It is these two thinkers, and what they represent, that Joly sends to hell to converse about the dark truths of modern politics. Machiavelli characteristically displays, Waggoner observes, “absolute control over the movement of the discussion.” As Waggoner ably demonstrates, Joly had a higher opinion of Machiavelli’s knowledge of politics than that of Montesquieu. Waggoner points out that Joly displays his discipleship to Machiavelli’s teaching even in the form of his dialogue, which, like The Prince, consists of twenty-five chapters with a discussion of conspiracies at its center.

Machiavelli effortlessly outmaneuvers Montesquieu, despite Montesquieu’s awareness of the Florentine’s penchant for cunning and deception. Machiavelli, however, knows to whom he speaks and appeals to Montesquieu’s native patriotism. In order to disarm the baron, he plainly disavows The Prince as a trite tract for the times, reflections simply on sixteenth-century Florence.

Despite his disavowal, Machiavelli returns repeatedly to The Prince and reiterates his teachings. In his words, “all men seek to dominate and no one would not be a tyrant if he could. All, or nearly all, are ready to sacrifice another’s rights to their own interests.” Any political theory worth its salt must start from the hard truths: all men, or nearly so, are self-serving “ravenous beasts.” Hence the search for social stability can never forgo the need to use force; quixotic abstractions like justice and right merely disarm one and leave one at the mercy of the bad. In the famous words of The Prince, chapter 15, one must “learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.” Machiavelli thereby puts the virtues of morality at a double remove: On the one hand, worry about reputation for the virtues, not the virtues themselves, and on the other hand, worry about whether they are politically useful or dangerous.

Montesquieu, for his part, admits that “force and cunning” are crucial in human affairs, but still he insists that men need principles that invoke “morality, justice, religion.” Montesquieu charges Machiavelli with undermining the very society whose stability he wishes to safeguard:

Stop deceiving yourself. Each act of usurpation by the prince in the public domain authorizes a similar infraction where the subject is concerned. Each act of violence in high places legitimizes one in low.…

The subject of The Prince is the “wholly new prince,” a discoverer of a new type of social order. “A wholly new prince in a wholly new state,” Machiavelli says, is a man who has not merely acquired an already existing state but has succeeded in founding a state; he is a radical innovator, the founder of a wholly new society, or even of a new religion. Machiavelli points to Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus as men “who have acquired or founded kingdom.” These men Machiavelli calls “prophets.” Machiavelli’s deepest intention in The Prince is “prophetic,” in his sense; he aims to set out a wholly new teaching, and thereby to inaugurate a new political project “for the common good of all.”

Joly’s Montesquieu replies that we no longer inhabit an epoch whose politics are moved by great founders. Politics and society have become more rational and stable; this is in no small measure due to his own contribution in the form of a new political science that stresses institutions, and not individuals, as the key to social stability. The administration of things has replaced the need for biblical piety, classical virtue, and Machiavellian virtù. This new political science will virtually ensure the demise of tyranny as a political possibility by remaining cognizant of the true dynamics of power, capable of regulating such power through separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and by working in conjunction with a free press, universities, and transparent financial institutions.

Machiavelli, for his part, seizes on Montesquieu’s historical optimism. Montesquieu has not taken into account subsequent events, most notably the “events of 1848,” by which Machiavelli no doubt means the coup d’état of Napoleon III. In effect, Machiavelli says: Your optimism is misplaced.

In the crucial moment, Machiavelli wagers that he can transform Montesquieu’s liberal republic, even with its “ideas, mores, laws… [and] all the institutions that guarantee liberty,” into a thriving tyranny.

For the remainder of the dialogue Machiavelli takes us step by step on the steady march of a potential tyrant showing us ad oculus how to subvert every one of liberalism’s institutional checks and witness the emergence of a tyrant with unparalleled authority. It was the genius of Joly to see with unrivaled clarity that the political and economic arrangements in nineteenth-century Europe did not amount to an inevitable march of progress and enlightenment, but rather contained the seeds of an even darker age: A new epoch of unprecedented tyranny. In the voice of Machiavelli, Joly identifies the greatest weaknesses and vulnerabilities of liberalism, and he finds them in the very institutions championed by his Montesquieu as having eliminated tyranny altogether.

The separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers mandated by liberal constitutionalism can be undermined by means of a series of subtle reforms. The prince may press for constitutional changes to weaken the legislative branch and strengthen the more easily corrupted judiciary. Even if such innovations require a national plebiscite for legitimacy, the people might voluntarily agree to amend their own constitution.

As The Prince teaches, one must rely on one’s own arms, and the modern arms par excellence are the press. Here is Joly’s Machiavelli:

I dare say that, to this day, no government has conceived of anything as bold as what I am about to describe. Since it is almost always because of the press that governments in parliamentary countries are brought down, my scheme envisions neutralizing the press by the press itself. Because journalism wields such great power, do you know what my government will do? I will become like them. I will be journalism incarnate!

Machiavelli’s revolutionary tyrant turns the press into his weapon by managing information, journalists, journals, and newspapers. He even manages the criticism of the regime so as to conform with the legitimacy of his rule.

But the critical question for Machiavelli remains: how does the prince pay for all of this? Joly’s Montesquieu points out that modern princes must borrow money, and there are limits to what even a crooked accountant can do. Because a prince wishing to borrow money requires “a system of accountability and public access to information,” it seems Montesquieu’s new science of politics has tamed Machiavelli’s prince. But in addition to employing the powers of the modern media mogul, Machiavelli’s prince, like his latter-day progeny, the modern executive, masters too the imperii arcana of budgetary manipulation. 

Joly characterizes the abuse of liberalism that Machiavelli counsels —the preservation of liberal forms and institutions as a mask to hide one’s tyranny—as the decisively novel and modern element of this tyranny. Modern tyranny is supported by a political religion that appeals to the most profound longings of its citizens by demanding absolute obligation and promising the greatest reward: Salvation here on earth. In the words of Aron, modern tyranny belongs to the religions seculaires: The regime founded upon a religious passion and containing a religious element satisfies the people as it justifies absolute obedience to absolute authority. It is precisely this strange hybrid of religious passion and political power that Waggoner identifies as “the common ideological trait of totalitarianism.”

Machiavelli wins the wager, not so much because he can demonstrate that tyranny can take root and flourish even within a liberal order, but rather because he shows that it is especially within the liberal order, and without separating morality from politics, as Montesquieu had declared. Just declare the prince a quasi-god, and his glory will be fused with morality, for he is at one with the justice prescribed by his law.

Like our contemporary soothsayers, believers in technological solutions to politics, Joly’s Montesquieu had been confident that the progress of liberalism was inevitable. But, Joly seems to say, his ignorance of Europe after 1848 is a fatal blindness. The arrest of Joly and the censorship of his Dialogue would seem to prove it. Napoleon III’s dictatorial coup d’état of 1851 was the beginning of a new form of tyranny that constituted the greatest threat to liberalism, consisting of a perverse, but all too easy, mixture of a despotic state with humanitarian social goals.