michel de l’hôpital & christophe de thou Consideration of L’Hôpital and de Thou side by side – their overlapping careers, political roles, legal thoughts, and reform activities – provides a unique vignette through which one can approach the notion of royal justice and its administration in sixteenth-century France in the binary of state action and individual choice.12 Examination of these two towering figures places a human face to the conventional narratives of the conflicts betweenthe king and the judges, and allows us an intimate look at judicial self-conception, social aspirations, and professional values that predominated in early modern French history.13 Both were jurists-turnedstatesmen, not abstract theorists, and their political opinions and actions were shaped by theconjonctures of civil war. The significance of these developments is not always captured by studying the works of jurists. Jean Bodin acclaimed L’Hôpital to be a notable illustration of one who overcame an adverse background through virtue and erudition. Bodin attested that his contemporaries, especially the common people, were “ravished with an incredible pleasure to feel themselves all honored” when they saw “a poor physician’s son” become chancellor of a great kingdom by his “illustrious virtues.”14 L’Hôpital’s rise to the highest judicial office in the kingdom was indeed nothing less than remarkable. He was born in Aigueperse in Auvergne.15 His father, Jean, was a personal physician of Charles de Bourbon, the constable of France. Among the few memories of his childhood, L’Hôpital recalled that his father, political-historical and professional values” of the Parlement of Paris, see Roelker, Nancy Lyman 1996 p. 59-94. 12 The importance of studying the actions of the statesmen in legal history, apart from the activities of scholars and judges, has been stressed in Kim, Marie Seong-Hak 2010b. 13 L’Hôpital left voluminous writings, in the form of public speeches, memoires, and Latin epistles. See L’Hospital, Michel de and Petris, Loris 2002, and L’Hospital, Michel 2013. On the other hand, de Thou did not leave any work attributed to him. Thou’s thought is gathered, apart from a few letters and public statements, derivatively from what he did and what his contemporaries said about him. 14 Bodin, Jean 1577, liv. 6 ch. 6 p. 1097. 15 In his testament, L’Hôpital stated that he was “always uncertain of age”, but available evidence indicates that he was born sometime between 1505 and 1507. 136 A Tale of Two Jurist-Turned-Statesmen
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