Popular Resistance and Popular Sovereignty: Roman Law and the Monarchomach Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty

The chapter examines the Huguenot theory of popular sovereignty in two of the major Monarchomach tracts of the 1570s: François Hotman’s Francogallia and Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay’s Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. As I show, these theories were designed specifically to combat humanist theories of princely authority, by locating the origin of sovereign authority in the civil body of the people at large. I focus specifically on the Monarchomachs’ strategic use of Roman private law to underline how, despite rejecting the legitimacy of princely rule, they nevertheless accept the humanist analysis that sovereignty is fundamentally a form of proprietary right, or dominium. This civilian language of dominium enables the Monarchomach theorists not only to justify popular resistance as a kind of legal action, such as a vindicatio, but also to construct one of the first modern examples of a theory of constituent power.