Of Spiders and Bees 209
humanitarian and literary fi gure, as well as an early supporter of the revolu-
tion in general, and of the abolition of the monarchy in par tic u lar (with his
memorable assertion that “kings are in morality what monsters are in the
world of nature”). He served for a time as president of the National Conven-
tion. Among his causes were the or ga ni za tion of public libraries, the estab-
lishment of botanical gardens, the improvement of education in general, the
preservation of antiquities against “vandalism” (a term that he coined), and
the championing of racial equality. One of the less known of his many inter-
ests was the codifi cation of international law.
Grégoire’s proposed declaration was nothing resembling a detailed code
of substantive law. It was a statement of very general principles, scarcely over
a page in length, with a pungent natural- law fl avor. It comprised twenty- one
articles, of which the fi rst stated the nations of the world to be “among them-
selves in the state of nature” with “universal morality” as their common
bond. “A nation should act towards others,” it asserted, “as it wishes others to
act towards it; what a man owes to a man, a nation owes to another nation.”
Nations were exhorted to “do in peace the greatest amount of good to each
other, and in war the least harm possible.” Th ey were also urged to subordi-
nate their private interests “to the general interest of the human family.” Some
of the provisions were a bit more specifi c than these. Th ere was a statement,
for example, that a “nation has not the right to meddle in the government of
others.” It asserted that “[e]very nation is the own er of its own territory.” Al-
liances directed against “the interest of a country” were pronounced to be
“an attack against the human family.” Diplomatic immunity was asserted,
and treaties declared to be “sacred and inviolable.”
One person who was unimpressed with Grégoire’s eff ort was Martens. Of
a generally conservative temperament, as well as a pragmatic one, Martens
was a staunch foe of the French Revolution generally. He was contemptuous
of Grégoire’s opus in par tic u lar, deriding it as “nothing but a beautiful play
of fancy” that was ultimately “nothing but a chimera.” Also voicing objec-
tion to rationalistic, natural- law approaches to international law was a British
lawyer named Robert Ward. He rejected the very idea of deriving interna-
tional law in hypothetico- deductive fashion from a set of fi rst principles, ar-
guing instead for a pluralistic world in which “varieties of religion and...
moral systems,” combined with “important local circumstances,” produced
diff erent systems of international law for diff erent parts of the world.