Cardin Le Bret and Lese Majesty Ralph E. Giesey; Lanny Haldy; James Millhorn Law and History Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), 23-54. Stable URL: butp//links jstor.org/sici?sict=0738-2480% 28 198621%294%3 1% 3C234%3ACLBALM%3E2.0,CO%3B2-R Law and History Review is currently published by American Society for Legal History, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.hml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. 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Moreover, within the large corpus of those writings (630 folio pages, published three times), one treatise alone raises him from obscurity: De la Souveraineté du Roy, first published in 1632.' And finally (to allot Le Bret the least that is due him), the fame of that treatise owes less to the perspicuity of its author than to the timeliness of its subject. It is one of the first comprehensive treatments of sovereignty to appear after Jean Bodin ‘invented’ that concept in his Six livres de la République (1576). Le Bret’s treatise could thus provide important evidence of the status of ‘sovereignty’ in legal and political discourse two generations after Bodin. What gives Le Bret’s treatment of sovereignty its special quality—and makes up for its overall mediocrity—is the fact that when he composed and then revised the treatise he was a royal councillor, privy to the inner workings of the central government during the very years when the para- digm of absolutism was being articulated. Here was no mere political theorist, but an important actor on the political scene. Ralph Glesey is professor of History at the University of lowa. Lanny Haldy and James Milthorn are graduate students at the University of Iowa, “Graduate work’, Felix Frankfurter once said, implies @ personal relation between two students, one of whom isa professor’, 15 Jowa Law Review, 139 (1930) In his case there are thre students, the first-named a professor. He would like 10 dedicate this essay 10 the ‘memory of William F. Church, A large part of the essay was presented at the annual meeting ofthe Society for French Historical Studies held in Bloomington, Indiana, in March of 1981 1. After the original publication asa separate book in 1632, De la Souveraineté du Roy was Drinted three times in collection of Le Bret's Oewores, twice during his lifetime (1635, 1642), each with extensive revisions, and once posthumously (1689), which copies the 1635 edition. The editions of 1632 and 1635 (in its 1689 version) were realy availble to.us, and Ms. Elizabeth McCartney kindly made professional collations of the 1642 edition for us from the Bibliotheque National's copy. Le Bret's biographers are G. Picot, Cardin Le Bret (1558-1655) et a doctrine de la souveraineté (Naney, 1948) and Ivo Comparato, Cardin le Bret: ‘Royauté’e ‘Ordre’ nel pensiero di un consiglere del ‘600 (Florence, 1969)24 Law and History Review William F. Church, in his study on Richeliew and Reason of State, took special note of the chapter on lese majesté in Le Bret’s treatise.” Prosecution for lese majesty was one of the main devices used by Richelieu to quash opposition to the central administration. Not only did Le Bret himself participate in some of the trials, but he also provided (or so it would seem) legal justification for the practice itself. Not that prosecutions in France for lese majesty were new per see—they can be found at least since the thirteenth century—nor that there was a lack of legal documents and even a few royal edicts (the latter from the sixteenth century) that dealt with the subject before Le Bret did, What was new in the pratique of lese majesty in the 1630's was the large-scale prosecution of eminent people (by Richelieu), and in the realm of dogmatique the composition for the first time of a synoptic study of the subject (by Le Bret). For, as it turns out, Cardin Le Bret has no real predecessor—no French one, that is—in his effort to integrate the law of lese majesty into political thought. W.F. Church knew this very well; for, as author of the magisterial work, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France (1941), he knew that lese majesty had played scarcely any role in the thinking of French lawyers and political writers before Le Bret’s time. W.F. Church himself planned a major study of lese majesty. That project, cut short by his untimely demise, would have featured an analysis of the great trials of the 1620's, 1630's and 1640's, and would also have surveyed the earlier history of legal thought on the subject.” As authors ofthe present essay, we did not set out originally to emulate Church's plan, but in the end e found ourselves doing something quite similar—although in miniature— insofar as we provide elements of both 'histoire évenémentielle of lese majesty in the second quarter of the seventeenth century and a synopsis of la Tongue durée of the subject extending back for several centuries, We started out to study ‘sovereignty after Bodin’, taking Le Bret’s De la souveraineté as a point of reference. Soon enough, however, we were led by W.F. Church’s writings to concentrate upon the lese-majesty chapter. That Le Bret expanded and modified this chapter in successive editions of his ‘work had been noted by others before us. On the supposition that there ‘might be more of interest in those changes than others had realized, we collated very closely the two main editions of Le Bret’s lifetime, those of 1632 and 1642. What we found was quite provocative for the contemporary practice as well as for the deep legal history of lese majesty in France. It is not difficult to discern how Le Bret employed long additions in later editions to make his subject immediately relevant to French politics, 2. William F, Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, 1972), p. 273-76 (hereinafter cited as’ Church, Richelieu) 3. The fruits of Church's research before he died, in 1977, are found in a small archive, now in the John Hay Library of Brown University (see French Historical Studies, xi (1980) 635), which consists chiefly of an extensive bibliography, photocopies of Felevant works, notes on manuscripts in Paris, and even a few microfilms of those manuscripts. We would like to thank Mrs. Martha Mitchell, University Afchivist at Brown University for her assistance in utilizing the Church archive