Mazarinades

by mercuriuspoliticus

Unlike English pamphlets of the seventeenth century, which are easily accessible on EEBO, I’ve found it harder to track down their French equivalents. I’ve been looking at Mazarinades of the mid-seventeenth century: libelles or political pamphlets mostly directed against Cardinal Mazarin during the Fronde. They take their name from a libelle by Paul Scarron, La Mazarinade, of 1651:

Buggering bugger, buggered bugger,
Bugger to the supreme degree,
Hairy bugger and feathered bugger,
Bugger in large and small volume,
Bugger sodomizing the State,
And bugger of the purest mixture…

Below are a few sources of Mazarinades and details about them online:

• Moreau, Choix de Mazarinades (1853), vol. 1.
• Moreau, Choix de Mazarinades (1853), vol. 2.
• Moreau, Bibliographie des Mazarinades (1851).

Christian Jouhaud and Hubert Carrier’s secondary works on the Mazarinades sadly aren’t available online, let alone in translation, but Jeffrey Sawyer’s book on earlier libelles of the seventeenth century, Printed Poison, is available in its entirety here.