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- Herausgeber: Universe
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
It is 1570, and France has been torn apart by religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots. The formidable Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, calls on Henri de Malassise to negotiate a peace treaty with the Huguenots. The wily nobleman needs all his experience and psychological insight to navigate through the tactics, manoeuvres and compromises of the discussions. He sees some division in the Huguenot ranks: is it a weakness, or a clever ploy by his adversaries? Is it by chance or design that his Huguenot cousin, the enigmatic Eléonore, appears on the scene at a critical moment? The negotiation at Saint-Germain really did take place, and Malassise played a key role. The author Francis Walder draws on his own military and diplomatic experience to illustrate, through this Prix Goncourt-winning novel, the skills of negotiation much needed in diplomacy and business today.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Towns and cities mentioned in the negotiation at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1570
Contents
Introduction
The former soldier and diplomat Francis Walder won the Prix Goncourt with this historical novel in 1958. His aim was to illustrate the art of negotiation, and he chose as his context an actual peace treaty: the Peace of Saint-Germain was signed in 1570 during the French Wars of Religion, and two of the novel’s main characters – Henri de Malassise and the Baron de Biron – did indeed represent the Catholic side in this negotiation with the Calvinist Protestants (or Huguenots).
Saint-Germain-en-Laye is some 20 kilometres west of Paris. The château there was embellished earlier in the sixteenth century by King Francois I, and this royal residence often hosted the French court, as was the case at the time of this treaty.
The bloody and destructive wars between Catholics and Huguenots had raged intermittently in France for nearly a decade, and would continue into the 1590s. While the Catholic army had won major victories at Jarnac and Moncontour the year before, by 1570 the Huguenot army – led by the Admiral de Coligny – had moved north and defeated the royal forces at Arnay-le-Duc. The talks at Saint-Germain were an attempt to bring peace to a divided kingdom.
It was not the first effort. The Edict of Janvier eight years earlier had granted some limited opportunities for Protestant worship, and in the following year the Edict of Amboise saw an end to what has been called the First War of Religion. Hostilities resumed in 1567, and although the amnesties of the Peace of Longjumeau in 1568 made for a short-lived interruption, by September of that year fighting had started again. In that 7month, the more restrictive Edict of Saint-Maur, while permitting freedom of conscience, banned Protestant worship throughout the kingdom.
The questions of Protestant freedom to worship, and of which towns could be Protestant strongholds, are the issues under negotiation in this novel. After earlier meetings elsewhere with the Huguenot leader (Admiral de Coligny), the narrator – Henri de Malassise – goes to Saint-Germain for discussions with Huguenot delegates in the hope of reaching a workable agreement. He is representing the young Catholic King Charles IX and the latter’s influential mother Catherine de Médicis. Accompanying him is a senior military officer, the Baron de Biron.
Two years and two weeks after the signature of the Peace of Saint-Germain, the fragile peace was broken by the events of St Bartholomew’s Day, in Paris. When the Protestant leader Coligny was shot and wounded, the Catholics feared a violent Huguenot reaction and authority was given for the pre-emptive execution of Protestant leaders, including Coligny. A Catholic militia then went on to kill thousands of Protestants in a massacre which spread to the provinces.
Thereafter, except for short intervals, armed conflict continued into the last decade of the century. In 1598, in the reign of Henri IV (formerly Protestant, now converted to Catholicism), the Edict of Nantes finally brought an end to the Wars.
Author’s note
Ido admit that, in writing this book, I have drawn on certain national and international meetings in which I took part. The meetings took place in London, in Paris, in various languages, and over a number of years which now seem far in the past. The teams of delegates would sit at green tables, and their discussions could not have succeeded had they not all come with their own plans and tactics. The tricks and subtleties involved in such tactics have often made me think that one should attempt a portrait of the negotiator. But in what context? A contemporary setting would be difficult. A historical one, then. And better to avoid any international situation, which could seem anachronistic or shocking today. I settled on the somewhat obscure Treaty of Saint-Germain, signed in 1570, to show French people negotiating with the French.
No, the characters in the present work are not based on anyone I have met in commissions and conferences. There are no allusions. The narrator and his colleague are real historical figures, who did negotiate the clauses of the Treaty of Saint-Germain in the order in which they are presented. Only the manner in which they do so cannot be evidenced by documents surviving from the period. Their two adversaries are based on people remembered from periods of my life well before the years in London and Paris, and who never moved in diplomatic circles. The female character who appears with them is wholly fictional.
Yes, I have made a novel from what seems the driest, most impersonal thing in the world: negotiating a treaty. But, behind the scenes, living forces were at work, and what is alive is worth writing about. Not surprisingly, the 9book is about people. If I have darkened the character of the narrator, and generally stressed the duplicity of the individuals, it is because the novel calls for this type of exaggeration. Having chosen the cast and made them slightly larger than life, it only remained to pitch them into the procedures followed since negotiation began, in order to see its workings more starkly than in reality. I have enjoyed it. I hope you will too.
F.W.
The Negotiator
I
Truth is not the opposite of lying; betraying is not the opposite of serving; hating is not the opposite of loving; trust is not the opposite of mistrust; nor rectitude that of falsehood.
Yesterday evening – in front of the hearth, where the branches of a dead tree were blazing – I mused upon my past. I thought of the uncertain nature of this existence devoted, in large measure, to diplomacy, and wondered whether such lack of definition was due to my chosen profession, or to some natural inclination of mine, or whether perhaps every human life is, of necessity, something vague, contorted and, at its extremes, contradictory.
I have always thought that I have led a strange existence. Nothing in these missions, in the many operations which have occupied me more than my official responsibilities, has ever placed me in a prominent position. And yet I have been struck by the contrast between the power I could experience, the resources I could draw upon, and how little of this showed on the surface of the visible world. I concluded that all truly human activity is unseen, that man’s struggles take place in the shadows, and that what is finally seen in the light, and which we call victory or defeat, is merely an artificial construct for the eyes of the multitude, and with no bearing on the underlying truth.
From which it follows that he who would build something must do so in obscurity. Such a one was I. I let others take credit for my work. This was necessary, as darkness and light are not compatible and we must choose one or the other. But it seemed to me that, had I been able to play both roles, and, after crafting my negotiations also receive the acclaim for them, I would have found it inelegant and vulgar to do so. To be aware that one is the underlying initiator, the mind behind something for which another will claim ownership, is a strong, masculine sensation. To keep one’s thoughts to oneself, to hear the error in men’s chatter and to recognise it but not pursue it, is the greatest satisfaction. This has always been my way. My immense pride was thus satisfied, and, in the absence of a cause – which pride always lacks – at least it found its object.
As I pondered so, before the flames, I felt the desire to tell the story of my life. The many twists and turns I could bring to memory made, out of little-known episodes, tales more ingenious than many a fable. Subtle ambiguities of feeling, which I expressed as aphorisms at the start of these pages, to me offered more clarity than many a philosophy. Only the difficulty of choosing was holding me back.
I reflected at length on those years in Italy where meticulously, passionately, discreetly I learned the art of diplomacy from the very people who had invented it. I could think of countless episodes which, if their secret story were told, would astound the world. Then my thoughts led me back to France, and I settled upon the peace treaty we agreed at Saint-Germain, the negotiations being peculiarly memorable for me. Is it because of two exceptional personages I encountered there, or the mysterious female image which those talks conjure up? Perhaps it was there that I found most opportunity to engage the resources of my mind and the convolutions of my character.
II
And here I am, this February morning of 1591, in the uppermost room of my home in Languedoc, dictating and recalling the splendours of the age. Through the window I can see the dry landscape, frozen by this harsh weather. Winter and memories go well together, both being dead.
The first image which comes to mind transports me to exactly such a season, twenty-one years ago. King Charles IX summoned me one March day in 1570. You remember this monarch: not lacking stature or courage, but prey to a choleric disposition and consequently unstable. On his bad days he would be seen wandering through his apartments, his face swollen with some inner resentment, looking from side to side as if searching where and on what to vent his temper. Or he would walk straight ahead, with a fixed stare and projecting lip, gloomily resigned to a hostile fate which only he could know. His utterances would be few, and violent. He would simply repeat the same words, however one answered, like a vexed child deaf to reason.
It was always too easy for him to turn to the Queen Mother, who was watching over his every step. He lacked that solitude, that abandon and freedom of action which are the making of young leaders. Yet he was maturing, and there were signs that he would have made a king of some note, if illness had spared him and taken the Queen Mother instead.
His nostrils and lips, more prominent than usual, alerted me to his mood. As was my practice, I withdrew into myself, into a state void of feeling, a zone of indifference and insensibility on which his attacks could make no impression, and from the safety of which I would be able to observe, reflect and respond.
The King told me that he – in fact, it was the Queen Mother – had decided to come to terms with the Huguenots. Convinced of the futility of the civil wars which were weakening France, he agreed to negotiate and would make a concession. Freedom of conscience for those of the Reform was already recognised. Henceforth, they would be able to declare their convictions openly, but no ritual or public demonstration of their faith would be permitted.
“Such must be your position, Monsieur de Malassise,” he concluded.
“Sire,” I asked, “from this position, how far may I step back?”
The King’s fist struck the table.
“Not one single step!”
I rose at once.
“Sire, find a soldier. I am a diplomat.”
And I went to the door, though pausing there a moment to give him time to call me back. But he did not – at least, not immediately.
“Not one single step!” he repeated, shaking his heavy forehead as if threatening me with invisible horns, and not moving until I left.
The next day I was called back. I found the King with Monsieur de Biron.
“Here,” he said, “is the soldier.”
I could see from his relaxed features that he was savouring my surprise and, with it, what he took for his own cunning. He explained that the idea had seemed to him a good one and that, if such a negotiation required the services of a diplomat, some aspects of it nevertheless called for the presence of a soldier.
“So,” he said, “you will negotiate together. And while I count on Monsieur de Biron not to yield in the slightest, I rely on your skills to resolve any difficulties caused by his intransigence.”
The hand of the Queen Mother was apparent here, and it was not without some pleasure that I perceived the astute and subtle play of the Italian in this manoeuvre to reverse my refusal of the day before. I had known Monsieur de Biron a long time. He was an excellent military officer. Diplomatically he would not trouble me, although some of his views might prove an impediment.
He was short and solid, broad and heavy, and had a limp, for which infirmity he compensated with an incredible taste for ostentation. His bulging eyes had only one expression: self-assurance. His voice was rich, deep, strong and could easily boom like thunder. In many ways his physique – always richly dressed – lent itself to show as much as mine did to discretion.
With such pomp of character, he was not suited to grappling with the subtlety of problems and their nuances, or unravelling their intricacies.
During the night I had been thinking about this ambassadorial mission with the Huguenots and, as usually happened – though I had at first treated it lightheartedly – I now felt it was mine, as if I had begun to bite on it. I was smarting from the frustration of finding myself harnessed alongside someone who knew nothing. Then I reflected that Monsieur de Biron, with his impetuous character, would take on the outward duties of the affair and leave me the opportunity to work usefully behind the scenes. He would be seen busying himself, rushing around Paris, his voice droning and ringing in the ears of one and all, while I could handle the essential activity in the wings. Besides, our mandate tied our hands to such a point that we would most likely fail, and it was useful to cover myself with an associate who would absorb the public blame. Reassured by these thoughts, I gave my approval; or more precisely, I used them to justify to myself an acceptance to which my innermost preferences already inclined me.
By a strange turn of fortune, our mission almost succeeded at the very outset. We met the Huguenots at Saint-Etienne – an area which they were pillaging – and found that the Admiral de Coligny was ill. Although he was able to see us, his colleagues could not hide their concern for his condition.
“Not inauspicious,” said Monsieur de Biron.
I agreed unreservedly.
“We are meeting a weakened enemy,” he went on. “The strength of his spirit is probably diminished by the failure of his body. This is the time to attack, as hard as we can.”
But that was not how I understood our advantage. I have always observed in negotiations that the unexpected is valuable if one knows how to make use of it. Each delegation comes with a prepared set of ideas and arguments. There is nothing in its brief which has not been examined and thought through twenty times already. So any new element, even a favourable one, upsets this preconceived order and makes for a moment of uncertainty which the quickest mind can exploit before the others.
