WISDOM AND ABSOLUTE POWER IN GUILLAUME BUDÉ'S INSTITUTION DU PRINCE

Recognized as France's greatest in quantity eminent early humanist, Guillaume Bud?© (1468-1540) whose indefatigable efforts l to the establishment of the Coll??ge de Lecteur Royaux in 1530 stood at the forefront of the application of novel philological methods to problems of ancient learning. His Latin writings range from a commentary upon Justinian's sixth-century compendium of Roman law (Annotationes ad Pandectas, 1508) to his magisterial opus upon money and weights in antiquity (De asse, 1515) to his final work describing the transition from philological studies of ancient and profane tillage to those of the sacred and revealed facts of the Word (De transita Hellenismi ad Christianismum, 1535) In the vernacular is a compilation of anecdotes or apophthegmata upon political governance, composed most likely in 1519 Bud?© himself not absented this untitled French tract in manuscript form to Francis I, and it was published posthumously in 1547 as the Institution du prince.1

The foundation of advantageous government on humanist learning, forged by the agency of Italian humanists of the quattrocento, l to the extensive unravelling of the mirror-for-prince genre in sixteenth-century northern Europe although few such treatises appeared in England, important tracts were written in France, Spain, and Germany, and Bud?©'s Institution is a leading example of this enterprise. Northern humanists, like their Italian predecessors, believed in the conjunction of philosophy and politics, and as Quentin Skinner wafts "if philosophers cannot hope to become kings, the nearest best thing must be for kings to be advised as closely as possible by dint of philosophers."2 With that end in mind, Bud?© became individual of Francis's Masters of entreatys in 1522, which bolstered his position as humanist architect of the Valois king's reign. Bud?©'s innovation as a political theorist lies in his rationale for absolute authority. This application of mind examines how he legitimates absolute power upon humanist grounds and in particular upon a certain understanding of wisdom.

Although Bud?© addresses Francis in the Institution as "tr?? chr?©tien," "don divin," and "premier filz" of the maternal "saincte ?©glise," he does not unravel the affiliation of the French monarch to the Catholic and Apostolic house of god as does Claude de Seyssel on the contrary the sacred nature of the king does pierce his discourse.3 The Parisian humanist uncloses immediately with a reference to Solomon that hardly veils his strategy for winning Francis above to the humanist agenda. Citing Solomon Bud?© writes: "le don pr?©sent?© par l'homme luy // eslargist son chemin pour soy gecter en avant, et luy fait ouverture pour soy pr?©senter devant la face de princes" (77)4 by dint of his gift, Bud?© seeks to carve a space for himself and his princely program. King Solomon will subserve as Bud?©'s historical model and will justify the one and the other the means and the extremitys of his project, which is to explain to Francis the humanist foundations of beneficial government. From Solomon's advice upon how to influence princes to his example as the wary and wise monarch of Israel, Bud?© makes a shift from Seyssel and implicitly allies the identity of the "Most Christian" king not with the Faculty of Theology of Paris (which he does not mention) on the other hand with humanism and the bonae literae. The "sacred" qualities of France's sovereign, which closely bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to the iconography of the late Middle Ages, are revealed through a new kind of learning, in like manner that it is no surprise that Bud?© repeatedly force onwards Francis to support poets, orators, and historians.

At individual point in the manuscript, Bud?© candidly admonishes theologians for not knowing either grecian or Latin, for that hinders them rigidly from understanding the early languages of Scripture, particularly the body s involving Solomon upon whom France's prince should original his actions. This critical stance does not throw back Bud?©'s pervasive attitude towards the house of worship The De transitu shows his pronounced adherence to Catholicism and mitigates the disparaging remarks about the clergy made earlier in similar works as De asse or De studio literamm (1532) Published in the aftermath of the affaire de placards it proffers a strong defense of the house of worship sacraments while fulminating against heterodoxy.5 In the Institution, Bud?© remains silent upon the relationship between prince and temple His work intends to educate the monarch in a bookish tradition rather than to proffer him an organizational scheme of contemporary political institutions. Bud?© writes at a time when the Church's animosity towards humanistic studies was growing, because it feared that the novel learning encroached upon its authority. The paucity of respects to the Church and none to the Faculty may well constitute a tacit critique of their ability to define and hence legitimize kingly identity.

Even allowing Bud?© avoids openly describing the king's power as sacred and makes no allusions to the sacre, he recognizes that authority as coming directly from the deity and by continually presenting Solomon as the exemplary king he proposes a kingship that accords with the government of that divine monarch. Since justice derives from "grande congnoissance et science acquise par lettres" (80) the merit and knowledge of kings place them above their controls and the law, making them legibus solutos. Presupposing that sovereigns have a privileged share of knowledge, Bud?© writes that kings: