Après les Guerres d’Italie : Florence, Venise, Rome (1530-1605)

After forty years of incessant wars begun in 1494, the Italian peninsula is experiencing a long period of relative peace, until the end of the 18th century. Florence, Venice and Rome are at that time the three cultural and political spaces that give birth to the most important – and the most “European” – thinking upon the question of war and “post-war era”. After Florentine political thought and its connection of conquest politics to conservation in times of war, the “after-war” is always virtually tensed between the impossibility of peace and the consent to political and military domination. The understanding of such a situation is expressed by the praising of neutrality and pacification of power relations, in particular in venetian thought. In this perspective, peace is in the same time an imposed and a mobile framework. At stake is what does war transmit to after-war. Since war is a radical experience, a limit-experience, it brings a knowledge that gains necessity: therefore this knowledge continues to inform the reflection even when the circumstances are totally different. Even when the reasons of conservation are placed before the reasons of conquest, war is not replaced with peace. It is not thought anymore that after war comes peace: on the contrary, it is considered that peace has its origins in war.