Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe by Snyder Jon R.;

Author:Snyder, Jon R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2009-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

An Aesthetics of the Everyday

In 1624 Cardinal Richelieu came to power in France, advocating a truly Catholic state that would oppose Spanish universal hegemony. As Richard Tuck comments, “while ragion di stato on behalf of Catholic imperialism was present from the very beginning of his rule, only in the 1630’s [after the Day of Dupes] do we find blatant statements of the fundamentally anti-constitutional and even anti-moral views of the Tacitist humanists—and the most blatant of them all was never allowed publication.” The author of those views was the French ecclesiastic Louis Machon (ca. 1600–ca.1672), who was from the Lorraine and supported Richelieu’s plan to annex the province.129 A member of the cardinal’s circle and an apologist for his absolutist politics, Machon was also an advocate for Machiavelli at a moment in which the controversy between pro-and anti-Machiavellians showed few signs of waning. Machon’s massive treatise, Apologie pour Machiavel, was begun at the request of Richelieu, and Machon worked on the text for more than twenty-five years, beginning around 1641.130 One version was finished in 1643, but a second version was completed only in 1668.131 Due to the changed political circumstances in France after the death of Richelieu, the work was left unpublished. It nonetheless offers one of the most ambitious and unusual analyses of the problems posed by dissimulation for reason-of-state doctrine in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.

Machon’s stated aim, in his treatise, is to reconcile Machiavelli’s writings with the Holy Scriptures and the corpus of patristic literature.132 His arguments are numerous and complex, but the thrust of the work is to show that the early modern prince was free to engage in the sort of behavior promoted in Il Principe insofar as he “is an imitator of a God who himself employed illusion and deception in the interests of salvation.”133 Given the size of Machon’s work, I will limit my treatment of the Apologie pour Machiavel to the sections that comment directly on dissimulation. The reading of Machiavelli that it offers is, in any case, nothing short of scandalous. Machon ransacks the classical and Christian sources, and seriously distorts the text of Il Principe, in an attempt to give his argument authority; few anti-Machiavellians ever took greater liberties with the work of the Florentine secretary in attacking it than does Machon in defending it.

Machon first turns his attention to the maxim dissimuler, pour bien regner (adapted from the familiar motto nescit regnare qui nescit dissimulare, with reference to chapter 18 of Il Principe). The opening pages of this section supply a psychological disquisition on the ways in which humans constantly deceive themselves and ignore their own true nature. Nowadays everyone accuses everyone else of being dissimulé, Machon complains, when in fact those doing the accusing have failed to recognize the truth about themselves. Indeed, he contends, the discourse on dissimulation has thus far been dealt with much too harshly by those who should have known better. For Machiavelli, on the other hand, dissimulation seemed instead a

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