Born in Vézelay in 1516, the son of a royal bailli, Théodore de Bèze became a brilliant student in a very strong school in Orléans that led to his reputation as a reader of ancient Greek. In 1534 he also completed a law degree at the University of Orléans.1
After moving to Paris and marrying clandestinely, Bèze came down with a life-threatening sickness that led to a profound religious conversion that left him eager to spend his life fostering the Protestant faith in virtually every way possible. He moved to Geneva, the epicenter of the French Protestant Church, where he was engaged to teach Greek; but soon he became a collaborator of Jean Calvin. His life work would be teaching, writing, and leading the spiritual-political community that had sprung up in numerous areas of France, as well as elsewhere in Europe. He is to be admired for his leadership in a community where matters of doctrine were not beyond question by young, intense students who were studying to be pastors all across France.
When the French government sought the possibilities for compromise and reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics, it was Bèze who came to represent the “new” religion at Poissy in 1551. The historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou comments that Bèze did not do well when he presented and defended Calvin and his views on crucial matters of faith, against the arguments made by his opponent, the Cardinal of Guise. It is not certain that either Bèze or the cardinal really sought reconciliation.2 Bèze may never really have abandoned the hope that all of France would be converted to Protestantism.
Like Hotman, with whom Bèze collaborated, and like many other highly intelligent religious activists, Bèze took up the challenge to the religious, moral, and political crisis prompted by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. His Right of Magistrates first appeared anonymously in 1574 in Heidelberg, after the Genevan religious government had refused to let him publish it in their city.3 Analytic terms such as “will,” “rights,” “duty,” “necessity,” and “legitimate” are found throughout Bèze’s works, in a very insightful and coherent philosophical prose. He has a strong sense of the available political-social vocabulary, and he is less vague than most of the writers of his day. The distinctions he draws between public life and private life make for a balance between the religious and the civil that is very understandable to readers. He notes that some persons may be called by God (Max Weber!) to carry out specific divine missions, but that this fact in no way raises them above the law or gives them a special rank in the Huguenot churches. Like Hotman, Bèze adopts the two-bodies distinction, the person of the king being one body, and the kingship (or the office of monarch) the other.
For Bèze, the origin of all legitimate power is divine, and it is perpetually held by the people.4 Things are made by the people, not the other way around. What is a magistrate? “The magistrate is the one who with the consent of the citizens is ordered protector of the peace and public tranquility.”5 The magistrate also has the duty to foster desirable living conditions for everyone in the city or republic. Indeed, a king is only an individual—in effect, a magistrate with the greatest amount of (sovereign) power.
Bèze takes up the question of defining what is meant by “people,” and by what rights magistrates may act against a tyrant. Ancient Roman institutions and customs become the background for Bèze’s definitions supplemented by biblical and early-Christian sources. The distinctions between the people and the citizens are strong. There are private persons who have no power at all, but who are in the people and can act collectively in the founding of a republic and magisterial offices.
There are the higher or superior magistrates and the lower magistrates, the latter being between citizens who do not hold an office, and the inferior magistrate. In fact, Bèze defines the superior magistrates as all high-ranking officials who have very early historical origins: constables, for example; and he includes the peers, because they are hereditary, as titled nobles are.6 The lesser royal officials and the mayors and town councilors constitute the inferior magistrates, in effect, the members of the third estate in an estates-general; but for Bèze they were a second estate, because there would be no first estate, that is, the clergy. Bèze’s constitution has no specific corporate or individual membership of pastors—whose powers also come from God through the people, but do so through constitutions.
Bèze recognized that magistrates might disagree with the citizen who lodges a complaint against an individual who, his conscience tells him, is a tyrant; or magistrates (superior ones) may disagree among themselves. Redress might occur by the action of an estate or an assembly of superior magistrates, but at this point the type of tyrant informs the analysis.
For Bèze, there are the usual two types of tyrants. There is the usurper of power without any legitimacy, and there is the tyrant who has legitimate power as king, prince (or governing body, as in Switzerland), and who begins to govern in his own interest rather than in the interests of the people.
In the first instance, if no one acts to depose or mitigate the exercise of illegitimate power by the magistrate, the citizen himself cannot, in good conscience, kill the tyrant. In the second instance, the magistrate must use his powers to restrain the prince who is becoming a tyrant, and to convince him to mend his ways. If there is no amelioration, the citizen has no recourse but to live beneath the tyrant’s rule. Bèze quotes Saint Peter and Saint Paul to the effect that the citizen on his own cannot resist or otherwise eliminate tyrannical power.
But if the superior magistrates agree with the appellant, the magistrates who are meeting for an estates may lawfully act to depose a legitimate prince who has become a tyrant, a manifest tyrant. Bèze added the adjective “manifest,” demonstrating confidence that not only the people but also the magistrates would recognize the abuse of power, so that after a deposition, a new king may be elected.
Cast in a carefully constructed framework that moves from divine authority as constituted in divine law, on to natural law, and then to magisterial powers, there is also a principle of duty in the actions taken by the magistrates on behalf of the people. Bèze’s ideas about the nature of power, of human nature, and of all action are such that a detailed description of the tyrant as a monster did not seem necessary. And, of course, all divine action is good; but that is not true of kings, who are, after all, mere humans. Julius Caesar merited being assassinated.