Letter To The Queen Of Spain Analysis

Old regime France saw the beginnings of diplomacy with an emphasis on Foreign Service programs. These institutions served to avoid war and give countries the ability to achieve advantageous positions in Europe’s political climate at a cost less than that of war. Both the excerpt from François de Callières’s The Practice of Diplomacy and Louis XIV’s letter to the Queen of Spain center around the topic of diplomacy; however, they are dissimilar in that one regards the use of diplomacy in theory while the other gives insight into the actual practice of diplomacy during the reign of Louis XIV. In his writings, Callières demonstrated the optimal method of conducting foreign relations to best benefit France; by contrast, Louis XIV’s letter, a

In his letter, Louis XIV not only asserted France’s claim to Flanders by declaring it his wife’s inheritance, but he also laid out his justification for a French invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. He claimed that he wished to avoid war, saying, “we shall moreover most religiously observe the Peace . . . having no Design on our Part of infringing it by our marching into the Low-Countries” (D’Estrades 147). However, his language was less amicable. He threatened Spain, saying that France would do whatever necessary in order to receive justice for what they perceived to be a wrong done against them. Ideally, diplomacy would have resolved this type of situation. According to Callières, “misunderstandings and conflicts of ambition easily arise between nations, and cannot be settled by a process of law but only by a convention between the contending parties” (Callières 17). Because Louis XIV resulted to threatening Spain with war, on can infer that negotiation efforts taken prior to this declaration were

For example, Callières’s ideas about negotiation relied upon the presence of skilled negotiators, who were not always easily located owing to the requisite of a specific skillset. Therefore, during this period, there was minimal regulation among France’s negotiators. Some of the issues regarding subpar negotiators include instances where negotiators had never been outside of their own country, negotiators who lacked study of public affairs, lacked a high enough level of intelligence, and lacked indispensible knowledge about their assigned country. In addition, negotiators had the potential to be vulnerable to the manipulations of women; if they were not cautious or knowledgeable as to how one should use women to their advantage, they could divulge valuable