Political theory is an amphibious beast with one foot in the changing stream of history and another on the enduring ground of human nature and the human condition. Jean Bodin’s theory of absolute and undivided sovereignty was a product of time and place. His Six livres de la République (1576) was written four years after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which thousands of prominent Huguenots were killed by the Catholic League a few days after the marriage of Margaret of Valois to Henri of Navarre, a Protestant who later converted to Catholicism when he ascended the French throne as Henri IV in 1589. Protestant thinkers, such as François Hotman, who published Franco-Gallia in 1573, argued that French kings were initially chosen by the people and could be deposed by the people. Bodin’s doctrine of absolute sovereignty was, as Julian Franklin has argued, a product of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Huguenot Monarchomach theories, to which Bodin was opposed. Sovereign power, Bodin hoped, could police and moderate the religious conflict between the Huguenots and the Catholic League that cost so many lives in his day. Bodin was a “politique,” a partisan of neither the Huguenots nor the Catholic League, who had the reputation of caring more for civil peace than doctrinal truth. However, Bodin’s Six livres de la République was not merely a livre de circonstance but a major work of political theory concerned with enduring questions of the relations between religion and politics, of the conflict between patrician and plebeian orders, of the forms of government, and of the distinction between sovereignty and government.

I argue that Bodin, the theorist of absolute sovereignty, was not as hostile to liberal or democratic theories as is often assumed. John Locke recommended Bodin to his students at Christ Church, Oxford. Bodin, as we shall see, insisted that monarchs cannot tax their subjects without their consent, a doctrine central to Locke and later to Rousseau and to the American and French revolutionaries. Bodin’s distinction between sovereignty and government, which I shall shortly analyze, anticipated liberal doctrines of the separation of powers and the subordination of the executive to the legislative branch of government, as well as Rousseau’s doctrine of the distinction between a sovereign legislative and an aristocratic executive subordinate to the sovereign people. Further, I shall show that Bodin’s subordination of church to state served the goal of religious toleration and that the subordination of church to state was espoused by champions of religious toleration, such as Hobbes, Mandeville, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and John Stuart Mill, and thus was a genuine liberal alternative to Locke’s and Jefferson’s doctrine of the separation of church and state. I also wish to show that although Bodin was a monarchist, he wrote positively about republics and indeed could be said to have inspired some of the neo-Roman republicanism that flourished around the time of the American and French revolutions.





