Let’s be frank. Everything we know about Cardinal Mazarin (apart from his name in history textbooks glimpsed towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War) comes from Dumas’ Twenty Years After. A particularly odious cardinal, a sinister individual, a scoundrel and simulator compared to his eminent predecessor, the great Richelieu who knew how to defeat his enemies and grant a musketeer’s commission to those who deserved it, Mazarin lies, breaks his word, is reluctant to pay his debts, has the Duke of Beaufort’s dog, trained to bark at him, poisoned. An Italian rascal, whom Beaufort calls “the most illustrious scoundrel Mazarin”. He is a villain, a perjurer, a coward who sneaks, at nightfall, into the bed of Anne of Austria, who in earlier times had known how to love men of Buckingham’s caliber. Is it possible that Mazarin was such a scoundrel? We knew that Dumas, when describing historical figures, did not invent: he added color, staged, but was very attentive to sources, chronicles, memorialists, even for imaginary characters; so, you can imagine, a man of the stature of Mazarin! Therefore, we read with complete confidence.

I don’t know if Dumas knew this Politician’s Handbook attributed to Mazarin. It would have been possible, as the pamphlet appeared in Latin in 1684, from an improbable publisher in Cologne, then was widely translated and disseminated in the following centuries. Everything suggests that Dumas only heard about it. Indeed, if we only evoke and briefly summarize the text, we get a Mazarin à la Dumas, a penny-ante Machiavelli striving to rig his outward appearance, his feasts, his words and his deeds to win the favor of his masters and plunge his enemies into the blackest depths, throwing the stone and immediately hiding his hand in his wide sleeves. But if we read it thoroughly, a character emerges who, even if he remains the one Dumas knew so well how to describe, surprises us at least by his complexity, his lucidity, the high theoretical rigor of his very human planned dishonesty.

You will say to me, the book is not by him, it is an anthology of his maxims, whether they were words or deeds. Then why not read it as a satire, understood in the way some have interpreted Machiavelli, that is, as the work of a clever moralist who, pretending to give advice to the prince, “strips him of his burnous and reveals him to the people”, as Ugo Foscolo asserts in Dei Sepolcri? In any case, the author of this pamphlet — Mazarin or anyone else — took seriously what he wrote, because in the 17th century — Croce reminds us in his History of the Baroque Age in Italy — “simulation and dissimulation, cunning and hypocrisy, were, due to the oppressive conditions of the society of the time, a very practical art, providing material for innumerable treatises on politics and prudence”.

Machiavelli’s text was more of a treatise on imprudence, daring to proclaim loud and clear how the Prince should act for the good of all. Only then, the Counter-Reformation and Jesuit casuistry intervened: the little 17th century treatises teach only how to defend oneself in a world of disloyal princes, now too consciously Machiavellian, in order to save one’s inner dignity or physical integrity, or to make a career.

Before Mazarin’s, two other much more well-known breviaries appear on the cultural scene: The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián (1647) and Della Dissimulazione Onesta by Torquato Accetto (1641). Although there was material for inspiration there, Mazarin’s breviary seems original in its shameless intentions. Gracián and Accetto were not men of power, and their painful meditation concerns the techniques thanks to which, in difficult times, one could defend oneself from the powerful. For Gracián, it was a question of trying to live in harmony with one’s fellow men while suffering as little as possible (that said, he suffered in his life, showing himself less prudent than what he preached); as for Accetto, his problem was not to simulate what one is not (that would have been deception) but to dissimulate what one is, in order not to irritate others too much by one’s own virtues (the question was not how to cause harm but how not to suffer it). Mazarin is far from all that: he establishes the program of a man who, by learning to win the favor of the powerful, to be loved by his subjects, to eliminate his enemies, manages to keep power thanks to simulation techniques.

Simulation, not dissimulation. Mazarin (or whoever wrote the text) has nothing to hide: nothing, because he is only what he produces as an external image. See the first chapter, simulatingly titled Learn About Yourself. It begins with an aphorism on the necessity of examining oneself carefully in order to know whether one is “dominated by any passion” (and even here, the question is not “who am I?” but “how do I manifest myself to myself?”), then it immediately moves on, designating a self that is nothing but a mask, skillfully constructed: Mazarin has a very clear notion of the subject as a semiotic product, and Goffman should read this book, a true manual for the total theatricalization of the Self. Here we have an idea of psychic depth entirely made of superficiality.

We have here a model of “democratic” strategy (in the age of absolutism!) because instructions on how to obtain power through violence are very rare and extremely measured; and if there is violence, it is never directly, but always through an intermediary. Mazarin gives us a splendid image of obtaining power through pure and simple manipulation of consensus. How to please not only one’s master (a fundamental axiom), not only one’s friends but also one’s enemies, whom one must praise, cajole, convince of our benevolence and good faith, so that they die, but blessing us.

I would like to insist again on the fundamental first chapter. By “know thyself”, we generally mean a knowledge of the soul. Here, on the contrary, everything relates to external appearance, it means: examine how one presents oneself to others. As for the maxims concerning others, they also focus on symptoms, revealing signs, for countries, cities and landscapes as well as for friends and enemies. How to discover if a man is a storyteller, if he loves someone else, if he hates him; and the advice is very subtle, in the style of: “Highly praise someone in the presence of a third party. If the latter remains silent, it is because he is not the friend of the former. […] Another possibility […] greet him on behalf of that supposed friend, or announce to him that you have received bad news from him, and observe his reaction.” In the same vein, the methods for knowing if a man is capable of keeping a secret: send him a trusted person to provoke him and confide in him, then see if he lets himself go or if he opposes an impenetrable mask, equal to the one that Mazarin strives to construct of himself, going so far as to suggest how to write a letter in the presence of others without anyone being able to read it, or how to hide what one reads, and finally the necessity of passing oneself off as a serious man (“Do not give the impression of staring at your interlocutor, do not rub your nose, do not frown, […]. Be sparing in your gestures, keep your head straight and a somewhat sententious tone. […] Let no one be present at your rising, your retiring, or your repose.”).

And always make sure that your adversary does of his own volition what you want to lead him to: “If someone seeks an honor that you also covet, secretly send him an emissary who, in the name of friendship, dissuades him by representing to him the many obstacles he would have to face anyway.” And be ready for all traps, in order to thwart them: “Every day, or certain fixed days in advance, devote a moment to studying how you would react to this or that event that might occur”, which resembles the modern theory of war and peace “scenarios”, except that at the Pentagon it is computers that implement it.

One even learns how to do prison easily (anything can happen to a man of power), how to encourage the publication of one’s own panegyric, in the form of short and inexpensive works, so that it seduces “readers from all over the world”. The author also teaches us how to conceal wealth (and there, Dumas really hit the nail on the head) but with a few exceptions: indeed, at one point he launches into the surprising description of a stunning meal, intended to dazzle the guests, impossible to summarize… a real showpiece worthy of the best baroque theater.

But let’s put an end to the admiration. A book of this kind, one reads it to gain something from it. Well, don’t think that it can help you become a man of power. Not that its maxims are bad, they are all good. It just tells us what the man of power already knows, often by instinct. In this sense, it is not only a portrait of Mazarin, it is a composite portrait for everyday use, in your daily life. You will find plenty of people you know from having seen them on TV or met in business. On every page, you will say to yourself: “I know that one!” Of course. Mazarins become famous and never know decline. An Italian politician (quite close to Mazarin’s universe) said: “Power wears out the one who does not have it.” Long before him, Mazarin specified that power only wears out the one who does not already know all these things.

– Umberto Eco, preface to the Arléa translation of the Breviarium Politicorum