What was in the news: picturing current events in seventeenth century France
Creators: name: Brown, Thomas Franklin
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2022

description: My dissertation examines how images shaped and disseminated knowledge of current events in seventeenth-century France. Focusing on prints but also considering painting, tapestry, and other media, I investigate depictions of war, ceremony, festivity, diplomacy, and crime and punishment. Looking both at specific events and the period as a whole, I determine what was emphasized or ignored, when images were made and distributed, by whom, for whom, and to what ends, and how depictions changed as France emerged from internal strife to become the dominant European power. My opening chapter surveys the current events imagery of the sixteenth century, setting the stage for my study by identifying the formats for depicting events that emerged as artists, notably the Cologne printmaker Frans Hogenberg, documented the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch War of Independence. The second chapter uses a data set I amassed of about 1,200 seventeenth century prints of events to find patterns, continuities, and absences. The majority are French but to allow for cross-cultural comparison I include German and Dutch images of events connected to France. To understand how treatments of similar subjects varied (or not) over time and place, I take into account a range of criteria, including subject matter, timeliness, quality, gender of figures, and accompanying text. My finding is that over the course of the century, as the artistic sophistication of French prints of events increased, the amount of information they provided dwindled, and the time lag between an event and its depiction grew longer. Each subsequent chapter focuses on a specific event or period. Chapter 3 assesses prints of the 1610 assassination of Henri IV and the public execution of his assassin, François Ravaillac, who, notorious in the wake of his crime, became the subject of what I argue is a new genre of portrait print. Chapter 4 is devoted to imagery surrounding the 1627–28 Siege of La Rochelle, which definitively ended the decades-long conflict in France between the Catholic crown and the Protestant minority. Close analysis of a royal commission, Jacques Callot’s large-scale siege print, opens comparisons to mass-produced news images of the siege and contemporary chronicles by eyewitnesses. The final two chapters analyze portrayals of ceremonial and military events of the last decades of the century. Chapter 5 focuses on images of events at Versailles, both before and after it became the permanent seat of the French court in 1682; Chapter 6 on prints of the wars of Louis XIV, with special attention given to two engagements in the Franco-Dutch War, the 1673 Siege of Maastricht and the 1674 Battle of Seneffe. My careful consideration of chronological sequence reveals that in these years the production of timely images of what was in the news was rare. Instead, the dominant formats for depicting events were (i) the almanac prints brought out annually by Parisian publishers every December and (ii) state-sponsored sets that often appeared only years after the events they depicted. I propose that the absence of news prints in the France of Louis XIV, attributable on first glance to the repressive climate of an absolutist state, is instead a function of the conservative business practices of French print publishers themselves.