L’art de gouverner : Les noces de sang parisiennes de Gottsched et l’Anti-Machiavel de Frédéric II

Abstract

In his tragedy Die parisische Bluthochzeit König Heinrichs von Navarra / The Paris Blood Wedding of King Henry of Navarre (1745), Johann Christoph Gottsched takes up ideas he had set out twenty years earlier in an academic speech condemning religious fanaticism both from an ethical point of view and a political one. The political harmfulness of its tyrannical corollary, springing from the principle/axiom cuius regio eius religio, became blatant with the Fontainebleau edict, which is indirectly, if clearly, alluded to in the The Blood Wedding ; the edict had the unfortunate effect of weakening the Kingdom of France and benefiting Brandenburg.The lively debate that began in the early 18th century on the opposition vera sive falsa politica pervades the play, opposing good and evil, vice and virtue in a manner specific to drama of the mid-century. Faced with the Machiavellian ways of Catherine of Medici, no character—with the possible exceptions of Condé and Marguerite of Valois—evinces the qualities required in a statesman, Henry of Navarre and Coligny displaying the chivalrousness of a bygone age. Thus, the play works as a critique, a “mirror for princes”, some five years after Voltaire published the Anti-Machiavel by the hereditary prince of Brandenburg who had since become Frederick II.

Keywords

• despotism
• religious toleration
• Machiavelli
• statesmanship
• fanaticism