Conclusion

Summary

The Conclusion emphasises the dialogic, performative properties of politique both as a word and as a character, and emphasises that although the particular politique problem traced in the book is a sixteenth-century phenomenon, there is no particular rupture between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; I explore continuities and differences across the decades after the end of the wars, and consider the political writings of Cardinal Richelieu and Gabriel Naudé. The Conclusion also argues that sixteenth-century debates about politics and politiques had a long-term impact on the European political imagination; it looks briefly at early modern English and contemporary French examples to consider this. It further considers what room there might be for optimism amid the negativity attached to politics in the early modern period.