Telemachus: does a book written for a boy amount to an attack on his grandfather's throne?

François Fénelon, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

I wrote it to teach a boy who would be king what a king is for. It says that conquest impoverishes the conqueror, that luxury rots a court before it rots a country, that flatterers are the most expensive servants a prince can keep, and that a reign is judged by whether the people in the fields are fed. If that is read as an attack, the reading is an admission.12

Sources

  1. His steady justice, impartiality, and public faith render him the arbiter of all the kingdoms that surround his own. While the enterprises of ambition make the warrior odious, and the common danger unites the world against him, J?;iory, superior to that of conquest, comes unlooked for to the friend of peace.
    The Adventures of Telemachus, pp. 237–238
  2. By this unremitted vigilance vent many disorders and many crimes. Such cannot prevent, yon must immediately punish with for, in this case, severity to the individual is clemency to the public — it stops those irregularities at their source which would deluge the country with misery and guilt.
    The Adventures of Telemachus, pp. 363–364

Where the argument is made

  • The Adventures of Telemachus (composed for the Duke of Burgundy in the 1690s, published without his consent in 1699) — the kingdoms Mentor shows the boy, the ruin brought by conquest, and the prosperity of ordinary people as the measure of a reign. NOTE: the secondary literature in hand does not cover Telemachus — Howell's volume is on the Dialogues alone. This position is grounded in the primary text
  • do not make claims about its reception, its publication history, or the king's reading of it beyond what the book itself supports

How the argument was received

Contested in the most direct way available: it was published without his consent, read at court as a portrait of Louis XIV, and he never returned there.