Find in Library

This article focuses on the construction of the figure of the foreigner in polemical literature, from the regency of Marie de’ Medici to the end of the ministerial monarchy. This half century saw the emergence of a polarized national sentiment and resentment, around both love of the homeland and xenophobia. Conveyed by the defamatory misological discourse against foreigners, xenophobia reflects less the essentialization of abhorred alterity than the exercise of judicious political strategies, that of the princes against the regent’s Italian government, then that of the ministers against the enemies of the Spanish state. In the service of royal power, theorists – the Jesuit François Loryot, the doctor Carlos García and François La Mothe Le Vayer – will sometimes contradict, sometimes justify the thesis of a natural hostility towards the foreigner, making xenophobia a real political science of antipathy. The media vectors Richelieu and Mazarin used during the Thirty Years’ War employed xenophobia to endorse their diplomacy. Beyond the mythologizing of the foreigner, as opposed to the native French, the legal categorization of foreigners justified their exclusion from the political and public sphere. Defined as subjects naturally inclined to love only their homeland, foreigners, even naturalized ones, could not serve the kingdom that welcomed them, despite a curial space much more open to foreigners. There is a discrepancy between the political, legal and social definition of the foreigner. In this sense, through the mediatization of a xenophobic state passion, the first seventeenth-century state fully embraced political modernity.