8 - Pantagrue and Gargantua: The political education of the king

Summary

At the time he was writing his books, by and large the humanist political thought Rabelais would have been familiar with did not see much of an alternative to monarchy, or rule by one person. This was the case even if political thinkers insisted on limits set upon the prince's powers, even if, in addition, the city of Venice provided a living example of a republic and although, finally, the other relatively recent republics of northern-central Italy had an immense impact on French artistic and intellectual culture. The intellectual justifications for monarchy were ultimately derived from Aristotle and Plutarch, and were founded not on a secular theory of justice or rights, nor even primarily on an empirical calculus of how to maximize human happiness, but instead on monarchy's resemblance to divine creation and to various phenomena in nature. Thus, the (good) monarch has some semblance of God (imago deitatis, or dei simulachrum): just as God alone is set above creation, so the king is placed above his subjects.