CHAPTER 9 From Helmstedt via Mainz to : Hermann Conring and Hugues de Lionne

Hugues de Lionne is best remembered as the successor of Mazarin. Hermann Conring taught natural philosophy, medicine, and politics at the University of Helmstedt from 1632 until his death in 1681. Through the mediation of Johann Christian von Boineburg in Mainz Conring entered into formal contacts with Lionne, and later with Colbert. During the years from 1662 until 1671 he wrote a number of memoranda on behalf of French interests. From 1664 until 1673 he was rewarded with an annual pension. His memoranda have been seen as evidence for the disintegra- tion of the Empire and for his lack of patriotism. They are better inter- preted as evidence for a vision of a European civil society that was no longer governed by religious bonds, but still conceived as a single order strong enough both to guarantee principles of natural law and to oppose the uninhibited pursuit of profit.

The topic of this paper is not distinguished by much popularity. If one may take the volumes of the Bibliographie annuelle de l’histoire de as a reli- able barometer of scholarly productivity in the past thirty years or so, histori- ans of France have devoted exactly three brief articles to Hugues de Lionne, and none at all to Hermann Conring.1 Perhaps these numbers create a slightly false impression, since they conceal the attention paid to either man in the contexts of early modern diplomatic and intellectual history. Nevertheless a few facts about Hugues de Lionne and Hermann Conring will be appreciated. Hugues de Lionne, born in in 1611, is best remembered as the suc- cessor of Mazarin.2 His role in French foreign affairs has been eclipsed by that

* Originally published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, 16, ed. Gordon C. Bond (Auburn: Western Society for French History, 1989), 126–34. This paper has been annotated and slightly revised for publication. I would like to thank the chair of my panel, William Roosen, for encouraging me to revise this paper for publica- tion and my commentator, Ronald Martin, my co-panelists, Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey, and above all the audience for a stimulating discussion. 1 Prost, “Famille de Lionne,” Ridgely, “A Seventeenth-Century Debate,” and Paul Sonnino, “Hugues de Lionne.” 2 For the following details see Valfrey, Hugues de Lionne en Italie, and Valfrey, Hugues de Lionne en Espagne et Allemagne, which is still the standard treatment. In addition see such classics

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/9789004269576_011 340 chapter 9 of the two men for whom he worked during most of his life, Mazarin and Louis XIV, both of whom reserved control over foreign policy to themselves. But it is worth remembering that the volume of his political correspondence exceeds that of Mazarin and that he was instrumental in virtually every foreign affair from 1642 until his death in 1671. In 1631 he was called to Paris by his uncle, Abel de Servien, secretary of war, in whose service he gained his first exposure to government. In 1636 he went to Italy where he established a close and life-long association with Mazarin. After 1643, as Mazarin’s chief secretary in foreign affairs, he was deeply involved in the negotiations for the Peace of Münster. In 1651 and 1652 the Fronde forced him, like Mazarin, into a period of involuntary retirement. But after his reinstatement in 1653, which happily coincided with his coming into a large inheritance, he distinguished himself on diplomatic missions to Italy, Spain, and Germany that culminated in the formation of the Rhenish League in 1658 and in the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. Upon Mazarin’s death in 1661 Louis XIV put him in charge of foreign affairs, as Mazarin himself had suggested. In 1668 he negotiated the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which put an end to Louis XIV’s first war against the Netherlands, and shortly thereafter, in the treaty of Dover, he managed to divide England from the Triple Alliance. Those were his last successes. Hermann Conring was born in 1606 in Norden, a small town in Northern Germany.3 After a brief period of medical and humanistic studies in Leiden, he spent his entire adult life from 1632 until his death in 1681 as a professor of natural philosophy, medicine, and eventually politics at the University of Helmstedt. He wrote a series of scholarly, political, and scientific publications that are marked by extraordinary breadth of learning. At the early date of 1643 he was instrumental in introducing Harvey’s theory of blood circulation to Germany. His critical analysis of the relationship between Roman and German law earned him the conventional designation “the founder of German legal history.” As a consultant on several legal cases of far-ranging implications for German politics he developed lasting principles of historical criticism, and in a major study of ‘civil prudence’ he claimed, not altogether without reason, to have improved upon Aristotle and Bodin {126 | 127} by defining for the first

as Pagès, Grand électeur, J. B. Wolf, Louis XIV, and Mignet, Négociations, not to forget Bussy- Rabutin, Histoire amoureuse. 3 For the following details see the excellent collection of studies that was published on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of Conring’s death by Stolleis, ed., Hermann Conring (1983). This volume, with outstanding bibliographies and indices pointing the way to the relevant published and unpublished sources, is the indispensable starting point for all further research. In the present context the older studies by Goldschlag, Beiträge, Zehrfeld, Conrings Staatenkunde, and especially Felberg, Conrings Anteil, are still of much value.