May 3: Machiavelli, the Constitution Nobody Remembers, and the Day We Agreed the Press Should Be Free

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On this day in 1469, a future author of the most misread book in the history of politics was born in Florence. In 1791, a country that would cease to exist within fourteen months passed the most progressive constitution in the world. In 1978, the United States government declared a national day in honor of the sun, which had been providing energy without prompting for approximately 4.6 billion years. May 3rd is not a day that does anything by halves.

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The Day

1469: The Birth of Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, in Florence, in the Oltrarno district — the less fashionable side of the river, which seems fitting for a man who would spend his life describing the less fashionable operations of power.

He is remembered primarily as the author of The Prince, a short manual of statecraft written in 1513, and primarily misremembered as a cynical advocate for cruelty, deception, and the ruthless pursuit of power. The word “Machiavellian” has entered the language as a synonym for cold-blooded political manipulation, which would likely have irritated Machiavelli enormously, because it captures almost none of what he was actually trying to do.

The Prince was written after Machiavelli had been imprisoned, tortured, and exiled by the Medici family following the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1512. It was, among other things, a job application — addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in the hope of securing a position at court. It is a document written by a man who had spent fifteen years as a diplomat and administrator in the Florentine republic, who had watched the Italian states be carved up by French and Spanish armies, and who was trying to understand why Italian rulers kept losing.

The answer he arrived at was empirical rather than moral: successful rulers observed what actually worked and did it, rather than what the prevailing political philosophy said they should do. This was not an endorsement of cruelty. It was an argument that the appearance of virtue and the practice of virtue were often in tension with political effectiveness, and that a ruler who could not manage that tension would not remain a ruler long enough to do any good at all.

Machiavelli spent the last years of his life writing comedies, histories of Florence, and correspondence with friends that reveals someone warm, funny, and chronically short of money. He died in 1527, still out of favor, having never received the appointment he hoped for. The Prince was published posthumously. He would have hated that too.

1791: Poland Passes the World’s Second Modern Constitution

On May 3, 1791, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth adopted the Constitution of May 3rd — the second written national constitution in modern history, after the United States Constitution of 1787, and before France’s revolutionary constitution later that same year.

The context matters and is usually omitted in brief mentions: the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a vast, strange, and genuinely innovative political entity that had been declining for over a century. Its governing structure included the liberum veto, a parliamentary rule allowing any single nobleman to dissolve the entire legislative session by shouting “I do not allow.” This is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. Between 1652 and 1764, the liberum veto was invoked to kill 53 of 55 parliamentary sessions. Governing the country had become functionally impossible.

The Constitution of May 3rd abolished the liberum veto, established a hereditary (rather than elected) constitutional monarchy, extended rights to the bourgeoisie and some protections to peasants, and created a separation of powers across executive, legislative, and judicial branches that is recognizable to modern constitutional eyes. Rousseau had called Poland “incapable of reform.” The reformers proceeded to write one of the most progressive governing documents of the eighteenth century.

They had fourteen months to enjoy it. In 1792, Russia invaded in support of Polish conservatives who opposed the reforms. In 1795, Poland was partitioned off the map entirely — divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria — and would not exist as an independent state for another 123 years. Poland celebrates May 3rd as Constitution Day to this day. The constitution lasted so briefly that it barely governed; what it did do was establish the idea of a reformed, modern Poland that persisted through a century of occupation.

World Press Freedom Day (UNESCO, since 1993)

In 1991, journalists from across Africa issued the Windhoek Declaration — a statement of principles for a free, independent, and pluralistic African press. UNESCO adopted it, designated May 3rd as World Press Freedom Day in 1993, and the UN General Assembly confirmed the designation in 1994.

The mission was clear and the timing was optimistic: the post-Cold War period felt like one of expanding freedom, and the global press seemed to be gaining ground. Reporters Without Borders publishes an annual Press Freedom Index that has tracked conditions in 180 countries since 2002. Since approximately 2010, the index has moved consistently in the wrong direction on nearly every measure. As of 2024, fewer than a dozen countries score in the “good” category. The countries that established World Press Freedom Day to protect journalism mostly measure worse on press freedom than they did in 1993.

The day exists and matters and deserves marking. The irony is structural and worth naming.

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Also Today

• Sun Day (United States, 1978). President Jimmy Carter declared May 3, 1978 as Sun Day, a national event promoting solar energy awareness organized in the spirit of Earth Day. An estimated five hundred thousand people attended events across the country. Solar capacity in the United States in 1978 was negligible. It is now the fastest-growing electricity source in the country, which suggests either that Sun Day worked very, very slowly, or that the economics of photovoltaics eventually mattered more than a national awareness day. Possibly both.
• Japanese Constitution Memorial Day (Kenpō Kinenbi). Japan’s current constitution came into force on May 3, 1947, replacing the Meiji Constitution of 1889. It was drafted substantially under American occupation and contains Article 9, in which Japan “forever renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation.” Article 9 has been periodically controversial — interpreted more or less strictly depending on the political climate — but has never been formally amended. Japan maintains one of the most capable militaries in Asia, classified as “self-defense forces.” The constitutional tension between the text and the reality has been sustained for 77 years and counting.
• Paranormal Day. A modern observance with no clear founding body or date of origin, which is somehow appropriate. The internet attributes it to various sources; none of them appear to be the original one. It is celebrated on May 3rd in some listings, April 3rd in others. The paranormal community has declined to agree on when to celebrate the paranormal. This seems correct.
• 1951: Festival of Britain opens. The UK government organized a national festival to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and to signal post-war recovery. It ran from May to September 1951, attracted 8.5 million visitors, and was deliberately demolished by the incoming Conservative government almost immediately after it closed. The Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank is the only permanent structure from the festival that remains. Architecture historians generally consider its planned destruction one of the more pointless acts of political spite in modern British history.
• 1978: First spam email sent. Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an unsolicited promotional email to approximately 393 addresses on ARPANET — then an experimental network used primarily by researchers and military personnel. The response from recipients was largely furious. This established a precedent that has proven difficult to reverse. An estimated 45% of all email sent globally is currently spam, representing approximately 160 billion messages per day.

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The Backstory: Machiavelli, Properly Understood

If you have been told that Machiavelli advocated for evil, you have been told something that is both technically defensible and substantially wrong.

The Prince is a short book — you can read it in an afternoon — and its reputation has almost entirely displaced the actual reading of it. The book’s most famous claims are usually stripped of context: “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both” appears frequently as evidence of Machiavellian cynicism. Read in context, it is an observation about political stability in specific conditions, followed immediately by the qualification that a prince must avoid being hated, which fear without hatred can accomplish but cruelty without purpose cannot.

Machiavelli’s actual intellectual project was more interesting than the caricature suggests. He was one of the first political thinkers to insist on analyzing political reality as it is rather than as it should be — a method we now take so completely for granted in political science that we forget it required someone to insist on it in the first place. His contemporaries were still largely writing in the tradition of the “mirror for princes” genre, which offered rulers idealized visions of virtuous kingship. Machiavelli wrote about what Cesare Borgia actually did and why it worked or didn’t, which felt obscene to readers expecting the conventional moral instruction manual.

He also wrote Discourses on Livy, a longer and more genuinely representative work in which his republican sympathies are unmistakable. He admired the Roman Republic more than the Empire. He believed that civic participation and institutional checks were essential to stable governance. He was, if anything, more “republican” in the modern sense than most of his contemporaries. The Prince is the early work, written in crisis, addressed to a specific person, with a specific practical agenda. It is the work that survived. The complexity of the man behind it has been mostly sanded off.

The word “Machiavellian,” as used in common speech, describes something like a cynical schemer who will do anything for personal advantage. This is closer to the actual behavior of the Medici who exiled Machiavelli than to anything Machiavelli himself advocated. History has a sense of humor, but it takes centuries to land the joke.

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Pin It

May 3rd: the birthday of the most misread man in political history, the death date of a visionary constitution that lasted fourteen months, and the original Sun Day — a reminder that the largest fusion reactor in the solar system does not require a press release.

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Sources

• Viroli, M. (1998). Machiavelli. Oxford University Press.
• Machiavelli, N. (1513/1988). The Prince. Translated by Q. Skinner & R. Price. Cambridge University Press.
• Lukowski, J. (1991). Liberty’s Folly: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century. Routledge.
• Reporters Without Borders. (2024). 2024 World Press Freedom Index. rsf.org.
• UNESCO. (1993). Resolution 104 establishing World Press Freedom Day. UNESCO General Conference.
• Hobhouse, H. (1980). Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind. Sidgwick & Jackson. (Festival of Britain context.)
• Temperton, J. (2020). “A history of spam.” Wired UK.
• Energy Information Administration. (2024). Electric Power Monthly. eia.gov.

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