notion of the crown seems to converge with that of the chose publique
(an exact translation of res publica, the public ‘thing’ or ‘wealth’) as this
was understood by the early French humanist, Pierre Bersuire, the prior
of Saint-Éloi in Paris throughout the political storms of the 1350s. In the
translation of Livy’s History of Rome (later the inspiration of
Machiavelli’s Discourses) which he made for King John it is defined as
‘no other thing than the public or common state, [but one that is] not
general to all estates of lands, countries, realms and cities (l’estat
publique ou commun, et non general à touz estaz de terres, pais,
royaumes et citez)’. This is ‘the state of the commonwealth’ not,
Bersuire appears to be saying, in the sense of the whole wealth of the
community, but in the sense of the powers and resources deployed by
the king in its name, and therefore almost identical with the crown and
‘the state of the king’.^67
France as l’état monarchique
France’s changing fortunes in the fifteenth century confirmed that the
strength of its polity depended on the king’s ability to use and control
privileged groups of individuals rather than political assemblies. During
the early years of the century Christine de Pisan made the need for a
harmony of estates a chief theme of works in which she applied the
lessons of Aristotelian thinking more directly than her predecessors to
her adopted country’s political situation. As the reign of Charles VI
approached collapse under the impact of the king’s madness and the
rivalry of factions, Christine first of all harked back to the political skills
and concern for the bien communof the ruler who had engaged her
father, an Italian astrologer, to conjure the English out of France. In The
Deeds and Good Customs of King Charles V the Wise, written in 1404
as a model for the dauphin, she celebrated the old king’s chivalry but
also his willingness both to learn the elements of political prudence from
Giles of Rome and other works he had translated and to take counsel
from everyone, including townsmen and the poor. She found it
necessary to show how the chevalerie, the order of knighthood, was
linked to ‘other human institutions’, which meant investigating ‘the
origins of seigneurial and princely power’. According to philosophical
tradition it had been the people who decided, in the anarchic conditions
278 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 147, 153 ff.; Delachenal, ‘Journal des États Généraux réunis a Paris
au mois d’octobre 1356’, 431.
(^67) F. E. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, ix (complement), s.v. chose
publique, citing BN ms. 20312, fo. 1v; L. Pannier, ‘Notice biographique sur le bénédictin
Pierre Bersuire’, Bibliothèque de L’École des Chartes, 33 (1872), 325–54.