shared religion and laws, but by the existence within the country of an
authority able to make the laws and appoint magistrates to apply them.
A state is defined by the existence within it of a power with the five
marks of sovereignty, which turn out to be Smith’s five variables of
governments except that the power of life and death replaces the
negotiation of taxes between king and parliament. Bodin of course
draws on his knowledge of the respublicawhich had been created in
medieval France, as Smith does on his experience of the historical
English commonwealth. Already in the Methodus, he asserts that a con-
stitution cannot be mixed, because sovereignty cannot be shared. Rule
by a monarch, by the nobility, or by the people are the only possible
states of regime, and of the three monarchy is the most natural and
therefore best.^47
Bodin himself effectively reduces the number of states of regime to
one, that is rule of a community by a true sovereign. In 1587, the
English lawyer Richard Crompton expressed what was perhaps already
a commonplace when he wrote, in his Short Declaration of the Ende of
Traytors and False Conspirators against the State, and the Duetie of
Subjects to their Sovereigne Governour, that ‘there is no Common
wealth, state, or societie of man kind, that can continue, where there is
not superiority or preheminence in government’. The originality Bodin
claimed was in the demonstrating that indivisible sovereignty was
always exercised through the medium of a diverse political culture,
which included in the case of France the scrutiny of new laws by parle-
mentsand estates, the approval of royal alienations by the Chambre des
Comptes (Machiavelli was wrong in saying that the French king had
absolute control of the public treasure), and the authority of lords over
their vassals. There was no better argument for the strength of the
French commonwealth, Bodin wrote in the Methodus, than the way
that the courts and the great towns had continued in full splendour
through the war of religion which had just set the whole country aflame,
and that the edicts of the best of kings were quickly extinguishing the
tumult.^48
By 1576 the religious fanaticism which found hideous expression in
the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day had destroyed such
confidence. The Six Books of the Commonwealthsupplemented the
Methoduswith examples from recent politics, sharpened its arguments,
and put them in the vernacular so (Bodin said) that they might be under-
stood by all Frenchmen who wished to see ‘the state of this Realm’
rescued from the contemporary barbarism and restored to its former
glory. In such a crisis salvation was not to be looked for from the estates
318 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^47) Methodus, 169, 173, 174–7, 214–16.
(^48) OED, s.v. state, 27, 30; Methodus, 206–10: ‘Status & Conversiones Imperii Gallorum’.