Posthumous portrait of Nicolas Machiavelli, by Santi di Tito. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Nicolas Machiavelli was born in 1469, into a family of minor nobility with land ties to Montespertoli, the original stronghold. A whole lineage dedicated to public functions, to the service of the Republic. He studied classical studies, which gave him a command of Latin. He was 25 when the Italian wars began, the intrusion of the “Barbarians” (French, Aragonese, Germans) into the peninsula. Until his death in 1527, he will know only the state of war. He will draw this lesson from it which he will not budge, which he quotes in The Prince “Politics and war [are] inseparable since doing politics is first and foremost about making war […] and making war has become the condition and the heart of politics, since it does not There is no possible survival of the community without effective thought of the necessities of war. » The handyman of the Florentine state Machiavelli never exercised supreme functions. Rather, he was the handyman of the Florentine state. An “executive secretary”, in charge of a huge correspondence and archives. He took part in embassies which took him to France, to the Holy Germanic Empire, to Rome. In 1501, he became the right arm of the gonfalonier for life (the supreme magistrate of the city), Piero di Tommaso Soderini. For a decade, Machiavelli can estimate that he has almost achieved his goals, that he exercises a decisive influence, especially when he obtains the creation of a national army, a militia. But the disgrace of Soderini, in 1512, and his exile bring down Machiavelli. Thrown into a dungeon, tortured, he only comes out to enjoy supervised freedom. At 48, he will only live on the fringes of political life. His efforts to appease the Medici will earn him only crumbs of power. Also read:The real life of Nicolas Machiavelli In a letter to his friend Vettori, dated December 10, 1513, he seems to have had a good heart against bad luck. Withdrawn to the countryside, he hunts thrushes with glue, watches over his supply of wood, plays backgammon at the local inn with the innkeeper, the butcher, the miller... But the bitterness is there:"I conversations with those who pass, I ask for news of their country, I guess a lot of things, I observe the variety of tastes and the diversity of men's caprices. This is how lunchtime approaches when, in the company of my household, I feed on the food that my poor farm allows me. » He therefore lives in the "pouillerie", and it is only in the evening that he forgets all his torments:"I enter my study and, from the threshold, I strip myself of the everyday cast-off, covered and mud, to wear royal and pontifical court clothes; thus, honorably attired, I enter the ancient courts of the men of antiquity. Death gripped Machiavelli in Italy's worst days. Left to his own devices, the constable of Bourbon (the great feudal, sworn enemy of François I st ) marches on Rome to dislodge Pope Clement VII, a true antichrist for his lansquenets passed to the Reformation. For a time, he threatened Florence, then rushed to Rome, which was sacked on May 5 and 6, 1527. Eight weeks later, Machiavelli died, to the indifference of his compatriots. Confidential works Until he was sidelined, he had not written any of the works that made his reputation. The Prince dates from 1513, its distribution is confidential; the Discourses on the first decade of Livy are from 1520, as is The Art of War; Florentine Stories were just completed in 1526. In view of what he had observed, of what he knew of Roman history, Machiavelli draws an expertise that undermines everything that was agreed in terms of political science. As there is a "Copernican" time (the outline of the heliocentric system dates from 1513), there is a "Machiavellian" break. Reader of Lucretius, agnostic without saying so, Machiavelli desacralizes politics. Like Napoleon, who had read The Prince , it reduces religion to the status of an auxiliary to guarantee social cohesion. Reader of Lucretius, agnostic without saying so, Machiavelli desacralizes politics. But all her misfortune, posthumously, is that her Prince inspired everything and the opposite of everything, to the point of blurring her thinking. In fact, Machiavelli places politics under the auspices of Fortuna . To hold or play men, versatile, ungrateful, wicked, he deploys the panel of choices to be made for the powerful. Looking closely at Cesar Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, he holds that men are more inclined to spare those who make themselves feared than those who make themselves loved. There is therefore a good and a bad use of force, even of cruelty; just have to find the right ratio. Isn't the ideal prince the one who combines the cunning of the fox with the strength of the lion? All the posthumous misfortune of Machiavelli is to have been reduced to a series of sentences and aphorisms, while his thought is much more loose. Everything was taken from him and the opposite of everything. Richelieu, Cromwell, Rousseau, Marx, Croce, Mussolini and others found in him the interpretation that suited them. To the point of blurring the thought of Machiavelli. Preface The Prince , Raymond Aron observed:“Among the texts that pass for “immortal” this little book occupies a special place […]. The Prince has not kept its youth – many works deserve this banal praise –, The Prince kept its power of fascination. What more can I say? Find out more Machiavelli. A life of wars, J.-L. Fournel,J.-C. Zancarini, Past Compounds, 2020. Fortune rules the world Machiavelli is nourished by ancient values. Far from imagining the life of men as a linear course, he sees it interspersed with accidents, hazards that affect the greatest as much as the common people. The Fortuna is the allegorical goddess of Chance. One of the capitoli , a sort of short lesson inspired by the epistles of the Latin poet Horace, deals with Fortune:"Like a rapid torrent that prides itself, smashes everything it meets wherever it rushes, / Raising the ground by a side, lowering it on the other, changing its shores, its bed, its course, and making the earth tremble wherever it passes:/ Thus Fortune in her impetuous course, goes changing, now here, now there, the face of this world. »
