Some additional facts are mentioned at Henry Rollin's book, L'Apocalypse de notre temps,[2] and in Maurice Joly, un suicidé de la démocratie – a preface to a modern publication of Joly's Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, Épilogue and César – by the mysterious F.

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,[4] followed by Les Principes de 89[5] and Supplément à la géographie politique du Jura.

In 1864, Joly wrote his best-known book, The Dialogue in Hell, a satirical attack on Bonaparte's authoritarianism, and a defense of republicanism.

[7] 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.

In the Dialogue, Machiavelli claims that he "... wouldn't even need twenty years to transform utterly the most indomitable European character and render it as a docile under tyranny as the debased people of Asia."

"[9] The book was published anonymously (with the by-line par un contemporain, 'by a contemporary') in Brussels in 1864 and smuggled into France for distribution, but the print-run was seized by the police immediately upon crossing the border.

Though it gained Joly the reputation of a scandalous and bully barrator, he sued ten newspapers, one after another, either for not accepting his stories or for not publishing news about him.

Early in the 20th century, extensive passages from Joly's book were used to fraudulently concoct The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,[16] an infamous Russian-made antisemitic literary forgery.

[17][18][19][20] In his book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994), Italian writer Umberto Eco claims[21] that in the Dialogue, Joly plagiarized seven pages or more from a popular novel The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue.