Owning the Republic: Administration and Dominion in the French Wars of Religion

• In Event: Reimagining the Republic: Institutional Renewal & Virtue in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Second Discourse famously marks civil society’s founding as that moment when “having enclosed a plot of ground [one] thought of saying this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him.” Alongside other social contract theorists such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau can seem to give private property a highly prominent and especially negative role in tracing society’s origin. Such a polemical rendition, however, hearkens to a French tradition that examined questions of freedom and political legitimacy through the categories of right (ius) and dominium in property. In the 1560s the Gallican lawyer, Etienne Pasquier, in a dialogue critiquing the ‘naturalness’ of social laws, had a young criminal exclaim that the true thief was “the one who first placed boundaries around fields.”

Indeed, this critique of property rights found a particularly pointed expression in the late sixteenth century during the Wars of Religion, when anti-monarchical discourse turned to the question of the King’s status as a dominus, or Lord. The anonymously penned Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579) asked whether the King could truly be said to have dominion, or be a true proprietor of the Kingdom. Any answer in the affirmative readily invited accusations of tyranny and enslavement, undermining any invocation of divine sanction (associated with the status of a Dominus) as well as absolutist assumptions regarding the King’s control of temporal assets.

Anti-Monarchical writers (dubbed “monarchomachs” by William Barclay), reviving medieval, neo-Roman legal distinctions (explicated by Bartolus de Sassafarrato among others) held that the King could only be considered an “administrator” of the patria. As such, they firmly reframed the King’s role with respect to property in the same terms that had been used to neuter the power of the Church in prior centuries. The allegedly dignified role of “administrator", associated with the universitas, ascribed to Popes and Bishops had been used in medieval clashes to secure the King’s precedence in claims over taxation—now the same rhetoric was used to move towards a more republican vision of the patria.

This paper retraces various pieces of this narrative that are yet to be systematically theorized. The first section surveys extant work on the intersecting questions of slavery, natural right, property and the political implications of such (Tuck 1989; Brett 1997). It highlights important French debates between King and Church that have been overlooked in accounts of this development. The second section provides a closer examination of the various positions advanced in contesting the status of the king as “owner” of the kingdom. It examines texts by Étienne de La Boetié (Discours de la servitude volontaire, 1576), Étienne Pasquier (Pourparlers 1560s-80s), René Choppin (De Domanio Franciae, 1574) and various other late-16th century tracts that treat the matter.

The final section surveys the broader implications of this rather peculiar and idiosyncratic early modern debate. While the influence of Monarchomach writers on English parliamentarians just over half a century later has been well-documented (Skinner, 2005), the paper builds on work highlighting the distinctive contributions of French revivals of neo-Roman legal categories (Lee, 2008, 2016). Second, it investigates the extent to which the categories of this debate over the King as “administrator” versus “dominus” might have laid the crucial ground for Bodin’s innovative distinction between “government” and “sovereignty” (Tuck, 2015). Finally, it contributes to wider narratives regarding the contested place of property rights in debates over the republican framework.

Author

• Amy Chandran, Harvard University