Abstract

The article suggests a perspective for considering the tension between (i) the authoritarian — perhaps even in a sense ‘Machiavellian’ — political ideas of Gabriel Naudé in Considerations politiques sur coups d’etat, on one hand, and (ii) his at least assumingly liberal ideas of the library in Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque. The study starts from the review of the frame constituted by Naudé’s personality and political thought, which we, in turn, could best understand in the light of his own time and the history before him, including the history of political thought and particularly the aftermath of the French wars of religion (so-called Huguenot Wars) in the sixteenth century. The person of Naudé thus conceived of together with some developments after him until the end of the ancien régime and the Great Revolution of France — such as the Habermasian bourgeois public sphere — could be a frame for specifying the significance of Naudé’s thought about the library.