Jean Bodin, ‘This Pre-Eminent Man of France’

Jean Bodin (1530–96) lived through interesting times, punctuated by profound political instability, religious fanaticism and civil war. He witnessed the upheaval of the Reformation and the Catholic response in France, the troubles of minority kingship and weakened royal authority, political assassinations, notorious heresy trials and massacres of the Huguenot population. He participated actively and provocatively in political life, speaking out at the meeting of the Estates General in 1576, personally offending Elizabeth I on an ambassadorial visit to England in 1581 and signing up to the troublesome Catholic League in Laon in 1589. In Howell Lloyd’s estimable biography, Bodin emerges as a man of ‘curious intelligence’, ‘congenitally argumentative’ and ‘profoundly interested in politics’, who ‘provoked antagonism as readily as he evoked admiration’. The times in which he lived surely shaped Bodin’s mental world, but in intellectual biography historians seek sympathy with, and understanding of, the mind of their subject, a goal that can only be achieved through a profound historical understanding of his or her writings. With the publication of recent intellectual biographies of such luminaries as Max Weber by Peter Ghosh, Edmund Burke by Richard Bourke and Karl Marx by Gareth Stedman Jones, this genre is flourishing in modern history. However, in the early modern period, its peculiar challenges are amplified. The lacunæ in the biography are greater and more frequent; much of the detail of Bodin’s life is lost to us and probably always will be. Some of these gaps can be overcome by a close reading of his texts, but there are many questions that remain. We cannot be certain about Bodin’s education beyond its broadly scholastic content, and so identifying the tricky question of scholarly influence is a challenge from the start. Bodin’s library is lost to us and its remnants dispersed, so not only can we not be precise about the books that he owned but (as Lloyd acknowledges) we also cannot know how he read his own books by deciphering his notes and marginalia. Finally, the destruction of the archive at Laon by Allied bombers in 1944 put an end to further scholarly investigation of Bodin’s time there as procureur du roi; the troubled question of Bodin’s affiliation to the League therefore remains indebted to the Mémoires of a local administrative officer, Antoine Richart

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