In recent years, new scholarship about the 6,000 libels published during the Fronde have shown that the mazarinades engage with much more than the sole French political crisis of 1648-1653. These numerous and diverse pamphlets open to other historical or political spaces. They also call for a history of types of discourse, language modes, literary genres, poetic or theatrical forms, and they intervene in contemporary cultural topics in a two-way process: through the study of their composition process in context, and through their instrumentalization in polemical situations. Digital humanities have also brought new questions by enabling the investigation of voluminous corpora.
Building on such findings, the conference held in Rouen in September 2022, after the one in Paris (2015) and Tokyo (2016), moved to study the international range of the mazarinades:

Mazarinades as a Transnational Phenomenon -
Many recent studies have allowed us to observe and study the mazarinade collections on an international scale anew. Collections stored in Europe and beyond (especially in Japan, Russia and the United States) fosters new inquiry about documents printed during the Fronde. How were they distributed and disseminated abroad? What circles and networks were involved? What resonance did these texts, intended for a local audience, have outside France? How did foreign readers perceive them?

Mazarinades, Foreign Spaces and Foreigners -
What perception of international matters (current events, foreigners, actors, political systems) do the mazarinades construct? Although the representation of foreigners in France are well- studied — Mazarin and Anne of Austria — what about the representation of other individuals or groups?
Mazarinades’ approach to realities outside the French national space also offers great potential for interrogation: how do these texts, despite being rooted in a local conflict, account for events contemporary with the Fronde, near or far from France? What influence does the context of the French troubles exert on the narration of conflicts taking place between or within neighboring countries? Conversely, how was the Fronde perceived in the foreign press, or described in private correspondence? How were these hundreds of libels identified, collected and commented on by foreign readers? Do readers abroad consider Mazarinades a credible source of information, or are they seen as low-value, disposable libels?

Mazarinades Beyond Intellectual Boundaries -
Because of the chronology of the Fronde, the English Revolution and the end of the Thirty Years' War, scholarship tends to set 1650 as an essential turning point in historiography. In addition to this temporal boundary, other concepts, such as aesthetic distinction between Baroque era and Classical era, have assigned the Mazarinades to a specific period instead of acknowledging their importance for the whole second seventeenth century. Finally, disciplinary and epistemological boundaries also confined the study of mazarinades to specific fields, whereas the object itself calls for a multidisciplinary approach. Since collaborations over the past fifteen years have mainly involved specialists in history, literature, linguistics and document management, we very much hope this conference would bring contributions from other fields of expertise.

The conference will be held at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), from March 26 to 28, 2025. The papers — approximately 30 minutes each — may be presented in French, English, German or Italian.

Submission of approximately 400 words (title, abstract, brief bio-bibliographical presentation) should be sent to the following address by January 31, 2024: mazarinades2025@gmail.com.