Silva Rerum | 07.09.2015 François de Callières was born in Cherbourg, where he was baptised on 14 May 1645. His father Jacques was a long-time governor of the castle of Count de Longueville. It was with that family that Callières’ early career was connected.
In 1670, he went on his first diplomatic mission that led him to Poland. It was to be the first of Callières’ three expeditions to the Commonwealth. The goal of the first one was to promote the candidacy to the Polish throne of the young Duke de Longueville (Charles-Paris d’Orléans, Duke de Longueville and de Saint-Pol) – nephew of the Grand Condé, cousin of Louis XIV. In the previous year, Condé had unsuccessfully aspired to the Polish crown. At the time, Callières’ mission required especially delicate handling, as the Commonwealth had already chosen its king in Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, which meant that forcing a French candidacy meant conspiring against the lawful ruler. The aspirations of the French, including our hero, are explained by the ties of Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki to the Habsburgs through his wife Eleonor, the sister of Emperor Leopold I. As we know, France had competed with the Habsburgs since the end of the 15th century for hegemony in Europe. In this rivalry, it searched for allies, also in the Commonwealth. The failure of Callières’ first mission was decided by the sudden death of the young Longueville, which took place on 12 June 1672 during a fording of the Rhine in a campaign against the Netherlands.
Less than two years later, Callières found himself in Poland again. This time, the situation was not ambiguous, because an elective Sejm took place in Warsaw. After the sudden death of King Michał, a successor had to be chosen. It was an especially urgent and important challenge, since the death of the young Wiśniowiecki took place on the eve of the victory over the Turks at Chocim (Khotyn). This victory was the work of Grand Marshall and Hetman of the Crown, Jan Sobieski, who would play a prominent role in the election. In the meantime, the victory at Chocim (Khotyn) was not used and the threat of Turkish invasion loomed in the summer of 1674. The new ruler’s first task would be to face this threat.
As usual during free elections, many foreign candidates joined the game of thrones. François Callières represented one of them in Warsaw. He had arrived to Poland as an emissary of Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy and Piedmont. This ruler, allied with Louis XIV of France, used the services of the young French diplomat to push his cousin, Louis Thomas of Savoy, Count of Soissons. The seventeen-year-old was officially the son of Eugène Maurice de Savoie-Carignan and Olimpia Mancini, the niece of Cardinal Mazarin. In reality, he was considered a natural son of Louis XIV.
François Callières’ task was to convince voters that his candidate was the only one capable of reconciling warring factions and preventing a civil war between them. A preliminary step in this was to be the marriage between the young Savoyard and the Eleonor, the four-years-older widow of Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki and sister of Emperor Leopold I Habsburg. The alliance of the Pac family, powerful in Lithuania, wanted to push the Habsburg widow into the arms of Prince Charles of Lorraine. This would mean an even tighter connection of the Commonwealth with the Habsburgs and ensure their help in a confrontation with Turkey, as well as gaining a capable leader in the person of the Prince of Lorraine. He could even eclipse the fame and overshadow the outstanding leader Jan Sobieski. However, the ambitious Hetman and his even more ambitious wife – Frenchwoman Marie Casimire – wanted to thwart the Pac intentions. Sobieski sought the orientation of the Commonwealth he desired in France. He counted on, among others, French mediation managing to stave off the threat from Turkey. Therefore, he initially supported the candidacy of the Great Condé. Louis XIV, however, gave his support not to his ambitious cousin and former member of the Fronde, against his mother and Cardinal Mazarin, but to the Neuburg Prince Philip Wilhelm from the Wittelsbach family – his pretender to the throne of Poland in 1669. He did not, however, gain any support from the nobility, and thus had no chance of being elected.
François de Callières quickly realised that Sobieski, and especially Marysieńka, supporting Condé, who did not have the support of Louis XIV, sought to obtain the crown for the Great Hetman. Their plans, as we know, were successful. This meant a failure in Callières’ mission and the need to explain himself to his principal, thanks to which we have the French diplomats’ hand-written correspondence from his several months’ stay in Poland.
As it turned out, it was not his last stay. He came to the Commonwealth again in 1682. The particulars of this mission, however, have not been investigated. We know that he met with his close friend – whom he first met in 1670 – Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, the Great Under-treasurer of the Crown and known Baroque poet. The last Polish King, Stanisław August Poniatowski, was descended from Morsztyn in a straight line on the distaff side. Morsztyn was then the head of the French alliance in Poland, which was losing influence to the Austrian alliance due to Jan III Sobieski’s reorientation of policies. The direct threat to the empire from Turkey led the King to abandon ties with France and become closer-allied with the Habsburgs. Morsztyn became a victim of this change, and was accused of treason before the Sejm in 1683. Using the postponement of the trial, the under-treasurer sold his goods and moved to Paris. Beginning in 1684, the consistently unmarried Callières moved into Morsztyn’s palace.
A new career impulse for Callières was the publishing of a 1688 panegyric on the Sun King. This paved his way to the Académie Française. It also spoke to the recognition he received as an erudite and author of other publications. His claim to fame in the diplomatic arts was his participation as main negotiator in the negotiations in Ryswick, which ended the war with the Netherlands in 1697. The success of these negotiations also resulted in a promotion to Louis XIV’s Cabinet Secretary.
His writings, participation in missions – including those to Poland – and his successes as a negotiator resulted in a work that gave Callières immortality. In 1716, already during the regency, he published De la manière de négocier avec les souverains. After the first edition came others, as well as translations and printing in the main European languages. Callièries’ work became a compulsory textbook not only for students of French diplomacy until the time of the Revolution, but also for diplomats of other countries of that era. In addition to the content and excellent literary form of the book, another thing that mattered for its readership was it being written in the language of the European diplomacy of the time, i.e. in French.
The author did not enjoy his literary success for long, however, because he died in 1717, having left his entire fortune to the Parisian poor.
Translation: Lingua Lab
