Machiavelli, in His Time and Ours

Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What To Fear

Sometime around 1513, disgraced Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a short treatise on government. Though published only posthumously, The Prince gained such influence that it attracted ire from Counter-Reformation clergy, and the Catholic Church banned it for centuries. Modern critics still argue about how seriously to take the book’s precepts. Everyone seemingly has an opinion, regardless whether they’ve read it, and Machiavelli’s name has become a political byword.

French historian Patrick Boucheron thinks Machiavelli, as a man, means something different than his most famous book implies. Machiavelli wrote amid tempestuous times, when the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Italian Wars made life chaotic and unpredictable. And, Boucheron believes, we face similar tumult today. So time has come again to read Machiavelli, understanding his entire corpus, within his historical context. Boucheron accomplishes this eloquently.

Machiavelli emerged from Republican Florence, born into what we’d consider today the upper middle class: common citizens, that is, but relatively comfortable. But within his lifetime, the Medici family privatized Florence’s public domains, advancing the cause of nascent capitalism. Machiavelli used family connections to land a lucrative appointment to the chancery of the Grand Council, giving him a bird’s-eye view to civic governance— and to democracy’s rapid decline.

Even before the political texts which made Machiavelli immortal, he left copious written evidence, through his personal letters, state documents, and other writings. Boucheron reconstructs Machiavelli’s biography from the innumerable records he left, many of which survive in his own handwriting. Being neither gentry nor pedestrian, Machiavelli saw most of civic order with an outsider’s perspective. This was furthered by his extensive diplomatic journeys and international embassies.

But the Italian Wars saw Machiavelli’s beloved Grand Council abolished, and Machiavelli himself exiled to his ancestral estates. Reduced to country yeomanry, he rediscovered his childhood love of learning. He spent hours engaged in liberal arts studies, as Boucheron quotes him, conversing with the greats of ancient Greece and Rome. He would alternate between reading the classics, and writing his own books, which sought the connection between ancient literature and the Florentine Renaissance.

Patrick Boucheron

Boucheron combines biography with literary criticism to guide audiences through the complex thorn-bush of understanding Machiavelli’s work. Surely the man himself understood how difficult and morally complex his writings appeared. Famous among the populace for comedies like The Mandrake and The Golden Ass, Machiavelli preferred to couch his philosophy for commoners in art and imaginative literature; ordinary Florentines probably considered him a reclusive belle-letterist.

Meanwhile, political works like his authoritarian The Prince and his small-R republican The Discourses circulated among the city’s intelligentsia in manuscript format. Machiavelli attracted a following among the upper crust, and apparently conducted salons, discussing Latin classics for moneyed aristocracy. (Boucheron notes that Machiavelli never savvied Greek, which excluded him from true membership in Italy’s burgeoning patrician Humanist movement.)

Despite being an Ėcole normale scholar himself, and writing about one of history’s most controversial authors, Boucheron keeps everything in vernacular language, staying completely away from academic jargon. Perhaps this reflects this book’s origins as thirty weekly short radio broadcasts on French educational radio: form follows function. It may also reflect award-winning translator Willard Wood, who keeps both academic accuracy and linguistic clarity tied for number-one position.

Notwithstanding one false hope, Machiavelli never regained his political standing within Florence, as it flip-flopped between autocratic principality and madcap democracy. Since his most important works got printed for wider distribution only posthumously, we can only speculate how Florentine aristocracy perceived him. After all, as Boucheron notes, once his diplomatic dispatches stopped, the major source of Machiavelli’s life became his personal journal, which reflects internal turmoil over external acclaim.

Therefore Machiavelli descends to current readers, not as a person, but as a legacy preserved in others’ controversies. Critics debate exactly how literally to take his political positions, especially since he contradicted himself from one manuscript to another. Boucheron doesn’t eliminate this controversy, only to guide readers to participate in the debate more informed about the author. Even he admits, frequently Machiavelli intended less to be taken seriously, than to provoke an otherwise complacent audience.

This book’s main body runs barely 130 pages, and many pages are illustrated; few chapters exceed three pages. Eager readers could consume it in one ambitious Saturday, though I’d recommend spending longer in thought and rumination. An introduction written for the American edition admits Boucheron chose this subject specifically to address the Trump influence in global politics. Boucheron believes Machiavelli speaks to times as ungovernable as his own. Surely this counts as one such time.