In the year 1800 in L' État de la France à la Fin de l' An VIII, an anonymous publication written for the French government, Hauterive, perhaps the earliest director of a modern Ministry of Information, criticised the international system as it had operated in Europe since 1760.

At the outbreak of the French Revolution, he wrote, an effective law of nations had no longer existed. ‘The true principles of Europe's political and federal constitution were neglected or forgotten.’ Indeed, they had been destroyed―by the rise of the Russian Empire as a factor in the north of Europe and ‘the intervention of this in the intercourse of the rest’; by the development of Prussia to ‘a Power of the highest rank’, and especially by her resort to war, to a new form of government, to new military tactics, to the policy of accumulating treasure in the interests of power, which steps had forced all the states into an unnatural and enervating concentration on struggle; by ‘the rise and progress of the commercial and colonial system’ of Great Britain, which had had equally destructive consequences. By 1789 on account of these developments ‘there had long ceased to exist any maxims of government, any federal union, any fixed political principles in Europe….