GUICCIARDINI, FRANCESCO. – Historian, thinker, and statesman. Born in Florence to Piero and Simona Gianfigliazzi on 6 March 1483; died on 22 May 1540. Having obtained his degree in civil law at Pisa in 1505, he practiced law successfully until, in 1511, he was appointed by the Florentine Republic as ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic in Spain. He undertook this mission in 1512 and concluded it in 1514, returning to Florence, where, following the fall of the Republic, he placed himself at the service of Lorenzo de’ Medici. At Lorenzo’s request, G. was appointed in 1516 governor of Modena, a position he held until 1524, with his authority gradually extending over Reggio (1517–23) and Parma (1521–22); subsequently, through the protection of Clement VII, he assumed the presidency of Romagna. It was during this lengthy service to the Pontiff that great clouds gathered on the Italian horizon, with the resumption of the war (1521) between Francis I and Charles V, who was allied with Leo X. G. was personally convinced that the real danger for Italy lay in the victory of the “imperials,” by then masters of the Milanese territory, and during the various fluctuations of papal policy he supported a league of the Italian states with the king of France, a league concluded at Cognac in 1526. After this policy collapsed, Rome was subjected to the sack (1527), the Medici fell in Florence, and the new Republic was established, G. came under suspicion and accusation; in ’29 he appeared before the “Eight of the Guard,” and in ’30 he was condemned by the “Quarantia.” During the reconstruction of the Florentine government, his program (a mixed state) conflicted with the papal program favoring Medici absolutism, resulting in his expulsion from the city and his appointment as governor of Bologna (1531–34). Subsequently, as Medici policy turned toward the imperials, G., by then disheartened and shunned, had no choice but to withdraw to his villa of S. Margherita in Montici, where, from ’37 to ’40, he devoted himself to his History of Italy: the first serious effort to understand and portray in its total complexity the centuries-long life of the peninsula.
Unlike other minds devoted to a plurality of interests (Machiavelli himself, with whom he is often and inappropriately compared, was also a man of humanistic and literary proclivities), G. may be said to be wholly bound to political responsibility, both in practical action and in inward meditation. Ambassador, lieutenant, governor, his life was a permanent civic commitment, connected with a sustained critical examination and moral judgment. Thus, if there was ever a profoundly documented politician, it was G., continually impelled to draw conclusions and record “recollections”; yet this abundance of lived experiences, scrupulously recorded, while providing the complete framework of his reflection, may perhaps allow the most disparate connections, given the difficulty of separating occasional materials from essential ones for the purposes of a reliable reconstruction of his most authentic ethical and political world. Certainly, the heated and changeable phase of Florentine and Italian (indeed, European) life at the time, projected onto his personal experience, contributed now to expanding and now to exacerbating that experience in one direction or another. In the meantime, that experience itself, fundamentally, insofar as it was lived life, constituted the basis and condition of his fragmentary or extended argumentation. Much more than history, difficult to assess, it is immediate chronicle and everyday reality that form the humus from which the flower of his thought springs. The lesson of reality—changes of regime, breaches of agreements, struggles among political forces, and so forth—would inevitably give him the measure of human impulses, the power of events, and the instinct of the “particulare,” educating him in the school of that political science whose bare technical character would become increasingly apparent after Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s fellow student, though often more astute, G. derives a richer series of teachings: in G., the recognition of the “reason of state” is evident (the expression occurs in his writings, but not in those of Machiavelli, to whom, nevertheless, authorship of the formula has always been attributed); equally vivid is his intuition of the concept of a “political class” (the effectiveness of an organized minority in the conquest and administration of public affairs), which would find its doctrinal formulation only much later; and above all, G. lucidly establishes the existence of a political world of human beings, produced above all by a “prudence” tied to the relative and the useful. Without doubt, it is his cold temperament that, leading him—even in private life—to rigorous balances of thought, introduces a skeptical and disenchanted element into his writing. Just as he is not excited by futuristic or bookish programs (“How different practice is from theory!” Ric., 35), nor warmed by the idealization of an “agrarian law” to remedy the inequitable distribution of wealth (the “mine and yours” seems to him ineradicable, and “equality” unattainable), so most of the customary exemplary interpretations of history seem to him in need of calm reconsideration (hence his corrections to Machiavelli); and, as for the organization of the Florentine state, his aspiration (Dial. del regim. di Firenze) adheres to that “mixed government” which constituted the unoriginal formula of most Renaissance political thinkers.
The perspective of the “particulare” appeared (especially in the nineteenth century) to G.’s critics as the uninhibited assertion, if not outright exacerbation, of an individualistic demand (hence the cliché of a conservative and “bourgeois” G.); nevertheless, while in the more recent interpretation (U. Spirito, following De Sanctis) this formulation has appeared as an interesting anticipation of the modern “liberal” view of social life, it may also be observed that this “particulare” does not, after all, designate the egoistic demand of a homo homini lupus, indifferent to the community and alien to higher ideals. Indeed, it must not be forgotten that, although human frailty, the power of fortune, and the lure of opportunity are all present to G., equally vivid and resonant in him (in contrast to Machiavelli) is his confidence in the natural goodness of man. (“All men, by nature, are more inclined toward good than toward evil,” Ric., 134); “if anyone is found who by nature is more inclined to do evil than good, you may be certain 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 derive no greater profit or satisfaction from doing evil than from doing good are inclined toward good...” (Dial. del reggim. di Firenze, II; etc.). It is this genuine human tendency that explains, in G.—despite his observations on the wickedness resulting from the “occasions to corrupt or pervert this instinct” (loc. cit.)—the widespread appreciation of ethics, honor, and that religion (his tributes to the pope and to faith should not be regarded as rhetorical) which, above and beyond certain lively expressions of anticlericalism, remains the finest and greatest safeguard of individual and collective morality (the supreme end of individual happiness would be to resemble God: Ric., 16).
This certainty need not be contradicted even by the hypothesis that the practical origin of States (constituted power) is violence (Ric., 48), elsewhere corrected, moreover, 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 required by human life” (Dial. del reggim. di Firenze, II); an origin in violence which, consistently, would explain the inevitability of the “reason of State” and the bitter conclusion that “it is not possible to hold States according to conscience” (Ric., 48); for the ascertainment of something demonic in earthly life, already made, for example, by certain currents that were also Augustinian, does not exclude the possibility of redemption and a return to the “good path,” through the work of the truly prudent and good men, continually intent on overcoming private selfishness.
It may be concluded that the multiplicity of the elements ascertained, while documenting the profound complexity of his experience, supports a dialectical view of associated life, according to which the natural forces of good must clash with the inevitable seductions of the earthly city, as it is instituted today: a dialectic that constitutes the troubled fabric of history, made up of actions and reactions, whereby even the existence of a Martin Luther is useful in stimulating the Church’s healing work. The same historiographical inquiry to which he devoted himself from his youth serves him as a stern inspection of the secular human process as regards Italy’s fortunes; yet this copious recording of events and accidents does not ultimately dislodge, in the man G., the permanent possibility, in the face of contingency, of an appeal to his own inwardness and dignity, as the source of the optimum moral remedy. La Consolatoria, l'Accusatoria, la Defensoria, the Ricordi themselves, and the various small autobiographical materials are documents of a vigilant conscience, of an inner monologue, of an aspiration to transcend the malignity of what has occurred, scrutinizing and purifying himself in the conquest of a truth equally valid not only for the individual and the community, but also for chronicle and history. Storia d'Italia is, among other things, on the Index (decc. 7 January 1627).
(Ricordanze, Orazioni, etc.), v.: Scritti autobiografici e vari (edited by R. Palmarocchi, Bari 1936). — Studies: In addition to the foundational work by 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. LUCANIA, F. G. and his european reputation, Nuova 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 to 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. ENOCH. Ital., XVIII, p. 244 ff.: V. ancora: R. Palmarocchi, Studi guicciardiniani, Florence 1947; R. Spongano, Per l'ediz. critica dei « Ricordi » del G., there 1948; M. Fubini, Studi sulla letterat. del Rinascimento, there 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