command,... make laws for other nations’, and go on to establish the
‘best kind of Commonwealth’. The latter is defined as a balanced
arrangement of the ‘members’ of the republic, ‘that is to say, the
sovereign Prince [who must exist] in every type of Commonwealth; then
the Senate, Officers and Magistrates; the corporations and Colleges,
estates and communities; and the power and duty of each of them’.
Bodin is describing a France in which the king’s four secretaries of
finance had become known by the second half of the sixteenth century
as ‘secretaries of state’, each with oversight of a section of the country
and its frontiers: a France depicted in 1579 by Charles de Figon, an
assistant of one of these secretaries, as a great ‘Tree of Estates and
Offices’, with the ‘Conseil Privé et d’Estat du Roy’ as its roots, its trunk
the royal chancery, and its branches the secretaries, administrative
departments, and courts of justice.^51
A desperate wish for an unassailable monarchy to bring the country
through the wars of religion appears in the dogged argument (in book
2, chapter 5) that it is never permissible to go against a prince who
is sovereign by right of election or inheritance, however cruel and
tyrannical his behaviour. But Machiavelli’s recommendation that the
prince should use any stratagem, however unjust and irreligious, to
achieve and retain power is utterly rejected. Bodin’s sovereignty is exer-
cised within a metaphysical framework which looks back to Aquinas
rather than forward to a Hobbesian calculation of the natural passions
of ‘Pride, Revenge, and the like’ against which the laws of nature are
helpless ‘without the terror of some Power’. According to Bodin, the
king cannot be compelled to obey the laws of which he is the maker, but
if he swears to observe the laws of his predecessors he is bound by the
sacred laws of nature to observance of this contract, which is thus a
‘rule of state’. The ‘state of the realm’ and ‘the sovereign majesty’ are
themselves ‘stayed and grounded’ on ‘laws royal’ (such as the Salic law)
which cannot be annulled. The function of the prince and the prince
alone is to make a commonwealth out of a diversity of races, languages,
religions, and customs, by allocating status to his subjects and distin-
guishing citizens before the law.^52
In the Six Books of the Commonwealth, political empiricism is thus
joined to a vision of metaphysical order inherited from the middle
ages and registered in codes of law. Bodin was always a jurist, and
besides an array of histories the argument of his book on the ‘science
Politique’ of the commonwealth, ‘the princess of all the sciences’, draws
320 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^51) Les Six Livres de la République, preface, pp. iiia, v, bk. 1, cap. 8, pp. 122–4; H. Lloyd,
The State, France and the Sixteenth Century(London, 1983); E. le Roy Ladurie, The Royal
French State 1460–1610, tr. J. Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 141–2, 200–13, 274–5.
(^52) Les Six Livres de la République, preface, pp. iiib–ivb, bk. 1, cap. 8, pp. 128, 132, 137,
152, bk. 2, cap. 5, p. 307; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, part ii, cap. 25.