Vattel Publishes Le Droit des gens

1758

Emer de Vattel (1714 to 1767), author of Le Droit des gens, published 1758. Place: Neuchâtel, Prussian principality in the Swiss cantons Figures: Emer de Vattel, Neuchâtel jurist in Saxon service · Christian Wolff, whose Jus Gentium Vattel reframes for a wider audience · Frederick II of Prussia, technical sovereign of Neuchâtel and dedicatee of the work The Textbook of the System Hugo Grotius had written De Jure Belli ac Pacis in 1625 in Latin, for a learned readership. Samuel von Pufendorf had followed with De Jure Naturae et Gentium in 1672. Christian Wolff had produced a vast and unreadable Latin Jus Gentium Methodo Scientifica Pertractatum in 1749. Emer de Vattel, a Neuchâtel diplomat in the service of the Elector of Saxony, takes the Wolffian system, prunes its scholasticism, writes it in clear French, and titles it Le Droit des gens, ou Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des souverains. Published at Neuchâtel in 1758, the book is at once the most cited treatise on international law in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is the first comprehensive work to take the post-Westphalian sovereign state, as it actually exists in 1758, as the basic unit of analysis. What Vattel Codifies Three propositions structure the work. First, the sovereign equality of states: une petite république n'est pas moins un État souverain que le plus puissant royaume. A small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom. Second, non-intervention: it does not belong to any foreign power to take cognizance of the administration of any other sovereign. Third, the rights of neutrals in time of war, including freedom of commerce subject to contraband restrictions. American revolutionaries quote Vattel by name in the debates of the 1770s and 1780s. Benjamin Franklin orders three copies for the Continental Congress. Chief Justice John Marshall cites him repeatedly. Lincoln is said to keep The Law of Nations on his desk through the Civil War. Latin American independence movements read him in Spanish translation. The Westphalian principle of 1648 acquires, at Neuchâtel in 1758, a textbook that travels with the diplomatic bag of every new sovereign state for the next 150 years.