Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, a member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law at the University of Toulouse, who wrote amid the religious conflict in France after the Protestant Reformation. His best-known work, The Six Books of the Republic (1576), defined sovereignty as the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic and favoured a strong national monarchy as an antidote to factional strife. At the Estates-General at Blois he opposed a new war against the Huguenots. He also wrote On the Demonomania of the Sorcerers (1580) and the Colloquium heptaplomeres (1588), a dialogue of seven men of different faiths, and died in Laon during a plague epidemic.