Notre rencontre scientifique a pour but d’observer les mobilisations diplomatiques rebelles. L’attention portera principalement sur les questions suivantes qui ont toutes pour but de mettre en lumière des zones grises de la diplomatie, entre marginalité, normalité et centralité, dans lesquelles les mobilisations rebelles participent de l’effervescence des relations internationales de l’époque moderne.

International conference, Nantes Université, June 10-12 2026

Argument

From the Italian wars, through the era of confessional unrest, to the revolutions of the late 18th century, dissident individuals and groups projected their political action onto the international stage, sending agents all over the continent to defend their cause and seek help from external powers. Few studies, however, have been devoted to the actualities of the rebels' singular international experience, as they burst into an increasingly codified diplomatic sphere, theoretically dominated by monarchs, ministers, ambassadors and agents of so-called sovereign powers, who tended to claim the use of diplomacy exclusively for themselves. Suffering from a lack of political and symbolic legitimacy, rebel agents were nevertheless omnipresent, not only in European courts, but also in all the places where they could meet the representatives of the powers they sought to solicit, be they viceroys, governors, military officials or simply subordinate agents.

The questions that follow draw on several fields of historiography that are currently attracting renewed interest. First and foremost, they follow in the wake of research into the concrete frameworks of diplomatic practice and the day-to-day work of agents, focusing not only on ambassadors, but also on a wide range of others such as consuls, secretaries and spies. In the last twenty years or so, new studies have begun to take into account the full diversity of actors in international relations, beyond those who can only be described as sovereign powers: cities, merchants, religious orders, nobles, prelates, mercenaries, exiles, intellectuals, privateers and even local representative assemblies. These all acted on the international stage  with a degree of autonomy, playing their own part, in continuity with what has been observed for the medieval period. In the colonial context, the diplomatic agency of trading companies, military leaders and numerous non-European players has been clearly demonstrated. The interest in the international activities of rebels, whether outside any institutional framework or as constituted authorities, is therefore part of this opening up of the history of diplomacy and international relations.

These questions have also benefited from the significant historiographical revival of focus on revolts and revolutions in the early modern era. These are now studied as moments of intense politicization, manifested in rebels' efforts to appropriate political tools to their advantage, including symbolic violence, legal and historical justifications, information and propaganda, and deliberative practices. Diplomacy is, of course, one of the most important political tools used by rebels. Moreover, recent studies have shown that revolts are also geopolitical facts, whose possible local and international repercussions are observed by various government diplomatic agents, who are sometimes tempted to intervene in one way or another.

At the crossroads of these different fields, and following on from a first book devoted to this issue during the French Wars of Religion (published in 2022), the aim of our workshop  is to observe rebel  diplomacy in action. Attention will focus on the following questions, all of which aim to shed light on the grey zones of diplomacy, between marginality, normality and centrality, in which rebel mobilizations contributed to the ferment of international relations in the early modern era. They will also enable us to reconsider the division between internal and external affairs, precisely at a time when the field of foreign relations was becoming conceptually and administratively fixed:

1)  The legal and symbolic forms of our missions.

Who are the mandating bodies, and do they take the trouble to set up procedures to legalize their external actions? Are rebel diplomats concerned with imitating the forms, procedures and vocabulary of government diplomacy?

2) The spatial and geographical aspects of these approaches.

 To what extent does the lack of legitimacy force rebel agents to move clandestinely, and at what risk? Beyond foreign courts, rebels often turn to foreign diplomats stationed in their country, or to the governors of foreign border provinces. What are the specific features of mobilizations of this kind? To what extent do exiles constitute a kind of permanent rebel diplomacy with foreign powers?

3) The reception of rebel agents in the places they visit.

Do local authorities feel embarrassed by their arrival? Do the latter agree to receive them and openly assume responsibility for the negotiations, or do they seek secrecy, which they may also aim to exploit? When these negotiations become known, do they cause a scandal, particularly in the eyes of other diplomats? Or are they considered to be something commonplace? How do the representatives of the government against which the rebels have risen seek to delegitimize and obstruct the rebel missions? or, on the contrary, possibly to instrumentalize them?

4) The concrete work of rebel emissaries in the places to which they are sent.

How do they obtain information, represent their constituents and negotiate? What are their resources and weaknesses, particularly in financial terms? What networks and interpersonal relationships can they draw upon? Can they sometimes count on the protection of diplomats whose legitimacy is more assured, or on the solidarity of agents who suffer from the same weaknesses as they do?

5) Cultural and intercultural aspects of the rebels' diplomatic experience.

Do they share a common diplomatic culture with their interlocutors, enabling them to avoid blunders, particularly on the formal level? Or, on the contrary, does their lack of mastery of these customs constitute a handicap in their mission? How does the intercultural dimension of the exchange influence their approach, particularly in a non-European context?

Submission guidelines

The conference will take place on June 10, 11, and 12, 2026, at Nantes University:

• Accommodation (up to three nights) and transportation will be covered by the organizers;
• The conference languages will be French and English; 
• The conference proceedings will be published.

Proposals for papers (provisional title + abstract of up to 300 words + short one-page CV, in a single PDF) should be sent electronically

before November 15, 2025, 

to the following addresses:

• fabrice.micallef@univ-nantes.fr
• matthieu.gellard@sorbonne-universite.fr

Organization

• Matthieu GELLARD (INSPE de Paris/Sorbonne Université)
• Fabrice MICALLEF (Nantes Université/Institut universitaire de France)

Scientific committee

• Lucien BÉLY (Sorbonne Université/Institut de France)
• Indravati FÉLICITÉ (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg)
• Géraud POUMARÈDE (Sorbonne Université) 
• Penny ROBERTS (University of Warwick)
• Marie-Karine SCHAUB (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
• Éric SCHNAKENBOURG (Nantes Université)

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