6. Absolutist Thought in Italy and France (continued)

0:005. THE SPREAD OF HUMANISM IN EUROPE The newly fashionable Italian humanism, marked by its philological and literary devotion to the classical texts, its absolutist political thought and its contempt for the systematic Catholic thinking and natural law doctrines of the scholastics spread like wildfire to the north, to France, England, Germany and the Netherlands during the 15th century. This conquest of northern scholarship and northern universities by the 16th century was nearly as influential as the upsurge of the Protestant Reformation in putting an end in two scholastic thought, and in paving the way for the dominance of the absolute state.

1:00There was one important difference, however, in the political thought taken over by the northern humanists. In countries such as France, Germany and England, where the king was acquiring ever more centralized and dominant power, all discussion of the virtues of oligarchic like republicanism seemed like bizarre and irrelevant blather. For the northern humanists, in contrast, were solidly committed to the prince, although of course to the virtuous pre-Machiavellian prince, and to themselves as sage counselors to power. The first Italian humanist to teach in France, and to cause a sensation in so doing, was was the Neapolitan Gregorio da Tiferna circa 1415 to 1466, who arrived at the University of Paris in 1458 to become its first professor of Greek. Other Italian humanists soon came to storm successfully that venerable redoubt of medieval and early Renaissance scholasticism.

2:11Filippo Barroaldo, circa 1440-1504, came in 1476 to lecture on poetry, philosophy and humanist studies. Particularly influential at the University of Paris was Fausto Andralini, circa 1460-1518, who taught at the University of Paris for 30 years beginning in 1489, winning great fame for his classical scholarship on the Latin poets and essayists. Humanism penetrated England beginning with Pietro del Monte, died 1457, who from 1435 to 1440 was a collector of papal revenues in England and, more importantly, was a literary The advisor to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, brother to King Henry V, who became the first English patron of humanism.

3:14Gloucester brought an Italian rhetorician into his household, and he collected a remarkable library, including all the major humanist texts, many of which he later presented to Oxford University. Oxford and Cambridge also served as the home for Italian humanist scholars in the later The Milanese scholar Stefano Surigoni flourished 1430-1480, taught grammar and rhetoric at Oxford between 1454 and 1471, and Cornelio Vitelli, circa 1450-1500, became the first professor of Greek at an English university, coming to teach at New College Oxford in the 1470s. The Italian humanist Lorenzo da Savona taught at Cambridge in the 1470s and published a handbook on rhetoric in 1478 which went into two printings by the end of the century.

4:18And Caio Alberino, flourished 1450-1500, became official professor of rhetoric at Cambridge and taught Latin Literature there in the 1480s. Humanism also came to Northern Europe because many young scholars, often inspired by Italian professors in their country, traveled to Italy to learn the new humanism at its source. Thus, Robert Gagin, 1435-1501, after being converted to humanism by the lectures of Gregorio D'Artiferna, paid two extended visits to Italy in the late 1460s, and returned to become a distinguished French humanist at the Sorbonne in 1473, where he lectured on rhetoric and Latin literature, translated Libby, and published a treatise on Latin verse and the first history of France to be written in full rhetorical style.

5:21From England came William Grosson circa 1449 to 1519, a student of Vitale at Oxford who studied Humanism and Florence in the late 1480s. Grosson returned to Oxford to become its first professor of Greek in 1491. William Latimer circa 1460 to 1545, another young Oxford student accompanied his friend Grosson on his trip to Italy and then went to the University of Padua to perfect his Greek studies. Soon after Grosson's initial Oxford post, Latimer was appointed teacher at Magdalen College, Oxford, inaugurating Magdalen as a centre of humanist studies.

6:10The most eminent of the Oxford travelers to Italy was John Collet, circa 1467 to 1519, a student of Grosson at Oxford who spent the years 1493 to 1496 in Italy. On his return from Italy, Collet, too, was appointed a professor at Oxford, and he delivered before the entire university a famous series of lectures on the epistles of St. Paul from 1498-1499 6. Botero and the Spread of Machiavellianism The northern humanists along with the Italians were staunch believers in the necessity for the prince to practice the Christian virtues of honesty and justice.

7:02At about the same time that Machiavelli was writing his defense of the new pragmatic morality in The Prince, the greatest humanist of the age was penning a famous advice book to princes, sternly reiterating the Christian virtues. Desiderius Erasmus, circa 1466 to 1536, a Dutch Augustinian canon persuaded to study theology by John Collet, dedicated his account of the Education of a Christian Prince to the Future Emperor Charles V in 1516. While old Nick was proclaiming that no consideration must stand in the way of maintaining the ruler in state power, Erasmus warned the prince that he must never do anything, regardless of his motives, which may harm the cause of justice.

8:01Machiavelli's Prince was not printed until 1532 and after that, as we have noted, a storm of attack on Machiavelli proceeded throughout Europe. In England, the favorite term for Machiavelli was the politic atheist. Thus, one James Hull wrote a book on Machiavelli in 1602 entitled The Unmasking of the Politic Atheist. The northern humanists generally took the same position, defending the focus of traditional political philosophy on justice and honesty, and attacking the overriding concern of the new theorists with what one Machiavellian aptly termed the reason of state.

8:47Thus Cardinal Reginald Pole, 1500-1558, one of the champions of English Catholicism as as Against the Henryshian Reformation, and A Distinguished Humanist, attacked Machiavelli's Political Theory in 1539 in his Apology to Charles V as Destroying All the Virtues. Roger Asham, 1515-1568, another leading humanist and a long-time tutor to Queen Elizabeth in in Greek and Latin, commented in horror in his Report and Discourse of the Affairs and State of Germany, that Machiavelli taught that one may think, say and do whatever may serve best for profit and pleasure.

9:38Machiavelli also proved to be grist for the Huguenots' mill during the French religious war of the 1570s. The Huguenots attributed the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 to the wicked designs of the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, daughter of the self-same Lorenzo the Magnificent to whom Machiavelli had dedicated the prince. The Huguenots attributed the massacre to the philosophical outlook of Machiavelli. Thus the Awakener continually denounced the pernicious This Heresy of Machiavelli and asserted that the king was actually persuaded by the doctrines of Machiavelli to try to eradicate the Huguenots. Another tract, the Alarm Bell, 1577, maintained that Catherine had deliberately trained her son in the doctrines of the atheist Machiavelli, thereby instructing the young king in the precepts most suitable for a tyrant.

10:42To other Huguenots, Machiavelli was a preceptor in the science of cheating, a science imported by Italians, such as Catherine, into France. The outstanding example of the genre of anti-Machiavellian tracts was the Anti-Machiavelle of Innocent and Jean-Thier, circa 1535 to 1595, published in 1576. Jean-Thier was a French Huguenot who fled to Geneva after the massacre of St Bartholomew. Machiavelli, he pointed out, was essentially a satanic writer of handbooks on how to become a complete tyrant. But still All the seductive nature of the new morality of the justifying of evil means by the allegedly overriding end of maintaining and advancing state power, began to take hold among various writers.

11:42In Italy, a group of Machiavellians appeared during the 16th century, headed by Giovanni by Danny Botero, 1540-1617, and his treatise of 1589, The Reason of State. Botero was a leading humanist from Piedmont who joined the Jesuit order. It is indicative of the decay of scholasticism in Italy in this period that this proponent of reason of state, and hence opponent of natural law ethics in political life, should would have been a member of the great Jesuit order. Since Machiavelli was scarcely popular in Europe, especially in Catholic circles, Botero took care to attack Machiavelli explicitly and pro forma, but that was merely a ritualistic cover for Botero's adoption of the essence of Machiavellian thought.

12:41While beginning by paying lip service to the importance of the prince's cleaving to justice, Botero quickly goes on to justify political prudence as crucial to all government, then defines the essence of prudence that, in the decisions made by princes, interest will always override every other argument. All other considerations, such as friendship, treaties or other commitments, must go by the board. The overall view of Botero is that a prince must be guided primarily by reason of state, and that actions so guided cannot be considered in the light of ordinary reason. The morality and justification for actions of the prince is diametrically opposed to the principles that must guide the ordinary citizen.

13:35Botero's work touched off a raft of similar works in Italy over the next 40 years, all of which had the same title, The Reason of State. In addition to being a leading theorist of political pragmatism and reason of state, Giovanni Botero has the notable but dubious distinction of being the first Malthusian, The First Bitter Complainer About the Alleged Evils of Population Growth In his On the Cause of the Greatness of Cities, 1588, translated into English in 1606, Botero laid out almost the entire thesis of Malthus' famous essay on population two centuries later.

14:23The analysis was, therefore, highly mechanistic. Human population tends to increase without limit or, rather, the only limit is the maximum possible degree of human fertility. The means of subsistence, on the contrary, can only be increased slowly. Therefore, the growth of population always, to use Malthus' famous words, tends to press on the means of subsistence, with the result being ever-present poverty and starvation. Population growth, then, can only be checked in two ways. One is the dying of large numbers of people through starvation, plague or wars over scarce resources, Malthus' positive check.

15:13Second is the only element of free will or active human response permitted by Botero's Botero's theory that starvation and poverty may induce some people to abstain from marriage and procreation, Malthus' preventive or negative check. In an epoch marked by rising population and rising living standards and economic growth, Botero's gloom and doom about population growth was hardly likely to fall on friendly ears. Indeed, as we shall see further below, those 17th and 18th century theorists who foresaw unlimited population growth favored the idea as a spur to prosperity and economic growth.

16:04In any case, whether one draws pessimistic, neutral or optimistic conclusions from the thesis of unlimited population growth, its basic flaw is assuming that people will not react if they see their living standards declining from bearing large families. Botero and Malthus after him indeed gave the case away by even mentioning preventive checks. For if people will lower the number of children when faced with absolute destitution, why may they not lower it long before that? And if so, no such mechanistic tendency can be postulated. Historically, indeed, the facts totally contradict the gloomy Malthusian forecasts.

16:55Population only tends to rise in response to greater economic growth and prosperity, and the consequent rise in living standards, so that population and standards of living tend to move together rather than in diametric opposition. This rise in population generally comes in response to falling death rates caused by the better nutrition, sanitation and medical care attendant on higher living standards. The dramatic declines in death rates lead to accelerated population growth, roughly measured by birth rate minus death rate. After a few generations, the birth rate usually falls as people act to preserve their higher living standards so that population growth then levels off.

17:49The main defect of the Botero-Malthus doctrine of population is that it assumes that two entities, population and the means of subsistence, or production or living standards, operate under laws that are totally independent of each other. And yet, as we have seen, population growth may be highly responsive to changes in production. Similarly, the reverse can be true. Increases in population may well encourage the growth of investment and production by providing a greater market for more products, as well as more labor to work on these processes. Schumpeter puts the overall point well in his critique of Malthus.

18:38There is, of course, no point whatever in trying to formulate independent laws for the behavior of two interdependent quantities. In England, a leading humanist and colleague of Cardinal Pole in defending the Catholic Church, as against the Anglican Reform, was Stephen Gardner, circa 1483 to 1555, Bishop of Winchester. Gardner, in contrast to Pohl, was the first northern humanist to take a pro-Machiavellian line. Written appropriately enough when he was Lord Chancellor under the despotic Queen Mary and Tutor in the early 1550s, Gardner's discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to Britain was dedicated to King Philip II of Spain. Written as an advice book to King Philip on the eve of his marriage to Queen Mary, the book counseled the King on how to govern England. Gardner openly endorsed Machiavelli's view that it was far more important for a An ardent, if implicit, disciple of Machiavellianism was the prominent late 16th century Belgian and Classical Scholar and Humanist, Justice Lipsius, 1547-1606.

20:23Lipsius had moved from Antwerp to Leiden in Holland to avoid the rigors of the war against Spanish rule. In 1589, in Leiden, Lipsius published his Six Books of Politics. The prince, wrote Lipsius, must learn how to engage in profitable deceit, and judiciously be able to intermingle that which is profitable with that which is honest. Reason of state was again triumphant. 7. Humanism and Absolutism in France Before humanism made its mark in France, political thought was medieval rather than absolutist.

21:11Thus, near the end of his life, the prominent royal bureaucrat, jurist and churchman, Claude de Cecil, circa 1450 to 1520, published a treatise on monarchy summing up the post-medievalist perspective in politics. He wrote The Monarchy of France on the death of King Louis XII in 1515 and presented it to the new king, Francis I. The book was published four years later under the more presumptuous title The Grand Monarchy of France and was reissued often thereafter. Dissaisel was born in Savoy, trained as a jurist, and served King Charles VIII and King Louis XII, the latter as member of the Grand Council and, on numerous occasions, as ambassador.

22:05But despite his long service in the bureaucracy and his great admiration for Louis XII, Dissaisel was a constitutionalist rather than an absolutist. The king, he averred, is indeed absolute within his own sphere, but that sphere is severely delimited by a network of rights held by others in accordance with customary, natural and divine law. In contrast, the lengthy reign of Francis I, 1515-1547, saw the beginning of the triumph of absolutism in French political thought. This new trend was launched by the leading humanist in France, Guillaume Boudet, 1467-1540.

22:55A highly erudite classical and legal scholar, Boudet traveled in Italy in the early 1500s, imbibed humanism there and returned to write a bitter attack on scholastic jurisprudence in his Annotations on the Pandex in 1508. The advent of Francis I in 1515 had characteristically contrasting effects on the veteran de Cécelles and on the younger Boudet. de Cécelles wrote his magnum opus to instruct the young king on the greatness of what he believed to be the old king's constitutionalist regime. Boudet was inspired by the advent of the new prince to write The Institution of a Prince in 1519, celebrating the king's potentially absolute greatness and power.

23:52In this French form of advice book to the king, Boudet developed the idea, then new in France, of the prince as totally and absolutely sovereign, whose power and every whim must never be limited or questioned. The prince, in toned boudet, was a quasi-divine person, a man necessarily superior to all others. Laws that bind the prince's subjects do not bind or apply to him, for laws apply only to the average and the equal, not to the prince, who closely approaches the perfect ideal of mankind. The prince, in short, was a god among men, and a law unto himself.

24:39The monarch, therefore, was superhuman, himself the source and the criterion of all justice. For Boudet, the king's actions are always right, because the heart of the king moves by instinct and by impulsion of God, who controls and attracts it according to his pleasure, to undertake enterprises that are praiseworthy and honest and useful to his people and himself. Ruling by divine right and inspired directly by God, the King needs only the advice of philosophers, and it did not take much imagination to see who the great Boudet had in mind as philosophic counselor to Francis I.

25:26Boudet's work was carried on and developed by succeeding decades of humanists and particularly legists. The French kings were delighted at these dominant theories of their age and proceeded happily to put them into practice. In this they were greatly aided by the absolutist jurists being themselves top bureaucrats in the service of the king. Two of the leading jurists wrote in the reign of Francis I, Barthélemy de Chasseneu, 1480-1541, whose Catalogue of the Glory of the World was published in 1529, and Charles de Grasselle, whose Regale of France was written in 1538.

26:13Grasseil declared that the King of France was God in the flesh, that all his actions were inspired and brought about by God operating through the person of the King. The King was therefore God's vicar on earth and a living law. In a sense then, Charles de Grasseil said it all, the King is God on earth. The 16th century French legalists also systematically tore down the legal rights of all corporations or organizations, which, in the Middle Ages, had stood between the individual and the state. There were no longer any intermediary or feudal authorities. The king is absolute over these intermediaries, and makes or breaks them at will.

27:05Thus, as one historian sums up Chasseneu's view, All jurisdiction, said Chasseneu, pertains to the supreme authority of the prince. No man may have jurisdiction except through the ruler's concession and permission. The authority to create magistrates thus belongs to the prince alone. All offices and dignities flow and are derived from him as from a fountain. The most important contribution to the tearing down of the intermediary structures hampering the monarch's absolute rule over his subjects was that of the greatest jurist of his age, Charles Dumoulin.

27:52We have already seen Dumoulin's, Molinaeus, critique of the prohibition of usury in his and Treatise on Contracts and Usury, 1546. Far more important was his magnum opus, Commentaries on the Customs of Paris, 1539, a compilation and commentary on customary law in France. This book dealt a lethal blow to the medieval rights and privileges of intermediary orders and placed virtually all authority into the hands of the Monarch and his State. 8. The Skeptic as Absolutist, Michel de Montaigne It is a favorite conceit of modern 20th century liberals that skepticism, the attitude that nothing can really be known as the truth, is the best groundwork for individual liberty.

28:53The fanatic, convinced of the certainty of his views, will trample on the rights of others. The skeptic, convinced of nothing, will not. But the truth is precisely the opposite. The skeptic has no ground on which to stand to defend his or others' liberty against assault. Since there will always be men willing to aggress against others for the sake of power or PELF, the triumph of skepticism means that the victims of aggression will be rendered defenseless against assault. Furthermore, the skeptic, being unable to find any principle for rights or for any social organization, will probably cave in, albeit with a resigned An excellent case in point is one of the great skeptics of the modern world, the widely read and celebrated 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592.

30:05Men was born to a noble family in the Périgord region of southwestern France near the city of Bordeaux. He became a judge in the Bordeaux Parliament in 1557 at the age of 24 as his father had been before him. He also joined at the Parliament an uncle, his father's brother, a first cousin of his mother and a brother-in-law. Staying in the parliament for thirteen years and then denied promotion to the upper chamber of that body, Montaigne retired to his rural chateau in 1570 to write his famous essays. There he remained, except for a four-year stint as mayor of Bordeaux in the early 1580s.

30:51A leading humanist, Montaigne virtually created the essay form in France. He started writing these brief essays in the early 1570s and published the first two volumes in 1580. The third book of essays was published in 1588, and all three volumes were posthumously published seven years later. Though a practicing Catholic, Montaigne was a thoroughgoing skeptic. Man can know nothing, His reason being insufficient to arrive either at a natural law ethics or a firm theology. As Montaigne put it, reason does nothing but go astray in everything, and especially when it meddles with divine things.

31:39And for a while, Montaigne adopted as his official motto the query, what do I know? If Montaigne knew nothing, he could scarcely know enough to advocate setting one's face against the burgeoning absolutist tyranny of his day. On the contrary, stoic resignation, a submission to the prevailing winds, became the required way of confronting the public world. Skinner sums up Montaigne's political counsel as holding that everyone has a duty to submit himself to the existing order of things, never resisting the prevailing government, and, are necessary enduring it with fortitude. In particular, Montaigne, though skeptical about religion itself, cynically stressed the social importance of everyone outwardly observing the same religious forms.

32:34Above all, France must submit completely to the authority of our Catholic ecclesiastical government. Everyone to constituted authority was indeed the key to Montaigne's political thought. Everyone must remain obedient to the King at all times, no matter how he discharges his obligation to rule. Unable to use reason as a guide, Montaigne had to fall back on the status quo, on custom and on tradition. He warned gravely and repeatedly that every one must wholly follow the accepted fashion and forms, for it is the rule of rules and the universal law of laws that each man should observe those of the place he is in.

33:26Montaigne hailed Plato for wanting to prohibit any citizen from looking even into the reason of the Civil Laws, for those laws must be respected as divine ordinances. Although we may wish for different rulers, we must nevertheless obey those that are here. The finest achievement of the Christian religion, according to Montaigne, was its insistence on obedience to the magistrates and maintenance of the government. Considering Montaigne's fundamental outlook, it is no wonder that he warmly embraced the The Machiavellian concept of reason of state. May we say that he held the reason of man to be worthless, but the reason of state to be overriding?

34:13Characteristically, while Montaigne writes that he personally likes to keep out of politics and diplomacy because he prefers to avoid lying and deceit, he also asserts the necessity of lawful vice in the operations of government. in a ruler may be necessary, and furthermore such vices are positively needed for sowing our society together, as are poisons for the preservation of our health. Montaigne then goes on to integrate his defense of deceit in a prince with his seemingly paradoxical defense of reason of state, while having no use for human reason at all. For in following reason of state, the prince has simply abandoned his own reason for a more universal and powerful reason, and this mystical super reason has shown him that an ordinarily evil action needed to be done.

35:14Michel de Montaigne made a notable and highly influential contribution to mercantilism, the strictly economic aspect of state absolutism as well. Although he claimed that he knew nothing, on one thing he certainly asserted truth. His much-vaunted skepticism suddenly vanishing. In what Ludwig von Mises was later to call the Montaigne Fallacy, he insisted, as in the title of his famous essay number 22, that the plight of one man is the benefit of another. Where is the essence of mercantilist theory insofar as mercantilism has a theory at all? In contrast to the fundamental truth well known to the scholastics that both parties benefit from an exchange, Montaigne opined that in a trade one man can only benefit at the expense of another.

36:12By analogy, in international trade, one nation must benefit at the expense of another. The implication is that the market is a ravening jungle, so why should not a Frenchman urge the French state to grab as much from others as it can? Montaigne developed his theme in Essay 22 in a characteristically worldly, wise and cynical manner. He notes that an Athenian once condemned a funeral director on the charge that he demanded Unreasonable Profit, and this profit could not accrue to him but by the death of a great number of people. This judgment appears to be ill-grounded inasmuch as no profit can possibly be made but at the expense of another, and because by the same rule every kind of gain would have to be condemned.

37:07All work is done at the expense of others, and Montaigne correctly notes that the physician could be condemned in the same way. The same charge could be levied at the farmer or retailer for gaining because of people's hunger, the tailor for profiting because of someone's need for clothing, and so forth. He concluded broadly that the benefit of any one entity is necessarily the dissolution and corruption of some other thing. Unfortunately, of course, He could not see also that these producers did not create such needs, but instead were fulfilling them, and thereby removing the want and pain of their customers, and adding to their happiness and standard of living.

37:56If he had gone that far, he would have realized the nonsense of his dog-eat-dog, or what would 9. Jean Baudin, Apex of Absolutist Thought in France While Montaigne paved the way for the dominance of absolutist thought in France, surely the The founder, or at least the locus classicus of 16th century French absolutism, was Jean Baudin, 1530-1596. Born in Angers, Baudin studied law at the University of Toulouse, where he taught for 12 years.

38:43Baudin later went to Paris to become a jurist, and soon became one of the leading servitors of King Henry III and one of the leaders of the statist Politik Party, which upheld the power of the king as against the principled militants among the Huguenots on one side and the Catholic League on the other. Baudet's most important work was The Six Books of a Commonwealth, 1576. Perhaps the most massive work on political philosophy ever written, The Six Books was is certainly the most influential book on political philosophy in the 16th century. In addition to this work, Baudin published books on money, law, the historical method, natural science, religion and the occult.

39:34Central to Baudin's theory of absolutism, written in the face of the challenge of Huguenot rebellion, was the notion of sovereignty, the unchallengeable power of command in the A Monarch Ruling Over the Rest of Society. Characteristically, Baudin defined sovereignty as the most high, absolute and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a commonwealth. Central to sovereignty in Baudin was the sovereign's function as law-giver to society, and the essence of law-making was command, in exercise of will with binding force. Since the sovereign is the maker or creator of the law, he must therefore be above that law, which applies only to his subjects and not to himself.

40:28The sovereign, then, is a person whose will creates order out of formlessness and chaos. The sovereign, furthermore, must be unitary and indivisible, the locus of command in society. Bodin explains that we see the principal point of sovereign majesty and absolute power to consist in giving laws to subjects in general without their consent. The sovereign must be above the law that he creates as well as any customary law or institutions. Bodin urged the sovereign prince to follow God's law in framing his edicts, but the important The point was that no human action or institution could be employed to see that the prince follows the divine path, or to call him to account.

41:24Baudin, however, called upon the prince to rely for advice or counsel on a small number of wise advisors, Men who, allegedly lacking motives of self-interest, would be able to aid the king in legislating for the public good of the entire nation. In short, a small elite of wise men would share in the sovereign power behind the scenes, while publicly the sovereign would hand down decrees as if solely the product of his own will. As Kyoan writes, in Baudin's system, the monarch's dependence on his counselors is hidden by the impressive and satisfying fiction that the law is handed down by one benevolent, absolute, superhuman will.

42:16It is hardly far-fetched to conclude that Baudin, court politician and jurist, saw himself as one of the sages running government from behind the scenes. Plato's ideal of combined philosopher-king had now been transformed into the more realistic, and for Baudet, more self-serving, goal of philosopher-guiding the king. And all this cloaked in the illusory assumption that such a court philosopher has no self-interest in money or power in his own right. Baudet also envisaged a broad role for various groups to participate in the government of the Commonwealth, as well as a wide scope for bureaucrats and administrators.

43:05The crucial point is that all be subordinated to the power of the king. It is often true that political analysts are at their most acute in revealing the flaws in systems with which they disagree. Accordingly, one of Baudin's keenest insights was his examination of the popular democracies of the past. Baudin points out that if we rip up all the popular states that ever were and closely examine their real condition, then we shall find that the alleged rule of the people was always ruled by a small oligarchy. Anticipating such perceptive late 19th century theorists of the power elite or ruling class as Robert Michel, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, Baudin pointed out that in reality rule is always exercised by an oligarchy for whom the people serves but for a mask.

44:09There is a curious lacuna, however, in the agenda of absolutist power, proclaimed by Jean Baudin. That lacuna lies in an area always crucial to the practical exercise of state power—taxation. We have seen that before the 14th century, French monarchs were expected to live off and while a regular and oppressive system of taxation was in place in France by the early 16th century, even the royal and absolutist theorists hesitated to grant the monarch the unlimited right to tax.

44:57In the late 16th century, both the Huguenots and the Catholic Leaguers bitterly condemned the arbitrary power of the king to tax as a crime against society. As a result, Baudin and his fellow establishment politiques were reluctant to play into the hands of the king's enemies. Like the French writers before him then, Baudin inconsistently upheld the rights of private property as well as the invalidity of the kings taxing his subjects without their consent. It is not in the power of any prince in the world at his pleasure to raise taxes upon the people, no more than to take another man's goods upon him.

45:44Baudet's notion of consent, however, was scarcely a thoroughgoing or radical one. Instead, he was content with the existing formal agreement to taxation by the State's General. Baudet's own actions as a deputy from the Vermondois at the State's General meeting at Blois, 1576 and 1577, emphatically stress the limited taxes aspect of his consistent attitude toward sovereignty. The King had proposed to substitute a graduated income tax on all commoners with no exemptions, what might now be called a flat tax with bumps, for the myriad of different taxes they then were forced to pay. Curiously enough, this scheme was almost precisely the one which Baudin himself had publicly advocated a short while before. But Baudin's opposition to The King's proposal displayed his shrewdly realistic attitude toward government.

46:52He noted that the King could not be trusted when he said this tax would be substituted for the tails, aides and gabels. Rather, it was much more likely that the King was plotting to make this an additional tax. Baudet also engaged in a perceptive interest analysis of the reason that the Parisian deputies had taken the lead in support of the new higher tax. For he showed that the Parisians had not been paid any interest on their government bonds for a long while and were hoping that the higher taxes would allow the king to resume his payments. Jean-Baudin, anxious to prevent the king from launching an all-out war against the Huguenots, led the estates in blocking not only the single tax plan, but also other emergency grants to the king.

47:48Baudet pointed out that temporary grants often became permanent. He also warned the king and his countrymen that one cannot find more frequent upsets, seditions and ruins of commonwealths than because of excessive tax burdens and imposts. Among the absolutist writers following Baudin, the seventeenth century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified. In the more narrowly economic sphere of the theory of money, Baudin, as we have seen above, has long been credited by historians with pioneering the quantity theory of money, more strictly, the direct influence of the supply of money on prices, in his response to the paradoxes of Monsieur de Malastrois, 1568.

48:53Malastroie had attributed the unusual and chronic price increases in France to debasement, but Baudin pinpointed the cause as the increased supply of specie from the New World. We have seen, however, that the quantity theory had been known since the time of the 14th century scholastic Jean Bourdain and of Nicolaus Copernicus in the early 16th century. The increased specie from the New World was spotted as the cause of price rises a dozen years earlier than Baudin by the eminent Spanish scholastic Martin de Azpilcueta Navarres. As a highly learned scholar, Baudin would certainly have read Navarres' treatise, especially since Navarres had taught at the University of Toulouse a generation before Baudin came there to study.

49:50Baudin's claim of originality in this analysis should therefore be taken with many grains of salt. Jean Baudin was also one of the first theorists to point out the influence of social leaders on demand for goods, and therefore on their price. People, he points out, esteem and raise in price everything that the great lords like, Although the things in themselves are not worth that valuation. Then a snob effect takes over, after the great lords see that their subjects have an abundance of things that they themselves like. The lords then begin to despise these products, and their prices then fall.

50:37Despite his numerous keen economic and political insights, however, Baudin was ultra-orthodox in his view of usury, ignoring the work of his near-contemporary Dumoulin as well as the Spanish scholastics. Interest-taking was prohibited by God, according to Baudin, and that was that. 10. After Baudin Jean Baudin's exaltation of sovereignty struck French political thought like a thunderclap. Here at last was a way to justify and expand the ever-increasing powers of the Crown. In particular, the new view was adopted and subtly transformed by writers who were far more absolutist in practice than was Baudin himself.

51:32The one element that Baudin's veneration of sovereignty lacked was the Protestant notion of Divine Sanction, for to Baudin, absolute sovereignty was simply a fact of nature. Other politiques, however, soon added the missing ingredient, since they had long been accustomed to think of rule as by divine right. The idea of the king's rule being commanded by God was a familiar one in the 16th century. None, however, had extended kingly rule to the notion of absolute sovereignty created by Baudin. The most important immediate follower of Baudin was Pierre Gregoire in his De Republica, 1578.

52:20The king for Gregoire was God's appointed vicar in the temporal sphere, and his rule was under the constant influence of God's will. The king's command was therefore equivalent to God's, and was equally owed absolute obedience by his subjects. The prince is the image of God, in power and in authority, wrote Gregoire. Baudin and others had still retained the idea that true justice was a concept separate and apart from the king's edicts, so that the king's actions could well be unjust. No one, however, was allowed to obstruct or disobey such actions.

53:06But in the Doctrine of the Gallicized Scott, Adam Blackwood, the two concepts became almost totally conflated. Adversus Georgii Buchananii, 1581. The will of the prince, for Blackwood, becomes just virtually by definition. The King was necessarily just and virtually superhuman, a living law unto himself. Indeed, Blackwood carried the glorification of divinely constituted monarchy to its apogee, asserting that the very person of the King and not simply the authority of his office was divine and that he was, in a literal sense, a god on earth.

53:53As its title indicates, Blackwood's work was written as an attack on his fellow-galicized Scott, the radical Calvinist, George Buchanan. Buchanan's libertarian and pro-tyrannicide doctrine had rested, unsurprisingly, on the concept of natural law. And so Blackwood denounced natural law as a source of anarchistic liberty, prompting in its believers an aversion to to Law and to Political Authority. Against natural law, Blackwood upheld the eus gentium, the positive law of nations, as the explanation and justification of political authority. It is not surprising that the consensual limit on taxation, still active in Baudin's thought, should drop out immediately upon the fusion of absolute sovereignty and divine right.

54:50The leader of that fusion, Pierre Gregoire, introduced erasing the tax limit as well. Whereas even Baudin had conceded that natural law established a right to private property, with Gregoire, natural law only ratifies the unchecked power of the king. For Gregoire, the king had the unlimited prerogative to levy taxes, since the good of the state is higher than the property rights of the individual. Indeed, the king possessed by divine grant an absolute authority over all the persons and properties of his subjects. To avoid confusion, therefore, or any implication of consent to taxation, the States General should be abolished altogether.

55:41It was indeed Adam Blackwood who uniquely and radically reached the clarity of consistency on the ruler's right to tax. For if property rights are important and the king has the absolute right to tax or otherwise sees private property at will, then this must mean that all lands were originally held by the king and were granted by him to others. and the granting of fiefs by the king was but a partial transfer. All lands owed tribute to him and remained subject to his authority. In short, in an odd version of the state of nature, only the king had original or continuing property rights.

56:27Rights, all other seeming property rights are simply allowances by the king, temporary possessions that are regulatable by the king and revocable by him at any time. Whereas Adam Blackwood had been a lone extremist in absolutism in the early 1580s, a host of royalist pamphleteers were soon adopting his views. From approximately 1585 to Henry IV's conversion to Catholicism eight years later, the royal power was beleaguered and subordinate to the strength of the militant Catholic League. The royalist writers therefore felt obliged to push the divine sanction of the sovereign to the maximum in order to eliminate any power of the pope in France, and to counsel absolute Obedience to Any Legitimate Sovereign, Regardless of His Religion.

57:26The king had absolute authority over the Catholic Church in France as well as all other institutions. Thus, François Lejaye, On the Dignity of Kings, 1589, asserted that kings were established for the honor and service of God, and that subjects should obey their rulers as they Louis Servin, in his Vindicii, 1590, trumpeted of Henry IV, then still a Huguenot, that God is our king. By him he lives and flourishes, and by his spirit is he animated. Probably the most extreme version of this doctrine was expressed in a speech of Jacques de la Guelle, Procurator General of France, asking the Parliament to condemn a priest who had upheld the supreme temporal authority of the Pope.

58:23Sirs, the authority of the king is sacrosanct, ordained by God, the principal work of his providence, the masterpiece of his hands, the image of his sublime majesty, and proportionate to his immense grandeur, so as to bear comparison of the creature with the Creator. For just as God is by nature the first king and prince, so is the king by creation and and Imitation, God of All on Earth. The subjects, according to these Henryshian absolutists, owed this quasi-divine figure absolute obedience. These writers developed the Black Woodian theme that the king's decrees were ipso facto and necessarily just.

59:16Jacques Hurot, in his On the Offices of State, 1588, developed this doctrine most clearly. Hurot explained that the prince was guided by the hand of God and therefore could do no wrong. The ruler was not simply a man, but justice itself, which he dispensed according to the will of God. The constitution of the state was subordinated in Hurot to two simple points, the princes necessarily just commands and the obedience of his subjects, the ruler commands and the subjects obey, period. Furthermore, in reaction to the leaguer emphasis on the people, the royalists counseled the king not to allow naturally restless subjects much liberty.

1:00:10Since the Politiques and Henry 4th triumphed shortly thereafter, these ultra-absolutist views of the embattled Henryshian pamphleteers inspired and were followed fairly completely by the dominant theoreticians of the great age of absolutism, seventeenth century France.