Archive for Pavia

non, pour être libre, il ne faut être ni craint, ni puissant…

Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2025 by xi'an


The French president Emmanuel Macron gave a talk on 14 July to the French armies (discours aux Armées) calling for an increased military budget, with the fundamentally flawed argument that, to be free, one must be feared, and that to be feared, one must be powerful. Which sounds at best as a sophism and at worst as a contradiction of terms, as it leads to the conclusion that only tyrants can be free… I wonder where the president got the inspiration for this terrible sequence, in Machiavelli maybe since he wrote his master thesis on the Florentine political philosopher. As for the relevance of rearmament, I also deem the argument similarly flawed. (Nuclear disarmament alone would scrimp €5 billion to €6 billion of the French State yearly budget.)