For more than two hundred years Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens has attracted the attention of historians, jurists and political philosophers. The uninterrupted discussion and success of this work have been accompanied by lively debates about the originality and relevance of its author’s ideas about crucial issues such as the position of the individual in international law, the right of war, the question of peace, republicanism, and the nature of the international order. The Droit des gens, originally published in Neuchâtel in 1758, has proved to be a text capable of crossing historical contexts and geographical space, in so doing becoming a bestseller of international law.
During this long journey through time, Vattel’s treatise has, however, also been subjected to many processes that from a historical and interpretative point of view have distorted its meaning, processes that reflect the transformation of cultural contexts and changes in international geopolitics. The most significant is that after being used in the eighteenth century as a political and philosophical text invaluable to reform programmes and constitutional development, in the nineteenth century, after the Congress of Vienna, it began instead to be used as a simple yet dominant manual for studies on international law. Another important consequence of these processes has been the fact that compared to the period in which the Droit des gens played a part in political debates within states, in the past century interest in Vattel has turned almost completely towards his contribution to the analysis of interstate relations.
However, the readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries perceived many more points of interest in the Droit des gens, and these aroused heated debates, attracted praise and criticism, and generated continuous re-editions, translations and adaptations of the text. This book offers a historical analysis that aims to show the deeper reasons for the success of Vattel’s work, to understand what contemporaries saw and found in it and how it was able to make a contribution to the transformation of states and society, in Europe and across the Atlantic, both before and after the French Revolution.
To achieve this result, it is necessary to begin by shifting attention from the traditional vantage points from which Vattel’s work has been considered.1 The Droit des gens has in fact for a long time been analysed through internal readings of the text, in other words through philosophical or philological analyses aimed at studying the internal coherence of Vattel’s thought in relation to the great past masters of natural law, and in so doing identifying his sources or his expositive and interpretative strategy. This, however, is only one of the possible approaches to the Droit des gens, and one that does not fully explain the reasons for the work’s success, or the strategies for reading and receiving the text. If we turn our attention instead from the history of philosophy and law towards cultural and intellectual history, it is possible to study the legacy of the Droit des gens through the centuries, in particular in the second half of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth, including from the perspective of the circulation of thought. This book also proposes a subsequent goal, namely that of turning attention further towards the strategies of appropriation of the text, and of the cultural ‘consumption’ of the Droit des gens, to understand not only how it was read, but also how it was used, adapted and reworked by those drafting constitutions, formulating reform projects and fighting everyday battles for freedom in different geographical, linguistic and social contexts within ancien régime Europe.
Also hidden behind these phenomena is the paradox of the asymmetrical relationship between the fame of the author and the way his work found success for reasons unconnected to his objectives. Furthermore, Vattel himself appealed on the one hand to an idea of a natural law that was universal and eternal, and which for this very reason was also the source of guarantees, and on the other hand was convinced that the great works of the previous century were no longer sufficient to explain the great transformation of commerce and society of his time. The result was a work that did its utmost to stick to principles and characteristics of generality and abstractness, with very few references to contemporary affairs so as not to risk becoming a victim of contingent situations and debates. This characteristic, which could have been a strength but also a weakness of the Droit des gens, was, however, destined to be quickly overtaken by events.
As documented by letters exchanged with the French censors, Vattel had tenaciously defended his work plan, which he developed by interweaving general principles with case studies carefully selected from history. Yet, almost immediately the tendency to use and bend the text to serve specific political and geographical situations became apparent. Even the early pirate edition published in Leyden in the same year as the first official one, 1758, revealed a readiness to insert in the text examples considered dangerous by the censors and by Vattel himself, which dragged the interpretation and use of the Droit des gens towards the specific interests of certain states.2 To a greater or lesser extent, as we shall see in the pages of this book, this trend has continued to manifest itself constantly right up to the present day, through the strategies of translation and appropriation of the text, through the reorganisation of its contents in accordance with the tastes of editors, through summaries and epitomes used for study or work purposes in governmental offices, and through critiques and proposals for the correction and reconstruction of the work. The paradox of the Droit des gens’s success is linked precisely to these two opposing characteristics: on the one hand, Vattel’s readers could find in it concepts, affirmations and general principles of natural law that were mostly well-known and therefore reassuring, and on the other, thanks to the way they were formulated, they could be immediately transferred into their own political contexts, which were those of nations in ever-increasing competition with each other.
Good Government: A Renaissance Paradigm for the Eighteenth-Century State System
All this happened, however, when Vattel could no longer communicate with his readers, because death had taken him in 1767, less than ten years after the publication of the work. The story of the Droit des gens thereupon became—as often happens in cultural history—also the story of a work without an author, in other words one of readings and interpretations beyond his intentions. Consequently, it is particularly important to try to understand what the historical situations were that made the use of the Droit des gens constantly relevant during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
To this end it is necessary to return to the context in which Vattel wrote his work, that of mid-eighteenth-century Europe. As is recalled in the first chapter, the 1713 Peace of Utrecht and the 1718 Peace of Passarowitz had profoundly changed the international landscape, both through religious pacification and through the recognition that competition between states was by then more and more frequently of a commercial nature, rather than purely military. In consequence of this, the ancient moral code of conduct between states was gradually replaced by a system of legal norms based on the political will of the princes and nations. It was therefore necessary to look for the theoretical bases of this new system, and the books of the past no longer provided satisfactory answers, nor did they use a language suited to the new times.
Vattel was aware of these changes and above all of the fact that to understand the new international order it was necessary to start from the point of departure, to understand the nature and function of the state, and to use natural law to understand the mechanisms through which political relationships between single individuals and between the various communities of people are formed. He dedicated the first part of his work to this research, giving a long and detailed explanation of what exactly was meant by states, nations and constitutions, and also what was meant by sovereignty. The first book, in short, appeared more as a treatise on constitutional philosophy, which explained what the minimum criteria should be for achieving formal equality between states and which, in this sense, laid the foundations for modern constitutionalism.3 Only in the second part of the work did Vattel focus on themes that today are considered more typical of international law, in other words relations between states, the international system, treaties and their interpretation, and the politics of alliances and the remedies to apply when these failed.
As much of this research illustrates, public attention in the eighteenth century was primarily directed towards the first part of the Droit des gens. This is surprising, and it begs the question of what people found so interesting in those pages or, rather, why Vattel’s investigation into the constitution of the states seemed so important. The second chapter of this book focuses on the fact that running through Vattel’s work is a repeated reference to a phrase corresponding to a key concept of the modern age, which is that of ‘good government,’ understood as the ability of those who govern to adopt effective laws to avoid clashes and build consensus within the community. By using this concept, which became a key point in his plan for a constitutional state and for the regulation of international relations, Vattel managed to bridge the great cultural, philosophical and political debate of modern Europe on the goodness of the laws and the qualities of a good legislat...