Maurice Joly (22 September 1829 – 15 July 1878) was a French political writer and lawyer known for The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political satire of Napoleon III. Known life Most of the known information about Monsieur Joly is based upon his autobiographical sketch, , written at Conciergerie prison in November 1870, where he was jailed for an assault at Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Some additional facts are mentioned at Henry Rollin's book, , and in - a preface to a modern publication of Joly's and César - by the mysterious F. Leclercq. Joly was born in the small town of Lons-le-Saunier, in the département of Jura, to a French father and an Italian mother. He studied law in Dijon, but stopped in 1849 in order to go to Paris, where he worked as a clerk at various governmental institutions for about 10 years. He successfully completed his legal studies and was finally admitted to the Paris bar in 1859. He started writing in 1862, supplying literary portraits of his fellow lawyers to a small magazine, Gorgias, and later published these sketches as a stand-alone book, Le Barreau de Paris, followed by Les Principes de 89 and Supplément à la géographie politique du Jura. Then Joly concocted a lampoon, César, where he attacked the political regime of Napoleon III (Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte). The books were printed by the Martin-Beaupré brothers and swiftly destroyed by the publishers. Not a single copy survived. In 1864, Joly wrote his best-known book, The Dialogue in Hell, a satirical attack on Bonaparte's authoritarianism, and a defense of republicanism. The piece uses the literary device of a dialogue of the dead, invented by ancient Roman writer Lucian and introduced into the French belles-lettres by Bernard de Fontenelle in the 18th century. Shades of the historical figures Niccolò Machiavelli and Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu meet in Hell in the year 1864 and dispute on politics. In this way, Joly tried to conceal a direct, and then illegal, criticism of Louis-Napoleon's rule. Joly relates, in his 1870 autobiography, that one evening thinking of Abbé Galiani's treatise Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds and walking by the Pont Royal, he was inspired to write a dialogue between Montesquieu and Machiavelli. The noble baron Montesquieu (whom Joly consigned to Hell in his book because of Montesquieu's support of republics/democracies) would make