While the printed Mazarinades survive in considerable numbers, the Bibliothèque nationale alone holds thousands, and the Folger Shakespeare Library catalogues upwards of 2,600 titles, contemporary manuscript compilations of this material are genuinely scarce. They represent a different order of evidence: deliberate private archive assembled by someone with access, judgment, and reason to preserve what the Crown would have preferred forgotten. The compiler of this recueil was almost certainly a member of the legal or parliamentary class, and the collection reads as the political memory of the noblesse de robe during the great crises of the seventeenth century.
The presence of the Courrier Burlesque in manuscript rather than in its printed form (the original pamphlets were published by Saint-Julien in 1649–1650) is itself significant. Manuscript circulation of political verse served a different social function than print: it implied trust, shared risk, and membership in a community of dissent. The hand-copied political miscellany was the private memory of rebellion, preserved despite royal censorship by exactly the class of men who staffed the institutions the Crown sought to control.
The inclusion of Nostradamus prophecies is neither incidental nor eccentric. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Prophéties of Michel de Nostredame were actively mobilized as political weaponry: partisans of every faction ransacked the quatrains for ammunition, finding in their calculated obscurity whatever confirmation the moment required. During the Fronde especially, prophetic literature circulated alongside satirical verse and parliamentary polemic as part of the same arsenal of opposition. The compiler’s decision to include such material alongside the Courrier Burlesque and the Gallican documents reflects the period’s characteristic refusal to separate the prophetic from the political, a refusal that students of Western esotericism will recognize as central to the reception history of Nostradamus from the sixteenth century onward.
The later Gallican documents extend the compilation’s thematic range in a pointed way. The 1681 declaration from Pamiers, signed by the Vicar General sede vacante, places this manuscript at the intersection of the two greatest constitutional conflicts of Louis XIV’s reign: the Fronde and the Régale. The diocese of Pamiers, under its bishop François-Étienne de Caulet, was the epicenter of resistance to the royal extension of the régale to southern dioceses previously exempt. Caulet’s defiance, his excommunication of royal appointees, and the subsequent papal intervention made Pamiers a cause célèbre. That the compiler chose to bind these documents together with the Fronde material and the Nostradamus prophecies suggests a coherent political and indeed prophetic vision: these are the papers of someone who understood parlementaire resistance, Gallican conflict, and providential history as chapters in the same story.
The Grosley provenance is notable. Pierre-Jean Grosley was not merely a collector but one of the sharper minds of the French Enlightenment, a man whose antiquarian interests served a critical historical sensibility. His ownership of this manuscript links the political dissent of the seventeenth century to the critical inquiry of the eighteenth. Other manuscripts from his library have entered major institutional collections. The binding in medieval legal waste, the working pagination, and the absence of any decorative ambition all confirm that this was an archival object, assembled for consultation rather than display. The tripartite pagination and earlier stab-holes visible in the inner margins tell us something further: the sections of this volume circulated independently before being gathered into their present binding, suggesting a compilation built up over time from materials acquired separately, precisely how a working magistrate or collector would have assembled such a dossier.
RECUEIL DE PIÈCES HISTORIQUES, SATIRIQUES ET BURLESQUESsur les affaires de la Fronde et de la Régale (1648–1681). [Manuscript Miscellany of the Fronde, Gallican Crisis, and Nostradamus Prophecies]. Place/Date: [France, likely Paris], c. 1648–1681, with compilation likely completed c. 1681.
Physical Description: Octavo. Manuscript on paper, paginated in three sequences: 81; 193–335; 86 pp., evidently assembled from separately produced sections into a single volume (earlier stab-holes visible at extreme inner margins confirm at least some sections circulated independently before binding). Written in at least two distinct seventeenth-century cursive hands. The principal hand, responsible for the bulk of the text, writes a fluent, professional secretary cursive consistent with legal or parliamentary scribal practice; a second hand appears in portions of the later material. Text arranged in single and double columns depending on content (verse sections frequently in two columns).
Binding: Contemporary limp vellum, composed of what appears to be medieval manuscript waste (fifteenth-century legal document) with visible laced-in sewing supports. Rear cover with manuscript text visible. Spine titled in a contemporary ink hand: Recueil ms. sur les affaires de la Fronde et de la Regale an 1648 a 1680. Binding sound but rustic, characteristic of archival or working-library preservation rather than presentation binding.
Condition: Text block generally sound and legible throughout. First leaf with lower margin replaced with old paper. Some oxidation and browning to ink typical of iron gall ink of the period; occasional light foxing, though clean overall. Covers soiled and somewhat bowed. Sewing supports visible and intact. Good.
Provenance:
1. [Compiler/original owner]: Unidentified, likely a magistrate, clerk, or member of the noblesse de robe associated with the Parlement de Paris, based on the compiler’s evident access to parliamentary registers and legal documents, and the strongly parlementaire perspective of the collection.
2. Pierre-Jean Grosley (1718–1785): Inscribed on the flyleaf in a later hand: Manuscrit Curieux ayant appartenu a Grosley. Grosley was a magistrate, antiquary, and man of letters based in Troyes; a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert (volumes IV and XIV), a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1766), and author of the widely read Londres (1770). He was a noted collector of manuscripts, particularly those relating to French local and political history; other manuscripts from his collection have passed through major holdings including the Phillipps Collection.
3. Rütger Essén (1890–1972): Swedish diplomat and historian (PhD, Uppsala, 1919). Inscribed on the flyleaf: purchased on the Quai de Conti, Paris, 13 December 1913. Price noted as Fr. 4.
Contents: A recueil factice preserving the political underground literature of the Fronde (1648–1653) alongside documents from the Gallican crisis of the 1680s, Nostradamus prophecies, and related political and prophetic material. The compilation gathers satirical verse, burlesque poetry, mock petitions, political correspondence, prophetic texts, and parliamentary extracts into a coherent dossier spanning three decades of resistance to royal and ministerial authority. The volume’s tripartite pagination confirms it was assembled from at least three separately produced manuscript sections.
Principal texts include:
Le Courrier Burlesque envoyé à Monseigneur le Prince de Condé, pour divertir Son Altesse durant sa prison – A lengthy satirical poem in the burlesque mode, attributed to Saint-Julien (cf. Moreau #814–815). Addressed to the imprisoned Prince de Condé, it mixes political intelligence with mockery of the Crown and Mazarin’s government, narrating the events of 1648–1649 in octosyllabic verse.
Soupirs François sur la paix Italienne – A verse protest against the terms of a peace settlement perceived as shameful to French honor, lamenting the cowardice of deputies and the betrayal of national interests.
Explications des Prophéties Divines appliquées au Roy – A prose commentary applying Psalm 71 (Vulgate numbering) and other biblical prophecies to the person and reign of the King, blending providential royalism with close scriptural exegesis.
Nostradamus prophecies – The inclusion of Nostradamus material alongside parliamentary and satirical texts is characteristic of the period’s interweaving of prophetic and political discourse.
Documents relating to the Régale and Gallican crisis (1681) – Including a letter addressed to the prelates of the provincial assembly concerning the Regale controversy, referencing the Concordat, the authority of the Holy See in causae maiores, the Council of Lyon, and the rights of the Church of Pamiers; and a declaration signed by Frère Jean Cerle, priest, canon, and Vicar General of the Church of Pamiers, sede vacante, confirmed by the Holy See, dated 30 July 1681. These texts document the bitter Gallican contest between Louis XIV and Innocent XI over the extension of the royal régale to the dioceses of southern France.
While the printed Mazarinades survive in considerable numbers, the Bibliothèque nationale alone holds thousands, and the Folger Shakespeare Library catalogues upwards of 2,600 titles, contemporary manuscript compilations of this material are genuinely scarce. They represent a different order of evidence: deliberate private archive assembled by someone with access, judgment, and reason to preserve what the Crown would have preferred forgotten. The compiler of this recueil was almost certainly a member of the legal or parliamentary class, and the collection reads as the political memory of the noblesse de robe during the great crises of the seventeenth century.
The presence of the Courrier Burlesque in manuscript rather than in its printed form (the original pamphlets were published by Saint-Julien in 1649–1650) is itself significant. Manuscript circulation of political verse served a different social function than print: it implied trust, shared risk, and membership in a community of dissent. The hand-copied political miscellany was the private memory of rebellion, preserved despite royal censorship by exactly the class of men who staffed the institutions the Crown sought to control.
The inclusion of Nostradamus prophecies is neither incidental nor eccentric. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Prophéties of Michel de Nostredame were actively mobilized as political weaponry: partisans of every faction ransacked the quatrains for ammunition, finding in their calculated obscurity whatever confirmation the moment required. During the Fronde especially, prophetic literature circulated alongside satirical verse and parliamentary polemic as part of the same arsenal of opposition. The compiler’s decision to include such material alongside the Courrier Burlesque and the Gallican documents reflects the period’s characteristic refusal to separate the prophetic from the political, a refusal that students of Western esotericism will recognize as central to the reception history of Nostradamus from the sixteenth century onward.
The later Gallican documents extend the compilation’s thematic range in a pointed way. The 1681 declaration from Pamiers, signed by the Vicar General sede vacante, places this manuscript at the intersection of the two greatest constitutional conflicts of Louis XIV’s reign: the Fronde and the Régale. The diocese of Pamiers, under its bishop François-Étienne de Caulet, was the epicenter of resistance to the royal extension of the régale to southern dioceses previously exempt. Caulet’s defiance, his excommunication of royal appointees, and the subsequent papal intervention made Pamiers a cause célèbre. That the compiler chose to bind these documents together with the Fronde material and the Nostradamus prophecies suggests a coherent political and indeed prophetic vision: these are the papers of someone who understood parlementaire resistance, Gallican conflict, and providential history as chapters in the same story.
The Grosley provenance is notable. Pierre-Jean Grosley was not merely a collector but one of the sharper minds of the French Enlightenment, a man whose antiquarian interests served a critical historical sensibility. His ownership of this manuscript links the political dissent of the seventeenth century to the critical inquiry of the eighteenth. Other manuscripts from his library have entered major institutional collections. The binding in medieval legal waste, the working pagination, and the absence of any decorative ambition all confirm that this was an archival object, assembled for consultation rather than display. The tripartite pagination and earlier stab-holes visible in the inner margins tell us something further: the sections of this volume circulated independently before being gathered into their present binding, suggesting a compilation built up over time from materials acquired separately, precisely how a working magistrate or collector would have assembled such a dossier.
RECUEIL DE PIÈCES HISTORIQUES, SATIRIQUES ET BURLESQUESsur les affaires de la Fronde et de la Régale (1648–1681). [Manuscript Miscellany of the Fronde, Gallican Crisis, and Nostradamus Prophecies]. Place/Date: [France, likely Paris], c. 1648–1681, with compilation likely completed c. 1681.
Physical Description: Octavo. Manuscript on paper, paginated in three sequences: 81; 193–335; 86 pp., evidently assembled from separately produced sections into a single volume (earlier stab-holes visible at extreme inner margins confirm at least some sections circulated independently before binding). Written in at least two distinct seventeenth-century cursive hands. The principal hand, responsible for the bulk of the text, writes a fluent, professional secretary cursive consistent with legal or parliamentary scribal practice; a second hand appears in portions of the later material. Text arranged in single and double columns depending on content (verse sections frequently in two columns).
Binding: Contemporary limp vellum, composed of what appears to be medieval manuscript waste (fifteenth-century legal document) with visible laced-in sewing supports. Rear cover with manuscript text visible. Spine titled in a contemporary ink hand: Recueil ms. sur les affaires de la Fronde et de la Regale an 1648 a 1680. Binding sound but rustic, characteristic of archival or working-library preservation rather than presentation binding.
Condition: Text block generally sound and legible throughout. First leaf with lower margin replaced with old paper. Some oxidation and browning to ink typical of iron gall ink of the period; occasional light foxing, though clean overall. Covers soiled and somewhat bowed. Sewing supports visible and intact. Good.
Provenance:
1. [Compiler/original owner]: Unidentified, likely a magistrate, clerk, or member of the noblesse de robe associated with the Parlement de Paris, based on the compiler’s evident access to parliamentary registers and legal documents, and the strongly parlementaire perspective of the collection.
2. Pierre-Jean Grosley (1718–1785): Inscribed on the flyleaf in a later hand: Manuscrit Curieux ayant appartenu a Grosley. Grosley was a magistrate, antiquary, and man of letters based in Troyes; a contributor to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert (volumes IV and XIV), a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1766), and author of the widely read Londres (1770). He was a noted collector of manuscripts, particularly those relating to French local and political history; other manuscripts from his collection have passed through major holdings including the Phillipps Collection.
3. Rütger Essén (1890–1972): Swedish diplomat and historian (PhD, Uppsala, 1919). Inscribed on the flyleaf: purchased on the Quai de Conti, Paris, 13 December 1913. Price noted as Fr. 4.
Contents: A recueil factice preserving the political underground literature of the Fronde (1648–1653) alongside documents from the Gallican crisis of the 1680s, Nostradamus prophecies, and related political and prophetic material. The compilation gathers satirical verse, burlesque poetry, mock petitions, political correspondence, prophetic texts, and parliamentary extracts into a coherent dossier spanning three decades of resistance to royal and ministerial authority. The volume’s tripartite pagination confirms it was assembled from at least three separately produced manuscript sections.
Principal texts include:
Le Courrier Burlesque envoyé à Monseigneur le Prince de Condé, pour divertir Son Altesse durant sa prison – A lengthy satirical poem in the burlesque mode, attributed to Saint-Julien (cf. Moreau #814–815). Addressed to the imprisoned Prince de Condé, it mixes political intelligence with mockery of the Crown and Mazarin’s government, narrating the events of 1648–1649 in octosyllabic verse.
Soupirs François sur la paix Italienne – A verse protest against the terms of a peace settlement perceived as shameful to French honor, lamenting the cowardice of deputies and the betrayal of national interests.
Explications des Prophéties Divines appliquées au Roy – A prose commentary applying Psalm 71 (Vulgate numbering) and other biblical prophecies to the person and reign of the King, blending providential royalism with close scriptural exegesis.
Nostradamus prophecies – The inclusion of Nostradamus material alongside parliamentary and satirical texts is characteristic of the period’s interweaving of prophetic and political discourse.
Documents relating to the Régale and Gallican crisis (1681) – Including a letter addressed to the prelates of the provincial assembly concerning the Regale controversy, referencing the Concordat, the authority of the Holy See in causae maiores, the Council of Lyon, and the rights of the Church of Pamiers; and a declaration signed by Frère Jean Cerle, priest, canon, and Vicar General of the Church of Pamiers, sede vacante, confirmed by the Holy See, dated 30 July 1681. These texts document the bitter Gallican contest between Louis XIV and Innocent XI over the extension of the royal régale to the dioceses of southern France.
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