#OTD 7 February

Burning performs the useful ambiguity of destruction and absolution. So the 1933 book burnings by the German Student Union were dubbed “Action against the Un-German Spirit”. The logical conclusion is Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, where the role of the fireman is not to put out fires but to make them for the specific purpose of burning books.

7 February 1497 was the original Bonfire of the Vanities when supporters of the friar Girolamo Savonarola burnt thousands of books, cosmetics and artworks in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.

The event was well-planned. As the Nazis found 450 years later, arranging the burning of adult things is particularly stimulating for youths. Savonarola – shades of 1984 – was extra clever, enrolling mere children to ferret around in houses to find hiding places.

Nor was the day plucked from the air. 7 February 1497 was Shrove Tuesday, an ambiguous affair marking the end of the silly season – the Carnival – and the beginning of Lenten penitence. The fires of the Tuesday create the ashes for Ash Wednesday. The English “shrove” – ie shriven – may not be dramatic enough. The French like “Fat Tuesday” or “Mardi Gras”, a bonfire of many vanities but perhaps not what Savonarola had in mind.

Planning isn’t everything. Savonarola was invited to Florence by Lorenzo the Magnificent; the friar’s moment came upon the failure of Lorenzo’s son Piero the Unfortunate; the friar’s execution – by hanging and burning in the same Piazza – came the year after the bonfire; within months one Nicolai Machiavelli entered the Florentine public service; and years later, Machiavelli would write in The Prince, a work dedicated to Lorenzo’s grandson:

If Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus had been unarmed they could not have enforced their constitutions for long — as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer, and he had no means of keeping steadfast those who believed or of making the unbelievers to believe.