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Civil magistrates; government functionaries. The word does not appear in Johnson's
1755 Dictionary, but he does include the cognate verb, to syndicate:

To judge; to pass judgment on, to censure. An unusual word.

In the Genevan political system, according to the account in the 4th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1797), there were only four syndics chosen from among the
magistrates and these held the greatest authority in the republic. Geneva's syndics
passed a sentence of exile on Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, a time we might suppose
included in Alphonse Frankenstein's "many years." Mary Shelley mentions the event
in History of a Six Weeks' Tour, Letter II.

Doubtless, this will seem only a natural human reaction, but once we have experienced
Victor's narration of the agon through which he and his Creature have suffered, such
sympathy will appear to be a rarer attribute, all the more prized for how seldom it
is actually practiced by the major characters of the novel. Walton's reaching out
in sympathy stands in marked contrast to the universal reaction elicited by the presence
of the Creature.

Clerval, who has already exhibited an instantaneous fellow-feeling for Victor where
others might be oblivious to his pain (see I:5:18), functions in the novel as a paragon
of sympathy.

This seems an innocent-sounding phrase, but if read carefully, it manifests what the
final chapter of Volume 1 will likewise suggest, that this novel resolutely refuses
to invoke a supernatural or transcendental framework for support. As human beings
can create other beings, they also mentally create a divinity to structure their universe:
the same human fallibility can attend both operations with tragic consequences.

Although it is not said explicitly, this is a poetry defined by conventional feminine
concerns. Thus, Clerval's interest in it may implicitly suggest that realms exist
that allow a man to identify himself without simultaneously excluding the feminine.
In Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Asia is an archetypal feminine figure
of emotion and intuition in contrast to Prometheus, the male avatar of the analytical
European intellect.

Even more than the previous sentence the phraseology seems deliberately erotic. Since
the issue of this labor will be a being created by a man without female participation,
the autoerotic emphasis of the diction, though perhaps surprising for the age in which
it is written, is exactly appropriate to the situation.

Victor, it must be remembered, has no proof whatsoever, only the momentary intuition
the night before that his Creature was the murderer (see I:6:22). His having overnight
extended that supposition to the point of conviction once again ironically reproduces
the mental process by which Justine's guilt has been assumed before her trial begins.

In a patrilineal society Victor would be the principal heir of his father, anticipating
his succession to the principal share of the family estate. An English readership
would be well schooled in the legal circumstances involved, and, indeed, such exigencies
are at the core of many an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novel. Victor,
however, seems to think of this inheritance not just as a financial expectation, but
as a moral and civic obligation as well. We will soon come to realize, however, how
deeply he has failed to live up to the expectations of his father and of his earlier
self in this regard.

Condemned by society and forsaken by the Church, Justine is left by herself in a condition
that is the opposite of a state of grace, caught in a lie made and reinforced by social
institutions. Not only do these institutions not practice the candor they may preach,
but they deny its possibility on an essential level.