Maurice Joly

Maurice Joly

Maurice Joly (* 1829 (according to other sources 1821 or 1831) in Lons-le-Saunier , † July 16, 1878 in Paris ) was a French lawyer and writer. His main work was the book Conversations in the Underworld , a dispute between Machiavelli and Montesquieu , which was used as an indictment against Napoléon III. was meant and brought Joly 15 months in prison. Certain parts, but not the basic message of the book, later served as a template for the anti-Semitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion .

Life

Joly was probably born in Lons-le-Saunier in 1829 to a French father and an Italian mother. He broke off his law studies in 1849 and went to Paris, where he worked for ten years in the State Ministry. In 1859 he successfully completed his studies and was admitted to the Paris Bar . For a short time he was also a member of the National Assembly . He was Mathilde Bonaparte's secretary and was known as one of the "most enthusiastic and well-heard speakers" at public meetings.

After Napoleon III. Having been crowned emperor in 1852, Joly was one of his critics and published a large number of satirical essays Napoleon III. portrayed as ruthless despots. In 1861 he published the book César for which he had to go to prison for a short time. His best-known work, Conversations in the Underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu ( Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ) followed, for which Joly was sentenced to 15 months in prison and a fine of 200 francs.

During this time he wrote the Ascender's manual . After his release in 1870, he published his autobiography, joined a resistance movement and was repeatedly arrested and sentenced to prison. As a result of the Franco-Prussian War , Napoleon III. Abdicate in 1871. Joly worked for a political magazine until 1872, in the same year he published the book The Hungry . In 1878 he was found dead, it is believed that he suicide had committed.

Conversations in the underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu

Joly became known through his work Talks in the Underworld between Machiavelli and Montesquieu , with which he explored the political ambitions of Napoleon III. attacked.

In this work, Joly used the stylistic device of a dialogue between two historical characters who are talking in hell. This is where both core beliefs come together. Montesquieu argues in the spirit of liberalism , while Niccolò Machiavelli represents the amoral, cynical despotism , which he described in his treatise The Prince . In order to run his country in peace and quiet, all means must be right for a prince. Joly thus indirectly draws a connection between Machiavelli and Napoleon III, who, according to the maxims formulated by Machiavelli, behaved as a politician striving for success and power.

Since Joly was known as a critic of the emperor, the work was published anonymously in Brussels in 1864 and smuggled into France. But as soon as they crossed the border, the books were confiscated by the police and traces of the author were traced back. Joly was arrested and sentenced on April 25, 1865 to 15 months in prison for defamation of the emperor, which he served in the Sainte-Pélagie prison in Paris; his books have been confiscated.

The exact author and forger of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , based on the conversations in the underworld , is not exactly known. So far, many experts have suspected him to be in the circles of the Tsarist secret police in Okhrana. Particularly Pyotr Ivanovich Ratschkowski (1853-1910), head of the department for foreign affairs in Paris, and his assistant Matwei Golowinski (1865-1920) are suspected of having written the minutes in order to tell Tsar Nicholas II of the harmfulness of liberalism convince. More recent research, however, points to multiple authors rather than a single author. This suggests the genesis of the protocols, as the reconstruction of the original text on the basis of the various early Russian text variants by the Italian literary scholar Cesare De Michelis shows. Joly's The Talks served as a template for the forgery , with Machiavelli's theses being presented as a supposedly Jewish program. In the original text, a book with an educational tendency, there is no evidence of any anti-Semitic theses. Despite their long-known origin, the "Protocols" are still popular today with anti-Semites and enemies of the State of Israel.

As recent research shows, Joly himself borrowed from Eugène Sue's colossal novel Les Mystères du Peuple when formulating the dialogues .

Works (selection)

• Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la politique de Machiavel au XIXè siècle, par un contemporain , Mertens, Brussels 1864,
  • first German-language edition: Conversations in the Underworld between Macchiavelli and Montesquieu , Richard Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1948
  • Abridged licensed edition: Macht contra Vernunft (with a foreword by Joachim Christian Horn), Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1968
  • New edition of the 1948 edition: Power and Law, Machiavelli contra Montesquieu. Conversations in the Underworld (with a foreword by Herbert Weichmann, from the French by Hans Leisegang), Meiner, Hamburg 1979 (reprint of this 2016 edition)
  • New edition: A fight in hell. Conversations between Machiavelli and Montesquieu about power and law (from the French by Hans Leisegang), Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1990, series Die Other Bibliothek , ISBN 3-8218-4273-3
• Joly, Maurice: Son passé, son programs. Par lui-même. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Ce, Paris 1870 (autobiography by Joly in French based on a copy of the Bibl. Nat. In Paris (PDF; 5.0 MB), received from the files of the Bern Trial on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , Bern 1935 , today in the State Archives of the Canton of Bern).
• The manual of the climber (from the French by Hans Thill), Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2001, series Die other Bibliothek, ISBN 3-8218-4194-X

literature

• Foreword by the translator Heinz Leisegang, in: Macht + Recht - Machiavelli contra Montesquieu
• Wilfried von Bredow : Reality as a parody. About Maurice Joly and his “Dialogue aux enfers” . In: The State . Zeitschrift für Staatslehre und Verfassungsgeschichte , Vol. 35 (1986), pp. 435-438, ISSN  0038-884X .
• Carlo Ginzburg : Making the enemy aware. On the ambiguity of historical evidence. In: Trajekte , No. 16 (April 1988), pp. 7-17, ISSN  1616-3036 .
• Hans Speier : The Truth in Hell: Maurice Joly on Modern Despotism. In: Polity, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 1977), pp. 18-32.
• Michael Hagemeister : The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in court. The Bern Trial 1933–1937 and the “Anti-Semitic International” . Zurich: Chronos, 2017, ISBN 978-3-0340-1385-7 , short biography p. 538

Web links

Wikisource: Maurice Joly  - Sources and full texts (French)

• Literature by and about Maurice Joly in the catalog of the German National Library