Abstract
Among the many apparent paradoxes of Jean Bodin's personality one of the most striking was the sudden transformation of the defender of royal sovereignty and religious toleration into the apologist of the rebelling Catholic League at Laon in 1589. Throughout the middle period of the Wars of Religion (1572–84) Bodin had been attached to the parties opposing the Guise and the Catholic League; he had been active first in the royalist party of Henri III and subsequently he rose to prominence in the retinue of the king's brother, thepolitiqueduke of Alençon. After the duke's death in 1584 Bodin seems to have been attached loosely to Henri of Navarre, supporting (so it seems) his claim to the French throne and earning through his services to Navarre the promise of a reward in 1587. Yet despite this royalist andpolitiquehistory Bodin in March 1589 to all appearances threw overboard his old loyalties and went over to public support of the League. In so doing he appears at first sight to have repudiated political, religious and jurisprudential convictions of long standing. The League demanded that the king of France be Catholic whereas Bodin had never regarded a religious test as a fundamental law of the French crown; the League demanded sectarian religious war of the kind which theRépubliquehad proscribed; the League abhorred the principle of religious toleration advocated in theRépublique; the League overruled the juristic right to the throne of Henri of Navarre which Bodin had justified as late as 1586. What motives could conceivably have driven Bodin to commit this act of apostasy (if such it really be)? The answer is of the greatest significance for an understanding of Bodin's mind not only in his later years but from his youth onwards. For Bodin's change frompolitiquetoligueuris but one of the several conversions which punctuate his life and the details of this particular alteration may illuminate his personality and thought in general.
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