Professor Giora Sternberg

The post of marshal was the highest rank that a military career could offer in seventeenth-century France. But for a soldier who was not well versed in the hierarchical codes of the aristocracy, this high court office could prove to be a ceremonial nightmare. Nicolas Catinat, scion of a newly ennobled family, discovered that his extensive military experience was of no avail in Versailles. Following his elevation to the marshalate in spring 1693, Catinat immediately faced his first ceremonial challenge: to respond to the mountain of congratulatory letters that accumulated on his field desk. In so doing, the neophyte marshal had to make sense of how his newly acquired status affected the style of his correspondence. Which formulae should he adopt? How should he address the Vendôme brothers, descendants of Henry IV through a legitimated bastard line, who also happened to serve under his command? And how was his correspondence with the Secretary of State for War to be conducted henceforth? In a state of exasperation, Catinat turned to his brother Croisille, who was more versed in courtly etiquette. In a series of letters the new marshal expounded his epistolary dilemmas and urged his brother to help him. ‘I am much bothered about ceremonial’, he wrote to him in one letter; ‘I hope you will send me a reliable protocol in good form as soon as possible’, in another. In the meantime, however, he managed to make several blunders. On the one hand, some of his correspondents were offended by what seemed to them an unjustifiably imperious manner; on the other, some of his fellow marshals complained that his excessively deferential style failed to uphold the dignity of their rank.1 Catinat's predicament illustrates that, in the seventeenth century, epistolary ceremonial was no mere nicety. Endings were not always reducible …