The Royal Court of France at the End of the Old Regime in Light of Russian Diplomatic Correspondence: Features of Sources

The article compares the reports to the empress and the dispatches to the head of the Foreign policy department sent from France to St. Petersburg in the 1770s and 1780s by Russian diplomats: Prince I. S. Baryatinsky, N. K. Khotinsky and I. M. Simolin. As a result, the specifics of different types of diplomatic correspondence and the features of the texts compiled by the three authors are revealed. A noble ambassador could afford himself freedom, expressing his personal opinion and critical assessments of the behavior of the king and queen of France, while a diplomat of modest origin who had risen through the career ladder showed restraint and limited himself to reporting facts. The reports to the empress were compiled taking into account perlustration and were sent in unencrypted form. In them, diplomats wrote mainly about the ceremonial life of the French court, and negative information was necessarily accompanied by attached official French documents. The dispatches, many of them encrypted, were dominated by information about behind-the-scenes intrigues, the personal characteristics of the kings ministers, and the relationships between them. The different types of documents complement each other, providing a volumetric picture of court society in France at the end of the Old Regime, and showing the royal court as both an instrument of power representation and a political center.