5 - From Cosmopolitanism to la Grande Nation: French Revolutionary Diplomacy, 1789–1802

Summary

Across the eighteenth century, diplomacy became a pervasive dimension of European politics, although ‘negotiation’ was the commonly used term: the classic statement of it as aristocratic civility in the service of princes was François de Callières’s De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, 1716. An unknown contributor to the Encyclopédie on Ambassade referred to ‘able and experienced people who negotiate matters’. In contrast, the entries written on Diplôme and Diplomatique by Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy referred only to the production, study and verification of official acts or diplomas: there was no reference to international relations. The detailed entry on Droit by Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d’Argis referred to ‘the universal diplomatic corpus of droit des gens [law of nations], by Jean Dumont, which contains in seventeen volumes all the treaties of alliances, peace, navigation and commerce relative to the droit des gens since Charlemagne’.