Research

GitHub Replication Code

How did the French civil wars of the sixteenth century lead to both political breakdown and governmental centralization? The increasing professionalism of lawyers working for court bureaucracies holds the key to answering this question. My project, provisionally titled “Legislative Nationalism in Early Modern France,” explores the roots of court lawyers’ drive toward and their reluctance to accept the eventual form of centralization in a traumatic debate over the nature of governmentality. I hypothesize that French lawyers’ desire to professionalize government conflicted with a national identity that saw legislative autonomy as the foundation of the French constitution.

My primary case study will be a comparative textual analysis of the works of Michel de L’Hospital (ca. 1503-1573), the pre-eminent advocate of royal absolutiam, and Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596), an idiosyncratic apostle of legislative governmentality. While de L’Hospital’s career was devoted to establishing the authority of a truly national crown, Bodin sought to explain how both the legislative and executive branches of government were tied together in an immaterial ‘state.’

The area of non-congruence between these two thinkers represents Bodin’s and his contemporaries’s unique contribution to the doctrine of state sovereignty as understood by jurists of the following generation. Bodin explains the failure of governing authorities to maintain order and enforce policy as a failure of the professionalism that understands government to be a creature of legislation. Bodinian governmentality points the way out of war by using professional identity to legitimize a state that can rule, legislate, and create the nation without recourse either to a historical constitution or to authoritarian compulsion.