Du bien commun au mal nécessaire: Tyrannies, assassinats politiques et souveraineté en Italie, vers 1470-vers 1600 (review)

In this weighty volume (784 pages of text) Reynaud Villard puts forward a thought-provoking thesis. Focusing on the period from around 1460 to 1580, he points to a spate of assassination attempts in north and central Italy, suggesting that the phenomenon reflected a change in the concept of tyranny. In about 1400, he says, Aristotle’s view of tyranny, as one of several possible forms of government, gave way to a less political analysis. According to this latter approach, the tyrant was defined by his behavior—greedy, licentious, and cruel. Such a ruler was sent by God to punish the vices of the community; but, since people would inevitably remain steeped in corruption, the rule of a tyrant could continue indefinitely. It was therefore the duty of publicspirited individuals to undertake tyrannicide in the name of God, so effecting the community’s return to grace. Villard proposes a number of common features in these conspiracies: Their aim was murder (in contrast to the earlier period when the death of a ruler or his officials was simply a by-product of unrest); the objective was to unmask the bestiality of the tyrant for all to see; the attempt had to be made in public and, if possible, in a church or other sacred place, so highlighting the mission’s divine sanction; in the aftermath of individual plots, an appeal to the public in the form of a discourse on tyrannicide had to be made. The foiling of a plot could, by contrast, serve to demonstrate the ruler’s divine protection (with the result that many conspiracies proved to be government fabrications). The multiplication of plots, so Villard continues, was responsible for the transformation of princely government itself, leading, in the sixteenth century, to the prince’s retreat from public view: bodyguards, spies, and a culture of secrecy were now enlisted to protect his regime. As repression became the norm, the prince was no longer seen as the accessible and merciful father of his people. Rulers began to employ their own hitmen: victim and assassin had changed places. At the same time, along with the eventual acceptance that all rulers to some extent partook of tyranny, the figure of the tyrant himself was taken for granted and so less discussed.

The states of northern and central Italy clearly witnessed a rash of assassinations in this century, but to ascribe the phenomenon to a particular concept of tyranny raises problems. In terms of the intellectual context, the view of tyranny as the embodiment of cruelty and vice had long been articulated by Aristotle and his numerous followers and commentators, and was a perennial feature of medieval political thought. What was new, on the other hand, was Bartolo of Sassoferrato’s notion of the tyrant ex defectu tituli. Furthermore, to aim at highlighting certain common features in disparate episodes leads all too easily to a misrepresentation of events in the interests of pattern. Villard focuses considerable attention, for example, on the Pazzi conspiracy. And yet Lorenzo de’ Medici was not depicted by Florentine contemporaries as a monster whose vices had to be expiated. Moreover, although the plot did involve the murder in church of Giuliano de’ Medici, the original intention had been to stage the attack neither in a sacred place nor in public (in accordance with the program identified by Villard), but rather in a villa outside the city, a plan thwarted only by the chance absence of Giuliano. Similarly, the author sees Machiavelli’s avoidance of the word tyrant in The Prince (1513) as evidence of declining interest in the concept of tyranny. But Machiavelli’s choice of vocabulary stemmed rather from the particular purpose for which The Prince was composed: he used the...