Jean Yves de Saint-Prest.

As I’ve said before the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw several massive projects to transcribe and publish the contents of royal archives started. It’s quite amazing how many there actually are are. I’ve written already about the imperial historiographer Jean Dumont’s Corps Universel de Droit des Gens, about the need for more historical work to be done on the drive to compile peace treaties that he was part of, and my joy at finding these works made available to scholars over the internet. So I thought today I’d post a link to the text of another compilation, this time the Histoire des Traités de Paix put together by Jean Yves de Saint-Prest (1640-1721) and published after his death in 1725.  What I find particularly fascinating about comparing these works is not the texts of treaties they contain – after all, these tend to be pretty much the same, at least from Dumont onwards. It’s their different rationales for justifying why a study of treaties is important. 

In this respect, Saint-Prest is one of my favourites. His cynical suggestions that ‘one fools men with treaties as one fools children with nuts’ or that they were simply ‘spiders’ webs that are unable to catch flies’ are balanced with the idea that despite their faults, without peace treaties there would be an almost ‘universal upheaval’ between the states of the world; that as a soldier defends his patrie with a sword, so does the diplomat with his pen. There’s something that I particularly like about this passage from the introduction that extends this idea: ‘…que les transactions qu’on nomme Traitées de Paix, etc faites et ratifiées solonellement par les puissances assemblée, établies sur une infinité de précautions, jurées, après des dis cussions sans nombre, sur les Saints Evangiles, au nom de la trés Sainte Trinité, aux yeux de tous les peoples de l’univers, ne soient un necessité si indispensable, que sans elles on verroit bien-tôt un bouleversement universel dans les Etats. Toutes ces circonstances rendent l’étude des Traités de Paix la plus belle etude du monde et la plus nécessaire par rapport au bien public. Ceux qui s’y appliquent par leur plume qu’un habile Général par son épée. De meme que ceux-ci repoussent les violanes d’un ennemi qui attaque à force ouverte, les premiers repoussent les sophisms et les subtilités des perjures, mettent au jour leur mauvaise foi, et renversent leurs chicanes et leurs equivoques.’ (p.I.)

Of course, such sentiments praising the capacity of diplomacy to ‘counter the sophisms and subtleties of the dishonest, uncover their bad faith, and counter their chicanes and equivocations’ are not surprising, considering that Saint-Prest was the director of both the archival dépot of French foreign affairs and the  French diplomatic academy, both newly set up by Secretary of State, the Marquis de Torcy in 1710. What I like about this passage, though, is that it suggests studying peace treaties is not only useful, but also honourable and useful. This is something that is easy to forget. Looking at peace treaties retrospectively, it's much easier to see the equivocations, chicanes and deceptions that lead to the failures of particular agreements than it is the good intentions that led to other.

The Bilbiothèque Nationale in Paris has made Saint-Prest’s editions of treaties available through Gallica. Read/ download it here. Or, if you prefer, there is also a version scanned by the Boston Library of a copy once owned by the American statesman John Adams.

Dumont's CUD...

When I first started writing about  treaties I had a huge amount of trouble accessing many of the standard compilations that are the most useful sources for peace treaties. Only a few years later and there really are a wealth of sources on the web where full works have been digitized and are available for download in multiple formats at only the touch of a button.

Take Jean Dumont’s work Corps Universel Diplomatique du Droit des Gens, (CUD) which is pretty much the first work that gets turned to for the texts of treaties from Charlemagne to the late 17th century. When I first started needing this work I was put off looking at it on microfiche, perhaps the most awkward and least satisfying type of way to look at a historical source. Over the last few years, when I’ve really had to spend much more time with several volumes I’ve seen that look in librarians’ eyes that I read as questioning whether I really need to call up all those large volumes so often and keep them on the reserve shelves for so long.

To be honest, I’ve not felt too bad about doing this: not only did I need to do this, but they’re really the kind of work that should be on open access given that they’re the most authoritative compilation of pre-modern European treaties and are cited so often in any work you could poke a stick at by historians, political scientists and any others interested in the development of international law. Anyway, it seems as though the web has made these kind of problems a thing of the past as I’ve now got all the volumes and supplements of the CUD  sitting in a single folder. 

In some ways, it’s a shame, as I love the books themselves as objects – the smell, the feel of the rough paper, and the element of chance, of opening it up to a page at random and finding some gem I couldn’t find by design. However, these are small things in comparison to the benefits of having it scanned and digitized. Even better, it’s format-friendly. In the online viewing options as well as being available in colour or black and white PDFs, they’re also available in several e-reader friendly formats. There is also a Full Text version. Of course, these are a minefield in terms of typographical errors, which are so commonplace that they’re hardly worth using – except, perhaps, to search for certain terms to see how concepts are repeated (or not) in different periods.

So much academic work is remaining to be done in this area, not only on treaties themselves, but also on Dumont and how he fits in to the wider impulse towards compiling volumes of treaties in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So at some stage I’ll try to put together something on those themes. Until then, there’s quite enough to be getting on in these volumes already.

Thanks to the John Adams library at the Boston Public Library for digitizing these books and making them available through the Internet Archive. You can access them here: Corps Universel Diplomatique.