[Sidenote: Calvin]
The clear political thinking of Calvin and his followers was in large part the result of the exigencies of their situation. Confronted with established power they were forced to defend themselves with pen as well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember of their thought was blown into fierce blaze by the winds of persecution. Not only the Huguenots took fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of {597} France seemed on the point of anticipating the great Revolution by two centuries.
With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling discordantly with the servile doctrines of Paul and Luther, Calvin set to work to forge a theory that should combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesiastical authority, he yet regarded civil government as the most sacred and honorable of all merely human institutions. The form he preferred was an aristocracy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not prepared to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme cases. Grasping at Luther's idea of constitutional, or contractual, limitations on the royal power, he asserted that the king should be resisted, when he violated his rights, not by private men but by elected magistrates to whom the guardianship of the people's rights should be particularly entrusted. The high respect in which Calvin was held, and the clearness and comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately the most influential of the Protestant publicists. By his doctrine the Dutch, English, and American nations were educated to popular sovereignty.
[Sidenote: French republicans]
The seeds of liberty sown by Calvin might well have remained long hidden in the ground, had not the soil of France been irrigated with blood and scorched by the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of popular rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the jungle after the day of St. Bartholomew, were already sprouting some years before it. The Estates General that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded that the regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and that the members of the house of Lorraine and the Chancellor L'Hôpital be removed from all offices as not having been appointed by the Estates. In August {598} of the same year, thirty-nine representatives of the three Estates of thirteen provinces met, contemporaneously with the religious Colloquy of Poissy, at Pontoise, and there voiced with great boldness the claims of constitutional government. They demanded the right of the Estates to govern during the minority of the king; they claimed that the Estates should be summoned at least biennially; they forbade taxation, alienation of the royal domain or declaration of war without their consent. The further resolution that the persecution of the Huguenots should cease, betrayed the quarter from which the popular party drew its strength.
But if the voices of the brave deputies hardly carried beyond the senate-chamber, a host of pamphlets, following hard upon the great massacre, trumpeted the sounds of freedom to the four winds. Theodore Beza [Sidenote: Beza] published anonymously his Rights of Magistrates, developing Calvin's theory that the representatives of the people should be empowered to put a bridle on the king. The pact between the people and king is said to be abrogated if the king violates it.
[Sidenote: Hotman, 1573]
At the same time another French Protestant, Francis Hotman, published his Franco-Gallia, to show that France had an ancient and inviolable constitution. This unwritten law regulates the succession to the throne; by it the deputies hold their privileges in the Estates General; by it the laws, binding even on the king, are made. The right of the people can be shown, in Hotman's opinion, to extend even to deposing the monarch and electing his successor.
[Sidenote: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 1577]
A higher and more general view was taken in the Rights against Tyrants published under the pseudonym of Stephen Junius Brutus the Celt, and written by Philip du Plessis-Mornay. This brief but comprehensive survey, addressed to both Catholics and Protestants, {599} and aimed at Machiavelli as the chief supporter of tyranny, advanced four theses: 1. Subjects are bound to obey God rather than the king. This is regarded as self-evident. 2. If the king devastates the church and violates God's law, he may be resisted at least passively as far as private men are concerned, but actively by magistrates and cities. The author, who quotes from the Bible and ancient history, evidently has contemporary France in mind. 3. The people may resist a tyrant who is oppressing or ruining the state. Originally, in the author's view, the people either elected the king, or confirmed him, and if they have not exercised this right for a long time it is a legal maxim that no prescription can run against the public claims. Laws derive their sanction from the people, and should be made by them; taxes may only be levied by their representatives, and the king who exacts imposts of his own will is in no wise different from an enemy. The kings are not even the owners of public property, but only its administrators, are bound by the contract with the governed, and may be rightly punished for violating it. 4. The fourth thesis advanced by Mornay is that foreign aid may justly be called in against a tyrant.