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Innocent Gentillet (1535–1588) was a French lawyer and politician.
A Huguenot moderate lawyer and parliamentarian, he was exiled to Geneva after themassacre of St. Bartholomew, and then returned to France after theEdict of Beaulieu in 1576. His Protestant views are the cause of a new exile to Geneva in 1585, where he died in 1588.
He wrote and published in 1576 theDiscours sur les moyens de bien gouverner (Sermon on the means of governing), in which he condemned the ideas ofNiccolò Machiavelli, suspected of trying to introduce impiety and immorality in government. He also accused the Italians of the entourage ofCatherine de' Medici to make the propagators.[1] The book, translated and published in Latin in 1577, then in English, has considerable diffusion throughout Europe until the mid-seventeenth century. It was known as theAnti-Machiavel and amounted to a criticalpolemic against Machiavelli.[2] Gentillet argues that the source of wealth of a state is its large population. He believes that the infighting and bad laws are contrary to the development of population and condemned luxury as detrimental to national welfare. Gentillet'sDiscours would soon be known as theAnti-Machiavelli, a term chosen byFrederick the Great as the title of hisCritical Essay on the Prince falsely attributed toVoltaire (1740). He also announced political science as defined byJean Bodin.
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