Jean Bodin

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Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher whose work, written across the wars of religion that tore France apart in the second half of the sixteenth century, holds together three things that later readers have found hard to reconcile: a foundational theory of state power, a fierce manual for the hunting of witches, and a private dialogue of startling religious openness.

He trained in Roman law at Toulouse and made his name with Les Six Livres de la République (1576), written in the wreckage of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the civil war around it. Its central contribution is the concept of sovereignty — souveraineté — defined as the supreme, absolute, and perpetual power of a commonwealth, the authority to make law without being bound by another’s. Bodin held that this power must reside undivided in some single locus; a state with two ultimate authorities was, on his account, not a state at all but a body heading toward civil war. The argument was forged as a remedy for the disorder he had lived through, and it became a load-bearing idea in the long European development of the modern state.

The same man wrote De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), a treatise arguing that witches were real, numerous, and bound by pact to the Devil, and that magistrates were obliged to pursue and burn them — relaxing, where witchcraft was concerned, the ordinary rules of evidence he elsewhere defended. The book was reprinted widely and is read now as one of the period’s most influential demonologies, a reminder that the legal mind that built the theory of sovereignty could also lend its rigor to the machinery of the trials.

Set against that is the Colloquium Heptaplomeres, written near the end of his life and never printed in it, circulating instead in manuscript among the learned for generations. It stages a conversation in Venice among seven men — Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Jew, Muslim, a natural philosopher, and a sceptic — who debate religion and part as friends, none converted. Scholars have long argued over what Bodin himself believed, since the dialogue grants its non-Christian and naturalist speakers real force; readings range from a covert Judaizing or deist sympathy to a sustained case for civil tolerance. The text’s suppression is itself evidence of how dangerous such even-handedness then was.

What survives is a thinker who does not reduce to a single position. He defended an undivided state and an unconstrained inquiry into the gods; he sharpened the law and aimed it at the accused. Each side of the work has had its own afterlife, read by people who often did not know the others existed.

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