Cardin Le Bret and Lese Majesty

Abstract

Cardin Le Bret, councillor of state during the ministry of Richelieu, is sufficiently distinguished to have merited two monographs in modern historiography. The basis of his renown is not his official deeds, however, but his political writings. Moreover, within the large corpus of those writings (630 folio pages, published three times), one treatise alone raises him from obscurity: De la Souveraineté du Roy, first published in 1632. And finally (to allot Le Bret the least that is due him), the fame of that treatise owes less to the perspicuity of its author than to the timeliness of its subject. It is one of the first comprehensive treatments of sovereignty to appear after Jean Bodin ‘invented’ that concept in his Six livres de la République (1576). Le Bret's treatise could thus provide important evidence of the status of ‘sovereignty’ in legal and political discourse two generations after Bodin.