on the local custumals of France, laws registered in parlement, and six
thousand marginal citations of Roman and Canon law. In his writings,
the metaphor for a commonwealth is not the human body but arith-
metical harmony expressed in a system of justice. As he promises in the
preface, the Republicends with a discussion of ‘justice distributive,
commutative and harmonic, showing which of the three is proper to
l’estat bien ordonné’. L’estat de Monarchie is simple, but royal
monarchy is the best sort of state when its government is ‘tempered by
Aristocratic and Popular Government, that is to say by harmonic
justice, which is made up of distributive or Geometric justice, and
commutative or Arithmetic, which belong [respectively] to the Aristo-
cratic and the Popular state’. The laws of the king of France, like
God’s law, follow harmonic proportion, allotting offices, rewards, and
penalties to everyone, but in proportion to their status. Philip the Fair’s
ordinance (‘never printed’) on excessive dress and diet is given as an
example of such a law, for it administered equal (and arithmetical)
justice to all by (geometrically) setting ‘unequal penalties for unequal
persons’.^53
State, nation, and politics in France
Bodin clung to Thomas Aquinas’s vision of an ordered commonwealth
in which the legislative sovereignty of the monarch reflected the cosmic
sovereignty of God, in the face of religious upheavals that transformed
the model of the ‘state of the commonwealth’ from legal system to
national association, and the legitimacy of state power from a meta-
physical question into an intensely political issue. ‘Nation’ appears
late in political thought, and ‘Nation-State’ is a twentieth-century
expression, though there was of course a sense of national identity in the
middle ages, tending to show itself most clearly at the level of the
province, where local custom helped to consolidate it: the feeling of
Norman lords for their nation was exhibited both in their opposition to
English occupation and in their opposition at the estates general of
1484 to the taxes which the crown claimed to impose on the provinces
for the utility of the larger nation (nationis utilitas). But ‘nation’ (signi-
fying a group that belonged together by birth) was less a term of polit-
ical rhetoric than ‘people’ (populus), defined by Philip Pot in 1484 as
State, nation, and politics in France 321(^53) Les Six Livres de la République, preface, p. iiia, bk. 6, cap. 6, pp. 1013, 1032, 1049,
1051; for Philip IV’s ordinance, see above, p. 229; W. H. Greenleaf, ‘Bodin and the Idea of
Order’, in Jean Bodin, ed. H. Denzer (Munich, 1973), 29–36; M. Villey, ‘La Justice
harmonique selon Bodin’, ibid. 76–8; R. E. Giesey, ‘Medieval Jurisprudence in Bodin’s
Concept of Sovereignty’, ibid. 167 ff.; D. Parker, ‘Law, Society and the State in the Thought
of Jean Bodin’, History of Political Thought, 2 (1981), 255–84.