5. THE SPREAD OF HUMANISM IN EUROPE
The newly fashionable Italian humanism, marked by its philological and literary devotion to
the classical texts, its absolutist political thought and its contempt for the systematic
Catholic thinking and natural law doctrines of the scholastics spread like wildfire to
the north, to France, England, Germany and the Netherlands during the 15th century.
This conquest of northern scholarship and northern universities by the 16th century
was nearly as influential as the upsurge of the Protestant Reformation in putting an end
in two scholastic thought, and in paving the way for the dominance of the absolute state.
There was one important difference, however, in the political thought taken over by the
northern humanists. In countries such as France, Germany and England, where the king was acquiring
ever more centralized and dominant power, all discussion of the virtues of oligarchic
like republicanism seemed like bizarre and irrelevant blather.
For the northern humanists, in contrast, were solidly committed to the prince, although
of course to the virtuous pre-Machiavellian prince, and to themselves as sage counselors
to power.
The first Italian humanist to teach in France, and to cause a sensation in so doing, was
was the Neapolitan Gregorio da Tiferna circa 1415 to 1466, who arrived at the University
of Paris in 1458 to become its first professor of Greek. Other Italian humanists soon came
to storm successfully that venerable redoubt of medieval and early Renaissance scholasticism.
Filippo Barroaldo, circa 1440-1504, came in 1476 to lecture on poetry, philosophy and
humanist studies.
Particularly influential at the University of Paris was Fausto Andralini, circa 1460-1518,
who taught at the University of Paris for 30 years beginning in 1489, winning great
fame for his classical scholarship on the Latin poets and essayists.
Humanism penetrated England beginning with Pietro del Monte, died 1457, who from 1435
to 1440 was a collector of papal revenues in England and, more importantly, was a literary
The advisor to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, brother to King Henry V, who became the first
English patron of humanism.
Gloucester brought an Italian rhetorician into his household, and he collected a remarkable
library, including all the major humanist texts, many of which he later presented to
Oxford University.
Oxford and Cambridge also served as the home for Italian humanist scholars in the later
The Milanese scholar Stefano Surigoni flourished 1430-1480, taught grammar and rhetoric at
Oxford between 1454 and 1471, and Cornelio Vitelli, circa 1450-1500, became the first
professor of Greek at an English university, coming to teach at New College Oxford in the
1470s. The Italian humanist Lorenzo da Savona taught at Cambridge in the 1470s and published
a handbook on rhetoric in 1478 which went into two printings by the end of the century.
And Caio Alberino, flourished 1450-1500, became official professor of rhetoric at Cambridge
and taught Latin Literature there in the 1480s.
Humanism also came to Northern Europe because many young scholars, often inspired by Italian
professors in their country, traveled to Italy to learn the new humanism at its source.
Thus, Robert Gagin, 1435-1501, after being converted to humanism by the lectures of Gregorio
D'Artiferna, paid two extended visits to Italy in the late 1460s, and returned to become
a distinguished French humanist at the Sorbonne in 1473, where he lectured on rhetoric and
Latin literature, translated Libby, and published a treatise on Latin verse and the first history
of France to be written in full rhetorical style.
From England came William Grosson circa 1449 to 1519, a student of Vitale at Oxford who
studied Humanism and Florence in the late 1480s. Grosson returned to Oxford to become
its first professor of Greek in 1491. William Latimer circa 1460 to 1545, another young
Oxford student accompanied his friend Grosson on his trip to Italy and then went to the
University of Padua to perfect his Greek studies. Soon after Grosson's initial Oxford post,
Latimer was appointed teacher at Magdalen College, Oxford, inaugurating Magdalen as
a centre of humanist studies.
The most eminent of the Oxford travelers to Italy was John Collet, circa 1467 to 1519,
a student of Grosson at Oxford who spent the years 1493 to 1496 in Italy.
On his return from Italy, Collet, too, was appointed a professor at Oxford, and he delivered
before the entire university a famous series of lectures on the epistles of St. Paul from
1498-1499 6.
Botero and the Spread of Machiavellianism The northern humanists along with the Italians
were staunch believers in the necessity for the prince to practice the Christian virtues
of honesty and justice.
At about the same time that Machiavelli was writing his defense of the new pragmatic morality
in The Prince, the greatest humanist of the age was penning a famous advice book to princes,
sternly reiterating the Christian virtues. Desiderius Erasmus, circa 1466 to 1536, a
Dutch Augustinian canon persuaded to study theology by John Collet, dedicated his account
of the Education of a Christian Prince to the Future Emperor Charles V in 1516.
While old Nick was proclaiming that no consideration must stand in the way of maintaining the ruler
in state power, Erasmus warned the prince that he must never do anything, regardless
of his motives, which may harm the cause of justice.
Machiavelli's Prince was not printed until 1532 and after that, as we have noted, a storm
of attack on Machiavelli proceeded throughout Europe.
In England, the favorite term for Machiavelli was the politic atheist.
Thus, one James Hull wrote a book on Machiavelli in 1602 entitled The Unmasking of the Politic
Atheist.
The northern humanists generally took the same position, defending the focus of traditional
political philosophy on justice and honesty, and attacking the overriding concern of the
new theorists with what one Machiavellian aptly termed the reason of state.
Thus Cardinal Reginald Pole, 1500-1558, one of the champions of English Catholicism as
as Against the Henryshian Reformation, and A Distinguished Humanist, attacked Machiavelli's
Political Theory in 1539 in his Apology to Charles V as Destroying All the Virtues. Roger
Asham, 1515-1568, another leading humanist and a long-time tutor to Queen Elizabeth in
in Greek and Latin, commented in horror in his Report and Discourse of the Affairs and
State of Germany, that Machiavelli taught that one may think, say and do whatever may
serve best for profit and pleasure.
Machiavelli also proved to be grist for the Huguenots' mill during the French religious
war of the 1570s.
The Huguenots attributed the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 to the wicked designs
of the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, daughter of the self-same Lorenzo the Magnificent
to whom Machiavelli had dedicated the prince. The Huguenots attributed the massacre to the
philosophical outlook of Machiavelli. Thus the Awakener continually denounced the pernicious
This Heresy of Machiavelli and asserted that the king was actually persuaded by the doctrines
of Machiavelli to try to eradicate the Huguenots. Another tract, the Alarm Bell, 1577, maintained
that Catherine had deliberately trained her son in the doctrines of the atheist Machiavelli,
thereby instructing the young king in the precepts most suitable for a tyrant.
To other Huguenots, Machiavelli was a preceptor in the science of cheating, a science imported
by Italians, such as Catherine, into France.
The outstanding example of the genre of anti-Machiavellian tracts was the Anti-Machiavelle of Innocent
and Jean-Thier, circa 1535 to 1595, published in 1576. Jean-Thier was a French Huguenot
who fled to Geneva after the massacre of St Bartholomew. Machiavelli, he pointed out,
was essentially a satanic writer of handbooks on how to become a complete tyrant. But still
All the seductive nature of the new morality of the justifying of evil means by the allegedly
overriding end of maintaining and advancing state power, began to take hold among various
writers.
In Italy, a group of Machiavellians appeared during the 16th century, headed by Giovanni
by Danny Botero, 1540-1617, and his treatise of 1589, The Reason of State.
Botero was a leading humanist from Piedmont who joined the Jesuit order.
It is indicative of the decay of scholasticism in Italy in this period that this proponent
of reason of state, and hence opponent of natural law ethics in political life, should
would have been a member of the great Jesuit order.
Since Machiavelli was scarcely popular in Europe, especially in Catholic circles, Botero took
care to attack Machiavelli explicitly and pro forma, but that was merely a ritualistic
cover for Botero's adoption of the essence of Machiavellian thought.
While beginning by paying lip service to the importance of the prince's cleaving to justice,
Botero quickly goes on to justify political prudence as crucial to all government, then
defines the essence of prudence that, in the decisions made by princes, interest will always
override every other argument.
All other considerations, such as friendship, treaties or other commitments, must go by
the board.
The overall view of Botero is that a prince must be guided primarily by reason of state,
and that actions so guided cannot be considered in the light of ordinary reason.
The morality and justification for actions of the prince is diametrically opposed to
the principles that must guide the ordinary citizen.
Botero's work touched off a raft of similar works in Italy over the next 40 years, all
of which had the same title, The Reason of State.
In addition to being a leading theorist of political pragmatism and reason of state,
Giovanni Botero has the notable but dubious distinction of being the first Malthusian,
The First Bitter Complainer About the Alleged Evils of Population Growth
In his On the Cause of the Greatness of Cities, 1588, translated into English in 1606, Botero
laid out almost the entire thesis of Malthus' famous essay on population two centuries later.
The analysis was, therefore, highly mechanistic. Human population tends to increase without
limit or, rather, the only limit is the maximum possible degree of human fertility. The means
of subsistence, on the contrary, can only be increased slowly. Therefore, the growth
of population always, to use Malthus' famous words, tends to press on the means of subsistence,
with the result being ever-present poverty and starvation.
Population growth, then, can only be checked in two ways.
One is the dying of large numbers of people through starvation, plague or wars over scarce
resources, Malthus' positive check.
Second is the only element of free will or active human response permitted by Botero's
Botero's theory that starvation and poverty may induce some people to abstain from marriage
and procreation, Malthus' preventive or negative check.
In an epoch marked by rising population and rising living standards and economic growth,
Botero's gloom and doom about population growth was hardly likely to fall on friendly ears.
Indeed, as we shall see further below, those 17th and 18th century theorists who foresaw
unlimited population growth favored the idea as a spur to prosperity and economic growth.
In any case, whether one draws pessimistic, neutral or optimistic conclusions from the
thesis of unlimited population growth, its basic flaw is assuming that people will not
react if they see their living standards declining from bearing large families.
Botero and Malthus after him indeed gave the case away by even mentioning preventive checks.
For if people will lower the number of children when faced with absolute destitution, why
may they not lower it long before that?
And if so, no such mechanistic tendency can be postulated.
Historically, indeed, the facts totally contradict the gloomy Malthusian forecasts.
Population only tends to rise in response to greater economic growth and prosperity, and
the consequent rise in living standards, so that population and standards of living tend
to move together rather than in diametric opposition.
This rise in population generally comes in response to falling death rates caused by
the better nutrition, sanitation and medical care attendant on higher living standards.
The dramatic declines in death rates lead to accelerated population growth, roughly
measured by birth rate minus death rate.
After a few generations, the birth rate usually falls as people act to preserve their higher
living standards so that population growth then levels off.
The main defect of the Botero-Malthus doctrine of population is that it assumes that two
entities, population and the means of subsistence, or production or living standards, operate
under laws that are totally independent of each other. And yet, as we have seen, population
growth may be highly responsive to changes in production. Similarly, the reverse can
be true. Increases in population may well encourage the growth of investment and production
by providing a greater market for more products, as well as more labor to work on these processes.
Schumpeter puts the overall point well in his critique of Malthus.
There is, of course, no point whatever in trying to formulate independent laws for the
behavior of two interdependent quantities.
In England, a leading humanist and colleague of Cardinal Pole in defending the Catholic
Church, as against the Anglican Reform, was Stephen Gardner, circa 1483 to 1555, Bishop
of Winchester.
Gardner, in contrast to Pohl, was the first northern humanist to take a pro-Machiavellian
line.
Written appropriately enough when he was Lord Chancellor under the despotic Queen Mary
and Tutor in the early 1550s, Gardner's discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to
Britain was dedicated to King Philip II of Spain. Written as an advice book to King Philip
on the eve of his marriage to Queen Mary, the book counseled the King on how to govern
England. Gardner openly endorsed Machiavelli's view that it was far more important for a
An ardent, if implicit, disciple of Machiavellianism was the prominent late 16th century Belgian
and Classical Scholar and Humanist, Justice Lipsius, 1547-1606.
Lipsius had moved from Antwerp to Leiden in Holland to avoid the rigors of the war against Spanish rule.
In 1589, in Leiden, Lipsius published his Six Books of Politics.
The prince, wrote Lipsius, must learn how to engage in profitable deceit, and judiciously be able to intermingle that which is profitable with that which is honest. Reason of state was again triumphant.
7. Humanism and Absolutism in France
Before humanism made its mark in France, political thought was medieval rather than absolutist.
Thus, near the end of his life, the prominent royal bureaucrat, jurist and churchman, Claude de Cecil, circa 1450 to 1520,
published a treatise on monarchy summing up the post-medievalist perspective in politics.
He wrote The Monarchy of France on the death of King Louis XII in 1515 and presented it to the new king, Francis I.
The book was published four years later under the more presumptuous title The Grand Monarchy of France and was reissued often thereafter.
Dissaisel was born in Savoy, trained as a jurist, and served King Charles VIII and King Louis XII, the latter as member of the Grand Council and, on numerous occasions, as ambassador.
But despite his long service in the bureaucracy and his great admiration for Louis XII, Dissaisel was a constitutionalist rather than an absolutist.
The king, he averred, is indeed absolute within his own sphere, but that sphere is severely delimited by a network of rights held by others in accordance with customary, natural and divine law.
In contrast, the lengthy reign of Francis I, 1515-1547, saw the beginning of the triumph of absolutism in French political thought.
This new trend was launched by the leading humanist in France, Guillaume Boudet, 1467-1540.
A highly erudite classical and legal scholar, Boudet traveled in Italy in the early 1500s,
imbibed humanism there and returned to write a bitter attack on scholastic jurisprudence
in his Annotations on the Pandex in 1508.
The advent of Francis I in 1515 had characteristically contrasting effects on the veteran de Cécelles
and on the younger Boudet.
de Cécelles wrote his magnum opus to instruct the young king on the greatness of what he
believed to be the old king's constitutionalist regime.
Boudet was inspired by the advent of the new prince to write The Institution of a Prince
in 1519, celebrating the king's potentially absolute greatness and power.
In this French form of advice book to the king, Boudet developed the idea, then new
in France, of the prince as totally and absolutely sovereign, whose power and every whim must
never be limited or questioned.
The prince, in toned boudet, was a quasi-divine person, a man necessarily superior to all
others. Laws that bind the prince's subjects do not bind or apply to him, for laws apply
only to the average and the equal, not to the prince, who closely approaches the perfect
ideal of mankind.
The prince, in short, was a god among men, and a law unto himself.
The monarch, therefore, was superhuman, himself the source and the criterion of all justice.
For Boudet, the king's actions are always right, because the heart of the king moves
by instinct and by impulsion of God, who controls and attracts it according to his pleasure,
to undertake enterprises that are praiseworthy and honest and useful to his people and himself.
Ruling by divine right and inspired directly by God, the King needs only the advice of
philosophers, and it did not take much imagination to see who the great Boudet had in mind as
philosophic counselor to Francis I.
Boudet's work was carried on and developed by succeeding decades of humanists and particularly legists.
The French kings were delighted at these dominant theories of their age and proceeded happily to put them into practice.
In this they were greatly aided by the absolutist jurists being themselves top bureaucrats in the service of the king.
Two of the leading jurists wrote in the reign of Francis I, Barthélemy de Chasseneu, 1480-1541, whose Catalogue of the Glory of the World was published in 1529, and Charles de Grasselle, whose Regale of France was written in 1538.
Grasseil declared that the King of France was God in the flesh, that all his actions were inspired and brought about by God operating through the person of the King.
The King was therefore God's vicar on earth and a living law.
In a sense then, Charles de Grasseil said it all, the King is God on earth.
The 16th century French legalists also systematically tore down the legal rights of all corporations or organizations, which, in the Middle Ages, had stood between the individual and the state.
There were no longer any intermediary or feudal authorities. The king is absolute over these intermediaries, and makes or breaks them at will.
Thus, as one historian sums up Chasseneu's view,
All jurisdiction, said Chasseneu, pertains to the supreme authority of the prince.
No man may have jurisdiction except through the ruler's concession and permission.
The authority to create magistrates thus belongs to the prince alone.
All offices and dignities flow and are derived from him as from a fountain.
The most important contribution to the tearing down of the intermediary structures hampering
the monarch's absolute rule over his subjects was that of the greatest jurist of his age,
Charles Dumoulin.
We have already seen Dumoulin's, Molinaeus, critique of the prohibition of usury in his
and Treatise on Contracts and Usury, 1546. Far more important was his magnum opus, Commentaries
on the Customs of Paris, 1539, a compilation and commentary on customary law in France.
This book dealt a lethal blow to the medieval rights and privileges of intermediary orders
and placed virtually all authority into the hands of the Monarch and his State.
8.
The Skeptic as Absolutist, Michel de Montaigne
It is a favorite conceit of modern 20th century liberals that skepticism, the attitude that
nothing can really be known as the truth, is the best groundwork for individual liberty.
The fanatic, convinced of the certainty of his views, will trample on the rights of others.
The skeptic, convinced of nothing, will not.
But the truth is precisely the opposite.
The skeptic has no ground on which to stand to defend his or others' liberty against assault.
Since there will always be men willing to aggress against others for the sake of power
or PELF, the triumph of skepticism means that the victims of aggression will be rendered
defenseless against assault. Furthermore, the skeptic, being unable to find any principle
for rights or for any social organization, will probably cave in, albeit with a resigned
An excellent case in point is one of the great skeptics of the modern world, the widely read
and celebrated 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592.
Men was born to a noble family in the Périgord region of southwestern France near the city
of Bordeaux.
He became a judge in the Bordeaux Parliament in 1557 at the age of 24 as his father had
been before him.
He also joined at the Parliament an uncle, his father's brother, a first cousin of his
mother and a brother-in-law.
Staying in the parliament for thirteen years and then denied promotion to the upper chamber
of that body, Montaigne retired to his rural chateau in 1570 to write his famous essays.
There he remained, except for a four-year stint as mayor of Bordeaux in the early 1580s.
A leading humanist, Montaigne virtually created the essay form in France.
He started writing these brief essays in the early 1570s and published the first two volumes
in 1580. The third book of essays was published in 1588, and all three volumes were posthumously
published seven years later.
Though a practicing Catholic, Montaigne was a thoroughgoing skeptic. Man can know nothing,
His reason being insufficient to arrive either at a natural law ethics or a firm theology.
As Montaigne put it, reason does nothing but go astray in everything, and especially when
it meddles with divine things.
And for a while, Montaigne adopted as his official motto the query, what do I know?
If Montaigne knew nothing, he could scarcely know enough to advocate setting one's face
against the burgeoning absolutist tyranny of his day.
On the contrary, stoic resignation, a submission to the prevailing winds, became the required
way of confronting the public world.
Skinner sums up Montaigne's political counsel as holding that everyone has a duty to submit
himself to the existing order of things, never resisting the prevailing government, and,
are necessary enduring it with fortitude.
In particular, Montaigne, though skeptical about religion itself, cynically stressed
the social importance of everyone outwardly observing the same religious forms.
Above all, France must submit completely to the authority of our Catholic ecclesiastical
government.
Everyone to constituted authority was indeed the key to Montaigne's political thought.
Everyone must remain obedient to the King at all times, no matter how he discharges his
obligation to rule.
Unable to use reason as a guide, Montaigne had to fall back on the status quo, on custom
and on tradition.
He warned gravely and repeatedly that every one must wholly follow the accepted fashion
and forms, for it is the rule of rules and the universal law of laws that each man should
observe those of the place he is in.
Montaigne hailed Plato for wanting to prohibit any citizen from looking even into the reason
of the Civil Laws, for those laws must be respected as divine ordinances.
Although we may wish for different rulers, we must nevertheless obey those that are here.
The finest achievement of the Christian religion, according to Montaigne, was its insistence
on obedience to the magistrates and maintenance of the government.
Considering Montaigne's fundamental outlook, it is no wonder that he warmly embraced the
The Machiavellian concept of reason of state.
May we say that he held the reason of man to be worthless, but the reason of state to
be overriding?
Characteristically, while Montaigne writes that he personally likes to keep out of politics
and diplomacy because he prefers to avoid lying and deceit, he also asserts the necessity
of lawful vice in the operations of government.
in a ruler may be necessary, and furthermore such vices are positively needed for sowing
our society together, as are poisons for the preservation of our health.
Montaigne then goes on to integrate his defense of deceit in a prince with his seemingly paradoxical
defense of reason of state, while having no use for human reason at all.
For in following reason of state, the prince has simply abandoned his own reason for a
more universal and powerful reason, and this mystical super reason has shown him that an
ordinarily evil action needed to be done.
Michel de Montaigne made a notable and highly influential contribution to mercantilism,
the strictly economic aspect of state absolutism as well.
Although he claimed that he knew nothing, on one thing he certainly asserted truth.
His much-vaunted skepticism suddenly vanishing.
In what Ludwig von Mises was later to call the Montaigne Fallacy, he insisted, as in
the title of his famous essay number 22, that the plight of one man is the benefit of another.
Where is the essence of mercantilist theory insofar as mercantilism has a theory at all?
In contrast to the fundamental truth well known to the scholastics that both parties
benefit from an exchange, Montaigne opined that in a trade one man can only benefit at
the expense of another.
By analogy, in international trade, one nation must benefit at the expense of another.
The implication is that the market is a ravening jungle, so why should not a Frenchman urge
the French state to grab as much from others as it can?
Montaigne developed his theme in Essay 22 in a characteristically worldly, wise and
cynical manner.
He notes that an Athenian once condemned a funeral director on the charge that he demanded
Unreasonable Profit, and this profit could not accrue to him but by the death of a great
number of people.
This judgment appears to be ill-grounded inasmuch as no profit can possibly be made but at the
expense of another, and because by the same rule every kind of gain would have to be condemned.
All work is done at the expense of others, and Montaigne correctly notes that the physician
could be condemned in the same way. The same charge could be levied at the farmer or retailer
for gaining because of people's hunger, the tailor for profiting because of someone's
need for clothing, and so forth. He concluded broadly that the benefit of any one entity
is necessarily the dissolution and corruption of some other thing. Unfortunately, of course,
He could not see also that these producers did not create such needs, but instead were
fulfilling them, and thereby removing the want and pain of their customers, and adding
to their happiness and standard of living.
If he had gone that far, he would have realized the nonsense of his dog-eat-dog, or what would
9. Jean Baudin, Apex of Absolutist Thought in France
While Montaigne paved the way for the dominance of absolutist thought in France, surely the
The founder, or at least the locus classicus of 16th century French absolutism, was Jean
Baudin, 1530-1596.
Born in Angers, Baudin studied law at the University of Toulouse, where he taught for
12 years.
Baudin later went to Paris to become a jurist, and soon became one of the leading servitors
of King Henry III and one of the leaders of the statist Politik Party, which upheld the
power of the king as against the principled militants among the Huguenots on one side
and the Catholic League on the other.
Baudet's most important work was The Six Books of a Commonwealth, 1576.
Perhaps the most massive work on political philosophy ever written, The Six Books was
is certainly the most influential book on political philosophy in the 16th century.
In addition to this work, Baudin published books on money, law, the historical method,
natural science, religion and the occult.
Central to Baudin's theory of absolutism, written in the face of the challenge of Huguenot
rebellion, was the notion of sovereignty, the unchallengeable power of command in the
A Monarch Ruling Over the Rest of Society. Characteristically, Baudin defined sovereignty as the most high, absolute and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a commonwealth.
Central to sovereignty in Baudin was the sovereign's function as law-giver to society, and the essence of law-making was command, in exercise of will with binding force.
Since the sovereign is the maker or creator of the law, he must therefore be above that law, which applies only to his subjects and not to himself.
The sovereign, then, is a person whose will creates order out of formlessness and chaos.
The sovereign, furthermore, must be unitary and indivisible, the locus of command in society.
Bodin explains that we see the principal point of sovereign majesty and absolute power to
consist in giving laws to subjects in general without their consent.
The sovereign must be above the law that he creates as well as any customary law or institutions.
Bodin urged the sovereign prince to follow God's law in framing his edicts, but the important
The point was that no human action or institution could be employed to see that the prince follows the divine path, or to call him to account.
Baudin, however, called upon the prince to rely for advice or counsel on a small number of wise advisors,
Men who, allegedly lacking motives of self-interest, would be able to aid the king in legislating for the public good of the entire nation.
In short, a small elite of wise men would share in the sovereign power behind the scenes,
while publicly the sovereign would hand down decrees as if solely the product of his own will.
As Kyoan writes, in Baudin's system, the monarch's dependence on his counselors is hidden by the impressive and satisfying fiction that the law is handed down by one benevolent, absolute, superhuman will.
It is hardly far-fetched to conclude that Baudin, court politician and jurist, saw himself as one of the sages running government from behind the scenes.
Plato's ideal of combined philosopher-king had now been transformed into the more realistic,
and for Baudet, more self-serving, goal of philosopher-guiding the king.
And all this cloaked in the illusory assumption that such a court philosopher has no self-interest
in money or power in his own right.
Baudet also envisaged a broad role for various groups to participate in the government of
the Commonwealth, as well as a wide scope for bureaucrats and administrators.
The crucial point is that all be subordinated to the power of the king.
It is often true that political analysts are at their most acute in revealing the flaws
in systems with which they disagree.
Accordingly, one of Baudin's keenest insights was his examination of the popular democracies
of the past.
Baudin points out that if we rip up all the popular states that ever were and closely
examine their real condition, then we shall find that the alleged rule of the people was
always ruled by a small oligarchy.
Anticipating such perceptive late 19th century theorists of the power elite or ruling class
as Robert Michel, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, Baudin pointed out that in reality
rule is always exercised by an oligarchy for whom the people serves but for a mask.
There is a curious lacuna, however, in the agenda of absolutist power, proclaimed by
Jean Baudin.
That lacuna lies in an area always crucial to the practical exercise of state power—taxation.
We have seen that before the 14th century, French monarchs were expected to live off
and while a regular and oppressive system of taxation was in place in France by the early 16th century, even the royal and absolutist theorists hesitated to grant the monarch the unlimited right to tax.
In the late 16th century, both the Huguenots and the Catholic Leaguers bitterly condemned the arbitrary power of the king to tax as a crime against society.
As a result, Baudin and his fellow establishment politiques were reluctant to play into the hands of the king's enemies.
Like the French writers before him then, Baudin inconsistently upheld the rights of private property
as well as the invalidity of the kings taxing his subjects without their consent.
It is not in the power of any prince in the world at his pleasure to raise taxes upon the people,
no more than to take another man's goods upon him.
Baudet's notion of consent, however, was scarcely a thoroughgoing or radical one.
Instead, he was content with the existing formal agreement to taxation by the State's General.
Baudet's own actions as a deputy from the Vermondois at the State's General meeting
at Blois, 1576 and 1577, emphatically stress the limited taxes aspect of his consistent
attitude toward sovereignty.
The King had proposed to substitute a graduated income tax on all commoners with no exemptions,
what might now be called a flat tax with bumps, for the myriad of different taxes they then
were forced to pay. Curiously enough, this scheme was almost precisely the one which
Baudin himself had publicly advocated a short while before. But Baudin's opposition to
The King's proposal displayed his shrewdly realistic attitude toward government.
He noted that the King could not be trusted when he said this tax would be substituted
for the tails, aides and gabels.
Rather, it was much more likely that the King was plotting to make this an additional tax.
Baudet also engaged in a perceptive interest analysis of the reason that the Parisian deputies
had taken the lead in support of the new higher tax.
For he showed that the Parisians had not been paid any interest on their government bonds
for a long while and were hoping that the higher taxes would allow the king to resume
his payments.
Jean-Baudin, anxious to prevent the king from launching an all-out war against the Huguenots,
led the estates in blocking not only the single tax plan, but also other emergency grants to the king.
Baudet pointed out that temporary grants often became permanent.
He also warned the king and his countrymen that one cannot find more frequent upsets, seditions and ruins of commonwealths
than because of excessive tax burdens and imposts.
Among the absolutist writers following Baudin, the seventeenth century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified.
In the more narrowly economic sphere of the theory of money,
Baudin, as we have seen above, has long been credited by historians with pioneering the quantity theory of money,
more strictly, the direct influence of the supply of money on prices,
in his response to the paradoxes of Monsieur de Malastrois, 1568.
Malastroie had attributed the unusual and chronic price increases in France to debasement,
but Baudin pinpointed the cause as the increased supply of specie from the New World.
We have seen, however, that the quantity theory had been known since the time of the 14th
century scholastic Jean Bourdain and of Nicolaus Copernicus in the early 16th century.
The increased specie from the New World was spotted as the cause of price rises a dozen
years earlier than Baudin by the eminent Spanish scholastic Martin de Azpilcueta Navarres.
As a highly learned scholar, Baudin would certainly have read Navarres' treatise, especially
since Navarres had taught at the University of Toulouse a generation before Baudin came
there to study.
Baudin's claim of originality in this analysis should therefore be taken with many grains
of salt.
Jean Baudin was also one of the first theorists to point out the influence of social leaders
on demand for goods, and therefore on their price.
People, he points out, esteem and raise in price everything that the great lords like,
Although the things in themselves are not worth that valuation.
Then a snob effect takes over, after the great lords see that their subjects have an abundance
of things that they themselves like.
The lords then begin to despise these products, and their prices then fall.
Despite his numerous keen economic and political insights, however, Baudin was ultra-orthodox
in his view of usury, ignoring the work of his near-contemporary Dumoulin as well as
the Spanish scholastics.
Interest-taking was prohibited by God, according to Baudin, and that was that.
10.
After Baudin
Jean Baudin's exaltation of sovereignty struck French political thought like a thunderclap.
Here at last was a way to justify and expand the ever-increasing powers of the Crown.
In particular, the new view was adopted and subtly transformed by writers who were far
more absolutist in practice than was Baudin himself.
The one element that Baudin's veneration of sovereignty lacked was the Protestant notion
of Divine Sanction, for to Baudin, absolute sovereignty was simply a fact of nature.
Other politiques, however, soon added the missing ingredient, since they had long been
accustomed to think of rule as by divine right.
The idea of the king's rule being commanded by God was a familiar one in the 16th century.
None, however, had extended kingly rule to the notion of absolute sovereignty created
by Baudin.
The most important immediate follower of Baudin was Pierre Gregoire in his De Republica, 1578.
The king for Gregoire was God's appointed vicar in the temporal sphere, and his rule
was under the constant influence of God's will.
The king's command was therefore equivalent to God's, and was equally owed absolute obedience
by his subjects.
The prince is the image of God, in power and in authority, wrote Gregoire.
Baudin and others had still retained the idea that true justice was a concept separate and
apart from the king's edicts, so that the king's actions could well be unjust.
No one, however, was allowed to obstruct or disobey such actions.
But in the Doctrine of the Gallicized Scott, Adam Blackwood, the two concepts became almost
totally conflated.
Adversus Georgii Buchananii, 1581.
The will of the prince, for Blackwood, becomes just virtually by definition.
The King was necessarily just and virtually superhuman, a living law unto himself.
Indeed, Blackwood carried the glorification of divinely constituted monarchy to its apogee,
asserting that the very person of the King and not simply the authority of his office
was divine and that he was, in a literal sense, a god on earth.
As its title indicates, Blackwood's work was written as an attack on his fellow-galicized
Scott, the radical Calvinist, George Buchanan. Buchanan's libertarian and pro-tyrannicide
doctrine had rested, unsurprisingly, on the concept of natural law. And so Blackwood denounced
natural law as a source of anarchistic liberty, prompting in its believers an aversion to
to Law and to Political Authority.
Against natural law, Blackwood upheld the eus gentium, the positive law of nations,
as the explanation and justification of political authority.
It is not surprising that the consensual limit on taxation, still active in Baudin's thought,
should drop out immediately upon the fusion of absolute sovereignty and divine right.
The leader of that fusion, Pierre Gregoire, introduced erasing the tax limit as well.
Whereas even Baudin had conceded that natural law established a right to private property,
with Gregoire, natural law only ratifies the unchecked power of the king.
For Gregoire, the king had the unlimited prerogative to levy taxes, since the good of the state
is higher than the property rights of the individual. Indeed, the king possessed by divine grant an absolute authority over all the persons and properties of his subjects.
To avoid confusion, therefore, or any implication of consent to taxation, the States General should be abolished altogether.
It was indeed Adam Blackwood who uniquely and radically reached the clarity of consistency on the ruler's right to tax.
For if property rights are important and the king has the absolute right to tax or otherwise sees private property at will,
then this must mean that all lands were originally held by the king and were granted by him to others.
and the granting of fiefs by the king was but a partial transfer. All lands owed tribute to him and remained subject to his authority.
In short, in an odd version of the state of nature, only the king had original or continuing property rights.
Rights, all other seeming property rights are simply allowances by the king, temporary
possessions that are regulatable by the king and revocable by him at any time.
Whereas Adam Blackwood had been a lone extremist in absolutism in the early 1580s, a host of
royalist pamphleteers were soon adopting his views.
From approximately 1585 to Henry IV's conversion to Catholicism eight years later, the royal
power was beleaguered and subordinate to the strength of the militant Catholic League.
The royalist writers therefore felt obliged to push the divine sanction of the sovereign
to the maximum in order to eliminate any power of the pope in France, and to counsel absolute
Obedience to Any Legitimate Sovereign, Regardless of His Religion.
The king had absolute authority over the Catholic Church in France as well as all other institutions.
Thus, François Lejaye, On the Dignity of Kings, 1589, asserted that kings were established
for the honor and service of God, and that subjects should obey their rulers as they
Louis Servin, in his Vindicii, 1590, trumpeted of Henry IV, then still a Huguenot, that God is our king. By him he lives and flourishes, and by his spirit is he animated.
Probably the most extreme version of this doctrine was expressed in a speech of Jacques de la Guelle, Procurator General of France, asking the Parliament to condemn a priest who had upheld the supreme temporal authority of the Pope.
Sirs, the authority of the king is sacrosanct, ordained by God, the principal work of his
providence, the masterpiece of his hands, the image of his sublime majesty, and proportionate
to his immense grandeur, so as to bear comparison of the creature with the Creator.
For just as God is by nature the first king and prince, so is the king by creation and
and Imitation, God of All on Earth.
The subjects, according to these Henryshian absolutists, owed this quasi-divine figure
absolute obedience.
These writers developed the Black Woodian theme that the king's decrees were ipso facto
and necessarily just.
Jacques Hurot, in his On the Offices of State, 1588, developed this doctrine most clearly.
Hurot explained that the prince was guided by the hand of God and therefore could do
no wrong. The ruler was not simply a man, but justice itself, which he dispensed according
to the will of God. The constitution of the state was subordinated in Hurot to two simple
points, the princes necessarily just commands and the obedience of his subjects, the ruler
commands and the subjects obey, period.
Furthermore, in reaction to the leaguer emphasis on the people, the royalists counseled the
king not to allow naturally restless subjects much liberty.
Since the Politiques and Henry 4th triumphed shortly thereafter, these ultra-absolutist
views of the embattled Henryshian pamphleteers inspired and were followed fairly completely
by the dominant theoreticians of the great age of absolutism, seventeenth century France.