Jérémie Barthas

European University Institute

The transmission of Italian financial culture in France in the 15th and 16th centuries

2008-2009: Fall

Jérémie Barthas took his Ph.D. at the European University Institute ( Florence ) in 2006, with a dissertation on Machiavelli’s concept of people in arms and the Florentine public debt. He was associate researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) from 2005 to 2007, and Florence Gould Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa i Tatti, Florence) in 2007-2008.

His research fields include: the modern history of Italy and France (15th-18th centuries); the history of political thought; the history of financial culture, particularly in Italy ; the origins of political economy; and the social and financial history of the republic of the Great Council (1494-1512).

Recently, he edited and contributed to Della tirannia; Machiavelli con Bartolo, (Firenze: Olschki, 2007) and published Machiavelli e i libertini fiorentini; col ‘Sermone sopra l'elezione del Gonfaloniere’ del libertino Pier Filippo Pandolfini (1528), in Rivista Storica Italiana, 2 2008. He wrote an essay, Machiavelli in political thought from the age of revolutions to the present, to be published in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, edited by J. Najemy.

While at the Italian Academy he will complete the manuscript of his book on Machiavelli’s argument that “money is not the sinew of war.” He will also proceed with new research aiming to investigate what Antoine de Montchrestien means when, in his Traité de l’œconomie politique (1615), he invites the reader to consider Italian history in order to understand the danger represented by “the artifices and inventions of the gens de finances.”