general (in which Bodin himself sat in 1576), for it reflected and
confirmed the divisions within the country, but in a ‘sovereign majesty’
whose indivisiblity Bodin asserted even more strongly and whose
essence he now defined as ‘giving the law to subjects in general without
their consent’. The opinion that some had dared to put into print that
the French étatwas a mixture of the three [types of] commonwealth
(‘des trois Républiques’), the parlementof Paris embodying a form of
Aristocracy, the three estates constituting the Democracy, and the King
representing the royal state (‘l’estat Royal’), was declared to be not just
absurd but a treason punishable by death.^49
The Methodussurveyed actual states in history: the Six Livrescom-
bined historical examples with Aristotelian logic to construct a model
state, which (it was concluded) needed a sovereign legislator in order to
survive in a dangerous world. The locationof this sovereignty under one
of only three possible headings—monarchy, aristocracy, or demo-
cracy—was necessary simply to prevent the political scientist getting lost
in a world of republics more or less virtuous, tyrannous, or oligarchical.
But to avoid Aristotle’s confusions and fully understand a particular
polity another distinction was required, which Bodin claimed no one
before him had recognized, between the formal ‘state of a Republic’,
which was ‘always simple’, and the mode of government of that
republic. Monarchy was the contrary of ‘l’estat populaire’, yet the
sovereign majesty might be in a monarch who nevertheless could be
said to govern ‘son estat populairement’, if he chose to distribute
‘estates, magistracies, offices and honours indifferently to all, without
regard to the claims of birth, wealth or virtue’: the state would still be a
monarchy. Likewise a commonwealth such as ancient Rome, in which
the people held sovereignty but gave offices to the nobly born, was an
example of ‘l’estat populaire gouverné aristocratiquement’. It was a
distinction that shifted the concept of the state from the sovereign
authority towards the political life of the whole commonwealth.^50
This wider ‘estat de la République’ could be delegated by a sovereign
people to a dictator to ‘manage’ and ‘reform’, and could flourish, decay,
and be ruined by malice or simple ignorance of ‘affairs of state’. For
Bodin the ideal state in this sense was of course the French monarchy
working properly. The French, not Machiavelli’s Italians, enjoyed the
climate in which men could best ‘negotiate, traffic, judge, lead,
Jean Bodin on the state 319(^49) Les Six Livres de la Republique,preface; book 1, caps. 8 and 10; book 2, cap. 1; cf. the
English tr. of the work published in 1506 by Richard Knolles as The Six Books of a Common-
weale. Written by I. Bodin a famous Lawyer, and a man of great Experience in matters of
State, and repr. under the editorship of Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); for a
recent translation of bk. 1, caps. 8 and 10, and bk. 2, caps. 1 and 5, see Bodin on Sovereignty,
ed. J. H. Franklin (Cambridge UP, 1992).
(^50) Les Six Livres de la République, bk. 2, caps. 1 and 7, pp. 251, 339–41.