Francois de Callieres and the Marquis de Torcy's "political academy": new evidence.

Schweizer, Karl

In March 1712, Jean Baptiste de Colbert, Marquis de Torcy, minister and secretary of state for foreign affairs, (1) founded a special institution--the Academie Politique--for the training of future diplomats. A gifted negotiator himself, Torcy was anxious to truly professionalize the king's service in diplomacy at a time when under pressure both at home and abroad, (partly due to the Spanish Succession crisis), the government of France, with unprecedented demands placed upon its national (including diplomatic) resources, was becoming increasingly bureaucratized. (2) In addition, the exactions of war and its aftermath had revealed glaring deficiencies in France's diplomatic preparedness--not least the uneven capacities of her diplomatic agents--all too often novice court favourites, their appointment determined by patronage rather than professional expertise. (3)

Historically, Torcy's initiative was not wholly unprecedented, for Phillip II of Spain had earlier attempted to establish a similar training school, as had the papacy with the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, founded in Rome in 1701. Also, earlier in France, Richelieu had established a royal military academy that served as a model for the numerous privately organized academies d'equitation favoured by young aristocrats, while Louvois had attempted to form instructional regiments where cadets would acquire professional training as well as liberal arts instruction. (4) Somewhat later, in 1747, Frederick II set up a temporary training center to prepare, in this case, non-nobles for lower level diplomatic posts and, later still, an academy was set up at Strasbourg, directed by Carl Adam Koch, which numbered among its members Talleyrand, Metternich, and Benjamin Constant. (5) Even so, Torcy's vision of a professional school for diplomats was novel; indeed, the very concept of diplomacy as a distinct profession in its own right proved an unorthodox departure from traditional assumptions. (6) We now perceive an emerging sense of professionalism--a response in tuna to the realization that diplomacy had become a permanent and vital activity in the life of the state. The same intensity of interstate coexistence that fueled dynastic conflicts also fostered the refinement of collaborative devices on a continental scale: an increase in the number of permanently resident ambassadors and the spread, if not growing effectiveness, of the bureaucratic agencies directing and coordinating their work. Accordingly, diplomacy had become a permanent activity in the life of the state. Like the military, clergy, and judiciary, diplomats gradually acquired the character of professionals with their own ceremonial rules of conduct, methods, and corporate identity. As the diplomat became professional, diplomacy experienced more continuing development as an altogether distinctive enterprise and subject of study. French diplomacy, in particular, came to acquire a reputation for excellence--characterized by negotiating flair, a unique style, resourcefulness, and administrative innovation--providing a compelling model for other states. To augment these advantages, Torcy envisaged a permanent repository or depot for the vast amount of official documents and records of past events that regular diplomacy generated; documents to be centralized, classified and bound becoming a forum for historical research readily available in the Louvre for close analysis by prospective academy recruits. (7) Beyond these resources, central to the Political Academy's function as a teaching institution, Torcy's goal was perfecting the stature of French diplomacy. He also called upon planning consultants to assist in devising a program of study based on their respective areas of interest, expertise, and first-hand experience. Inevitably, he enlisted members of his own secretariat at Versailles: men such as the Abbe Jean Baptiste Dubos; (8) the Abbe Joachim Legrand, who was familiar with John Locke's educational ideas; (9) and Jean Yves de St. Prest, who would become the first (and only) directeur of the Academy. (10) All these consultants, respected savants, and seasoned analysts of crown policy, were closely involved in an intense deliberation preceding the Academy's formal opening. They contributed policy papers and devised a program of studies centered on texts considered essential reading, including collections of treaties, state documents, and such theoretical manuals as De Vera's The Perfect Ambassador, (11) Wicquefort's L'Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions, (12) and the writings of Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf.

Since the aforementioned collaborators were, on the whole, more experienced in "diplomatics" than in diplomacy (all except Legrand, who had spent some years as embassy secretary in Lisbon and Madrid), it stands to reason that Torcy would also have consulted those with practical, "hands on" experience in the conduct of foreign affairs--operatives able to buttress theoretical precepts with concrete, field-based illustrations, worthy models for students to emulate. Here an obvious choice was Francois de Callieres, distinguished ambassador at Ryswick, cabinet secretary at Versailles, and author of De la Maniere de Negocier ..., perhaps the best treatise on diplomacy written during the Ancien Regime. (13) In this work, the practitioner and reflective author combine to explore the diplomatic art, asserting its autonomy as a profession, its importance to statecraft as well as a national, communicative exercise. Throughout he emphasized the importance of compositional accuracy and style in the drafting of diplomatic instructions, official dispatches, treaties, and other related communiques. Emphasizing the connections between literary form in its many sidedness and the expository dimensions of the diplomatic art, Callieres realized that political perception and literary expression were symbiotically related, combining elements at once descriptive and analytical from which important insights into the essential principles of effective negotiation can be distilled. Diplomacy is the moderating institution of international politics, working by means of sophisticated communication to accommodate conflicting interests. Throughout this process, in Callieres' time literary craftsmanship, combining grace and precision, was a distinctive advantage. Even in his non-diplomatic writings, Callieres placed reiterative stress on the importance of stylistic precision in all writing genres or techniques, always focusing on the connections between contemporary modes of expression and their connection with social etiquette and concomitant effectiveness in office. (14) His incisive analysis not only earned Callieres the reputation of being a leading authority on the forms and substance of sound diplomacy, but also it became an enduring contribution to the literature on the subject.

Callieres's conceivable link with the Political Academy has been proposed, (15) but on a purely conjectural basis, suggested in part by the fact that his commentaries on the ideal education of an aspiring diplomat

closely parallel sections in the curriculum of the Academy; portions of his work were published in 1716, having circulated in manuscript form for over a decade. Research in connection with an expanded biography of Callieres, (16) has yielded new manuscript evidence confirming what scholars have long suspected. (17) The latter was indeed consulted by Torcy, in response providing advisory memoranda, stressing the need for a professional diplomatic corps (one major theme of his treatise), and dwelling on the importance of historical knowledge for aspiring diplomats, the need for manuals of diplomatic practice, (18) and specific exercises directly linked to the prospective students' careers as future diplomats. Collectively, if not individually, these memoranda provide additional insights into the thinking that underlay the creation of the Academy and its wider purpose as a learning institution for those aspiring to a career in the foreign service. They are important also as a clue to the fundamental maxims of sound conduct and technique that a specifically designed course of studies was believed to promote so as to be of practical and regular use within the profession. Clearly Torcy saw the Academy less as an institution for the glorification of monarchy than a device for much needed administrative reforms that were essential changes in the basic principles of French statecraft deriving from the symbiotic union of politics and intellect. Sadly, this proved to be an utopian vision not realized, and then only intermittently, until the First Empire. (19)

Appendix:

The Latest English Edition of Callieres' De la Maniere de Negocier: A Cautionary Tale

In 1716, Francois de Callieres (1645-1717), noted French writer and diplomat, published a treatise entitled De la Maniere de Negocier avec les Souverains. Representing the final synthesis of his experiente as diplomat and the diplomatic customs of his age, Callieres' work had aims both practical and theoretical. In it, the practitioner and reflective author combine to explore the diplomatic art and to assert its autonomy as a profession as well as its importance to statecraft. His penetrating analysis not only earned Callieres the reputation of being a leading authority on the forms and substance of sound diplomacy; it also became an enduring contribution to the literature in the field, constituting perhaps the finest expression of diplomatic thought during the ancien regime. (20)

From the moment of its publication, the work received widespread acclaim. Two French editions were published the same year, one in Amsterdam, the other in Brussels, and an English translation appeared in London. (21) Though subsequent sales proved disappointingly meager, Callieres' treatise enjoyed a European reputation throughout the eighteenth century. It also became renowned in North America--Thomas Jefferson's library at Monticello contained a copy (22)--along with the work of Wicquefort and, to a lesser extent, that of Antoine Pecquet whose Discourse sur l'art de Negocier avec les Souverains came out in 1738. Callieres was considered essential reading for prospective diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. (23) During the nineteenth century, Callieres was largely neglected and it wasn't until after 1914 that signs of renewed interest emerged. Ernest Satow, writing in 1917, considered De la Maniere ... "a mine of political wisdom," (24) a view shared by Sir Harold Nicolson, who regarded the work "as the best manual of diplomatic method ever written." (25) In 1919, there appeared an abbreviated "English rendering" of Callieres' book, under the title The Practice of Diplomacy edited by a member of the British delegation at the Versailles conference, A.F. Whyte. (26) This edition, alas, is seriously inadequate. The editor not only omitted entire chapters and rearranged the sequence of others, he also suppressed portions of the text, provided virtually no explanatory notes--vital in a work so historically grounded--and inserted material of his own, all done arbitrarily, without notice or explanation. Equally serious, a paperback edition appeared in 1963 with a new title "On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes," (27) using Whyte's abbreviated rendering. The work is identified "as translated from the French" though, in fact, it merely reproduced the defective English version of 1919.

By way of remedy, Maurice Keens-Soper and I produced a fresh critical edition in 1983 based on the 1716 contemporary English translation but carefully collated (and grammatically modernized where necessary) with the French manuscript original (long thought lost) which we located in the Bibliotheque Municipale de Troyes. (28) The edition has a lengthy introduction, extensive notes, amplifying appendices and a (then) up-to-date bibliography. This volume was universally well reviewed (29) and is now considered the "standard edition in English" of Callieres' classic tome. (30) However, defective scholarship, like rheumatic pain, tends to linger as witnessed by the continuing vogue of Whyte's defective editorial enterprise; not only does it continue to be cited in books and articles as "authoritative," (31) but also in a recent paper, Whyte's title was mistakenly assigned to the KeensSoper/Schweizer edition (32) (confusion compounded) and, more seriously, there appeared in 2000 a space-age reincarnation of Whyte curiously entitled "On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes: From Sovereigns to CEO's Envoys to Executives," with a wholly misleading introduction by Charles Handy (33) to ah already seriously expurgated text. Obviously what we have here is a piece d'occasion: an alleged "how-to manual" for business executives, serving the same purpose, from a diplomatic angle, as Sun Tzu's The Art of War, newly "discovered" in the business world as a putative guide to corporate/management success. Indeed, Sun Tzu is actually mentioned in this sense on the dust jacket of the most recent English edition.

All this, I am afraid, is to miss the point for both authors. In the case of Callieres, his recommendations concerning the essential elements of negotiations and qualities of negotiators have a decided ring of modernity but--and this is critical--these must not be extrapolated from their historic/political context and facilely transferred to the present. Despite the surface similarities of their functions, CEO's and corporate managers are not the audience for which he wrote. They are not eighteenth century diplomatic agents, even though they may possess diplomatic skills; and business enterprises, whatever their size and complexity, are not nation states, whose experiences and concerns (such as the prevention or mitigation of war), Callieres so masterfully chronicled. In his classic treatise, "negotiation" does not simply comprise a set of skills capable of being imparted or absorbed in the abstract, as Handy implies, but constitutes a way of life in society, both domestically and on the European scene as well as illustrating the abiding predicament of states. A rich body of experience cannot be reduced to a handbook or manual, as stressed in Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics which examines the errors of trying to formulate experience simply along the lines of "techniques." Moreover, in his prescriptions on how to deal with people more effectively, Callieres was not providing a guide to palace (or modern office) politics, as claimed by the dust jacket of Handy's edition, but was exploring the abiding predicament of states, and using the rules of diplomatic practice to illustrate the principal elements of interstate relation. In other words, Callieres, "in seeking to make explicit the terms of the emerging European tradition is raising a central feature of a uniquely complex states-system to the level of thought." (34) As such, De la Maniere ... is diplomatic theory expressed in literature, not a simple primer for business people worldwide. A final caution for those who might be deluded to seek in the latest edition of Callieres' work, the wisdom its author sought to impart: caveat emptor.

Rutgers University

(1) On Torcy see: John Rule, "A Career in the Making: The Education of Jean Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Torcy," French Historical Studies, 19 (Fall 1996), pp. 967-96; idem., "King and Minister: Louis XIV and Colbert de Torcy," in: R. Hatton and J. Bromley, (eds.), William III and Louis XIV, Essays by and for M. Thomson (Liverpool, 1968), pp. 213-36; Abbe Duffo, Jean-Baptiste de Colbert, Marquis de_Torcy, Ministre des Affaires Etrangeres sous Louis XIV (Paris, 1934).

(2) C.G. Picavet, La Diplomatie Francaise au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1930), ch. I. John Rule, "King and Minister," p. 216.

(3) K.W. Schweizer and M. Keens-Soper, (eds.), The Art of Diplomacy (New York, 1983, paperback, 1993), p. 192; W. Roosen, The Age of Louis XIV The Rise of Modern Diplomacy (Boston, 1976) ch. II; idem., "The True Ambassadors Under Louis XIV," European Studies Review, III, nr. 2 (1973), pp. 121-139. M.S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450-1919 (London, 1993), ch. III.

(4) J. Klaits, "Men of Letters and Political Reform in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV: The Founding of the Academie Politique," Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971), p. 583.

(5) Roosen, The Age of Louis XIV, pp. 73-75. K.W. Schweizer, "Diplomacy," in A. Kors, (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2003) p. 363.

(6) Contrast this with the near contemporary British scenario. See K.W. Schweizer, Statesmen. Diplomats and the Press: Essays on 18th Century Britain (Lewiston, 2002), ch. VII.

(7) Klaits, op. cit., p. 579; Art of Diplomacy, pp. 192-93; cf. A. Baschet, Histoire du Depot des Archives des Affaires Etrangeres (Paris, 1875).

(8) Klaits, op. cit., p. 579, cf. A. Lombart, L'Abbe Du Bos (Paris, 1913).

(9) J. Legrand, "Project d'Estudes," Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (henceforth BN), Collection Clairambault, 519, ff 320-322. John Locke's treatise on education referred to by Legrand appeared in French translation in 1705.

(10) Jean-Pierre Samoyault, Les bureaux du secretariat d'etat des affaires etrangeres sous Louis XV (Paris, 1971), pp. 90-99; Art of Diplomacy, P. 193; Baschet, op.cit., pp. 102-9.

(11) A French edition was published in 1707.

(12) This work appeared in 1681. See C.H. Carter, "Wicquefort on the Ambassador and his Functions," in: K.W. Schweizer, (ed.), Diplomatic Thought 1648-1815 (Sherbrooke, 1982), pp. 37-59; Baschet, op.cit., Ill, note 2. The English edition of 1716, translated by Digby, was reprinted in 1997 by the Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, Leicester University, with a new introduction by M. Keens-Soper.

(13) See: The Art of Diplomacy, passim; K.W. Schweizer, Francois de Callieres: Diplomat and Man of Letters (Lewiston, 1995); G. R. Berridge, et.al., Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger (London, 2001), ch. VI; M. Keens-Soper, "Francois de Callieres," (University of London, Ph.D thesis, 1972) and more recently, Jean-Claude Waquet, Callieres (Paris, 2005).

(14) The Art of Diplomacy, pp. 19-41. K.W. Schweizer, "Francois de Callieres and the Literary/Rhetorical Dimension of Diplomacy," www.h-net.org/diplo/essays (April 4, 2007).

(15) Ibid., p. 18; Klaits, op.cit., p. 584, note 16.

(16) Supra, note 13. The earlier work cited there, was merely a preliminary exploration.

(17) The relevant manuscripts are among the papers of the Abbe Renaudot, Callieres' friend and literary executor. These comprise papers, notes and memoranda written by Callieres but not catalogued as such. Handwriting comparison between these documents and Callieres' official correspondence (Archives du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, Correspondence Politique, Hollande, 159-168), his correspondence with the Marquis d'Huxelles; (BN MS Fr 24983) and the manuscript original of his famous diplomatic treatise (Bibliotheque Municipale de Troyes, MS328) prove conclusively the identity of their author. (See: BNF MS, 7488-7492).

(18) Wicquefort and De Vera are specifically mentioned.

(19) A. Outrey, L'administration francais dos affaires etrangeres (Paris, 1954), pp. 40-48.

(20) K. W. Schweizer, Francois de Callieres: Diplomat and Man of Letters 1645-1717 (Lampeter, 1995) p. 66 ; idem., "Francois de Callieres" in L. Frey and M. Frey (eds.), The Treaties of the War of the Spanish Succession (Westport, 1995) pp. 72-74; cf M. Keens-Soper, "Francois de Callieres and Diplomatic Theory," Historical Journal, xvi, 3 (1973) pp. 485-508.

(21) British Library General Catalogue of Printed Books (1965) xxxii, p. 175.

(22) L. Pope (ed.), Letters (1694-1700) of Francois de Callieres to the Marquise d'Huxelles (Lam peter, 2004), introduction.

(23) D. B. Hora, The British Diplomatic Service 1689-1789 (London, 1961), p. 125 ; In 1772 the work was also translated into Russian ; cf W.E. Butler, "Anglo-Russian diplomacy and the Law of Nations" in: A.G. Cross, (ed.), Great Britain and Russia in the 18th Century (Newtonville, 1979) p. 290.

(24) E. Satow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice (London, 1917), I, p. vii.

(25) H. Nicholson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, (London, 1954) p. 62.

(26) Francois de Callieres, The Practice of Diplomacy, with an introduction by A.F. Whyte (London, 1919).

(27) Edited by S.D. Kertesz, University of Notre Dame Press.

(28) M. Keens-Soper and K. W. Schweizer (eds.), The Art of Diplomacy (Leicester and New York, 1983); a paperback version was issued by the University Press of America in 1994.

(29) cf Paul Sonnino, review in: History Teacher, xx, nr. 1 (1986), pp. 122-23.

(30) Pope, op.cit., p. 37.

(31) cf G.A. Craig and A.L. George, Force and Statecraft (New York, 1991), p. 16; K.J. Holsti, International Politics: A Framework for Analysis (London, 1995) p. 126, note 10; N. Grebner, "Defining America's Role in a Unipolar World," http://www.vgronline.org/articles.2001.autumn. W. Mastenbroek, "Negotiating as a Civilizing Process," Website of Holland Consulting Group: http://www.com.publications.negotiating HTM.

(32) A. P. Lempereur, "A Rhetorical Foundation of International Negotiations: Callieres on Peace Politics," ESSEC; Documents de Recherche, (March 2003) p. 4, note, 1, p. 6. Incidentally, Lempereur is the editor of an equally deficient French reprint published in 2002.

(33) Houghton Mifflin (New York 2000).

(34) M. Keens-Soper and K. W. Schweizer, op.cit., pp. 19-36; G.R. Berridge et al., Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger (London, 2001) p. 108.