er and to receive development in quite a
different direction. Catholics or Protestants, agents of the king's
government or malcontents, all were getting a taste for and adopting the
practice of independence and a vigorous and spontaneous activity. The
bonds of the feudal system were losing their hold, and were not yet
replaced by those of a hierarchically organized administration.
Religious creeds and political ideas were becoming, for thoughtful and
straightforward spirits, rules of conduct, powerful motives of action,
and they furnished the ambitious with effective weapons. The theologians
of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches--on one side the
Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned
priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, Theodore de Beze,
Melancthon, and Bucer--were working with zeal to build up into systems of
dogma their interpretations of the great facts of Christianity, and they
succeeded in implanting a passionate attachment to them in their flocks.
Independently of these religious controversies, superior minds, profound
lawyers, learned scholars were applying their energies to founding, on a
philosophical basis and historic principles, the organization of
governments and the reciprocal rights of princes and peoples. Ramus,
one of the last and of the most to be lamented victims of the
St. Bartholomew; Francis Hotman, who, in his Franco-Gallia, aspired to
graft the new national liberties upon the primitive institutions of the
Franks; Hubert Languet, the eloquent author of the _Vindicice contra
tyrannos, or de la Puissance legitime du Prince cur le Peuple et du
Peuple sur le Prince;_ John Bodin, the first, in original merit, amongst
the publicists of the sixteenth century, in his _six livres de LA
REPUBLIQUE;_ all these eminent men boldly tackled the great questions of
political liberty or of legislative reforms. _Le Contre-un,_ that
republican treatise by De la Boetie, written in 1546, and circulated, at
first, in manuscript only, was inserted, between 1576 and 1578, in the
_Memoires de l'Etat de France,_ and passionately extolled by the
independent thinker Michael de Montaigne in his Essais, of which nine
editions were published between 1580 and 1598, and evidently very much
read in the world of letters. An intellectual movement so active and
powerful could not fail to have a potent effect upon political life.
Before the St. Bartholomew, the great relig