Monarchomachs

The monarchomachs (“those who fight against monarchs”) were sixteenth-century French Calvinist theorists who criticized absolute monarchy and religious persecution, while defending various related doctrines of ancient constitutionalism, social contract, and resistance to unjust or tyrannical government, up to and including tyrannicide. Although French Calvinists had long offered intellectual justifications for resistance to persecution, the term monarchomachs is generally reserved for those who wrote after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, an event that made clear that henceforth persecution had royal support. The three most important figures in the movement were Francois Hotman, the author of Francogallia (1574); Theodore Béza, successor to Calvin as leader of Geneva and author of On the Right of Magistrates (1574); and the pseudonymous Stephanus Junius Brutus, the author or authors of Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579), often thought to be Philippe Mornay du Plessis. The Scottish thinker George Buchanan is also often included, as he was by the Scottish absolutist George Barclay, who coined the word monarchomach as a term of abuse. While they did not agree among themselves on all matters of method or substance, they shared a great deal and are usefully thought of as a group.

The idea that unjust laws might be disobeyed or resisted is an old idea in political theory, and so is the idea that some rulers act so lawlessly or tyrannically that their rule might be resisted in toto. The [Page 902]monarchomachs, however, contributed novel modern elements, including a pre-Lockean characterization of fundamental constitutional law as a contract between king and people. When the contract was broken by royal overreach, not only was the duty to obey lost but under at least some circumstances a right or duty to resist—to enforce the contract—came into existence.

Hotman was an important legal scholar in the humanist tradition, who taught Roman law at a number of institutions including the University of Paris. Like other legal humanists, he was skeptical that the Roman law had continuing legal meaning for European societies, and he argued for renewed attention to the (broadly Germanic) customary law of France. Roman law was often opportunistically deployed by apologists for absolutism, who noted that voluntas principis legis habet valorem (the will of the prince has the force of law). But Hotman maintained that the customary constitution of the French kingdom was broadly opposed to the royal absolutism emerging in the theory and practice of the French monarchy. Instead, it rested on popular consent made manifest in the Three Estates, which Hotman maintained had even held the authority to elect kings. With its emphasis on the Frankish and Gallic—that is, not Roman—origins of the kingdom, Hotman's book became the standard collection of legal-historical evidence drawn on by antiabsolutists in later French debates.

Béza's On the Right of Magistrates overlaps considerably with the longer Francogallia, but draws much more heavily on biblical arguments than on constitutional history. The conclusion that magistrates who rule tyrannically should be resisted by force remains the same.

Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (The Vindication [of Liberty] Against Tyrants) is a somewhat different work. First, it freely uses Roman legal arguments alongside ancient constitutionalist ones. The author explains the foundation of government in a contractarian way and draws on Roman legal reasoning about contracts; he also draws on the natural law thinking associated with parts of the Roman legal tradition. Second, it is less thickly tied to the details of French constitutional history in particular than is Francogallia and is less theologically specific than Magistrates, and so appears more like a general normative political theory to modern eyes. Third, it offers a theory of organized resistance that builds on constitutional structures. The author argues that individual persons should not take it on themselves to resist, but that subordinate magistrates within the constitutional order may organize armed resistance to protect that order against tyranny. This is an important and original contribution to the theory of resistance, one that circumvents the traditional problem that “the people” have no institutional mechanism for reaching a unified collective decision to resist. Finally, unlike Hotman, the author of the Vindiciae characterizes France's judicial parlements as constitutionally appropriate bodies that might check royal power in the absence of the Estates General.

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