RESPONSE TO THE DOWNFALL OF THE CHRISTIAN REPUBLIC IN FRENCH PRE-REVOLUTIONARY REPUBLICANISM: GABRIEL BONNOT DE MABLY AND JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The author’s starting point is the assumption that the idea of the Christian Republic, suppressed by the Enlightenment, entered the French 18th-century discourse through its two secularized versions: the “Great Plan” put forward by Duke of Sully in Royal Economies (1638) and the Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe by Charles-Irenee Castel, the abbot of Saint-Pierre (1717). While the “Great Plan” aimed at establishing a secularized European peace alliance under the hegemony of France, Saint-Pierre strove to remove all hegemonic facets of the plan and establish peace according to the principles of equality of sovereign states. In the second half of the 18th century, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in reaction to the Seven-Year War, assumed different standpoints regarding the heritage of Sully and Saint-Pierre: although both deemed useful to build upon Saint-Pierre’s pacifist thought, they rejected his way of establishing a Christian Republic in Europe as essentially Utopian. The former saw the only way of pacifying Europe in federalization under the hegemony of a single federal republic. The latter however rejected this solution as too risky and too difficult to carry out, preferring a return to the old theory of balance of forces, which enables small, autarchic and belligerent republics, that must always take into account the certainty that they could be attacked at any time, to establish only temporary and loose connections with other (equally small) republics within the frameworks of defensive alliances.