Terry Foreman on 30 May 2012  •  Link

Franz Paul Baron de Lisola (1613-74). An Austrian diplomat, born at Salins in Franche-Conit. He began his diplomatic career in 1639, when he went to London as Ambassador to persuade Charles I. to reinstate the Count Palatine. In 1655 he was sent to Sweden to effect peace with the Poles, but having failed to attain this, he induced the Emperor Ferdinand III. to conclude an alliance with them. When Ambassador in Poland he brought about the reconciliation of that country with the Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg, and at the same time established a union between this Prince and the Emperor. In 1660 Lisola took part in the peace negotiations at Oliva, and after 1667 his great effort was to form a coalition against Louis XIV., whose plans he described and denounced in his famous pamphlet, he bouclier d'itat et de justice contre le dcssein de la monarchic universelle (1667). It is also due to his exertions that an alliance was established between Austria and Holland in 1672, in which union Spain also joined the following year. http://books.google.com/books?id=…

San Diego Sarah on 13 Aug 2020  •  Link

Goldie, M., & Levillain, C. (2020).
FRANCOIS-PAUL DE LISOLA AND ENGLISH OPPOSITION TO LOUIS XIV. HISTORICAL JOURNAL, 63 (3. PII S0018246X19000025), 559-580. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X…

ABSTRACT. Between the Restoration in 1660 and the Revolution in 1688 English public sensibility abandoned its century-long animus against Spain and began to identify France as its chief enemy.
Historians often hold that the most significant intervention in shifting the balance of public opinion was the Dutch-inspired pamphlet, England’s appeal from the private cabal at Whitehall (1673), written by the Huguenot Pierre du Moulin.

It is argued here that an immensely influential earlier intervention was made by François-Paul de Lisola’s Habsburg-inspired Buckler of state and justice (1667), which presented a rhetorically powerful body of arguments about the nature of the European state system at a critical juncture.
A Catholic in the service of the Emperor, who spent nearly two years in England in 1666-8, Lisola was an accomplished and versatile diplomat and publicist.
This essay interweaves diplomatic history with the history of geopolitical argument, tracing paths which led to Europe’s Grand Alliance against Louis XIV.

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/…

San Diego Sarah on 15 Aug 2020  •  Link

"François-Paul de Lisola’s Habsburg-inspired Buckler of state and justice (1667), ..."

This pamphlet changed the course of history, and I never heard of it -- or the Baron d'Isola -- before.

Lisola/d'Isola "proved a remarkably productive anti-French pamphleteer whose pen made way for the swords of William III, Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy. In the words of Winston Churchill, Lisola ‘devoted his whole life to this purpose of curbing the over-weening power of France’."

Circa 1664, "Sir William Temple and Lisola met in Brussels when the latter was making his way to London. Temple spoke highly of Lisola, describing him as ‘an honest man’ and ‘an equal partner in business’ (par negotiis), belying the negative image of Lisola conveyed by Charles II’s envoys in Paris."

"In Andrew Marvell MP’s 1677 'Account of the growth of popery and arbitrary government', he opens the narrative of national folly with the Second Anglo-Dutch War, arguing that it ought to have demonstrated to Charles II the perfidity of Louis XIV.

"Louis XIV dissembled in his supposed support for Charles II, leaving England to suffer naval disaster. England shattered, Louis was free to launch the War of Devolution, and had ‘in violation of all the most solemn and sacred oaths and treaties, invaded and taken a great part of the Spanish Netherlands, which had always been considered as the natural frontier of England’.

"Charles II was momentarily jolted into sanity and hurried to make the Triple Alliance. This was ‘a thing of so good a report and so generally acceptable to the nation, as being a hook in the French nostrils’, but soon enough the king undid it by his shameful Treaty of Dover.

"For Whigs, the Glorious Revolution involved a revolution in foreign policy: an end to the Stuart appeasement of France and the permanent installation of the Habsburg – Dutch – English axis that would persist as the bedrock of English diplomacy throughout the following century.

"Sir William Temple now acquired a golden reputation – enhanced by the literary endeavors of his former secretary, Jonathan Swift – as the visionary who had devised the original Triple Alliance, the diplomat who shaped the anti-French future.

"Naturally, the living Englishman eclipsed the dead Burgundian [Lisola]. Yet François-Paul de Lisola’s Buckler remained in play in post-Revolution writing: ‘the most excellent treatise of the truly honorable and learned statesman the Baron d’Isola’, as the political economist Roger Coke put it; while David Jones, who touted his own service as a double agent at the French court and who exposed the perfidy of Anglo-French dealings, explicitly recommended the Buckler as a complement to Sir William Temple’s Memoirs."

Excerpts lightly edited for clarity from https://www.academia.edu/41661703… -- all of which go to show that the pen is mightier than the sword in the long run.