Jean Bodin

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Jean Bodin

1530-1596

Political philosopher

Humble Beginnings. The son of a tailor, Jean Bodin was born in the French city of Angers. It is possible that he had a Jewish mother from a family that had been expelled from Spain, which would explain his knowledge of Hebrew and deep interest in Judaism. He entered a monastery as a teenager, but left after five years and studied law at the University of Toulouse. He taught law there for a time after receiving his master’s degree. In 1561 he arrived in Paris, where he served in the royal court. His knowledge of law and humanist learning caught the attention of Henri III, who appointed him the royal attorney in the city of Laon in 1576. Bodin had just arrived there when he was selected as a deputy for the Third Estate at the 1576 meeting of the Estates General, which met at Blois. There he was elected speaker for the Third Estate, which gave him a platform for appealing for religious toleration for the French Protestants. This stance marked him as a politique, one of those Frenchmen who argued that religious toleration was necessary for the good of the kingdom. He successfully opposed the efforts of the Catholic League to require the king to use force against the Protestants. He also succeeded in opposing Henri III’s request to sell off royal lands to help pay the enormous royal debt. Bodin argued that it was a fundamental law of the realm that royal lands must remain in royal hands.

Advocate of Freedom. Bodin’s advocacy of religious toleration was greatly expanded in his Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime, which he finished in 1588 but was not published until long after his death. Three of the seven speakers who participate in the dialogue on religion and morality are a Jew, a Muslim, and a follower of natural religion, who criticize both sides of the religious split in France. They suggested that religious truth might be found outside of Christianity and that there might exist a universal moral code on which all religions could agree. Bodin seemed to hint at the need to tolerate not only different Christian churches but also Judaism and Islam. Yet, Bodin joined the Catholic League about the same time as he finished the Colloquium. The League was determined to prevent the Protestant prince, Henri of Bourbon, from taking the throne after Henri III’s assassination in 1589. Bodin probably agreed with the League that French tradition required that the king be Catholic; he supported the claim to the throne of Henri of Bourbon’s uncle, a cardinal in the Catholic Church. Bodin was quick to recognize Henri as king after the monarch converted to Catholicism in 1593.

Economic and Social Philosopher. Bodin also made a mark with two other books. His Réponse aux paradoxes de M. de Malestroit (Response to the Paradox of Monsieur Malestroit, 1568) called for free trade and dealt the problem of inflation at a time when no one had any idea that there could be such a thing. Since the early sixteenth century the European economy had seen a steady increase in prices, which averaged 1 to 2 percent annually until about 1550, then increased to 2 to 3 percent. Jehan Cherruyt de Malestroit, an adviser to the king, had blamed it on the greed of merchants who were gouging their customers. Bodin found the cause to be largely the great increase in the amount of gold and silver coinage in circulation coming from the Americas through Spain. He also placed some blame on the royal practice of debasing coinage, that is, reducing the amount of precious metal in coins and replacing it with lead, making them worth less. Bodin’s book is generally regarded as the first work of economic theory. The other book was De la demonomanie des sorciers (On the Demonology of Sorcerers, 1580), which he wrote to oppose a handful of skeptics who were challenging the reality of witchcraft. In it he justified the use of judicial torture and execution for sorcery, on the grounds that it was real and evil. He had spent a great deal of time as a judge at witch trials and heard the confessions of the accused. The confessions were undoubtedly extracted by torture, but he and most contemporaries had no doubts about the value of torture to gain confessions. Anyone who had made a pact with a spirit to do evil was a traitor toward God and humanity. No toleration was to be permitted for such persons. Yet, the rationalism that shows itself in his other books comes through in this one as well, as he was eager to reform the legal procedures for witch trials, arguing that many judges were quick to convict on too little or questionable evidence.

An Ideal State. Bodin’s major work was Six livres de la Republique (The Six Books of the Republic), published in 1576. He did his own Latin translation ten years later. The purpose of the work was to answer the question of how the king should deal with the anarchy of the French religious wars, which had been dragging on since 1562. Bodin believed it necessary to find a natural basis for the source of royal authority in order to replace religion, which no longer was adequate. Religion was a cause of the civil war and therefore was creating anarchy, not preventing it. Many French political thinkers of the era were arguing for a mixed constitution in which power would be shared between the king and the Estates General. Bodin believed that such thinking was partly responsible for the anarchy. His solution was to place all political authority in the hands of the king; only a king who had absolute power could reestablish law and order. Bodin argued that the absolute king depends on no one for power, makes and enforces the law for everyone, and has the right to command his subjects and take a reasonable part of their property as taxes for the common good. Bodin’s discussion of the king as lawgiver was novel, since the medieval concept of law was that it had existed from time immemorial and the king “found it in his breast.” The king, however, was bound by natural, divine, and fundamental laws of the realm. Bodin carefully hedged the authority of the monarch, who was not to be a despot in the way that Europeans believed the Ottoman sultan was. Despite that caveat, The Republic provided theoretical underpinnings for the development of French royal absolutism in the seventeenth century.