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A diplomat born in Holland, Abraham de Wicquefort (1606–1682) closely observed seventeenth century diplomacy during the 1648 Congress of Westphalia. In 1680–1681, he published The Ambassador and His Functions, a scholarly analysis of this profession, which was then in full expansion. Illustrating how established was the practice of mediation between sovereign powers, section XI of volume 2 is entitled “Of mediation and ambassadors‐mediators.” Wicquefort already saw the difficulty of the task: “The status of mediator is one of the most difficult for the ambassador to bear, and mediation is one of his most unpleasant tasks.”

More recently, the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, signed at The Hague in 1907, had for its main objective in Part I: “The Maintenance of General Peace.” The path to be preferred for this purpose was specified in Part II: “Good Offices and Mediation.”

Mediation has been a research topic for a long time already. In France, research on mediation dates from the beginning of the twentieth century. A bibliography on the period 1945–1959 contains some 572 references of books and articles (Meynaud and Schroeder 1961). These writings and works relate mainly to mediation in labor relations and collective conflicts, but also in international relations.