Bodin Publishes Les Six Livres

1576

The French political philosopher Jean Bodin published Les Six Livres de la Republique, articulating the first systematic theory of sovereignty as indivisible and absolute. Writing in the middle of France's religious wars, he argued that only a strong monarch could hold a religiously divided state together. His insistence that sovereignty must be indivisible provided the theoretical framework for the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century.