Giuliano da Empoli Le Fondateur. The new novel from a political scientist who understands power from the inside. Da Empoli is not a novelist by temperament—he’s a former senior advisor to Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, a professor at Sciences Po, and the founding chairman of Volta, a Milan-based think tank focused on European power. He writes fiction from the inside of institutions, not from the outside looking in.
His trajectory over the past five years tells you everything. 2019: Les ingénieurs du chaos—essays dissecting how modern systems actually function. 2022: Le mage du Kremlin—his debut novel about proximity to power in Russia, which won the Grand Prix du Roman and sold half a million copies. 2025: L’Heure des prédateurs—direct, non-fiction analysis of the predators reshaping our world. Now: Le Fondateur.
This is not speculation. This is someone who has sat at the table with power, watched how it consolidates, understood the architecture from within. When he writes about Panoptik and Alexander Zimmer—a surveillance apparatus operating behind every global crisis—he’s not extrapolating from tech journalism. He’s drawing from twenty years of watching how systems actually work.
The themes are what matter now: the unchecked power of tech giants, total surveillance rebranded as order, the post-human future being engineered by men convinced of their own inevitability. After five years of essay and analysis, da Empoli returns to fiction to show us what it looks like from inside the machine. Giuliano da Empoli Le Fondateur is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the world we’re actually living in.
Le Fondateur releases October 1st, 2026 from Gallimard.