In 1864, French political writer Maurice Joly published a fictional dialogue set in Hell between political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli and Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu. Titled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the book was a thinly veiled satire attacking the authoritarian ambitions of Emperor Napoleon III. Decades later, agents of the Okhrana, the Russian Empire's secret police, manufactured the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to paint revolutionary movements as part of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Rather than writing original propaganda, the Russian agents systematically plagiarized Joly's political satire. Over half of the text in the Protocols was lifted directly from Joly's work, simply replacing Machiavelli's cynical arguments for autocratic power with fake Jewish cabals. In 1921, Philip Graves, a journalist for The Times of London, uncovered the hoax by comparing the two texts side-by-side, exposing one of the most destructive literary plagiarisms in human history.