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  • Les Traités monarchomaques. Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (1560-1600)
  • Sophie E. B. Nicholls
Les Traités monarchomaques. Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (1560-1600). Par Paul-Alexis Mellet (Travaux d'humanisme et Renaissance, 434). Genève: Droz, 2007. 568 pp.

William Barclay, the Catholic Scottish jurist and author of De regno et regali potestate (1600), would no doubt have been gratified that the term he coined, 'monarchomach', has taken such a firm hold on the imagination of scholars up to the present day. The word literally means 'king-killer', and Barclay had used it to describe works that threatened the status of monarchy. Modern scholarship has tended to use the term within Barclay's parameters, to refer to Calvinist 'resistance theorists' who at points in their text advocate legitimate tyrannicide. However, Paul-Alexis Mellet adopts a different approach to the monarchomach brand, taking us away from its associations with anarchy and assassination. He first narrows down the application of the term to solely French Huguenot texts, and within those parameters finds a corpus of ten. The focus of his study is on François Hotman, Théodore de Bèze, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, and Mellet opens up the field to include works that typically have not received much scholarly attention. He identifies the following features that they have in common: the right to armed resistance, the rejection of tyranny, the existence of a double covenant, the sovereignty of the people, and, finally, conditional obedience of the people to monarchical rule. One of the most significant moves Mellet makes with regard to French scholarship is his argument that the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) should not be read as the primary intellectual context of these works. He argues that the texts in his corpus should be read with a much longer view of the state of France in mind, their aim being a profound transformation of the French monarchy rather than a polemical response to the massacre. Mellet's reinterpretation of 'monarchomach' offers an important adjustment to our reading of 'resistance theory' in this period. Returning to Barclay's De regno, however, there are aspects of that work that raise questions Mellet does not answer: for example, the implications of Barclay's analysis of both Calvinist and Catholic texts from within and outside of France. Mellet could perhaps have refined his distinction between Calvinist and Catholic, instead of attributing rational political thought to the former and anarchy to the latter. There is also the question of the ambiguities of Barclay's own work, which John Locke had noted in his Two Treatises of Government (1690), observing that Barclay's De regno shares the same genetic story as those works to which he responds: following the origins of sovereign power in the divine, moving to its location in the corporate body of the political community, and finishing with its (revocable) transfer to the monarch. Nevertheless, these points should not detract from the success of Mellet's intelligent and sophisticated work. Since Madeleine Marabuto's thesis Les Théories politiques des monarchomaques français (Paris, 1967), scholarship has lacked a comprehensive study of the political theory of this intellectual group, and Mellet's rich, broad-ranging study is extremely welcome, particularly regarding his reorientation of our understanding of monarchomach texts away from tyrannicide and towards a reconstruction of the legitimate relationship between subject and ruler.

Sophie E. B. Nicholls
St Anne's College, Oxford
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