All power is the power of storytelling. This doesn't just mean that power can be seen and understood through fables and intrigues; it also means that power only becomes fully effective when it reorients the life stories of those it dominates. If we are to understand the historical forms of consent to authoritarian power, we need to consider the narrative power of the exercise of power, which links the art of governing with the art of storytelling. To put it briefly: what's attractive about tyranny is its fictional power. Not only its ability to speak and make others speak, but also its capacity to generate narrative energy. And the historian's job is to find ways of countering this.
This year's lecture continues the reflection on political fictions begun last year. The aim is still to consider them as narrative forms of political theory, capable of producing truthful effects on the present, and of sharing the experience of the present on the basis of a historical past. But now we must do so on the basis of a strictly limited corpus: that of the Italian novellistica , which, in the wake of the narrative revolution of Boccaccio's Decameron , constitutes a literary genre specific to the urban societies of communal and post-communal Italy, particularly in Tuscany. From the 14th to the 16th century, a singular textual production developed, conveying a particularly corrosive social knowledge, the implicit sociology of which we will attempt to analyze.
From Franco Sacchetti to Matteo Bandello, via Giovanni Sercambi, the pseudo-Gentile Sermini and so many others, often anonymous, this novella literature enables us to grasp the mechanisms of a political society in crisis, particularly through the test of the beffa, i.e. the subversive power of derision. We will attempt to paint a historical portrait of this society, taking stock of the relationship between seigneurial experience and communal tradition. To this end, we'll focus in particular on the fictional destiny of Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan from 1354 to 1385, who became a novella character in his own lifetime , embodying a disturbing and grotesque figure who remained as such for a century as the genre developed. He became an attractive tyrant who, in his role as beffatore, never ceased to create surprises and provoke laughter. Is this laughter liberating, or does it install a certain acclimatization to tyrannical power in the familiar narrative horizon of the short story?