Guicciardini, Francesco

GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO. - Historian, thinker and political man. Born in Florence to Piero and Simona Gianfigliazzi on 6 March 1483, died 22 May 1540. Having obtained a degree in civil law at Pisa in 1505, he practised law with success until, in 1511, he was appointed by the Florentine Republic as ambassador to Spain to Ferdinand the Catholic: a legation which, undertaken in 1512, he concluded in 1514, returning to Florence, where, the Republic having fallen, he placed himself at the disposal of Lorenzo de' Medici. At the latter's request, G. was appointed, in 1516, governor of Modena, in which office he remained until 1524, his attributions gradually extending over Reggio (1517-23) and over Parma (1521-22); and subsequently, through the protection of Clement VII, he assumed the presidency of Romagna. It is during this long service under the Pontiff that heavy clouds gather on the Italian horizon, with the resumption of the war (1521) between Francis I and Charles V allied with Leo X. Personally, G. is persuaded that the true danger, for Italy, lies in the victory of the «imperials», by then masters of the Milanese, and he is a supporter, during the various oscillations of papal policy, of a league of the Italian States with the king of France, a league stipulated at Cognac in 1526. That policy having collapsed, Rome subjected to the sack (1527), the Medici having fallen in Florence, and the new Republic having been installed, G. fell under suspicion and accusation; in '29 he appeared before the «otto di guardia», in '30 he was condemned by the «Quarantia». In the phase of reconstruction of the Florentine government, his programme (mixed State) was in conflict with the pontifical programme favourable to Medicean absolutism, whence his removal from the city, with his assignment to the governorship of Bologna (1531-34). Subsequently, as Medicean policy oriented itself towards the imperials, for G., by then disheartened and discouraged, there remained nothing but to retire to his villa of S. Margherita in Montici, where, from '37 to '40, he attended to his History of Italy: the first and serious effort to understand and illustrate in its total complexity the secular life of the peninsula.

G., unlike other spirits adhering to a plurality of interests (Machiavelli himself, to whom he is often and improperly compared, is also a man of humanistic and literary pursuits) may be said to be totally bound to political responsibility, both in the sphere of practical action and in that of intimate meditation. Ambassador, lieutenant, governor, his life is a permanent civil commitment, to which is connected a continual critical examination and moral judgement. So that, if there is a thoroughly documented politician, it is precisely G., continually induced to draw up balances and to note down «ricordi»; except that this copiousness of lived and scrupulously recorded elements, while it provides the complete picture of his reflection, may, perchance, offer occasion for the most disparate connections, given the difficulty of separating occasional materials from essential ones, for the purposes of a sure reconstruction of his most authentic ethico-political world. And certainly the overheated and changeable phase of Florentine and Italian (one might even say European) life of the time, projecting itself upon his personal vicissitudes, contributed now to make plethoric, now to exasperate, in one sense or the other, his experience. Which, meanwhile, is fundamentally, as lived life, the basis and the condition of his, fragmentary or extended, reasoning. Far more than history, difficult to sift, the immediate chronicle, daily reality is the humus from which the flower of his thought germinates. A lesson of reality (changes of regimes, ruptures of agreements, plays of political forces, etc.), which fatally will give him the measure of human motions, of the empire of events, of the instinct of the «particulare», and will educate him in the school of that political science, of which, from Machiavelli onwards, the naked technicality will be ever more discovered. A fellow pupil, but often more astute, of Machiavelli, G. achieves a richer series of instructions: there is evident, in G., the recognition of «reason of State» (the expression recurs in his writings, and not in those of Machiavelli, to whom nevertheless the paternity of the formula was always attributed); there is likewise alive the intuition of that concept of «political class» (efficacy of an organized minority in the conquest and management of public affairs) which only much later will find its doctrinal enunciation; and above all there is lucid, in G., the ascertainment of a political world of men, the fruit, more than anything else, of a «prudence» bound to the relative and the useful. Without doubt, it is his cold temperament which, leading him (even in private life) to rigorous equilibria of thought, will insinuate something sceptical and disenchanted into his writing. As futuristic or bookish programmes do not excite him («How different practice is from theory!», Ric., 35), as the yearning for an «agrarian law», a redresser of the iniquitous distribution of wealth, does not warm him (the «yours and mine» seems to him ineradicable, and «equality» unrealizable), so the most usual exemplary acceptations of history seem to him to be calmly revised (whence his corrections to Machiavelli); and, as regards the ordering of the Florentine State, his wish adheres (Dial. del regim. di Firenze) to that «mixed government», which constituted the not original formula of most of the politicians of the Renaissance.

The perspective of the «particulare» appeared (especially in the nineteenth century) to G.'s critics as the easy assertion, if not indeed the exasperation, of the individualistic claim (whence the cliché of a conservative and «bourgeois» G.): and yet, while to the most recent interpretation (U. Spirito, following De Sanctis) this enunciation has appeared as an interesting anticipation of the modern «liberal» vision of associated life, one may also observe that this «particular» does not wish to mark, after all, the egoistic exigency of a homo homini lupus, disinterested in the community and alien to superior ideals. One must, in fact, not forget that, if human frailty, the empire of fortune and the seduction of occasion are indeed present to G., vivid and ringing is likewise in him (in contrast to Machiavelli) the confidence in the natural goodness of man. («All men, by nature, are inclined more to good than to evil», Ric., 134); «if anyone is found who by nature is inclined to do evil more willingly than good, say confidently that he is not a man, but a beast or a monster; since he lacks that inclination which is natural to all men» (op. cit., 135); «all those who draw no more profit or satisfaction from doing evil than from doing good, are inclined to good...» (Dial. del reggim. di Firenze, II; etc.). It is this genuine human tendency that explains, in G. - despite the observations of the wickednesses due to the «occasions of corrupting or perverting this instinct» (loc. cit.) - the widespread appreciation of ethics, of honour and of that religion (his homages to the pope and to the faith are not to be considered rhetorical), which, above certain lively expressions of anticlericalism, remains the best and greatest bulwark of individual and collective morality (the supreme term of the happiness of the individual would be to resemble God: Ric., 16).

This certainty may not be contradicted by the very hypothesis that the practical origin of States (constituted power) is violence (Ric., 48), which is moreover corrected elsewhere by the Aristotelian observation that "cities were instituted principally for the security of those who gathered in them and so that they might have the conveniences that human life requires" (Dial. del reggim. di Firenze, II); a violent origin which, consistently, would explain the fatality of "reason of State" and the bitter conclusion that "States cannot be held according to conscience" (Ric., 48); since the ascertainment of something demonic in earthly life, already made, for example, by certain currents that were nonetheless Augustinian, does not exclude the possibility of a redemption and a recovery of the "good path," through the work of the truly prudent and men of good will, striving continually toward the overcoming of private egoisms.

One may conclude that the multiplicity of the elements ascertained, while it documents the profound complexity of his experience, militates in favor of a dialectical vision of associated life, according to which the natural forces of good must clash with the ineluctable seductions of the earthly city as it is instituted today: a dialectic that constitutes the troubled fabric of history, made of actions and reactions, whereby even the existence of a Martin Luther serves to stimulate the healing work of the Church. The same historiographical inquiry to which he dedicated himself from his youth serves him as a severe inspection of the centuries-old human process as regards the fortunes of Italy; but this copious recording of events and accidents does not, in the final analysis, undermine in the man G. the permanent possibility, in the face of contingency, of an appeal to his own inner self and dignity, as a source of the optimum moral remedy. The Consolatoria, the Accusatoria, the Defensoria, the Ricordi themselves, the various minor autobiographical material, are the document of a vigilant conscience, of an interior monologue, of a yearning to transcend the malignity of what has happened, scrutinizing and purging himself, in the conquest of a truth equally valid not only for the individual and for the community, but also for chronicle and for history. The Storia d'Italia is, among other things, on the Index (decree of 7 January 1627).

(Ricordanze, Orazioni, etc.), see: Scritti autobiografici e vari (edited by R. Palmarocchi, Bari 1936). - Studies: Besides the fundamental work of A. Ototea, François Guichardin. Sa vie publique et sa pensée politique, Paris 1926-27; Ch. Benoist, Guichardin historien et homme d'état florentin au XVIe siècle, Marseille 1862; C. Gioda, G. e le sue opere inedite, Bologna 1880; E. Zanoni, La mente di F. G., Florence 1897; N. Barckhausen, G. politische Theorien in seinen Opere inedite, Heidelberg 1908; A. Luzio, La « Storia d'Italia » del G., in Atti della R. Accad. d. scienze di Torino, 65 (1930), pp. 231-48; P. Treves, Il realismo politico di F. G., Florence 1931; F. Ercole, Machiavelli e G., in Pensatori e uomini d'azione, Milan 1935, pp. 178-211; V. Luciani, F. G. and his european reputation, New York 1936 (translated into Italian with additions and improvements: F. G. e la fortuna dell'opera sua, Florence 1949); F. G. nel IV centenario della morte, supplement of Rinascita, Florence 1940 (E. Bodrero, F. G.; G. Masi, Il G. e la giurisprudenza del suo tempo: F. Sarri, G. e la religione; etc.); V. Vitale, G., Turin 1941; U. Spirito, Machiavelli e G., Florence 1944; as well as F. Chabod, s. v. in Enc. Ital., XVIII, p. 244 ff.: see also: R. Palmarocchi, Studi guicciardiniani, Florence 1947; R. Spongano, Per l'ediz. critica dei « Ricordi » del G., ibid. 1948; M. Fubini, Studi sulla letterat. del Rinascimento, ibid. 1948, pp. 138-207; N. Valeri, Sul « particolare » del G., in Bellagor, 5 (1950), pp. 537-48; V. De Caprariis, F. G., Bari 1950.

Rodolfo De Mattei