The Dilemma of Sixteenth Century French Constitutionalism

Liberty and authority are the two poles between which most political doctrines oscillate. It was the distinction of two sixteenth-century thinkers, François Hotman and Jean Bodin, to define these limits in a way that seems particularly meaningful to the modern state.

Hotman’s Francogallia (1573) suggests that government should proceed by consent, and that ultimately rulers are responsible to the ruled: Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) asserts that the criterion of the state is the existence of an indivisible and unchallengeable power to rule by the imposition of law, regardless of consent.

Neither thinker wished to change the hierarchical social structure of their day. Their contrasting opinions were enunciated in response to an intense political crisis in the French wars of religion, and their message was primarily political in its impact. Each represented himself as the discoverer of a basic truth that no one else had descried.