The Frenchman, Gabriel Naudé, almost a contemporary of Schoppe's, constituted himself the champion of Coups d'Etat, if they promised political advantages; further, he justifies and praises the Night of Saint Bartholomew, a very energetic measure taken in his lifetime to put an end to the religious strife which was weakening France and causing the government much embarrassment; his only regret is that the happy idea of slaughtering all the Huguenots was not carried out more completely; in other words, that the massacre of the obnoxious Protestants was not continued until they had been completely wiped out. Even in Descartes, who confessed to a somewhat shady opportunism in questions of state and, for instance, concedes reasonable and moral justification to Absolutism, we find the depressing statement: "Against the enemy one is, so to speak ('_quasi_'), permitted to do anything," a conscious and determined denial of the Christian commandment "Love thine enemies," which perhaps demands too much of the average man and can only be expected from saints, but which, anyway, contains an exhortation for all the world at least to be just to one's enemies and act according to the dictates of Morality. D'Holbach does not beat about the bush, but declares roundly: "In politics the only crime is not to succeed." Even Macchiavelli did not express it as baldly as that. To quote the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, he at least pays virtue the compliment of hypocrisy, for he gives this advice: "Do (the evil which is profitable) and excuse it afterwards." This is a paraphrase of the old advice given by a pettifogging lawyer for the benefit of the criminal: "If you have done it, deny it," and of the well-known phrase of Frederick the Great which runs something like this: "If I have a desire for a foreign country, I begin by seizing it, then I send for lawyers who prove that I had a right to it." This, then, was the opinion of that king who wrote an "Anti-Macchiavelli," of whom, however, Paul Janet neatly remarks: "Nothing is more typical of Macchiavellism than as heir presumptive to the throne to refute Macchiavelli's principles, and then as ruling monarch to apply them with the more determination."