© The Author(s) 2020
O. RanumTyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance Francehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_12

12. Seyssel on Tyranny in the Monarchy of France

Orest Ranum1  
(1)
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
 
 
Orest Ranum

Abstract

Seyssel on tyranny. While French kings may have absolute power, it is in fact restrained by the powers of religion, good laws (justice), and polity, that is, Aristotle’s notion of “mixed government,” or shared powers in all three forms of government. The tyrant or “bad prince” is dull, witless, and corruptly depraved.

Keywords
Seyssel on tyrannyForms of government, mixedTraits of a tyrant

The illegitimate son of an ancient Savoyard family, Claude de Seyssel was born in about 1450. In mid-career as an administrator, ambassador, advisor to the dukes of Savoy, and to several French monarchs as well, circa 1515, he left his office in the Paris Parlement1 to assume his duties as bishop of Marseille. This career change coincided more or less with the accession to the French throne of Francis I, above all. Indeed, it was during these years that Seyssel wrote the Grand’ Monarchie de France.2 Francis was no longer a youth; he no longer needed a tutor. Thus Seyssel’s aim was to instruct the prince at a non-memorizing level. His main themes are the institutional powers of the monarchy, and the dangers of waging war and administering conquered territories. The latter subject was of great importance for Seyssel, who formerly had been the viceroy of the Milanese territories that had repeatedly been conquered, lost, and re-conquered under Charles VIII and Louis XII.

Seyssel’s religious faith and his perception of the need for reform in the church carried him more toward religious reformism, rather than toward continued political action; but he continued to translate and to comment on ancient texts, particularly religious ones. The first edition of the Grand’ Monarchie de France3 appeared in 1519, a truly ground-breaking text. Seyssel died in 1520.

How is a bad prince described? “Hébété et despravé”: those are Seyssel’s words. Hébété can be translated as “slow-witted,” “dull,” “witless.” Despravé means “corrupt, depraved, vitiated.”4

Did Seyssel add the term frein, “bit and bridle,” to the Western European political vocabulary? Freins are used to keep horses disciplined (they were not brakes), so by extension a frein both directed and regulated royal governing.

These freins are: (1) religious faith and the rules by which Christian rulers must, or ought to, live; (2) justice, royal in its source as incarnated in laws, in courts, and in the persons in royal service who carry out kingly decisions; (3) police, that is, the rules and regulations that are accepted at every level of French society, that is, the established practices that are carried out by royal officials, high and low.5

The dangers to the French Monarchy, says Seyssel, come more from the ambitious, that is, the despravé, than from rulers who are imbeciles or who are minors. He believes that French kings have la puissance absolue, “absolute power”; but it is the freins, the “bit and bridle,” that keep him from acting absolutely. As the following quotation suggests, for Seyssel a chef, a “head,” is synonymous with “monarch.” This quotation is surprisingly silent about thaumaturgy and other sacred aspects of French kingship, which in principle set the monarch apart from everyone else who wields power. Note the order in which these freins are listed; and note that one is “religion,” not the “church.” There is a sense that politics is a dynamic situation that has no end in the Aristotelian sense, other than that the well-being of the monarchy is involved:

Thus, with respect to the disorders which may result from the imperfections of monarchs,6 there are several remedies to check their absolute authority if they are unrestrained and willful, and more still to check those who have the custody of the realm if the monarch is entirely incapacitated by youth or otherwise. Yet the royal dignity and authority remains always entire, not totally absolute nor yet too much restrained, but regulated and bridled by good laws, ordonnances, and customs established in such a way that they can scarcely be broken or reduced to nothing, even though in some times and places some violence is done in them. Of these bridles by which the absolute power of the king of France is regulated I deem that there are three main ones. The first is religion, the second justice, the third the polity.7

There is an atmosphere of serenity, confidence, and openness, without fear or headiness resulting from the psychological effects of power—an anachronistic remark, yet an interesting one because it confirms the vaunted sense of stability that Machiavelli attributes to the French Monarchy.
There are no references to Syracusan tyranny, or to tyranny as a form of government. But if we think of the reader who would peruse Seyssel’s Monarchie later in the sixteenth century, his remark about kings, who will be hated if they are not religious,8 might strike readers in the reign of Henry III as prescient:

Now, if the king lives according to the law and the Christian religion, he cannot do anything tyrannical.9

The implication is that tyranny is a political state or condition that has skewed the dynamics established by the freins. Still, in general Seyssel’s project may be thought of as responding, perhaps not even consciously, to increased powers wielded by kings, and to the rising tide of absolutist theory.

For Seyssel, France was very far from having a tyrant in power; but by noting the importance of religion for her kings, he implies that he would agree with Plato, who asserted that corrupt or perverse monarchies end in tyrannies and democracies.