Machiavel, in Italian Niccolò Machiavelli. Writer and Italian politician.

Son of a family of the middle-class florentine, Machiavel is born whereas Lorenzo the Magnificent exerts practically the power, initially under the authority from his father, then only. The childhood and the youth of Machiavel are marked by the conspiracy of Pazzi, which fails to reverse the tyranny of Médicis (1478), the entry of the French in Florence (1494) and the dictatorship of Savonarole (1494-1498).

Entered in 1498 with the service of the Republic florentine as secretary of the chancellery of the Ten, Machiavel accomplishes many diplomatic voyages in Italy, France and Germany; it is in particular sent on mission near César Borgia (1501 and 1502-1503), he measures political cheating, and at the Holy See (1503, 1506).

Its diplomatic activity proceeds in a context disturbed by the ceaseless inversions of alliances, and Machiavel is charged by the gonfalonier Soderini with the most delicate missions, as at the time of its legation in France in 1510 when he convinces Louis XII not to help his allied Ferrare, attacked by the pope Jules II. In same time, it tries to contribute to the interior reinforcement of Florence, in particular on the military level, and is at the origin of the creation of the militia. The inversion of the Republic and the return of Médicis (1512) mean its setting with the variation.  

After a short stay in prison in 1513, it is withdrawn in San Casciano, where it composes its principal works, the Prince (1513), and the Art of the war (1513-1520) parallel to the Speeches over the first decade of Tite-Live (1513-1520). In this last work, Machiavel tries “to draw the utility which one must propose of the knowledge of the history” while studying, through the example of Rome, the birth, the life and the death of a republic; this long text will be published only in 1532. A relative back in favor at Médicis enables him to return to Florence in 1520. It then composes monumental Histoires florentines (1520-1526) as well as works of circumstance, worms and a comedy, the Mandrake (1520), only part which is entirely of him - Clizia being inspired of Casina de Plaute -, and which will be a great success in Rome, Venice and Florence. From 1521 to 1527, it fulfills various other missions in the context of the war between Spanishs and French which is held in Italy, and whose summit will be the bag of Rome, May 5th and 6th, 1527. Machiavel dies a few weeks later, on on June 22nd.  

Machiavel is not questioned, like utopians, on what should be the States, but on what they are, and the laws, drawn from the history, which govern their constitution, their life and their decline; when it considers the whole of the means of preserving the power, it does not raise the questions about the major nature of the human being which will interest, after him, Hobbes or Rousseau. What impassions it is rather to discover the most effective way to exert the power, which is not always the strong manner: “If one does not want to ruin an accustomed city of living in freedom, one holds it much better by the means of the citizens themselves than in any other way”, he in the Prince affirms; thus, the best means of dominating the men who tasted with independence is still to grant certain freedoms to them. And, in the same direction, Machiavel disadvises to the Prince attacking the Republics, which “have more life, hate and wish revenge more bitterly”.

If the political thought of Machiavel could appear ambiguous, it is paradoxically because by revealing the truth of the power, it could be used by characters who saw there only one cynical handbook of introduction of tyranny.