Maurice Joly
| Maurice Joly | |
|---|---|
Albumen photograph by Eugène Appert (photographer), c. 1870
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| Born |
September 22, 1829 Lons-le-Saunier, France |
| Died | July 15, 1878 (aged 48) Paris |
| Occupation | Writer, lawyer |
| Language | French |
| Nationality | French |
| Period | 1862-1878 |
| Genre | Political satire |
| Notable works | Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu |
Maurice Joly (1829–1878) was a French publicist and lawyer known for his political satire titled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la politique de Machiavel au XIXe siècle, that attacked the regime of Napoleon III. Available English translations include: Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by Herman Bernstein, and The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by John S. Waggoner.
Most of the known information about Monsieur Joly is based upon his autobiographical sketch Maurice Joly, son passé, son programme, par lui-même, written at Conciergerie prison in November 1870, where he was jailed for assault at Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Some additional facts are mentioned at Henry Rollin's book L'Apocalypse de notre temps, and in Maurice Joly, un suicidé de la dèmocratie - a preface to modern publication of Joly's Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, Épilogue and César - by mysterious F. Leclercq.
Joly was born in the small town of Lons-le-Saunier, in the department of Jura, to a French father and an Italian mother. He studied law in Dijon, but stopped in 1849 in order to go to Paris, where he worked as a clerk at various governmental institutions for about 10 years. He successfully completed his legal studies and was finally admitted to the Paris bar in 1859. Politically, Joly was a conservative, a monarchist, and a legitimist; he had no known use for republics/democracies or popular sovereignty.
He started writing in 1862, supplying literary portraits of his fellow lawyers to a small magazine "Gorgias", and later published these sketches as a stand-alone book Le Barreau de Paris, followed by Les Principes de 89 and Supplément à la géographie politique du Jura. Then Joly concocted a lampoon César, where he attacked the political regime of Napoleon III, a.k.a. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. The books were printed by Martin-Beaupré brothers and swiftly destroyed by the publishers. Not a single copy survived.
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