1« The Status of Rebels in the Writings about Anbassadors at the beginning of the Early-Modern Period »
Dante Fedele

2This paper examines how the early modern legal scholarship on the ambassador conceived of the status and diplomatic activities of rebels. After addressing the issues of rebellion and of the right to send and receive ambassadors, the analysis focuses on the rebels’droit d’ambassade and reveals that the literature on the ambassador focused on the activities of dialogue between a prince and his revolted subjects, or between the parties to a civil war (two situations which were clearly distinguished), rather than on the relations that these actors established with foreigners.

3« From Rebel Diplomacy to Royal Diplomacy: the beginnings of Huguenot International Politics during the early Civil Wars »
Hugues Daussy

4During the 1560s, the Huguenots demanded aid from the Protestant powers of Switzerland, Germany and England. From 1560-1561 the deployment of dissident diplomacy, with the aim of gaining political support, became noticeable. But with the start of the First War of Religion, these initiatives evolved into rebel diplomacy, the objective of which was to ask foreign governments for financial and military aid to support the confrontation with the royal armies. Gradually seeking to gain respectability and efficiency on the international scene, the French Protestant leaders tried to give their procedures the formal appearance of legality. From 1569, Huguenot emissaries availed themselves of the accreditation of a sovereign princess, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, which tended to transform rebel diplomacy into royal diplomacy.

5Directing Revolt from Here and There: Henri de Condé’s Difficult Task of Mobilising the Malcontents, 1574-1576
Mark Greengrass

6The revolt of Henri de Bourbon-Condé in 1574-1576 has not received the historical attention it deserves. This article concentrates on the agents that the young prince, elected protector of the Huguenots, at his disposal to mobilise foreign support for the protestant and ‘malcontent’ cause. Under-resourced and operating in dangerous circumstances, they were divided by their confessional allegiances, conflicting strategies, and ambitions. They exploited royal permission to assemble delegates and demands to come to court and reach peace. With the collapse of those negotiations, Condé metamorphosed from being a ‘loyal rebel’ to being a ‘warrior rebel’.

7« François d’Alençon and Malcontent Diplomacy: the Italian Horizons of a Prince in Rebellion in 1575 »
Lana Martysheva

8This article deals with a key figure of the rebel diplomacy in the sixteenth century: François d’Alençon, brother of the King of France and heir presumptive to the Crown. It reveals his interactions with princes of the Italian peninsula (less well known than his connections with Protestants) after his escape from court in 1575, as well as King Henry III’s reactions to them. D’Alençon’s high rank, the equivocal character of his confessional discourse and the particularity of his place on the international scene make his rebel diplomacy ambiguous, not autonomous, but located on the fringes of royal diplomacy, even at a time of open revolt.

9« An “incompatibility of being for and against” Henri III: the twin-faced Diplomacy of Henri de Navarre in the early 1580s »
Dénes Harai

10In the early 1580s, Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre, negotiated simultaneously with Philip II, King of Spain, and Henry III, King of France, while these two rulers clashed in a covert war. Due to the strategic location of his sovereign possessions (Basse-Navarre and Béarn) and his important heritage in France and Flanders, the King of Navarre was potentially a useful ally for both of them in a possible open war. However, the Béarnais was also a subject of the King of France, and his contacts with Philip II raised suspicions that he was fomenting a revolt against Henri III while the peace of the kingdom was very fragile. The King of Navarre’s inclinations for war against Philip II also troubled French affairs, because Henry III did not want to engage in an open war against his powerful neighbor. This chapter sheds new light on these negotiations, which are parallel and contradictory. There are some elements that remain shadowy, but the analysis allows us better to understand the two-sided diplomacy, sometimes rebel, sometimes close to rebellion, of a border prince.

11« The Ambassadors of the last Valois Kings and how they deal with Rebel Envoys »
Matthieu Gellard

12Using the correspondences of the last Valois kings’resident ambassadors in London, Madrid and Rome, this contribution considers the ways these royal envoys (re)act to rebel missions. Ambassadors must initially do everything in their power to be aware of the arrival of any rebel agent in the country they reside in, both to inform the French court and, if possible, to frustrate the activities of such agents. The issue of the specificity of such diplomatic activity is then addressed, since their efforts to frustrate rebel missions is redolent of many aspects of the usual tasks assigned to ambassadors (summaried in the famous triptych: representation, information, negotiation).

13« A Diplomatic Cluster. League Agents in Spain and Italy (1589-1598) »
Fabrice Micallef

14The diplomacy of the League was not limited to the international initiatives instigated by the Duke of Mayenne. Municipalities, provincial institutions and local nobles sent emissaries to Italy and Spain to request help from the Catholic powers. Aside from Mayenne’s representative to the popes, these agents of the League did not seek to be recognized as having diplomatic status. They also suffered the consequences of their weak political legitimacy, often negotiating in adverse conditions, symbolically and materially, except when foreign powers found it in their interest to show deference.

15« Rebellion as a Means of Legitimizing French Diplomacy in the Empire? (1590s-1620s) »
Camille Descenclos

16While rebellion theoretically delegitimates any diplomatic action, it is remarkable how readily in 1589 the protestant princes in the Empire granted immediate political and institutional legitimacy to the agents and former rebels of Henri, king of Navarre. This paper seeks to resolve this apparent paradox by distinguishing between the spirit behind French diplomatic initiatives from 1589, and the techniques that it adopted, in order to evaluate how much Henrician diplomacy owed to its Navarrist inheritance, and to what degree former rebel diplomats appropriated the language and behaviour of institutionalised royal diplomacy. This article aims thereby to raise the issue of how rebellion (past, present or suspected) could be used to legitimate, or delegitimate, a political actor, in what he says and in his stance.

17« “Our Huguenots have a powerful cabale here”. Huguenots, England and the Dutch Republic (1621-1622) »
Michel De Waele

18Armed conflicts resumed between the King of France and some of his Protestant subjects in May 1621. For the Huguenots, the royal offensive was part of a vast international plot aimed at eradicating Protestantism from the continent. After trying in vain to defuse this crisis by negotiation, the Huguenots gathered in La Rochelle to send deputies to England and the United Provinces to ask the authorities for arms and soldiers that would help fight the royal forces. If James I received their deputies in an official audience, the Prince of Orange, Maurice of Nassau, refused to meet them and thus give a certain legitimacy to their actions. This refusal did not prevent the deployment of an informal diplomacy that the ambassadors of Louis XIII, despite their efforts, were unable to prevent.