This essay examines the period between the publication of The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). During this six-year time span, the concept of the ‘natural history of destruction’, Sebald’s negative philosophy of history, gains more and more prominence in his writings. This especially applies to the unfinished Corsica Project and in his Zurich Lectures on air war and German literature (resulting in: On the Natural History of Destruction). The Corsica Project examines various forms of human aggression: hunting, blood revenge, deforestation, and pyromania. The origin of these forms of aggression against nature are attributed to nature itself, thus forming part of an all-encompassing natural history of destruction. The destructive instinct of human beings is presented as an innate, natural characteristic and thus as beyond personal moral responsibility. In On the Natural History of Destruction, this pessimistic idea is applied to contemporary history, with the phenomenon of firestorms in the bombing raids of World War II becoming emblems of the natural history of destruction.

High rates of interpersonal violence in Renaissance Italy were not signs of backwardness, requiring repression in order for the conditions of modernity to be set: quite the opposite. Italy, the most economically advanced and urbanised region of Europe, was the first to experience the negative consequences of social mobility and social differentiation. Notaries, accountants and lawyers were not modern bureaucratic functionaries. In order to be accepted as gentlemen they also had to act like gentlemen. The creation of a more amorphous social elite forced Italians to rethink the rules regulating social conduct, codifying the laws of civility and the duel, and elaborating the art of peacemaking. None of this stopped the violence however. Renaissance ideals of glory triumphed over the pious trappings of chivalry. Fighting was liberating, permitting any man, whatever his status, to win fame. Duelling became endemic, a corollary to and consequence of vendetta. The rest of this chapter outlines the contours of the new Renaissance masculine culture.

Communal politics is an important and still largely unexplored aspect of social and political relations under the Ancien Régime. This chapter attempts to get at the village view by means of a vendetta which has left a rich trail of archival sources. We get an invaluable and rare insight into non-elite politics before 1789 that goes beyond the standard historical conventions of peasant resistance and rebellion, shedding light on villagers’ motives, deliberations and divisions, as well as their capacity to organise, use the law and exploit the protection offered by local lords and officials. The story that emerges is not simply one of resistance to the royal fisc, centre against the periphery, or the people versus the nobility. Rather, the demands of the state after 1635 divided local society among itself and led to faction and violence within the corps politique. While in the short term these internal divisions posed a challenge to traditional local order, they paradoxically offered an opportunity for the state and its agents to intervene as arbiters, an opportunity that was realised by Louis XIV’s redeployment of the intendants after 1661.

Vendetta was a commonly used term in early modern Italy and widely viewed in as legitimate, contributing to Italy’s very high homicide rates. But vendetta has received surprisingly little attention from historians. Vendetta was not opposed to the state or the law, because it was closely associated with justice. The process of getting even did not require the spilling of blood: an injury could be satisfied in bloodless ways and medieval statutes progressively sought to deny or restrict self-help. The elaboration of more punitive courts institutionalised the system of compensation for an injury. Vendetta was a process of conflict resolution in which the state, church and community brought significant pressure to bear on the parties to renounce enmity and seek peace. This became much more difficult after 1500. The Italian Wars not only unleashed mass violence and regime change on a scale not experienced in the late Middle Ages but also led to the collapse of traditional political loyalties. The violence unleased by civil war changed the nature of faction: factional identities were henceforth forged in blood.

The political violence that characterised mid-seventeenth-century Italy had subsided in the north by the 1690s, a process that can be traced in the falling homicide rate. But the return of large-scale warfare to the peninsula in the 1690s cautions against any simplistic claims regarding the disciplining of the aristocracy. However, in regions where the state’s legitimacy remained weak assassination survived. The mid-century convulsions that shook the Spanish Empire cast a long shadow. Historians have long dismissed ideas of Spanish ‘decline’. The notion of ‘decline’ is a moral category and the empire proved remarkably resilient in its Mediterranean heartland. Rather, the problem of violence in the Mezzogiorno was rooted in politics. The weak legitimacy of the state required the use of fear and violence, which in turn bred contempt for and distrust of the law. The decline of vendetta practices in northern Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century is well attested. It was a consequence of political and social processes which transformed the social elite and its relationship to authority in the decades around 1700. It was during the eighteenth century that a clear distinction between a pacified north and a south characterised by stubbornly high levels of interpersonal violence first became apparent. Vendetta became a regional problem.

This chapter places an outbreak of noble vendetta in the mid-century into the context of the civil war introduced in the previous chapter, arguing that the decline of social and institutional trust in Bologna provided the legal and social space for nobility to practice traditional forms of revenge politics and violence.