HOTMAN, Francois

(1524-1590)

Francois Hotman was a French legal scholar and historian who strengthened the case for resistance to kings by writing about the elective nature of the early Frankish monarchy. A native Parisian who received his doctorate in law at Orleans, Hotman converted to Protestantism in 1547 and pursued a career teach­ing law. With the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion in 1562, Hotman took up his pen to criticize members of the powerful Guise family, the principal Catholic advisors of King Charles IX. In the wake of the 1572 St. Bartholo­mew s Day Massacre, in which upwards of thousands of Protestants (called Huguenots by their opponents) in the city of Paris and a dozen other cities were murdered by Catholic mobs, Hotman fled to Geneva and finally settled in Basle.

Hotman s greatest work, the Francogallia (1573), was a constitutional history of France that offered support to emerging Protestant theories of resistance to the monarchy. The author accomplished this second goal by presenting historical evidence for the elective nature of the early French monarchy. He also empha­sized the integral nature of a public advisory council that represented the inter­ests of the entire population.

In Hotman s day that council was the Estates General, but the Francogallia insisted that this and earlier councils held ultimate power in the French state. Councils could create and depose monarchs, shared in the most important de­cisions relating to the kingdom, including taxation, and participated in the reg­ulation of religious matters. According to Hotman, the Roman Catholic church had exercised a malign influence on the public council in recent centuries, dis­torting the original mandate in the interests of the majority religion.

Hotman s legal antiquarianism placed the author within the mainstream of humanist scholarly researches. The study of ancient texts and state documents, which in Hotman s hands established the origins of a "mixed constitution" in early Frankish culture, provided contemporaries with a justification for political action against the centralizing state in an age of religious and civil conflict. By arguing in favor of an elective monarchy, Hotman provided Protestant opponents of the French Catholic monarchy with historical precedent for their cause.

Bibliography

D. Kelley, Francois Hotman: A Revolutionary's Ordeal, 1973.

William Spellman