CONCLUSION

What emerges in Bodin’s thought, then, was a strictly consent-based conception of subjection and citizenship. It is subjection only - wherever one happens to live - that forms the foundation of citizenship in a respublica, not a common residential patria, nor a common ancestral gens.

The freedome of a citizen is not lost, neither the power of a prince over his subiect, for chang­ing of the place or country; no more than the vassal can exempt himself from the faith and obedience he oweth unto his lord; or the lord without iust cause refuse to protect and defend his vasall, without the consent of one to the other, the bond betwixt them being mutuall & reciprocall.^[349]

By rejecting residency and ancestry, Bodin is positioned to defend his own theory of what is required in any change in citizenship status, namely the consent standard, which naturally follows from his more basic doctrine that citizenship is a kind of contracted obligation resulting in civil subjection.

If citizenship is, as Bodin maintains, a mutual obligation or legal bond, con­tracted between the parties who take on the respective roles of sovereign and sub­ject, it follows that any amendment to the contract of citizenship requires consent of the parties tied to the contract, just as any amendment of a contractual obligation in force requires consent of all parties to the contract. It is only by consent of both the sovereign and the subject to undo the existing civil bond of subjection that it can be undone. Such leave or permission to be released from the original sovereign author­ity is necessary, just as it is necessary for a foreigner to obtain permission of the receiving sovereign authority in order to create a new civil bond of subjection and become a citizen.^[350]

What is perhaps more significant, although of less obvious importance for Bo­din, is that he does not express any difficulty in changing one’s civic status; citizen­ship is not a fixed permanent lifetime condition, as was, say, one’s origo.⁷¹ Rather, it was a matter of choice.

Bodin does not take any credit for identifying this consensual foundation to citizenship. Instead, he gives credit where he believes it is due, to the Romans:

I see that what was permitted to the Romans has likewise been permitted to all peoples, that when they have renounced their own citizenship, they may without crime take another, pro­vided they are accepted.⁷²

Again, in the De Republica, he cites Cicero to make the same point:

That the citisens of Rome might at their pleasure leave their freedome of citisens, to become citisens of another citie: nothing was unto them therein more lawfull, than that was in like case unto all other people lawfull also.⁷³

Bodin’s theory thus turns out to be, one might say, a neo-Roman theory of citizen­ship.⁷⁴

Bodin’s theory of citizenship is important for us because it highlights a key distinction between two contrasting models of citizenship, which began to emerge in the sixteenth century. One was the Roman �?imperial,’ or �?monarchical,’ model of citizenship as consensual subjection that, as we have seen, Bodin championed in his vision of the modern sovereign state. But it is equally important to observe the al­ternative model of citizenship that also began to hold sway, just as the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states reshaped the boundaries of law and politics.

that would not; neither if he would could he so be, either of the princes interposing themselves.’ Zouch points out in his report of the Cenamy Case at 70 that Longueval’s lawyer suggested cases of forfeiture - citing Cicero - where �?man could divest himself of citizenship, not only by committing a crime, but also by abandoning his own state and enrolling himself as a member of another.’ In such cases, consent of the parties is not needed. Zouch also cites Cenamy’s use of the Emperor Diocletian that no man, even of his own wish, can divest himself of his citizen­ship of origin

71 D.50.1.6.

72 Methodus (1566), 161: Quod autem Romanis, idem popoulis omnibus video licuisse; ut dimissa civitate propria, possint sine fraude usurpare, si modo recipiantur.

73 De Republica (1586), 90: Nam quod ait Cicero, civitatem retinere aut amittere Romanis, modo vellent [Bodin adds a marginal reference to D.49.15.5, 49.15.12, and 49.15.26] licuisse eis li­cuit, quod omnibus populis in eo genere non liceret.

74 In a lecture from 1992 delivered at Leuven, Quentin Skinner distinguished between two con­cepts of citizenship, �?classical’ and �?gothic,’ but it was only obliquely connected to what he would later designate the third concept of liberty as non-dependence, labeled the �?neo-Roman’ theory (Skinner 1993). My purpose is not to suggest that early modern neo-classical theories of citizenship owe their origins exclusively or even chiefly to Roman republicanism, but to the legacy of Roman imperialism.

That alternative was what we might name the �?national’ or �?republican’ model of citizenship, a notion conceptualizing citizenship not as subjection, but in terms of membership of a self-governing political community, the republican nation-state. While Bodin was busy resuscitating Roman imperial models of civil subjection, many of his contemporaries, such as Rene Choppin, Charles Loyseau, and Jean Bacquet, saw citizenship not in terms of a vertical bond of obligation between sov­ereign and subject, but in terms of a horizontal bond between co-nationals of a shared community.^[351] To become a “citizen” - whether French or otherwise - was not to become a subject, a servant or tenant owing allegiance to a ruling sovereign authority like a king. Rather, for them, citizenship involved cultivating mutual iden­tification, allegiance, and performance of civil duties owing to co-nationals of the wider community or commonwealth, of which one was a member. It was a com­munitarian ideal that would undergird the vision of republican citizenship in the thought of theorists such as Rousseau, whose understanding of citizenship was in­timately bound to patriotism and the patria, or civic nationalism and the natio J^[352]

But citizenship in such a republican or “popular’ state [status reipublicaepopu­laris] presented a unique problem since, as Bodin recognized, citizens of a �?popular state’ played an ambiguous dual role, both as ruler and as the ruled.^[353] A republican citizen was not only a subject; but “everie citizen is in a manner partaker of the majestie of the state.”^[354] For this reason, Bodin observed, there was a heightened national interest in excluding foreigners in republican nation-states, which “do not easily admit strangers into the freedome of citisens.”^[355]

The politics of exclusion that has colored much of the modern understanding of citizenship is remarkably absent in Bodin’s analysis, and this is because of the les­son that he finds in the Roman experience.^[356] If one is willing to submit, then any­body could in theory be a citizen of a state.