Politics, Polemic, and Political Thought During the French Wars of Religion

Lawyer and royalist, political prisoner and polemicist, Pierre de Belloy (c. 1550-1611) had the misfortune to live through interesting times. During the 1580s, Belloy became a notorious opponent of the French Catholic League for his position as the leading Catholic apologist for the cause of the Protestant Henri, King of Navarre. Imprisoned in the Conciergerie and the Bastille at the League's behest, Belloy escaped and was later appointed as Henri IV's Advocate-General in the Parlement of Toulouse, where he played a part in the king's politics of peacemaking in Languedoc. Belloy is known to historians principally as a forerunner to seventeenth-century theorists of absolute monarchy and as a proponent of religious toleration. In testing those claims, this book, the first work devoted to Belloy's life and thought, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of legal thinking and legal rhetoric in early modern French political writing. It follows Belloy's forays into disputes over royal and Papal authority, religious toleration, and succession to the French throne. This book identifies Belloy's engagement with thinkers, such as Marsilius of Padua, Charles Du Moulin, and Jean Bodin, but it also looks to the strengths, shibboleths, and inconsistencies of Belloy's rhetoric in those debates to develop our understanding of the political and social attitudes of his readers. In the war of words with the Catholic League, Belloy was not shy to resort to savage vituperation as well as imaginative reuse and inversion of his opponents' very words. As well as studying Belloy as a political writer, this book considers his life and career in the labyrinthine legal world of early modern France. Using material from both notarial and court archives, it shows the intensity of disputes over status among the magistracy of early modern France, and constitutes an important contribution to the history of Toulouse during the wars of religion.