2.

He was not the first to plan a definite scheme for establishing a perpetual peace.  Long ago Emeric Cruce had given to the world a proposal for a universal league, including not only the Christian nations of Europe, but the Turks, Persians, and Tartars, which by means of a court of arbitration sitting at Venice should ensure the settlement of all disputes by peaceful means. [Footnote:  Le Nouveau Cynee (Paris, 1623).  It has recently been reprinted with an English translation by T. W. Balch, Philadelphia (1909).] The consequence of universal peace, he said, will be the arrival of “that beautiful century which the ancient theologians promise after there have rolled by six thousand years.  For they say that then the world will live happily and in repose.  Now it happens that that time has nearly expired, and even if it is not, it depends only on the Princes to give beforehand this happiness to their peoples.”  Later in the century, others had ventilated similar projects in obscure publications, but the Abbe does not refer to any of his predecessors.

He was not blinded by the superficial brilliancy of the reign of Louis XIV. to the general misery which the ambitious war-policy of that sovran brought both upon France and upon her enemies.  His Annales politiques are a useful correction to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze.  It was in the course of the great struggle of the Spanish Succession that he turned his attention to war and came to the conclusion that it is an unnecessary evil and even an absurdity.  In 1712 he attended the congress at Utrecht in the capacity of secretary to Cardinal de Polignac, one of the French delegates.  His experiences there confirmed his optimistic mind in the persuasion that perpetual peace was an aim which might readily be realised; and in the following year he published the memoir which he had been preparing, in two volumes, to which he added a third four years later.

Though he appears not to have known the work of Cruce he did not claim originality.  He sheltered his proposal under an august name, entitling it Project of Henry the Great to render Peace Perpetual, explained by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre.  The reference is to the “great design” ascribed to Henry iv. by Sully, and aimed at the abasement of the power of Austria:  a federation of the Christian States of Europe arranged in groups and under a sovran Diet, which would regulate international affairs and arbitrate in all quarrels. [Footnote:  It is described in Sully’s Memoires, Book XXX.] Saint-Pierre, ignoring the fact that Sully’s object was to eliminate a rival power, made it the text for his own scheme of a perpetual alliance of all the sovrans of Europe to guarantee to one another the preservation of their states and to renounce war as a means of settling their differences.  He drew up the terms of such an alliance, and taking the European powers one by one demonstrated that it was the plain interest of each to sign the articles.  Once the articles were signed the golden age would begin. [Footnote:  For Sully’s grand Design compare the interesting article of Sir Geoffrey Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.]