If such a king were seen as immoral, Bodin argued, this would undermine the state's legitimacy. Moreover, he wrote:
In addition to the counselors of tyranny [e.g., Machiavelli], there are others… who are no less dangerous and are maybe even more so. These are the ones who under the pretext of the people's liberties cause subjects to rebel against their natural princes, and thereby open the way to factious anarchy which is worse than tyranny ever was.13
These “others,” perhaps even more “dangerous” than Machiavelli, were writers who claimed the right of resistance for the people. Bodin insisted that all authority had to be vested in a sovereign, a single will. The king could impose any law on his subjects with or without their consent; to hold otherwise meant that the State was something less than sovereign, that it could be thwarted as when a man with a severe physical disorder finds himself unable to command his limbs to move. A king's will is the sovereign of the State just as a man's will is the sovereign of his body. This is the credo of absolutism, and it is the constitutional doctrine of the kingly state.
Perhaps we today are inclined to exaggerate the actual absolutism of the kingly state.14 Things may look more monolithic from a distant perspective. Doubtless a more consensual and complex arrangement prevailed at the time than may now appear. For our purposes, however, it is enough to observe that contemporaries of this period perceived both an enormous change under way in the centrality of the State as well as a crisis of legitimacy besetting that State. For it was a significant change to place the State in man, especially when it had been scarcely a century since the State was torn from the local princes who were so soon to be made redundant by it. Hobbes saw this clearly, and made it his life's work to give reasons why the monarch was not simply another man—owing to the move to an objectified State—and why the obedience owed the State could be owed to a man. In the Behemoth, he complains:
Lastly, the people in general were so ignorant of their duty [they had been seduced and corrupted], that no one perhaps of ten thousand knew what right any man had to command him, of what necessity there was of King or Commonwealth, for which he was to part with his money against his will; but thought himself to be so much master of whatsoever he possessed, that it could not be taken from him upon any pretense of common safety without his own consent. [Moreover] king, they thought, was but a title of the highest honor, to which gentlemen, knight, baron, earl, duke were but steps to ascend to, with the help of riches…15
To overcome this attitude had been one of the chief goals of the consti-tutional form of the kingly state. Some form of constitutional response was certainly necessary owing to those strategic innovations that were marginalizing the princely states as well as imposing new demands upon them. The kingly state established itself as an absolute yet legitimate state form in the era that witnessed the permanent schism of the ecclesiastical regime (which had been the main barrier to the emergence of the kingly state) and the destruction of the imperial regime (which was the kingly state's main rival to succeed the princely state as the dominant constitutional order in Europe).
This outcome was far from obvious in the first half of the sixteenth century when Charles V attempted to consolidate a Habsburg empire against the opposition of the French king Francis I. In a way, the princely state can be said to have originated in the rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and that of the Angevin/Valois of France, because the invasion of Italy in 1494 had been undertaken to support a French claim to the throne of Naples against the claims of Aragon; to this claim was later added the assertion of a French dynastic right to the Duchy of Milan against the Sforzas and their Imperial patrons. The opposition to French claims became unified, however, and vastly increased with the consolidation in one Habsburg heir, Charles V, of a staggering dynastic inheritance. Thereafter the modest princely states of the Italian peninsula were no longer principal players. Instead, Charles's vast continental realm of dynastic properties was eventually opposed by an alliance of princely states led by the champions of the emerging constitutional order of kingly states. Thus the competing variants of the State all contended, and, thanks to the sheer scope of Charles's inheritance, these forms played for stakes that would be historically decisive.
Charles was born at Ghent in 1500. His father was the Habsburg archduke of Austria, son of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, and of Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles's mother was the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile. Thus Charles promised to unite within one person an Austrian-Spanish realm that included the Low Countries, to which he might add the German emperorship and even lay fair claim to Burgundy. It was an astounding example of the dynastic conglomerations that were acquired through inheritance and the alliances of marriage. Such a “realm,” as I have used the term, was in essence a personal union of territories. To the modern eye some of these dynastic states seem very odd indeed, and would appear to have little hope of survival; their various geographic components seem too disparate in terms of culture, language, and institutions. This observation, however, anticipates the outcome of a struggle that Charles V and his successors had first to play out: it is only because the universalism of the Empire and the Church was shattered during that struggle that it seems to us that national culture, language, and local institutions are the stuff out of which viable states must be made. Indeed it was Charles's goal to reverse this development and restore the unity of a Catholic Europe.*
One might say that the inheritance of Charles V created the conditions for a perfect experiment to determine whether in fact the State could encompass many different nations once the Reformation had so greatly sharpened the cultural differences among the peoples under his rule.
When Charles was crowned emperor in 1519, he had inherited not only vast dynastic properties from his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon and his other grandfather, Maximilian, but also quarrels over the thrones of Naples and Milan, respectively; plus a third dispute over the crown of Navarre from one grandmother, Isabella, as well as a fourth dynastic claim, from his other grandmother, over lands lost to France by her father, the Duke of Burgundy. In all of these disputes his antagonist was the losing candidate for the emperorship, Francis I, who had become king of France.
What is important for our study is that both Charles and Francis failed to achieve their strategic objectives, so that by the end of this period in the mid-sixteenth century, it was clear that a dynastic realm agglomerating princely states across Europe could not succeed in creating an imperial state. Such an entity simply could not manage sufficient control of its domestic resources in order to maintain standing armies capable of the prolonged campaigns required to vindicate dynastic claims that were often geographically remote and politically fraught.
It took an entire century, however, for the new constitutional form of the kingly state to triumph, ascending a helical staircase whose steps connected religious conflicts on one side and dynastic ones on the other. For at the same time that Charles V was concluding the compact of Noyon with Francis I, which provided him with safe passage to his new Spanish inheritance, Martin Luther was proclaiming his doctrines for the reform of the Church. In the ensuing two decades—that is, until the beginning of the more radical career of John Calvin, which made matters considerably more difficult—religious strife rendered the domestic bases of both Francis and Charles ever more insecure, so that when their conflict ended with Francis's death in 1547, the main objective of Charles's policy was the suppression of the Protestant cause, which he himself had done much indirectly to support when his pursuit of hegemony in Europe had united anti-imperial German princes with religious reformers. Charles's motives at this moment were expressed in a letter to his sister:
[I have decided to attack the Protestant League because] if we fail to intervene now, all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith… After considering this and considering it again, I decided to embark on war against Hesse and Saxony as transgress
ors of the peace… [a]nd although this pretext will not long disguise the fact that it is matter of religion, yet it will serve for the present to divide the renegades.16
The hostility of France toward Habsburg designs did not die with Francis, however personal the quarrel with Charles. Indeed the possibility of alliance between German princes and Henry II, Francis's successor, drove Charles to agree to the Treaty of Passau, whose provisions led to the Augsburg settlement in 1555.
Augsburg is an historic agreement because it provided that rulers were to determine the religious denomination of their respective states (the constitutional principle of cuius regio eius religio), matching Lutheran princes with Lutheran subjects and Catholic rulers with Catholic peoples. According to this principle, the decisions of the ruler as to which sectarian preference to adopt were binding also upon his subjects with the concession that dissatisfied persons were welcome to emigrate to more congenial states. This, with the migrations that followed, sealed the dominance of the princely state over the feudal princes who had ruled within a universal Christendom, and intensified the sectarian basis of the princely state. Augsburg enshrined the constitutional form of the princely state because it attached to the State an attribute—religious affiliation—hitherto associated with a human being, the prince.
Charles, in frustration and despair at these developments, which forever fragmented Europe and ended his dream of a restored, single Christendom, abdicated in October 1555. He left his Spanish dominions (including the Netherlands) to his son, Philip II, and arranged for the imperial crown to be assumed by his brother Ferdinand, who possessed the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. A putative constitutional successor to the princely state—a dynastic empire accumulating many princely states—had thus far failed.
Although foreigners frequently regarded the empire of Charles V or that of Philip II as monolithic and disciplined, it was in fact a congeries of territories… There was no central administration… The absence of such institutions which might have encouraged a sense of unity and the fact that the ruler might never visit the country, made it difficult for the king to raise funds in one part of his dominions in order to fight in another.17
But the princely states of Italy had not succeeded either, for these states had been extinguished by the wars between Charles and Francis, with whom the comparatively small states of the Italian cities could not compete, even though they had pioneered the techniques by which the energies and resources of their conquerors were concentrated. The sack of Rome by Habsburg mercenaries in 1527 is perhaps the best date for the death certificate of the innovative Italian states whose “precocious development of an urban economy”18 had produced the wealth that could employ, and the vulnerability that would require, mercenary forces and had thus begun the process of modern state formation. The next historic constitutional event, the development of the kingly state, could not be completed so long as civil war threatened those great states that were candidates for absolute monarchical rule. A domestic, constitutional imperative—consolidation—drove the strategic aims of the State; when this was accomplished the strategic innovations by which this prerequisite was achieved still required further constitutional change before the kingly state, a unified, autocratic, monarchical state—the “absolute” State of early modern Europe—could fully emerge. Such states, though legitimated by dynastic rules, had to be reconfigured by the demands of war for mass taxation and state efficiency.
The Peace of Augsburg had the unfortunate effect of giving free rein to savage repression by those sovereigns who stayed within its rules, and thus the Inquisition and the civil wars in France, Germany, and the Netherlands began in earnest at this time. The ensuing Thirty Years' War made evident the weakness of both the princely and the imperial options for the state. But the kingly state did not truly triumph as a stable and powerful entity until constitutional centralization became a reality. The Peace of West-phalia, ending the Thirty Years' War, ratified this new political creation, uniting the legitimacy of the dynastic realm and the Italian administrative innovations of the Renaissance, with the permanence of a fixed and contiguous national population. Westphalia provided France—the first and most successful kingly state—with a period of domestic consolidation, and effectively ended the Habsburg drive for empire. Ironically, it also set the stage for the next constitutional form of the state, the territorial state,* as if the triumph of one constitutional order somehow germinates the form that will ultimately vanquish it.
In France, as in the rest of Europe, the experience of the Italian Renaissance had paved the way for the Reformation. The Italian Wars begun by Charles VIII in 1494 had brought the French into contact with a spirit that is reflected in the colorful chateaux that replaced the dark feudal castles of medieval France, and in the works of Rabelais, and, somewhat later, Montaigne. In time this spirit must catch fire in theology: five years before Luther's 95 theses, a lecturer in Paris had published a commentary on St. Paul in which the doctrine of justification by faith was asserted.
In response to these developments, Charles's successor, Francis I, and his successor, Henry II, favored a policy of Protestant suppression; this became in time a policy of persecution. The accession of Francis II produced no change. When, in 1560, a Protestant conspiracy to seize the government was exposed, a new round of persecution began. The death of Francis II in 1560 brought an eleven-year-old, Charles IX, to the throne. Neither he, nor his mother, Catherine de Medici, nor her other son, Charles's successor, Henry III, seem to have had any especially intense sectarian convictions. Their chief goal was simply to maintain themselves in power between two powerful contending parties. In the event, they presided over forty years of civil war, including the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants on August 24, 1572, which is as good a date as any to mark the end of the princely state in France. The massacre was a consequence of strategems attributed to the Florentine Queen Mother whereby the leader of the Protestant party was to be killed, and the blame laid on the leader of the Catholic party. The last Valois monarch, Henry III, finally murdered the head of the Catholic League, and was himself assessinated by a Burgundian monk. After four further years of fighting, Henry of Navarre, a Calvinist Bourbon prince who was the next in the dynastic line, agreed to a nominal conversion to Catholicism—his was the famous phrase, “Paris is worth a mass”—and was crowned at Chartres in 1594. Having subdued the last remnants of civil war, Henry propounded the Edict of Nantes on April 13, 1598, granting religious toleration to all sects. His assassination in 1610 by a deranged monk cut short this experiment in multiculturalism, and made way for the full development of the kingly state in France, which depended upon a united, rather than internally tolerant but divided, populace.
The architect of the French kingly state was the remarkable minister Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. One significant contrast between the kingly and princely states can be detected in the contrasting concepts of raison d‘état and ragione di stato, principles of the kingly and princely constitutional orders, respectively. Among the Italian princely states, ragione di stato simply stood for a rational, unprincipled justification for the self-aggrandizement of the State, whereas raison d‘état achieved a parallel justification through the personification of the state, and leveraged the imperatives of this justification to impose obligations on the dynastic ruler. This enabled Richelieu to pursue a policy abroad that was in pragmatic harmony with his domestic policy, though distasteful to his ruler. Such an approach contrasted also with the constitutional imperatives of the Habsburgs: Olivares, Richelieu's Spanish counterpart, was not allowed the same latitude, dealing as he was with a dynastic ruler who was not committed to the personification of the state but rather to the reverse, one who instead saw his realm as an objectification of himself. “If constitutions do not allow this, then the devil take constitutions,” Philip IV once exclaimed in frustration. Thus Olivares's strategic designs were largely governed by Philip's personal religious convictions, a limitation that ult
imately proved fatal to the plans of both men. Richelieu, on the other hand, contended that state decisions were not to be confused with questions of personal religious preference: the State (and therefore the king who embodied the State) had special responsibilities for preserving peace and the general welfare, and the king was divinely appointed to this role. History does not record Richelieu's reply to a prominent Jansenist who asked, “Would [the king] dare to say to God: let your power and glory and the religion which teaches me to adore You be lost and destroyed, provided the state is protected and free from risks?” but we can imagine his reply: “Take this up with God—it is He who has imposed this responsibility on me.”
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 17
