The voice of the “disarmed prophet”

The memory of “ poor little brother Which since Florence advocated at the end of XV^e century a return to Christian asceticism has always divided the interpreters between edifying accounts and accusations of deception. Whether it is the hagiographic companies that saw the day during his lifetime, detractors anxious to undermine the soap for the aftermath of his condemnation, or even biographical reconstructions which began to appear in the context of Risorgimentothe issue for Anyone interested in Savonarole has long been to establish or deny the truth of his preaching and his prophecies.

Refusing to enter this debate, Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini-specialists in XV^e And XVI^e centuries and strong of numerous works having re -situated the trajectory of the brother in the Florentine context – here make the choice of a secular perspective whose challenge is to hold together the spiritual, religious and political dimension of this personality which is essential in the history of Florence. The objective of the work is to understand how the legitimacy of the intervention of this religious, which is more foreign, is built in the life of a city of merchants where, according to the expression of Côme de Médicis, it was not possible to “ governing with our father ». Much more than the story of a life, this approach implies placing in the center the question of the relationship that Savonarole has maintained with Florence and the Florentins, that is to say to understand the adhesion that aroused and the effects produced by the Savonarolian speech.

An investigation into prophetic charisma

This “ Savonarolian parable Traces the rocking points that have marked the progressive learning of a penitential and prophetic word capable of deeply upsetting the moral and political life of the Florentines.

Originally from Ferrare and intended for a career as a doctor, Savonarole chooses a religious vocation at the age of 23 by entering the preacher’s order of the Dominicans. If he acquired during his novitiate in Bologna a solid theological training, thanks in particular to the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures and the Aristotelian tradition reread by Thomas Aquinas, his preacher career begins timidly. During his years of roaming in Lombardy and Tuscany, his left and clumsy sermons, far from PRADICANDI ARTES And artifices of humanist rhetoric, arouse indifference. From the mid -1480s, the turning point is twofold: its penitential vision of the world is enriched by a prophetic message announcing the proximity of the plagues and the next Renovatio ecclesiaeand in 1490, at the request of Laurent the Magnificent, he settled definitively in Florence, at the San Marco convent of which he was elected prior.

It is this Florentine anchoring which allows the deployment of the Savonarolian verb, of these fiery sermons in which it announces the next “ tribulations », Surgeces against the vices and corrupt customs of the time and preaches a« Living well Christian », Prerequisite for a moral and political reform of the Church and the City. Interpreting the descent of the King of France as the sword of God, he played from 1494 a major role in the creation of new republican institutions after the departure of the Medici, by supporting the creation of a great council, the establishment of a loan system for the poorest, the Mont-de-Piété, and by working in favor of a universal pacification of the city.

By choosing to consider soap as “ A major agent of a collective history with multiple written traces (P. 65), one of the forces of this work is the diversity of the sources it mobilizes. Chronicles, stories, hagiographies, diplomatic correspondences dialogue in a constant concern, not so much to establish the truth of the facts or to plead in favor of an interpretation, as to grasp the reality of the reception of the soap message. The authors’ approach aims to understand how “ The force of the verb shakes up the story “(P.38), that is to say to account for the construction of this prophetic charisma, which supposes to parallel the discourse that the Dominican develops on the history of his time and the way in which contemporaries welcome his sermons and contribute to shaping his public image.

The political biography of an adoption Florentine

At a time when millennial speeches are multiplying, when preachers denounce in sermons with apocalyptic accents the corruption of the clergy and the customs of Rome, a soap is undoubtedly not the only reformer to want to link religious, moral and political reform. On the other hand, the originality and the success of the soap speech reside in the political character of the reflection and in the Florentin horizon where it is part since Brother Jérôme is undoubtedly the first to consider a reform for a particular place and moment.

This bias allows in the chapters to breach the commonplace generally associated with soap -in -law in order to avoid the trap of exceptionality. Attacks against blasphemy or sodomy, the reform of the loan system, the vanity pys which made the black legend of the brother or the processions of farciulli Disguised: as many topos Let the authors endeavor to deconstruct by showing how these practices actually draw their roots in long traditions that the preacher updates to openly make a political instrument, an intervention force in the city.

If exhortation to “ Living well Christian “And to the reform of Florentine republican institutions stands out as a central issue, it is that the moral and spiritual renovation project obeys a” perception by successive enchons (P. 80) of three spaces, Florence, Italy and the Church. In a continual tension between local reflection and universal horizon, the originality of the soap message is due to the way in which it combines the penitential injunction, the apocalyptic announcement and its concrete interventions in the life of the city. The republican reform, embodied by the Grand Council, is perceived as well as a condition as as a consequence of the moral and religious renovation of the Church – which allows not only to justify the close link which exists between the religious and civic engagement of the brother but also to understand, without anachronistic drift, “ What religion does to politics and politics to religion (P. 14).

Word as a political weapon

Although he has put on a central role in the life of the Florentine Republic called to become the “ New Jerusalem “, Savonarole is nonetheless, according to the formula forged a few decades later by Machiavelli, a” Disarmed prophet ». Unlike large founders such as Moses, Theseus or Romulus, celebrated in The princeBrother Jérôme does not consider the use of force as a means of establishing political power: he prefers to wear his qualities as a prophet and act in the service of civil harmony, which means a priori Exclude the question of resistance to the enemy and rely on the preaching to ensure the support of his supporters. But the novelty of this Soap Puts precisely in the fact of considering this word itself as a weapon, which comes back, to better free it, to locate the debate beyond the Machiavellian paradigm which has long shaped the interpretation of the message of the preacher Ferrarais.

Taking up a methodology widely experienced in their previous works, the authors are interested in the “ Word life “(P. 15) in order to better identify the conditioning and the challenges of these speeches which are available as a permanent fight in favor of the reform. The challenge is size since the soap speech adopts multiple forms. It is not only a question of reconstructing from fragmentary traces the oral and ephemeral performance of the preacher in pulpit, but also of understanding how the conviction is deployed in a complementary way in the passage towards writing and towards publication, in the choice of Latin or vulgar. Thus, alongside the cycles of sermons – already partly published in French by the authors – the survey embraces spiritual, homelitic and pedagogical opuscles, notes of legal and theological doctrinal reading, poems, correspondence, political interventions, so as to show how these texts, envisaged as “ Theological and political will (P. 300), make system. For Savonarole the issue is, at all times, to illustrate the continuity of its flawless commitment because from there depends the membership of the reform that it wishes to promote.

It is in particular in sermons cycles, where he ties with the Florentins a tight dialogue not devoid of humor, that the preacher builds a space of moral and spiritual teaching, criticism of the present time, but also a tool of understanding of the in progress and combat: “ The spiritual verb takes place from a word of war in which effectiveness is a permanent injunction (P. 17). We then understand how preaching, a form of ritualized expression whose rhythm is chanted by the liturgical calendar, are extraordinary from 1494 in a civic time to respond to a historical-political necessity, and slide with a penitential logic towards the politics, oscillating between the call to concord and mercy and on the one hand and on the other hand. Because the prophecy is not exhausted in a messianic expectation, but means adapting the desire for reform – inspired by God and justified by human reason – in present times.

The question of the use of weapons is thus faced in the last chapters of the volume. While events related to the Italian wars lead to the city a radicalization of oppositions between “ whining “(The supporters of the brother),” enraged »(His opponents) and Palleschi (favorable to the return of the Medici), the warrior metaphors, which illustrate in sermons the principle of a spiritual and symbolic war to carry against the infidels or the “ lukewarm », In reality, the echo of armed clashes between factions are echo. What the work then demonstrates is that if Savonarole refuses the offensive of weapons – it is arrested, then hanged and burned in the public square on May 23, 1498 without real resistance – his project of political, religious and spiritual reform does not exclude a thought of the conflict. The authors insist on the existence of two opposite logics as to the way of reacting in the face of violence, especially when the attack on the convent of San Marco poses the concrete question of taking up arms – two logics which coexist among Savonarole supporters and which we find in the speeches of the preacher: “ that, all religious and spiritual, of the search for martyrdom, for which the only weapon that should be opposed to violence is the weapon of speech ; but also that which consists in assuming war as a possible effect of politics (P. 332). Savonarole, however, chooses to lead this conflict armed with his only word, preferring the logic of martyrdom everything “ (having) undoubtedly the intuition that war is the continuation of the policy (P. 333). In the continuity of their biography of Machiavelli published by the same publisher three years ago, the authors demonstrate that in this Florentine Republic marked by the prevalence of a permanent state of war which unfolds inside and outside the city, the horizon of reflection remains – even for a “ Disarmed prophet – that of power and conflict relationships.