347814.html, accessed September 20, 2019.
64 Arendt, The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 52.
Auteur
Sasha Rossman is a PhD candidate in the department of art history at the University of California, Berkeley and an assistant at the Institute for Art History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He studied art history and fine arts in the United States and Germany, most recently at the University of Konstanz in the graduate colloquium « The Real in the Culture of Modernity ». His research and writing focuses on the political roles and lives of furniture and other « decorative » arts (including a dissertation about early modern tables) as well as film, holes, cartography, the emergence of capitalism in Tudor and Stuart England, and the history of political boundaries. Recent publications include articles on Europe’s borders in film, representations of the rogue state, the history of rubber gloves and criminality, 17th century gaming tables and the Turkish Wars, and revolutionary French earrings. Future projects include an edited volume on « The Corner ».
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