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137 World Affs. 186 (1974-1975)
The Abbe de St. Pierre and Voltaire on Perpetual Peace in Europe

handle is hein.journals/wrldaf137 and id is 196 raw text is: Patrick Riley THE ABBE DE ST. PIERRE AND VOLTAIRE ON PERPETUAL PEACE IN EUROPE Since the Abbe de St. Pierre's Project for Perpetual Peace has long been considered the first truly comprehensive plan for a lasting peace in Europe through an international federation or sovereigns-though this may do injustice to the less comprehensive schemes of Cruce(Le Nouveau Cynee, 1623) and Sully (The Great Design of Henry IV, 161 1-35); and since, at the same time, St. Pierre's Project is as neglected (so far as serious analysis is concerned) as it is celebrated, there is good reason to take up again a work which Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant thought worthy of attention. And at the end of this paper there will be time to take up a few of Voltaire's criticisms, which remain interesting as a forceful expression of the view that only human enlightenment, and not mere institutions such as inter- national federalism, will ever bring about perpetual peace. The Abbe'de St. Pierre was an inveterate creator of projects of reform and cor- rection of abuses ranging from the maleducation of women to the extermination of corsairs and Barbary pirates; his Project for Perpetual Peace was only the most ambitious of an inexhaustible store of political plans. First published in 1712, it went through several revised and enlarged editions, and finally became quite famous, if sometimes as the object of Voltaire's and Frederick the Great's jokes. While the earnest desire of the Abbe for peace was undoubted, and his condemnation of war quite eloquent, it is often thought that his plan vacillated between a true federation of independent sovereignties and a modified medieval Respublica Christiana; and that (what is more serious) the Abbe based his hopes for the success of his scheme on an utterly erroneous analysis of the nature of the 17th-century German Empire as a federal system (which, he thought, could serve as the model for a European Diet), and on a most inaccurate view of Sully's quasi-federal The Great Design of Henry IV. This left the Abbe'with only the rationality and the utility of peace as a defense; hence the jokes at his expense. My design, said the Abbe, is to propose means for settling an everlasting peace amongst all the Christian states.2 Enlarging on the disadvantages of war- cruelty, the ruin of commerce, constant instability, and fear --the Abbe insisted that without a European federal congress the Christian princes must never expect anything but an almost continual war, which can never be interrupted but by some treaties of peace, or rather by truces, which are necessary productions of the equal- ity of force.3 The existing means of preserving peace-unenforceable treaties and the balance of power-he found unsatisfactory. There will never be any sufficient security for the execution of treaties of peace and commerce in Europe, St. 186

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