Recueil de maximes véritables et importantes pour l'institution du Roy - Joly, Claude 1607-1700 (Paris Elsevier, 1653)
The most prominent rebellions in the mid-seventeenth century France were those of the nobles and the judges and known as the 'Fronde'.The leading theoretician of the parleamentary fronde was Claude Joly. His treatise 'Recueil de maximes' is a collection of constitutionalist maxims, remnants of a pre-absolutist age, and include trenchant attacks on two contributions of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin to political thought and practice in France. One was the new motion that the king is rightly the master - in effect the owner - of the persons and properties of all inhabitants of France. The other was the Machiavellian view that succesful public policy requires the systematic use of immoral means. The King's power, warned Joly, is limited and not automatically sanctionned by divine law. Frenchmen posess just title to their lives and properties, and are not the slaves of a despot or tyrant. The king's original divine power is mediated through the French people, Joly added, and the king cannot rightfully tax the French without the consent of the states-general. The fact that Joly was reviled by the king and his party as a rebel and a traitor, he declared, shows that the old constitutionhas been overcome by new views holding the king to have unlimited authority above all law. For Joly this view was 'pure usurpation' bred in the 'monstrous cauldron' of Machiavel.
Ex Libris Lily Anderson (manuscript)
Contre la fausse & pernicieuse politique du Cardinal Mazarin, prétendu sur-intendant de l'éducation de Sa Majesté
Keywords: Mazarin, Jules -- 1602-1661; 17th Century (1601-1700); Philosophy; Law; Politics; France