Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 408 - Constitutional Conventions - the Huguenots.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Constitutional Conventions, the Huguenots. Political life is full of clichés that are so familiar as to escape our notice, but would benefit from closer inspection. We already touched on the phrase, let's agree to disagree, which distills the issues we looked at over the last couple of episodes into four innocuous words. Another phrase, the body politic, is now basically a dead metaphor, but it was originally intended to convey that a political community is an organic whole, with different parts or organs playing different roles. Or take the phrase, public servant, which we routinely apply to our politicians, and which they hasten to apply to themselves. If you think about it, that phrase has deep implications. It suggests that the leader serves at the pleasure of the people, and ultimately has to do what they say, rather than vice versa. Indeed, if the people are the master and the political leader, the servant, then the people should be able to get rid of the leader if they are minded to. The 16th century may have been the first time that anyone in European intellectual history started to take this idea seriously. Certainly, the notion that the ruler should look to the good of the ruled was a very old one. In the first book of his Republic, Plato said that a ruler is like a shepherd who needs to tend to the welfare of his flock, and that analogy was repeated many times thereafter. But for the most part, this was advice given to autocratic rulers, and they might choose to take the advice or not. If you want to be a good ruler, you should be looking after our advantage and not your own. So be a good ruler. Please? There were few institutions and few political theories that would actually force or require the ruler to do so, or threaten him, it was usually a him, with dire consequences if he failed. Medieval and Renaissance political thought was dominated by that metaphor of the body politic. The ruler is the head of the body, its best part, and the one that steers the rest from above. As for why one man should occupy that privileged place, the usual explanation was one that was hard to argue with, God put him there. Of course, if this podcast series has taught us anything, it's that such sweeping historical claims are at best only partially true. So here too, one can think of exceptions like the Magna Carta in England, or Marsilius of Padua, who argued in the 14th century that rulers acquire their authority through popular consent. But Marsilius was a man ahead of his time, and that time would turn out to be the 16th century. The concept of popular sovereignty was embraced above all by Protestant thinkers, especially the Huguenots in France, though as we'll find out later on, their position was taken in a still more radical direction by Protestants in the British Isles. Of course, the Protestants were a minority in France, and their political theory was a minority opinion, but it started to gain traction and, ironically enough, would be used by Catholics once the political tide turned. Even before the Huguenots got going, there was a debate in France between more absolutist and more constitutionalist political theories. This debate especially concerned the question whether kings are subject to the law or above the law. A relatively constitutionalist position was taken in a work entitled The Monarchy of France, published in 1519 by Claude de Céselle. Céselle was a legal scholar and royal courtier who was far from interested in weakening the monarch's hold on power. To the contrary, he argued that unchallenged, single, personal rule was needed to restrain dissension amongst the people. He used a metaphor for this that we previously considered at length when talking about Machiavelli. The different factions or classes in the community are like the four humours, recognized by medical theory, and need to be held in balance if the body politic is to be healthy. So the monarch must have all power and authority to command and do what he wishes. Yet, he is bound by what Céselle calls three bridal's. The ruler must obey religion, natural justice, and most interestingly, what Céselle calls police. He doesn't mean the cops, no one is coming to arrest his supreme sovereign, but the traditional laws and customs of the nation. Still, this is all presented more as advice on how to be a good and admired king. It's a ruling suggestion, not a serving suggestion. As timid as Céselle was from the viewpoint of a genuine constitutionalist, he was far from the most absolutist of theorists. In fact, French political ideas evolved in a more autocratic direction toward the middle of the century. The organic metaphor of the single body whose parts play different roles was phased out in favor of a simpler story, the king is on top, everyone else is on the bottom. Even the requirement for the king to seek advice was de-emphasized. We can observe this tendency toward the end of the reign of Francis I and under his successor, Henry II, who reigned from 1547 to 1599. Around this time, Charles de Moulin was pushing to its limits the long-standing idea that the king is a living law. Throughout every part of this kingdom, proclaimed de Moulin, the king is the source of all justice, holding all jurisdictions and enjoying full authority. It would be downright incoherent to suppose that any lower authority can stand in judgment over the king, they are merely extensions of his power, so he would in effect be judging himself. No less absolutist was an author already known well to us, Guillaume Boudet. We met him as the jewel in the crown of French humanism, but he also argued on behalf of the real French crown. In his mirror for princes, he positively discouraged the ruler from sharing power with anyone, stating that kings are, not subject to the laws and ordinances of their kingdom as others are. Now, as you might recall, Boudet benefited from the support of King Francis. A man in that position had every reason to grant far-reaching authority to the monarch. If you like the king and what he is doing, and if you even have reason to think you might have the king's ear, absolutism looks pretty good. Conversely, if you see yourself and even your religious beliefs as being under threat by the monarch, then you might seek to put limits on his power. So, if robust constitutionalism was going to come from anywhere in 16th century France, it would more likely be from Protestants. But that didn't mean that it was especially likely. Remember the leading reformers Luther and Calvin were determined not to associate their movement with social unrest. Thus, we saw Luther condemning the Peasants' Revolt. More directly relevant was the position of Calvin, since he was originally from France and many French Protestants were his followers. For the most part, as we also saw, his recommendation was to obey even an oppressive prince. Faced with religious persecution, one could always go into exile, or of course die nobly as a martyr. Slowly but steadily though, more militant voices started to make themselves heard among the Protestants. In particular, we see the suggestion that an unjust or tyrannical ruler could be rightfully unseated by lower magistrates, that is, men holding official government posts below the rank of the king. An early example would be the Confession, written by the Lutherans of Magdeburg in Saxony, which stated that, if the high authority does not desist from eradicating true doctrine and true worship of God, then the lower magistracy is required by God's divine command to attempt to stand up to such superiors as far as possible. What arguments could be used to support this more confrontational position? Well, this was the Renaissance, so a natural strategy was to look to the past for ideas worth reviving. This was the method of a book called Franco Gallia, written by the jurist and humanist Francois Hautman, while he was enjoying the protection of the Huguenot leader Louis de Condé in the 1560s. The work was printed in 1573 and appeared in new expanded editions in 1576 and 1586. The application of history to present concerns was typical of humanism, of course. A few names that leap to mind here might be Bruni and Machiavelli in Italy, or Lipsius in the Low Countries. But what has been called Hautman's antiquarian gusto was unusual, in that his historical argument mostly concerned the medieval period, and mostly drew on medieval historical documents. He focused on the peoples who lived in the French territories in former times, namely Franks and Gauls, hence the title of his treatise, Franco Gallia. His aim was to show that, as far back as the Gauls of antiquity, these peoples abhorred kingly rule, as he puts it. They were so concerned to avoid falling under tyranny that they tightly constrained the powers of the king. Toward this end, two policies were especially key, and on Hautman's telling, both were consistently followed in Franco Gallic history. First, the throne was not simply passed on to the king's family by inheritance. Rather, kings were elected by the people, who could also depose kings who abused their power. Second, the kings were advised by a council representing the interests of the people. Actually, more than advised, the kings were actually bound to seek the approval of the council when it came to such important matters as warfare and legislation. Hautman cites Julius Caesar to show that the council already existed in his day, and stresses the longevity of the institution through the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian dynasties. Even Charlemagne, whose name literally means, Charles the Great, was not so great that he could operate independently of the council. He was, claims Hautman, unable to deprive the Franks of their pristine right and liberty, nor did he ever undertake any matter of importance without first obtaining the view of the people and the authority of the nobility. Notice here that, like Machiavelli, Hautman takes account of the complexity of the body politic, dividing it into the general population and the nobles. Actually, his usual analysis, which will remain standard right up to the time of the French Revolution, recognizes three orders or estates. The nobility are at the top, the farmers and tradesmen at the bottom, and in between there's a middle class of lawyers, merchants, and the like, though this middle group is sometimes identified with the clergy. Hautman follows ancient political theorists, including Aristotle, by arguing that the best constitution allows all three estates to have input into decision-making, in a kind of compromise between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. He paints a harmonious picture of the resulting polity. A multitude of men ought not to be governed by one of their own number, who sees less than others do when taken together, but rather by proven men of excellence, selected with the consent of all, who act by combined advice as if they possessed one mind composed from many. That pious hope that rulers should be like good shepherds, looking to benefit their subjects rather than themselves, would actually be enforced in Hautman's ideal state. He never tires of quoting the motto, salus populi suprema lex esto, meaning, let the welfare of the people be the supreme law. Hautman's approach was, as I say, that of a historian. Indeed, he remarked of his own work, it is a historical book, the history of a fact. And he was at pains to show himself to be a fair-minded and critical researcher. After presenting evidence for something that would be quite convenient for his thesis, namely that some early French kings were rather reluctant to use their power, he admits that this could be a fiction perpetrated by their successors to make the kings in question look weak. But of course, such displays of scrupulous scholarship are intended to make his argument all the more convincing. As a modern scholar has remarked, what gave the Franco-Galia its potency was its very antiquarian nature. Many were not convinced though. One of our former interview guests, Quentin Skinner, has remarked that the Franco-Galia displays more than a touch of tendentious scholarship, and critics of Hautman, like Antoine Matarel, were thus able to point to distortions and omissions in his presentation of the historical record. Still, the treatise was meant to be just that, a presentation of the historical record. Its clear message remained implicit, namely that the ills of 16th century France resulted from breaking with Franco-Gallic tradition from a culture in which the conventions had always been constitutional. Apart from the excesses of autocratic rule, Hautman is critical of allowing women to wield political power, hardly an innocent point to make during the time of Catherine de Medici. As for where such corruptions come from, the answer is, and always had been, Rome. In antiquity, the Gauls suffered tyranny under the Roman Empire. In more recent days, the plague of lawyers manipulating the crown has been imported from the papal curia in Rome. Which is not to say that law in general is unwelcome from his point of view. He could hardly say that, being a jurist himself, and having written texts fulminating against slavish devotion to ancient Roman legal custom. Rather, in place of a strong king, or still worse, a strong queen, Hautman wants a monarch who is truly fettered by the bridles that were only loosely draped around absolute rule by authors like Claude de Cézel. The grounding of this argument in French history was a strength, in that it was a tactic calculated to appeal to a wide and learned audience, but it was also a weakness. Even if you believed Hautman's rather partial and tendentious version of history, you might respond as did the aptly named absolutist Louis Lerois. Why would we need, or even want to imitate the early medieval barbarians of the Merovingian and Carolingian times? A more principled rationale was needed, and for it the Huguenots turned to a rather ironic source, the medieval theory of natural law developed by such stalwart Catholic authorities as Thomas Aquinas. This has led the aforementioned Quentin Skinner to observe that, even if most constitutionalists in this period were Calvinist, they were not using originally Calvinist arguments. Instead, they could borrow the idea that humans were born into a natural state of freedom, and enter voluntarily into an agreement to obey a ruler who will look after their common interests. If a legally appointed ruler fails to do this and becomes a tyrant instead, the people no longer have to obey him. This account of political authority became more appealing to the Huguenots in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre. Ottmann apparently wrote his Franco-Galia before that outburst of violence, though it was published afterward. This explains its rather detached, primarily historical approach. It was a contribution to a debate between constitutionalists and absolutists, not a broadside in a literally life-and-death struggle. A more urgent tone would be struck after the massacre by Theodore Beza in his On the Rights of Magistrates Over Their Subjects, published without his name in 1574. The title is ironic, he really intends to address the duties of magistrates and the rights of subjects. Those rights are also explored in the most famous Huguenot political treatise, Vindicchiae Contra Tiranus. The title is hard to translate, the second part obviously means against tyrants, but vindicatio is a legal term with a more complicated sense, along the lines of a decree concerning someone's freedom. It was written in 1579, and again published anonymously. Obviously such tracts appeared at considerable risk to their authors. In this case the author is generally agreed to be Philippe du Plessis Monet, and I will refer to him as Monet even though the attribution is not absolutely certain. Both Beza and Monet are influenced by Ottmann, and they repeat his arguments about the traditions of France. But, as I've just explained, they defend constitutionalism on more abstract grounds. There is no king without a people, but the reverse is not true. Rather, the people had to come together to appoint their ruler, and they must have had mighty good reasons for doing so, since, as Monet notes, humans are free by nature, impatient of servitude, and are born more to command than to obey. The only possible explanation is that they expected to reap significant benefits from the contract with their ruler, notably protection of their persons and property, and the maintenance of justice in general. Thus, the ruler needs explicit consent to take property away from subjects, as when imposing taxes. In fact, nothing belongs to the king except his own personal wealth. Whatever is held by the crown is only given to it for safekeeping. Now, Beza observes that if one party to a contract breaks its terms, the other party is no longer obligated to observe the agreement. Monet, in fact, says that the subjects are only conditionally bound to the ruler, whereas he is bound unconditionally to them because his office exists only for their benefit. The king is truly a public servant. To quote Skinner once more, Monet sees the status of a lawful king as more like that of a salaried official than a sovereign magistrate. And salaried officials can, of course, be removed by their superiors. In direct contravention of the absolutist tradition, Beza and Monet see the people as being, in this sense, the superiors of the king, even if they owe him their obedience so long as the contract between both sides is still in force. The representatives of the people swore an oath of allegiance to the king when installing him, and on behalf of the people, they should depose him if he fails to provide the expected benefits. Nor is this because the king was installed by oath-taking or election. In a contrast to what we saw in Hautman, it is natural law, and indeed plain common sense, that the people would never have agreed to shackle themselves to the will of a tyrant. So just by the logic of the political commonwealth and its origin, it surely cannot be required that they submit to tyranny whatever social conventions or traditions are in force, whatever oaths or promises have explicitly been made. The question now becomes, what should actually happen when the contract is broken? Here our two authors pull back from the most radical possible conclusion, which would be that any member of the population can remove a tyrannical ruler by killing them, if necessary. Actually, Beza says that an outright usurper can be rightly dispatched by anyone, since they have no real standing at all. But in the case of a legally installed king who becomes tyrannical, one should explore all other remedies before using force. And when force does become necessary, it should not be exercised by private individuals. As Calvin said, these people should just endure with patience. Monet makes the same point by adapting the age-old metaphor of the ship of state, something else that goes back to Plato's Republic. The crew of a ship should clearly not stand by if the captain gets drunk and steers them toward the rocks. But not just any deckhand is allowed to throw the captain overboard, the officers have to do it. Just so, private individuals should look to government officers, who are the representatives of the people's will. In other words, it is the role of magistrates lower than the king to remove the king, who has become a tyrant. The officials have not just the right to do this, but even the duty to do it. Now, this is not to say that the magistrates can rise up against the king as soon as he deviates from ideal justice. To the contrary, Monet says with bracing realism that, we should not wish to have only perfect princes, but rather we should consider ourselves extremely well-served, even if we shall have got mediocre ones. Revolution and tyrannicide are reserved for extreme cases. But of course, this was an extreme time, when the French throne was at least indirectly guilty of the murder of thousands of Protestants. One could hardly imagine a more flagrant failure to preserve the life and property of the subjects. So, the upshot of the arguments presented by Béza and Monet was that the noble leaders of the Huguenot cause were entirely justified in resisting oppression. A moment's reflection, though, will show that these arguments could be used just as well by Catholics, or indeed anyone who thinks that they are being subjected to tyranny. And in fact, they were used by Catholics. In 1588, King Henry III turned against those staunch supporters of Catholicism, the Guise family, and had two of them executed. French Catholics reached for the same theories of popular sovereignty to argue that Henry was a tyrant. The theologians at the Sorbonne declared him no longer a rightful monarch, and a pamphlet published in support of the Catholic cause faithfully repeated Huguenot reasoning, the people made the kings and submitted itself voluntarily to their power. When the kings abused their power, the people can pull them down as easily as they created them. Again, it seems that sympathy for absolutism lasted only as long as agreement with the policies of the supposedly absolute monarch. The ecumenical appeal of popular sovereignty might help to explain why the most radical French political treatise of the era was penned by someone who never left the church, Étienne de la Boétie. He died young in 1563 at the age of only 32. He was then memorialized in the writings of his close friend Montaigne, who emphasized that La Boétie was a good citizen and a good Catholic. Montaigne was moved to these apologetic remarks by an extraordinary work that La Boétie had written when he was barely an adult. It was called On Voluntary Servitude, and its paradoxical title already reveals quite a lot about its contents. La Boétie was deeply puzzled by the fact that people do the very thing that was emphasized by constitutionalists like Ockman, Beza, and Monet. They willingly placed themselves under the authority of another man. Why in the world would they do this and then submit to the autocratic whims of that man when they could easily kill him? Actually, they don't even need to kill him. They can just ignore him. A mere lack of consent to his rule would make him entirely impotent. Again, ideas about natural law are important to the argument. La Boétie observes that even animals seek liberty, a point also mentioned by Monet. We humans, too, yearn for freedom, yet it is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist, for surely if they really wanted it, they would receive it. La Boétie sets out to understand this perverse state of affairs. He knows that people forget their freedom once they have been subjected to servitude, they just get used to being oppressed, like someone who is gradually accustomed themselves to drink a poison without dying from it. Consider the Romans, says La Boétie, who were so bamboozled by bread and circuses that, the most intelligent and understanding among them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Moreover, rulers use a kind of pyramid scheme to dominate the whole society. Directly below the monarch are perhaps six direct advisors, powerful men who each have six hundred clients, and those clients may have yet further underlings. Thus, the lower magistrates, so far from being the check on the tyrant's rule as the Huguenot theorists imagined, are the instrument of tyranny. Unlike the works of Beza and Monet, it's not easy to say what the direct practical application of La Boétie's treatise was supposed to be. Maybe none at all. It's been suggested that the treatise is not as radical as it may seem, but in fact elitist and conservative because its author cannot imagine any real resistance to tyranny. If we did manage to kill our tyrant, another would just replace him. Perhaps, but La Boétie's lack of concrete revolutionary zeal comes along with some genuinely revolutionary political ideas. The reader of involuntary servitude comes away wondering not so much under what circumstances people may resort to the extreme step of deposing their monarch as whether monarchy could ever be more than an illegitimate trick in the first place. Behind the pomp and circumstance of the French court, there is just one single little man, as La Boétie puts it, if you submit to that man, it's your own fault. These were implications that disquieted even La Boétie's open-minded friend Montaigne, so you can only imagine how they would have been greeted by partisans of royal absolutism. And such partisans certainly existed. In this episode, I touched on a few of them like Cézel, Dumouiné, and Boudet, but the greatest theorist of strong monarchy in this time was a multifaceted author whose Six Books of the Commonwealth was only one of his many impressive contributions, though it might have been, in every sense of the word, the crowning achievement of Jean Baudin, our subject, next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.