Formation of Social Ties in P. I. Potemkin's Embassy to France (1680–1682)

Based on the extant complex of Russian and French sources, this article analyses the mechanisms of the formation of social ties of the Russian embassy in France in 1681. The embassy had both foreign policy and diplomatic significance for the representation of tsarist power and Russian culture in France: the envoys had not only to inform Louis XIV about the events in Eastern Europe, but also to get an overview of the French position on the preparation of the Perpetual Peace of Russia with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the conclusion of the Russian-French trade treaty, and to ensure the recruitment of foreign specialists. The author examines the formation of relations in the context of the new diplomatic history, paying special attention to the problems of power representation, the personalities of diplomats and the cultural side of their mission. For the first time in historiography, the article characterises the whole complex of archival documents about the embassy, the peculiarities of the formation of social ties of the embassy participants necessary for the successful implementation of the tasks of the diplomatic mission. The study is based on French court reports on ceremonies, notes of courtiers, internal correspondence of Russian and French diplomatic departments, materials of the Parisian periodical press, and reports of Russian envoys. Conclusions are drawn on the peculiarities of the strategies of the envoy P. I. Potemkin in establishing social relations, their significance for the development of Russian diplomacy, foreign policy, and cultural contacts with Western Europe, as well as on the peculiarities of the reflection of these relations in the surviving sources.