The Legacy of Vattel's Droit des gens

Koen Stapelbroek, Antonio Trampus, Koen Stapelbroek, Antonio Trampus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030238377
• eBook ISBN: 9783030238384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This edited collection offers a reassessment of the complicated legacy of Emer de Vattel's Droit des gens, first published in 1758. One of the most influential books in the history of international law and a major reference point in the fields of international relations theory and political thought, this book played a role in the transformation of diplomatic practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But how did Vattel's legacy take shape? The volume argues that the enduring relevance of Vattel's Droit des gens cannot be explained in terms of doctrines and academic disciplines that formed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, the chapters show how the complex reception of this book took shape historically and why it had such a wide geographical and disciplinary appeal until well into the twentieth century. The volume charts its reception through translations, intellectual, ideological and political appropriations as well as new practical usages, and explores Vattel's discursive and conceptual innovations. Drawing on a wide range of sources, such as archive memoranda and diplomatic correspondences, this volume offers new perspectives on the book's historical contexts and cultures of reception, moving past the usual approach of focusing primarily on the text. In doing so, this edited collection forms a major contribution to this new direction of study in intellectual history in general and Vattel's Droit des gens in particular.

Part IVattel’s Ideas and His Context

© The Author(s) 2019

K. Stapelbroek, A. Trampus (eds.)The Legacy of Vattel's Droit des genshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23838-4_2

Begin Abstract

Vattel as an Intermediary Between the Economic Society of Berne and Poland

Radoslaw Szymanski¹

(1)

University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Radoslaw Szymanski

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

Vattel’s three-year stay in Poland (1760–1763) remains a relatively unknown episode in his life. Although some facts from this time in his life have been mentioned by scholars who worked on the intellectual exchanges between Poland and Switzerland in the eighteenth century, the significance of his stay in Warsaw has never been fully established.¹ In terms of Vattel’s impact on Warsaw intellectual circles with which he came into contact, his influence on late eighteenth-century Polish political thought remains understood only partially. Indeed, the most important survey of writings on the subject of the law of nations in Enlightenment Poland barely mentions the fact that he lived in Poland.² While recognising his centrality to the late eighteenth-century Polish discourse on the law of nations, its author featured Vattel as either a foil or as one of several distant, “Western” influences on Polish thinkers. Conversely, the handful of facts pertaining to his stay in Warsaw which have been established by Polish and Swiss historians have not yet been fully brought to bear on his general outlook. As we shall see below, his adamant advocacy of the milieu associated with the nascent Economic Society of Bern, and its French secretary Elie Bertrand (1713–1797) in particular, reinforces the image of Vattel emerging from a number of recent studies. That of a thinker deeply exercised by the questions related to domestic and economic conditions necessary to secure peaceful coexistence between sovereign states, the less visible foundation of a theory of international relations for which he had become famous.³ Consequently, in the present study I shall analyse two aspects related to Vattel’s stay in Poland.

Firstly, I will recount the story of his involvement with one of Poland’s most influential families of that period, the Mniszechs, and in particular his role in organising an ambitious educational project for the young members of the family, poised to become important statesmen in the near future. The fact that Vattel invested energy in securing the position of tutor to the counts for Bertrand, who later put Vattel’s writing at the centre-stage of the curriculum was not a mere quid pro quo, but rather, as we shall argue, a mark of a consistent, deliberate project orchestrated by the two. We shall then briefly discuss the subsequent trajectory of this educational project that Vattel had set in motion, at the time when he no longer had any direct involvement in it. The rich and practically oriented curriculum pursued by his friend and associate Bertrand can plausibly be thought of as inspired in part by Vattel’s thought. Even more consequentially, Bertrand and his students launched an ambitious prize-essay competition on the “spirit of legislation which could encourage growth of agriculture, commerce, arts and industry”. We shall attempt to demonstrate the extent to which this competition can be construed as complementary to Vattel’s best-known work, insofar as the promotion of agricultural self-sufficiency and a healthy balance between farming and manufacturing amounted to a necessary condition of success of his theory of international relations.⁴

In the second half of the present study, we will focus on the reception of Vattel in Poland and provide some hypotheses about the history of the dissemination of his thought which could help explain the commonalities of his Polish commentators and readers. His importance in the Polish context was primarily due to the fact that he put emphasis on the normative assertion that the sovereign states should be the sole building blocks of European politics, to the exclusion of both the infra-national and of the supranational. This double-edged critique was something that struck a chord with the citizens of a republic beleaguered by powerful neighbours who resorted to both types of justification for their aggression: Russia and Prussia grounded their claims to intervene interchangeably either in the purported non-observance of antiquated privileges acquired by certain cities or territories vis-à-vis the Polish crown, or in the “offices of humanity” which supposedly required them to step in on behalf of progress and enlightenment. His immediate reception in Poland operated within these very parameters. It was especially the generation of writers who had experienced the first partition (1773) who were attracted to Vattel’s writings for this reason. His was not a Machiavellian theory which would give the weak and the strong states alike the licence to act as they pleased to maximise their security, power and wealth. Nor was it a broadly Wolffian theory invoking civitas maxima which could be used not only to give a theoretical footing to predatory colonialism and to justify actions against foreign and distant cultures such as pre-Colombian Incas and Aztecs, but also, as the awestruck Polish political thinkers learned watching the two monarchs famously considered as “enlightened” scandalously partitioning defenceless Polish-Lithuanian Republic in the name of religious freedom, a similar kind of discourse could be weaponised against even the closest neighbours. As we shall see, Vattel’s appeal for his early Polish readers owed a lot to his ability to aptly thread the needle between these two default positions which both underscored actual threats to the security of the Polish state.

Vattel, Brühl and the Mniszechs (1760–1763)

Vattel’s stay in Poland was a result of an unpredictable conjunction of circumstances, rather than a deliberate choice. Despite the fact that he had been working for the Saxon court before, it was only in the aftermath of the success of his Droit des gens that he was recalled from Berne to the court of the Elector of Saxony. The Elector who reigned as Frederic Augustus II in Dresden was also the elective King of Poland, as Augustus III. As a consequence of one of the most publicised military campaigns of the Seven Years’ War, the Prussian invasion of Saxony, Augustus’ court was driven out of its habitual location in Dresden. These circumstances diverted Vattel from Saxony to Poland, where he reached the royal-electoral court already settled in Warsaw. Vattel made his way to Poland around April 1760 and, in all likelihood, moved back to Dresden together with the court in April 1763. In a letter written to his friend towards the end of his stay in the Polish capital, he expressed contentment with the fact that chance placed him where it did:

Pour moi je suis fort agréablement; on m’a fait en Pologne le plus gracieux accueil: Les Grands, même ceux qui ne sont pas trop bien avec la Cour, m’y comblent de politesses, & je ne crois [pas] que je puisse être à Dresde aussi bien que je suis ici.⁵

Unfortunately, not much is known about this “most gracious welcome”, let alone Vattel’s putative engagement in Polish politics of the time.⁶ He was brought in by, and remained tied to, the faction regrouped around the Saxon court. The two main figures of this faction were the Saxon Heinrich Brühl⁷ and the Pole Jerzy August Mniszech.⁸ The genesis of this so-called Mniszech Camarilla was that when Brühl felt the need to strengthen and diversify the base of support of the Saxon regime among Polish noble families, he was snubbed by the then-dominant Czartoryski family. This failed partly because they believed in their capacity to oscillate between Saxon and Russian interests, and partly because Brühl’s idea of reinforcing the link between the two parties involved an actual marriage of his own daughter to one of the prominent members of the family, which members of one of Poland’s most influential aristocratic families believed to be below their status. It was in that moment that Jerzy August Mniszech, up to that point a middle-range ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• The Legacy of Vattel’s Droit des gens: Contexts, Concepts, Reception, Translation and Diffusion
• Part I. Vattel’s Ideas and His Context
• Part II. The Reception of Vattel in Italy and Elsewhere
• Back Matter