‘all inhabitants of the kingdom of whatever status’, who should be
regarded as the ultimate source of the ruler’s authority. The concept was
given new life by the sixteenth-century writers who questioned the
sovereignty of l’estat de Monarchiein the name of religious truth, and
in the process opened the way to a more modern sense of state.^54
The Huguenots who contested the state of a king they saw conniving
at the massacre of his protestant subjects helped to make the 1570s a
decade of the most intense constitutional debate since the Hundred
Years War. Francogallia, published by Francis Hotman in 1573, the
year after the the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre drove this great
Calvinist jurist from Paris to Geneva, was most original in its founding
of old theories of limited kingship on a detailed constitutional history of
France, which Hotman believed showed the people exercising the power
to make and unmake kings right back to Frankish times.^55 The power
of the people was exalted further in the anonymous Vindiciae contra
tyrannos(‘justice against tyrants’), in form a scholastic disputation but
in substance an uncompromising assertion of the people’s right to dis-
obey their king if he did violence to God’s law. Indeed, the tract made
it an obligation on all citizens to follow the nobles and magistrates in
using force against a bad king, for the Old Testament showed that king-
ship was instituted by a covenant between God and the people as a
whole. This reasoning opened the way to a purely secular theory of
government, which posited a further contract between the people and
the king obliging him to do justice in accordance with the laws and
customs they had made, and entitling them to resist if he oppressed the
commonwealth. The same line of argument was pursued by George
Buchanan, a Scottish Calvinist who was no stranger to France, in his De
jure regni apud Scotos, also published in 1579.^56
Talk of the king’s contractual responsibilities and the placing of their
enforcement in aristocratic hands hints at the influence of medieval
ideas of the relationship of the lord paramount to his feudal tenants-in-
322 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^54) Supplement to the OED, s.v. nation, 9; G. Dupont-Ferrier, ‘De quelque synonymes du
terme “province” dans le langage administratif de l’ancienne France’, Revue Historique, 161
(1929), 301–3; id., ‘Le Sens des mots “patria” et “patrie” en France au moyen âge et jusqu’au
début duxviiesiècle’, Revue Historique, 188–9 (1940); B. Guenée, States and Rulers in Later
Medieval Europe, tr. J. Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 216 ff.; Ladurie, The Royal French
State, 278 ff.; Masselin, Journal, 148, 424.
(^55) Francis Hotman, Francogallia, Latin text by Ralph E. Giesey, tr. J. H. M. Salmon
(Cambridge UP, 1972), 234–5, 286–321, 399–401, 415–51, 458–9.
(^56) Vindiciae contra tyrannos, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century,
tr. and ed. J. H. Franklin (New York, 1969); Ladurie, The French Royal State, 190–1; on
Buchanan, see J. H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early-
Modern Scotland(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. 208; for the long-term political
significance of the sectarian controversies of the sixteenth century see also the classic work of
J. N. Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 2nd edn. (Cambridge UP,
1916: repr. by the Thoemmes Press, Bristol, 1998), lectures IV and V.