" Here's the ^15th " : Stendhalian meditations on humanism and defeat

Abstract

Considering the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza as one of the fine arts is perhaps just one way of apprehending what has been called the " long-term crisis of exemplarity " since the ^19th century. Hence the need to address the question of the return of the humanist paradigm today, seen as a " subtle tectonics of time transfigured into present history " (Clémence Revest). Based on the relationship between humanism and rhetoric, explaining the convergence of governing styles in a narrative configuration indifferent to the institutional form of political regimes, and finding its expression in the Vie des hommes illustres, attempts to resist the Romantic temptation to biograph the era. The analysis of Stendhal's relationship with political violence in Renaissance Italy serves here as an opportunity to unravel the relationship between experience and narrative. To stop romanticizing the tyrants of the Quattrocento, therefore also means renouncing a purely literary history of tyrannicide.

Contents

• From assassination (of Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1476) to fine art: a look back at a stunning reading
• Literary passion, police impulse and the power of words
• ^15th-century humanism, or the "return of the paradigm
• A "subtle tectonics of time transfigured into present history" (Clémence Revest)
• The humanist "movement": we Italians, we moderns, we dominants, we Romans
• Thomas de Quincey, Lorenzaccio, Romanticism: a youthful mistake  ?
• Track down quotations, from Stendhal to Voltaire: "Voilà ce que fut l'Italie" or "voilà le XVe^siècle " ?
• "I would say to modern princes, so proud of their virtues and who look with such superb contempt on the petty tyrants of the Middle Ages: "these virtues of which you are so proud are only private virtues. As a king, you're useless. The tyrants of Italy, on the contrary, had private vices and public virtues" (Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie)
• "In my youth, I wrote biographies (Mozart, Michelangelo) that are a kind of history. I repent of this. The truth about the greatest things, as about the smallest things, seems to me almost impossible to attain, at least a truth that is a little detailed " (Stendhal, quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, "L'âpre vérité. Un défi de Stendhal aux historiens", in Le fil et les traces. Vrai faux fictif, 2010)
• To stop romanticizing the tyrants of the Quattrocento is therefore also to renounce a purely literary history of tyrannicide
• Tyranny of exercise and tyranny of usurpation: the dilemma of medieval political philosophy
• Giovanni Simonetta'sDe rebus gestis Francisci Sfortiae commentarii and the ambivalence of Caesarian memory in the Quattrocento
• From April blood (Lauro Martines) to political assassination (Renaud Villard)
• In^15th-century Italy, humanist ideology "turns the lecture of experience on its head"
• The princely convergence of governing styles: the lives of illustrious men
• "Cosimo di Giovanni de Medici was of very honorable birth, from a powerful family with great authority over the republic" (Vespasiano da Bisticci)
• "Young men": a generational Neoplatonism
• Humanism and rhetoric: when Milanese ambassadors made King Charles VIII smell " the smokes and glories of Italy " (Commynes)
• "... From whence came, in 1494, great fears, sudden flees, and astonishing disasters" (Nicolas Machiavelli, The Art of War, 1521).