Cap. 2 Voltaire and Frederick The Great

2 The enlightened prince and the future
of Europe
Voltaire and Frederick the Great’s Anti-Machiavel
of 1740
Isaac Nakhimovsky
Frederick of Prussia’s joint venture with Voltaire, the Anti-Machiavel of

1740, has often been taken to be a disingenuous, or at best misleading
declaration of the primacy of virtue and justice in politics.1 By the end
of 1740, its newly crowned but still anonymous author had already
invaded Silesia, engulfing Europe in war. At the turn of the twenti-
eth century, the Anti-Machiavel was influentially cast by the historian
Friedrich Meinecke as emblematic of a broader eighteenth-century
failure to overcome the tension between its enlightened values and
its genuinely Machiavellian power politics: the Anti-Machiavel, in this
view, proclaimed the former while affirming the necessity of the latter.2
Meinecke’s interpretative framework leaves unexplained what it was
that the Anti-Machiavel was designed to do, and more recent attempts
to connect the political theory articulated in the Anti-Machiavel to
Frederick’s subsequent manner of exercising power have not supplied a
convincing answer to that question.3
In fact, this chapter will show, the Anti-Machiavel sought to explain
how to participate in a new kind of international order: a new kind of
balance of power that, as Voltaire put it, had turned Europe into “a great
1 Or, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s words, as “an edifying homily against rapacity,
perfidy, arbitrary government, unjust war, in short, against almost every thing for which
its author is now remembered among men.” “Frederic the Great,” in Critical and Histor-
ical Essays, Contributed to The Edinburgh Review, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1866), 2:250.
2 Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison D’état and Its Place in Mod-
ern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 272–
342.
3 See Theodor Schieder’s 1983 biography, Frederick the Great, trans. Sabina Berkeley and
H.M. Scott (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 75–89; Massimo Mori, “Federico II e Machi-
avelli: Una reinterpretazione,” Etica & Politica 17, no. 3 (2015): 9–31.
44
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The enlightened prince and the future of Europe 45
republic divided into many states.”4 This vision of a “great republic” did
not amount to a vision of “perpetual peace” as articulated by the Abbé
de Saint-Pierre, in which an institutionalized legal order above states
allowed the reciprocity of doux commerce to definitively supersede mil-
itary competition.5 Nor, however, did the Anti-Machiavel regard com-
merce solely as an arena for power politics, as it had been by writers
like the Bristol merchant John Cary, who saw an empire to monopolize
trade as a means for overcoming a rival power: a “neo-Machiavellian”
perspective that David Hume labeled “jealousy of trade.”6 Rather, the
Anti-Machiavel joined Hume in claiming that commerce could exert a
moderating influence on competition among European states. It would
not serve as a substitute for a balance of power, but as a means of sta-
bilizing its operation. Such attempts to define a stable middle ground
between perpetual peace and power politics cannot match the analytical
clarity of either Cary’s or Saint-Pierre’s understanding of the balance of
power. As the most interesting recent literature has emphasized, it is in
fact the latter’s cosmopolitan critique of the idea of a balance of power
that offers the most clear-sighted treatment of that concept.7 The aim
of this chapter is to locate the Anti-Machiavel’s vision of Europe’s future
in this context, and to identify its significance for modern international
political thought.
As this chapter will also show, this vision of Europe shaped the
Anti-Machiavel’s engagement with Machiavelli’s The Prince. The Anti-
Machiavel was a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Machiavelli’s text
4 Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV, in Oeuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Gallimard,
1968), 620.
5 On “doux commerce” see Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Argu-
ments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1977).
6 David Hume, “Of the Jealousy of Trade,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed.
Eugene Miller, Rev. ed (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 327–31. On “jealousy
of trade” in Enlightenment thought and on “neo-Machiavellian political economy” see
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical
Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). On John Cary in this context
see Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
7 See especially Bruno Bernardi, “L’idée d’équilibre européen dans le jus gentium des
modernes: esquisse d’histoire conceptuelle,” in Penser l’Europe au XVIIIe siècle: com-
merce, civilisation, empire, ed. Antoine Lilti and Céline Spector (Oxford: Voltaire Foun-
dation, 2014), 19–46. On Saint-Pierre’s “realism” see also Olaf Asbach, Staat und Politik
zwischen Absolutismus und Aufklärung: Der Abbé de Saint-Pierre und die Herausbildung
der französischen Aufklärung bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim: G. Olms,
2005); Céline Spector, “L’Europe de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre,” in Les projets de l’abbé Cas-
tel de Saint-Pierre, 1658–1743: pour le plus grand bonheur du plus grand nombre, ed. Carole
Dornier and Claudine Poulouin (Caen: Maison de la recherche en sciences humaines,
Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, 2011), 39–49.
46 Isaac Nakhimovsky
that Frederick undertook in 1739 with Voltaire’s encouragement and

guidance.8 Contrary to Meinecke’s view, the Anti-Machiavel’s moral
condemnations of Machiavelli, and its claim to have superseded the pol-
itics of The Prince, did not amount to the claim that moral virtue, as
opposed to self-interest, ought to guide the conduct of the prince. In fact,
as its title ultimately indicated, the Anti-Machiavel constituted a revision
rather than a rejection of the idea of reason of state – an idea closely
associated in the eighteenth century with Machiavelli. In Voltaire’s edi-
torial hands, the title of Frederick’s original manuscript, the Réfutation du
Prince de Machiavel, became the Anti-Machiavel, ou essai de critique sur le
Prince de Machiavel, publié par M. de Voltaire.9 At the same time, however,
the Anti-Machiavel was also a critical intervention in a literature that
sought to articulate a moral alternative to reason of state: a literature that
includes, most importantly for Frederick and Voltaire, the Archbishop
Fénelon’s celebrated epic The Adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysees.10
The first part of this chapter shows how Frederick and Voltaire posi-
tioned the Anti-Machiavel in relation to Machiavelli’s politics – especially
as interpreted by the late-seventeenth-century critic Amelot de la Hous-
saye – as well as Fénelon’s. As we shall see, the Anti-Machiavel’s attempt
to define an enlightened form of reason of state was not grounded
solely in moral claims about the nature of kingship. Rather, it also drew
on Voltaire’s contributions to a much broader set of early-eighteenth-
century discussions concerning political economy and the nature of a
8 Frederick announced his intention to undertake such a project in March 1739, having
previously objected to Voltaire’s inclusion of Machiavelli in a list of great figures of his
age in a draft of what became the Age of Louis XIV. Frederick of Prussia to Voltaire,
31 March 1738, in François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Correspondence and Related Doc-
uments, ed. Theodor Bestermann, Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Geneva: Institut et
musée Voltaire, 1969-), vol. 89, D1476; and 22 March 1739, in Correspondence, Oeu-
vres Complètes 90, D1950. On the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick
and the many twists and turns in their relationship see Christiane Mervaud, Voltaire et
Frédéric II: une dramaturgie des lumières, 1736–1778, Studies on Voltaire and the eigh-
teenth century 234 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1985).
9 Werner Bahner and Helga Bergmann, “Introduction,” in Anti-Machiavel, by François
Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes 19 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996),
94–5.
10 On Fénelon and reason of state theory see Albert Chérel, “L’Anti-Machiavélisme de
Fénelon et la ‘Conversion’ du Roi,” in Mélanges Albert Dufourcq (Paris, 1932), 181–93;
Lucien Jaume, “Fénelon critique de la déraison d’Etat,” in Raison et déraison d’Etat,
ed. Yves Charles Zarka (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 395–422. On
Fénelon as educator see Jacques Le Brun, “Du privé au public: l’éducation du prince
selon Fénelon,” in Le savoir du prince: du Moyen Age aux Lumières, ed. Ran Halévi (Paris:
Fayard, 2002), 235–60. On Fénelon’s importance for eighteenth-century thought see
Albert Chérel, Fénelon au XVIIIe siècle en France (1715–1820) Son prestige – Son influence
(Fribourg: Imp. Fragnière frères, 1917); Christoph Schmitt-Maaß, Stefanie Stockhorst,
and Doohwan Ahn, Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations:
With a Preface by Jacques Le Brun (Rodopi, 2014).
distinctively modern form of monarchical government.11 The remainder

of the chapter then shows how these discussions in turn formed the basis
for a vision of Europe’s future that amounted to a controversial substi-
tute for the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s perpetual peace project. The result-
ing debate, including the subsequent responses to the Anti-Machiavel by
Saint-Pierre and his admirers and defenders (the most interesting and
formidable of whom was Jean-Jacques Rousseau), reveals a recurring
pattern in modern international political thought.
“Anti-Machiavellianism” is a notoriously diffuse category. For Voltaire,

as for Pierre Bayle and others, it referred to critical commentaries
on Machiavelli’s The Prince, beginning with Innocent Gentillet’s Anti-
Machiavel of 1576.12 However, many of these commentaries can just as
plausibly be described as “Machiavellian”: though they might purport to
restore moral content to the concept of self-interest, or in classical terms
to reassert the compatibility of the utile with the honestum (the advanta-
geous with the honorable), in fact many served to legitimate as “true”
reasons of state the tactics that Machiavelli had advocated.13 Voltaire
was breezily dismissive of this earlier literature, advising Frederick not to
bother with it.14 Instead, Voltaire used his editorial preface to launch a
sharp attack on Amelot de la Houssaye, the ex-diplomat turned historian
11 On the scope of these discussions see above all Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge:
Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton
University Press, 2007), chap. 2. On the failure of many discussions of Frederick’s
“enlightened absolutism” to distinguish sufficiently between a form of government and
a style of rule see Simone Zurbuchen, “Theorizing Enlightened Absolutism: The Swiss
Republican Origins of Prussian Monarchism,” in Monarchisms in the Age of Enlight-
enment: Liberty, Patriotism, and the Common Good, ed. John Christian Laursen, Luisa
Simonutti, and H.W. Blom (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 240–66.
12 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, 1 June 1740, in Voltaire,
Correspondence, Oeuvres Complètes 91, D2214; Pierre Bayle, “Machiavel,” in The Dic-
tionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, vol. 4 (London, 1737), 10–17. On
this tradition see José A. Fernández-Santamaria, “Reason of State and Statecraft in
Spain (1595–1640),” Journal of the History of Ideas 41, no. 3 (September 1980): 355–
79; Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic
Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1990); Alain Dierkens, ed., L’antimachiavelisme de la renaissance aux lumières, Editions
de l’Université de Bruxelles 8, 1997; H. Höpfl, “Orthodoxy and Reason of State,”
History of Political Thought 23, no. 2 (2002): 211–37.
13 On this pattern see “Pact with the Devil: the Ethics, Politics and Economics of Anti-
Machiavellian Machiavellism,” a collection of essays edited by Ioannis D. Evrigenis and
Mark Somos, and their introduction, “Wrestling with Machiavelli,” History of European
Ideas 37, no. 2 (2011): 85–93. On “true” reasons of state see Richard Tuck, Philosophy
and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14 Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, 1 June 1740, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres Com-
plètes 91, D2214.
who, Jacob Soll has claimed, was “the only Frenchman openly defending
Machiavelli in late seventeenth-century Paris.”15
The Anti-Machiavel’s engagement with Amelot was not straightfor-
ward. In 1739 Frederick reported to Voltaire that Amelot had come
to his attention because someone to whom he had disclosed his plan
to refute Machiavelli had told him that this would be a wasted effort,
since Amelot had already produced a “complete refutation” of the Prince
in his commentary on Tacitus’s history. Upon investigation, Frederick
told Voltaire, he did not find that Amelot had refuted “the work as a
whole” (l’ouvrage en corps) but only “some maxims of that dangerous
and detestable politics.”16 Though Frederick himself originally used a
different edition of The Prince – a French translation by Henri Desbor-
des published in 1696 – Voltaire went to considerable lengths, at Fred-
erick’s instigation, to ensure that Frederick’s commentary was bound
together with Amelot’s 1683 translation of The Prince into French, com-
plete with the preface and notes in which Amelot had elaborated his
interpretation of Machiavelli.17 Arranging the two texts side by side,
Voltaire explained in his preface, was supposed to bring together the
poison with the antidote.18 However, as Soll has pointed out, in mak-
ing the Anti-Machiavel into a multilayered commentary on a commen-
tary, this strategy preserved an important formal link to the human-
ist reason of state literature that Amelot himself was instrumental in
reviving in the final decades of the seventeenth century.19 In taking this
form, the Anti-Machiavel differentiated itself in a significant way from
the most formidable contemporary statement of a moral alternative to
reason of state, namely Fénelon’s Telemachus, which first appeared in
1699 and was published in full in 1715. The Anti-Machiavel’s relation-
ship to Fénelon’s famous work is spelled out in an anonymous review of
the Anti-Machiavel – a review that Voltaire wrote himself in 1740:
The author [Jean Terrasson] of a novel, entitled Séthos, said that if the well-being
of the world could arise from a book, it would arise from Telemachus. May it be
permitted for us to say that in this regard the Anti-Machiavel surpasses even the
Telemachus. The one is principally made for young people, the other for men.
15 Jacob Soll, Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, & the Birth of Political Criticism (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 96.
16 Frederick of Prussia to Voltaire, 6 November 1739, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
Complètes 91, D2214.
17 For a full discussion see Charles Paul Fleischauer, “Voltaire and the Anti-Machiavel of
Frederick the Great” (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1952), 15.
18 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, ou essai de critique sur le prince de
Machiavel, publié par M. de Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes 19 (Oxford: Voltaire Founda-
tion, 1996), 106.
19 Soll, Publishing the Prince, 116.
The pleasant and moral novel Telemachus is a tissue of incredible adventures,

and the Anti-Machiavel is full of real examples, taken from history. The novel
inspires an almost ideal virtue, and principles of government made for a fantas-
tical age, which one might call heroic. It wants, for example, to divide citizens
into seven classes: it gives each class distinctive clothing, it entirely bans luxury,
which is perhaps the soul of a great state, and the principle of commerce. The
Anti-Machiavel inspires a practical virtue, and its principles are applicable to all
the governments of Europe.20
This review, which was printed together with several subsequent edi-
tions of the Anti-Machiavel, shows that the aim of the project was to
supersede Fénelon’s politics as well as Amelot’s. It sought to translate
the moral message of the former into the historical idiom promoted
by the latter. The Anti-Machiavel emerges from Voltaire’s review as a
synthesis of Fénelon’s moral tale with the Tacitist reason of state litera-
ture represented by Amelot: it sought to transfer Fénelon’s ideals from
the realm of classical fantasy to the real historical circumstances of mod-
ern European monarchies, just as, by taking the form of a commentary
on Machiavelli, it translated them into the conventions of Tacitist reason
of state literature.21
At the most basic level, the Anti-Machiavel aspired to replace Machi-
avelli’s advice book with a very different account of the interests that
ought to govern a prince. Its chief target in this enterprise was not so
much Machiavelli’s The Prince itself, however, as the conception of rea-
son of state that Amelot had articulated in his commentary on that text.
“He speaks much of reason of state in his dedicatory epistle,” Voltaire
wrote of Amelot, “but a man, who, having been secretary of an embassy,
did not have the secret to rescue himself from poverty, poorly under-
stands reason of state, in my opinion.”22 Voltaire and Frederick’s distaste
20 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 497–8. This review was published by Pierre Paupie, the house
that published the authorized version of the Anti-Machiavel in 1740, and subsequently
appeared in other editions as well. For evidence of Voltaire’s authorship see Bahner
and Bergmann, “Introduction,” 55–6. On Jean Terrasson and his novel Sethos see Mark
Somos, “The lost treasures of Sethos, Enlightened Prince of Egypt (1731),” in Athenian
Legacies: European Debates on Citizenship, ed. Paschalis Kitromilides (Florence: Leo S.
Olschki, 2014), 271–314.
21 The same form was adopted by some critics of the Anti-Machiavel, including Saint-
Pierre; the result was a commentary on a commentary on a commentary. See Charles
Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, Réflexions sur l’Antimachiavel de 1740 (Beman, 1741);
Ludwig Hess, Historische und politische Anmerkungen über den Antimachiavel (J.A. Berger,
1751).
22 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 108–9. The same criticism appears in Voltaire’s “Catalogue
de la plupart des écrivains français” in his Le siècle de Louis XIV: Voltaire, Oeuvres his-
toriques, 1133. Voltaire’s remark reflects an old trope about the mysteries of state. In fact,
Amelot too had observed in the dedicatory letter to his edition of The Prince that “there
are so few who know what reason of state is”; he attributed criticism of Machiavelli
for Amelot’s politics was widely shared by contemporaries such as the

Scottish commonwealthsman Thomas Gordon and the Huguenot
printer Prosper Marchand.23 The common denominator was a rejection
of the severe Augustinianism that characterized much late-seventeenth-
century moral theory.24 Amelot had defended Machiavelli by presenting
him as a faithful disciple of Tacitus who had correctly perceived the need
for a distinct political morality and identified “certain maxims of state
whose practice has become almost absolutely necessary because of the
evil and perfidy of men.”25 According to Amelot, The Prince was a good
guide for princes that showed them how to conduct themselves in a cor-
rupt world where genuine virtue remained beyond the capacity of self-
interested, fallen humanity. Machiavelli’s The Prince had suggested that
it was sufficient for princes to give the appearance of virtue.26 Amelot,
who defined political science as the science of reconciling reason of state
with religion, interpreted this claim in a markedly Augustinian spirit.27
In a world thoroughly corrupted by self-love, it would be prudent for
to this ignorance, and concluded that “one must be a prince, or at least a minister, in
order to know, I do not say the usefulness, but the absolute necessity of these maxims.”
Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye, “Epitre,” in Le prince de Nicolas Machiavel,
ed. Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye (Amsterdam: Henry Wetstein, 1684).
Cf. Machiavelli’s own preface to The Prince, where he says that commoners have a bet-
ter view of mysteries of state than those who practice them. By contrast, in encouraging
Frederick, Voltaire emphasised the prince’s unique authority to write about the myster-
ies of statecraft: “it is for a prince like you to instruct princes.” Voltaire to Frederick of
Prussia, 15 April 1739, Correspondence and Related Documents, Oeuvres Complètes 90,
D1978.
23 Thomas Gordon, “Discourses upon Tacitus,” in The Works of Tacitus, vol. 1 (London,
1737), 54. Voltaire recommended Gordon’s discourses to Frederick: Voltaire to Fred-
erick of Prussia, c. 25 July 1739, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres Complètes 90,
D2051. Though he was likewise no supporter of Amelot, the Huguenot printer Prosper
Marchand found Voltaire’s attack in the preface to the Anti-Machiavel distasteful and
even wondered if someone else had written it: “It is a very amusing, not to say very
ridiculous thing, that such a reproach appears at the head of an Anti-Machiavel. If it is
true, as it is pronounced, that Mr de Voltaire must be the minister of the king of Prussia
here, it is enough to imply that he will use reason of state more skilfully than the simple
imbecile Amelot de la Houssaye; and that he will know at least as well to refute the wise
lessons of his master in fact, as he knew to praise them by writing.” Prosper Marchand,
“Anti-Machiavel,” in Dictionaire historique ou mémoires critiques et littéraires concernant la
vie et les ouvrages de divers personnages distingués, particulièrement dans la république des
lettres, vol. 1 (La Haye: Pierre de Hondt, 1758), 44.
24 On Amelot’s Augustinianism see Luc Foisneau, “Le machiavélisme acceptable
d’Amelot de la Houssaye ou la vertu politique au siècle de Louis XIV,” Corpus, revue de
philosophie 31 (1997): 189–206. On late-seventeenth-century moral theory more gener-
ally see Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the
Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1980).
25 Amelot, “Preface,” in Le prince de Nicolas Machiavel.
26 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 55.
27 Amelot, “Epitre,” in Le prince de Nicolas Machiavel.
princes who lacked genuine virtue at least to simulate it, rather than
incite resistance by displaying their faults openly.28
Amelot’s approach to Machiavelli produced a form of political criti-
cism that many eighteenth-century critics found excessively opaque and
irredeemably compromised.29 Amelot’s theory was designed to exclude
attempts to give a moral content to self-interest, while showing that
even rulers who were incapable of genuine virtue (like Louis XIV) could
still approximate its effects by following their personal self-interest. The
famously outspoken challenge to Louis XIV’s reign posed by Fénelon
was fundamentally different in nature.30 Fénelon had served as the tutor
of the Duc de Bourgogne, Louis XIV’s grandson and the successor to
French throne, and he had composed Telemachus in the hope that his
pupil’s reign would be nothing like his grandfather’s. In Telemachus as
well as his other writings, Fénelon held out an alternative ideal of king-
ship that reversed Machiavelli’s view of the people as easily deceived and
too self-interested to be bound to the prince by love instead of fear.31
This moral message was articulated as an explicit attack on Machiavelli’s
The Prince by Fénelon’s close collaborator and fellow tutor Claude
Fleury.32 In his Reflections on the works of Machiavel, Fleury observed
that the principles of politics elaborated in The Prince “complemented
the corruption of the human heart.”33 Though most people might live
badly and in error, Fleury insisted that Machiavelli was wrong to deny
the existence of a moral standard or of truth, and to advocate self-interest
and dissimulation in their place. Fleury claimed that the pursuit of self-
interest was self-defeating, for its discipline could only guide a prince to
tyranny and hence provoke resistance, while the practice of dissimulation
would necessarily generate distrust. The “goal of true politics,” Fleury
insisted, was the good of the people, and pursuing this goal demanded
spiritual renewal from the prince.34
28 Foisneau, “Le machiavélisme acceptable,” 200–1.

29 Its opacity remains sufficient for Amelot to have been identified as a panegyrist of Louis
XIV by Luc Foisneau and as a crypto-republican by Jacob Soll.
30 Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French
Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1965).
31 Machiavelli, The Prince, 59, 62.
32 On Fleury and Fénelon see Chérel, “L’anti-machiavélisme de Fénelon et la ‘conversion’
du Roi”; A.T. Gable, “The Prince and the mirror: Louis XIV, Fénelon, royal narcissism,
and the legacy of Machiavelli,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 15, no. 1 (1993):
243–68.
33 Claude Fleury, “Réflexions sur les oeuvres de Machiavel,” in Oeuvres de l’abbé Fleury,
ed. Louis Aimé-Martin (Paris: Auguste Desrez, 1839), 564. Fleury thought better of
the Discourses on Livy: “Voilà des belles maximes.”
34 Fleury, “Réflexions sur les oeuvres de Machiavel,” 565.
In line with Fleury’s attack on Machiavelli, Fénelon’s Telemachus rede-

fined the interest of the prince by showing that princes could attain
true glory only by serving their subjects. Fénelon attributed Louis XIV’s
quest for glory and imperial conquest to selfish pride, rather than a
principle of legitimate government. By contrast, he promised, a prince
who subordinated his own interests to the “true needs of the state” and
ensured the people’s security and prosperity would earn their love as
well as true glory.35 So long as a ruler sought to earn the love of his
people rather than dissimulating his personal ambition, Fénelon’s tale
promised, he would enjoy much greater power than Louis XIV: “He can
do anything to the people; but the laws can do anything to him. He
has an absolute power in doing good, but his hands are tied from doing
wrong.”36 Fénelon was not the only admirer of Fleury to employ this
evocative formula to describe virtuous kingship: it also appears in John
Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. In his depiction of the dynamics
of royal prerogative, Locke described an unlimited “power to do good”
whose scope would keep expanding insofar as it was manifestly exercised
in service of the people’s welfare by a good king, but find itself hemmed
in by constitutional restrictions if trust should evaporate.37 The same
formula would reappear in a number of early-eighteenth-century texts
connected to Voltaire, including the Anti-Machiavel.
Fénelon’s claims about the power and security of a virtuous king were
grounded in economic and military analysis as well as in moral claims
about the nature of glory and love. A virtuous king was more power-
ful and secure not only because of the immense authority he would be
granted by his grateful subjects, but because the policies that would earn
35 Fénelon preferred the language of “true needs” to that of interest: Jaume, “Fénelon
critique de la déraison d’Etat,” 403. See, e.g., Fénelon’s contrast between the “true
needs of the state” and the prince’s own “pretentions” in his “Examen du conscience
sur les devoirs de la royauté,” in Oeuvres complètes de Fénelon, vol. 22 (Paris: Gauthier
frères, 1830), 237.
36 François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, ed. Patrick Riley
(Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61.
37 “For as a good Prince, who is mindful of the trust put into his hands, and careful of
the good of his People, cannot have too much Prerogative, that is, Power to do good: So
a weak and ill Prince, who would claim that Power, which his predecessors exercised
without the direction of the Law, as a Prerogative belonging to him by Right of his
Office, which he may exercise at his pleasure, to make or promote an Interest distinct
from that of the publick, gives the People an occasion to claim their Right, and limit that
Power, which, whilst it was exercised for their good, they were content should be tacitly
allowed.” John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 377 (sect. 165). See also sect. 42: “that Prince who shall be so wise
and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and incouragement to
the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and narrownesse of
Party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.”
him this love would significantly enhance the state’s economic and mil-
itary capacity. The primary target of this argument was Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, the finance minister who had sought to pay for Louis XIV’s
wars by accelerating the development of French trade in competition
with the Dutch and English. In Fénelon’s estimation Colbert’s policy
had only succeeded in impoverishing the state, damaging the moral char-
acter of its people, and funding wars of conquest that served only Louis
XIV’s appetite for personal glory. In fact, heavy taxation and the growth
of the luxury trade had undermined the true foundations of the state’s
power by distorting its economy, depopulating the countryside and crip-
pling agricultural productivity. Accordingly, Fénelon’s alternative ideal
of kingship was closely linked to a sweeping program of political and
economic reform.
The most important element of Fénelon’s reform proposal was to
thoroughly purge France of “luxury” by imposing an elaborate regime
of sumptuary laws and reorienting the economy toward agricultural pro-
duction (though it would retain a commercial port, isolated from the rest
of the economy and modeled on Holland, whose revenue would fund
an armaments industry).38 As Fénelon had argued in his letters to Louis
XIV as well as in Télémaque, the elimination of luxury and the revitaliza-
tion of agriculture would actually increase “real wealth” by eliminating
“false needs.”39 The result would be a powerful monarchy that was able
to take advantage of the military as well as economic benefits of agri-
cultural self-sufficiency and population growth. As Fénelon explained
to the Duc de Bourgogne, his reform program supplied an alternative
path to restoring French power without reigniting the disastrous wars of
Louis XIV: an alternative that Jean-François Melon would later capture
in his distinction between the “spirit of commerce” and the “spirit of
conquest.”40 The pursuit of territorial expansion was self-defeating
because it imposed the necessity of resistance on others, and resulted in
wars that inflicted tremendous damage on the constitution and economy
of even a victorious state. Instead, Fénelon concluded, the best policy
was to seek to maintain a stable balance of power militarily and territo-
rially, while pursuing aggrandizement only through internal economic
development. In this vision, the revitalization of France would go hand
38 On luxury and Fénelon’s reform proposal see above all Istvan Hont, “The luxury debate
in the Early Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political
Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 379–418.
39 Fénelon, Telemachus, 59–60.
40 Jean-François Melon, A Political Essay upon Commerce (Dublin: Philip Crampton,
1738), 136.
in hand with the emergence of a more stable and peaceful European

order.
The Anti-Machiavel was the product of a re-examination of Fénelon’s

anti-Machiavellism as much as it was a response to Amelot’s Machiavel-
lism. Frederick had been enthralled by Fénelon’s Telemachus since the
age of nine, but he had been deeply affected by Voltaire’s ideas as well.
The crown prince of Prussia was particularly influenced by Voltaire’s
The Henriade, the epic poem that had made Voltaire a celebrity at age
twenty-five, and after he drew Voltaire into correspondence in 1736 he
received many other writings including Le Mondain and an early draft
of what became The Age of Louis XIV.41 Amidst the flowery flattery
that filled their early correspondence, Frederick’s declaration in his first
letter that Voltaire’s poetry had been “a course in morals” that had
taught him “the idea of true glory” seems relatively sincere.42 Three
years later, while composing what would become the Anti-Machiavel,
he wrote that “What I am planning against Machiavellism, is properly
a continuation of The Henriade. It is upon the grand sentiments of
Henry the Fourth that I am forging the lightening bolt that will crush
Cesar Borgia.”43
Fénelon’s vision of an anti-Louis XIV and his model of an anti-
Machiavellian monarchy had inspired several decades of debate over how
much of Fénelon’s model should be retained in the aftermath of the
Sun King’s reign. Voltaire was an important figure in this debate.44 The
Anti-Machiavel was in fact one of several texts connected to Voltaire that
emerged in the late 1730s, and were concerned to reassess Fénelon’s
critique of Louis XIV’s reign and the French monarchy. One of these
was a manuscript treatise on monarchy, by René Louis de Voyer de
Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson. Voltaire praised d’Argenson’s treatise in
1739 as a real-life, new and improved version of Fénelon’s Telemachus –
the same terms he later used in his review of the Anti-Machiavel.45
41 Bahner and Bergmann, “Introduction,” 4.

42 Frederick of Prussia to Voltaire, 8 August 1736, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
43 Frederick of Prussia to Voltaire, 26 June 1739, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
44 See Patrick Neiertz, Voltaire et l’économie politique (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012),
chap. 4; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, chap. 2; Hont, “The luxury debate in the Early
Enlightenment,” 412–418; Florian Schui, Early Debates about Industry: Voltaire and His
Contemporaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). These discussions have super-
seded an older literature that was more concerned with Voltaire’s skepticism and deism:
e.g. Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988).
45 Voltaire wrote that “I find all my ideas in your work” and claimed that “it can be said
more justly of this work than of Télémaque, that if a book can give birth to the well-being
Voltaire even asked d’Argenson if he could share the closely guarded

manuscript with Frederick, then still crown prince of Prussia, but his
request was denied.46 Another close parallel is Viscount Bolingbroke’s
The Idea of a Patriot King (1738), which, like Fénelon’s Télémaque, was
originally intended to instruct an heir to the throne (in this case, Fred-
erick the Prince of Wales) on how to recover from the policies of the
current regime (Walpole’s ministry). Though Bolingbroke’s text is usu-
ally discussed in the context of English party politics, its discussion
of an enlightened form of reason of state, and its views on the polit-
ical and economic character of a modern monarchy, were also closely
related to Voltaire’s re-evaluation and development of Fénelon’s anti-
Machiavellian ideas.47
Like Saint Pierre, d’Argenson, Bolingbroke, and others, Voltaire chal-
lenged the strict dichotomy between a genuinely selfless virtue and
an inherently corrupt self-love that had been asserted by Jansenist
and Calvinist theologians.48 Instead Voltaire joined those such as the
Huguenot pastor Jacques Abbadie who sought to identify a more flex-
ible and complementary relationship between self-love and morality,
and to establish the possibility of a more accessible and worldly type of
virtue.49 Voltaire’s anonymous review of the Anti-Machiavel referred to
of humankind, it would be this book [ . . . ] This is not any longer the colony of Salentum
where Mr de Fénelon wants there to be no pastry-chefs, and seven modes of dress. Here
is something very real, which experience proves in a most striking manner.” Voltaire to
René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson, 8 May 1739, in Voltaire, Corre-
spondence, Oeuvres Complètes 90, D2008. Though Voltaire encouraged d’Argenson to
publish the manuscript treatise, it was only published, partially, in 1764.
46 Voltaire to d’Argenson, 21 June 1739, and d’Argenson to Voltaire, 7 July 1739, in
Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres Complètes 90, D2035 and D2041. See Nannerl
O. Henry, “Democratic monarchy: the political theory of the Marquis d’Argenson”
(Ph.D., Yale University, 1968), 75.
47 Bolingbroke’s relationship with Voltaire was complex: Voltaire once referred to him as
“one of the most brilliant geniuses and the most eloquent man of his age,” but their rela-
tions subsequently cooled. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII,
in Oeuvres historiques, 241. For the English context see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot
Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1994). On Bolingbroke’s involvement in French intellectual circles during
his period of exile there see D.J. Fletcher, “The fortunes of Bolingbroke in France in the
eighteenth century,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 47 (1966): 207–32;
and Nick Childs, A Political Academy in Paris, 1724–1731: The Entresol and Its Members
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000).
48 See Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France; Dale Van Kley, “Pierre Nicole,
Jansenism, and the morality of enlightened self-interest,” in Anticipations of the Enlight-
enment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 69–85; Patrick Riley, The Gen-
eral Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1986); R.R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France
(Princeton University Press, 1939).
49 See Isaac Nakhimovsky, “The enlightened epicureanism of Jacques Abbadie: L’art de se
connoître soi-même and the morality of self-interest,” History of European Ideas 29 (2003):
this conception of virtue as “practical virtue,” and the text presented

it as a middle ground between Fénelon and Machiavelli. “Compare
Fénelon’s prince with Machiavelli’s,” Frederick wrote. “If in reading M.
de Fénelon’s Telemachus it seems as if our nature approaches that of the
angels, it appears to approach the demons of hell when one reads the
Prince.”50 In his Traité de metaphysique (1736), Voltaire had held that
virtue might be associated with a healthy kind of love of esteem that
was grounded in but transcended the self.51 As Bolingbroke later put
it in The Idea of a Patriot King, the attention to “decorum” or “civil-
ity” that characterized such action was not a deceptive veneer that con-
cealed a true nature lacking in virtue; rather it was the quality that made
virtue inherently pleasurable and admirable to behold, and distinguished
it from purely self-seeking dissimulation, or a mask of deceit that no
prince could keep in place forever.52 Accordingly the Anti-Machiavel did
not condemn the self-interest of the prince but sought to moderate it.53
A prince whose love of esteem led him to serve the best interests of the
people would be rewarded with the object of his desire. Voltaire con-
densed Frederick’s characteristically scattered pronouncements on this
theme in his original Réfutation into one concise argument: “one wants
princes to have enough self-love in order to love glory, to do great acts,
and that at the same time to be indifferent enough to renounce their
tastes for the sake of their work; the same principle ought to push them
to deserve praise, and to reject it.”54
The Anti-Machiavel also reflects the challenge that Voltaire leveled
against Fénelon’s reform program. Voltaire accepted Fénelon’s basic
argument that a prince would gain real power and true glory by encour-
aging internal growth and development rather than pursuing conquest.
However, he challenged the claim that this development required
the exclusion of luxury from a monarchy and the imposition of an
austere asceticism on its prince and subjects. Instead Voltaire worked to
1–14. For another helpful discussion of such arguments see Thomas Ahnert, Religion
and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the
Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006).
50 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 147.
51 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Traité de metaphysique, ed. W.H. Barber, Oeuvres
Complètes 14 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989), 468–81.
52 Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke, “The idea of a patriot king,” in Political Writings,
ed. David Armitage (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 280–1. On the importance
of Ciceronian decorum in eighteenth-century moral thought see James Moore, “Utility
and humanity: the quest for the honestum in Cicero, Hutcheson, and Hume,” Utilitas
14, no. 3 (2002): 365–86; Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century
Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 1.
53 “ . . . no man is without passions. When they are moderated, they are the soul of society;
but when they are unleashed, they are the cause of its destruction.” Voltaire, Anti-
Machiavel, 139.
rehabilitate the legacy of Colbert: in The Henriade, Henry IV – the image

of the virtuous king and the antithesis of Louis XIV – was granted a
vision of France’s future, only to discover (in a line Voltaire added to
the 1737 edition) that his posterity was ensured by none other than
Fénelon’s bête-noir: “Colbert, it is on your heels that happy abundance,
/ the daughter of hard work, comes to enrich France.”55 Voltaire elab-
orated this defense of luxury in Le Mondain (1736), which viciously
satirized Fénelon’s view of luxury as inherently antithetical to virtue,
and mocked the austere reforms he had proposed in order to insulate
the domestic economy of a monarchy from luxury and foreign trade.56
Voltaire’s poem infamously stressed that the simple life of Adam and
Eve was not particularly virtuous, it was just bestial and poor. The
message was that the pursuit and enjoyment of luxury was not neces-
sarily equivalent to corruption and vice, and that trade could promote
rather than hinder agricultural improvement. In fact, Voltaire held, the
spiritual dimensions of life could not be accessed without the cultivation
of the arts. Only the arts made it possible to develop a taste for virtue,
just as one could never develop a taste for living well if every day of one’s
life was a struggle for bare survival. Without the veneer created by the
luxury and arts of a developed society, human nature would hardly be
characterized by moral purity and the selfless love of one another.57 The
expression of natural morality was the result of substantial social devel-
opment, which was itself contingent upon a certain condition of material
abundance. In short, as Voltaire put it in The Age of Louis XIV, the prob-
lem with more severe moralists was that they failed to appreciate how it
was only the development of the arts that distinguished the “age of Louis
XIV” from the “age of Attila”; to reverse this development in the name
of “austerity” would not yield a golden age of virtuous simplicity.58 Such
moralists “who cry out against what is called luxury,” Voltaire wrote in
55 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, La Henriade, ed. O.R. Taylor, Oeuvres Complètes
2 (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1970), 528. On the image of Henry IV and its
emergence as a rival to that of Louis XIV see Neal Johnson, Louis XIV and the Age of the
Enlightenment: The Myth of the Sun King from 1715 to 1789, Studies on Voltaire and the
Eighteenth Century 172 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1978). In the preface he later
wrote for La Henriade, Frederick claimed that Voltaire was better than Homer because
Henri IV’s dream was more realistic: La Henriade, 347–8.
56 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “Le Mondain,” in Writings of 1736, ed. H.T. Mason,
Oeuvres Complètes 16 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), 295–303.
57 As Voltaire later elaborated in his article on “love” in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764),
it was the arts, and the wealth they produced, that gradually allowed sexual desire to
develop into a desire to love and be loved. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “Amour,”
in Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Christiane Mervaud, vol. 1, Oeuvres Complètes 35
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 323–7.
58 Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques, 893.
a letter to Frederick, were “nothing but wretches with a poor sense of

humor.”59
These claims about morality and the arts stood behind the Anti-
Machiavel’s aspiration to identify a middle ground between Fénelon
and Machiavelli. The Anti-Machiavel’s account of monarchy was based
on a contrast between the way of commerce and the way of conquest
that recalls Fénelon’s. As Frederick put it, “There are two manners by
which a prince can aggrandize himself: one is that of conquest, when
a warrior prince extends the limits of his dominion by the force of his
arms; the other is that of good government, when a hard-working prince
makes all the arts and sciences flourish in his states, rendering them
more powerful and civilized.” This point, he noted, was entirely lost on
Machiavelli, whose book “is full of reasoning on only the first manner of
self-aggrandizement” rather than “the second, which is more innocent,
more just, and just as useful as the first.”60 However, the Anti-Machiavel
rejected Fénelon’s further claim that the alternative to conquest entailed
the elimination of luxury. It was true that “luxury would cause the death
of a small state,” Frederick argued, but the opposite was true of a large
monarchy: “The luxury which comes from abundance, and which makes
riches circulate through all the veins of a state, makes a great kingdom
flourish. It is what maintains industry, and what multiplies the needs of
the rich, in order to bind them by these needs to the poor. If it occurred
to some incompetent politician to banish luxury from a great empire,
that empire would begin to languish.” It was thus “an indispensable rule
for all politicians never to confound small states with great ones, and it
is in this that Machiavelli grievously sins in this chapter.”61
In addition to their ability to produce vast amounts of wealth, the
political stability of eighteenth-century monarchies set them apart from
small states. “In the time of Machiavelli,” Frederick wrote, “the great
and the nobles were still seen in France as little sovereigns who shared
the power of the prince in some manner; this gave rise to divisions, for-
tified factions, and fermented frequent revolts.”62 The long process of
political centralization had eliminated this instability by elevating royal
authority. The Anti-Machiavel aligned itself with the royalist historiogra-
phy of the French monarchy promulgated by the Abbé Dubos as well as
Saint-Pierre, Voltaire, and d’Argenson. In France, in Frederick’s admir-
ing view, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin had consolidated authority
so successfully that the crown had become the sole representative power
59 Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, 10 January 1737, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
60 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 225–6. 61 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 192–3.
and no longer faced any meaningful opposition from the parlements.63

Machiavelli’s analysis of the threat to the prince posed by the nobility
therefore no longer applied because their wealth and status had come to
depend so thoroughly on the sovereign.64 Frederick shared d’Argenson
and Voltaire’s skepticism about the merits of a system of ranks: since it
was in a prince’s interest to avoid creating divisions among his popu-
lation, Frederick observed, “a prince must treat all the orders he com-
mands in his state equally well, without making distinctions that would
cause jealousies disastrous for his interests.”65 To a considerable extent,
in fact, the Anti-Machiavel envisioned that the subjects of a monarchy
could come to resemble the citizens of a republic. Like Saint-Pierre,
d’Argenson (who labeled this ideal “democratic monarchy”), and Bol-
ingbroke, Frederick presented the commercial prowess and republican
spirit of the Dutch as a model for large monarchies.66 Though Frederick
deemed republics ungovernable, he was full of praise for that repub-
lican “spirit of independence and pride which has produced so many
great men in the world.”67 In one of its most radical moments, the Anti-
Machiavel declined to assign the nobility any distinctive political or mili-
tary function: in effect, the only role that remained for them was to con-
sume the luxury that drove economic development. Though he stopped
well short of explicitly advocating a limited monarchy for himself, Fred-
erick did repeat Fénelon’s description of the king as the first servant of
the people (Voltaire upgraded the title from domestique to magistrat); and
he followed Voltaire as far as praising England as an ideal constitution
that embodied Fénelon’s ideal of virtuous government: “It seems to me
that if there is a government which in our days could be proposed as a
model of wisdom, it is that of England. There the parliament is arbiter
between the people and the king, and the king has all the power to do
good; but he has none to do evil.”68
Voltaire had previously echoed Locke and Fénelon’s anti-
Machiavellian formula for virtuous kingship in his Letters Concerning
the English Nation (1733), where he praised England for having “at last
63 “Today,” Fredrick wrote, “this body is no more than a phantom, which still occasionally
imagines that it might well be a body, but which is ordinarily made to repent of this
error.” Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 133.
64 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 121. 65 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 214.
66 On “democratic monarchy” see Henry, “Democratic monarchy: the political theory of
the Marquis d’Argenson.”
67 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 158. In another passage toned down by Voltaire, Freder-
ick’s Réfutation matched Bolingbroke’s sentiment that “The height of glory would be
to restore liberty to a people having rescued it.” Frederick of Prussia, “Réfutation
du Prince de Machiavel,” in Anti-Machiavel, by François Marie Arouet de Voltaire,
Oeuvres Complètes 19 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 293.
68 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 119, 211.
establish’d that wise Government, where the Prince is all-powerful to

do good, and, at the same time, is restrain’d from committing evil.”69
The same formula also appears in Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot
King.70 From this perspective, the Anti-Machiavel can be seen as an
attempt to join this ideal of virtuous kingship to a new understanding
of monarchy as a form of government, with a new political economy
based in “luxury” and a new historiography that celebrated the con-
solidation of royal authority. What this synthesis implied was that the
interests of an eighteenth-century monarchy could hardly be compared
to the concerns of a small Renaissance principality constantly struggling
just to survive. Because state power had become so dependent on the
development of trade, Frederick argued, it was no longer sufficient for
a prince to focus exclusively on military matters, as Machiavelli had
advised.71 Modern princes would have to expand their portfolios to
include the promotion of trade and economic development. “The surest
mark that a country is under a wise and felicitous government,” Freder-
ick observed, echoing Voltaire, “is when the fine arts are born under its
care; these are flowers which grow in rich soil and under a clear sky; but
which die in a drought or under the heavy breathing of noses. Nothing
makes a reign more illustrious than the arts that flourish under its
wing.”72
The Anti-Machiavel deemed Machiavelli’s The Prince to be outdated
in its analysis of military and diplomatic matters as well. Departing from
Fénelon, Frederick claimed that the transformation of warfare by mod-
ern military tactics, resources, and technologies had actually enhanced
rather than diminished the security of contemporary states, to a level
that could scarcely have been imagined in the principalities of Renais-
sance Italy. “Since the time that Machiavelli wrote his Prince,” Frederick
asserted, “the world has changed so much, that it is almost no longer rec-
ognizable. If some skillful captain of Louis XII reappeared in our days,
69 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas
Cronk (Oxford University Press, 1999), 34. Voltaire also wrote to d’Argenson that Eng-
land was “existing evidence of the wisdom of your ideas”: Voltaire to d’Argenson, 8 May
1739, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres Complètes 90, D2008.
70 “The limitations necessary to preserve liberty under monarchy will restrain effectually
a bad prince, without being ever felt as shackles by a good one. Our constitution is
brought, or almost brought, to such a point, a point of perfection I think it, that no
king, who is not, in the true meaning of the word, a patriot, can govern Britain with
ease, security, honour, dignity, or indeed with sufficient power and strength. But yet a
king, who is a patriot may govern with all the former; and, besides them, with power as
extended as the most absolute monarch can boast, and a power, too, far more agreeable
in the enjoyment as well as more effectual in the operation.” Bolingbroke, “The Idea of
a Patriot King,” 233–4.
71 Machiavelli, The Prince, 51–2. 72 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 228.
he would be entirely disoriented.”73 Above all, Frederick claimed, the

large standing armies maintained by modern princes increased the secu-
rity of their states by restraining the ambition of others: they were “naked
swords, which keep those of others in the scabbard.”74 The dependence
of modern monarchies on commerce meant that the standing armies,
which formed the basis of their security, could not be composed of patri-
otic citizen soldiers, as Machiavelli (and Fénelon) had advised. However,
Frederick argued, the risks Machiavelli had attributed to a reliance on
mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries could be greatly mitigated so long as
they were properly assimilated into the national army and brought to a
high level of discipline using barracks and other innovations unknown
in Machiavelli’s time.75 Although Machiavelli was undoubtedly cor-
rect that “the best troops of a state are the national ones,” Frederick
allowed, no major European state enjoyed this military advantage.76
The military self-sufficiency that Machiavelli had advocated was also
no longer feasible: if even Louis XIV had not been able to sustain
himself without allies during the War of the Spanish Succession, then no
lesser prince could possibly aspire to survive without alliances, let alone
aspire to “universal monarchy” or the recreation of Roman hegemony.77
However, the Anti-Machiavel claimed, the development of the treaty
system and the creation of diplomatic channels between the courts of
Europe had made it possible to maintain the balance of power more
effectively.
The central claim of the Anti-Machiavel, as Voltaire’s anonymous
review indicated, was that the possibility of realizing the “practical
virtue” of the prince was linked to some of the same historical devel-
opments that Fénelon had condemned as the essence of Louis XIV’s
Machiavellism. On the contrary, Voltaire and Frederick argued, it was
these very developments that now made it possible for the prince of
a “great state” to avoid making recourse to Machiavelli’s ruthless tac-
tics. Reversing these developments as Fénelon had proposed meant not
escaping from a Machiavellian world but destroying what had made an
escape possible. Frederick memorably concluded that Machiavelli had

76 The only exception was Sweden: “It is only the Swedish troops, who are burghers, peas-
ants, and soldiers at the same time; but when they go to war, almost nobody remains in
the interior of the country in order to work the land: thus, they cannot do anything for
long, without ruining themselves more than their enemies.” Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel,
174–5. On eighteenth-century concerns about the implications of a revival of ancient
military virtue in modern Europe see Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish
Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
77 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 163, 257–8.
become obsolete: “The princes of whom Machiavel speaks,” Frederick

wrote, “are properly no more than hermaphrodites of sovereigns and
[private] individuals; they play the role of sovereign only in a very small
theater.”78 On the other hand, Frederick wrote,
what would Machiavelli himself say if he could see the new form of the European
body politic [corps politique de l’Europe], so many great princes who now figure in
the world but amounted to nothing then, the power of kings solidly established,
the manner in which sovereigns negotiate, and that balance which establishes in
Europe the alliance of some important princes in order to oppose the ambitious,
with no other goal than the tranquility of the world?79
The “new form of the European body politic” had drastically reduced
the need for and applicability of the ruthless politics that Machiavelli had
deemed a matter of constant necessity: “All these things have produced
a change so general and universal that they render most of Machiavelli’s
maxims inapplicable to our modern politics.”80 The Anti-Machiavel,
then, represents a revision, not refutation of reason of state theory. The
true interests of modern states demanded that sovereigns abandon their
pursuit of false glory through conquest and devote themselves to pro-
moting the industry and prosperity of their subjects. At the same time,
the enhanced resources of modern states and the established authority of
their sovereigns made them far more secure. In this way, the harsh imper-
atives of reason of state were diluted by a kind of politics based primarily
on practical virtue rather than necessity. Where Machiavelli’s prince was
tasked with resisting the effects of chance or fortuna, the Anti-Machiavel
asserted both that the modern prince faced a changed set of historical
circumstances and that these were, to a significant degree, intelligible;
those who grasped the nature of these changes best would distance
themselves the most from the world of Machiavelli’s The Prince.81
Machiavellian tactics could not be ruled out when the necessity of sur-
vival did impose itself on sovereigns, but eighteenth-century Europe was
increasingly no longer a world in which dire necessity had to be the soli-
tary interest governing the prince, leaving room for the practice of virtue
and the operation of commerce. For the most part – a significant caveat,
as we shall see – princes of large commercial monarchies could be virtu-
ous and follow the greater, more enlightened interests of their subjects.
They could make their people prosperous and happy by pursuing the

81 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 394. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, “Chance as a motivational trace
in historical writing,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith
Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 117–19.
interests of their peoples within a more stable and peaceful international

system.
These claims about the radically enhanced capabilities of mod-
ern monarchies are perhaps more familiar as Hume’s concept of the
“civilized European monarchy,” which he introduced in his famous
essay “On civil liberty,” first published in 1741 (one year after the
Anti-Machiavel).82 Hume pursued a comparable line of argument: he
claimed that a large monarchy like France was nearly as capable as
small republics of fostering the kinds of behavior that had hitherto been
possible only in the latter. The arts and sciences flourished, property
was secure, and above all commerce thrived in such a monarchy. Hume
concluded that these transformations had profoundly altered the polit-
ical constraints faced by these states: “Machiavel was certainly a great
genius; but having confined his study to the furious and tyrannical
governments of ancient times, or to the little disorderly principalities
of Italy, his reasonings especially upon monarchical government, have
been found extremely defective; and there scarcely is any maxim in his
prince, which subsequent experience has not entirely refuted.”83 The
Anti-Machiavel, like Hume’s account of “civilized European monarchy,”
had no time for the contractual underpinnings of Locke’s theory, but
it retained the view that the trust earned through utility and encoded
in public opinion served as the measure of the prince’s prudence. Like
Hume, too, the Anti-Machiavel detached the Lockean ideal of “constitu-
tional reason of state” from an exclusively national context.84 Whereas
Locke’s account of royal prerogative operated within the parameters of
English constitutional history, the Anti-Machiavel substituted a general
82 The original title was “Of liberty and despotism”; it was changed beginning with the
edition of 1758.
83 David Hume, “Of civil liberty,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene
Miller, Rev. ed (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 88, 92–4. On Hume’s complex
engagement with Machiavelli see Frederick G. Whelan, Hume and Machiavelli: Polit-
ical Realism and Liberal Thought (Lexington Books, 2004). Hume’s attempt to distin-
guish Machiavelli from Machiavellism, and his defense of the former as a precursor of
a modern science of politics, are also discussed in “Hume’s knaves and the shadow of
Machiavellianism,” Istvan Hont’s unpublished contribution to a conference on “Anti-
Machiavellian Machiavellism” convened by Ioannis Evrigenis and Mark Somos at the
University of Sussex in 2010.
84 Cf. Duncan Forbes, “The European, or cosmopolitan, dimension in Hume’s science of
politics,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1978): 57–60; John Robert-
son, “Universal monarchy and the liberties of Europe: David Hume’s critique of an
English Whig doctrine,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe,
ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 349–73. On “constitutional
reason of state” see, in conjunction with Duncan Kelly’s contribution to this volume,
Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Reason of State: The Survival of the Constitutional Order
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1957).
European history with the French monarchy as its archetype: a histori-

ography that it exported as a model for Prussia.85
In his anonymous review of the Anti-Machiavel, Voltaire claimed that its

vision of politics was “applicable to all the governments of Europe.” In
Prussia the Anti-Machiavel did in fact become a touchstone for debates
about the nature of monarchical government and political economy,
and it remained one into the nineteenth century. For Jacob Friedrich
Bielfeld and Thomas Abbt in the 1750s and 1760s, for example,
The Anti-Machiavel continued to represent an attractive alternative to
the theory of monarchy put forward in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of
the Laws (1748): though Montesquieu also famously proclaimed the
eclipse of Machiavellism, and described a fundamental affinity between
monarchy and a political economy based on luxury, he also insisted
that monarchies required a system of ranks and seemed to deny that
the patriotism of a republican citizen could be matched by the subject
of a monarchy. Though Frederick himself had abandoned his bid to
sideline the nobility, Bielfeld and Abbt appealed to the Anti-Machiavel
in order to defend a vision of what d’Argenson had called “democratic
monarchy.”86
What made the Anti-Machiavel particularly controversial, however,
was the vision of Europe and of the European balance of power that
it articulated. As J.G.A. Pocock has shown, Voltaire’s image of “a great
republic divided into many states” was embedded in an “Enlightened
narrative” whose premise was that Europe was no longer haunted by the
specter of “universal monarchy” and that international politics since the
Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 had transcended the confrontation between
85 “He that will look into the history of England . . . ” Locke, Two Treatises of Government,
377 (sect. 165). One figure who may have had a part in this historiographical shift was
the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, a personal friend of Locke’s (and a correspondent of
Fénelon’s) whose history of the French monarchy was much admired by Voltaire. On
Dubos see Thomas Kaiser, “The Abbé Dubos and the historical defense of the French
monarchy in early eighteenth-century France,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Cen-
tury 267 (1989): 77–102; Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, chap. 2; Dan Edelstein, The
Enlightenment: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
86 On these debates see Eva Piirimäe, “Thomas Abbt’s Vom Tode für das Vaterland (1761)
and the French debates on monarchical patriotism,” TRAMES: A Journal of the Human-
ities & Social Sciences 9, no. 4 (December 2005): 326–47; Eva Piirimäe, “Dying for the
Fatherland: Thomas Abbt’s theory of aesthetic patriotism,” History of European Ideas
35, no. 2 (June 2009): 194–208; Zurbuchen, “Theorizing enlightened absolutism: The
Swiss republican origins of Prussian monarchism.” A classic work remains Horst Dre-
itzel, Monarchiebegriffe in der Fürstengesellschaft: Semantik und Theorie der Einherrschaft in
Deutschland von der Reformation bis zum Vormärz (Köln: Böhlau, 1991). On Frederick’s
own readings and annotations of Montesquieu see B. Hemmerdinger, “Montesquieu et
Frédéric le Grand,” Studi Francesi 36 (1992): 505–12.
Louis XIV and the Anglo-Dutch led alliance.87 Europe was no longer
divided by a quest for continental hegemony on one side and a quest
for a maritime trading empire and control of the seas on the other.88 On
the contrary, Britain and France had locked themselves into a stable sys-
tem of treaties and commercial relations that did not exclude wars but
precluded a repetition of the historical trajectory of classical antiquity:
the consolidation of a “universal monarchy” followed by its decline and
fall. However, Pocock further observed, this post-Utrecht vision of a sta-
bilized balance of power operating according to the logic of commerce
lasted only as long as the Anglo-French compromise over the Spanish
succession. By the Seven Years’ War, it had become entangled in and
overtaken by intensified imperial rivalries far beyond the Anglo-French
core, in North America and South Asia as well as in Central Europe.89
The Anti-Machiavel embraced this post-Utrecht historiography of
the balance of power and backed it up with its Fénelonian description
of internal development as a peaceful mechanism for maintaining the
balance of power. What the Anti-Machiavel added to this Fénelonian
vision, besides linking it to a radically different political economy
that prioritized industrial rather than agricultural development, was a
proposal to extend its scope through the territorial reorganization of
Central Europe. Far from reflecting the narrow geographical limits of
Voltaire’s “Enlightened narrative,” then, the Anti-Machiavel represents
an effort to extend it into the space that later, tendentiously, came to
be called Mitteleuropa.90 To observers like d’Argenson, the key problem
with the balance of power in continental Europe was that it still revolved
to a great extent around the dynastic rivalry between the houses of
87 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon,
1737–1764 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 109–23; J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and
Religion, Vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge University Press, 1999). On
“enlightened narrative” see also Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopoli-
tan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and, more gen-
erally, Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy.
88 On the historiography of land and sea empires see also David Armitage, Foundations of
Modern International Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 3.
89 Pocock, Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 130.
90 The Anti-Machiavel therefore qualifies Pocock’s claim that “As the Enlightened Europe
of Utrecht was a construct of France and the Maritime Powers, so its scheme of history
was both Latin and Atlantic, with little room for German history.” Pocock, Enlight-
enments of Edward Gibbon, 111–12. For a projection of this claim into the nineteenth
century see J.G.A. Pocock, “Enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, revolution and
counter-revolution: a Eurosceptical enquiry,” History of Political Thought 20(1999):
126–39. Contrast the engagement with the maritime world described in Alison Frank,
“Continental and maritime empires in an age of global commerce,” East European Pol-
itics & Societies 25, no. 4 (2011): 779–84. For the tendentious view of a Mitteleuropa
set apart from the economic world of the maritime powers see Friedrich Naumann,
Mitteleuropa (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1916).
Bourbon and Habsburg – an arrangement that seemed too outdated

to serve as the framework for an enlightened politics of reason of state.
The relative backwardness of the Empire and the Habsburg dominions
ensured that so long as the balance remained in its current form, it
could not be governed by peaceful aggrandizement through commercial
development alone. Nor was the Empire equipped with the resources
needed to prevent it from falling under the sway of the German clients
of a foreign power (in particular, d’Argenson and others were saying in
the 1730s, of Britain). In short, the political circumstances and interests
of the Habsburgs, Emperors over the monstrously decentralized and
fragmented Holy Roman Empire, were unlike those of the kind of prince
described by Frederick and Voltaire. An increasingly powerful faction
at the French court, centered around figures like the Duc de Richelieu
and the Comte de Belle-Isle, argued that a war directed by France
was the only way to stabilize the political landscape of Germany.91 To
them, the long-anticipated death of Emperor Charles VI in 1740, and
the contested succession of his daughter Maria Theresa, presented the
opportunity to transform Germany and bring the European balance
of power up to date with eighteenth-century realities. According to
d’Argenson, who rehearsed this scenario several times, the goal of such
a war was not to aggrandize France itself, but to end the obstructive
influence of the Habsburgs and restructure the territory of the Empire:
“To chase the new House of Austria out of Europe and send it back to
Hungary, to make us the distributors of its hereditary states for a new
division that equalized the possessions of the third part of Europe, and
to take nothing for us.”92 Following this plan “involves no less than exe-
cuting the famous plan of Henry IV which is discussed in the Mémoires
de Sully” – the legendary peace plan described by the Duc de Sully
which Saint Pierre had claimed as the inspiration of his own writings on
“perpetual peace.” In this manner, d’Argenson claimed, France would
be able to bring about the pacification of Europe, achieving the aims
of Saint-Pierre’s system of international arbitration singlehandedly.93
91 See François Labbé, “La rêve irénique du marquis de la Tierce: Franc-Maçonnerie,

lumières, et projets de paix perpétuelle dans le cadre du Saint-Empire sous le règne
de Charles VII (1741–45),” Francia 18, no. 2 (1991): 47–69; Peter Robert Campbell,
Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London: Routledge, 1996), 156–76.
92 René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson,
ed. E.J.B. Rathery, vol. 4 (Paris: Mme V. Jules Renouard, 1862), 223. Cited in Labbé,
“La rêve irénique,” 53. The passage cited appears to vary in different published editions
of d’Argenson’s journal: in some versions, for example, Austria is to be chased out of
Germany, not Europe.
93 René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, Journal et mémoires du marquis d’Argenson,
ed. E.J.B. Rathery, vol. 1 (Paris: Mme V. Jules Renouard, 1859), 371. See also Édouard
The unnecessary wars of succession caused by the present dynastic

confusion of Germany would be eliminated, and the “tyrannical com-
merce” of the English could be confronted by the rest of Europe.94 The
result would be the transformation of Central Europe into economically
viable, politically centralized, modern states capable of participating in
a more stable and peaceful form of a balance of power, one that was
disentangled from the complicated problems of dynastic politics.
This political context suggests a reading of Frederick’s Anti-Machiavel
as an overture to pro-war factions at the French court, and perhaps as
an offer to serve as a client whose enlarged and consolidated kingdom
of Prussia would help France liberate Germany from Habsburg domi-
nation, preserve it from British influence, and extend the post-Utrecht
order eastwards into central Europe.95 From this perspective, Freder-
ick’s insinuations that the petty princes of Germany – modern examples
of the “hermaphrodite” sovereigns of Machiavelli’s day – had no place
in modern politics take on added meaning: in his Réfutation he explic-
itly counseled them to abandon their miniature armies and pretensions
to power and opt instead “to figure in the world only as well-to-do pri-
vate individuals.”96 Frederick’s commentary on Machiavelli’s principles
of conquest is also instructive in light of the French aspirations to reor-
ganize Germany by military means: he claimed that a ruler did not need
to reside in the states he had conquered, as Machiavelli had advised, and
that it was not necessary to kill vanquished former princes. In a similar
vein, colonies were not necessary to preserve conquests; the best strat-
egy was to garrison troops in the new cities and to ensure that they were
well-disciplined enough not to impose on the local population.97
The Anti-Machiavel expanded Voltaire’s revision of the Fénelonian
ideal of monarchy into a vision of a stabilized European order, and pro-
jected that vision into central Europe. The tensions in this enterprise,
Goumy, Étude sur la vie et les écrits de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre (Paris: P.A. Bourdier, 1859),
60–2.
94 René-Louis de Voyer marquis d’Argenson, Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et
présent de la France (Amsterdam, 1765), 323–5.
95 Frederick had already made such an overture to the French: in 1734, when his father
fell gravely ill during the Polish succession crisis, Frederick secretly offered his ser-
vices as a “Gustavus Adolphus or Charles XII.” See Ernest Lavisse, Le Grand Frédéric
avant l’avènement (Paris: Hachette, 1893), 327–8. On the recurrence of this idea dur-
ing the Napoleonic Wars see Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual
Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton University Press, 2011),
chap. 2.
96 Frederick of Prussia, “Réfutation du Prince de Machiavel,” 313. I have borrowed the
translation of this remark from The Refutation of Machiavelli’s Prince: Or, Anti-Machiavel,
ed. Paul Sonnino (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 77.
97 Frederick of Prussia, “Réfutation du Prince de Machiavel,” 277–80.
of conquering in the “spirit commerce,” are reflected in the negotiations

between author and editor about publishing the Anti-Machiavel. What-
ever his other ambitions at the time (they were many, and seem to have
included the prospect of heading Frederick’s new academy of sciences),
Voltaire does seem to have entertained the hope that the publication of
Frederick’s avowal of an anti-Machiavellian politics would act as a con-
straint both on Frederick and on other sovereigns – particularly once
Frederick had acknowledged his authorship. Voltaire expressed this hope
in a verse he planned to add to the edition of The Henriade that Frederick
had intended to publish (it never appeared, though Frederick’s preface
later did, and Voltaire withdrew the verse):
And you, young hero, always guided by [Truth]
Disciple of Trajan, rival to Marcus Aurelius
Citizen on the throne, and model of the North
Be my dearest aid, be my greatest support
Let the other kings, those false terrestrial gods
Bring deception or war everywhere:
They ravage the world, and you must enlighten it.”98
For his part, Frederick did not commit himself to Voltaire’s publica-
tion plan for the Anti-Machiavel, even after he had sent Voltaire the
manuscript, and pursued other options in England; he only left Voltaire
in charge of the project when his succession to the throne made it impos-
sible for him to remain involved any longer.99
The tensions inherent in the French project to reorganize Germany
by force are also reflected in Voltaire’s editorial efforts to temper Fred-
erick’s more expansive remarks about just war. Frederick’s manuscript
dismissed wars of personal ambition and wars of religion as unneces-
sary and therefore unjust. However, while the circumstances of modern
monarchies had reduced the incidence of truly unavoidable necessity,
Frederick stressed that they did not entirely eliminate it:
The world would be happy if there were no other means than that of negotiation
for maintaining justice and for re-establishing peace and good harmony among
nations. Arguments would be employed instead of arms, and people would only
debate each other, instead of slaughtering each other; an unfortunate neces-
sity obliges princes to have recourse to a much more cruel means. There are
occasions when it is necessary to defend by arms the liberty of a people whose
oppression is unjustly sought, when it is necessary to obtain by violence that
which iniquity refuses to mildness, when sovereigns must commit the cause of
98 Voltaire, La Henriade, 366.

99 For a guide to the resulting proliferation of authorized and unauthorized editions, see
Bahner and Bergmann, “Introduction,” 10–13.
their nation to the fate of battles. It is in such cases that the paradox becomes
true, that a good war yields and affirms a good peace.100
Frederick’s typology of just wars extended well beyond defensive wars.
It also included “preventive wars” to maintain the balance of power,
wars undertaken to meet treaty obligations, and more generally, wars
to “repulse usurpers, maintain legitimate rights, guarantee the liberty of
the world, and avoid the oppression and violence of the ambitious.”101
Voltaire significantly downplayed Frederick’s discussion of such wars,
which he labeled guerres d’intérêt: he omitted Frederick’s assertion that
“Since there is no tribunal superior to kings and no magistrate in the
world to judge their disputes, combat decides their rights and judges
the validity of their reasons,” and that such wars were a “sacred and
indispensible” means of securing justice.102 Finally, Voltaire also omit-
ted Frederick’s argument that there was a place for conquest in anti-
Machiavellian politics so long as it was justly undertaken and in the
interests of the people rather than the product of ambition.103
These discrepancies suggest more than an impending rift between a
secretly bellicose young prince and a well-meaning philosopher. Freder-
ick’s broader endorsement of wars in the public interest, and Voltaire’s
efforts to tone it down, also reflect the fault lines between two closely
related but competing visions of the future of Europe after the Treaty
of Utrecht. These fault lines were exposed in the controversy gener-
ated by two pamphlets responding to the Anti-Machiavel, authored in
1741 by the 82-year-old Abbé de Saint-Pierre. In his commentary Saint-
Pierre fulsomely endorsed the moral discourse of the Anti-Machiavel
and echoed its distinctions between true and false glory, between the
spirit of conquest and the spirit of commerce.104 Saint-Pierre’s own
views on monarchical government and political economy were also quite
close to Voltaire’s and Frederick’s.105 However, Saint-Pierre rejected the
notion that realigning Germany territorially and modernizing it politi-
cally would reduce instability sufficiently to ensure that the balance of
power could operate primarily through trade rather than military action.
Saint-Pierre had always maintained that the Utrecht settlement would
101 Frederick of Prussia, “Réfutation du Prince de Machiavel,” 402–3.
102 Compare Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 256; Frederick of Prussia, “Réfutation du Prince
de Machiavel,” 402.
103 Frederick of Prussia, “Réfutation du Prince de Machiavel,” 277.
104 Charles Irénée de Castel de Saint-Pierre, Reflexions sur l’antimachiavel de 1740 (Rotter-
dam: J. D. Beman, 1741), 22–4, 47–8.
105 See for example his favorable response to Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII: Charles
Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre to Voltaire, 2 October 1739, in Voltaire, Correspondence
and Related Documents, Oeuvres Complètes 91, D2085.
remain unfinished without the creation of a permanent and comprehen-

sive federation of states, formed to deter aggression and ensure access to
international markets. In Saint-Pierre’s view, in other words, the image
of Europe as a “great republic of states” had to become less like a
metaphor and much more like an actual republic with a federal gov-
ernment. Only the irresistible military force controlled by this federal
republic of sovereigns could ensure that territorial expansion was no
longer an option for particular princes; as a result they would have no
choice but to pursue “the other kinds of aggrandizement, which may
result from good policy, the perfection of laws, useful establishments,
the progress of arts and sciences, the augmentation of commerce.”106
Though he had, and has long retained, a reputation for utopianism and
irrepressible optimism, at the end of his life it was Saint-Pierre who
accused Voltaire and Frederick of entertaining an unrealistic view of the
balance of power. “The way of wars is the great obstacle to the progress
of universal reason,” he wrote. “It is clear that as long as the infancy
of the world endures, that is to say, as long as war or the superiority of
force, skill, and treachery, remain the means for deciding the differences
between sovereigns, there is hardly any point in hoping for improvement
through political proofs in order to augment human happiness.”107 The
only way Frederick could redeem the Anti-Machiavel and prove he was
not another conqueror in pursuit of false glory like Charles XII of Swe-
den, Saint-Pierre lectured, was to admit that his invasion had been a
youthful mistake.108
Though he shared a great deal with Voltaire intellectually, the publi-
cation of the Anti-Machiavel found Saint-Pierre in rather different com-
pany politically. A tireless promoter of his peace plan, Saint-Pierre had
seized an opportunity in January 1740 to urge it once again upon the
aging Cardinal Fleury, whose control over French policy was fading
together with his hopes of keeping France out of the escalating Anglo-
Spanish colonial war.109 Saint-Pierre then travelled to Berlin following
Frederick’s coronation in May, with an introduction from the Saxon
minister Count Brühl to Count Manteuffel, the Saxon ambassador in
106 Charles Irénée de Castel de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe,
ed. Simone Goyard-Fabre (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 32–3.
107 Saint-Pierre, Reflexions sur l’antimachiavel, 62.
108 Saint-Pierre, Reflexions sur l’antimachiavel, 28.
109 On Saint-Pierre’s exchange with Fleury see Goumy, Étude sur la vie et les écrits de
l’abbé de Saint-Pierre, 67–9. Saint-Pierre also contributed a proposal for Franco-Dutch
mediation in the Anglo-Spanish conflict, as a vehicle for introducing his scheme
of permanent arbitration. His “Idées pacifiques sur les demelez entre l’Espagne et
l’Angleterre” was published by Antoine-Augustin Bruzen de la Martinière in État poli-
tique de l’Europe, vol. 3 (La Haye: Adrien Moetjens, 1740).
Berlin.110 Manteuffel had been a fixture of Berlin’s literary establish-

ment in the 1730s and helped engineer Frederick’s reinstatement of the
exiled philosopher Christian Wolff. Manteuffel represented a network of
Wolffians competing for influence over Frederick against Voltaire and
his compatriots: their efforts even produced a Wolffian counterpart to
the Anti-Machiavel, a French popularization of Wolff’s discussion of vir-
tuous kingship, dedicated to Frederick and published immediately fol-
lowing his coronation.111 The lines between these philosophical camps
were not as rigidly drawn as Voltaire’s famously outspoken skepticism
about metaphysics would suggest: the edition of Wolff’s lecture took
its epigraph from Voltaire’s The Henriade, and Frederick tried unsuc-
cessfully to recruit both Voltaire and Wolff for his new Academy of
Sciences.112 In the end, though, the rivalry between Voltaire and Man-
teuffel merged with diplomatic intrigue between France and Saxony,
and collided with Frederick’s invasion plans. Manteuffel was summar-
ily expelled from Berlin in November 1740, and Saint-Pierre was not
treated more delicately. In April 1741, as the Comte de Belle-Isle made
his way across Germany to negotiate an offensive alliance with Fred-
erick, Saint-Pierre amplified his criticism in a second pamphlet, which
deemed the Anti-Machiavel the work of a “political enigma”: it openly
accused Frederick of hypocrisy, claiming that his conquest of Silesia rep-
resented the very kind of Machiavellan politics he had written against.
The only way for Frederick to vindicate the claims of his treatise, Saint-
Pierre insisted, was to submit his claim to Silesia to international arbi-
tration. A year later, as the war dragged on in Moravia and pressure on
Frederick to submit to British diplomatic mediation increased, Freder-
ick noted to Voltaire that Saint-Pierre “honors me with his correspon-
dence” and had sent him a “bel ouvrage” – presumably l’Enigme poli-
tique. Frederick immediately commissioned a response from Jean Henri
Samuel Formey, the Prussian-born Huguenot who later became the
perpetual secretary of the new Berlin Academy. Formey’s pamphlet,
L’Anti St. Pierre, ou refutation de l’enigme politique de l’Abbé de St. Pierre,
110 Johann Gustav Droysen, “Über die Schrift Anti-St. Pierre und deren Verfasser,” in
Monatsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Aus dem
Jahre 1878 (Berlin, 1879), 713.
111 Christian Wolff, Le philosophe-roi et le roi-philosophe: La théorie des affaires publiques, pièces
tirèes des oeuvres de Monsieur Chr. Wolff (Berlin, 1740). On Manteuffel and his role see
Johannes Bronisch, Der Mäzen der Aufklärung: Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel und das
Netzwerk des Wolffianismus (Walter de Gruyter, 2010).
112 Adolf von Harnack, Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
zu Berlin (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1900), 1:249–54. See also James E. McClellan,
Science Reorganized: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), 73.
appeared in June 1742 and ridiculed its elderly target, notably employing
allusions to Fénelon’s Telemachus to cast Saint-Pierre as an impractical
dreamer.113 Saint-Pierre’s many volumes were good only for battles of
books or lecterns, Formey charged, whereas the Anti-Machiavel was des-
tined for immortality.114
Voltaire’s response to Saint-Pierre’s challenge was less clear cut. His
taste for jokes at the good Abbé’s expense is well known.115 How-
ever, his correspondence with Frederick after the publication of the
Anti-Machiavel expresses French dissatisfaction with the course of the
war and reflects the tensions that Saint-Pierre had identified. In March
1742, weeks before Frederick reported that Saint-Pierre had sent him his
Enigme politique, Voltaire wrote to Frederick mocking him as “the image
of the divinity; and a very thinking and very active image” – so active
that Voltaire professed not to know which battlefield to address the let-
ter. In an echo of the withdrawn additional verse to The Henriade that
had praised Frederick, he went on to question whether the war could
in fact yield peace and stability: “Will you ever cease, you and your fel-
low kings, to ravage this earth, which, you say, you desire so much to
render happy?” Voltaire asked. “Instead of this horrible war / Whose
blows are felt by everybody, / Why do you not address yourselves / to the
good Abbé de Saint-Pierre?” Paris was full of rumours about Belle-Isle
and Frederick, Voltaire noted, yet Saint-Pierre “would grant you every-
thing as easily as Lycurgus divided the lands of Sparta, and as easily
as equal portions would be given to monks. He would establish the fif-
teen dominions of Henry IV.”116 Perhaps fearing he had gone too far, in
subsequent letters Voltaire took pains to clarify that he held no illusions
about the practicality of Saint-Pierre’s ideas or the arbitration arrange-
ment he was advocating, and assured Frederick that “the philosopher
king knows perfectly well that which the philosopher who is not king
tries in vain to guess.”117 Shortly after Prussia’s important victory over
113 Saint-Pierre was likened to “Mentor” and “le Nestor Politique”: Jean Henri Samuel
Formey, “Anti St. Pierre, ou refutation de l’enigme politique de l’Abbé de St. Pierre,”
in Monatsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Aus
dem Jahre 1878 (Berlin, 1879), 738, 740.
114 Formey, “Anti St. Pierre,” 745.
115 See Merle Perkins, “Voltaire and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre on World Peace,” Studies in
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 18 (1961): 9–34; Patrick Riley, “The Abbé de St.
Pierre and Voltaire on Perpetual Peace in Europe,” World Affairs 137, no. 3 (1974):
186–94.
116 Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, c. 15 March 1742, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
117 Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, 15 May 1742 in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
the Austrians at Chotusitz on 17 May 1742, Voltaire told Frederick he

would be as celebrated as Louis XIV:
I think of humanity, sire, before thinking of you yourself; but after having become
an Abbé de Saint-Pierre and crying over humankind whose terror you have
become, I abandon myself to all the joy which your glory gives me. This glory
will be complete if your majesty forces the queen of Hungary to accept peace,
and the Germans to be happy. Now you are the hero of Germany, and the arbiter
of Europe. You will be its pacifier, and the prologues of our operas will only be
for you.118
Though he thereby reaffirmed his support for the war (over which the
French had rapidly lost control), Voltaire’s remarks about Saint-Pierre
are telling. The balance of power continued to operate according to the
principles of necessity and war, rather than being stabilized according
to the principles of peaceful commerce, as the Anti-Machiavel had
envisaged.
The Anti-Machiavel’s vision of this new kind of balance of power in
Central Europe remained beyond the reach of Frederick’s Prussia. Fred-
erick’s attempt to begin participating in global commerce by creating a
Prussian East Asia company in 1750 was immediately suppressed by
the British and Dutch.119 Frederick’s secret Political Testament of 1752
notoriously conceded that “Machiavelli is right”: a state surrounded by
ambitious powers would perish unless it continued to expand.120 Signif-
icantly, however, the only means of growth that Frederick went on to
discuss were conquest and succession: the Fénelonian ideal of internal
economic growth had disappeared from the picture.121 In practice, over
the course of Frederick’s reign, the aspirations articulated by the Anti-
Machiavel were largely sacrificed to the imperative of maximizing rev-
enues to support the army.122 Nonetheless, the Anti-Machiavel’s claims
about the stabilization of the continental balance of power did have an
enduring legacy. They were revived and reworked by others, including
by the Prussian subject turned Saxon diplomat Emer de Vattel in his
118 Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, 26 May 1742, in Voltaire, Correspondence, Oeuvres
119 Florian Schui, “Prussia’s trans-oceanic moment: the creation of the Prussian Asiatic
Trading Company in 1750,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 143–60.
120 Frederick of Prussia, Die politische Testamenten Friedrich’s des Grossen, ed. Gustav
Berthold Volz (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1920), 59.
121 Frederick of Prussia, Die politische Testamenten Friedrich’s des Grossen, 59.
122 T.C.W. Blanning, “Frederick the Great and Enlightened Absolutism,” in Enlightened
Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H.M. Scott,
Problems in Focus Series (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990), 265–88. For a
famous indictment leveled at the conclusion of Frederick’s reign see Honoré-Gabriel
de Riqueti de Mirabeau, Lettre remise à Frédéric-Guillaume II, Roi Regnant de Prusse, Le
jour de son Avénement au Trône (Berlin, 1787).
famous treatise The Law of Nations (1758).123 At the same time, how-
ever, Saint-Pierre’s challenge to that vision of Europe’s future continued
to carry a great deal of force.
The force of Saint-Pierre’s challenge reverberates in the reading of
the Anti-Machiavel conducted by the “Société du Comte de la Lippe,”
a reading group convened in Lausanne in the 1740s to help educate
the teenage heir of the German principality of Lippe, which recorded a
remarkable transcript of its discussions.124 In one sense the Société used
the Anti-Machiavel as it was designed, as an advice book for enlightened
princes that superseded Machiavelli’s The Prince. The spirit of the discus-
sion is captured by one participant who concluded: “The Anti-Machiavel
successfully refuted the author [i.e., Machiavelli] in saying that a prince
must be sensitive to praise; because the desire to win the esteem of men
and to acquire reputation is a powerful motive for princes to fulfill their
duties.”125 However, in limiting their interest in the book to its state-
ment of moral values, these readers were silently rejecting its politics.
The Anti-Machiavel’s vision of replacing the “hermaphrodite” sovereigns
who populated the landscape of Germany with modern monarchies on
the French model left no political future for a prince like Lippe. Tellingly,
when the Société did turn to questions of just war and the balance of
power, they were much more interested in the writings of the Abbé de
Saint-Pierre, which they discussed in detail over the course of several
sessions. Far from regarding Germany’s fragmented political landscape
as incompatible with modern commerce and in need of radical restruc-
turing, Saint-Pierre regarded the Holy Roman Empire as a prototype for
a future European Union and one of its historical antecedents; his peace
plan was premised on freezing the territorial status quo.
The most explicit and forceful restatement of Saint-Pierre’s challenge
to the Anti-Machiavel, however, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s. Rousseau
had met Saint-Pierre at the end of the latter’s life, in 1742 or 1743; in
1756 he began an arduous and frustrating effort to edit Saint-Pierre’s
123 See Isaac Nakhimovsky, “Vattel’s theory of the international order: commerce and the
balance of power in the law of nations,” History of European Ideas 33 (2007): 157–73.
On Voltaire’s sceptical response to Vattel’s treatise see Dan Edelstein, “Enlightenment
rights talk,” The Journal of Modern History 86, no. 3 (2014): 533–8.
124 Société du comte de la Lippe, “Extrait des conférences de la société de M. le Comte
de la Lippe” (Lausanne, 1742–45), Bibliothéque cantonale et universitaire Lausanne, Ms.
BCUL 2S 1386/1–2, now transcribed and published online at http://lumieres.unil.ch/
projets/5/.
125 Société du comte de la Lippe, “Assemblée XIX. Lecture du chapitre XXIII de l’Anti-
Machiavel ‘Comment il faut fuir les Flatteurs,’” in “Extrait des conférences de la
société de M. le Comte de la Lippe,” 30 March 1743, 1:215, transcribed at http://
lumieres.unil.ch/fiches/trans/534/. The remark is attributed to Lieutenant Ballival De
Bochat.
prodigious writings.126 Saint-Pierre had doubted whether European

states could be reformed and their leaders animated by the “spirit of
commerce” absent the establishment of a European Union or system of
permanent arbitration; Rousseau greatly amplified this scepticism while
also denying the availability of Saint-Pierre’s solution.127 From this
perspective, the vision of Europe articulated by the Anti-Machiavel was
an absolute travesty. Rousseau, who later defended Machiavelli’s The
Prince as “the book of republicans” and its author as “an honest man
and a good citizen,”128 identified Frederick as the real Machiavellian in
a 1758 letter:
I can neither esteem nor love a man without principles, who tramples every law
of nations, who does not believe in virtue, but regards it as a decoy for toying
with idiots and who began his Machiavellism by refuting Machiavelli. I confess
that I would always like to keep the diameter of the earth between me and that
man, I think I could sleep more comfortably there.129
Rousseau later made this condemnation public, and cast the Anti-
Machiavel as the antithesis of Fénelon’s ideals, in his best-selling novel
Emile, or On Education (1762). At the very end of the novel, it is finally
time for Emile to exit his pedagogical cocoon and learn about the real
world. Following Rousseau’s exposition of his political philosophy, “the
true principles of political right” of the Social Contract, Emile’s tutor
takes him on a tour of Europe, with Fénelon’s book as his guide:
Then I make him read Telemachus while proceeding on his journey. We seek the
happy Salente and the good Idomeneus, made wise by dint of misfortunes. On
our way we find many Protesilauses, and no Philocles. Adrastus, king of the
Dorians, is also not impossible to find. But let us leave the readers to imagine
our travels – or to make them in our stead with Telemachus in hand; and let us
126 On Rousseau’s engagement with Saint-Pierre see Olaf Asbach, Die Zähmung der
Leviathane: die Idee einer Rechtsordnung zwischen Staaten bei Abbe de Saint-Pierre und
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Principes du droit de la guerre: écrits sur la paix perpétuelle, ed. Blaise Bachofen and Céline
Spector (Paris: J. Vrin, 2008).
127 Rousseau’s scepticism in this regard is explored in Richard Tuck, The Rights of War
and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford
University Press, 1999), chap. 7; Béla Kapossy, Iselin Contra Rousseau: Sociable Patrio-
tism and the History of Mankind (Basel: Schwabe, 2006); Sonenscher, Before the Deluge,
chap. 3; Richard Whatmore, Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in
the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), chap. 3.
128 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor
Gourevitch (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 95.
129 Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Toussaint-Pierre Lenieps, 4 December 1758, in Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Correspondance complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. R.A. Leigh, vol. 5
(Geneva: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1967), no. 748.
not suggest to them invidious comparisons that the author himself dismisses or
makes in spite of himself.130
As contemporaries well understood, and as Rousseau later spelled out in

his Confessions, “invidious comparisons” were precisely the point here:
the remark about Adrastus was a reference to Frederick.131 In Fénelon’s
thinly-veiled allegory, Idomeneus’s Salente stood for a reformed France.
Idomeneus, unlike Louis XIV, was persuaded to abandon his misguided
quest for false glory through conquest; he then joined the alliance that
had formed to resist his unjust ambitions (an alliance that promised to
become the permanent foundation of international peace) in order to
combat the real menace to all, namely Adrastus, King of the Dorians,
“who despised the gods, and sought only to deceive mankind.”132 In
Emile, Rousseau rounded off his attack on the Anti-Machiavel and its
author by implicating its editor as well. “Besides,” concluded Rousseau,
echoing Voltaire’s review of the Anti-Machiavel while accusing him of
hubris, “since Emile is not a king and I am not a god, we do not fret
about not being able to imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good that
they did for men.”133
The Anti-Machiavel no longer figures in discussions of Europe’s des-

tiny or in debates about the nature of a stabilized international order,
though Frederick makes a brief appearance in John Rawls’s Law of
Peoples (1999), where he serves as an archetype for Machiavellism.134
In the nineteenth-century, however, Frederick could still represent
the possibility of superseding Machiavelli’s politics. For the prominent
Swiss international lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli, for example, it was
important to establish that the emergence of modern political life was
not to be traced back to 1789 or 1688, nor to the Renaissance or the Ref-
ormation, but rather to 1740, because Frederick’s reign represented the
taming of powerful post-Renaissance monarchies like Louis XIV’s and
their transition into constitutional regimes that could coexist in a stable
international order.135 Of course, not all nineteenth-century writers on
international law were so sanguine about Frederick’s legacy. But even
Henry Wheaton, the American diplomat who served as Ambassador to
130 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Alan Bloom (Basic Books,
1979), 467; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and
Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 4:849.
131 Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 1:593. 132 Fénelon, Telemachus, 214.
133 Rousseau, Emile, 467; Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 4:849.
134 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 26.
135 Johann Caspar Bluntschli, The Theory of the State, trans. P.E. Matheson, R. Lodge, and
D.G. Ritchie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 55.
Berlin in the 1830s and 1840s, retained a fine sense of the nature of the
ambition that animated the Anti-Machiavel, even as he named Frederick
a warmonger. Voltaire and Rousseau alike would have recognized the
work that he glossed in his celebrated History of the Law of Nations in
Europe and America (1845):
These sentiments, worthy of a Fenelon in the benevolent spirit they breathe, and
at the same time not too refined to be capable of practical application by the
ruler of a state, did not prevent Frederick from reviving an antiquated claim of
the house of Brandenburg to several duchies in Silesia [ . . . ] His real motives are
avowed in his private correspondence, which discloses the love of glory, ambi-
tion, the desire of employing the army and treasure his father had bequeathed
to him, in the aggrandizement of Prussia, as the secret springs by which he was
moved.136
The Anti-Machiavel was animated by the prospect of stabilizing the
balance of power, by a vision of independent states capable of substi-
tuting commerce for war without relying on the degree of consensus
required to establish an institutional order above themselves. Whenever
the latter has appeared beyond reach, visions of this sort have tended
to return to the fore, however incisively the tensions they harbor have
been exposed by the likes of Saint-Pierre or Rousseau. It is overly hasty,
therefore, to claim that “it was Adam Smith [ . . . ] and not Frederick II,
who with The Wealth of Nations wrote the true Anti-Machiavel of the
Age of Enlightenment.”137 In fact, as Istvan Hont recognized, the
Anti-Machiavel and The Wealth of Nations shared a good deal in common
in their respective efforts to rework the idea of reason of state for an age
of commerce that was something less than an age of perpetual peace:
not to resolve the fundamental tension between the way of commerce
and the way of war, but to determine how, and how far, the politics of
necessity could be curbed by commerce.138
136 Henry Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America: From the Earliest
Times to the Treaty of Washington, 1842 (Gould, Bank & Company, 1845), 170.
137 Michel Senellart, “La Raison d’Etat Antimachiavelienne,” in La Raison d’Etat: Poli-
tique et Rationalité, ed. Christian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynié (Paris: Presses univer-
sitaires de France, 1992), 32.
138 Istvan Hont, “Introduction,” in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the
Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 8,
22–30, 78–81.

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2 The enlightened prince and the future

Frederick of Prussia’s joint venture with Voltaire, the Anti-Machiavel of

that Frederick undertook in 1739 with Voltaire’s encouragement and

distinctively modern form of monarchical government.11 The remainder

“Anti-Machiavellianism” is a notoriously diffuse category. For Voltaire,

The pleasant and moral novel Telemachus is a tissue of incredible adventures,

for Amelot’s politics was widely shared by contemporaries such as the

28 Foisneau, “Le machiavélisme acceptable,” 200–1.

In line with Fleury’s attack on Machiavelli, Fénelon’s Telemachus rede-

in hand with the emergence of a more stable and peaceful European

The Anti-Machiavel was the product of a re-examination of Fénelon’s

41 Bahner and Bergmann, “Introduction,” 4.

Voltaire even asked d’Argenson if he could share the closely guarded

this conception of virtue as “practical virtue,” and the text presented

rehabilitate the legacy of Colbert: in The Henriade, Henry IV – the image

a letter to Frederick, were “nothing but wretches with a poor sense of

and no longer faced any meaningful opposition from the parlements.63

establish’d that wise Government, where the Prince is all-powerful to

he would be entirely disoriented.”73 Above all, Frederick claimed, the

73 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 161.

become obsolete: “The princes of whom Machiavel speaks,” Frederick

78 Voltaire, Anti-Machiavel, 164.

interests of their peoples within a more stable and peaceful international

European history with the French monarchy as its archetype: a histori-

In his anonymous review of the Anti-Machiavel, Voltaire claimed that its

Bourbon and Habsburg – an arrangement that seemed too outdated

91 See François Labbé, “La rêve irénique du marquis de la Tierce: Franc-Maçonnerie,

The unnecessary wars of succession caused by the present dynastic

of conquering in the “spirit commerce,” are reflected in the negotiations

98 Voltaire, La Henriade, 366.

remain unfinished without the creation of a permanent and comprehen-

Berlin.110 Manteuffel had been a fixture of Berlin’s literary establish-

the Austrians at Chotusitz on 17 May 1742, Voltaire told Frederick he

prodigious writings.126 Saint-Pierre had doubted whether European

As contemporaries well understood, and as Rousseau later spelled out in

The Anti-Machiavel no longer figures in discussions of Europe’s des-

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