INTRODUCTION
Few classical states had as powerful and as mesmerizing a hold on the early modern political imagination as the Roman Empire. With the revival of classical studies in the Renaissance, scholars looked to Rome as a model to emulate, to reproduce the secret to its civic greatness.
Political theorists in particular were especially keen to uncover in the Roman experience what Machiavelli once regarded in his Discourses on Livy as the exemplar of civic virtue and republican liberty. But while many commentators on Rome have focused on different aspects of the Roman legacy, including the famed mixed constitution of the Republic described in Polybius' history, one aspect in particular caught the attention of perhaps the most important theorist of Roman citizenship in early modern Europe, the French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin (c.1530-1596).Bodin may perhaps seem to be an unconventional choice of focus for a study of Roman citizenship. Indeed, in the history of political thought, he is known not so much as a theorist of citizenship, but primarily - and, in the eyes of some commentators, exclusively - as the preeminent theorist of sovereignty, which he investigated in his two major works of political theory, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) and the Six livres de la Republique (1576, later revised and translated as the De Republica libri VI in 1586). While there certainly can be no doubt that sovereignty was one of the central concepts in Bodin's system of legal and political thought, Bodin's analysis of sovereignty was instrumental for yet a larger purpose, that of elucidating how the various elements of a state - or, as he stipulated, a respublica - were tied together as a single juridical unit. And among the elements tied in this way were the cives, all of whom, as Bodin put it, were said to be under the “maiestie of him to whome he oweth obeysance.”[288]
It was only natural that Bodin would be interested in the concept of citizenship.
As a lawyer trained in the civil law at Toulouse, he would certainly have encountered the legal treatment of citizenship in the Justinianic Corpus Iuris Civilis, such as in the rubrics De statu hominum [D.1.5], Admunicipalem et de incolis [D.50.1], De Latina libertate tollenda et per certos modos in civitatem Romanam transfusa [C.7.6], and De municipibus et originariis [C.10.39], as well as in the major commentaries on citizenship produced by medieval civilians such as Bartolus of Sas- soferrato. But citizenship also posed a practical legal problem for sovereign courts of sixteenth century Europe, such as in the Parlement of Paris, where Bodin practiced beginning in the early 1560s. Given the increasing mobility of national populations and the rise of expatriate communities in early modern Europe, especially as a result of the Reformation, jurists were forced to settle the question of who was - and who was not - a citizen.[289]Jurists were thus forced, as they so often are, to venture into the realm of political theory. As a conceptual problem in political theory, the classical authority of choice on citizenship was Aristotle, who was peerless on the analysis of citizenship in the Politics. But as we shall see below, Bodin, whose goal was to create the foundations necessary for a new civil science of the state, found the Aristotelian analysis completely unacceptable. What is most important to examine, however, is how Bodin, having departed from the Aristotelian analysis, went about to craft his own theory of citizenship.
This chapter shows that Bodin’s most important model in conceptualizing citizenship in the modern state was not Aristotle’s Athens, but the imperial ideal of universal citizenship in Caracalla’s Rome. Drawing upon this legacy of Roman citizenship epitomized by the Antonine Constitution, Bodin offered a theory that effectively universalized the Roman imperial experience as a general theory, so that citizenship in a modern state could be understood simply as a modern reincarnation of citizenship in the Roman state.
The chapter begins by situating the intellectual context within which Bodin crafted his theory of citizenship as a response to the prevailing Aristotelian analysis. Unlike Aristotle and his followers, Bodin refused to define citizenship in terms of the capacity to serve in judicial and deliberative functions or to hold public offices. Rather, Bodin offered a very different analysis of citizenship, defined strictly in terms of the subjection under a single sovereign authority uniformly shared in common by all citizens of a state. In this account, then, even disenfranchised persons lacking civil rights could still be counted as citizens of some state, so long as they were recognized to be subject to the sovereignty of that state, a claim he defended with reference to the universal grant of citizenship to all grades of free persons in the Roman Empire. But Bodin also insisted that subjection must be understood as a mutually binding obligation activated only by consent. It is, as we see in the latter part of the chapter, an analysis which Bodin adopted from one of the most important medieval commentators on Roman law, Bartolus of Sassoferrato. With this background, the chapter proceeds to examine how Bodin’s Romanist theory of citizenship might have helped in adjudicating several cases on citizenship then before the French courts. I conclude by contrasting Bodin’s theory, inspired by Rome, with emerging models of republican-national citizenship that pointed to a very different model of citizenship in a nation-state.
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