Writer and Italian politician. As all those which read it honestly (thus of Spinoza, Bayle, and Diderot), Rousseau knows that Nicolas Machiavel is not Machiavellian, cynical who recommends a government of trick and force: the Prince does nothing but clarify the fact that the interest of the kings is more often to fix the people than to see it flourishing.

The kings thus become easily tyrannical. “Thus, while pretending to give lessons to the kings, it gave the large ones to the people. Prince de Machiavel is the book of the republicans”.

He goes from there differently from other less scandalous works, (Speech over the first decade of Tite-Live, Histoires florentines), which Rousseau inherits certain concerns, like the inevitable corruption of all the political regimes, and their cyclic revolution.

Also he seeks as Machiavel what reinforces of it at least temporarily stability, thus of the extraordinary personality of the legislator. The legitimacy, which is for Rousseau of the gasoline of the political company, does not worry as much Machiavel which more empirically seeks a compromise between the satisfaction of the princes and that of the mass. The State to continue must regularly return to its principle founder. This return took the form at Rousseau of the Genevese public festivals (Letter in Alembert).

“Machiavel was an honest man and a good citizen: but attached to the house of Médicis, it was forced in the oppression of its fatherland to disguise its love for freedom. The choice alone of its execrable Hero expresses enough his secret intention and the opposition of the maxims of its book of the Prince to those of his speeches on Tite-Live and its History of Florence shows that this deep policy had up to now only surface or corrupted Readers. The Court of Rome severely defended its book, I believe it well; it is it whom it depicts most clearly.”

Consult the card on Machiavel.