"Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular version of Machiavelli's The Prince of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In translating, Amelot also transformed, altering the form and meaning through his prefaces and commentaries, while marketing to a general audience. His translations were then translated into other languages, and his ideas spread." Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show that the very sphere of political criticism and the terms of public debate were absolutist creations, which were in turn appropriated by critics of the crown.