Dialogue 16

Tue Feb 10, 2026

27nd November

Maurice Joly’s mode of writing is to take something that Napoleon III had done (for whatever motives) and reframe it such that his motives become lurid.

Golovinski’s mode of writing is to take something that liberalism accomplished (for whatever motives) and reframe it such that the outcome appears to preplanned for manipulative purposes.

28th November

Montesquieu brings up four independent topics today: National militias, universities, lawyers, the church.

All of these have the ability to germinate opposition against the order of things. They hold social power and they are closed societies.

Dialogue 16

● National Guard subordinate to civil authorities, not military. Bourgeoisie likes it, so keep it shining. ● Universities already impotent as opposition. ● No more political science on the curriculum. ● Don’t tempt 18 years olds to write constitutions as a hobby. ● No more extra ecclesiam renegade instructors. Professors can hold evening courses for the populace. ● Lawyers are socially irresponsible: They seek loopholes. ● Replace lawyers with magistrates (employees of the state) when possible. ● Break up legal guilds by having lawyers nominated by emperor. ● Christianity doesn’t topple absolutist kings, it supports them. ● Plebiscites are just modern de rigueur. Divine right to rule is the norm. ● Clergy defiant against the emperor…? Provoke a schism! ● The emperor is a mighty protection for the church… or its worst enemy. Choose wisely.

Militias

The National Guard in America, just to take an example, had its historical roots in the militias that were useful to the otherwise unprotected colonies. Today it is a part of the regular army as a reserve group.

Machiavelli wants to dissolve it, but knows that the bourgeoisie believes it to associate the country with a positive image which is good for business.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: I cannot speak to you of everything at once. Let us deal with the national militias, because I would not have to occupy myself with them; their dissolution would necessarily have been one of the first acts of my power. The organization of a citizen’s guard could not be reconciled with a regular army, because the armed citizens could transform themselves into agitators at any moment.
Nevertheless, this point is not without difficulty. The national guard is a useless institution, but it bears a popular name. In military States, it flatters the puerile instincts of certain bourgeois classes that -- due to a quite ridiculous fault -- ally the taste for military parades with commercial habits. As such, the national guard is an offensive prejudice; it would be much more maladroit to clash with it, because the prince must never have the air of separating his interests from those of the city that believes it has found a guarantee in the arming of its inhabitants. We love the image of the National Guard.

Having those part-time civilians running around with guns is too much, though. So the solution becomes to keep the image, discard the organisation.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: I would dissolve it so as to reorganize it on other bases. The essential would be to place it under the immediate orders of the agents of civilian authority and to remove from it the prerogative of recruiting its leaders through elections; I would be the one to do this. Furthermore, I would only organize it in the places that are suitable, and I would reserve the rights to dissolve it again and reestablish it on other bases if circumstances demand it.

The constitution does not mention citizen militias at all. The Lexicon merely says:

NATIONAL GUARD (FRANCE)

Napoleon III confined the National Guard during the Second Empire to subordinate tasks to reduce its liberal and republican influence.

Joly’s portrait seems to have some basis in reality.

I could see why Napoleon and Joly ends up in opposite corners. Would my own political thinking be different, if I knew I had an army on my side? Would I be more audacious, would I walk further in some radical direction, if I felt protected by armed men?

That really depends on whether you secretly lean against oppression with all your weight or, if the confines are removed, will hold the balance.

Desperation can be a hard thing to read, especially if you are “the oppressor”.

Universities

The despot is in a good position as the Universities of his day have come to terms with the fact that they are a service to the public foremost.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: […] Concerning the University, the current order of things is satisfactory to me. You are indeed not unaware that the great bodies of education are no longer organized as they once were. One assures me that, almost everywhere, they have lost their autonomy and are now only public services supported by the State. Nothing more apolitical than a public service.
Thus, as I have told you more than once, the State would be the prince; the moral direction of the public establishments would be in his hands; it would be his agents who inspire the minds of the young.
Both the leaders and the members of the teaching bodies of all level would be named by the government; […]
I must not abandon this subject without telling you that I regard it as very important that, in the teaching of law, studies of constitutional politics would be prohibited.

Indirectly that points forward to our times: When politicians demand that colleges should only be a public service, they are arguing against liberal democracy.

Unable to find laws from the 1860s, I again had to resort to the Lexicon. The Falloux Laws of 1850, adopted even before Napoleon III became emperor, shows the odd pendulum of political power.

One should always be wary about thinking that anybody is the “voice of the people”. The “people” don’t have a voice. The republican leaders of the French Revolution may have felt they were the embodiment of an entire people rising against oppression.

Sixty years later republicanism is on the backslide.

Is democracy today going through a similar process? First conflation with “the people’s will”, then expansion and finally regression?

The Falloux Laws epitomises France’s impossible choice between being a religious or a secular society.

Church as well as king and republican politicians all have their share of people’s mandates. Someone actually wants them there. Ignoring that is to fool yourself. Since we all agree on respecting the voter, the challenge then becomes to explain how the masses are shaped by ideology. Or in modern parlance: Who has brainwashed who?

But none of that is what Machiavelli expects difficulties from.

He is concerned with the corruption of the young, less due to drinking and drugs than falling into the honey sweet trap of writing constitutions.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: My reasons would be very simple: I do not want the young people who are at the conclusion of their studies to be carelessly occupied with politics. To get mixed up in writing constitutions at the age of 18 is to prepare a tragedy.
Such instruction could only falsify the ideas of the young people and prematurely initiate them into matters that surpass the limits of their reason. It is with badly digested, badly understood notions that one prepares fake statesmen, utopians whose temerity of spirit will later be translated into temerity of action. Joly is joking about it, Golovinski means it.
It will be necessary that the generations that are born under my reign are raised with respect for established institutions and with love for the prince.
[…]
I would like the history of my reign to be taught in the schools while I am still alive. This would be how a new prince enters into the hearts of a generation.

And so the struggle for the power of education goes on endlessly.

The Falloux Laws allowed Catholics to teach in separate institutions, thus breaking the secular stronghold on education that has persisted since the break with the old regime.

Joly puts that into his own perspective in his usual “it looks like tolerance, but it is all aimed at controlling power”-style.

Next is a lovely taunting exchange of words between this old married couple. Savour the irony.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: […] other means that I would employ would aim at acting against free instruction, which one cannot directly proscribe. The universities contain [veritable] armies of professors whom one can use – outside of the classroom, in their spare time – for the propagation of good doctrines. I would have them open free courses in all the important towns; through these means would I mobilize the instruction and influence of the government.
Montesquieu: In other words, you would absorb, you would confiscate the very last glimmers of independent thinking for your profit.
Machiavelli: I would confiscate nothing at all.
Montesquieu: Would you permit professors other than yours to popularize science by the same means and without diplomas, without authorization?
Machiavelli: What? Would you want me to authorize clubs?
Montesquieu: No: let us pass on to another subject.

Lawyers

Machiavelli examines the robust self-awareness permeating the culture of the legal profession.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: […] In the States in which the bar is constituted as a guild, those who are accountable regard the independence of this institution as a guarantee that is inseparable from the right to [legal] defense before the courts; that it is a question of their honor, their [self-]interest, or their lives.
It would be quite serious to intervene here, because public opinion could become alarmed over a cry that would not fail to be echoed throughout the entire guild.

Ah, but always the humanist, Machiavelli knows how to spin a human angle on the problem:

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Nevertheless, I would not be unaware that this order would be a center of influence constantly hostile to my power. You know better than I, Montesquieu, that this profession develops characters who are cold and opinionated in their principles; it develops minds of which the tendency is to seek in the acts of power the element of pure legality. The lawyer does not have the same degree of the elevated sense of social necessity that is possessed by the magistrate; he sees the law from too close and from sides that are too small to have the just sentiment, whereas the magistrate – Magistrates are employees of the government, supposedly chosen for the loyalty like you have to be vetted to enter the CIA.
Montesquieu: Spare me the apology.

Letting criminals (and the occasional subversive agitator) off on legal technicalities is immoral.

He prefers his usual tactic: Keeping them aware that they depend on the government for their livelihood.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: Thus they ended up overthrowing the State itself. I do not want my courts of justice to be parliaments and the lawyers to be policymakers under the immunity of their robes. The greatest man of the century, whom your homeland had the honor of producing, would say: “I want things such that one can cut the tongue of a lawyer who speaks ill of the government.” Modern customs being gentler, I would not go so far. Nobility of the robe (noblesse de robe) was a name used for the members of the various parlements in the leading French cities, i.e. legal courts with political influence. They could order the burning of a subversive book. The title was inherited, hence a kind of nobility.
On the first day and in the circumstances that are suitable, I would limit myself to doing a rather simple thing: I would issue a decree that, with full respect for the independence of the guild, would force the lawyers to receive the nominations for their profession from the sovereign. In the exposition of the motivations for my decree, I believe that it would not be too difficult to demonstrate to those who are accountable that they would find this method of nomination a more serious guarantee than when the guild recruits for itself, that is to say, with elements that are necessarily a little confused.

The Protocols can do him one better as will become apparent in Protocol 17.

Priests and bishops

Montesquieu’s unwavering belief in the value of good upbringing shows its colours when he confidently presses the issue of the moral autonomy of the Christian conscience.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Montesquieu: […] Here is an institution that only depends upon the State on one side and that wields a spiritual power of which the seat is located somewhere beyond you. I declare to you that I know nothing more dangerous for your power than the power that speaks in the name of the heavens and whose roots are everywhere on the earth: do not forget that the Christian word [parole] is a word of liberty. No doubt the laws of the State have established a profound demarcation between religious authority and political authority; no doubt the word of the ministers of the religion only makes itself heard in the name of the Gospels; but the divine spiritualism that was extracted from the Bible is the stumbling block of political materialism.
It was this humble and gentle book, it alone, that destroyed the Roman Empire, Caesarism and its power. The frankly Christian nations still escape the clutches of despotism because Christianity elevates the dignity of mankind too high for despotism to reach it, because it develops the moral forces that human power cannot seize. Beware of the priest: he only depends on God and his influence is everywhere, in the sanctuary, in the family, and in the school. You could have no power over him: his hierarchy is not yours; it obeys a constitution that does not decide things according to the law or the sword. If you reigned over a Catholic nation, and if you had the clergy as an enemy, you would perish sooner or later, even though the entire population was behind you.

Choirs of angels can be heard singing above Montesquieu’s head.

Unless we consider the likes of Jean Meslier, the priest whose Testament contained so strong statements that even Les Philosophes were shocked, Montesquieu’s version fits our account of our cultural self-aggrandisement. Je suis Chrétien, at least when we are comparing cultures.

Machiavelli is perplexed. Montesquieu seems to have flipped a sign.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: I do not know why it pleases you to make the priest the apostle of liberty. I have never seen this, neither in ancient nor modern times; I have always found a natural support for absolute power in the priesthood.

Being on the side of history is notoriously difficult. Having an opinion is of little help. What do you do when the world suddenly swings toward your stance? Stay and join up with a regime that posterity might view as authoritarian?

As to the veracity of Joly’s mockery I have to lean on the Lexicon. One of the forces pushing for the return to empire was exactly the clergy. The French Revolution dethroned the church and secularised the country. The clergy were strong supporters of Napoleon III even before the coup.

As far as I can see, neither Napoleon’s constitution nor the following senatus consulta linked the Emperor’s power to God, divine will or anything else. In fact, not until a senatus consultum in 1870 introduced these words: “Napoleon, by the grace of God and the national will, Emperor of the French, to all present and to come, greetings” did God explicitly enter the picture at the last year of his reign.

Since the Catholics had taken so many beatings since the revolution, their support was not something Charles-Loius had to work hard for.

Back in 1852 it seems that the sole basis for establishing the Second Empire was the plebiscite.

Joly alludes to the plebiscite, but remarks how the church plays an even more significant role:

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Remark it well, if – in the interests of my establishment – I would have to make concessions to the democratic spirit of my age, if I would take universal suffrage as the basis of my power, these would only be artifices demanded by the times; I would no less claim the benefit of divine right; I would no less be king by the grace of God. By virtue of these things, the clergymen would have to support me, because my principles of authority would be in conformity with theirs.

And there. The church and the monarch in cahoots with each other like hand in glove.

But frankly I am not sure Joly has a sharp angle here. The impression one is left with after reading the exchange of words of our two protagonists is muddy and unclear.

Machiavelli suggests introducing a schism the manual way:

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: I would provoke a schism in the Church that would break all the ties that bind the clergy to the Court of Rome, because that is the Gordian Knot. I would have my press, my publicists and my politicians say the following: "Christianity is independent of Catholicism; what Catholicism prohibits, Christianity permits; the independence of the clergy, its submission to the Court of Rome, are purely Catholic dogmas;
[…] this hierarchy from the Middle Ages, this tutelage of people in their infancy, can no longer be reconciled with the virile genius of modern civilization, with its lumimaries and its independence.
Why seek in Rome a director of consciences? Why would not the leader of political authority also be the leader of religious authority at the same time? Why should the sovereign not be the pontiff? Such would be the language that one would have published by the press, especially the liberal press, and it is very probable that the people would listen to it with joy.

Perhaps Joly was acutely aware of the psychology employed and the above passage is a correct assessment. Perhaps Napoleon III really did exploit this impulse to modernise to the extent that the church felt it too would have to join up with the leading figures in the modernisation process.

According to census of the era, most of the population adhered to Catholicism. Side note: After around 150 years of a policy of keeping religion and state apart, Catholicism has only these last decades seen sharp declines in France, falling below fifty percent, losing ground to atheism.

Perhaps the revolution taught the church a lesson it never forgot. Perhaps insisting on moral dominance by bullying felt like a dangerous move. If so, allying itself with the emperor may not have been the worst possible strategy. But all this is speculation on my part.

In the Dialogue, Machiavelli does suggest the emperor as protector of the church.

Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Ch. 16 Subtext
Machiavelli: […] In contemporary times, as you know, temporal power is seriously threatened by irreligious hatred and the ambition of the northern regions of Italy. So, I would say to the Holy Father: "I will defend you against them all; I will save you; this would be my duty, my mission; but at least do not attack me, support me with your moral influence." Allegiance s above principles.

It is strange though, isn’t it? That you can trade with your followers like that?

PARADISE LOST