author
Maurice Joly
1831–1878
Best known for a bold satirical attack on Napoleon III, this French lawyer and political writer turned a philosophical dialogue into a sharp critique of power. His most famous book later became infamous for being plagiarized in the creation of the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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About the author
Born in eastern France, Maurice Joly was a 19th-century French lawyer, political writer, and satirist. He is chiefly remembered for Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, first published in 1864, an imaginative and dangerous book for its time because it used a fictional exchange between two thinkers to criticize the authoritarian rule of Napoleon III.
The book led to serious consequences. Joly was prosecuted by the imperial government and imprisoned, which fixed his reputation as a fearless critic of power. Although he wrote other works, this dialogue remains the center of his legacy because of both its literary form and its political courage.
There is some inconsistency among library and reference sources about his birth year: some list 1829, while the heading you provided uses 1831. What is clear is that he died in 1878, and that his writing has had a long afterlife—partly for admirable reasons, and partly because his work was later misused by others in one of the most notorious political hoaxes of modern history.