The abbé de Saint-Pierre and British pacifism (original) (raw)

2021, The Literary Encyclopedia

The last thirty years have seen increasing interest in the Norman political and economic thinker Charles-Irénée de Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743). The main reason for this attention is to be found in his Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe [Project for Bringing about Perpetual Peace in Europe], published in two volumes between 1713-the year of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)-and 1717. More specifically, Saint-Pierre's relentless and lifelong insistence on the need to surpass the balance of power system through the foundation of a powerful, sovereign European Diet has led historians to wonder where such a visionary proposal might have originated. As shown by scholars like Maria Grazia Bottaro Palumbo and Jean-Pierre Bois, despite Voltaire's and d'Alembert's snide accusations of utopianism, Saint-Pierre's Projet did not arise from a sort of abstract ideal, but was rather the final outcome of an intense, pragmatic, rational analysis regarding the instability of the European interstate system as well as an original re-elaboration of the former European peace plans put forward by king Henry IV of France (1589-1610) and his minister Sully, and by the French monk Émeric Crucé (c. 1590-1648). However, these undoubtedly brilliant historiographical attempts to deepen and broaden our understanding of Saint-Pierre's radical ideas about war, peace and states nonetheless leave questions that are by no means negligible or secondary. What exactly was the connection, supposing that there was one, between the European Union, so fervently craved for by the abbé, and previous, surprisingly similar projects advocating perpetual peace, published on the other side of the Channel by the English Quakers William Penn (Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, 1693) and John Bellers (Some Reasons for an European State, 1710)? And, from a more general point of view, considering Saint-Pierre's well-known admiration for Great Britain and its philosophical, scientific, economic and political culture, how far were the abbé's pacifist programs and theories shaped, influenced or even simply inspired by the British pacifist milieux of the time and vice versa? The research undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s by Peter van den Dungen and Daniel Sabbagh has shown the extent to which these questions are indispensable. In fact, it is no exaggeration to define Saint-Pierre as a passeur (mediator) of pacifist theories between France and Britain (Perrot, 43), implying that, on the one hand, the abbé drew heavily on English Quaker pacifism as espoused by William Penn and John Bellers and that, on the other, his plan for perpetual peace in Europe met with substantial success with British public opinion, at least during the first half of the eighteenth century, as will be explained later. Saint-Pierre's Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe was a text indisputably at the cutting edge of enlightened political science. What lay at the core of the Projet from its very first draft (ébauche), conceived in 1707 in the middle of the dramatic, cruel, ruinous War of the Spanish Succession, was a dazzling intuition: the endless recurrence of war in Europe should not be dismissively attributed to Louis XIV's expansionist policies, as many kept saying on a daily basis, but was to be traced back to the so-called balance of power principle