block shook the whole. His fellow Frenchmen would know what he was
talking about when he said that putting one’s opinions above the public
peace brought revolutions in the state (mutations d’estat) and civil war.
Moreover, disputes about the best form of state, like those in
Machiavelli’s Discourseswere ridiculous intellectual exercises; to wish
for ‘the government of the few in a popular state, or some other sort of
government in a monarchy, is vice and folly’. Nothing oppressed a state
like innovation; change provided the mould for injustice and tyranny.^62
So, ‘in the argument now convulsing France with civil wars, the best
and sanest party is without doubt the one that stands by the ancient
religion and polity of the country.’ The king alone might be able to hold
together ‘the different parts and factions of our state’. Rule and sub-
jection (la maistrise et la subjection) are naturally opposed, so
Montaigne is not inclined to believe the case of either against the other
as set out by two Scots he has been reading, ‘the people’s man’ [George
Buchanan], who puts the king below a carter, or his monarchist
challenger [Adam Blackwood], who places him a few fathoms above
God in sovereignty and power. Montaigne simply accepts the state and
its laws as facts. States endure against the odds, though how they do it
may be beyond our intelligence, and it has been known for great states
(des grands estats) to be ruled by women, children, and lunatics
equally as well as by capable princes.^63
In Montaigne’s essays ‘state’ is both the disturbed political condition
of the whole commonwealth and the traditional forms of rule that may
save it. This is also the state running through Jean de Serres’ Inventaire
Général de l’Histoire de Franceof 1597, which is addressed to all
Frenchmen as having the principal interest in the state of their country,
and asks how ‘any State’ in the difficulties theirs has been through can
survive. The Catholic League’s moves against Henry III are seen by de
Serres as a ‘coup d’État’, a ‘shaking of this State’ which the majority of
the nobility resisted; the three estates met in 1588 to hear proposals for
‘the reformation of the State’; the execution of the Guises was the sort
of measure which is necessary when ‘the state is in peril’; and the
Sorbonne’s condemnation of the king was contrary to that college’s
laudable record of opposition to Rome’s actions against ‘the State of
this Realm’.^64
326 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^62) Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes, 116–19 (On custom and not readily changing a trad-
itional law), 638–9 (On presumption), 651 (On liberty of conscience), 933–6 (On vanity).
(^63) Ibid. 19 (Our emotions get carried away beyond us), 114, 117, 691 (On a monstrous
child), 776–8 (On what is useful and honourable), 896 (On the disadvantage of high rank),
913 (On the art of conversation), 937.
(^64) Jean de Serres, Inventaire Général de l’Histoire de France Depuis Charles VIII iusques à
Henri IV(Lyon, 1653), ii. 820–1, 833–4, 846–7, 851–2; M. Yardeni, La Conscience nationale
en France pendant les Guerres de Religion(Louvain, 1971), 17, 68–70.