MACHAULT D’ARNOUVILLE, JEAN BAPTISTE DE (1701–1794), French statesman, was a son of Louis Charles Machault d’Arnouville, lieutenant of police. In 1721 he was counsel to the parlement of Paris, in 1728 maître des requêtes, and ten years later was made president of the Great Council; although he had opposed the court in the Unigenitus dispute, he was appointed intendant of Hainaut in 1743. From this position, through the influence at court of his old friend René Louis, Marquis d’Argenson, he was called to succeed Orry de Fulvy as controller-general of the finances in December 1745. He found, on taking office, that in the four years of the War of the Austrian Succession the economies of Cardinal Fleury had been exhausted, and he was forced to develop the system of borrowings which was bringing French finances to bankruptcy. He attempted in 1749 a reform in the levying of direct taxes, which, if carried out, would have done much to prevent the later Revolutionary movement. He proposed to abolish the old tax of a tenth, which was evaded by the clergy and most of the nobility, and substitute a tax of one-twentieth which should be levied on all without exception. The cry for exceptions, however, began at once. The clergy stood in a body by their historical privileges, and the outcry of the nobility was too great for the minister to make headway against. Still he managed to retain his office until July 1754, when he exchanged the controllership for the ministry of marine. Foreseeing the disastrous results of the alliance with Austria, he was drawn to oppose more decidedly the schemes of Mme de Pompadour, whose personal ill-will he had gained. Louis XV. acquiesced in her demand for his disgrace on the 1st of February 1757. Machault lived on his estate at Arnouville until the Revolution broke out, when, after a period of hiding, he was apprehended in 1794 at Rouen and brought to Paris as a suspect. He was imprisoned in the Madelonnettes, where he succumbed in a few weeks, at the age of ninety-three.
His son, Louis Charles Machault d’Arnouville (1737–1820), was bishop of Amiens from 1774 until the Revolution. He was famous for his charity; but proved to be a most uncompromising Conservative at the estates general of 1789, where he voted consistently against every reform. He emigrated in 1791, resigned his bishopric in 1801 to facilitate the concordat, and retired to the ancestral château of Arnouville, where he died in 1820.
MACHAUT, GUILLAUME DE (c. 1300–1377), French poet and musician, was born in the village of Machault near Réthel in
Champagne. Machaut tells us that he served for thirty years
the adventurous John of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia. He
followed his master to Russia and Poland, and, though of peaceful
tastes himself, saw twenty battles and a hundred tourneys.
When John was killed at Crécy in 1346 Machaut was received at
the court of Normandy, and on the accession of John the Good to
the throne of France (1350) he received an office which enabled
him to devote himself thenceforth to music and poetry. Machaut
wrote about 1348 in honour of Charles III., king of Navarre, a
long poem much admired by contemporaries, Le Jugement du roi
de Navarre. When Charles was thrown into prison by his father-in-law,
King John, Machaut addressed him a Confort d’ami to
console him for his enforced separation from his young wife,
then aged fifteen. This was followed about 1370 by a poem of
9000 lines entitled La Prise d’Alexandrie, one of the last chronicles
cast in this form. Its hero was Pierre de Lusignan, king
of Cyprus. Machaut is best known for the strange book telling
of the love affair of his old age with a young and noble lady long
supposed to be Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad;
Paulin Paris in his edition of the Voir dit (Historie vraie) identified
her as Perronne d’Armentières, a noble lady of Champagne.
In 1362, when Machaut must have been at least sixty-two years
of age, he received a rondeau from Perronne, who was then
eighteen, expressing her devotion. She no doubt wished to
play Laura to his Petrarch, and the Voir dit contains the correspondence
and the poems which they exchanged. The romance,
which ended with Perronne’s marriage and Machaut’s desire
to remain her doux ami, has gleams of poetry, especially in
Perronne’s verses, but its subject and its length are both
deterrent to modern readers. But Machaut with Deschamps
marks a distinct transition. The trouvères had been impersonal.
It is difficult to gather any details of their personal history
from their work. Machaut and Deschamps wrote of their own
affairs, and the next step in development was to be the self-analysis
of Villon. Machaut was also a musician. He composed
a number of motets, songs and ballads, also a mass
supposed to have been sung at the coronation of Charles V.
This was translated into modern notation by Perne, who read
a notice on it before the Institute of France in 1817.
Machaut’s Oeuvres choisies were edited by P. Tarbé (Rheims and Paris, 1849); La Prise d’Alexandrie, by L. de Mas-Latrie (Geneva, 1877); and Le Livre du voir-dit, by Paulin Paris (1875). See also F. G. Fétis, Biog. universelle des musiciens . . . (Paris, 1862), and a notice on the Instruments de musique au xiv e siècle d’après Guillaume de Machaut, by E. Travers (Paris, 1882).
MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ (1469–1527), Italian statesman and writer, was born at Florence on the 3rd of May 1469. His ancestry claimed blood relationship with the lords of Montespertoli, a fief situated between Val di Pesa and Val d’Elsa, at no great distance from the city. Niccolò’s father, Bernardo (b. 1428), followed the profession of a jurist. He held landed property worth something like £250 a year of our money. His son, though not wealthy, was never wholly dependent upon official income.
Of Niccolò’s early years and education little is known. His works show wide reading in the Latin and Italian classics, but it is almost certain that he had not mastered the Greek language. To the defects of Machiavelli’s education we may, in part at least, ascribe the peculiar vigour of his style and his speculative originality. He is free from the scholastic trifling and learned frivolity which tainted the rhetorical culture of his century. He made the world of men and things his study, learned to write his mother-tongue with idiomatic conciseness, and nourished his imagination on the masterpieces of the Romans.
The year of Charles VIII.’s invasion and of the Medici’s expulsion from Florence (1494) saw Machiavelli’s first entrance into public life. He was appointed clerk in the second chancery of the commune under his old master, the grammarian, Marcello Virgilio Adriani. Early in 1498 Adriani became chancellor of the republic, and Machiavelli received his vacated office with the rank of second chancellor and secretary. This post he retained till the year 1512. The masters he had to serve were the dieci di libertà e pace, who, though subordinate to the signoria, exercised a separate control over the departments of war and the interior. They sent their own ambassadors to foreign powers, transacted business with the cities of the Florentine domain, and controlled the military establishment of the commonwealth. The next fourteen years of Machiavelli’s life were fully occupied in the voluminous correspondence of his bureau, in diplomatic missions of varying importance, and in the organization of a Florentine militia. It would be tedious to follow him through all his embassies to petty courts of Italy, the first of which took place in 1499, when he was sent to negotiate the continuance of a loan to Catherine Sforza, countess of Forlì and Imola. In 1500 Machiavelli travelled into France, to deal with Louis XII. about the affairs of Pisa. These embassies were the school in which Machiavelli formed his political opinions, and gathered views regarding the state of Europe and the relative strength of nations. They not only introduced him to the subtleties of Italian diplomacy, but also extended his observation over races very different from the Italians. He thus, in the course of his official business, gradually acquired principles and settled ways of thinking which he afterwards expressed in writing.
In 1502 Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini, who bore him several children, with whom, in spite of his own infidelities, he lived on good terms, and who survived him twenty-six years. In the same year Piero Soderini was chosen gonfalonier for life, in accordance with certain changes in the constitution of the state, which were intended to bring Florence closer to the Venetian type of government. Machiavelli became intimately connected
