Mise en Scène: The Indictment

Abstract

The revolutionaries attacked the premises and functioning of the international order under the old regime where war was the norm and peace the exception and states recognized no bonds but self-interest. They also critiqued the demonstrable foreign policy failures of Louis XV and Louis XVI which reduced France to a nullity and underscored its impotence. The revolutionaries could draw upon a long tradition of criticism of the diplomatic system. Statesmen, philosophers, and clerics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Leibniz, Mably, and Fénélon, critiqued both the system and the king, as did many of the philosophes, notably Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Holbach. Even worse from the perspective of many was to engage in war and repeatedly fail as the kings did.