Guaritori del popolo. Le radici moderne del populismo (Machiavelli, Pomponazzi, La Boétie)

Résumé 0

This paper addresses the debate on the origins of populism by proposing a new chronology of this phenomenon. The hypothesis developed here is that populism is a phenomenon of enchantment of politics made possible by the transformation that the notions of «enchantment» and «enchanter» underwent, for the first time, during the sixteenth century. The signs of this transformation are identified, almost simultaneously, by three political observers: Machiavelli, Pomponazzi and La Boétie. Starting from the image of the tyrant as a great «charmeur» at the beginning of La Boétie’s treatise, the article proposes to read the notion of «voluntary servitude» as a form of collective enchantment. The different contexts that this enigmatic image allows us to identify indicate that the Discours de la servitude volontaire is inscribed, in an original way, in the long tradition of the therapeutic power of enchantments. By recognising in the tyrant the qualities of the enchanter, La Boétie gives the incantation a political value and identifies in the relationship enchanter/enchanted the key to an unprecedented pact of subordination. In this variation of scale, enchantment as a political phenomenon occurs when the leader is the depositary of the charisma to perform prodigies considered credible by the multitude. This reconstruction assigns a central role to the figure of the prophet-thaumaturge in which elements are interwoven that refer as much to figures and practices of popular medicine («ciurmatori») as to academic debates on the healing power of the imagination. The article illustrates how this hybrid model of leadership is clearly identified by Machiavelli and Pomponazzi. The article concludes by proposing to read the populist model as a «democratisation» of the thaumaturgical paradigm described by Marc Bloch in Les rois thaumaturges (1924). The people preferentially tend to grant the trust of healing to individuals who share their fears, beliefs and hopes: anyone who proves to possess the charisma to enchant (and to heal) can become ruler of multitudes.