and individual contentment, for from discord would follow the ruin of
the monarchy and the dissolution of the mystical body.^93
The rhetoric of the kingdom maintained by justice and laws may have
been remote from the actual brutalities of political life, but its ubiquity
and persistence reflected a basic need to believe in a commonwealth
with an ordered constitution. As it was understood at the end of the
middle ages, this can no longer be called a feudal constitution—the
liberties of the landed aristocracy had been far too tightly constrained
within the scheme of estates. ‘King and kingdom’, respublica and
policiecould be used, as they were by the chancellor and others in the
estates general of 1484, to refer to the entity which historians of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries habitually translate as ‘state’.
The acts of Francis I have ‘respublica gallica’, ‘l’état de chose publique’
(the time-honoured status reipublicaeconverted to the vernacular), ‘nos
affaires et affaires publiques’, and the ‘chose publique’ or ‘la couronne
et chose publiqueof our said realm’.^94
France was being called a ‘monarchy and chose publique’ in royal
acts well before Seyssel discussed the best form of regime in good
humanist tradition and concluded that it was ‘l’État monarchique’:
there were imperfections even in ‘the aristocratic state and government
of the Venetians’, though by reason of its laws and customs that was
‘the best policed empire and state of community (mieux policé empire et
état de communauté) one has seen or read about up to now’. Seyssel’s
state seems to be both the regime and ‘the mystical body of human
society’ that is born of ‘a civil and political union’ and like a natural
body goes through the five ages of childhood, youth, manhood ‘which
is the state [?proper]’, age, and decrepitude. Used of an extensive
monarchy like France, where government had grown in symbiosis with
territorially dispersed organs of justice and administration, ‘state’
had come to mean regime andcommonwealth together. The State thus
existed in its own right, no longer having to be ‘of the king’ or ‘of the
kingdom’, though it could always be characterized by its type of regime
(as in ‘the monarchic state’); whether the emphasis was on the ordered
community or the government that ordered it depended on context.^95
To that extent ‘the state’ would always be an ambiguous term, as it
was sometimes even in The Prince. A sense of the state as a territorial
community creeps in when Machiavelli contrasts France and Turkey as
France as l’état monarchique 293(^93) Seyssel, La Monarchie de France, ed. Poujol, 18, 115–19, 154–5; The Monarchy of
France, tr. Hexter and Sherman, 49–57, 93–5, 182 (part 1, caps. viii–xii, part 2, cap. 17);
Rubinstein, ‘The History of the Word politicus’, 52–5.
(^94) Masselin, Journal, 48–9, 166–7, 186–7, 334–6, 366–8, 380–1, 386–7; Ordonnances:
Règne de Francois I, viii. 139, 351; ix. 6, 207–8, 294.
(^95) Seyssel, La Monarchie de France, 107–11: tr. in The Monarchy of France, 42–6 (part 1,
caps. iii–iv).