Political ideology

The religious wars had posed a new and fundamental threat to the monarchy and therefore to the whole French state, which makes the strong position that Henry IV achieved by the time of his death that much more remarkable. Part of his success lay in the unwillingness of his great (noble) subjects to contemplate a social and political upheaval that would displace them as well as the king from their positions of power and prestige. The religious wars also engendered a luxuriant growth of political ideas that in the end provided a strong theoretical basis for the reassertion of royal authority.

A strong element in Calvin’s teaching was the importance of passive obedience to secular authority—an idea that became impossible for the Huguenots to support after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. They began instead to advocate the right to attack the king if he would not guarantee them toleration. The most important Huguenot contribution in this change was the anonymous pamphlet Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579; "A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants"), which raised fundamental questions about the prince’s power and the rights of his subjects. The pamphlet advanced the idea of a twofold contract: the first contract, between God and ruler on the one hand and the ruler and his subjects on the other, recognized the belief that the king ruled under the aegis of Divine Providence; the second contract, between the king and the people, obliged the king to govern justly and the people to obey him so long as he did so. It followed from the argument in the Vindiciae that subjects had the right to rebel if the prince disobeyed the laws of God or refused to govern his people justly. This twofold contract was not intended to be a license for private and personal rebellion but was interpreted as justifying the corporate opposition of whole towns and provinces.

A second element in the realm of political ideas, deeply opposed to the contractual theory of the Huguenots, was that of the Jesuit supporters of Ultramontanism. The Ultramontanists feared that a strong national monarchy would mean the subordination of the church to its authority and the diminution of papal authority. They feared the triumph of both Huguenotism and Gallicanism in France. Their most effective controversialist was the Italian prelate Robert Bellarmine, whose Disputationes, 3 vol. (1586–93), and De potestate summi pontificis in rebus temporalibus (1610; "Concerning the Power of the Supreme Pontiff in Temporal Matters") gave definite form to the theory of papal supremacy. By no means were all members of the league supporters of Bellarmine, though their extreme Catholicism made many of them sympathetic to his ideas. The definitive Gallican reply came in 1594 with Pierre Pithou’s Les Libertés de l’église gallicane ("Liberties of the Gallican Church"), which reiterated the basic tenets of Gallican doctrine: that the pope had no temporal authority in France and no more spiritual power than that bestowed on him by such conciliar decisions as the monarchy chose to recognize.

The growing support for Gallican opinion was a reflection of the emergence of the Politique Party after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. In the opinion of this moderate Catholic group, toleration should be granted to the Huguenots for the sake of peace and national unity. The Politiques were the spiritual heirs of the chancellor L’Hospital and represented an attitude of mind rather than an organized movement. Under the pressure of political events, this group became convinced of the need to support a strong monarchy that could resist both Ultramontane and Huguenot excesses and the divisive influence of noble factions. They therefore increasingly identified themselves with the Gallican position. The Huguenots, too, were not slow to see the advantages for themselves of this new attitude, and the ideas of the Vindiciae gave way to the theory of passive obedience. The wheel had turned full circle.

With this emphasis upon passive obedience emerged the theory of the divine right of kings. The first written statement of the theory in France is contained in the works of Pierre de Belloy, especially his De l’autorité du roi (1588; “Of the Authority of the King”). He asserted that the monarchy was created by God and that the king was responsible to God alone. Any rebellion against the ruler, therefore, was a rebellion against the Almighty. The essential premise of the divine-right idea is that the right to command obedience cannot be bestowed by man; only God can grant such authority. God therefore chooses the king, and there can be no contractual relationship between the king and his people; to rebel even against an unjust ruler is to challenge God’s choice. If the king breaks his contract with God, then he is answerable to God alone. On the wave of such ideas, Henry of Navarra became king of a united France, supported by Huguenots and moderate Politique Catholics alike. The universalist doctrine of Bellarmine gave way to the national one of Pithou as the country closed ranks against Spain, the common enemy.

One other concept emerged about this time that helped to set the seal on Henry’s authority: the idea of sovereignty, as expounded by Jean Bodin. In his Six Livres de la république (1576; The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 1606) Bodin argued that the political bond that made every man subject to one sovereign power overrode religious differences. Bodin provided the link divine right did not allow between the king and his people; divine right was concerned with the source of the ruler’s power, sovereignty with its exercise. The needs of the political situation forced Bodin to give his sovereign virtually unlimited authority, though he insisted—as was traditionally the case in France—that the ruler should respect the sanctity of the natural law, of the fundamental laws of the kingdom, of property, and of the family. In 1614, on the occasion of the last meeting of the Estates-General before the Revolution, the Third Estate sought to have it made a fundamental law of the realm that under no pretext whatever was it permissible to disobey the king. This effort gives some indication of the extent to which the ideas of divine right and sovereignty had provided a firm theoretical base for the reestablishment of monarchical power after the dangerous years of civil war.