“Les Malcontents” and the Monarchomach Treatises: The Aristocratic Justification of Revolt and the Ideology of Popular Sovereignty in 1570s France

Abstract

Intended to destroy the aristocratic leadership of the Huguenots, the massacre of St. Bartholomew galvanized instead the opposition to a monarchy seen now not only as tyrannical, but also treacherous. The Huguenots started exploring various ways to check and even depose a hostile monarch, in the so-called monarchomach treatises. But the massacre also led to the formation of a faction of moderate Catholic aristocrats, “les malcontents”, who cooperated with the Huguenots against a monarchy that, in their opinion, had committed a major breach of trust. Both the Huguenots and the malcontents proposed their own constitutional theories, aimed at limiting the power of the monarchy: the former argued in favor of a form of popular sovereignty, which would have turned the king into something akin to a first magistrate of his kingdom, while the latter put forward ideas that preserved the king as the undisputable head of the political pyramid, but argued in favor of the right to revolt, in the name of the same king, for the sake of the “public good”. The aim of this paper is to examine both the differences and the common ground between these two political models, as they are reflected in the propaganda issued by the Huguenots and the leaders of the malcontents during the 1570s.

1. Introduction

The political thought of French society during the Wars of Religion (1562–1598) has always attracted the interest of historians of the respective period, and one of the main reasons was the proliferation, in the context of a traditional monarchical state, of theories about resistance to tyrants, together with the emergence of some of the first concepts of a popular sovereignty manifested through representative assemblies such as the Estates General. On this matter, the Huguenots have stood out the most: their resistance literature, whose authors came to be known as “monarchomachs”, after a term coined by the royalist writer William Barclay, in 1600, not only had a significant echo in its time, but retained some of that interest during the seventeenth century. Consequently, the historians of political thought who covered France in the second half of the sixteenth century also came to focus first on the Huguenot resistance theories: the most comprehensive study on this subject has been provided by Paul-Alexis Mellet, in his book Les traités monarchomaques. Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (1560–1600), published in 2007, while another book dedicated specifically to this topic was Jules Racine St.-Jacques’ L’Honneur et la foi: Le Droit de résistance chez les réformés français (1536–1581) (2012). Historians like Ralph Giesey (1970) in “The Monarchomach Triumvirs: Hotman, Beza and Mornay”, James Smither (1991) in “The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Images of Kingship in France: 1572–1574”, Hugues Daussy (2004) in “Les huguenots entre l’obéissance au roi et l’obéissance à Dieu”, Anne McLaren (2006) in “Rethinking Republicanism: ‘Vindiciae, contra tyrannos’ in Context” and Cornel Zwierlein (2005) in “L’importance de la Confessio de Magdebourg pour le Calvinisme: un mythe historiographique?” have also brought significant contributions to the historiography on the subject, while the theories of the Huguenots have always received ample space in most works covering the sixteenth-century political thought.

However, the resistance theories were not a monopoly of the Huguenots. The Catholics developed their own ideas on this matter, especially during the rebellion of the Catholic League (1588–1596), although their major works, Jean Boucher’s De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) and De justa reipublicae christianae (1590), the latter written by an unknown author, were tarnished by the ignominous defeat of the party they supported and by the Catholic-inspired regicides. However, besides these two clearly antagonistic groups, resistance theories were also embraced, for a short period during the mid-1570s, by a Catholic group actually allied with the Huguenots, called “les malcontents”. They too attracted the attention of historians, like Arlette Jouanna, who, in her book Le dévoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne (1559–1661), draws a brief sketch of their major political ideas. Despite this, a specific study aiming to draw a parallel between the ideas of the Huguenot monarchomachs and those of the malcontents has not been attempted yet. The malcontents and the Huguenots fought together against the French king in 1574–1576 and, together, they imposed upon Henry III the peace of Beaulieu, the most favorable treaty for the Protestant cause during the entire Wars of Religion. In this context, it is important to examine their ideologies as well: this is what this study intends to do, by comparing and contrasting their major principles, in order to identify their points of convergence, but also how they diverged. For this purpose, this article will make use of the three main Huguenot works, François Hotman’s Francogallia, Theodore Beza’s Du droit des magistrats and the anonymously published Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, and, for the malcontents, of the official proclamations and manifestos of their main leaders, Henry de Montmorency-Damville and François d’Alençon. While other texts associated with the malcontents exist, this article made a deliberate choice to focus only on those official proclamations, because they represent as much of an “authorized” ideology as one could ever hope to have. In other words, this choice of texts allows for a direct and unfiltered comparison between what heights Huguenot resistance could reach as a theoretical construct only and what it actually meant to attempt to implement such ideas in practice, in the political environment of 1570s France. Additionally, the proclamations of Damville and Alençon are insufficiently studied in the historiography of the French Wars of Religion: while mentioned often in the works on this topic, only some brief summaries are provided, without being provided with a specific analysis of the political ideas they contain.

2. Discussion

2.1. Historical Context

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the French monarchy appeared to be the most solid political regime in all of Western Europe: its major rivals, Spain and England, had recently gone through changes of dynasties, the Tudors taking the throne in 1485 and the Habsburgs assuming the definitive rule of Spain in 1516, with all the turmoil that such shifts in power entailed. The ascension of the Tudors and the Spanish Habsburgs had not been smooth: the former occurred at the end of thirty years of civil war and political unrest and, even then, the new king Henry VII still had to fend off significant challenges to his rule in the guise of new pretenders; the latter had to deal with the revolt of the Comuneros in 1520, which might have ended Habsburg rule in Castile. France, on the other hand, had survived the mighty trial of the Hundred Years War intact and, when the direct Valois line ended in 1498, the throne passed without any troubles to a collateral Valois branch, descending from Louis of Orléans (1372–1407), in the person of Louis XII, who reigned between 1498 and 1515, and then, when he, too, died without a son, to Francis I. Such a smooth transition of power, when the successor was only a distant relative of the reigning king, was something to be amazed of for its contemporaries: for them, it testified to the enormous prestige of the French monarchy, which had managed to easily solve dynastic problems that, in other places, could have easily led to civil wars.

The strength of the French monarchy explains its extraordinary resilience during the terrible trial represented by the French Wars of Religion: all factions, regardless of their interests and goals, appealed to the monarchy for support and denied any seditious intent while launching this accusation at their opponents. Even those who were, in fact, rebelling against the king, like the Huguenots during the first decade of the Wars of Religion, tried at all costs to maintain the facade of loyalty towards the Crown. This attitude was prevalent especially in the texts issued by the Huguenot nobility, because, for them, loyalty towards the king was their entire raison d’être: the entire tradition of noble revolt in France was focused on the idea that such an action aimed at the restoration of the relationship between the king and his nobles, a relationship which was imagined as broken by the intervention of a third, ill-intentioned, party, referred to as the “evil advisors”, who blocked the normal channels of communication between king and subjects. As such, the Huguenots identified other targets for their propaganda during the first three Wars of Religion (1562–1570), first and foremost the Guise family, through its most prominent members, François de Guise (until his death in 1563) and his brother, the cardinal Charles de Lorraine. A rebellion directed against the king himself was almost inconceivable for the French aristocratic ethos during the sixteenth century, but one aimed at removing the Guises from power was totally acceptable from this point of view: assigning the blame to the Guises, who were accused of having usurped the royal authority by either keeping the king captive (during 1562–1563) or by deceiving him (during 1567–1570), meant absolving the king of any role in the outbreak of hostilities. True, there were voices that took a more confrontational tone towards the Valois monarchy during this period, but they were marginal.

This attitude towards the Valois monarchy changed significantly in the wake of the massacre of Saint-Bartholomew: regardless of the attempts at justification made by the Crown, this event seemed a fundamental breach of the monarchical ethos that a just king was expected to observe. In the words of Alain Desrayaud, Saint-Bartholomew “had tarnished the image of the king”, because “the most Christian king became a dissimulator (because of the ambush of 24 August), a perjurer (because he had violated the treaty of Saint-Germain), a felon (because of the breaking of the contract uniting the king with his nobles), a man-eater (because of his failure to protect his subjects) and a tyrant (because of his violation of Christian moral rules)” (Desrayaud 1996, p. 100). The Huguenots made great efforts to push forward the idea that the massacre had been a premeditated event (Crouzet 1994, chap. IX), which had been plotted by the Valois monarchy as early as 1565, starting from the meeting between Catherine de Medici and the envoy of Philip II, the Duke of Alba, at Bayonne. This negative attitude was not limited only to the Protestant circles, but spread even amongst the more moderate Catholics, who were starting to consider that a religious compromise based on a grudging acceptance of the existence of a Protestant community in France was preferable to incessant warfare. According to Denis Crouzet, this imaginary of a massacre premeditated much in advance contributed to the alliance between the Huguenots and the moderate Catholics, “Saint Bartholomew and its past becoming thus a tool in the fight between the factions” (Crouzet 1994, chap. IX).

For the Huguenots, the idea that a legitimate king could be actively resisted and even deposed in case of tyranny was pushed in the mainstream through the so-called monarchomach literature1. Simultaneously, many Catholics, who coalesced in the aristocratic faction known as “les malcontents”, rose up in rebellion in 1574 and 1575 against what they saw as the abuses of the Crown. The catalyst was, for them, a failed plot during the last months of the reign of Charles IX, which led to the execution of several minor nobles and the imprisonment of others: by far, the most important among them was François de Montmorency, marshal of France, and the consequence was that his brother, Henry de Montmorency-Damville, also a marshal of France and governor of Languedoc, joined the already-ongoing Huguenot revolt, which had started in the aftermath of Saint-Bartholomew. The success of the revolt was also helped by the favorable political circumstances: the death of Charles IX had left France without a (present) king for a period, because his heir, Henry III, was in Poland at that time, having been elected to the throne of that country one year before. According to Gianmarco Braghi, this situation “put seriously at risk the feeble political balance at court”, with the likes of “Alençon and Navarre having already demonstrated their unwillingness to accept the authority of either Charles or Catherine”: this caused the royal government to attempt to shore up the authority of Henry III by putting forward “a ‘hyper-sacred’ and hagiographic image of Charles IX in their sermons and publications”, with the purpose of excluding the malcontents backed by Alençon and Navarre from power (Braghi 2014, p. 312)2. Despite these efforts, the cause of the malcontents gained ground and, in January 1575, a pact of union, described by Jean-Pierre Babelon as “of quasi-republican inspiration”, was sworn at Nîmes between Catholics and Protestants for a common defense (Babelon 2009, pp. 209–10). But the most important adherent to the Huguenot cause was the king’s own brother, François, Duke of Alençon and heir to the throne, who ran away from the royal court in 1575, where he was kept as a quasi-prisoner, and joined the rebellion in his turn.

Both the monarchomachs and “les malcontents” were fully aware of the importance of public opinion: it played a role in French politics during the previous centuries as well, as testified by similar propagandistic efforts, and it took even greater proportions in the sixteenth century, due to the advent of print, which allowed the diffusion of ideas with a speed and on a scale totally unseen before. As such, the monarchomachs and “les malcontents” made efforts to publicize their political theories and justify both their actions and their goals. For the monarchomachs, their propaganda campaign took an overwhelmingly intellectual form, with several political treatises being published between 1573 and 1579: these treatises proposed what can be considered some proto-constitutional schemes of limiting the royal power and replacing the ultimate sovereignty vested in the king with one located this time in the people, who acted through representative institutions such as the Estates General. These treatises are well known in the historiography of political thought, the most important of them being authored by three Huguenot intellectuals whom Ralph Giesey named “the monarchomach triumvirs”: François Hotman’s Francogallia, Theodore Beza’s Du Droit des magistrats and the anonymous Vindiciae, contra tyrannos, usually attributed in historiography to Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. On the other hand, Damville and Alençon, who were leading an actual struggle against a (potentially) abusive royal authority, had to adapt their ideology to their own personal situation and to the existing political conditions and, therefore, were less inclined than the monarchomachs for abstract considerations. The monarchomachs could propose extravagant constitutional reforms, without having to concern themselves with their immediate political applications, but the leaders of the malcontents had to consider the political expediency of their propaganda and their own political interests, which distinguishes their ideology from that of the monarchomachs, but also from even their own less prominent adherents. The justification of their revolt was developed in two declarations issued by Henry de Montmorency-Damville on 13 November 1574 at Montpellier and by François d’Alençon on 18 September 1575 at Dreux, which will form the object of my analysis. The historiography of the French Wars of Religion has also identified several theoretical tracts that it associated with the movement of the malcontents: Briève remonstrance à la noblesse de France sur le faict de la Déclaration de Monseigneur le Duc d’Alençon (1576), text attributed to the Huguenot jurist Innocent Gentillet, Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et déportements de Catherine de Médicis, published in two versions in 1575 and 1576, Résolution claire et facile sur la question tant de fois faicte de la prise des armes par les inférieurs, published first in 1575, and France-Turquie (1576). However, unlike Damville’s and Alençon’s declarations, these tracts were mostly published anonymously and, despite the ideological affinity with the movement of the malcontents, they were not officially assumed by its leadership, nor did they always reflect the position of the two most prominent members of the rebellion from 1574 to 1576, the marshal of Montmorency-Damville and the Duke of Alençon.

Having emerged in the same political context and out of the same feeling of discontent, there are many common points between the monarchomachs and the political ideology of the malcontents, in particular the right of revolt in face of manifest oppression and the idea of a limited royal power. However, despite their alliance, there are also significant differences in the ideology espoused by these factions. Unlike the Huguenot radicals, the malcontents still professed at least a formal loyalty towards the Crown, regardless of their criticism directed against specific actions of a particular king, either Charles IX or Henry III. If the Huguenot political thought evolved from being formally loyalist before 1572 to advocating a form of popular sovereignty, which threatened to make the king only the highest ranking magistrate of the state and placed the ultimate sovereignty within the kingdom in the hands of the people, wielded through its official representatives like the Estates General or the magistrates of the kingdom (the latter within the purview of their office), the malcontents, according to the traditional historiography, were in favor of a form of mixed monarchy, where sovereignty was shared between the king, his council (which was to be composed of the main aristocratic families of France and from where the “evil” advisors, in particular the foreigners, were to be expelled) and the Estates General.

2.2. The Right to Revolt and the Concept of “Public Good”

What characterizes both the monarchomach literature and the texts of the malcontents was the firm assertion of a right to revolt: despite other disagreements, on this issue both groups literally spoke with one voice, insisting that misgovernment could and, sometimes, even had to be met, if there was no other alternative, by force. Of course, this right was not absolute: the most important figures of the Reformation, Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, both insisted on the necessary and divinely sanctioned obedience of the subjects towards their lawful rulers and were extremely hesitant to accept the possibility of a lawful rebellion. The pressure of political realities caused both Luther and Calvin to partially withdraw from their previous rejection of active resistance and accept that, in some extreme circumstances, such resistance was both lawful and morally justified. The first formal acceptance of the idea of forcible resistance by orthodox Lutherans can be dated to October 1530, during a conference between jurists and theologians held at Torgau, where Luther and his colleagues argued that resistance was permitted because the law of the Empire allowed it: this argument had been based on the private law statement that an individual can resist an unfair judge in certain circumstances (Skinner 2004, pp. 199–200). In turn, Calvin’s conception of a providential mission entrusted by God to the secular government led him to consider the possibility that the latter could fail in its task and, therefore, correction became necessary: for him, this correction could be carried out only by magistrates possessing lawful authority and only within the sphere of their competences. Calvin refers in particular to the historical examples of the Spartan ephors, Roman tribunes and Athenian demarchs as the kind of magistrates entitled to resist the tyrannical actions of a ruler, but William Stevenson points out that “the grounds and impetus for justified ‘resistance’ can come only from God’s explicitly revealed will”; therefore, “what Calvin seeks to assert, it seems, is less an ‘authorization’ to subjects seeking to revolt and more a warning to tyrants that both God and the affected subjects are watching” (Stevenson 1999, pp. 32–36). And, just before the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion, Calvin’s theories were put to the test when he was asked his opinion about the lawfulness of the Huguenot attempt to remove François de Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, from power, in 1560: in a justificative letter addressed to Coligny, Calvin asserted that such an endeavor was justified only if it was led by the princes of the blood and supported by the French Parlements (Daussy 2015, pp. 134–35). In his book Season of Conspiracy, Philip Benedict insists that Calvin was more sympathetic to the respective plot (that came to be known as the “tumult of Amboise”) than he let up afterwards and that his ulterior caveats, like the one from the letter to Coligny, were purely strategic, to avoid being linked with a conspiracy that failed in the most lamentable manner. Philip Benedict bases this argument on some sources from Calvin’s correspondence and the testimony of a Huguenot named Gilles Triou, who had been arrested at Lyon in late 1560 and had been part of a plot to capture that city (Benedict 2020). However, this does not necessarily contradict the argument that Calvin was hostile to unrestricted resistance against tyrannical rulers and placed significant conditions for such resistance to be lawful. The key issue here is that Calvin’s hopes for what the conspiracy should have been differed significantly from what actually unfolded. During that period, Calvin and other Huguenots were still holding out hope that Antoine de Bourbon, the first prince of the blood, could be drawn to their side and persuaded to take the lead of the Protestant movement in France—and of whatever actions this movement might take. What Calvin rejected was the reality of a pitiful plot led by a minor nobleman, La Renaudie: it is very likely that Calvin had a greater vision for this action and this is what he intended to support. Attributing Calvin’s rejection only to the failure of the conspiracy is meaningless, because its success could have significantly changed its character, by attracting open support from the Huguenot grands, at least from Condé, Antoine’s younger brother, whose secret involvement was strongly suspected (Sălăvăstru 2022, pp. 167–68).

Max Engammare, in his article “Calvin monarchomaque?…”, points out many instances when Calvin downright insulted a monarchy that would impede God’s law or persecute the faith (by that, meaning the Reformation) and raises the legitimate question of whether Calvin played a “double character”, because those insults coexist with appeals to obedience and praise of the royal state (Engammare 1998, p. 223). However, despite these vacillations, Max Engammare agrees that Calvin “allows for a right of resistance against tyrants, but one which is never individual”, thus opening the path that the future monarchomachs will take. Also, in a very recent work, Jon Balserak argues that, in order to carry out his plans to evangelize France, Calvin “systematically employed falsehood and deception in order to hide what he and his Genevan colleagues were doing from the French authorities”, first and foremost in order to ensure “the safety of those involved in the work, the safety of those individuals and groups of faithful evangelicals who were on the front line (so to speak) in France, and, of course, ultimately the safety of the evangelistic enterprise itself”. Calvin’s stance in this regard was very conventional, namely that “God’s call to bring the gospel to France was paramount and could not be set aside on the grounds that an earthly monarch despised Christ’s reign and legislated against it” (Balserak 2024, pp. 3–17). Jon Balserak argues that Calvin, by proclaiming the obedience of Protestants in texts like his prefatory letter to Francis I from 1535, “sought to hide his illegal conduct from the king and wished to fashion an image of himself as obedient and loyal to the monarch”, in the perspective of his otherwise illegal efforts to spread the new faith throughout France (Balserak 2024, p. 121). But a distinction must be made between defying a king’s impious commands (which pretty much everyone agreed on at the time) and using force in order to strong-arm a king or, worse, remove him from the throne. Jon Balserak points out that “the majority of scholars err in holding that Calvin was opposed to all forms of active resistance”, but such a statement misrepresents the state of the historiography on the subject: Balserak’s conclusion, that Calvin “was willing to support active resistance against the civil magistrate so long as it was pursued by a Prince of the Blood and, in fact, was actively involved in such resistance”, had been expressed, for instance, by J.W. Allen, in his A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, as early as 1928. In professor Allen’s words, Calvin recognizes “one possible loophole” in the injunction against resisting tyranny, namely that certain magistrates might exist for whom it would be lawful “to resist tyrannical action and, therefore, it would be their duty to do so”. Professor Allen also refers to the already mentioned letter of Calvin to Coligny, where the former claims that “if the Princes of the blood took action to maintain their legal rights and if the Parlements of France joined with them, then indeed all good subjects might lawfully aid them in arms”, and concludes that “there is no reason to suppose, and no likelihood whatever, that in this letter Calvin stated anything but what was true” (Allen 1957, pp. 58–59). It could be argued that Allen’s statement here is too categorical and that professor Allen ignores the possibility that Calvin might have moderated his conditions for legitimate armed resistance—namely, that the participation of one prince of the blood (preferable the highest ranking one, Antoine de Bourbon) might have sufficed. However, claiming that, in 2024, the majority of the scholars still assert that Calvin was opposed to all forms of active resistance is exaggerated, because there is a significant group of historians, of comparable numerical strength with the opposing side, that shares Jon Balserak’s assessment, as Balserak himself admits when analyzing the state of the historiography on this issue (Balserak 2024, pp. 174–76).

Calvin’s rationale was retained and expanded by the monarchomach “triumvirs” after 1572, but there is also one major difference between Calvin’s position and theirs: namely, they significantly reduced the emphasis on the religious motivation for resistance and insisted that secular tyranny could also justify revolt against a ruler. Sophie Nicholls points out that the aim of these political treatises “was to focus attention on the problem of tyranny instead of the presence of the reformed religion and to construct an argument for popular sovereignty centred on the role of the Estates General” (Nicholls 2021, p. 58). As Quentin Skinner (and other historians) pointed out, “the Huguenots shifted from a purely religious theory of resistance to a political one, based on the idea of a contract which gives rise to a moral right to resist any ruler who fails in his duty to pursue the welfare of his people”, theory that is phrased both as a right and a duty: thus, the idea that the preservation of religious uniformity is the sole grounds for resistance is abandoned, and the result was “a fully political theory of revolution, founded on a recognisably modern secularised thesis about the natural rights and original sovereignty of the people”. This happened because the Huguenots needed “to produce a justification of resistance with a wider and less purely sectarian appeal than the theories developed by the earlier generation of Calvinist revolutionaries” (Skinner 2004, pp. 335–38). This was something the political leadership of the Huguenots of the first three Wars of Religion had also aimed at and, certainly, the emotion which the events of Saint-Bartholomew had triggered amongst moderate Catholics was not lost on the monarchomachs. During the 1560s, Condé had constantly tried to co-opt moderate Catholics to support the Huguenot struggle by enmeshing their demands for religious freedom with other requests aiming only for “good governance”—something which everyone, Catholic or Protestant, could support. Saint-Bartholomew provided the Huguenots with a real chance to establish a genuine alliance with at least a part of the Catholic majority—and the monarchomachs tried their best to make use of this opportunity.

The most important trait of the monarchomach literature is its acceptance of the idea that royal power had to be limited by constitutional restraints and that unjust commands of a king could and should be opposed. In his book Francogallia, François Hotman relies in particular on examples from French history in order to point out situations where such a thing (taking action against a legitimate king) happened and he takes care to make it clear that such actions must have as their cause either the king’s descent into tyranny or the king falling prey to vices which could have endangered the welfare of the realm. In his turn, in the book Du Droit des magistrats, Theodore Beza identifies two fundamental justifications for resistance against a lawful ruler: first, on religious grounds, because one should obey God first, rather than man, and therefore a command against God’s law must be resisted (Bèze 1970, pp. 3–7); second (and in this he differs from Calvin and gets close to the ideas of the malcontents), on secular grounds, when the people is “oppressed by manifest tyranny” (Bèze 1970, pp. 9–11). At the same time, though, Beza cautions that ordinary vices that do not actually endanger the realm should not be mistaken for tyranny, which is “confirmed wickedness that involved overturning the state and the fundamental laws of the realm” (Bèze 1970, p. 61). Finally, the author of Vindiciae pretty much agrees with Beza on these issues and places both justifications, religious and secular, in the context of a double covenant, the first between God, king and the people, and the second only between the king and the people. As a result of the former, “a pious people will not only restrain a prince who impiously abrogates the law of God, but will also take special care lest anything should be gradually introduced through his fault or negligence, which by the effluxion of time might corrupt the pure worship of God. Not only will it not tolerate crimes committed publicly against the divine majesty, it will even diligently remove the opportunities for such crimes” (Brutus 2003, p. 45). As a result of the second covenant, the king is lawfully compelled to rule with justice and to care “for the welfare of the people” (Brutus 2003, pp. 130–31): otherwise, if “he subverts the commonwealth deliberately, if he shamelessly perverts the laws, if he has no concern for faith which has been pledged, for agreements, for justice or piety, if he is an enemy to his subjects; if, in short, he should begin to use all, or the most important, of those artifices which we have listed, then he is manifestly a tyrant”, the people is released from its obligations and can “bring to bear against him whatever is permitted against a tyrant either by right or just force” (Brutus 2003, pp. 154–55).

This secular justification for rebellion can also be found in the propaganda of the malcontents, who invoked the concept of “public good”, a notion described by Arlette Jouanna as “designating the collective patrimony bequeathed by the ancestors, the ensemble of customs, the laws and the privileges thought to guarantee the liberties of the subjects and prevent royal arbitrariness” (Jouanna 2007, p. 269). In his declaration from 13 November 1574, Henry de Montmorency-Damville draws up an extensive list of grievances, which he claims had caused him to take up arms, namely the “violation of edicts and ordinances issued by the Estates General of Orléans”, the “toleration of massacres, assassinations, imprisonments, rapes of women and young girls, pillaging and arson by those whose duty was to prevent them”, the contempt shown towards the French nobility, the usurpation of royal power by “conspiring strangers” or the sale of justice for money (Devic and Vaissete 1889, pp. 1105–8). One year later, in his own manifesto from 18 September 1575, François d’Alençon justified his revolt by referring to the necessity of “chasing out the disturbers of public peace” and the need to “seek justice for all pillages, robberies, murders and massacres”, “release the nobles, gentlemen and others made prisoners or banished without cause”, “abolish all taxes, subsidies and contributions burdening the poor people”, “preserve the ancient laws and statutes of the kingdom”, “maintain the nobility and the clergy in their privileges and ancient liberties” and “establish in France a good, stable and sure peace” (Brieve remonstrance 1576, pp. 6–7). Both Catholics, Damville and Alençon do not concern themselves with a religious justification of the revolt (like Beza and Vindiciae or, partially, Condé in his propaganda texts from 1562 to 1568): obviously, they could not claim that the “true faith”, which in their case was Catholicism, was persecuted in France; therefore, the issue whether one should resist commands against God’s law does not arise for them. But the problem of misrule is just as stringent for these two most prominent malcontents as it was for the monarchomachs and, if this misrule reached a point where it endangered the welfare of the entire realm, they also argue that any solution, even a violent revolt, was acceptable in order to correct the situation3.

Paul-Alexis Mellet correctly points out that the malcontents adhered to the monarchomach interpretation of the justification of armed resistance, based on the principle of conditional obedience, where “taking up arms is a duty in case of tyranny”, but, at the same time, he raises the question of “what kind of tyranny?”, because the malcontents refuse to take the risk of upsetting the traditional social hierarchy (Mellet 2007, p. 85). Indeed, there is a fundamental difference between the resistance imagined by the monarchomachs and that conceived by the malcontents, which is also reflected in the terminology used by each faction: the monarchomachs refer to “tyranny” as the only justification of revolt, the specific grievances listed by them being the clues that could help identify a tyrant and distinguish him from a merely inadequate—but susceptible to correction—ruler, while Damville and Alençon make use of this term much more sparingly. The monarchomachs associate the notion of “tyranny” with the sovereign ruler: while subordinate magistrates could have also been referred to as “tyrants” (and there had been such cases), the monarchomachs focus their attention on the possibility of ruling monarchs becoming tyrants. Damville also refers to the “tyranny, oppression and evil counsel” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1108) that had to be opposed, while Alençon speaks of the “tyranny of those who demand only to create disorder so, at whatever cost that might bring, they could enrich themselves from the blood and sweat of the poor” (Brieve remonstrance 1576, p. 4), but it is a tyranny instigated by conspiring foreigners, of which the king himself is blameless. Religious non-conformists such as the Huguenots were willing to take their approval of rebellion up to its ultimate consequence and direct it against the king himself: in all three of the monarchomach tracts, their authors openly acknowledge that the responsibility for evil acts can belong to the king himself and refuse to shield a tyrannical monarch with the traditional fiction of the “evil advisors”.

Damville and Alençon were prominent members of the French political establishment and they were not willing to completely break with the established order: the traditional aristocratic idea of revolt saw rebellion as a way of restoring the relationship of the aggrieved nobles with the king, when that relationship had been previously compromised by other factors. The disruption of the relationship was clearly indicated in the propaganda of the period and the blame was assigned to the usual suspects, the rapacious and evil-intentioned foreigners4—and the solution was a “legitimate prince of the blood leading a group to purify the monarchy of evil influences” (Holt 1986, p. 37). As pointed out by Paul-Alexis Mellet, “the ties which link the king to his subjects are thought of in terms of a personal allegiance by the malcontents”; therefore, their “system of obedience constituted a personal or familial commitment, inspired by the vassalage obligation of the feudal law” and the people has no right no interfere in the designation of the king, nor is the possibility of deposition ever envisaged (Mellet 2007, pp. 87–88). The monarchomachs were shifting the locus of the ultimate sovereignty in the kingdom from the person of the king to the people—and, consequently, they argued that a king could even be deposed, in accordance with a lawful constitutional procedure, in case he committed serious transgressions which endangered the realm or the welfare of the people. This is something that Damville and Alençon refused to do: for them, the king still represented the main source of political legitimacy in the kingdom and, therefore, the source of the grievances that caused them to revolt could not have been the king. Consequently, the propaganda of the malcontents argued that the king was either misled or obstructed and, therefore, could not address the problems of the kingdom himself—which he would have undoubtedly done if his freedom of action had been unimpeded. Damville and Alençon were thus taking up arms not against the king, but in the king’s place and for the sake of the king’s authority. Damville claims in his declaration that it was “the duty and loyalty which he had in service of his Majesty” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1105) that determined his actions and, therefore, his goal of restoring justice, peace and the observation of the ancient laws of the kingdom also meant “to maintain and preserve what rightfully belongs to him” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1108). In the monarchomach tracts, it is the king who is usurping the rights of the people, but, in Damville’s text, the king is himself the victim of such usurpation, carried out by grasping foreigners who occupy their positions within the state unlawfully and oppress the people contrary to the king’s wishes. As pointed out by Nicolas Le Roux, “the question of the access to royal resources is found at the heart of the arguments developed by the opponents of the king”, accusations of “poor employ of the royal favor”—which results in unworthy persons (in particular, foreigners) gaining offices and influence normally they should not have been entitled to—being used by the malcontents to bring nobles from both faiths around the Duke of Alençon (Le Roux 2006, p. 45). This same concern for the preservation of the king’s rights is clearly stated in Alençon’s manifesto of 1575 as well, where it is claimed that his “wish and intention was not to do anything against the authority of the king our lord and brother, which we desire to increase with all our strength” (Brieve remonstrance 1576, p. 6). In the words of Arlette Jouanna, one could identify in these texts “an elementary form of civic conscience, fueled by the feeling of belonging to the same country”, and “below the different motivations, one can see a common concern for the political identity of the country, altered by dangerous innovations and whose defense demanded the union of all people of good faith” (Jouanna 2007, pp. 269–70). However, it has to be pointed out that it is a political identity which preserves the king at its apex: unlike the monarchomachs, Damville and Alençon still pay tribute to an abstract, idealized image of the king who is the embodiment of the justice of his realm and, by his nature, cannot ever become a tyrant. The civic conscience of the malcontents, which Arlette Jouanna speaks of, is one where the king and his aristocratic subjects can and must find a common ground, implying political consensus between them, while the “civic conscience” of the monarchomachs demanded action against the king in case of necessity.

Once the principle of resistance to a tyrant was accepted and the circumstances making resistance permissible were defined, the next step was to determine by whom this resistance could be carried out. In fact, this was the quintessential problem of all resistance theories and represented the major stumbling block for all political theorists prior to the Reformation: pretty much everyone vilified tyranny and agreed upon the harm a tyrant could cause to the realm, but, if the tyrant had no superior whom the oppressed subjects could appeal to, no lawful solution to the problem could actually be found. If the monarchomachs wanted their support for the concept of resistance against tyranny to have any practical effect, and at the same time not result in complete anarchy, they had to find persons possessing an independent authority of their own, who could determine whether tyrannical acts had occurred and act accordingly, leading an action to restrain the tyrannical king. The nature of the community as envisioned by the monarchomachs also plays a part in establishing who can actively resist a tyrant, because, as pointed out by John Hearsey McMillan Salmon, it was regarded “as a self-sufficing Aristotelian entity” and “more than the aggregate of the individuals who composed it, the whole more than the sum of its parts”: their resistance theories “lacked the individualist premises to speculate about a state of nature and a social contract prior to the contract of government” (Salmon 2002, p. 137). For this reason, the monarchomachs firmly reject the possibility that private persons could actively resist a ruler on their own, no matter how serious the transgressions of the respective ruler were: Beza points out that “without a special calling from God, it is not lawful for any particular to oppose the force of a tyrant with his own force, by his own authority” (Bèze 1970, p. 16). Vindiciae is in complete agreement over this matter, because “since God has not handed the sword to private individuals, so He does not demand use of the sword from them”; any pretended divine calling should be treated with extreme caution, to be sure that the self-appointed avenger “does not derive that great spirit for himself from within himself, and that he does not, therefore, conceive a vanity and beget a lie” (Brutus 2003, pp. 59–62). On the other hand, for both Beza and Vindiciae, unlike private individuals, the magistrates of the realm, which, in the case of France, were mainly the officers of the Crown, were lawfully entitled to resist the tyrannical acts of a king. Ralph Giesey uses the term “defensive resistance” in order to describe this type of resistance (Giesey 1970, pp. 47–48), which involved only opposing the unjust commands of a tyrant and was the only option available to the inferior magistrates, who, being subordinate to the respective ruler, could not legally attempt to overthrow him.

For Paul-Alexis Mellet, a significant difference between the malcontents and the monarchomachs is the fact that, for the latter, “resistance” is not an exclusively aristocratic enterprise: on the list of “magistrates” authorized to oppose tyrannical acts also appears, besides the nobility, the town officialdom, drawn from the bourgeois population (Mellet 2007, p. 86). But, if the monarchomachs argued thus for the exclusive right of the “magistrates” to revolt for the sake of public welfare, Damville and Alençon are less explicit on the matter, even though their actions themselves could have been regarded as practical confirmation of the theories proposed by the former. Arlette Jouanna argues that there is an identity of opinion between the malcontents and monarchomachs regarding the position of the officers of the Crown within the realm, namely that “they served an entity superior to the royal person” (Jouanna 2007, pp. 277–78): this is explicitly stated in all three monarchomach tracts as a necessary basis for the right of resistance, in order to avoid a conflict of loyalties between the magistrates’ duty to oppose tyranny and their potential obligations towards the king. Arlette Jouanna’s opinion, though, needs to be more nuanced, because, as far as the propaganda personally issued by the two leaders of the malcontents is concerned, the distinction between the duty to the king and the duty to the Crown is not made very clear: as already pointed out, the right of revolt acknowledged by both Damville and Alençon was not directed against the king, but, rather, it was supposed to protect the king’s authority. Consequently, their loyalty is not shifted from the person of the king to the Crown—instead, both coincide. On the other hand, there is an obvious common ground between the monarchomachs and the malcontents’ leadership with respect to the elitist character of the right to resistance and the necessity of political consensus. When Damville published his justificative declaration at Montpellier on 13 November 1574, he took care to emphasize his position as “officer of the Crown, native Frenchman and born of Christian barons of France who always had before their eyes the protection, conservation and defense of their kings and their kingdom” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1110). Damville’s justification shows that, in the malcontents’ propaganda, a wide agreement over the negative conditions affecting France was considered necessary: Damvile was spurred into action by “many remonstrances and exhortations from princes of the blood, officers of the Crown and peers of France” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1110). One year later, in his declaration issued at Dreux, Alençon alluded briefly to “heroical and excellent persons called by God to oppose the tyranny” of malefactors, but, on the other hand, since the declaration of Dreux is a personal justification, there was no need to delve at length into the rights of the different social and political categories to resist iniquitous acts. As heir to the throne, François d’Alençon was, according to the monarchomachs’ theories, the person most entitled within the kingdom to organize a rebellion for the sake of the public good, even against the king himself. Obviously, Alençon felt the same way, as he emphasizes his responsibility towards the kingdom, but it is a collective responsibility: the decision for revolt cannot be taken by the “magistrate” (in this case, Alençon) on his own, but was the result of an appeal from “princes and gentlemen, men of the Church, townspeople and bourgeois” (Brieve remonstrance 1576, p. 5). For the monarchomachs, the rebellion against a tyrant is a corporative act, carried out by the magistrates of a realm in the name of the sovereign people. The declaration of Dreux implies pretty much the same: even someone as highly placed as the Duke of Alençon could not dispense with the agreement of the general political community of the realm. For the decision to revolt to be both morally and legally justified, just like Damville one year before, Alençon must show that a consensus existed regarding the danger to the realm and that his decision was not motivated by personal grievances or personal ambition. In the monarchomachs’ tracts, even a single magistrate had the right to initiate resistance in the name of the people, but both Damville and Alençon position themselves as the leaders of large coalitions of discontented people, who pressed them into action.

2.3. The Nature of the Monarchy

The character of the resistance envisioned by the monarchomachs had, in turn, a significant influence on the character of the monarchy: if resistance to tyranny was to be considered a lawful and legitimate constitutional option, then the monarchomachs had to prove that obedience to a ruler was not absolute, but conditional5. Each of the “triumvirs” argues in favor of a contractual monarchy, where the king governed by respecting a set of obligations that he assumed at his coronation: failing to observe these obligations would cancel the people’s duty to obey and would give the people the right to take action against the respective ruler. In Francogallia, François Hotman does not describe directly the existence of such a contract, but it is strongly implied when he claims that a king is to his people “as a father to his family, a guardian to his ward, a custodian to his charge, a pilot to his ship or a captain to his army” and that “a people is not created for the sake of the king, but the king is established for the sake of the people, because a people can exist without a king, like those which are governed by more noble men or govern themselves, but we cannot find, or even imagine, a king who could exist without a people” (Hotman 1574, p. 157). Basically, the terms Hotman uses in order to depict the relationship between the king and his people strongly point towards the existence of mutual obligations, which can void the respective relationship if one party is found in breach. Beza and Vindiciae, on the other hand, proclaim the concept of contractual monarchy in the strongest terms, by tracing its origin to what constituted for Christian writers the most authoritative political model, namely, the Israelite monarchy of the Old Testament. In Du Droits des magistrats, Beza points out that the ancient monarchy of Israel was based on “a double obligation. […] There was a solemn oath by which the king and the people obligated themselves to God to observe His laws, political and ecclesiastical; and after, there was another mutual oath between the king and the people” (Bèze 1970, p. 30). Vindiciae makes the same argument, by claiming that “the king swore to observe the law of God, and that he vowed, in so far as he was able, to preserve the church. In just this way the whole of Israel, like a single person, promised the same at God’s stipulation. We now say that individual cities, and the magistrates of individual cities which form part of the kingdom, individually promised the same in explicit terms, in so far as it concerned their own interests. It follows that all Christian cities and societies have done so tacitly” (Brutus 2003, p. 52). By developing the concept of a contract between king and people, Beza and the author of Vindiciae create the legal framework which allows the concept of lawful resistance to emerge. By making God a party to this contract, through the references to the Biblical tradition, they tie the relationship between king and people to a much higher authority, to which both became thus obligated. This was an absolutely necessary strategy in order to escape the accusations of sedition which radical Catholics were constantly launching at the Huguenots. Jules Racine St-Jacques asserts that the monarchomach writers do not oppose the power of a single individual, but only when that power is used tyrannically (Racine St.-Jacques 2012, pp. 194–95): but, in our opinion, this is a statement with little basis in fact, because the contractual monarchy imagined by the monarchomachs is a permanent feature of their ideal model of governance, not just a remedy to be resorted to in extraordinary circumstances in order to prevent royal abuses. There are simply too many examples of the active participation of the people, through the Estates General and their other ordinary magistrates, in the governance of a kingdom and, thus, one cannot conclude that the monarchomach tracts were supporting an unlimited authority for a righteous king.

As Alain Desrayaud pointed out, the monarchomachs and the malcontents had fundamentally different ideas about the concept of sovereignty: if the former were in favor of a popular sovereignty exercised by the Estates General, the latter were thinking about a sovereignty exercised in common with the king (Desrayaud 1996, pp. 110–11). Unlike in the monarchomachs’ treatises, the monarchy depicted in the propaganda of the malcontents is not explicitly contractual: neither Damville nor Alençon points to any specific moment in time when the French monarchy came into being through some pact with its subjects. That feature alone would have been enough to eliminate the idea of deposing the king, had any of the two been inclined to actually consider it. However, despite their protestations of loyalty (or maybe because of them), it is also obvious that neither Damville nor Alençon is in favor of an unlimited royal power: the ideal monarchy which they envision is one, to use Seyssel’s expression, “bridled” by moral constraints and the governance traditions of the kingdom. In the declaration of Montpellier from 1574, it is clearly stated that one of the main reasons for Damville’s revolt was the violation of the “edicts and ordonances made at the Estates General of Orléans and reiterated by many kings for the pacification of the kingdom”; also, the text charges that the deprivation of the French nobility of its rightful position occurred against “the ancient laws made at the establishment of this kingdom” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1106). The first accusation was one of the main grievances of the Huguenots, which was brought up, again and again, in the propaganda issued by Condé during the period of 1562–1568, namely, that the edicts of pacification and, generally, all decisions favorable to the Protestants were not actually observed. Since Damville’s rebellion of 1574 was closely coordinated with the Huguenots, it is not surprising that he would appropriate their arguments in his own propaganda. The second accusation was the typical grievance of a French aristocracy in a kingdom where the upper echelons of the government had been penetrated by foreigners, especially of Italian origin, but, by this emphasis on the illegality of the situation, it is depicted as an attack against the constitutional order of the kingdom itself: basically, Damville and his allies were not revolting because their personal ambitions had been frustrated, but because the traditional structure of the kingdom was being subverted. According to Arlette Jouanna, the malcontents noblemen were motivated by a belief that “honor demanded them to prevent the denaturation of the ancient traditions of the kingdom”, a “quasi-constitutional” belief which made them “natural guardians of the French identity” (Jouanna 2013, p. 219). However, this claim would be admissible only if the “ancient laws” prohibiting such a shift were immutable—and that, in turn, required a sovereign authority which was ultimately limited in its ability to carry out significant constitutional changes. For Damville, there is no contradiction between the total loyalty towards the king proclaimed in the declaration of Montpellier and the limits placed on the royal authority, because an unrestrained royal power, which could be exploited by “flatterers and dissimulators” deceiving the king, is against the king’s own interests. The welfare of the kingdom depended on a strict observance of the kingdom’s ancient constitution and any arbitrary interference with the latter would lead to chaos and suffering: only “when the ancient laws had been inviolably preserved”, the kingdom was “flourishing and enjoyed good renown amongst all the other nations” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1107). One year later, in the declaration of Dreux, Alençon reiterated many of Damville’s arguments, in particular the emphasis on the inviolability of the kingdom’s laws and the dire consequences resulting from the failure to observe them scrupulously: Alençon draws a direct link between the state of peace and concord within a kingdom and the state of its laws, as only through “these means, peace between subjects is sustained and preserved” (Brieve remonstrance 1576, p. 5). The laws of France were part of an ancient constitutional tradition, which must be preserved “in the purity left by our forefathers”: in other words, the legislative process is independent on the arbitrary will of an individual king. This is a point where both the monarchomachs and malcontents were in perfect agreement, as the former had always insisted that passing new laws or changing existing ones was a cooperative process between king and people, and, more so, one where the ultimate authority rested with the latter.

2.4. The Role of the Estates General

One of the most significant aspects of the resistance theories promoted by the monarchomachs is the role reserved for the Estates General6. In one of his articles, Ralph Giesey argued against the notion that the Estates held an important place in the monarchomach literature, because they were “impotent in Hotman’s scheme, as likely as not ineffectual in Beza’s and superseded in Mornay’s” (Giesey 1970, p. 44). This is an opinion which I cannot agree with, because it ignores the fact that the entire monarchomach constitutional scheme was a theoretical construct that was running contrary to the traditional practices of government in France: the fact that the real Estates General was not properly equipped to function as a check on the monarchy does not mean at all that it was also meaningless in the constitutional template proposed by the monarchomach authors. This template was basically a complete reconstruction (or, with the monarchomach terminology, a “restoration” to the ideal form of government that had existed in the past and had become corrupted in the meanwhile) of the French polity: for the monarchomachs’ suggestions to have any practical effects, the position of the monarchy and its relationship with its officialdom and with the people as a whole had to be completely redefined anyway—and this included the Estates General as well. The monarchomach authors might not have all given the same attention to the Estates General, but none of the three could dispense with it altogether, because to do so would have meant giving up the option of deposing a tyrant—and deposition of a ruler was a crucial part of their resistance theories. Without the Estates, all the effort put by Beza and the author of Vindiciae into demonstrating the contractual nature of the monarchy and the superiority of the people would have been meaningless: the people may have been placed above the king, but, lacking an institution which could act as representative for the whole realm, it could not have acted based on this superiority to remove an unworthy king from office.

Among the so-called “monarchomach triumvirs”, François Hotman is the one who focuses on the Estates General the most. In Francogallia, Hotman based his constitutional ideas on a (presumed) historical tradition7, where both the Gaulish royalty and the subsequent Frankish royalty were elective (Hotman 1574, pp. 10–11, 59–71) and, at the same time, their powers were constrained by (in the case of the Gauls) “a general assembly of all the country where the affairs of state, concerning the universal good of public matters, were discussed” (Hotman 1574, p. 2) or (in the case of the Franks) by “the general and solemn assembly of all the nation which we call since then the assembly of the three estates”, to which “the sovereign and the principal administration of the Kingdom of Francogallia belonged” (Hotman 1574, pp. 96–97, 114). François Hotman argues that the “constitution” of the original Merovingian and Carolingian kingdom was that which ancient philosophers had judged “the best and the most perfect of all”, composed of “all three kinds of government: of the monarchy, because there is only one king who commands, of the aristocracy, which is the estate of nobility, where a small number of people hold authority in their hands, and of the state where the people is sovereign” (Hotman 1574, p. 97). But, in Hotman’s political template, the king, the aristocracy and the people do not equally share power, because the ultimate authority resides with the people, who has the right even to depose unworthy kings and they do that through the Estates General. According to Hotman, this institution continued its existence during the Capetian period, but its powers were slowly diminished through the efforts of the kings, with the connivance of the Parlements, a decline that got stronger from the reign of Louis XI onwards: in his opinion, this decline of the “ancient constitution” of “Francogallia” represented the main cause of the political crisis tearing France apart in the second half of the sixteenth century, because the people lost its previous capacity to restrain the actions of a (tyrannical) king. According to the historical tradition envisioned by Hotman, the Estates would deliberate and decide on “first, the election and deposition of kings; then, of peace and war, of public law, of offices, governorships and administration of public things, of assigning a part of the domain to the male heir of the deceased king and providing a dowry for his daughters (…). Finally, of all matters which we call right now affairs of state, because it is not lawful to decide on issues concerning the state of public thing, except in the assembly of the Estates” (Hotman 1574, p. 114). According to this “constitution”, the king was not actually sovereign: the Estates possessed this ultimate sovereignty; therefore, technically speaking, one could not even talk about a right to revolt per se. The Estates would simply pronounce the deposition of an unworthy king as per their right. Therefore, Hotman’s historical lessons “justified resistance to royal authority and to judicial authority, providing such resistance was led by an institution that represented the general population” and were put into practice with the development of a number of political assemblies in the south and west of France, which gathered armed forces for a confrontation with the royal government (Kingdon 2006, p. 209), which, in their opinion, proved treacherous towards its subjects.

Theodor Beza and the author of Vindiciae took a different approach than François Hotman and, as previously pointed out, they entrusted the role to oppose tyranny, in the first instance, to the magistrates of the kingdom, who were to resist any unjust commands. At the same time, they were both aware that, confronted with an incorrigible tyrant, the powers of the magistrates were not enough, because, being subordinate to the ruler, they could not remove him from office and, thus, the kingdom could have been mired in a permanent civil war: in order to break the stalemate, a higher authority was needed. Such an authority resided in the Estates General, which, in Beza’s words, “can and should resist until things are restored to their good order, and even punish the tyrant, if needed, as he deserved” (Bèze 1970, p. 44). Such an extreme action, the deposition of a legitimate king, could be taken only by the Estates General, because, as representative of the realm, in Beza’s constitutional scheme, the Estates were placed above the king. On the other hand, Vindiciae places the least emphasis on the Estates out of all three tracts, undoubtedly because of the anti-Huguenot attitude of the Estates General held at Blois in 1576–1577, but it still does not omit them altogether: instead, the power to depose a tyrant is attributed to the people “or those who represent it—the electors, palatines, patricians, the assembly of the Estates, and the rest” (Brutus 2003, p. 156).

The same consideration for the Estates General can also be encountered in the two declarations of the leaders of the malcontents, but for completely different reasons. Arlette Jouanna argues that the malcontents felt themselves “threatened by the evolution of the monarchy” and, therefore, intended to restore the strength and efficiency of the institutions tasked with preventing a slide into tyranny, namely, the Council and the Estates General, which “had to assemble on a regular basis”, thus achieving the ideal of the “mixed monarchy” (Jouanna 2007, p. 269). However, there is little basis for this assertion in the official proclamations of the main leaders of the malcontents, Damville and Alençon. Since they absolve the king from any blame in the troubles afflicting France and refuse to entertain any thought of deposing him, the Estates General can no longer play the same role as in the treatises of the monarchomachs, that of the ultimate restraint placed upon monarchical power. Instead, for the malcontents, the Estates General becomes the most appropriate place where a general political and moral reformation of the kingdom could be initiated. Since the purpose of the Estates, for Damville and Alençon, is not to exercise control over the king, there is no need for the Estates to be permanently in existence or, at least, to be summoned on a regular basis. Both the monarchomachs and the malcontents see the Estates as the solution for the kingdom’s troubles, but, if the monarchomachs envision the Estates as exercising a coercive power over the king and, ultimately, controlling the policies of the kingdom, the malcontents treat the Estates as a trusted partner of the monarch. In the words of Arlette Jouanna, demanding the convocation of the Estates General meant “demanding the visible reconstitution of the body politic in its entirety, which unites the king and the Estates of his kingdom, and which the disturbers tried to dismember. Acting this way was to promote the public good, of the body of the state and of the Crown; and it meant to be animated by a ‘holy devotion to the majesty of the king and to the country’” (Jouanna 1989, p. 295).

In the limited monarchy envisioned by the malcontents, the authority of the king alone was not enough to initiate and carry out the sweeping reforms that the seriousness of the situation created by the Wars of Religion demanded. A “restoration” of the ancient constitution, in the parlance of the epoch, required the efforts of the entire political community, headed by the king, and such an endeavor could be organized only through the Estates General. Since a major reason for the strife was the religious differences between Catholics and Protestants, the Estates could even act as an institutional substitute for a general or national Church council in order to find a remedy for the confessional division. In the declaration of Montpellier, the “general assembly of the Estates of France” is the institution that could and should “lead to an agreement in religion and the union and restoration of the kingdom in its first state” (Devic and Vaissete 1889, p. 1111). Alençon’s declaration of Dreux reveals the same confidence in the capacity of the Estates General to provide a remedy to the civil wars, albeit with one caveat, namely, that all foreign influence must be eliminated from the respective assembly (something that Damville did not ask explicitly, although, having in mind the accusations he directed at the same foreigners, it is likely that he would have considered such a proviso as well). Only such an assembly, which would thus allow the king to free himself from the pernicious influence of his foreign advisors, could properly restore “justice” and “peace” within the kingdom, even going as far as healing the religious divisions if no Church council managed to do so until then. As such, the Estates, in the vision of the two leaders of the malcontents, are merely an extraordinary organ of reform and not a permanent feature of the government. Arlette Jouanna argues that the malcontents give a great importance to the royal council, “which represents the aristocratic element” in their template of mixed monarchy, and see the exercise of power as a cooperative process between the Estates General, the Council and the king (Jouanna 2009, pp. 504–5).

3. Conclusions

Unlike the monarchomachs, it is quite obvious that the malcontents took a moderate approach regarding the role of the monarchy in France, staying clear of the radicalism which characterized the former: the monarchomachs may have changed the locus of the ultimate sovereignty from the person of the king to the people, which, through institutions like the Estates General, was entitled to censor or even depose its kings, but the malcontent leadership clearly did not, and still envisioned the king as the ultimate source of political legitimacy in the kingdom. It is even questionable whether, at least in what concerns the official declarations of Damville and Alençon, the malcontents truly envisioned the French monarchy as a mixed one. There is no serious suggestion in their propaganda that the people was to have a share in sovereignty, nor is there any attention paid to the concept of the royal council as a partner of the king in the governance of the realm. The attitude of the two leaders of the malcontents towards the people is one of populist paternalism: it was, indeed, concern for the plight of the people that determined their actions and they were spurred to take arms by the pleas of the people, but, in this matter, they were not acting as representatives subordinated to a people who would possess authority over them, as was the case with the magistrates envisioned by the monarchomachs. The king himself is never depicted as a possible antagonist by Damville’s and Alençon’s justifications: on the contrary, their entire ideology revolves around the idealized image of a king who was somehow impeded to act himself in order to remedy the troubles of his kingdom. The legitimacy of Damville’s and Alençon’s revolt depended on the king’s approval: and, since their revolt was just, carried out for the sake of the “public good”, this approval—according to their justifications—was unavoidably forthcoming. The Estates General did not have a permanent, or independent, position in the governance of the realm: while its significance was great, it was merely an extraordinary forum to be used in exceptional circumstances to resolve certain political difficulties, after all normal methods had failed. Being seen as a possible alternative to a general or national Church council, in order to restore religious unity, the Estates General is imagined in a similar manner to such a council, operating only in a specific context and, more importantly, under the aegis of the king. Arlette Jouanna and other historians speak of the “mixed monarchy” of the malcontents, but, at least as far as the official propaganda of Damville and Alençon is concerned, it would be more accurate to speak of a “limited monarchy”. The difference is that the latter does not necessarily imply the equal sharing of sovereignty which the former does. The king is the ultimate possessor of sovereignty in his kingdom, but his authority is not unlimited. Damville and Alençon envision a king who rules alone, but in accordance with the traditional conventions of the Capetian monarchy and where no meaningful alterations can be carried out without the consent of the whole realm.