In Florence, the
intellectual center of civic humanism and republican renewal, the
selection of magistrates by lot was a key institution of the republican
system. Finally, Venice - the Most Serene Republic whose stability
and longevity fascinated observers - continued to practice a form of
lot until its fall in 1797} The new representative governments might
call themselves republics (as the United States did from the beginning
of the revolution, or as France did from 1792); they were
nevertheless breaking with the republican tradition in finding no
place for lot