Excellences ! Versailles aux sources de la diplomatie française

Exhibition at the Galerie des Affaires étrangères de la Bibliothèque Choiseul, Versailles, 20 September - 20 December 2025

What is diplomacy? How did it come about? What role did France play in defining it? The history of international relations, well known from a political perspective, is often much less clear when it comes to its day-to-day functioning: internal management, specific procedures, legal principles, intelligence, influence, all subjects fraught with shifting clichés.

This catalogue of the exhibition presented at the Foreign Affairs Gallery, housed in the Hôtel de la Marine et des Affaires Étrangères since 1762 and once the showcase of French diplomacy, uses texts and objects to explore the birth of modern diplomacy during the Renaissance and what made it so powerful until the eve of the Revolution, including original perspectives: female influences, views from other cultures and private interference intersect in the combinations of clerks and secretaries of state.

From diplomatic dispatches to ceremonial treaties, official gifts, beautifully bound manuals for the perfect ambassador and propaganda works, this book offers an intimate glimpse behind the scenes of relations between states, adding secret and private diplomacy to the prism of a history waiting to be rediscovered.